50% part whiskey
50% part sour mix
100% fun

I started drinking whiskey sours around christmas but hadn't had one since. Kind of a girly drink, but those things go down so easy. JD was on sale so I hooked myself up. Now I'm in real trouble. I'm in the habit of making them like I do gin & tonics, except instead of 2 shots alcohol it's 50% (though by the end of a long evening I end up drinking the whiskey straight).

Expect many nonsensical journal entries from me in the near future :] :] :]

BitTorrent is an awesome idea. If you haven't tried it, next time you download something big, check it out. It's use has skyrocketed, ranging in use from the perfectly legitimate to things of questionable legality.

There are a couple of reasons why I love it. The biggest is that I can run it with no GUI and just ncurses and python2. Very cool. And setting the max_upload_rate to prevent saturating the upload is easy.

But I have one big problem. BitTorrent seems to randomly cause kernel panics in my system, which is ... inconvenient. The torrent-talk Yahoo group doesn't seem to be much help, but I haven't posted a message there yet.

I have a feeling the problem is in my hardware. The system hangs at the bios initialization unless I give it a gentle *WHACK* before powering on. Journal recovery fails a quarter of the time. And the network card's autosensing abilities are fairly dodgy. It's on its final days, a laptop that I acquired in 1997 and probably traveled with in excess of 20,000 miles. The battery died long ago and the hinges are broken. The "manufacturer" went out of business in 1998. But I'm really attached to it, I don't want it to die.

Ahhh, I had a lot of fun time with this machine. It took me all the way through high school. But its brothers were laid to rest long ago, perhaps it is time... *sniff* so many memories.

Looks like pizza for breakfast this morning.

Last night it was between burgers and pizza for dinner and the beef won, so this is the only obvious conclusion.

I love making my own food :)

So I get a "transfer admit day" email from UCSD and think, damn, I better check my transfer status. Click click badda bing, I'm in! w00t! No more putt putting around bs CC classes! Man, I would have been pissed if it had been a rejection... It's a 10 minute walk to UCSD and 25 minuted drive to state.

Let all the other slackers out there learn from this, I'm just about the biggest slacker out there. WE're talking I wrote the application essay at 11:30 pm when the deadline was midnight, no bs.

And the best part is I have a a four month summer break. Sure beats last summer when I got out late June and started early August.

So tonight we shall celebrate. I've got soem sangria in the fridge and believe I have perfected the recipe to my taste, too bad it's a bit too early to start. For those interested, here it is:

Sangria
1 750 mL red wine
2 cups rum
1 orange, peeled and sliced
1 lime, sliced
1 lemon, sliced
3/4 cup strawberries, sliced
3/4 cup crushed pineapple
1 cup orange juice
1 cup sugar

Mix it all together and stuff, then let it sit in the fridge for a while. Drink away! Serves 2. I'ts become a weekly tradition here.

The "Best if sold by 5/19/01" label is just a recommendation, right? We'll see :/

Definitely won't be as bad as this one time in high school heh, uhhh never mind I don't want to talk about that.

Stupid Time Warner and Comcast. I was home last week for spring break and found the Comcast cable connection went down more than a 2 dolla uhh, then I come back Sunday to find Road Runner giving me the shaft. It just came back up a few minutes ago.

Interesting having no net connection. Turned out I was a lot more "productive"- I played all the way through MOH:AA (though I can't say it was a long game), read a few books. Trigger by Arthur C. Clarke and some other dude was pretty cool, it had everything in it. Reminded me of a Clancy novel. IT did make me a bit paranoid.

What would you do with "unlimited" processing power?

In my last entry I wrote a bit about my room turning into a server room while I was away. I thought they were Sun Blade systems, but it turns out they're prototype rackmount servers (one 1U, one 2U). Anyway, I was bugging my dad about them and he said I could mess around with the 1U one and do whatever with it (wipe drives, install preferred OS, etc). It's got 2 GB memory, dual 2.8 Ghz Xeons (w/hyperthreading, so I guess it shows up as 4?), and 100 GB in two 10K RPM drives.

I've been thinking about this for a while. This thing has probably four times the processing power of every computer I have ever owned combined. What can I do with it? Maybe encode some stuff into xvid, but I don't think that can take advantage of smp/hyperthreading. There's always searching for aliens or any one of the other distributed computing projects out there.

So my question is, if you had a beast of system like this at your (temporary) disposal, what would you do with it?

So I haven't been back home in a while, about four months. Not much has changed around the house, but my room seems to have turned into a server room. Four sun blade systems, a NAS box, and a wireless router. Tough to sleep at night with all the blinking lights. The area does seem to have been hit hard by the economy. One of the places I worked in high school, Seattle's Best Coffee, closed down its only nearby location. After quitting I thought I wouldn't mind never seeing he place again, but now I kind of miss it. I probably spent in excess of 2000 hours in that place. I remember feeling grumpy that I was getting paid $8 an hour while friends got paid $15 an hour to surf the web during the dot com boom. Still, I was making bank for a high schooler- 30 hours a week at $8 an hour plus tips works out to be quite bit.

But some of it I regret. I had to work the morning after my junior prom, being there at 6:30 AM to open. That was horrible. I don't remember much of the summer of 1999, because I went out with friends until early morning nearly every night, only to have to wake up at 4:30 AM to go to work four days a week. Sleep deprivation has strange effects on memory. And the summer of 2000, the year I graduated from HS, I kept working the 30 hours at the coffee place along with a full time dot com gig. I would work 5 am to noon at the coffee place and then 12:30 to 7:00 at the dot com.

Anyway, it's kind of strange being back right now. Nobody else I know is on spring break, so I'm a bit bored (hence this rather lengthy journal entry). I'll probably take a bunch of pictures with my mom's digital camera, maybe go camping if the weather improves. It's nice to be able to read the SJ Mercury again, I really miss Gillmor's articles. The writing quality seems a bit better than the UT, even if it is owned by Knight-Ridder.

The drive was fun, I love the sound the engine makes at higher RPM. Managed to make it just under six and a half hours, despite a little traffic. I think my car is speed limited at 120 mph, but maybe it's just a limitation due to the gearing. My car doesn't have a tach, so I guess I'll never know without doing the math. The speedometer doesn't go past that anyway. I've said it before, but 152 is the greatest freeway ever. 0.75 miles total elevation change in 25 miles, banked curves and pretty scenary equals mucho driving fun at 80-90 mph.

Current weather where I am now: 75 degrees, sunny
Current weather where I'm going for spring break: 55 degrees, rainy

So why am I going home for spring break? And I have that nice 500 mile drive to look forward to...

I came across a post by an anonymous coward that got me thinking.

The post mentions that the domain jessicalynch.org was registered on March 17, 2003, six days before the ambush that led to her capture. The fact that it appears to have been registered via proxy makes this all the more strange.

Granted, it's certainly a possibility that the domain was registered by one of the other numerous people named Jessica Lynch in the world or even by the family of this particular person. But the other possibilities are more appealing to those conspiracy theory minded folks out there.

reported by the Union Tribune.

"She has surpassed Joan of Arc. Look where France is today. I'd take Jessica Lynch over 10 Joan of Arcs."

Uh huh...

One of the downsides to this warm weather is that one of my neighbors feels it is now appropriate to leave her pet bird on her balcony. It's about fifteen feet away from me and every 10 seconds my thoughts are interrupted by a loud *SQUAWK*. We're not talking about an ordinary bird here, this thing is damn loud.

It's almost as fun as my neighbor who's taken up playing the bagpipes, although that's considerably more tolerable.

On a lighter note, I decided to try my luck at a couple FARK Photoshop contests. It's a nice way to waste some time. I was surprised by the amount of bandwidth used though, it really adds up. Two pics at about 50 KB combined, and the total traffic for them is approaching 200 MB in 14 hours.

Anyone know what's best for making sangria, a merlot or cabernet? TJ's still has the Charles Shaw 2000 of both on sale for $1.99. Maybe I should use one of each?

Drinking a Beck's dark until I figure it out, looks like it may be a rough day tommorrow :-)

I'm using this recipe.

:)

It's about 80 degrees in the sun, not a cloud in sight.

Been a great week so far, aside from borking my server by breaking perl and and accidentally making it reject mail for a couple of days. I saw a girl I went to high school with yesterday, she had (and has!) the most perfectly formed derrière ever. Not to mention her sister is in town for spring break...

Tonight's menu is pizza and sangira- perhaps I should throw a party.

This is my first Linux-related journal in a long time.

My Linux system runs Redhat 7.2. I use it mainly as a router, although it also has several services running (smdb, httpd, etc..). Recently, while trying to install a certain package, I entered RPM dependency hell. While not a unique situation, this time I found myself unable to find a resolution.

Fortunately, I remembered hearing of something called apt-rpm touted as what is supposedly a vastly superior replacement for what Red Hat calls a package management system.

I've fooled around with Debian, I even got a box working properly with it. And I absolutely loved apt-get. But doing a clean install of Debian on my router would result in a lot of unnecessary downtime. Hopefully apt-rpm is the solution I am looking for.

There were some issues after the install. apt-get update managed to consume all the free disk space (I'm working with an 800MB / partition here). So sendmail stopped running, which in my eyes is a very bad thing. I freed up 75 MB by removing old kernel packages and also moved the /var/cache/apt to another (larger) partition. Hopefully it won't cause any more disk space problems.

Hurray! Running apt-get update worked this time. apt-get upgrade results in 155 packages to upgrade and needing to get 68.6MB of archives. OK, I agree. Looks like it may take a while. I'll go find something else to do for an hour or two, and when I return either a) I will have a freshly updated system, or b) The system will be completely broken and I'll spend the entire afternoon just getting it bootable.

It's a gamble, really. I'm glad I did a full backup this morning.

Boring, boring, boring, but when I discover apt-get upgrade really is the same as sudo rm -rf /, at least there will be some documentation of the event left behind :]

Yesterday I received a piece of mail from the Democratic National Committee soliciting donations thinly disguised as a presidential poll. What really struck me was some of the wording:

Unlike past elections, funding for our next presidential campaign efforts must come primarily from donors who give $20, $35, $50, and $100 contributions. And frankly, the Republican Party holds a huge lead in the number and amount of small contributions it raises.

...

P.S. All individuals who support the Democratic National Committee with a contribution of at least $20 this year will be allowed to directly elect a small number of delegates to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. We want our supporters to have an extra voice in who wins out nomination, so please make a donation and help support the candidate of your choice.

Seems kind of shady to me. For the record, my party preference is 'none of the above.'