Oh yeah, I forgot to mention in my last post that my birthday is coming up, this Thursday, in fact. If you’re one of the people out there that thinks I need to be given a gift, then feel free to select an item from my Amazon or ThinkGeek wishlists. If you don’t feel like getting me anything, that’s fine too, since I probably forgot your birthday already.
Yup, another weekend come and gone. This one was fairly busy. On Saturday, I managed to get the HTPC up and running in the entertainment center. I was having some issues with the onboard ethernet, but it fixed itself once I disabled ACPI. I’ve also gotten the framebuffer TV out stuff working, but it still needs some adjustment to make it look decent. Hopefully I’ll spend some time with it over the next couple of days and get it to my liking.
Saturday afternoon, Matt and I went to see 28 Days Later…, which is kindof an odd little zombie movie. Not as much random zombie-related horror as I was expecting, but it was still a fun movie to watch. It’s rather refreshing to go see a movie that doesn’t rely on billion dollar special effects every 10 seconds to keep things interesting. Probably not a must see movie, but definitly worth a rental.
After that we wandered around for a bit, and ended up grabbing Matt’s hard drives out of his system, taking them to Manchester, and hooking them up to my PC so I could swipe a bunch of his music and stuff. While waiting for that, we broke out the old THPS3.
On Sunday, Matt and I went out to Newmarket so I could fix one of SimPro’s installations out there. Once again the Belkin router that we’re tapping off of for Internet access decided to forget it’s port forwarding settings. I’m not sure why it keeps doing it, but it’s getting annoying. We were also wardriving for the trip out there. Picked up a decent amount of stuff, which I have mapped.
After getting back, Matt and I parted ways, and I picked up Andrea to go see a movie. We ended up seeing The Italian Job, which was pretty good. Again, not a great movie, but I thought it was fun to watch. Not really all that much to say about it though. Afterwards, I took Andrea home, then wandered home to fiddle with my computers for a little while before heading off to bed.
I had a much better posting written up yesterday, but Windows crashed on me, and I can’t remember half of what I wrote. Ah well.
Let’s see, what have I been up to? Friday night I assisted on another upgrade at JLC, mostly because doing upgrades for them is my way of keeping Hindenburg connected to the net. It wasn’t as bad as usual, we just swapped the hardware in the web server, and everybody was happy. Still lasted to about 5am though.
Saturday, I woke up having no plans. Andrea called me, asking if I wanted to go into Boston, which I had suggested a few days earlier, but she had declined. So we did that. We were looking for Pix Poster Cellar, which used to have a store front near Harvard Square. We were under the impression that they still had a store, but at a new location. This turned out to be incorrect, as their new address was in an office building, though we didn’t figure this out until we were standing at the building. After that, we hopped back on the T and went to Harvard Square, poked around the Garage Mall, and I ended up buying The Wee Free Men, a new Terry Pratchett book. Then we wandered across the street to Urban Outfitters, where Andrea bought a pink velvet Buddha.
On Sunday, I was supposed to go to Marci’s party thing, but managed to lose the location of the event, which makes it rather hard to get to. That, and not having contact information for any of the other people involved. So instead I wandered over to Matt’s house to check out his freshly painted PC. It was looking pretty slick at the time, and will hopefully look nice once it’s all dry and reassembled. We also stuck a red cold cathode into Vincent, which is glowing quite nicely as I type this. The kit was pretty easy to install, and even came with a little rocker switch to turn the light on and off from the front panel. Hopefully I’ll have some pictures of it up soon.
After that, we went down to Lowell to see The Hulk, which was perhaps the most disappointing of any of the Marvel movies done so far. If you want to see a superhero movie, go see X2 if you can find it in theaters, or just rend X-Men or Spiderman, it’ll be a lot more fun.
So that brings us to Monday. Started off normally enough, went fairly well up until about 11:30, when someone decided to launch some sort of DDoS attack on Hindenburg. This caused me to wander over to JLC to check up on things. I didn’t get much information about it, but apparently it was targetted at Hindenburg’s SSH port. So I upgraded OpenSSH to the latest version, and hoped for the best. So far, things have been fairly quite. I’m guessing one of the people who IRC from the box pissed off some script kiddie. Ah well. If I find out who, their account will go away rather quickly.
Oh, I also registered a new domain name, though the registration isn’t complete yet. Within the next day or so, 2bithacker.net should be up and running. Not 100% sure what I’m going to use it for yet, but I liked the sound of it, and it’s a little less tied to a gamer thing as chocobo.cx.
Update complete. Carry on.
Interesting day of work today. I was awakened by a phone call from Mark telling me that things were broken, specifically network things. Turned out that Dave had been doing some work in the server room, and managed to knock out one of the cables that connects our master switch to it’s two slave switches. Annoying thing about it is that the slave switches appear to continue working fine without the master; they power up, link lights turn on, and activity lights blink, but they don’t actually pass packets around, they need the logic in the master switch to do that. That was a fun way to start a day. Moral of the story: Always screw in your switch’s interconnect cables.
Luckily, the rest of the day was much less eventful. I worked on a script to grab weather observations from UNH, which Mark is using to graph up some stuff for the pump station we’ve been working on in Newmarket, which is close enough to Durham for the data to be fairly accurate.
It also looks like I’ll finally begin work on the grand and glorious Rewrite. This is a project to basically tear down most of the stuff I’ve written in the past few years, and rebuild it stronger and better than before. When we started out, the software was designed to talk to a single device, the SimLink-SC, and then upload data to a remote server via a modem. Since then we’ve added 2 other devices for it to talk to, support for taking snapshots from cameras, notification, voice menu support, support for people to dial into the remote boxes, and we scraped the whole remote storage system. Each feature has been hastily bolted onto the side of the program, and that tends to get messy after a while. So finally I get to start from scratch and redo the whole thing. Rather excitied about it, I am. My end goal is to design a system whereby new devices can be added by writing a single interface module, so that down the road other people can write modules for us, without SimPro needed to do anything more than release an API.
Life has been progressing as usual lately. I still havn’t finished up the HTPC, but I’ve got it all ready to go into the entertainment center, I just need to get it in there and start configuring things. I bought a CD/DVD/VHS shelving thing from Best Buy and put it together on Saturday. I like it, but it reminds me that I should go out and buy more DVDs.
Also been reading more recently. I recently finished Night Watch and In the Beginning was the Command Line, which was a interesting look into the way operating systems are seen in society, and why some do well and others do not. I think it’s probably worth reading if you’re interested in that sort of thing, and it’s fairly short. Currently I’m reading The Code Book, which is a look at the evolution of cryptography. I’m only up to telegraph-era stuff now, and it’s been pretty interesting. It’s got a decryption challenge at the end of the book for a contest that ends in 2010, I think I’ll take a crack at it.
Matt and I have been hanging out a bit. It currently looks like he’ll be moving off to Texas after the wedding, so he’s just taking assisting jobs for the summer. We stumbled across some excitment yesterday, which he describes better than I could. We also purchased a few things off of xoxide.com, including some cold cathode tubes. We’re planning on modding our cases a bit before the next LAN, which will hopefully be sometime in July or August.
As for work, I had to go out to Newmarket the past couple of days to fix up our system out there. We now have the flow sensors working, and the wireless link seems to be fairly stable. I’ve learned that no one should ever buy a Belkin router though, the interface on them is terrible.
There is a true and sincere friendship between you both.
Yeah, I got the same one again. Matt felt bad for me, so he gave me his as well:
You are going to have some new clothes.
Which I take a dark omen that something bad will happen to my beloved pants and shirts.
Your Existing Situation
Under considerable stress due to the demands of the existing situation. Trying to extricate himself from the things which restrict him or tie him down.
Your Stress Sources
Suppresses his innate enthusiasm and imaginative nature, for fear that he might be carried away by it only to find himself pursuing some will-o’-the-wisp. Feels he has been misled and abused and has withdrawn to hold himself cautiously aloof from others. Keeps a careful and critical watch to see whether motives towards him are sincere—a watchfulness which easily develops into suspicion and distrust.
Your Restrained Characteristics
Feels trapped in a distressing or uncomfortable situation and seeking some way of gaining relief. Able to achieve satisfaction through sexual activity providing no turmoil or emotional agitation is involved.
Your Desired Objective
Needs a peaceful environment. Wants release from stress, and freedom from conflicts or disagreement. Takes pains to control the situation and its problems by proceeding cautiously. Has sensitivity of feeling and a fine eye for detail.
Your Actual Problem
Needs to protect himself against his tendency to be too trusting, as he finds it is liable to be misunderstood or exploited by others. Is therefore seeking a relationship providing peaceful and understanding intimacy, and in which each knows exactly where the other stands.
Your Actual Problem #2
Disappointment at the non-fulfillment of his hopes and the fear that to formulate fresh goals will only lead to further setbacks have resulted in considerable anxiety. He is trying to escape from this into a peaceful and harmonious relationship, protecting him from dissatisfaction and lack of appreciation.
Yes, yet another weekend in the action packed life of Chip. We started off on a high note Friday night, managing to lock my keys in the apartment. This was a fun adventure, since Andrea, who has my spare keys, is still in Italy, and the number for building maintainance isn’t posted anywhere. I ended up catching another tenent on his way in, and asking him for the number. That was fun.
On the wonderously rainy Saturday, I spent some time cleaning up the apartment. While I was working on Shadow and Vincent, I managed to make quite a mess. Most of it is picked up now, but there’s still work to be done. After spending some time on that, Matt came over for a visit. He came bearing gifts in the form of games, which we installed and played around with for a bit, then wandered out to get some dinner and ended up renting Guilty Gear X2 for the PS2 and The Animatrix, which we didn’t watch.
Guilty Gear X2 is perhaps the strangest fighting game I have ever played. With characters ranging from Girl-with-a-Boat-Anchor to Guy-with-a-Paper-Bag-on-His-Head-and-a-7-Foot-Scalpel, one finds oneself quite often exclaiming things such as “What the?” and “That’s messed up.” I ended up going over to Matt’s house today to continue playing (he got his brother to rent it as well.) We broke down and looked online to see how to unlock various things, all of them taking quite a large investment in time. The easiest way is apparently to complete all 3 storylines for each of the 20 characters. Needless to say, this will take a while. The other method involves getting to level 230 in Survival Mode. I think the highest we got was 40. At any rate, it’s a fun game, and I’m considering purchasing it.
Other than that, not really much going on. I didn’t do a bit of work on the HTPC over the weekend, which kindof annoys me, since I really would like to get it going. Perhaps tomorrow night I’ll at least put it in place and hook it up to the network so I can play with it in place, rather than having to hook it up to my monitor and keyboard, which is just a pain.
