Making NASA stronger == Kill NASA.

Don't Leave Children Behind == Leave them behind.

Healthy Forests == Cut down the forests.

Clear Skies Act == Degraded air quality standards.

Improve Head Start == Dismantle Head Start.

Taken from Slashdot here and here.

Slashdot: Woo, Services for Unix is now free! The most important part is that it is almost completely based on OpenBSD. Running OBSD tools on Windows sounds like a great fusion to me.

So, I've heard of mice with too many additional buttons to be useful, but thankfully my new mouse just has left click, right click, scroll wheel, scroll up button, scroll down button, task switch and then two currently unassigned buttons that I would assume are used for forward and backward in a web browser. That may sound like a lot of buttons, but I think of the scroll up and down buttons as just an extension of the wheel and the task switch button is miniscule.

Now the keyboard on the other hand is just asinine. Along with the normal keys that a normal keyboard has (letters, numbers, punctuation, navigation and keypad), this one has seperate keys for scrolling, go, back, sleep, f-lock, e-mail, messenger/sms, webcam, media, mute, volume up/down, last track, next track, stop, play, iTouch, search, shopping, favorites, and my home. Additionally to that, it has a function key to enable new, reply, forward, send, undo, redo, print, save, my computer, my documents, my pictures, and my music. To make matters worse, they labeled the normal control key functions like undo, cut, copy and paste. They keyboard is just a little bit overboard!

Living in the land of coffee, I have yet to be impressed by the coffee shops available out here. There is no end to the number of Starbucks available and there is a healthy dose of Tully's as well. The only place I've enjoyed so far has been Caffe Ladro, and they are only located in Seattle proper. Well, today I found out about a place in Redmond called Victor's, located at 7993 Gilman St. I will have to give it a try soon!

So I go to backup my MP3 drive on my server and it crashes, deleting every single MP3 I have collected for the past six years! I am going to cry. There was so much effort put into building that collection, from ripping my own CDs to downloading full albums from Kazaa to emusic (which isn't even the same site anymore). So pissed.

Happy four month anniversary!

Last night, I originally planned on leaving work a bit early, taking a nap, having a quick bite to eat and then hitting the gym with Jeff. None of that happened! Around 5:30 PM, Eric and I were talking about the new laptop he just ordered. I told him not to buy Office from Dell since I could get a good deal on a legit copy of Office 2003 from work. I decided to run to the company store right then since I was tired and needed a bit of fresh air. After that, Lee sent me a chat request and convinced me to join him and some of his MS friends for dinner. We went to Cucina Cucina (a decent to mediocre italian restaurant, thankfully we get 2-for-1 specials) and had a fun time. It was good to meet new people, but I sometimes forget how horribly dorky we can all be. I explained how Microsofties and non-Microsofties have difficulty mingling and there needs to be a certain percentage (we estimated 60%) of non-Microsofties for a group to work.

I still planned on going to the gym with Jeff, but he was feeling fairly comfortable at home and wanted to skip it. Good thing, since Russ called me soon after wanting to get drinks to unwind from a 13 hour day. We went to Tap House, he got dinner and I got a liquid dinner of an Emerald City Tea and a Manhattan. I pretty much ordered the tea (vodka, gin, rum, midori, pineapple, sprite) because it already looked like Russ and I were on a date, so I had to get something fruity and served in a hurricane glass. The Manhattan was used to bring up my testosterone levels afterward. We had a good discussion and I'm glad I skipped working out. I can always go a bit harder tonight.

Kat and I had quite a relaxing and enjoyable weekend, if I may say so myself. Originally, we had planned to go to Dahlia Lounge for dinner on Friday, but we both had a hard week and figured we wouldn't be up for such a nice dinner. Instead, we ended up going to Wasabi Bistro and had some of the best sushi available in Western Washington. We tried two of their signature rolls, the Spicy 101 and the Belltown. Other than an overabundance of mayo on the Spicy 101, the meal was great. Kat had a craving for edamame and that was satisfied by the complementary bowl served with every dinner.

Much of Saturday morning was spent lounging around my apartment, but it was definitely not a waste of time. Much of the afternoon was spent at Starbucks: Kat doing work, me just playing around on the internet. That evening, we made the first meal in her new townhome. We made spinach and cheese ravioli, fresh bread and a mixed greens salad. All in all, very enjoyable. Before we could make dinner, however, I had to put together the table and chairs we would need to eat off! I've gotten pretty good at putting together Ikea furniture, so it didn't take too long.

Sunday saw me fighting with my server for a good part of the afternoon and then having dinner at Kat's parents. We played a dominos game called Mexican Train and then had a lovely filet dinner. Her dad and I did most of the talking, but I think everyone enjoyed themselves.

I have now moved to my fourth office in six months. If anyone takes my stapler, this place is going down!

I have been a bit behind in adding new image galleries to the navigation. I have since added these galleries:

• Events
  • Snow 01.06.2004
  • Chicago 01.01.2004
  • New Years Eve 12.31.2003
  • Holiday Party 12.13.2003
  • Holiday Party 12.12.2003
  • Go-Karting 10.18.2003
• Stuff
  • Cats 01.03.2004
  • Verona 10.28.2003

Mmmm, new wireless keyboard and mouse... Thanks, slickdeals!

It's Fifteen Minute Photoshop® time!

Basically, my bedroom is not in the most optimal configuration. Both of my tall bookshelves are covering up one window completely and part of another window. So, I started thinking about alternative arrangements. Knowning me, I couldn't just visualize this or write it out on a sheet paper, I decided to measure and model my room in Photoshop.



It's pretty hard to see on the left, but there is a long window there. The upper left red line is another window. The red line on the right is the bathroom door. Here is my suggested layout:



This clears both windows (since the dresser fits underneath the window and the sides of the bed are not against the bed) and seems like a good idea. Bah, no time to do it tonight.

I've been wrestling with hardware issues for about four days now. That is what I get for naming a server fireball! Basically, the machine that has been my internet router, NAT box, development web server, database server, RDP proxy has gone through quite a few upgrades. It originally was my old overclocking desktop (thus, "fireball") running a 300 MHz Celeron. It was upgraded to a 500 MHz PIII and it currently has a 700 MHz Duron. A month or so ago, I bought a new 120 GB drive for my desktop (thanks, Slickdeals!) and last week I finally got around to putting my old 30 GB drive into fireball.

The problems started then. Since the 30 GB drive was already in my desktop, I decided to install OpenBSD 3.4 on the drive before transferring it to the server. That install went smoothly, but the drive would not boot when I transferred it. I figured it just didn't like the transfer, so I reinstalled OpenBSD while in fireball. When I tried to boot after the second install, the bootloader would come up with crap like "@$%&@#$&*@#$#$%!@#(&(^%". After 45 minutes of playing around with the bootloader, the BIOS and the boot sequence, I finally figured out that it wouldn't boot unless the drive was the primary on the IDE chain. Ok, finally got the new drive up and running! When installing OBSD, my first steps are to install the ports tree, tcsh, vim, the source and add 'mbibik' as a user. I got as far as compiling tcsh static when the machine just froze, hard. I figured, whatever, just a random lockup. Nope, anytime I taxed the processor, the machine would freeze. Obviously (at least to me), this seemed like a heat issue. I opened the case to check out the CPU fan, but it's a fairly small (AKA cramped) case so I couldn't see the fan behind the power supply. I monitored the CPU temp and it never seemed to get into dangerous territory.

I gave up at this point and told Russell the internet would be down for awhile (no server, no NAT, no internet). I started to play with it again, but there isn't much you can do when the damned thing freezes every 15 minutes! I gave up trying to install tcsh, vim, etc and just started surfing the net from my desktop. Oddly enough, it didn't lock up. At this point, I realized that interactive activities such as installing or compiling are probably accessing the disk more than just using the box as a router (which would only access the disk to periodically write logs). I switched back to the old drive, and all is well. Too bad my 30 GB drive is fried!

Reminder for later: Sour Times; Breath From Another

"Everywhere in these days men have ceased to understand that the true security is to be found in social solidarity rather that in isolated individual effort." - F. Dostoyevsky