Man, it doesn’t get much more looney or screwball than “Bringing Up Baby”. :) This one definitely gets added to the favorites. It’s even funnier the second time around.

I reallly love those late night/early morning hacking sessions when things are finally clicking. It’s a good feeling when you look at the clock and can’t believe that it’s 2:30 in the am and you don’t know where the last two hours have gone. And I love it when you get done what you set out to accomplish before sun comes up. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my fair share of all-nighters. Getting the Crunchtime video out the door comes distinctly to mind.

This weekend, I cut over my network from the mundane, basic WRT54G doing everything, to having a shiny new dual wan, internal dns, dhcp, qos, Debian based router. It’s my old dual Celeron with two of the dual port e100 cards. The primary reason for this was internal dns, so that I can get Kerberos running. But that’s somewhat on hold, as I’m not 100% sure that moving everything to kerberized nfs would be the simplest thing, maintenance wise for my clients. I guess that CIFS has authentication built in, so maybe it’s not too big of a deal. I just don’t know right now how hard it will be to get kerberized nfs clients. The main goal last night was to get WPA2 Enterprise working on the WRT54G, authenticating to a FreeRadius server, authenticating to my LDAP server. And it all works now (802.1x is so cool)! I should have documented it better, but I was more concerned with getting the concepts down and getting it working. I still have the wiki up and running with nothing in it. I really should be posting my notes up there… Also during this process, I figured out how to get wpa2 working on Debian, as I’d never figured it out before, or really ever had any need to… I will say this, though, that NetworkManager really is quite slick.

The other thing I forgot to mention was that a dear friend, Dr. Dudley Moore, died January 13, 2007. Most of my readers wouldn’t know him, but I know there should be at least one or two that did. His health had been declining for some time, having pneumonia and confusion/dimentia. He had been in the hospital for a while and wasn’t getting any better. On January 11, they transfered him to hospice and died two days later. I distanced myself from his worsening health and told myself that he had led a full life. It didn’t really hit me until he was gone that I would miss him. We stopped by to see him the Thanksgiving before last at the Clarks’ house, a couple of streets over from my parents. That will be my last memory of him, in decent health, and I am sort of glad I never saw him in poor health. I am sorry I won’t be able to attend the funeral; my father is one of the honorary pallbearers. I know Dr. Moore impacted many people in his life, and it really will be a shame to miss the funeral, as I know it’ll be big and I know it’ll be a party, just like he’d want it to be.

There were several things that I wanted to mention… what were they…

There was something about venting, about how it’s just a bandaid for your feelings and the problem. When you’ve blown everything out of proportion, I suppose it can help you get a reality check. And if you’re having some issues figuring out how to solve some set of problems, then maybe it’s good for getting a second opinion. But for me, most of my problems don’t involve not knowing the course of action, but rather a lack of motivation to put that course of action into motion. But, I think I’m over it for the moment…

I spent a lot of time remote diagnosing/troubleshooting the Wesley network with Ben tonight. During that time, I could hear people in the background carrying on. Wow, I miss those times a lot… :( Thinking about it now, I realize how much I miss just sitting around for hours on end spending time with your closest friends, day after glorious day. Something that I did for I don’t know how many years straight, I almost never do nowadays. I guess I took it for granted then, and only today did I realize that I missed it. Oh to sit on a germ infested Wesley couch for 8 hours straight, with very little to care about except whether to eat Jin’s or Freebirds.

I am very tired, so I don’t know why I’m posting this.

My living room is an obstacle course/minefield from my new coffee table, old coffee table (aka my microwave box), and a plethora of boxes of stuff I’ve gotten in the mail in the recent past.

This kernel package I made’s name is entirely too long: linux-image-2.6.18.011207-l7_2.6.18.011207-l7-10.00.Custom_i386.deb

I don’t think that sentence makes sense.

I am now the new, proud owner of my very own, real coffee table. It was finally dropped off today and I put it together when I got home. I think I’ve already got a little grease/vegetable oil on it, so I can’t eat on it again until it’s finished. :(

Steve Jobs had his keynote today at MacWorld. I’m have two questions about AppleTV. One, why doesn’t it have a firewire port so it can stream TV from a cable box, and two, does it support UPNP? They also announced the iPhone. It looks cool, but I’m not one much for that kind of stuff. I still have really old, plain cell phones, and I still don’t have much need for an iPod…

I wore my Greece shirt to work today. Only one guy noticed and mentioned something to me about it. That tells you something about the guys I work with. Or maybe they’re all afraid of me. Or maybe they noticed and didn’t say anything.

I’ve finally gone through my photos from the past several months and the photoblog will be on autopilot for the next (almost) 2 weeks, just as Marc’s is at the moment. Hopefully I’ll get around to posting the raw pics into original soon.

I heard a song on Scrubs during my binge that caught my attention from Kutless. I downloaded some songs and they seem like a cool band.

I bought 4 2-port 10/100 e100s on ebay (a buy it now) for $30. I probably would have spent $20 on one single port from best buy or fry’s. I need them for a router, so I can finish building the home network (I need real dns before I can setup kerberos…). Also on the tech front, I realized that even though my webhost symlinks uptime to /bin/true, I can still read /proc/loadavg (and top will show it as well). But the bad part about this is that I’ve seen the load be 30. Now I understand why it’s unbearably sluggish sometimes. :( This is almost unacceptable and I’m half inclined to setup a cron job to monitor it to see what it’s like over time…

I’ve also solved a problem with my Nexenta system that’s been driving me up the wall. I had gotten Nexenta to work with OpenLDAP, but it wasn’t seeing the groups. I finally posted to sparks-discuss and they solved it for me pretty quickly. It was a known bug, but they had a decent work around, so I was pretty happy with the result.

Maybe it’s been the up-teen hours of Scrubs that I’ve watched over the past several weeks, but tonight I am feeling mysteriously better about my life. I just finished catching up, having watched all of the Scrubs episodes through the current season and episode. Like most television shows, at the end of their 30 minutes, whatever mystery or problem plaguing the characters seems to find resolution. And you might not think that life is really like that…

There are many days that I feel completely overwhelmed in my life. And there aren’t too many people in this world that I talk to about stuff like that, and it seems like that pool grows smaller and smaller every day. I get tired of talking about the mundane details of my life, and I’ve never been one much for small talk, so that does not lend itself very well to me keeping up with some of my best friends.

But somehow at the end of every episode, things are all right. And, you know what kind of show it is, so there isn’t truly much doubt that things will turn out okay, even when things look their most bleak. And somehow it’s the same way with my life. There hasn’t been a day gone by in years when I honestly didn’t know in my heart of hearts that my future is secure. But there are too many days when I can’t for the life of me see my next step, and too many days where I can’t imagine a wife and a family, and too many days when I feel like I don’t know who I am or what I’m doing. And knowing that my life is going according to plan does not always grant me solace.

But there are times, when I briefly glimpse clarity, and know that we really are going to be alright.

I just wish someone could tell me what I’m supposed to be doing here. And I wish I had someone to go through life with me and help me get through all of those little things that I need nudges to do. And I wish I had someone to vent to and someone I can listen to. Someone whose life I have a vested interest in.

It’s just so hard for me to know that in the end everything will be alright when I can’t see my next step.

Note: I should have posted this yesteday (Saturday), but I didn’t. :(

Today has been monumental. I rode again today. Here are the stats from the ride near my apartment: 6.1 miles, 27 minutes, 13.6 mph average, and a top speed of 34.87 mph. Yah! And I didn’t really feel that bad afterwards. I think I’ve finally realized that I need to pace my riding. I didn’t try to sustain 20 mph, and just tried to keep it between 10 and 15 mph, which seems to work out much better for me and should be a better work out for me. Longer time at an elevated heart-rate and all that. I also vacuumed the living room. Go me!

Venting is extremely foreign to me. You feel upset and overwhelmed. You angrily spout out a bunch of stuff that may or may not be relevant, meaningful. or pertinent to anything. And generally at the end you feel better or maybe after a little while, you feel better. Even though nothing has fundamentally changed with anything that’s going on in your life or whatever’s been bothering you. And it’s even worse when you feel bad for no good reason, then vent for no good reason, then feel better for no good reason. The problems still exist, remain unresolved, and no solutions created, yet you just feel differently about them now. That just doesn’t compute. Which is why it seems such a foreign concept to me. Perhaps because I view it more as a problem solving strategy, when in fact it is not. And the reason I view it as a problem solving strategy is because everyone and their dog wants you to talk stuff out whenever you feel like this, like it will solve all of those problems that have led to this. It solves the problem of how you feel, but little else. But is that really a solution at all? Can feelings really be solved? Of course not! They are “just feelings”. But it’s not like they can be ignored (well, I bet I do a more than fair job at that…). They must be dealt with somehow. But why? I guess it’s a little too much like cleaning to me. Yeah, I could clean this stuff, but in a day or a week, it will be dirty again. And, in all honesty, I’d rather just leave it dirty for a long time than have to clean it up once a week. There is no satisfaction cleaning it up once a week. (Well, there is little satisfaction in cleaning at all for me.) But, it gets the monkey off my back. So, it’s like, if you feel bad for no good reason, then why deal with it, because eventually you’ll feel better for no good reason. Shouldn’t it just balance itself out? Seriously, what’s up with feeling bad for no good reason? Why does that happen? Anyway, doesn’t that make sense? If you feel bad for no good reason, and you wait long enough, shouldn’t you feel better for no good reason? Why am I trying to justify this to myself? I dunno, but I need to go to bed.

So, instead of trying to “solve” your “feelings”, wouldn’t it be more advantageous to actually fix the problem instead of fixing the feelings associated with the problem? Where by fixing the problem, ergo, vis à vie, ipso facto, e pluribus unum, you fix the feeling.