February 2004 Archives

Seriously -- can't wait to get out of here. Plane leaves at 11:30pm tomorrow night and I don't know if I can spend a day in Vegas without drinking (I'm sick of it), eating (I'm sick from all the food here), gambling (I don't gamble), or buying stuff (I'm just about out of money).

In Vegas tonight. Going to see strippers tonight.


So much ... shiny noisey crap....

Leaving today for Las Vegas... Going for a friend's bachelor party. Need strippers, condoms, cash, and some kind of sexual utensils....

I'm looking to put in a cooktop range and a dishwasher underneath it, but most dishwashers are of a standard height which make it impossible to put these things in underneath a standard countertop with a cooktop range in it. The kitchen isn't very big, and I want a built-in dishwasher, so I thought I'd have to do without ... until now.





http://www.theappliancepro.com/fispaysindis.html

Saw some nice warm(er) weather on the way to work today, but a little disappointed with the lack of colour everywhere. I know this time of year, a lack of green is expected; I shouldn't expect a blue sky when it's overcast and raining; and I've been indoors all day, so what do I care?


So I was thinking of the colour blue. How calm and soothing a nice blue/purple sky would look right about now, as the sun drops below the horizon, and night comes over everything. Just before the sky goes black (unlike in the city, where the sky goes a perplexing orange) and the stars come out. You know what I'm talking about ... and if you don't, you should leave the city sometime -- just sit out in an empty field and watch the sky from cowpie hill.


I think what I'm missing is summer (note that I was missing summer as early as last autumn) and all the dark blue in the night sky there was. The warm summer wind blowing around you in the middle of the night, the peace and quiet of the larger world interrupted by only the most intermittent traffic sounds (even in the country).


Even up in the north side of Algonquin, there was always some kind of sound, but the blue/black night sky was really the thing which took my breath away. And stars too! Stars in such a concentration where you could actually see the rest of the Milky Way pouring across the night sky like a spilled glass of whole milk (Homo milk in Canada, eh).


So here's to ya, blue. Old buddy, old pal. Here's to the Blue Train, the Galactic Express, the Kind of Blue. Here's to the stars. Here's to the upcoming summer nights. Here's thinking of you.

I remember taking this pic in San Francisco. I've probably already posted it somewhere, but it's still a neat pic, taken behind the City Lights bookstore. They renamed a bunch of streets after beat poets, and Kerouac got the alleyway behind City Lights. How unfitting...

Feel like I'm being weighted down with all of the money issues and all the paperwork for the new house. Looks like dozens of people need to be contacted, what with insurance, lawyer, mortgage, utilities, taxes, and all that other junk -- I'm bound to miss something. I even need to find a fridge and stove before I move in, otherwise it's "beans out of the can" and microwave popcorn for dinner.


Got some nice pics of the house when I went to visit it again, and it's a little bigger than I remembered the first time. Especially large was the little kitchen in the basement, and the furnace room/work room. The ceiling in the stairwell to the second floor is a little lower than I remember, but I'm short enough that I didn't hit my head when I went upstairs.


Can't wait to get in there and start using it! Gonna need a few coats of paint, but that's about all it'll need.

Check out this awesome image I found on the 'net. I didn't know Louie Armstrong was a Beat...

Reading Kerouac's _Maggie_Cassidy_ today, and thinking about the beat generation.


In the depths of the Greyhound Terminal
sitting dumbly on a baggage truck looking at the sky
    waiting for the Los Angeles Express to depart
worrying about eternity over the Post Office roof in
    the night-time red downtown heaven
staring through my eyeglasses I realized shuddering
    these thoughts were not eternity, nor the poverty
    of our lives, irritable baggage clerks,
nor the millions of weeping relatives surrounding the
    buses waving goodbye,
nor other millions of the poor rushing around from
    city to city to see their loved ones,
nor an indian dead with fright talking to a huge cop
    by the Coke machine,
nor this trembling old lady with a cane taking the last
    trip of her life,
nor the red-capped cynical porter collecting his quar-
    ters and smiling over the smashed baggage,
nor me looking around at the horrible dream,
nor mustached negro Operating Clerk named Spade,
    dealing out with his marvelous long hand the
    fate of thousands of express packages,
nor fairy Sam in the basement limping from leaden
    trunk to trunk,
nor Joe at the counter with his nervous breakdown
    smiling cowardly at the customers,
nor the grayish-green whale's stomach interior loft
    where we keep the baggage in hideous racks,
hundreds of suitcases full of tragedy rocking back and
    forth waiting to be opened,
nor the baggage that's lost, nor damaged handles,
    nameplates vanished, busted wires & broken
    ropes, whole trunks exploding on the concrete
    floor,
nor seabags emptied into the night in the final
    warehouse.


(I stole that from Ginsberg, FYI).

The new template is almost finished for the main page -- just have to tweak some link colours, and I'll be done. I'm still fighting with getting all style settings onto the css page, and not having it divided up on the main page and the stylesheet. Oh well. I'm not very good at this stuff.... At least the page looks more cheery than it did previously. I was going for a more professional look, but still fun and kinda whimsical.


Thinking of heading out to Starlight tonight, or maybe Jane Bond. I've been pretty good all week, and could use a couple of stiff drinks (maybe a good Cuban cigar or something)... The guy from the Orange Monkey will probably be spinning tonight (he does a great job with some serious disco tunes). The music really fits with the style of the club, what with all the vintage furniture and the way the place is laid out.

Got the new front page of Zuckervati.com loaded up, and I'm pretty happy with the Anime chickie silhouette. Introducing some more publicity images, and rebuilding my openBSD box at the same time... Got a spiffy new aluminum case, an AMD Athlon 1700+ and a gig of RAM, with a hard drive big enough to store all my mp3s for Radio Zuckervati. There were too many logistical problems with running that radio station from two different machines, so I'm going to see if I can get IceCast running.

Been trying to update the look and feel of Zuckervati.com, and I think I'm on to something. Over the next couple of days, I'll be playing with the format, so don't be surprised if you see anything weird (or - gasp - broken!).

Got my mortgage approved. Just need to get all my money together so I can buy the house when it closes in May. I'm going to be eating onions and bread for the next little while (actually, this was told to me by the nice lady at the Moody Blues café in one of her fascinating stories about how the café got started....).

So I've been a little on edge this week, mainly because I just bought a house.


!!!


Yes, I bought a house. Now I'm just waiting for the mortgage application to go through without incident. The place was listed way too low, and was only on the market for about 3 hours before someone else put an offer in. So we had a brief and uninteresting bid war, and I came out on top. HUZZAH! Perhaps the worst thing about the house is it's insane cuteness, down to the hearts on the window shutters. Other than that, it's excellent: there's a library, a bar in the finished basement, and an awesome kitchen, patio with awning, detached garage, and a big back yard. Awesome looking place (considering it's diminutive size.


So, here's hoping I can pull this off without too much trouble...

Was back in Toronto again yesterday, and got the HD working properly. Unfortunately, I put the bad drive back in the wrong place, 2nd from the SCSI bus instead of 1st from the bus. So I mistakenly FDISKed the wrong drive, and had to work on restoring two hard drives instead of one. Luckily, these were cache/squid drives, do no big deal.


Got to see a basketball game at the Air Canada centre. That was pretty cewl, even though I'm not a big Raptors fan (and they lost). But we got some neat box seats, with a wet bar, much food, and our own personal majordomo. Sweet living.

Worked a late night last night in T.O. and didn't get back home until 2am. The worst part about this is that I couldn't finish the job I set out to do -- recover a hard drive. I couldn't get the terminal window to properly display in single-user mode, and the keymappings were all foobarred. I should have done a setenv TERM const25, but I couldn't remember the exact setting.


And it snowed on the way home too. It always seems to be stormy when I head for T.O. Makes me think the city doesn't want me there...

Getting tired, looks like it's time to go home. Just got all my email caught up (or most of it, anyway), and I still have two servers to setup for a VPN experiment. Got to do this tomorrow.


Just got a classy new 2U server for our own use. Going to have to set that one up and take it up to T.O. for mounting in the cold room. I'll have to get that up there the same time I'm replacing the hard drive on one of our existing servers ... got one done, now have to replace another failing HD. This one's not hot-swappable either. Still don't know how I'm going to get the new server through the revolving security door.... Hrmmm.

Yes, after fumbling around in Moncton with that old Targus bag, I figured it was time to get something rad and hip -- something that would appeal to the kids, and would also carry around all my 12" vinyl (like I have any of that yet). So I picked up this cewl new Samsonite courier bag, one that doesn't appear on their website yet, it's soooo high tech.


The Samsonite 'Tech Series' is a new line of computer bags aimed squarely at the younger crowd, the active 'techie', or the business person who doesn't want to haul around a 20 lb leather bag. This bag offers the user the abiity (sic) to convert it from shoulder bag to backpack in seconds, and also offers a sturdy handle for those times when you don't want to shoulder it. The 840-denier nylon gives the bag it's durability and lightweight. The colouring is distinctly 'High Tech' yet business-like, using mainly black with grey accents and some reflective piping on the main flap. Double rivets and internal reinforcements have been added to all the weight-bearing points to prevent any catstropic failure, especially when you're running across a busy street to catch your bus.





Yes, I'm just that cool. Soon, I'll have to get a new laptop just so I'll have something worthy of putting in my new bag.