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Christopher 'Vulpine' Kalley,
vulpine@cyberfox.org

Copyright © 1998-2006

"Better Vulpines through Technology."


"Backwards talking am I.Again go there I. Sh*t Oh." -- Carlin


Server Foo Wed Jul 31 23:28:02 CDT 2002
Well, my service provider for hosting decided to swap IP's on me. Now they did warn me, and they did give me about 24 hours notice. But they also said between 12-3 pm today...it switched around 9pm. Ugg. Lucky for me, I already knew about this, setup some backup MX records and general backup stuff, logged into Hodge (primary DNS) and updated. Now to just let the natural flow of the 'net take the changes to everyone. Oh well, it least I was prepared and setup. I'm good :)

Austin Powers: Goldmember Tue Jul 30 23:41:11 CDT 2002
I went to see this tonight. Umm...it was...umm....an Austin Powers movie. Like most Austin Powers movies it has really really bad jokes, scenes you can't belive happened, lots of cute females, including a scene with Britney Spears that was just hysterical. :) If your looking for classy comedy, stay away. If you like silly, it's an ok movie.

Freakin' the Ufies Tue Jul 30 23:26:41 CDT 2002
Amazing how being cheery on the DFWUfies email list can have people wondering...

Original Email:

    "Isn't it a LOVELY morning. Come on, everyone, be happy, be perky :)
    *singing* Oh what a beautiful morning !!!!!
The Responses.
    "Who the hell are you and what have you done with Chris?"
    "Chris must have hit the cider on the way to work."
    "Ummm, riigggghht. What'ca on and are you going to share?"
    "I think he was abducted and fitted with an anal probe."
    "Either that or the fox was out wondering around and stumbled upon a field of marijuanna."
    "Did you get laid ?" (heard/saw this 3 times)
    "No offense to you Chris....but the only reason a guy is suddenly this happy is that he is either A.) in love, or B.) got some. Which is it? :)"


The names have been left off to protect the guilty. :)

Abuse: The Tech Support Version Tue Jul 30 14:09:44 CDT 2002
Chorus:
    abuse, abuse...I like abuse
    I've never had anything quite like abuse
    I work techsupport, my brains must be loose
    I've never had a job, quite this abuse(ive)
I've been done retail, i've done fast food
I've done customer service, where customer are rude
I know the pay scale is fair, I'm not overjoyed
But the idiocy of customers, has me greatly annoyed.

My mother and father think I am a geek
working all hours and dressing like freak
My brother and sister think I am a fool
Helping customer find porn, and listening to them drool.

My supervisor has pointy hair, he scares me alot.
my fellow techs talk anime, big eyes must be hot.
The sysadmin has 13 piercings and his hair is lime green
and the sales weasel is slick and smells like vaseline

The customer now they are a hoot,
they get spam with promises of loot
the call me screaming to complain
"How did these people get my name"

I tell them calmly, 'forward to abuse'
Expose all the headers, don't be a goose.
If you dont give us the info, to find these freaks
We'll show up on your door, a pack of pissed off geeks.

The customer call, saying things are slow.
"I've touched nothing, it must be you"
I let them know graciously, we appreciate the call.
Then transfer them to the dead phone down the hall.

Screaming at me will not get you fixed.
Boy do I wish you were over the Styx.
There is no Any Key, right click isn't hard
Gods I wish I could boil you in lard...

When my day over, and the call they are done.
I go home from work, it's time to have fun.
I make jokes about customer, write lots of verse
And think, I could work sales, it can be worse. :)

New Years Resolution...well close. Mon Jul 29 15:25:36 CDT 2002
In some culture, somewhere in the galaxy, July 29th is new years day ;) I've just decided to post at least once a day to this page. Post something, even something as banal as what my cats are doing. Ok...not much of a resolution, but it's something ;)

On to an actual geek post. Because of the loss of one of my 19" monitors, I've been looking for a replacement plan. I was looking for a term program that could do tabbed windows (multiple shells under one program window). Over the weekend I used both Gnome Terminal and Konsole. Gnome term was ok, nothing to write home about, Konsole had more of the features I was looking for, but it has some font fault that fills up my /var/log/messages with module faults. :( Now, Eterm (which is what I use currently) can do tabs in CVS, but I have such headaches with CVS programs...I may just wait til I rebuild my workstation with SuSE 8.0.

Eight Legged Freaks Sat Jul 27 23:38:47 CDT 2002
Well, went to see Eight Legged Freaks tonight. Now I love a good horror monster movie. I love silly movies. I love movies that make fun of themselves. It's rare to find all of the above in one movie. Eight Legged Freaks is such a movie. Lots of bad jokes, lots of silly spider noises, lots of jumping spiders, lots of actually spider fact. It's not shakespear, but boy is it fun. I haven't laughed this hard in a very long time. True, busting a gut, cackling laughter that hurt to do. And I wasn't the only one...the whole theater was laughing. Unless you have a BAD fear of spiders, go see it. it's that good :)

Reign of Fire Wed Jul 24 13:34:45 CDT 2002
Well, this weekend I saw Reign of Fire with Rhiannon and another friend. It was pretty good, kinda depressing. The dragons looked really good, the rest of the movie was grey. As in, grey skies, grey scenery, grey everything. It was depressing. Other than that, it was ok. Not what I expected, not at all. But worth a matinee ticket IMHO. :)

Argh... Thu Jul 18 23:32:51 CDT 2002
Just to add insult to injury today, I have one of my KDS 19" monitors go south. The middle one. *thud* Not the one going dark. But one of the good ones. This pisses me off. Also, Rhiannon's new computer is being a brat. Modems suck. Windows sucks. KDS sucks. *thud*

This rant had been brought to you by the Vulpine Neo-Luddite society.

Hey squeaker. Thu Jul 18 16:19:57 CDT 2002
You asked...everyone this is Squeaker . I work with him. His job sucks worse than mine. He wanted me to mention him on my site. So here you are Squeak, your mentioned.

Poly Rollercoaster Thu Jul 18 15:55:44 CDT 2002
Well, I have some less than happy news. You may remember how a while back, back in April where I was talking about my polyamorous love life ? Well, as of last week it ended. I'm not going into details on things, lets just say situations beyond anyone's control made things too hard and we'll leave it at that. I still love Maeve, Jander is still like a brother to me. But the relationship wasn't working. Oh well.

On the plus side though, as many of you may have gathered, I've been spending alot of time in Austin with Rhiannon. Well, we started dating back while I was still with Maeve. Everyone was fine with this, poly has advantages. ;) I'm still dating Rhiannon, getting very serious actually. Now the drive for a date is a tad much...but she's worth it. So we'll see what happens in my life...should be intresting at least ;)

Vulpine's Austin Adventures (Part 3) Tue Jul 16 17:26:41 CDT 2002
Of a fairly open ended series ;)

Well, I went down to Austin this weekend to harrass a cute redhead. Leave for Austin later than planned friday night. Drive fine, other than the storms making everyone drive like grannies. Get though Temple (about 1 hour from Austin), start hearing a funny sound from the right front...when it registers that it's a low tire...it goes bang. So I pull over, check my spare... flat. Curse alot. Look up and down the highway, see a Whataburger (Texas hamburger chain) in the distance. Call Rhiannon, she's going to drive up with a donut. Walk to Whataburger, long ass walk. Sit down, get a drink...wait. Read. Listen to the locals talk about cheating on spouses or their spouse cheating on them. Read more. Rhiannon and her mom finally show. We go back to my car, and bonehead #1, we didn't check to see what type of wheel Rhiannon had. Argh.

Rhiannon's mom goes off to call a cop (Bonehead #2, we had cell phones). Cop shows, calls wrecker, Rhiannonmom comes back. Cop was super nice, looked like he could bend steel with his hands, but was very easy to deal with. He leaves, Rhiannonmom remembers she has fixaflat...fix the spare tire (the flat is fubared), just as the wrecker shows. He tops off my spare, my other tires, changes it for me. Says no charge. Tip him $20 anyway, and off we go for Austin. Original ETA was 9ish, got home around 2. yawn !!!!

So that's how my friday went...ick ;)

Saturday was better, went to Wal-Mart to get the tire fixed, did a little shopping, headed home and changed the tire. Got ready for the GWNN munch. For the uninformed and innocent, a munch is a term for a social get together among BDSM folks. Nothing much kinky, just a meet and greet. Rhiannon's been a member of GWNN for years. Met alot of people, had a nice time. From there went to the Austin area Pagan Night Out. Met more people, some I already knew from CMA. Eyed the apple cider with intrest, but since I'm on liver damaging drugs, and I was driving...I abstained. Left around 11pm.

Sunday started with geeking. I built Rhiannon a Windoze machine to replace her really out of date machine. It worked fine in Dallas. Get it to Austin, and it has a fit about com ports and monitors. I hate windows. *thud* I brought it back to Dallas, and when I boot it up here it will work fine...evil computers. Then I went to see MiB II again with Rhiannon, it was as funny the second time. All in all it was a damn good weekend, minus the blow out ;)

Top 15 things a Webmaster Should Never Say Mon Jul 15 21:09:45 CDT 2002
I found this while cleaning up my website...something I started writing about 4 years ago or so, while webmaster at Onramp . Never got it quite done...but it's still funny.

Top ? Things a Webmaster Should Never Say

  • 15. Logs ? What logs ?
  • 14. I never knew flames could shoot out like that.
  • 13. Who cares if it downloads slow, make it pretty.
  • 12. Nah, don't use ssh, telnet's mighty secure.
  • 11. Nah, forget using real IP's, we'll just virtually host the domains.
  • 10. If it's good enough for Bill Gates, it's good enough for me.
  • 9. VI ? Pico ? Nah, do it in Frontpage.
  • 8. Hmm, isn't that command 'rm -rf /usr/local/httpd' ?
  • 7. Nah, lets skip backups, only wastes space.
  • 6. Well, it works under NT.
  • 5. Nah, just chmod it 777. It's secure.
  • 4. Does it run on DOS ?
  • 3. Oh fsck !
  • 2. You really didn't need that file did you ?
  • 1. Oops...

    • Vulpine's Episle to the Morons Fri Jul 12 17:42:08 CDT 2002
    I used to have faith in humanity, I even maintained it after working graveyard shift at 7-11. But after working Customer service/Tech Support for the last 8 years has pretty much killed it. Maybe the average joe has enough brains to survive, but the people who call in and complain really must drag the national average down. Between cupholders, 'yes it needs to be on to work' and "no sir, right mouse click...your other right !", I'm fairly sure we've been invaded by brainsuckers from the planet Zercon. Hell, it's not just computers...money makes people stupid. For the majority of the people in the US, they have lived all their life in a monitary exchange economy. That means, you give money, you get item or service, you sell item or provide service, you get money. Rarely do we work on a pure barter system. So why are people so suprised to sign up for a service, and then get a bill ? Free market economy people...it's not rocket science...TANSTAAFL should be taught in school along with the 3 R's. For the non Heinlein fans out there, TANSTAAFL = There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. You never, ever get something for nothing. But people assume it works that way...

    Oh wait...where did this soapbox come from. *jumps down and pushes the box under the couch* *whistling*...

    DNS scramble. Thu Jul 11 23:55:37 CDT 2002
    Ok...I had to find new DNS hosting for my various domains. I was hosting with Jander's colo. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I needed to find new DNS hosting in a very short order. Thanks to WesM I had a place to move to. Most of the move was easy, save for one domain registered with Network Solutions. That will be a pain in the A$$ to move. So tomorrow is phonecall time. :( See if I can harrass them into letting me move things, since they set a password on my domain that I have no clue on. :( Bad netsol, very bad netsol. I need to setup my own colo, preferably on a network that has nothing to do with where Wes is hosted. Redundancy is my friend. :)

    Men in Black II Thu Jul 4 17:35:44 CDT 2002
    Vulpine, at the Movies. Well, last night I went and saw Men in Black 2. Opening night, but it wasn't too packed. Probably will be today thought. It was fun, not quite as impressive as the first one, but that would have been a little hard to do. Lots of laughs, lots of cool aliens, lots of fairly fake looking aliens. Strange civilizations dwelling in the Grand Central Station lockers. All what I expected. Vulpine says, check it out.

    Voyeur Tue Jul 2 23:01:20 CDT 2002
    No, this isn't an advertisement of kinks...this is an actual geek notification. Ok, not much of one, but I went ahead and reinstalled my laptop over the last couple of days. Actually, I've reinstalled it about 4 times. SuSE 8.0, Windoze XP, SuSE 8 again, then finally I went ahead and stuck in the recovery CD I got from Fujitsu and brought it back to Win98. After a little driver shuffling, I got it running on the network mostly fine (although in 10bT instead of 100bt...have to figure out why.) Installed a bunch of programs to allow me to chat, surf the web, and access my Linux boxen, specifically Trillian, Opera 6.04, and Putty. Plus a snazzy wallpaper stolen from TigerT's website. I need to add some hardware so that using it at home is less painful, but other than that I'm pretty happy. :) Now to test the dialup connection, one of these days. ;)

    Vulpine's Austin Adventure Mon Jul 1 14:47:46 CDT 2002
    Well, just got back from another run on Austin. Went with Rhiannon to her high school reunion. Well, that was the plan at least, we actually spent most of the time driving around Austin and being tacky about the yuppies she went to school with. ;) I was the ONLY longhair at the reunion, guest or alumni. In Austin ! That's bloody bizarre. Went and hit a bunch of stores in between boring reunion crap. Places like Book People and Things Celtic. Book People is the largest independant bookstore in Texas, and boy is it fun. I could spend hours in there just browsing. Things Celtic is another fun shop, full of some great stuff. If it's celtic, you can probably find it there. Also, while I was in Austin, I saw Lilo and Stitch. Funny, funny movie. Lots of kid laughs, and lots and lots of things that will have the adults howling. Go see it. All in all, I had a really good weekend.

    New emails Mon Jul 1 12:57:04 CDT 2002
    Ok, in my quest to have too many damn email addresses, I went and scoured the internet for free email aliases...found 3. Oh well, it's a start. :) Check out the Email page.