So, it turns out, WalMart is the only place open at 10:15pm on a Sunday night with computer equipment. They had some 10/100 hubs (not switches, but good enough for now).

When we get home, it turns out we also need a new dial-up modem (WalMart only had internals, which I intend never to buy). But at least our LAN is back up and running.

But once again steeds.com and our other domains are down for a while (until sometime tomorrow).

Update: I forgot I had a modem in my IBM Thinkpad. It's one of those crappy "WinModems" that almost never work under Linux, but in this case, IBM released drivers. Go IBM! :-) So, for the time being, my plucky little Thinkpad is our gateway to the Internet. (Well, for the static IP addresses, anyway.)

Gaaaaaaaa!

I'll be glad to be rid of them. I liked them a long time as they were flexible and gave me the features I needed without requiring me to buy a big fancy plan. But they have entirely too many outages between their POPs and HQ.

So, if anyone wants good, Unix-based web/mail hosting (we'll be using some mix of Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD), go to steedshosting.net to see prices and sign up.

I found two different places where I'd mistyped my IP address when reconfiguring DNS for my domains (one was in DNS zone file, and the other was at the domain registrar (GoDaddy rocks!)) which had prevented me from being back in service probably a day or two ago.

Gaaaaaaa!

So, I'm getting email again, and I presume our web sites are back online again. Even mail which was queued up at our ISP on their backup MX host is coming through. Yay!

I thought it was just because staubly.net was the first domain I changed over, and others hadn't propogated yet. Or, it was less widely used, therefor wasn't in local DNS caches.

Gaaa... sometimes I hate networks.

Update: For the next week or so, please use the address vicky at staubly dot net to email me.

Update: Nevermind, my email is back.

If I manage it, it will be through the supreme goodness of GoDaddy and Comcast. And fuck Crosslink for cutting me off without some warning.

I am not a poor person. I make enough to satisfy most people. However, I have some expensives I have no business having. And I think it's time to make some changes in my life to lower the occurance of unexpected expenses (and other drama).

Steeds will be back up on April 7th, if not before. I apologize for any inconvenience.

Now, this fall, I'll vote for Kerry, just because he isn't Bush (I'd have preferred Kucinich). But I think Kerry is just as much a "political insider" as anyone. Sort of how I supported Clinton, even though he lied, cheated on his wife, etc. He simply agreed with more of my positions than his opponents.

Unfortunately, what's popular in this country is just as likely to be morally wrong (in my view) as morally right. The phrase "tyranny of the majority" wasn't just some theoretical ramblings. It's a real danger in this country. One need only look at the quality of popular television shows to know a little something about the intellect and wisdom of the majority of Americans (and, lest anyone think me "anti-American", the majority of humans). But, fortunately, in the case of television, niche shows and networks are available which allow minority tastes and interests to be satisfied. This is not the case when the majority of people in a region (state, country, etc.) try to legislate the behavior of everyone.

Ok, rant over.

That's right, I'm going to Ozzfest this summer (July). Should be a blast. I was afraid I'd never get to see Rob Halford perform with Priest, but they reunited this fall. There's some uncertainty about whether Ozzy will really be performing (after his recent ATV accident), but I can live even if he's not there (after all, I did see the original Black Sabbath line-up they had at a previous Ozzfest).

Wooohoooo!

Oh yeah, and Iced Earth is playing at Jaxx this spring, and I'd like to see them too, money permitting.

Update: (next day) The tickets arrived. Yay!

1. tcsh - I like csh syntax and tcsh has great command-line editing features.
2. wget - the must-have program for downloading
3. emacs - the programmers editor
4. jove - emacs-like and a bit more light-weight, if only I could remember the key bindings for query-search-and-replace... (ok, it's M-q, not terribly hard to remember, but I get used to M-%).
5. Apache - the 1.x version, as I wasn't able to compile 2.x (not sure why, the NetBSD/sparc64 pages make reference to compiler problems, but that's not what this seemed to be).

So, all in all I have it running and doing what I want. Pretty cool, eh? Now, I just have to tear things apart so I can put it at the base of my "tower of sparcs".

1. Sticky keyboard. Some of the keys stick, and the "/" key doesn't work at all (but the one on the keypad does). Fortunately, I'm generally logging in remotely via ssh.
2. The machine came with 2 hard drives. A 9GB main drive and a 2GB second drive. The 2GB drive seems to have excessive bad sectors (at least according to fsck).

I was able to get NetBSD installed and configured last night. Today, however, I've been trying to add packages (tcsh, emacs, all my favorites). It seems NetBSD doesn't have the sparc64 versions of its binary packages (if it does, and I just haven't been looking in the right place, let me know). Instead you have to download the pkgsrc.tar.gz archive, and install all your packages from source (I feel like I'm running "Gentoo BSD").

At least it's a fairly fast Sun (compared to the 40MHz SparcStation-2's I have), so the compiles go reasonably fast.

I haven't yet plugged it in to see what (if anything) is already on the disk drive. It doesn't matter much, as I'm planning to install NetBSD for sparc64. Hooray for "Sparcy Goodness". :-)

a romantic sleigh ride interrupted by a flatulent horse

Is Bess moonlighting by acting in beer commercials?