12.08 club-ubuntu WAN party

so i need to get me arse in gear and prepare for the WAN party i’m organizing/running for the ##club-ubuntu crew on freenode (see also: club-ubuntu.org and launchpad.net/~club-ubuntu for more info on them).

(see https://lists.launchpad.net/club-ubuntu/msg00014.html for a list of games, summary, etc. Note: it isn’t in that email, but we also added armagetronAD to the rotation list).

still on the to-do:

-configure/test armagetronAD
-configure/test cube2/sauerbraten
-enable/test voting on urban terror

it’s open to anyone who wants to play! i encourage you to stop by and check it out. connection details are in the topic for the ##club-games channel on freenode.

all the games are free in cost at the very least, and most are fully open-source as well. all have linux ports, all have windows ports as well, and most have mac ports also.

moving!

i’m going to try to start blogging again.

linux and other tech stuff is gonna be on this’un, and personal life will be at blogspot.

obviously, the other one will probably get more frequent posts.

“…in an old silverline i was yours, you were mine…”

(“Falling Out of Love with You” – the 6ths)

today is spring cleaning day!

except it isn’t spring. but i AM cleaning the apartment in preparation for a certain (insert long string of positive adjectives here) lady friend of mine’s visit.

and doing homework.

and laundry.

HUZZAH FOR GTD!

“…we’ll consider our options, our dollars, and then put up a fight…”

(“Secret” – Citizens Here and Abroad)

…whatever happened to me updating at the very LEAST twice a week?

yeah. sorry about that. things got a little hectic.

but i’m taking the time to update!

so here’s what’s new:

-new job! i now work at ACE Technology Group in Malvern, PA. it’s an hour-long commute from me, but that’s okay. i’ll move closer once i’m salary instead of contract (3 months).

-new girl! she’s fantastic, beautiful, sweet, kind, loving, cuddly, adorable, quite short, quite attractive, and loves jesus. still have no idea how i managed to pull this one off, but i’m absolutely smitten. even just thinking about her makes me all sorts of giddy and other kinds of non-masculine things.

-it’s really cold. and i hate cold weather.

that’s it, in a very oversimplified nutshell.

i’ve been knockin’ on that door in my sleep

alela diane’s “the rifle” is, quite simply, a song i could listen to on loop for a day or two straight and not get tired of it.

Bill Gates is to hacking as Sid Vicious was to the Sex Pistols

for those of you linux newbies, i’m copying over some comments i made on Lifehacker.com for the benefit of you guys.

(sorry for the messy formatting. maybe i’ll clean it up some other time. VERY text-heavy, but has a LOT of good info in it.)

“you’re letting the terrorists win!”

i live in my friend B’s basement. it’s not as weird as it sounds; he’s about a decade older than me, i’ve known him for ten or so years, and the basement’s actually furnished into a complete apartment- bedroom, kitchen w/stove, sink, etc., bathroom, living room, etc. and i pay him rent so i’m definitely not mooching.

occasionally we’ll talk about politics. well, he’ll talk about them. i prefer not to because it usually only ends in argument or judgment, etc. because people seem to think that your character should be entirely based upon your ideas of political guidance and so forth.

well, over the past two days it really hit the fan.

a bit of GNU ddrescue magic…

right now, i have the 750 gb seagate hooked up and doing a badblocks test.

when that finishes, i’m going to:

1. partition it into a ~345gb partition and a ~405gb partition
2. set up ext3 filesystems on both
3. GNU ddrescue the old dying data drive into an image file on the 405gb partition
4. mount the image file as a loopback device, and copy what i can to a 160gb hdd i had lying around. once i get the image’s contents down to ~320gb, i’ll copy the rest to the 345gb partition.
5. use GPartEd to delete the second partition and grow the 345gb partition to the whole drive.

here’s hoping it works with no hitches.

EDIT:
venting and frustration below. not for young eyes.

“…i found a fox who was caught by dogs…”

(“Hounds of Love” – Kate Bush)

i’ve always felt so-so about the Futureheads. they had that dime-a-dozen britpop post-punk sound to them. while i generally do enjoy those sort of artists, they can grow a bit tiresome when they all begin to sound like one another.

enter the Futureheads’ cover of Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love”..

i’m a mediocre Kate Bush fan. i’m not about to skin people alive for tickets to one of her concerts, but i am able to listen to her for quite a while if i’m in a certain mood.

that all being said, this cover gripped me.

there is a rather cute music video on youtube here, as well as the original. i prefer the former. there’s urgency and confession there. the new context of the lyrics is something i can relate to well, i think.

lyrics:

bzzzzzzclickclickclick

welp, it happened.

after knowing it was coming for ages and still not backing up, it finally happened.

my data drive is dead. dying, rather.

so, being the conscientious techie i am, i took it out (my OS drive still works fine) and have it resting on a shelf. i ordered a replacement (a lovely 750 GB beast from seagate). i plan on doing a dd_rescue to see what i can get from it. maybe i can also get a RMA from WD for a new 400gb. i’d like to RAID the drives but to do that, i need a larger case ($$) and another 750 gb ($$$).

i desperately need a job. it’s frustrating that i’ve only gotten two interviews after sending out about 16 of my resumes.

nightmares of livecd remastering pt. 2

or:

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Modprobe

i just spend THIRTY MINUTES trying to get my software raid-1 to show up in knoppix.

thirty minutes of cursing and getting red in the face. i even resorted to manually mounting the filesystem, copying over mdadm.conf to the knoppix root, and running mdadm –assemble –scan again.

still, “no devices found”…

and then, in a stroke of genius, i remember:

modprobe md
mdadm –assemble –scan

and lo! and behold,

root@Knoppix:/# mdadm –assemble –scan
mdadm: /dev/md0 has been started with 2 drives.
mdadm: /dev/md1 has been started with 2 drives.

so this is moreso for my reference than anyone else’s, but if you ever have trouble getting your software raid recognized in knoppix, MAKE SURE YOU START THE MD MODULE. hahaha. oh man.

“…if i’m to be the fool, then so it be…”

(“Kiss” – Scout Niblett ft. Bonnie “Prince” Billy)

i’ve taken a huge admiration to Scout Niblett recently (esp. her duets). this is why.

there’s just something about her voice and the way she almost fights herself to sing what she wants to (or needs to) get out there.

it’s been raining an awful lot as of late. i just wish it could be sunny and 75 degrees all the time.

EDIT

i couldn’t find the lyrics ANYWHERE online, so i transcribed them myself.

nightmares of livecd remastering

knoppix: the final frontier.

the Creative Commons license, mark twain, and SCO- oh my!

i just read an interesting article on ars technica. it talks of how mark twain/samuel clemens supported copyright, but not for the reasons you’d think.

full moon

it’s a full moon, again. i can feel it happening- the fur growing, the fangs extending, the eyes turning to slits.

a long, loud, sweet howl escapes my lips (over the tongue, through the gums- watch out, woman, here i come) and i am arching my back in the pale moonlight of photos.

“psychedelic latex is never aesthetic sculpture;”

(“magnetic poetry #1″ – cathartic love letters, brent saner)

so!

i finished the most recent update to my portfolio. 13 new pieces! and i fixed a WHOLE crap load of typos/spelling mistakes in other pieces.

you can read it here: cathartic love letters (143 pages, 187 pieces)
(a list of new pieces are on the changelog)

here’s a highlight of my favourites from this update: the “thursday night alone” series (foul language. be warned.)

snot faucet

my allergies are kicking my ass.

“…it’s hard to die when all the birds are singing in the sky…”

(“Seasons in the Sun” – Terry Jacks)

mountains and valleys and piles of books lay on my carpet like a swamp, all just to keep up in school and learn things about the economy i never wished to learn and it gets boring taking a class when you already can excel at the discussions related to it but it’s been a lovely day; the sun was bright and the weather was perfect and i drove with my windows down and smoked my pipe like a wise old sage, and i came home to my mountain of books and i ignored them so i can read my treasure chest. sleep is a habit inescapable and it’s supposed to rain today but i’ll still keep my windows open. and N, she still gets sick in the mornings with sadness, i bet, and takes medication which is comparable to taking cyanide for a rough cough cough, it’s so dry in here N, why is it dry, are you okay? no, not really, but neither are you. no, i am, promise, it’s a nice day out and i’m feeling swell. it’s not fair, then- black and white are more perfect than shades of grey you may think that N but you’re wrong. you look a little pale N are you okay no she says i’m not and proceeds to pull swords from her tongue as if a sword-swallower in reverse stop-motion, it’s all jerky and it hurts my heart to watch and it’s a little creepy but what can you do, it’s one of your favourite clips. please get better N i’ll say when i leave and she says that she won’t, but i’m no better either but i’m out the door before i hear her.

WHOO 7.10

let me begin by saying i, by habit, am not an ubuntu fan. i find it a bit too bloated for my likes, and the system scripts it uses are less than friendly (compared to my preferred distro, gentoo. warning: NOT FOR BEGINNERS). and i still feel it lacks the stability that its daddy, debian, has for servers.

but i WILL grant it this- it has and is bringing linux to the people.

today marks the release of Ubuntu 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon. if you never tried linux before for whatever reason (being scared, i think, is the most common reason. but don’t be scared! it’s more stable than windows, it’s free, and tux is WAY cuter than the windows logo), Ubuntu is a GREAT place to start. it’s probably the most newbie-friendly distro out there. if you want to try it out, you have a couple of options. it’s all on their site and there are plenty of people willing to help you in the forums. just a caveat: make sure to do a little reading before jumping right in. google any questions you might have beforehand; you’ll find most of them have been answered. and, as always, beware the FUD-mud. it’s icky and it’s out there. ignore it in favor of intelligent criticism.

so what’re you waiting for? give it a shot! at the very least, learn about it.

oops

so much for my goal of posting at least once a day. i missed yesterday.

it’s a sick, sad world when we decide between paying rent and eating

i noticed that Last.fm is hiring.

i can has employment?

i need a job.

“…my dreams; it’s never quite as it seems…”

(“Dreams” – The Cranberries)

i’ve been having these strange, extremely vivid dreams as of late.

fluorescent neon buzz

the volume only goes so high but it gets drowned out by the clickBUZZZZhmmmmmnnnnnnnnnnclickhmmmmmmnnnnnnnn of the light above the stove and that can’t be healthy for me or my electric bill or the environment although supposedly fluorescent lights are very clean and not very dirty dirty boy, sit in the corner. but what did i DO you didn’t do anything, that’s the problem but how can i do something wrong if i didn’t do anything. i’m on autopilot, i fear; the planes come soaring like sick strawberry fields and sugarbombing me with hunger in the middle of the morning before i’d prefer to wake up dead alone stone-cold and my bed although warm is lonely and nothing can warm the cold heart except love and what can love you when you are not loved? what can you hide so deep that is not able to be seen or heard or felt by strangers and lovers alike, chefs take your heart to town and serve it up on a platter “look at MY masterpiece! nevermind the one it came from, i was the one that served it to you!” so who do we thank for a good steak- the one who grills or the one who grew? i must begin to plant gravemarkers for cattle and lay flowers in thanks like my Lenape ancestors. i am not vegan or vegetarian, but who says you shouldn’t thank your food? we take so many things for granted- for some people, their cattle is their life. this is beginning to look like filler lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem is some kind of mess but OH NO i broke the fourth wall, the fourth wall between you and i and i know it’s all a joke; that’s why i’m simply mad and off my rocker, you see, it’s because it’s all a joke. sanity is in the eye of the beholder- there is no beholder, everyone is insane- straightjackets are quite a friend indeed in need and that is why i will not take sugar in my tea or in my hand or in my words because i’m sweet enough already; i need salt and i need light and i need earth because i’m losing ground and i’m fighting but you can’t win! not with that attitude young man back in the corner and i’m sorry, no more wire hangers i promise. will true love find me in the end or will i end up cold and alone like i wake every morning, will i have faith or will i keep being stuck in the same old rut of annoyance, who knows. the light above my oven isn’t saying anything except humming along his own beeswax. i wasted so many hours the past few days doing who knows what and i am a waste and i cannot find a job because i’m either overqualified or underqualified or it’s customer service and customer service will kill you- that’s how i know i’m not suicidal, i refuse to take a job of customer service. the customer is NOT always right and they deserve to know that, i will not bend over and grab my ankles “yes sir! why don’t you use that streetlamp, i’m sure that’d be much more painful” no way, not me, i want to fix people- it’s how we’ll fix other problems- and you can’t fix people by lying to them and telling them they’re right when they aren’t or let you walk all over you. “you corrected a customer? GET IN THE CORNER” yessir massa’ johnson, oh, i sorry, i never gon’ do it ‘gain massa’, please don’t whip me. and all the light has to offer is clickbuzzhmmmmmmNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

why i hate school

“Please identify and describe the four components of GDP and answer the following question, making sure to demonstrate how you arrived at your solution. If GDP is $100 billion, consumption is $60 billion, investment is $30 billion, and net exports are –$5 billion, what is government spending in this economy?”