"Better Vulpines through Technology."

"For life is quite absurd. And death's the final word." - Monty Python

Outage	Thu Jan 31 00:15:25 CST 2002
Well, AT&T aka my cable internet provider decided to have a siesta today. All of a sudden, no network connection. Ok...powercycle cable modem. No dice. Reboot foxgate. Comes back without a dhcp lease. Feh... The short of it is, I left the house after 30 min of tinkering, got away, came home, rebooted both firewall and cable modem...and guess what...bleah. I hate cable some days.

American Nightmare	Mon Jan 28 23:41:18 CST 2002
Guess what gets released tomorrow... American Nightmare !!!! Woohoo !!!! Go to your local store and buy a copy...send it to me and I'll even autograph it. Go to Amazon.com and help them keep making money. :) How ever you get it, get it. :) It's really a good movie.

NFS evilness

Mon Jan 28 23:28:43 CST 2002

Well, I had a fun couple of days fscking around with Fennec. For those who don't know, fennec is my homegrown NetApp...a box with a ton of hard drives accessed by the rest of the network for file storage. Well, after adjusting some files, I rebooted the box. When it came back up, it wouldn't allow me to mount the root directory. Hmm, annoying. Re-export. Same. Adjust /etc/exports No go. Same partition is mountable from another box. grr. Tweak, reboot and scream for a while. Finally get annoyed at at nfsd and kill -9 every instance of it. Restart nsfd...and it works. Bleah. I need to learn more of how the kernel crap works I guess.

Movies, movies, movies

Sun Jan 27 16:51:40 CST 2002

Well, Friday was movie day for the fox. First, I went to a matinee showing of Kung Pow: Enter the Fist. Yep, it's as bad as the trailers make it look. On the other hand, it's funny as hell. Now, I love bad hong kong movies, and most of this movie is from a flick called Savage Killers. Which is really bad unto itself. Add some weird white guy digitally added to the movie, and it's beyond bad. Not as bad as Not Another Teen movie, but bad. I wouldn't pay full price for it, but it was ok as a matinee.

Later that night, the DFWUfies got together to go see The Count of Monte Cristo. Now this was a good movie. Lots of buckled swashes. Lots of swordplay, lots of good lines. Good plot. Now this was worth full price :) Go see it, unless you hate swashbuckling movies.

Computer Flernage

Thu Jan 24 23:28:36 CST 2002

Another day, another snafu. Started working on swapping out my Netgear 6 port 10/100 hub, for my other Netgear 8 port 10/100 hub, and not being able to find the bleeping power supply. And of course this hub needs some specific power supply (that I had to order from netgear for some outragious price.) It's in this house somewhere...where, no clue. So then I decide I'm going to get my old SGI Indy back up and running. Open up the case to install memory, already has 64 megs in it. Cool. Move the big ass HEAVY monitor over...plug everything in...except the monitor to cpu cable. Tear the house up, can't find it. Curse for a while. Give up. Get the bright idea to install a sound card on Reynard under winbloze XP. Looks like it went ok...then blue screen. Blue screen alot. A ton. Ok...the hell with it, wipe the drive and try to install win98. No dice. Won't boot from the cdrom. Flernage. Curse alot, cry curses down on MS. Watch tv. Develop a true desire to wipe everything again and install linux. Only reason I've been running Windoze is to run my favorite newsreader program, which doesn't have a good match under windows. Oh well. At least I got GkRellm updated...one thing went right so far.

Movies, Movies, Movies

Mon Jan 21 15:54:52 CST 2002

Well I saw two pretty good movies this weekend. Started with watching Jeepers Creepers on video. Very good horror movie, with very stupid actors playing the heros. *laugh* I think I counted 5-6 fatal mistakes within the first 30 min of the movie. And it just got worse. It was funny, and gory, and kinda cool. If you like weird horror, this is good for you.

The other movie I saw was Le Pacte des Loups (aka Brotherhood of the Wolf). Obviously it's a French flick, subtitled, and very very good. Lots of good costumes, lots of violence, and a cute redhead. What else do you need ? Martial arts ? Got it. Gunfire ? Got it. Killer werewolves ? Got it. :) It's fun, it's long, it's cool. See it.

New Emails	Fri Jan 18 12:53:07 CST 2002
Well, the total is now 78. Dude, I am one big spam depot waiting to happen. Lucky for me my Procmail scripts are good, and limited my spam to about 15% of what actually comes in. Need to tighten it down more. Thanks again to Jander for the aliases.

Punday :)

Thu Jan 17 23:18:22 CST 2002

Ok, I'm declaring today to be Punday...

The following bit of creativity is only funny if your a fan of Celtic music.

I once knew a guy named Mike Winnigan. He was part of an experimental cloning program, that had alot of issues. In fact, his clone was very shoddy looking, it looked like a bad copy of him. In pity he took it home with him. His wife took a real shine to his clone. When Mike came home the next day from work, he found his clone in bed with his wife. "Honey, what are you doing ?" Mike asked...shocked.

His wife replied.

"I'm having lots of fun with Winnigan's Fake."

Don't kill me :)

Special thanks to Spider Robinson for teaching me that a good pun is in the oy of the beholder.

Enterprise (the series)

Thu Jan 17 23:09:30 CST 2002

Ok, I've been watching the new Enterprise show rather religiously. My first opinion was fairly negative. I hate the theme song, and I didn't like the show all that much. But, due to a combination of boredom and curiosity... I've been keeping up with it. And you know what, I'm starting to like it. I like the fact that everything is "low tech" compaired to Next Generation or Voyager. Plus the characters are pretty cool.

Plus for a geeky moment, I've watched every episode on Xine in mpg format, which is very cool. It's good to be a geek...especially since I normally work when the show is on. I miss when I was younger, and I could stay up all night watching the orignal series on TV. I grew up with a local PBS station that did Star Trek marathons on Saturday nights. I've been watching the show since I could walk as I recall. And it's nice to feel something similar to what I did as a kid. It's cool.

Random Flern

Wed Jan 16 17:11:31 CST 2002

Hey there, random fox babbling. So far it's been a fairly sub-optimal but un-dismal week. No one yelling at work, home life is pretty good, I'm poor as a churchmouse, but not falling deeper into debt. And for the most part, my mood is up. I'm not sleeping well, but I can handle that.

On the cyberfox front, I've got vulpes working really well as a desktop station, next step...get networking running on it correctly. DNS, mail, apache, etc. Everything I tinker with on a regular basis. And I plan to get it all working correctly this time. Reynard is working better under XP... I still think I'm going to wipe it and start over, but I'll put that off for a while. See if it crashes tonight. Either way, I need to get the sound card installed (I don't remember removing it, but I must have...since it's on a shelf. I also need to neaten up all the wires for my office area...it's a rat's nest already, and I just moved things 2 weeks ago. Probably do that on Friday day. Days off are good for that.

Speaking of rats' nests, I've been having fun cleaning house, replacing lightbulbs, taking out trash, scrubbing things. I've more or less decided to stay at my apartment complex another 6 months at least when my lease comes due. Save up money to move, plus if I can clean up everything...I might not need to move. Except I can't get DSL. :( But with cable, it's not so bad. Now to just finish cleaning, organizing and setting up stuff.

OS Foo

Sun Jan 13 16:57:42 CST 2002

Ok...finally got vulpes running SOMETHING. Ok, it's SuSE 6.4...but it's still something. Got Enlightenment running, got my other settings in there. For now, vulpes is a backup workstation...eventually it will be back to doing workgroup server stuff. Sooner or later that is. *laugh*

Back to the M$ front...I'm about to wipe XP off reynard, and reinstall Win98. Maybe throw in linux as well, see what happens. But that's another day.

WinXP, Part Three

Wed Jan 9 12:12:11 CST 2002

Ok, it's crashing again. Works well for a while, then crashes...usually while unattended. No idea why. I'm going to try installing Win98 tonight, after grabbing a few things off the box first. This is really weird. Oh well, when has my life not been weird. Oh, speaking of weird...Fennec, my file server has just stopped recognizing the two 8.4 gig drives on the 3rd IDE interface...not a big deal, since I wasn't using them...but kinda odd. Yet another thing I'll be tinkering with later.

WinXp Revisited.

Mon Jan 7 19:13:27 CST 2002

Ok, Reynard works again. No idea why, but when I booted it up to try to reinstall win98, it went into finishing up XP. Weird. So I finshed up the install, installed a few programs and played.

My honest opinion, it's pretty. So far I haven't found a feature in it that is better than my Win98, and quite a few features I prefered in Win98. SMB doesn't work. The gui is slow (but that may be due to the lack of RAM in the system right now). Freecell still looks good though. ;) Tonight I will install some games and some sound stuff, and see how it work with that. Now that's the test.

Operating Systems Suck

Sun Jan 6 16:57:44 CST 2002

Ok, I spent most of yesterday trying to get Reynard reinstalled with Some form of Windoze and trying to get SuSE 7.2 installed on Vulpes via DVD. Something hates me out there. Reynard has been bluescreening under Win98 for a while...so I finally bit the bullet and reinstalled. And since I have to support XP, and I have access to it, I installed XP. Or tried to install XP. It keeps nuking during the install. :( So play with RAM, play with settings, finally give up and try to install 98...doesn't recognize the cd as bootable...ARGH !!! Give up.

On to Vulpes and SuSE 7.2. First I install a DVD drive in vulpes so I can install from DVD. Boots up, installs, not too bad. Get though everything and lilo doesn't work. Boot off DVD, get back into it, network doesn't come up. Tweak the hell out of it, no network...and no lilo. WTF ?!? Give up after a while, and start playing with things like KDE2 and Gnome Nautilus. Kinda neat, but kinda slow on a dual pentium 200, and not really necessary.

So, my score is Vulpine:0, Operating Systems: 2. I'm going to play more later, but so far I'm fed up with Operating Systems in general. Well, at least Kitsune and Fennec are running fine. Btw, the network page has been updated. :)

Fennec Gets Boost	Thu Jan 3 20:59:56 CST 2002
A boost in hard drive space. Thanks to Arth I am now the proud owner of a new WD 40 gig hard drive. It got slotted into Fennec, formatted, reformatted when I noticed it only saw 5 gigs of the 40, then moved all sorts of mp3s over to it. It's taking the place of two 8.4's in there. I now have over 130 gigs of space in this box. Now to replace everything with 120 gig drives. ;)

Happy Y2K+2	Tue Jan 1 00:01:00 CST 2001
Just wanted to say Happy New Year to everyone...I'm actually writing this a tad early, but who cares...it's the new year somewhere. Here's too a much better year, with better jobs and nekkid redheads for all ;)