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Christopher 'Vulpine' Kalley,
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Copyright © 1998-2006

"Better Vulpines through Technology."


'You possess a mind not merely twisted, but actually sprained.'


Cthulhu's New Heads Tue May 31 17:09:24 CDT 2005
Mood: geeky Music of the Day: Hammerfall - The Unforgiving Blade
*grin* For those not in the know, the subject is in regards to my work workstation. (Compared to my home workstation, Shub-Internet). I've been trying on and off to get multi-monitors running under Fedora Core 3 for a while now. Finally I broke down and bought a cheap Matrox dual vga card. Slot it in, run the X configuration script in Fedora, and woot. 2560x1024 desktop. Hurrah for having room to be a geek :) The monitors have a varied degree of burn-in, so I'm thinking I'll be doing a black background for now. Life is good with multiple monitors.

Friday Fox Update Fri May 27 12:14:35 CDT 2005
Mood: ok Music of the Day: Hammmerfall - Destined for Glory
Been a while since I posted anything, besides ferret updates. So, I thought I'd take some time to post what I've been up to. This shouldn't take long since, I've been up to just about...

nada.

Seriously, I haven't been up to much at all. Existing, working, ferret foo. I did see Episode III, and I enjoyed it. There were bits that could have been better, but all in all I was pleased. Needed more Count Dooku and less General Grevious (aka the killer weedwhacker), but what can I say, I prefer Christopher Lee as a villian.

Been playing alot of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City when I've been home, nice stress reliever to do a drive by on a moped. That and chasing down gangbangers with a chainsaw. Makes me a calmer fox ;) I still like Pirates, but the game got repetative quickly. Maybe next paycheck I'll blow the cash and get Worlds of Warcraft and start MMORPGing again. I dunno.

Hmm, what else. Been reading alot, Brian Lumley's Necroscope series. I first read these in High School, then I found out that Mr Lumley was a Mythos author, one of the first I'd run into besides Lovecraft, Derleth and Robert Howard. So it's been a fun trip down memory lane with the books. I'm running out of Mythos fiction to read, need to figure out what collections I haven't read in a while and give them a whirl...that and spend too much money on Ebay. Hurrah for Ebay.

*ramble ramble* I actually cooked dinner for someone, with more than a single item. *laugh* Last Wednesday I made dinner for Amythest. Nothing too fancy, italian sausage and spagetti. Made my own sauce, well...doctored a couple of cans of tomato paste with cinnamon, paprika, garlic and salt. I think I over did the cinnamon a trad, but Amythest thought it was yummy. And the sausages came out nice. Next time, I'm going to do one of my mom's tricks, and simmer the sausages in the sauce for a while, make both the sauce and the sausages taste better. I also figured out toasted ravioli on another day. My cooking fu ain't great, but it's good enough to keep me fed.

Oh, on the geeky front...I spent a few hours this week writing up a shell script to do alot of the compromised server detection I do. Basically it's a long string of commands showing 'nobody' processes and owned files, as well as common exploits and holes. Nothing fancy, but instead of me typing the same 15 or so commands over and over again, I just download and run this script and wait for it to spit me out a log. Later, I'm going to modify it to automatically close the holes for me, but that's for another revision. Err...I lied, I just modified the script to lock down files, and it works rather well. It, and the rest of the script is pretty kludgy, but it works and that's all that matters.

Ok, I think that's enough babbling for now, might write more later.

Shadow Update Mon May 23 14:42:17 CDT 2005
Mood: Good Music of the Day: Mailcall on TV
Ok, it's been a while since I posted. Quick ferret update, the antibiotics helped alot...Shadow is not having issues with his poo anymore, which is a plus (makes cleaning the cage easier). As for his energy, he's slowly getting back to normal. He hasn't been falling over, but he's hasn't been poinging around....

Til today.

I came home for lunch, and I've been kinda blah today, so I was looking forward to giving my boys some snacks. Shadow leapt out of the cage, and scarfed down his snack. Then I let him down to explore for a bit. And off he went, poing poing poing. *smile* Hurrah for happy ferrets. And hurrah for foxes who get to watch poinging ferrets. *smile* So I'm in a good mood now. I called the vet, and the vet tech agrees he sounds like he's getting back to normal. He keeps on the prednasone for the next week, then we'll see about lowering it and seeing how he acts. But, I'm still in a good mood...teary eyed a bit, but good. :)

Shadow Update Sat May 14 11:33:04 CDT 2005
Mood: better Music of the Day: None
Short post, since I'm brainfried. Shadow back from vet...he has a low blood sugar count again. It could be insulinoma again, but the vet thinks, due to the time frame and the ohter symptoms, he may just have a virus/bug affecting his pancreas. So I got lots of meds for my boy, including prednazone (for the blood sugar) and an antibiotic for possible bugs, and some high protein chow for him to gobble, and in a few weeks, we see how he's doing and go from there. He may need to be on a maintainace dose of pred for the rest of his life, or we may get him stable and ween him off it. We'll see.

Thank you all for your good thoughts about Shadow, we both appreciate them very much.

Ferret Update and Assorted Foo Tue May 10 11:05:21 CDT 2005
Mood: better Music of the Day: Virgin Steele - Summoning the Powers
Hey all, message from Fox land. First of all, Shadow's doing a bit better. Not bouncing off the walls, but not staggering either. He's got an appointment with the vet for Saturday. So we'll see what's going on. *hopeful look*

The rest of my life is fairly normal. last Friday night I went and saw Kingdom of Heaven, with a feeling I was going to be mildly irate at liberties taken with history. The Crusades are one of my favorite historical periods, so I half expected to be yelling corrections at the screen. I was very pleasantly suprised, they got it mostly right. Not all, there were liberties and changes made to make the plot more interesting, but nothing I had to yell about. Most of the changes were shuffling dates and times around. Definitely a Ridley Scott movie, lots of gore and battle scenes. I say go see it, it's worth the money.

Saturday I went to Scarbourough Faire again, had a nice time...other than I got a little too warm and felt wonky the rest of the day. That night I stayed home, watched Saw (very twisted and disturbing movie) and Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones (I was in a lightsaber mood). Sunday, well, I already talked about Shadow. Not much else happened that day... Amythest swung by to keep me company and we watched Hot Shots. I spent the rest of the day/night kinda out of it. Wasn't my most happy day.

Yesterday was work...and payday. And after checking on my sick weezel, I went to walmart to get some food and a new sd card for the palm pilot. 256 megs of space, which I spent most of last night installing mp3s and ebooks and pics and whatnot. So hurrah for me, I have music and stuff on my palm. :) TsathogGUI is pleased.

Not alot else...hopefully the rest of this week will be fairly dull.

Sick ferret Sun May 8 20:48:15 CDT 2005
Mood: sad Music of the Day: Dio - The Sign Of The Southern Cross
Looks like Shadow's insulinoma is coming back, he's listless and falling over and generally lacking energy. Classic insulinoma symptoms. So I'll be talking to the vet tomorrow, see what the options are. Probably more prednazone to control it, I don't see another surgery though...there isn't much left of his pancreas. We'll see. As I get more news I'll keep everyone posted, and no, I'm not doing too hot. I knew this would more than likely happen, but still...he's my ferret....ok, I'm going to stop typing before I loose it.

New Toy Tue May 3 17:20:06 CDT 2005
Mood: geeky Music of the Day: Yngwie J. Malmsteen - Gates of Babylon
In other news, I got a new toy this last weekend. A good friend of mine got a new Palm Pilot from where she works, so she wanted to know if I wanted to buy her old one. And since my Palm III is about to give up the ghost, I said sure. So for $50 (paid out) I got me a Palm Tungsten T. It's not the newest thing out, but it does what I need...and better than the old Palm III. It's got color for one. ;) Cool games for another, and it handles eBooks much better than the III.

Now, the downside. It's USB, and I couldn't get it to sync under linux. Not sure why, might be how the cradle isn't active til it tries to sync, and then it's already in mid sync... so I gave up and set it up on Yog-Software. Not perfect, but workable.

I want to get a few accessories for it, like memory cards (it can double as an mp3 player) and a keyboard. Not sure about networking it, unless there's a palm ssh client out there somewhere...but definitely adding memory to the beast. Also a new carrying case would be nice as well.

And in time honored Cabal23.net tradition, the new device is named....TsathogGUI. (ya, that was the Wintendo for a while). Hey, it's always a good idea to keep a Geek Old One in your pocket ;)

On the Spanish Main... Tue May 3 11:13:58 CDT 2005
Mood: salty Music of the Day: Yngwie J. Malmsteen - Demon Dance
So I picked up a new game last week. Sid Meyer's Pirates. I've been hearing rave reviews of this game for a while now, so I finally decided to plop down the cash for it. (I'm also about to give up on City of Heroes, so I need something else to fill up my time. World of Warcraft fans, relax...I'll probably hit the crack pipe a little later). I got the game, installed it fine, started playing. Then stopped playing, read the manual, and restarted. And ye gods, is it a pretty game. Sailing ships, water, little dolphins swimming along side. It's probably one of the most enjoyable games to just watch. They even have the rigging moving in regards to the wind, including swinging the spanker (back sail on some ships that is swung on a boom. Yes, I know that, reading Master and Commander has helped alot) to catch the wind as the ship turns. Very cool. Game mechanics are pretty straightforward, keyboard controls to turn the ship, fire, change views, change type of shot. Shoot out the rigging to slow the enemy ship, shoot out their hull to sink them. Sinking means no booty, so it's better to board and fight mano on mano with the enemy captain. Hand to hand combat is kinda hokey, but good enough. I think it's a rather good game, and I recommend it to anyone looking for a little mindless sailing fun.