The Empirical Manifesto

Daivd is quite sad to see me go. It was fun David - thanks for having me!

We had a nice time visiting and fraggin' the ever-living Shiite Muslim out of each other via Holomatch. The cats felt it too. They all gathered around my cot last night to pay their respects. The car is even more tightly packed than it was yesterday. I'm dead tired. I'm supposed to be creating new httpd error pages, fixing newly added printers to a workgroup of Solaris boxes in D.C., and writing an LDAP HOWTO for adding clients. Or, I could just blog all day...

New on quark is a section entitled, 'Blogs' which contains banners I've created for blogs I keep up with on a daily basis. Feel free to jump in the fray. We're talking sometimes 200+ comments on a wide variety of subjects here.

Internet connectivity at work today is intermittent. I hate that. Still, it beats a 24.6 AOL dial-up connection.

So I'm burning some music in CDDA format for the drive, but I've already packed my desk. No Sharpies! Then I recall...Tony had purchased me some high-speed, low-drag mini's, which I had clipped to the inside of my mobile command center utilizing the slick, integrated patented 'clip-cap.' Problem solved - Hooray Sharpie!



At the folks tonight, dropping stuff off at my storage shed, then last day of work tomorrow, a week in Wichita, then onto St. Louis! I know few things at this point, but I'll share with you my desires. I absolutely must have a Hotel with broadband, else I'll just die. I can't go 6 days, let alone 6 months without it. My livelihood depends on it. I'll probably unpack teh max0r and the 17" Viewsonic monitor and the ADT workstation and 22" monitor. I'd like to rebuild my Scorpio box as a unix box, but I may just give in and install linux on it. Either way, that will go into storage with the 17" Sun monitor in St. Louis until I'm ready for that. Anything that I keep in the Hotel will have to be moved to car every time I leave to drive to Wichita. The nature of the beast.

As always,

Slightly Greater than Fantastic

Went off on the Team Leader yesterday. I feel sorry for him, really. Asking me stupid questions. Poor guy.

Email he rec'd:


I've had a problem using ssh to connect from my box (blade100) to v120. Eric is to resolve this problem; and it's been several weeks. Iris is waiting for me to test the DB that she moved over there. Would you please see that this issue resolved ASAP? Thanks!


Oh, I fixed that problem alright. THREE WEEKS AGO! I deleted his third-party licensed ssh client and used Tony's brilliant SunOS 5.8 tarball to install all the packages necessary for a Solaris 8 box to run secure shell. Then I kindly (oh, so kindly and gently) explained to him how to use IP's in place of hostnames to do exactly what he wanted to do, and he was a happy, secure-shell'ing fool when I left him. Now this. And then the questions about his email from a guy who doesn't know what 'ssh' stands for. Grrrr. I exploded and walked away to work on LDAP. Today, this came in the mail from someone else:


v120 now has a new IP address. When it was given the new IP address three weeks ago, it was not added to the DNS tables or the NIS+ tables. To make matters worse, (1st email guy) and I had resolv.conf files on our Sun boxes that pointed to (old dns server), which is no longer updated but is still functioning as a DNS server and still thinks v120 is at the old address.


Ya think that might be the problem??? Asses.

He asks me yesterday, "So how's L.D.A.P. going?"

"Commonly pronounced, 'LDAP,' it's going fine thank you."

So, I've been using Photoshop Elements in place of Photoshop CS these days for several reasons. Basically, if you know CS, Elemets will just piss you off, as all the same tools are in different locations and some of the features of CS are just non-existant. By far the most wonderful thing about Elements is that it retains batch processing. I tell it, "Take these 400 images in this directory and all it's subdirectories, resize to 50% of their orginal size, make it a gif, and overwrite the original file." Nice.

Sun ONE is gay.

0615: So my normal route is blocked this morning by a tractor-trailer which decided to turn upside down stopping traffic in all directions this morning. I whip around on an alternate route with nothing lost. It's not unusual for me to be behind a Cavalier with one behind me as we're passing one. They're shit cars, and there are a lot of them. But I wasn't driving my shit car, I was driving the wife's car, and what is unusual is following a Saturn LW300 in your Saturn LW300.


0700: So I trek on over to the ADC since our last remaining connection to the internet went down yesterday at 0900, and I pull across our abandoned parking lot, put the car in reverse to back into my parking space, and nearly hit a car which was right on my bumper!


0800: No cigar smoking in the wife-mobile. Arrive at work grumpy.


1415: NIS+ to LDAP in 5 minutes Flat is a lie. Solaris 10 is a lie. Java Gay Desktop is a lie.