OwlManAtt’s Blog

Well folks, I just sort of melted my p2 box, rambo.

You see, I had set up mysql, apache, and phpmyadmin so I could view a massive .sql file with relative ease. When I started actually running the sql statements in the .sql file, the box …segfaulted to death.

When nothing would work without segfaulting, I rebooted it, hoping the problem was something like the kernel in memory had been corrupted or something.

Well, the good news was the kernel in memory had been corrupted. The bad news was the kernel image on disk also seemed to be corrupted, and boot failed.

So I’ll be reinstalling on rambo later today. Fun.

I’m a little late with the SCOSUG tale, but that isn’t my problem. I can post it when I feel like it. And I think I feel like it now.

I arrived at the meeting place, Innovation Software, around 5:45.

But before I continue, allow me to give a brief description of Innovation. When you walk in, the first thing in your face is the MAME cabinet being worked on. And this is a NICE cabinet. Quality coolness. The next things you see are the penguin/bsdeamon posters/stickers/whatever all over. Only two people are present at the time, both discussing a kernel bug one of them found in relation to samba. And while they do that I just read this poster on unix optimization.

Now, more people show up over the next 20 minutes or so. We finally go sit down in the room the talk is being given. This room has like 15 workstations, and along with those is an awesome chair. Further observation reveals a massive projected mounted in the ceiling. It has lots of buttons AND a remote.

So yea. Everyone sits down, and Chris Hilton gives his talk on Python (with the use of the awesome projector). He has a PDF file, each page is a slide.

He pretty much just goes ever python basics. (Strings, lists, tuples, dicts, etc etc). Nothing all that interesting, as I knew all of it from Learning Python. But still, it was a good talk. Then people broke into groups and had little conversations on whatever.

So after that, people said they were going to the dinner. Having no idea which dinner they were going to (there was some sort of food-supply store out front), I asked if they were walking. They weren’t. John offered me a ride to the diner and home.

Only eight people (there were like 20 at the talk) go to the diner. The guy sitting next to me (I don’t remember his name. Come to think of it, I don’t think he ever told me his name.) was damn funny. The nerdy discussion was great too.

Oh yea, I forgot. John’s car is really cool. It has a little screen that shows all kinds of stuff. THe car was also gas/electric. And he had an iPod. And none of those stupid meters for fuel level and speed. It had a nice digital display for this stuff.

I’ll say it again. His car is really cool.

And on top of that, he said he could give me a ride to the meeting on Monday. The one with the Debian people. w00t. John is awesome.

And I was going to say something about today’s field trip, but I don’t feel like it anymore.

For those ignorant fools who do not know, Stargate Atlantis premiered last night. A two hour episode, w00t. (Because the rule is during a two hour episode something has to blow up every THREE SECONDS!) It was alright. I like the whole ancient-ship-goes-through-stargate concept. And the sheild on the gate is cool. You put that up as the Wraith drones fly in…no problems anymore.

But yea.

As of late I’ve been reparing windows PCs for people (and making money). Thursday I did a format on some dude’s box, as his FAT was fucked. The one thing I learned there is that soundblaster is an asshole. The driver is such a dickhead.

And tonight, a box came into the shop that seemed to be spyware-dominated. It would start up, then explorer would preform an illegal operation. Then you could do some stuff. Depending on what you did, the computer could crash. Mostly anything you did crashed it.

After about four painful hours of trying to save it, I gave up. Looked to me like a bad case of porn surfing with IE. (An icon labeled ‘XXX’ on the desktop, I ask you…). The windows install was totaled. I ran Adaware, spybot, WinDoctor, scandisk, some tools on Ultimate Boot Disk, and Norton Anti-virus. So I shall format it in the morning.

And now, the furure…

Tomorrow (Sunday) I will be attending an SCOSUG meeting. SCOSUG is the Southern Connecticut Open Source User Group. Meaning it’s a bunch of people who run linux/bsd. There is going to be a talk on Python and its uses, which sounds fun.

Yep.

Sorry for the downtime, folks. What transpired in the past few days was what is sometimes referred to as ‘bullshit’.

You see, to start things off OwlManAtt.com expired and Cyberpixels sent no notice 15 days prior, as they normally do. So it took about two days to get them to process the renew order. During that time, Cyberpixels’s datacenter where three servers are held did something and /lost/ the server for a few days.

During the time after owlmanatt.com expired and before the server got lost, I had the foresite to make a backup of everything important (mainly the blog data).

Cyberpixels began making new accounts for everyone who used the lost server on Wintermute, a newer server. The timing for the announcement was ideal, as I just got the domain name and it would need to re-propogate anyway. So I pointed the DNS to the new server, and here we are. =)

So yea. Sorry folks, nothing I could of done about it…

Today was the ‘first day’ of highschool. Actually, just this stupidshit summer program. But there isn’t much of a difference.

And now I shall proceed with gross exaggerations of how ’shitty’ my day was.

First of all, I had to wake up at six in the fucking morning. Waking me up at this hour is normally a shooting offence (and people would be shot for doing this if I were ruler of the world). Then I had to go wait for the G bus, which wasn’t that bad. It was running on time. After a brief ride, we arrive at the Green and I hop off. A quick jaunt to the bus shelter thing I need to wait at, and a few minutes later I’m on the O bus.

And this is where I start bullshitting through the day.

I have no idea where to get off the O bus. Well, no. I have a very, very slight idea of where I’m going. I must of, because I managed to debus about three hundred yards from the school.

And with the first bus trip hellride behind me, I take the walk up the block, across the street, and into the school.

Actually, no. I don’t go into the school. I wait in front of it because some girl who arrived as I walked up tried the door and found it locked. After another person comes and starts standing with us (and no one is saying a damn thing) some teacher comes and opens this second door no one tried. And look. it’s open!

So we go into the shitty cafferia. It smells like …sweet. Very sweet. Almost annoyingly so.

For about half an hour the two other people and I sit in the room without saying anything, as other people slowly join us who are likewise not saying anything.

Eventually, we get the loud buzz that we should have in a caffeteria loaded with people.

Then this weird lady who seems to run the AHEAD thing comes in and gives the whole you’re-all-special-welcome-to-career-these-are-teachers-now-stfu speech that every year has to be started with. She then points us to an ugly looking paper taped to the wall which says what group each person is in. And every group is named after a gemstone because ‘we are all precious’.

BULLSHIT. NAME MY GROUP SOMETHING COOL LIKE ASSKICKERS. NOT ‘DIAMONDS’.

So at eight something, we all head up to the classrooms we are told to go to. Our group has some wierd dude first. He was…interesting. One of those ‘im cool!’ teachers. He wasn’t much of an asshole, so I really can’t complain. He went over some of the rules (the basic dresscode thing and the no cellphone thing), passed out our scheduals, and then we did the ‘ok tell us about yourself’ thing.

But we need to stop for a second. Instead of moving on to the ‘tell us about yourself’ thing, I need to discuss these shit papers with our classes.

And shit papers they are! Whoever came up with it was on crack at the time. Let me show you what it looks like.

+—————————+
| harris | 203 | DA |
| ———- | —— | CE |
+—————————+

Can you figure that out? And that’s just for one period on one day. It took us about five minutes to understand this shit.

You see, there are four periods every day. The letter stands for a group. Just one leter, not two, as the boxes imply. So ‘Diamonds’ (D) would have harris in room 203 first on whatever day. Then group A, then C, then E.

This is just fucked up. Do you know how much simpler things could of been if you say ‘Ok, this group has these teachers every other day this week.’ instead of this?

But yea. Now the ‘tell us about yourself’ thing is pretty standard. We say who the fuck we are, what school we came from, what our major is (business or health), and what your intrests are.

So we get through that class. Then in our next one (With some jackass who is going to make us do loads of math problems every day) we do the same thing, and take a tour of the building.

Taking a tour excludes the mythical third floor, just like last time. In fact, we are told that if we are ever seen on the third floor we will be shot without question.

Yep. Then we go back down to the caffeteria, where we all talk instead of getting some of those waffel-crackers.

Finally that weird lady who runs AHEAD comes into the room and yells at us because we were supposed to go to class five seconds ago but no one heard her say it over the intercome which has a volume level of -50.

So third period we have Dr. Someone, who isn’t that bad. We sort of talk for her class. Apperantly, we’re going to do lots of labs and shit. She isn’t too bad, but we don’t have her again until like thursday. But we have the math asshole again tomorrow.

Then fourth period we have some science dude. He was OK. We *did* something in his class. An actual experiment. However simple it was, we *did* something today. Wow.

What we did was really, really basic. The water and oil thing. And we answered questions about it. Mhm. It was sort of fun.

And then, into bus hell. I didn’t know where the hell to find the O bus, because some lady had pulled stop requested before the bus stopped at the real stop and I debussed because it was a good spot to walk from. So I walked back to where I debussed and asked some locals. They told me to go down a block and wait in front of a store. The bus was there in a matter of minutes.

And what came next was a real show of true bullshitting. I didn’t know where to get off the damn thing. All I knew was a Dunin’ Dougnuts. After a few minutes, we stop near one. I debuss, turn the corner, and *SHOCK*! I actually got off in a good spot. The bus shelter was right freaking /there/.

And after, like, half a freaking hour and a dollar twenty five/bottle of lemonade, the G bus arrives. Fucker.

So I get on the loaded bus and find a seat. There is a huge traffic jam, and the bus is fucking freezing. Then the bridge is up. Finally we get to Townsend.

And I think ‘Wow! No fuck ups today!’.

So guess what? I fuck up. I pull the stop request cord a bit too late and overshoot the drop point by a block. It was a very short walk to fix the fuckup, but still…

And this is how the first day went. It wasn’t that shitty, but I’ll call it shitty because everyone calls highschool shitty.