no, not for failure to post anything. pft. apologies to anyone using me for blog hosting, as my database went kaput or something in the last few days, and lost a bunch of…well, data.

also, apologies for spamming your RSS readers, with old posts that want to show up as new. mercifully, i had a recent enough backup of my tables. one of the advantages of not posting anything for 6-7 months.

and hey, finally activated that theme i was working on sometime last year. still not complete, but whatever.

kinetic sculpture race is hella fun.

will talk more about it, or at least post a link to pictures, later. like, when my body starts working again.

saw eugene mirman at his book reading at barnes & noble last night. there are even some pictures:

Eugene Mirman, 27 February 2009

also, this was my parking lot at work this morning:

From From my phone

let’s just say that at 1:30PM, there’s not much waiting. the entire process took about 20 minutes, most of that being the walk to and from the polling place.

i would like to thank everyone who voted ahead of time via absentee ballots, and also got out of the way by coming in early this morning. thanks for making my life a little bit easier.

the US government seems to think that i’m trust-worthy enough for a TS clearance.

although, by posting this, i’m sure i just invalidated that. oh well.

seriously, is my hair just getting curlier as i get older? is this normal?

i got a haircut yesterday, and my hair is just wicked curly right now. i do not recall it being this bad when i was younger. maybe more wavy, at that point. now? its like dr. cox from scrubs (somewhere around season 4 or 5…if you watch the show with any regularity, you know what i’m talking about).

at this rate, its going to be like later-episodes mike brady by the time i’m forty.

and why do all of my similes involve television characters?

I today I learned how it feels to do an rm -rf / on my system.

This happened and work, and luckily, it was my computer, and not one of the servers. And I wasn’t running as root.

But still.

Somehow…and believe, I’d love to know about that how…but somehow, my root folder (/) go into my Trash folder. (I’m using Gnome, BTW, so hence why I even have a Trash folder.) And I decided to empty my trash before shutting down the machine (today is the day we move back into our permanent offices).

Which suddenly caused a lot more items to go flying by than I would have suspected. After cancelling the process, I realize that my Desktop is now clear of anything useful, such as my files and links. And my shortcuts are gone. And then I find that quite a lot of my dot-files are gone.

*sigh*

So now I’m trying to recover from all of that. Luckily, few (if any) binaries were affected. So its more a matter of getting things set up the way I had them before. Sadly, I’ve lost my archived e-mails for last year. And the bulk of the work I had done on our password changing mechanism.

But hey, at least I’ve got my window again, so no more going crazy without natural light.

Got a message from tech support saying that one of our proxies was running low on disk space. Usually this is a problem that sorts itself out on its own, but I decided to check it out, anyways.

Log in to the machine and check out the directory that holds all of the files that are being virus scanned on the way to the end-user, and find a large (1.8GB) ISO file. “Ah, that would be it”. Looking through the file, I see a bunch of stuff about Microsoft. So, someone is downloading a Windows DVD image. Nothing wrong with that (assuming it was from a legal source). Since it was almost two hours old, I cleared out the disk space, solving the tech support issue.

And then I noticed something else of interest. A file with a .php extension. And it was just over 200MB. Looked through the file, and realized it was a Windows Media file.

“Very, very interesting”, says I.

I watch the file for a bit, and once I’m sure its done downloading, I copy it over to a temp drive. Then I tell my coworker about it, and we proceed to copy it to each of our machines: his a Windows box, mine Linux.

For whatever reason, it doesn’t come up on his. But I send the file to VLC and start playback:

“Oh yeah…its porn.”

Bad porn, but porn none-the-less.

Sometimes, I really do enjoy my job.

Background: Co-worker #2 is my team lead, and his wife is into swordplay-type stuff. Co-worker #1 is our boss.

Co-worker #1: So are we going to see a picture of your wife beating things up with a mace now?
Co-worker #2: Yeah, eventually.
Co-worker #1: It just seems odd to spend so much time learning about swords. Is she just a naturally violent person?
Co-worker #2: Not really. More of a protection thing.
Co-worker #1: Protection from what? Muggers?
Co-worker #2: You never know who is lurking in the dark when you’re walking around.
Me: Also, zombies.
Co-worker #1: What’s wrong with guns?
Me: Guns are loud. And attract more zombies.
Co-worker #1: Hunh.
Me: You obviously do not spend enough time thinking about zombie defense.

Photos from the 2007 National Book Festival

While I was quite disappointed with the Book Sales tent at the Festival (I really had my hopes up that there would just be stacks and stacks of books for super cheap, but alas and alack, this was not to be), I was not at all disappointed by Mr. Terry Pratchett.

Listened to him speak and do a question-and-answer session for about 20 minutes. At which point, Jenny and I decided that we should go get spots in line for our respective book signings (mainly remembering the fiasco of a few years ago, waiting for Neil Gaiman.) And what good timing, as we left just when a young man starting telling the story of how one of Mr. Pratchett’s book changed his life, complete with tears. Wow.

Got in line by 12:30. And then with the waiting. Luckily, the people in front of me were hella cool. (Hi Ari! Hi Chris!). We spent the next hour and change geeking out over Pratchett, Gaiman, King and more webcomics than I thought possible. I feared for nerd riots, though, when the event staff announced that there was going to be a second hour of signing, but it would require moving everyone in the various lines that had been set up over a couple of tents.

“This won’t end well” was all I could think. Luckily for our little group, we managed to get to the actual signing tent before any moving had to occur.

And I was this close to having random food scraps from an internationally-famous author in my copy of Sourcery. Seriously: Pratchett signed my book, grabbed his wrap, ate a bite of it, returned it to his plate, and then closed and handed me my book.