Remember the Reason for the Season: December 24th is my birthday!

In the dawn of my 42nd year, I'd like to reflect on what made the 41st so superb: Me, I am awesome.

Have a great Day After Grub's Birthday tomorrow, everyone! :)

Once again I reach out to that vast pool of knowledge at slashdot...

Scenario: I have a couple of decent machines on the desktop at home. One is an AMD-2500xp+ running Win2000. It's used for games. The other machine is an AMD64-3800x2 (64 bit dual core thing) It's running Ubuntu. Rest of the place is all OpenBSD on various machines and one FreeBSD box.

I'm thinking that I really don't need to keep 2 machines running on the desk. Ideally I'd have some sort of VM manager running on the Linux AMD64 box which I could run a Windows VM in for when I need my gaming fix. I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions for a VM manager. I have only a few needs:

- It has to run a normal 32 bit Windows in a VM on this 64 bit box so I can reinstall Win2k on it or a copy of normal XP, not XP64.
- It must support the 3d capabilities of my graphics card (ATI 9800 Pro).
- It must support my Audigy2 sound card (no stuttering, etc)

I've looked at Xen but my processor lacks the AMD-V (nee Pacifica) goop to run Windows unmodified. QEMU and VirtualBox also look nice. So far, though, it looks like VMWare is the one to beat. I'm not shy about spending a few bucks to get it.

There you have it. All suggestions are appreciated.

I'm on both right now ('grieder' on Multiply) and find that Slashdot is much more to my liking. Granted I haven't done much on Multiply other than read and post a few comments but it's just not my thing. Much of what I see on Multiply has been linked over from slashdot and I just don't see the need for a second discussion forum.

Rather than deleting my multiply account and dropping it entirely, I've turned off all email alerts for everything other than private messages. That way I can see if I really miss it (doubtful)

Slashdot is a news site (or so they claim ;)) with some good discussions in the comments geared to the story. Multiply seems much more contrived... Come up with a topic and hope people talk about it.

YMMV, but I'm sticking close to the loveable ol' hag known as Slashdot.

Rewind Life's TiVo back to June 13, 2006 1:10 AM

I awoke to Kim's shrill "Gord, we have to go to the hospital now!" Arriving at the hospital her water broke and the nurse said "You're going to have her today".

What?! There was still 22 days left! Are we ready for this?!

Fast forward the TiVo to 12:33 PM There's our little girl just out. We are parents, a whole different demographic group than we were just a minute before at 12:32. Holy shit. All the reading and planning can't prepare you for that. I felt amazed and helpless and proud and scared.

The hospital sent us home two days later. Huh? They trust us with this fragile little entity? Aren't the car seat straps too tight? No, they have to be snug. That idiot is tail-gating us. Hrm, no he's far enough back. Our first drive home as a family was a blur. I was beat from not sleeping well on the pull-out 'dad' chair they had in the room. Kim was understandably a bit rough.

Here in .ca you're allowed about a year off of work for parental leave to be split however you want. I took the first month and Kim overlapped with me. Most days she would slept in while I drank a Bodum full of freshly ground espresso beans, it was the only thing that kept me going. I'd stay up late with Anna so Kim could get her sleep at that end of the day. The month flew by, it was a complete blur of diapers, espresso, downloaded TV shows and watching little Anna. Just watching her sleep. Hours would go by as she slept in my lap. Those were some of the best moments of my life.

Fast forward the TiVo to yesterday Our little girl was one year old. They picked me up at work for lunch. Took some nice pictures at 12:33 which will soon be on Anna's website.

So a year of diapers, some crying, watching her grow, working on her 9th tooth, standing, trying to walk, bathing her, swimming with her, watching her eat by herself and picking her favourites off the tray first, dancing in spot to music (yes, she likes the beat of Motorhead and High On Fire, don't tell Kim!) A year of watching her personality flourish and of enjoying her infectious smile that always seems planted on her face. A year of can't-wait-to-get-home-and-see-the-family after work, of walking to the park with Anna in her wagon.

Happy Birthday Anna!
Pics to be here soon

Not sure what the /. deities have been tweaking but I've received mod points twice this week after a few years of never getting them.

Ohhh the power... it's going to my head already. Grovel, swine!

I've got some larger projects around work, mainly networkish things (SNMP trapping, {Squid|PIX|routers|switches|WLAN|VPN} log parsing, nmap, etc.) and I'm at a crossroads between what language to use. I'm most comfortable with plain ol' C but that would be overkill for these jobs

I've done a fair amount of Python and am happy with it but have read great things about Ruby.

Basically I'm wanting something that works well with SNMP, has a good networking library and plays very nicely with Apache & PostgreSQL. The ability to script telnet and ssh stuff (ala Expect) would be a definite plus.

Simply put: I want to settle on a language for these types of projects. Input from anyone would be appreciated!

EDIT: Perl need not apply, I'd rather use awk.

Yaayy!!!

Kim and BabyAnna went to Edmonton for a week to visit Kim's sister and brother-in-law. The house has been so damn quiet I was going out of my mind. For a week there was:

- No calling home "as I turn onto Colony St."

- No asking if we need anything picked up

- No Anna smiling and bouncing in her chair as I walk in the house

- No kisses when I get in (Kim's still on mat leave and usually there when I get home)

- Too many "dinners for one" :( (That one hurts)

- None of Kim's laughing and joking (she has a deliciously evil sense of humour)

- No feeding Anna her dinner at 6:00

- No putting our little girl in her crib together and just smile at her before we quietly scuttle out.

- No waking up to Anna's smiling face.

- No going out to the store "as a family"

Our home became quiet as a tomb.

Going straight home was a total drag so a couple of times I went out for a beer(s) after work. Then the "Man, what would I do without them?" mind tricks happened. That kind of crap started up. So I'd leave the pub feeling worse than I did before I went in.

I'm so domestic now but I wouldn't trade it for anything.

btw, be sure to visit Anna's Homepage :) No homepage for Kim (yet?)...

edit: 12:20 CST Just got mail from Kim, she sounds happy about coming home too. :)

I'm always looking for invites to private trackers. Hey, it never hurts to spread out one's bets. If you have something interesting email me (slashdot at grub dot net) and put "TORRENTS" in the subject and perhaps we could reciprocate invites.

Please don't bother mailing me if you aren't a Fan or Friend. Mention your /. ID in your email.

Cheers!

I resolve to be outspoken and obnoxious.

If anyone knows Swedish and would like to translate a video for Swedish audio->English subs please let me know.

It seems there's a Swedish expose on Landmark Forum which would be great to have English subs for.

Any takers? You'd be doing free-thinking a great favour!

Drop me a msg here with your address or, if you're worried about cultish threats, mail slashdot (at) grub (dot) net or grieder (at) gmail (dot) com.

THANK YOU!

Here's the poop:

I used Linux a lot "back in the day" when Slackware came on a stack of 3.5" floppies for my 486. I moved on to FreeBSD and (my personal favourite) OpenBSD.

I'm setting up a machine for my workbench to work with JTAG and BDM interfaces and a lot of the info out there seems Linux-specific.

I'm not looking to be converted from OpenBSD, that isn't going to happen, I just want a decent distro of Linux to hack about on for this application and I don't want to do porting or debugging. If I screw up a piece of hardware through JTAG or BDM it can be rendered pretty useless, hence my desire to stay close to home.

Recommendations anyone?

1 minutes, 25 seconds of WTF?

I've always looked for the silver lining in a cloud, here's mine for 9/11.

In '01 I was working a 6 month contract doing network security stuff here in .ca. I had my TN visa in hand so I could move to Austin, TX to work at ud.com (they're the guys who assimilated the distributed.net crew) once my contract here was through.

We had a realtor lined up to sell the house, moving company arranged, etc.

My contract had ~6 weeks left when Sept. 11 happened. The immigration lawyer which UD supplied told me that the border was effectively closed.

Oh well, I still had a month and change of work in the contract, surely it would be settled by then, right?

The contract finished, the border was still tight. I wasn't working. So I took a few weeks off to basically play games, fuck the dog, whatever.

In Feb. 2002 the place I was contracted to on Sept. 11 heard I was still in town and offered me a position. Very soon after my ex and I got a divorce.

Fast forward a bit and I met Kim. And now we have Anna who will be 13 weeks old tomorrow, Sept. 12. I'm still working at the place and love what I do.

If it weren't for Osama's boys and their flight plans there'd be no Kim in my life, Anna wouldn't exist, and I probably wouldn't have this job that I love doing.

Weird how life works....

Have you had anything good come from what happened on Sept. 11?

rah1420 (whoever that is) made me his first foe. I've been fairly innocuous lately, wonder what did it... oh something shiny! Have to run...

A link to this article was posted as a reply to a post of mine yesterday. I've re-read it a couple of times and it just disturbs me the more I read it. There's a group of gay people who actively look for getting infected by HIV.

Bug Chasers: The men who long to be HIV+

This is just fucked up.