I haven't been writing much about what's been going on in my life lately because there's been so much of it. Working out wedding plans, picking out tuxedos, trips to the HacDC loft to work on stuff, hanging out with Zapheus from Brass Goggles, shopping, keeping the apartment picked up.. I haven't had time to write about things like that. Most of the posts I've been putting up lately I actually wrote offline over a period of days in a catch-as-catch-can manner and then cut and pasted them into entries.
I haven't forgotten anyone, and I'll get posts up as …
Longtime readers of my weblog are no doubt familiar with my preoccuptation with security, which lead to my working in that field of endeavour, and also my interest in personal privacy. A couple of weeks ago, some of my readers asked me what they, as computer users who aren't experts but aren't starting from square zero either could do on a personal level. I thought and thought for a couple of days and put together a list of things, and then realized that making all of it make sense would take much more than a single post because it's not …
Contrary to most years, my Fourth of July weekend was far lower in impact and more relaxing this time around than it usually is. I've been running short on sleep for a while now and made up for all of that by sleeping as long as I possibly could, over thirty hours in total spread over three days (plus a two hour power doze (like a power nap, only I never actually fell asleep but instead elfnapped, the way I do when I'm on the road) on Saturday afternoon). I actually feel refreshed and clear-headed for the first time in …
Running between work, home, and the bed to sleep, mostly. It's been an unusually long week (and it's not even Friday yet), and rather than write incoherent posts in the evening I've decided to catch up on sleep where and when I can. Consequently, there hasn't been much to write about in the past few days, but I can authoritatively state that there are no pin-holes in my eyelids. Battling highway traffic in southern Virginia is tiring work, though ultimately rewarding.
I've just pre-registered for The Last HOPE conference in New York City later this year (18-20 July 2008, to …
This is week four of my "three weeks out, one week in" work cycle, so I'll have much more constant net.access for at least a couple of days. I may as well take the time to write a couple of updates. My off-the-road workload has been sizable lately, enough so that even working from home means a day of solid work, with little to no socially acceptable goofing off at work stuff going on, such as reading Slashdot or checking one's e-mail. Work aside, I haven't been doing much of anything at all. Yesterday morning, Lyssa and I drove …
Yesterday wasn't so much a wave of mutilation as it was a stormfront of WTF sweeping across the land. While I can't really put my finger on any one trigger event that caused yesterday to go west in a serious way, I can outline more or less what happened. First off, the hard drive in my workstation at the office decided to pack it in while I was working on something, which turned the rest of the day into a mad dash to find a new drive and rescue everything that I could. Finding a replacement drive took somewhere around …
Well, let me see... it's been interesting times the past couple of days, which has left me precious little time to write about what's actually been going on with my day to day life lately.
First off, early last week Alphonse Elric, Lyssa's primary machine and workstation at home packed it in. One moment he was cunching merrily away, the next utterly locked up. No amount of rebooting or jiggling was able to bring him back online, though we did notice that the components inside of his silver chassis (as well as the exhaust fans and chassis itself) were horribly …
Lyssa and I changed our plans last weekend because a) there weren't nearly as many RSVP's for the Starcraft LAN party we were organizing, and b) because there were some things that we had to take care of because we'd been putting them off for too long. That morning we sent out word of the cancellation, had a quick breakfast, and then set out for Maryland to take care of things.
There. Nice and fast, so that nothing else has a chance to crash on me.
Jean and Chandler went home early yesterday morning, something that's taking Lyssa and I a while to get used to. They're almost like family to us, and it feels weird to come home after work and not have anyone there. We're now able to take Lucy out of the office and let her spend the evenings in the living room because Chandler isn't here anymore. He's a good dog, to be sure, but he's also never seen small rodents before and we couldn't take a chance.
Lucy, to her credit, wasn't unduly shaken up by Chandler's presence. She knows that …
The past couple of days have been busy, highly eventful, and fruitful, to be sure, which is why I've only been posting terse updates here and there.
Here's what happened:
Lucien, the mail server that I've been running for the past couple of years, flamed out on Monday afternoon, leaving me mostly incommunicado for a few days. I had to scramble to construct a replacement for reasons that I'll go into shortly. What I wound up doing was downloading an .iso image of the 2007.0 release of Gentoo Linux and while Leandra was pulling it down I hunted through …