I haven't been tinkering a lot lately. Not because I haven't wanted to (well, that's not quite true) but because I've had other stuff that I wanted to get out of the way. Basically, I couldn't stand the impacted shitpile that I call an office-cum-workshop in its current state anymore. Figuring out how much floor space I had a few weeks ago really got to me and I decided to do something about it. I've been spending a couple of hours every day (after work and over the weekends) going through one thing at a time (one stack of drawers …

Somehow it's turned into one of those really busy months, where I've been working on stuff more than anything else. Thing is, most of it isn't really worth talking about; not yet, anyway. Lifestyle maintenance is like that. It's not glamorous, interesting, or even all that fun, but it still has to get done, if only for the sake of one's mental health.

For starters, I've been trying to free up some room in my office (where I spend most of my days, if only because of my day job). Talking to someone a week or two ago about home …

I flew back to Pennsylvania about two weeks ago to wrap up my mom's estate.

I'm really not sure how else to put it. It's short, to the point, but nothing at all like simple.

Lyssa and I flew back on two different days: I got us set up in a hotel and tried to sleep off the jetlag because I flew out at 0700 from California. Lyssa flew out just before midnight a day later. As it turned out we both slept all day and night because we just didn't have it in us to do anything else.

We …

My .plan file has been updated. As always, there is NSFW content therein. Use discretion.

While we didn't get hit by Hurricane Hannah, the DC metroplex certainly felt her wrath late Friday and all day Saturday. I don't want to say that it was raining cats and dogs but not long after waking up on Saturday morning I saw a squadron of squirrels wearing what appeared to be miniature SWAT gear high-tailing it through rain blowing at a forty-five degree angle toward a nondescript white van in the parking lot. Unfortunately, they've moved back in and are busily digging in the coffee and aloe vera plants on the balcony, Lyssa tells me.

I've had a …

A good bit of yesterday was spent monitoring Leandra as she upgraded her systemware and applications, which amounted to watching the output of various compilation batches (thank you, Portage) and making sure that nothing went horribly wrong. However, something did, in the form of a major change between revisions of the Apache web server, which had the net effect of making all of the config files obsolete and unusable. I discovered it last night while watching Leandra boot back up, but was too tired after work to do anything about it.

It appears that service is restored to all of …

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 …

I still have to write about the rest of Thresholds, going to see Daywatch, and on Sunday night going to The True Colors Tour to see the Dresden Dolls and Cyndi Lauper perform. There's a lot going on right now; story of my lives for the past month or so, in fact.

But I still want to write about something, so I'm going to get out my war jacket and write about the Tor Hidden Wiki vanishing. The Tor Hidden Wiki was a site hidden somewhere on the Tor darknet. Nobody knows who ran it or where it was located …

As you've probably guessed, I've been too busy to write at the moment because there are a lot of things happening.

This weekend past, Lyssa and I were going crazy getting the apartment torn apart, cleaned, and put back together in time for Heron61 and Teaotter to fly in from Portland to visit us this week. As one might expect, this was a nontrivial exercise, and involved disconnecting many things, moving them, running the vacuum cleaner, moving them back into place, and starting them back up. This also meant running around to acquire foodstuffs to make dinner for everyone on …