It's been too long since I've blogged...tons of stuff has happened. I think it'd be therapeutic if I took some time to write about that stuff as it's happening but I just haven't.

First off, I've been having email screwage, both at work and for the home domain. I had to scramble at the last minute to transfer stuff on my personal domain, as my friend Dave's last day at work was Friday, and I still hadn't gotten it together yet as far as transferring mail and web stuff over. So, friday, I was scrambling to do that stuff, while still struggling a little bit with an unfamiliar operating system (OpenBSD). Of course, I bought a great book about OpenBSD, but now I can't find it after searching high and low. Having said that, I'm gaining more and more respect for OpenBSD. It ships with a decently configured sendmail and a chrooted Apache by default, which rules. The ports system and "pkg_add" are great. Really, the only things I need to learn more about are the startup scripts, which are different.

My battery for the Lombard arrived yesterday. I was excited until I opened up the box; they (batterysavings.com) sent me a 14.4 volt battery for a Wallstreet PowerBook G3, not a 10.8 volt battery for a Lombard. I called them up and got a rep who quickly figured out what the problem was (cross-reference error). She then goes, "I'll start the return process." I go, "Can't I just exchange the battery for the right one?" She said, "Well, the cross-reference number is wrong, so when you order the battery again you'll just get the wrong one again." I'm thinking to myself, "so why not just fix the glitch and manually pick out the correct battery?" I wonder if batterysavings.com is staffed by former government employees. The other thing was that she said, "you have to log into the web system to get an RMA number." I said, "fine, but the system never let me select a password." She goes, "Oh, it did, you just didn't put anything in." I'm thinking, uhhhhh no, your account creation script is fuxxored. Regardless, she dropped it soon enough, and just went into the system and started the RMA process. So, in the end batterysavings.com gets good points on customer service for returns processing so far, but can't seem to figure out how to send the correct battery. Their loss.

FYI: For my friends still in the Pacific Northwest, I'm headed up there...for two weeks starting labor day weekend. I'm really looking forward to it.

I've been making some changes in the computer stable. I switched out my prized Voodoo 5 card in my Duron box for a passively cooled Voodoo 3. It's not like I do a ton of 3D gaming, and the fans on the Voodoo 5 were starting to go. It did give me three years of good service, and that was a hand-me-down from Nate Bollig of my Navy days. I got rid of another machine as well; the second of the two rack mount boxes Mark gave me is gone. I gave it to my co-admin, who didn't have a dedicated Linux box at home and could use the box to learn.

We just got hit by a great thunderstorm. If there's one thing I miss about the midwest, it's thunderstorms. I love those.

Yesterday Mitsubishi replaced the steering wheel in my Lancer under warranty. It wasn't a huge deal, but the bottom of the original wheel felt like there was no finish. I was afraid it was just going to spontaneously combust in the sun at some point. I mentioned it the last time I was having my oil changed, and the guy, without quibbling at all, said that they'd warranty it. I couldn't believe it. Now I've just got to ditch the bling-bling rims for some smooth riding ones, and I'll be set. I look back on the decision to buy a car, and while I pay for the privilege, I still have no regrets.

When I was twelve, in the summer between my sixth and seventh grade years, my dad was away all summer in Japan for business. The faucet on the kitchen sink went completely haywire, so my mom told me she would give me a reward if I could fix it. We went to the hardware store, a small town store where the owners knew us, and he sold us a new faucet and explained to me the fittings I'd need to use and how to do it. A few hours later, we had a new faucet. It was a really positive experience for me; I didn't have any confidence that I could do that stuff before.

Spending the week in training on Veritas's (now Symantec's) NetBackup product. Good concept, lousy execution from what I've seen. We've had it at work for a little less than a year, and I always assumed that most of our problems were due to the fact that nobody here really knows how to run it. But, of the six students in my class, every single one of us had some sort of glitch in the install process that made the instructor go "???" Oh well...as they said in the Navy, "training documented is training had!"

Apparently, it's been above average here every day since June 29th. I'm getting to the point where its no big deal to see the thermometer at 115 degrees. Today, interestingly, isn't quite as bad. Yesterday, we got the first taste of "monsoon" season here....a killer lightning storm and downpour. The lighting here is that type that doesn't seem to lead to a lot of thunder though. As much as I dislike the midwest, I do miss a good midwestern thunderstorm. Florida and South Carolina didn't disappoint in this regard, either.

One of my co-workers went and saw "Never Been Thawed" last Saturday, and he told me about it this morning. All I can say is "damn, I wish I had gone to see this with Nate and Christina." Don't get me wrong, "Garden State" was a great movie, but looking at the website of this fake documentary made me just about lose it.

The theme of the movie is that the head character, Shawn, a collector of frozen entrees and bandleader of a not too successful hardcore band, decides to cash in on the wave of popularity of Christian rock and his band becomes "The Christers." Christers' shows and meetings of the Mesa Frozen Entree Enthusiasts Club are held at the No-Choice Cafe, an established dedicated to providing substinence to pro-lifers.

I found out the other day that GNOME can't handle multiple GNOME sessions open at one time for the same user. I was setting up the x86_64 box downstairs. I run NIS with an NFS shared home so that I'm not creating users over the handful of machines at home, and having to worry about maintaining UID/GID's the same.

So anyway, I load out the new box with FC3, configure NIS and NFS, and log in to a GNOME session. Then I start noticing that there are all sort of little problems....the panel doesn't work right, etc. I was dumbfounded. So I start doing research and find out that GNOME can't support sessions for the same user in more than one place. This, to me, is a huge oversight. I ended up turning off NIS/NFS on my downstairs box and creating a user with the same ID and a separate home directory.

Yesterday Christina and Nate Hersey came through town on their way up to Portland for Nate to take his first post-Navy job. It was a treat to see them; I haven't seen them in almost three years. They're doing very well. We had dinner, and I took them to the top of the South Mountains to get a decent view of the Phoenix area. We ended up renting "Garden State" later and watching it. I really enjoyed it and I'd recommend it.

A guy at work downloaded Google Earth. I showed it to some people here in I.T. and we've spent the last half-hour throwing stuff at it. It is *amazing*; I'd almost run Windows to run it (Wine won't support it).

Chilling in L.A. The temperature is *great* here in Manhattan Beach, at 64 degreees. It's 108 degrees back home in Mesa. Screw that.

Erik, ever the fan of all things ghetto, had an assortment of Rap Snacks available for snacking pleasure. I'm not sure why you need two or more different BBQ chips, but it's nice to know they exist. I'm a big fan of the "Southern Crunk BBQ" variety with the picture of the Youngbloodz on the front.

Off to L.A. tomorrow to chill with friends. I'm looking forward to the trip...and getting out of the Phoenix area for a bit. Jorge and others in the Phoenix area...look me up and we'll party.

My friend Mrinal took off for Montreal, where he's working this summer, on Monday. I got to be caretaker of his 98 Eclipse, which would be a cool car, except for the fact that whoever had the car before him did a terrible job of lowering it. Lowered cars suck because they catch everything on the road, and sure enough, the front clip is about toast because of it. I was going to drive it around to keep the miles off of the Lancer (he actually encouraged me to drive it) but damn, it really throws you around after a while. If I find the time and I can find springs that aren't too expensive, I'm thinking about raising the thing back up on new springs. Driving the Eclipse has given me the experience of having a crappy car again...and it makes me even more grateful for my Lancer.

My friend Erik sent me this. Maybe it's doctored but if you know me, you know how much humor I find in this.

First off, does anybody know specifically what RedHat does to get fancy anti-aliased fonts in Mozilla? I upgraded my Mozilla on my FC2 work machine using the installer from Mozilla's site (since Fedora Legacy's version was a revision behind), and I simply cannot get them to work. I even downloaded the gtk2 + xft version, but nothing. I'm sure it's a config setting I missed somewhere. I searched on the web a bit, but most of the stuff seemed related to getting anti-aliasing turned on for really old versions of RH.