is a spoof of the matrix with a message about factory farms. It’s pretty funny, check it out.

How was your weekend?  Mine was fantastic.

Friday Jeremy and I jammed for a little bit, until he blew out the speaker in his makeshift guitar cabinet.  Still, it was fun especially since I hadn’t played the drums in about 6 months (because Jeremy was holding my set hostage).  Then I helped him record a few songs at his apartment, and that was super.  He’s such a good musician.  One of the songs was "Seasons Change" which is just pure beauty.  I remember 3 years ago when I first heard him play it and begged him to hurry up and get it recorded because I wanted to be able to listen to it again.  There’s been one "finished" recording of it already, on the first Owned and Operated EP, but I think he wants to get just a pure acoustic-and-vocals take recorded.

Anyway, recording is fun because you record one instrument at a time, so we did the guitars and then the vocals.  Of course the vocalist needs to wear headphones and listen to the guitar track as he sings, but since I was just manning the computer, I didn’t actually need to listen to the geet.  And it was really cool to just listen to him sing a capella.  But it was also hard to just sit there and not sing along to these songs that I love.  At one point, while I was humming at what I thought was an inaudible level, Jeremy stops and goes "Are you humming?!?"  Heh.  Sorry.

THEN, when we finished recording, and I got home around 3:30, I finished up a few things on my computer, and was going to get to bed.  But since I had to get up fairly early and drive home in the morning, I decided that I probably wouldn’t feel like showering and shaving in the morning, so I did it before bed.  Well when that was all done, at 5:45am, I heard a cat meowing on my back porch!  I opened the door, and the cat tried to charge right in, but I held it back so I could get a look at it.  At first I thought it was the same black cat that I saw walking around on Wednesday, but then I noticed that he had a slit in his left ear!  He also had a tiny patch of white on his neck/chest.  His meow was really different, but that could be explained by having been in really cold weather and from having been crying loudly a lot; his coat looked different (smoother and tighter to his body), but that could also be explained by having been in the cold; his face was thinner but that could be explained by not having eaten enough lately; his eyes were different (gigantic and too glassy) but that could be explained by having been in the dark and the cold.  The thing that convinced me completely was that although he was really friendly, rubbing up against you like there’s no tomorrow, he wouldn’t do it to my nose/face.  Every other cat we’ve ever had (and probably that I’ve ever seen) would do that, but CJ will not rub noses with you.  He’ll rub his nose on your arm, leg, foot, hand, or doorways, boxes, pretty much anything except your face.  That I’ve never seen in another cat, and combined with the slit left ear and tiny patch of white (many black cats have a white patch on their chests, but CJ’s is tiny -- literally about 15 hairs -- and he has no other white on him), I know it’s him.

So I gave him some fresh food and water, but he wouldn’t touch it.  So I broke out a can of wet cat food, and he tore it up.  He ate it so fast there were pieces of it flying around.  I don’t know how, but there was a big mess of it on the floor when he was done, splattered all around the plate.  After he was done, then he was willing to eat the normal dry cat food, and drink water.

He’s now safe and sound, happy as a clam, sitting in my lap as I type this.  He won’t tell me where he was for those 10 days either.  I asked him, but he’s being all shady about it.  You know how cats are.  I didn’t have time to post about it until now because my weekend was pretty packed (it was 6am when he came home and I hadn’t even gone to bed yet), and my mom beat me to it.

After sleeping for a few hours Saturday morning, I went home to attend my brother Rolly’s wedding reception.  It was at the Collegeville Inn and was quite fancy.  Margie’s dress was beautifully minimalist (not that there’s anything wrong with big fancy dresses, but this one was really nice), and she wore a thin white veil-type thing over her shoulders from the front, and those things combined with the way her hair was done made her seriously look like an angel.  Rolly’s suit was white (or an off-white/tannish color) and he was definitely looking Rico Suave; I think either I haven’t liked white suits other times I’ve seen them, or I just expect them to look silly and not-serious for some reason, but on Rolly it was perfect.  Tasha took photos and said she’d send them to me so I can post them, so I’ll do that.  I didn’t take my camera; I’ve never taken photos at a social event like this because I think I’d feel strange about it.  At a wedding it seems OK because there’s a pro photographer there, and everyone is taking photos, but at something less formal and more social I’d think it’d be weird walking around taking photos.  But since lots of other people did, and since there were disposable cameras provided at each table, it’s probably pretty kosher.  Maybe it’s also the fact that my camera is a mammoth compared to all these new tiny things that are out now, and a camera around your neck is a lot more obtrusive than a tiny little thing around your wrist.

Anyway... there was a live band, which was nice.  And the food was good too, it was a buffet, and who doesn’t love a buffet?  Mmm roast beef, and shrimp, and scallops, and pasta... On the funny tip, my Aunt Karen was at our table, and she tried to tell me that roast beef is the same thing as prime rib.  Therefore I don’t think she’s ever actually had prime rib.  She is also one of those people who, when you say that you don’t like fish, she responds with "but try the salmon, you’ll love it!!!"  Um, no, I don’t like fish.  "But you’re eating shrimp and scallops!!"  Yes... those aren’t fish.  That conversation cracks me up every time it happens, which is actually pretty often, which is troubling.

I rounded out my weekend with a double-dose of computer fixing.  My mom’s computer died 2 weeks ago (the power supply failed, and decided to fry the hard drive on its way down), so I had to install Windows and a few essential programs and restore her data from her external backup hard drive.  I had just installed this backup drive about 3 months ago, and good thing too, otherwise she would have lost all her digital photos and financial stuff and all her other data.  Tasha decided she should probably keep an active backup too, especially since she uses her computer for her business and needs to keep the files for 7 years.  So we headed down to Best Buy, picked up a firewire drive just like my mom’s, and set that up today.  I also installed Mozilla on her computers; score +2 for the freed-from-the-bonds-of-IE camp.

-----

For those interested in backing up their data on Windows (see here for how to do it on Linux), here’s what I do.  Install a second hard drive that’s at least as big as your main hard drive.  This can be an internal or external drive; external is preferable because then you can turn it off when you’re not backing up, and because that helps to guard your data in the event of a virus.  Once you’ve got this second drive set up, as F: for example, then install xxcopy and run this command:

This will copy your entire c: drive into the folder f:\backup\c_drive\ and it will log any errors to the file c:\xxcopy.log.  (For example, some files, like Windows registry files, refuse to be copied, so those will show up in the log.)  And the next time you run that command, it will only copy those files that have changed since the last time you ran it, so if you run it once a week, then it’s pretty quick.

For various reasons, including the fact that some critical files won’t allow you to copy them, you cannot simply take this backup drive and boot it and have it work just like the original drive did.  (Contrasted with Linux which naturally allows this by design.)  So if your main hard drive fails (as my mom’s just did), you’ll have to reinstall Windows and all your programs on a new hard drive.  But the point of the backup is to backup your data files, not your program files.  Programs can be reinstalled; digital photos, tax files, email, etc., cannot be; they are lost forever if you don’t have them backed up.  Also, it might then seem like a waste to backup the entire drive; why not just back up the data?  Two reasons: first, the size of the OS and program files is generally only a gig or two, so when backing up a 20 or 40 or 80 gig drive, that’s negligible.  Second, most people have files that they consider "data" in various places (browser bookmarks/favorites, files on the desktop, saved email, in addition to any files that the user manually saves from within an application, plus some programs save their data into their own program folder), so you’d have to run xxcopy a handful of times for a handful of folders if you wanted to try and exclude program files and OS files.  You’d be doing a lot more work for very little benefit (the small amount of space you’d save), or no benefit (because you probably shouldn’t be using that space on your backup drive for anything else).

Finally, use "Scheduled Tasks" in the Control Panel to set xxcopy to run once a week (in the middle of the night one day, for example).

Hi !  A quick note to thank you for getting me up and out into cyberspace once again.  The withdraw was really getting pretty bad.  The only REALLY upsetting part of not having my pc was that I missed being your 50,000th visitor, boohoohoo ;-(  Who was it, when did they get on and what was their prize?  So glad you have your CJ back home safe and sound.  Enjoy him!  lvu,

So I’ve been pretty depressed for the past 10 days or so since my cat disappeared, but it’s starting to become more of "something that makes me really sad when I think about it" and less of "something that makes me constantly depressed because I miss the cat and can’t think about anything except how I should be out looking for him."  And in case you’re about to make fun of me for being a sissy... shut up.

Some pretty funny things have been said of late, so that’s helped.  My sister’s comment about the trailer park was hilarious.  Then tonight I had an exam, and apparently the room got double-booked so all of us CSE465-ers were squished in with a full room of Math110-ers.  (For non-PSU students: Math 110 is math for people who didn’t have math in high school.  Or something like that.)  So anyway, we’re all crowding into this room, about 300 of us, I’d say, and a professor goes "CSE students in the odd seats, Math students in the even seats."  And one of my CSE classmates says, "Although if you’re in Math 110, you may not know what an ’even seat’ is."  Uncontrollable laughter erupted.  (Well, not from the Math students...)

In more news of happiness, Andy put up a bunch of really artistic webpages over here.  The kind of stuff that makes me want to do a new site layout or something, until I realize that my site has way too much stuff on it so all the beauty of that kind of layout would be destroyed.  Oh well.  (PS - on his site, click the little Vs at the bottom to see more.  And if you get the fiery red one, you have to scroll way over sideways (just pretend you have a gazillion inch monitor like Andy :) to get to the Vs.)

I haven’t posted anything about Homestarrunner in a while.  So here are two emails that you should check out right now: Labor Day and Impression.  On "Labor Day," at the end, click on the sign on his cooler, and you’ll hear Homestar rapping.  It’s hilarious.

If a man means to kill you, either you persuade him that he should not, or you kill him first, or you die. Sometimes you can get him locked up, but that only postpones the problem. By the same token, if an enemy political power is engaged in war with you with the goal of your destruction, you either persuade its supporters that they should not, or you kill those supporters, or you die. The international equivalent of imprisonment (diplomatic and economic sanctions) only postpones the problem.

We are engaged in a massive effort to destroy the ideology which threatens us by persuasion and coercion. We mean to eliminate the ideological threat by convincing the bulk of its supporters to abandon it. This is unprecedented and it is risky; we’re on uncharted ground. To a great extent we’re making this up as we go along, and that means we’re making mistakes and learning-while-doing. We might not succeed.

If the experiment in Iraq fails, if we cut and run, and Iraq reverts to savagery, if reform efforts elsewhere in the mid-East falter and succumb to an extremist backlash, and if the governments in that region become more radical and unite against us, then all hope of reform in the region in the short run (20 years) would be gone. As time went on, those nations would certainly acquire (covertly or overtly, developed or purchased) more and better industrial age military capabilities, with range and striking power able to threaten us with catastrophic losses.

If our attempts to eliminate the threat through reform fail, then we face the decision to either kill them or let them kill us. It’s worse than that: we would inevitably have to kill them. Once our cities begin to get nuked, we would respond massively, causing unprecedented devastation, resulting in a tragedy that it might take centuries for the world to recover from. Such attacks against us are inevitable based on the ideology that opposes us unless we surrender to it. If we refuse to surrender (and we aren’t going to surrender), then the only decision we’d have would be whether we should kill huge numbers of them before or after they’d started killing huge numbers of us.

Whatever else you might have to say about genocide, the one thing everyone can agree on is that once completed it is conclusive and irrevocable. (But nearly everything else you will probably want to say about genocide is negative.) If you face an implacable foe who refuses to be dissuaded or deterred from trying to kill you, you must kill or die. At the level of nations, you must commit genocide or become its victim.

If we reach that terrible eventuality, where we must commit genocide or succumb to it, we would not rely on anything as clumsy as fleets of aircraft indiscriminately scattering bombs over enemy cities. For an information age military, it’s still one bomb per target, only the targets would be cities and the bombs would be thermonuclear, and the destruction would be total.

No one wants it to come to that. That’s why we must remain dedicated to fostering reform. It may be risky, and difficult, but it’s still preferable to surrender, or committing genocide, or being the victims of genocide. The reason we’re following the strategy we are is that it’s the only way we can avoid defeat without resorting to total war.

- Steve Den Beste

Today while walking around looking for CJ, making the "pswswswswswsss" sound at the top of my lungs, a black cat ran out of someone’s yard and came right up to me.  This cat was just like CJ: smooth black short hair, no visible white spots, the same size, and really really friendly.  But it wasn’t him.  His face was a little different, his hair was a little less fluffy, he wagged his tail strangely when he walked, and he didn’t have a cut on his one ear like CJ does.

Anyway, that’s 3 black cats I’ve come across now, that aren’t CJ.  And one of the guys I ran into while walking said that he had a cat that came 30 miles back to him after he sold it.  Maybe hopefully CJ’s on his way home (safely).

But on a lighter note, here’s a snippet of a conversation I had with my sister:

me: and there’s this trailer park near my neighborhood, so I might go look there
Tasha: ew, you didn’t go into it, did you??
me: well, not yet, but...
Tasha: ANTHONY, IF HE’S GONE, HE’S GONE!  GET AHOLD OF YOURSELF!!

Heh.

Listen.

Not much to say here.  I haven’t seen my cat in over 48 hours so I’m pretty upset.  After calling for him yesterday and today, and biking around looking for him, I handed out flyers to a little over half of my ~80 neighbors today (the ones who answered their doors).  One lady said she saw a black cat laying in the road (just laying there, not hit) on a small side-road near my house yesterday.  I biked there tonight before the rain got too hard, but didn’t find him anywhere.  And one guy said he saw a black cat being really friendly with some kids at a bus stop right outside my development.  Tomorrow morning around 8 I’m going to go there and hope to find that it’s CJ, or at least talk to the kids and parents if the cat isn’t there tomorrow.

Konstantin keeps laughing at me because I’m upset about this.  He says he doesn’t get attached to animals, because the 3 cats they ever had all got hit by cars before they got to be a year old.  Well, no wonder then, of course he can’t sympathize, much less empathize.  We’ve had CJ for a long time, something like 6 or 7 or 8 years now, I think.  You get pretty attached in that amount of time.  And he isn’t "just a cat."  He’s my cat.  And personal feelings aside, almost everyone who’s ever met CJ is amazed by how friendly he is.  He really is the most friendly and lovable cat ever.  We’ve had quite a few other cats, most of which I liked a lot, but as great as they all were, none were anywhere near as amicable as CJ is.

Today CJ did something he’s never done to me before.  For no apparent reason, he walked over to me and bit my big toe.  Not a real bite; more of a "pay attention to me" kind of bite.  I wondered what his problem was, and went to check his food/water/litter box situation, and sure enough, he was out of food.  Pretty clever move, I’d say.

He got brave enough to walk upstairs today, and of course, he was tip-toeing around, all scared-like.  In a turn of events that somehow didn’t surprise me, someone managed to set off the smoke detector during the 10 seconds he was up there, sending my already-high-strung cat flying back down into the basement.  Poor meow mix.  But he also finally got brave enough to go outside, and he’s been out there since about 11pm.  He usually stays out all night at home, so I think (hope) that he’s doing the same thing here now, and he’ll be right back here in the morning.

After a few days of taking these new dumb vitamins, I discovered something weird.  If you put one of them (or presumably any similar item) in your mouth, and then take a big sip of liquid, you can get the pill to float to the back of your throat and just sort of fall right off the edge, without having to swallow at all.  It’s really awesome and handy, if a little unsettling at first; the secret is to not fight it.

I really like the Nissan Murano.  That car is about the only vehicle I’d consider driving that isn’t a Volkswagen.  But since VW has the Touareg now, the Murano would have to be really exceptional in some way in order to make me choose it over that.  And come on, Touareg has three consecutive vowels in its name.  What could stop it?

Speaking of driving, I propose a new mandatory test for all persons who currently drive, or who would like to drive.  This test would require the taker to correctly define the terms "passing lane," "turn signal," and "passing lane."  What you’d see is a 90+% drop in driver stupidity, as 90+% of drivers are no longer on the roads.  (As a bonus, by seeing which people put down different answers for #1 and #3, you identify those people who should not only be off the roads, but should be summarily executed.)

In even more random news, I seriously love these 10-10-987 commercials with John Stamos.  They’re so laid-back and conversational and funny, and the people say the dumbest things to him.  In one of them, a bunch of people are like, reluctant to try it or something ridiculous like that.  So the one guy is like, "How do I know it’s that cheap?"  And John goes, "You know how you’ll know?  Try it."  And then a lady is like, "I just can’t believe it’s really that cheap."  John says, "I PROMISE it’s that cheap."  That’s just not something you ever hear in a commercial, someone doubting what they’re selling, and the guy saying "I promise" to reassure her.

One last piece of ridiculosity: the music teacher asked another absurd question last week: regarding the word "hybrid," she asked, "For how many of you is this a new term?"  Come on.  She might as well ask, "How many of you have completed grade school and/or high school before enrolling in college?"

I brought CJ to school with me!  I am well beyond stoppable now.  (In case you didn’t know, CJ is the best cat of all time.)

He survived the 3-hour trip OK.  It was really funny to watch him walk around the basement here when I first let him out of the car carry cage.  His eyes were gigantic and his every step was carefully calculated for the first hour or so.  He won’t follow me up the stairs to the first floor, and when I opened the basement door to the backyard, he sniffed the air, took a few steps out, and then came right back in.  I think he’s overwhelmed.  There’s a tiny space between my hanging-file caddy, my old monitor, and some plastic containers -- a space just big enough for a cat, with a narrow opening to get into it -- and when CJ isn’t in my lap or following me around, he’s sleeping in that space.

He has no problem eating, but he won’t drink the water (not that I blame him; the water is awfully chemically here, and I won’t drink it either).  But I put some spring water in a bowl, and he didn’t drink that either, at least not while I was watching.  But the food is in his food bowl from home, and the water is in a normal bowl from here, so maybe that has something to do with it.  Or maybe he is drinking it, and he just doesn’t drink very much very fast.

The bad news: large portions of southern California are on fire.  I hope Patrick and family are OK out there.

The good news: everything is working on my new server.  I had some problems with email and name resolution, but they’re fixed now.  All my content has now been removed from the old server, so if you’re reading this, you’re at the new one.

The more better good news: there’s a new song up.  Go listen to it, read the lyrics, and post comments, all on the song page.

Hey Honeybunny, (sorry, Moms just have to use those cute names once in a while from way back when)  uhmm, is there some kind of prize for being the 50,000th visitor to your site?  It’s getting close since March.  What’s the total to date from inception?  Just wondering.

The server change I mentioned a week or two ago actually didn’t happen, because there were some issues that had to be ironed out with the new server (telling it to use eastern standard time instead of UK time, for instance).  Anyway it’ll happen over the next 3 days -- I just updated the DNS resolution for nodivisions.com to point to the new server.

What this means for you, fair and noble visitor, is that you might not see some posts, or some posts might suddenly disappear, because they got posted to the site on the old server.  I’ll eventually move any such posts to the new server.

In the meantime, if you want to start using the new server right away and avoid all that (not that "all that" is really anything...), you can edit your hosts file, which will be in one of these locations:

C:\Windows\hosts
C:\WinNT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Just open it up in Notepad and add a line to the bottom that says:

212.13.208.64 nodivisions.com

(And the amount of space or tabs in between doesn’t matter.)  Then File, Save, and exit.  Close your browser and re-open it, and you’ll be able to see the new site.  Which is, of course, the same as the old site.  I made one little change so I could tell when my DNS servers get updated -- the new site has a capital S at the start of the "song of the moment" link (in the Fall theme, of course).

(If you use Linux, you can add the same line to your /etc/hosts file... but if you use Linux, I probably didn’t have to tell you that : )

I took a little nap and ended up sleeping through all but the last 10 minutes of American Dreams.  It’s the only show I watch on TV, and it’s only on once a week, and I freaking missed it.  Gr.  (OK, I watch O’Reilly too but that’s not the same; for one, it’s not a continuous story where you’re somewhat lost when you miss an episode, and two, it’s on at 8, 11, and 4am, so you can always catch it later.)  If anyone knows anyone who saw it, and could give me a summary... or who taped it and can hook me up... let me know.

subject?  where to sign in.  that’s the subject.  you know some people don’t adjust well to change.  it can be quite a shock to log on and not be able to sign in, ya know.  of course, then again, well, ok.  the sun will come out tomorrow ;-)

where is it?  where?  where do I sign my name at the top?  where do I sign  in?  I don’t want to be ’memom’ anymore.  where, oh where????

Happy mole day!

According to that commercial, "lycopene is one of the ingredients in tomatoes that may help to reduce the risk of heart disease."  So of course now all the multivitamins (whether it’s One-a-Day, One Daily, or the generic Wegmans version) have to have it.  Which is ridiculous, but whatever, that alone wouldn’t really bother me.  What bothers me is that now the pills are about twice as big.  (Just how that’s possible with the addition of only one vitamin, when there were already like 25 vitamins in it, I have no idea.)  Not only that, but apparently lycopene is made out of sandpaper, because the pills are no longer smooth.  It used to be easy to swallow them, but now it’s a lot like skinning your knees on the sidewalk for about 20 feet.  That’s beat.  I’m switching back to Flintstones vitamins.

And that commercial bugs me too.  Tomatoes don’t have "ingredients."  That’s like saying sirloin is an ingredient in cows.  Come on.

I just found these by accident while doing a quick search for something else.  Now I’m quitting because I’m afraid I’ll find more stuff, and I’m in a hurry.  Has anyone read these before?  Thought-provoking, at least.

As much as I like the "Fixed" theme, I get sick of dark themes very quickly.  I’m also generally sick of sans-serif fonts, and lately I have a newfound appreciation for serif, and for plainness in web design.  So here we are.  This is the new fall theme.  (Of course, there needs to be the usual disclaimer for Internet Explorer users: IE doesn’t adhere to standards when rendering web pages.  The current case in point is my Last 5 Visitors jammie: it doesn’t have any background color, but IE gives it a white background.  As a result, there’s an ugly white block underneath it, on top of this theme’s background image.)

In my music class today, the professor had a slide that contained the phrase "vernacular language."  She stopped and said, "I had not heard this phrase until I got to college, so I want to explain it to you.  How many of you are familiar with this phrase?"  My initial reaction was that she is completely insane; how can a person possibly go through ~18 years of life having never heard the word vernacular??  Then again, this professor had just finished saying that a violin doesn’t require air to make sound, so if that tells you anything...  But here’s the sad part: only about half the class raised their hands.  Now I went to private school, so I can only speculate about what kids have (not) learned in public schools.  I know public schools are not so good with the grammar and language skills (I know that because I interact with society every day), but surely they can’t be SO bad as to never present any kind of lesson involving the idea of vernacular languages... right?  Or so I’d’ve thought.

And on the funny tip, I drove out to the FedEx center to ship a package, and on the way I drove over some speed bumps... except instead of the usual yellow sign that says "BUMP," there were big white letters painted right on the road... and they said "HUMP."  Forgive me, but that’s just too much.

Anyway, in that music class, I sat down behind a guy who had a little Vaio notebook.  I look over his shoulder and I see kismet running.  Kismet?  Couldn’t be.  But I look a little closer, and it turns out he’s running Red Hat.  Sweet.  We talked after class, and it turns out his name is Andrew, he’s big into Linux (works as a Red Hat admin on campus and at a local company -- which is pretty close to my current dream job, by the way), and he drives a Golf.  He’s also done some wardriving (which is the name given to the process of driving around detecting wireless networks), which I just taught my musicbox to do.  All pretty coincidental stuff to me.

And speaking of linux, rsync is an amazing tool.  With a single simple command, you can clone an entire hard disk partition.  And you can do it "incrementally", so that for a backup partition, it only copies the files that were changed/added since the last time you backed it up.

rsync -ax --delete / /mnt/backup-partition

-a is the "clone" switch, which basically says "make /mnt/backup-partition an exact copy of /" ... and -x is the single-filesystem switch, so that any other partitions that you have mounted (usually under /mnt/) are excluded.  And --delete says to remove any file from /mnt/backup-partition that no longer exists on the source (/) partition.

Two things about this are particularly cool: one is that you can take the backup partition and boot it*, and it’s fully functional just like the original (which is something you can only dream of in the Microsoft world, unless you’re using some partition cloning tool that doesn’t actually copy files, and needs to be run as the boot disk to work, and might not work anyway if you move the disk to another system).  Two is that rsync uses some kind of advanced algorithm which allows it to only copy the parts of a file that have changed, so if you’ve got some huge file where you’ve only modified a little bit of it, it won’t need to re-copy the entire huge thing.

Also, / happens to be the root directory on a Linux system, which contains the whole partition... and I happen to have another partition mounted at /mnt/backup-partition/.  But / and /mnt/partition/ are just directories as far as rsync (and Linux in general) are concerned, and rsync can clone any directory to any other directory, even if it’s not the whole partition.

*Of course, the backup partition needs a proper boot sector, so you’ll need to run the lilo command on it once (which takes all of 3 seconds) before it will boot.

Heidi just sent me some photos of Cailin (that’s my niece).  The cuteness is almost unbearable!

This is what happens when you get a vacuum after not having one for 2 months.  That’s just from my room, just from vacuuming one time.  Mmmm.  But on the bright side, this new vacuum with the clearness and bagless features is very fun to use.  The junk is all swirling around in there like a tornado while it’s running.

It occurred to me that I should point out that my homeserver guide is actually really easy.  It looks intimidating because of how long the page is, but it’s only that long because I explained everything step by step.  It does take some time, but it shouldn’t actually be difficult at all.

In other really really cool news, my car mp3 player now has a tiny wireless network card that plugs into the USB port, and I installed software and configured the system so that it detects any wireless networks within range and displays info about them on the LCD screen.  I can also synchronize the music library with my home library without taking the system out of the car now  :)  and with a single keypress, no less.  Next task is teaching it how to log on to any public networks it finds.  There are text-based IM clients that I’m looking in to, and web browsing works... in text-only mode, of course, but that’s perfect for reading things like blogs, or checking simple stuff like weather, or whatever.

Stein’s got some amazing photos of Norway in his DeviantArt gallery.  Alas, DeviantArt is one of those gay must-register-to-post-comments websites.

I also stumbled across the site of a guy named Julian Coccia, and he too has some really great photos from around the world in his gallery.

I mailed the mailing list!  I never do that.  If you missed this monumental event, be sure to scroll way down and enter your email address to sign up, and I’ll send the message out again in a few days.

Also... The Guide is finished.  By following the guide, you can set up your own website on your own system, and share your digital photos with everyone, for free.  (Well, as free as a cable/DSL connection, which you should already have.)  Or, you can use the website for whatever you want, like a blog.  You can check out the guide here:

Tell all your friends.