I am moving my journal to http://rasteri.blogspot.com/

I've just come back from my favourite club, Drum. My favourite DJ (BK, aka Ben Keen) was playing... and OH MY GOD he was amazing. I don't think I've ever had as much fun in a night without sex before.

I won't be seeing my g/f for another 3 weeks... god I'm going to miss her. Anyways, off to bed now. Goodnight slashdotters :)

Well, I was forced to take down the network by the university. I only have about another week of DSL time left, so I'm downloading all the farscape episodes that my brother forgot to tape (all of them) and a couple of episodes of Black Books (if I like it then I'll probably buy the DVD, Bill Bailey is a genius).

I wonder what I'm going to do with the server. I could plug my 56k modem into it, but as I'm the only person who'll be using it I may as well save electricity and plug the modem directly into my computer.

I have no money. Literally, no money. In fact, I'm £800 into my overdraft. I just hope my student loan gets through soon or I won't be able to eat. I've taken to drinking water out of an empty beer can in an attempt to persuade myself it's beer.

Ooops, just missed another object oriented programming lecture. Ah well.

I'm currently standing in the bon accord centre typing on one of the webphones. I can tell you, the keyboard is horrible, and i've had to correct about a dozen spelling mistakes so far. meh. ah well, time's about to run out, so goodbye

I just found out that I am the owner of "thickveinycock.com". I must have registered it on thursday when I got drunk. But I set it to point at Stufro's website, which I find rather amusing :)

"Mind if I point my thick, veiny cock at you?"

Well, it's 4:39 in the morning, and I've just finished putting the final touches on the firewall script I wrote for the server. That's right - I've finally bit the bullet and installed a "proper" linux distro. And it works great! I wish I'd saved myself the time and done this to start with.

The box is running Slackware 8.1, with kernel version 2.4.18. I wrote my own firewall script, and I intend to use webmin to keep everything running smoothly. I've gone back to the time-honoured pptp method of connection, simply because it seems to work faster than static routing.

I'm thinking about getting a lobotomy. I actually WANT to see the jackass movie. I can't tell if it's simply appealing to my masculine side (if I have one) or if I just like seeing grown men perform insane stunts on camera.

Finally, I bought a lavender scented air freshener for my room. I put it under the monitor. It smells nice :)

Well, 2003 has been upon us for two months now, and geeks like me have been waiting for this year possibly more than any other. Why? Because some of our favourite things are getting sequels. The Matrix : Reloaded, the sequel to one of my all-time favourite movies, should be with us by summer. Also, the sequel to my undisputed favourite game, Deus Ex, MIGHT come out shortly after that. But who knows. Anyways, I can hardly wait for either of them. Which may be a problem.

You see, The Matrix was good precisely because you didn't know what was going on at the start. It had the whole element of discovery - what is the Matrix, who is Morpheus and so on - and it never properly explains things until the very end. This is quite a different from your usual "12 minutes of plot, followed by 2 hours of fight scenes, explosions and naked women" rubbish that hollywood insists on making.

The real trouble is that the vast majority of people just ignored the plot, and only saw the movie because of the (admittedly breathtaking) special effects and kung-fu fight scenes. I actually had a conversation with one of my friends that went something like this -

Him - "The Matrix sequel is probably not going to be as good. The thing that made the first one so cool was the bullet-time, and they won't be able to do something as original this time around."

Me - "Well, perhaps not, but it'll be interesting to see how the characters develop and so on. I mean, the whole element of discovery in the first film was amazing."

Him - "Eh? The Matrix had a shite plot. The only point of watching it is for the bullet time."

Cue lengthy argument.

It should be noted that I consider "Him" to be a rather intelligent person. However he has definitely got a love of popular american culture, and watches the same TV shows that your "average" American does.

It seems to me that if his opinion is widespread, the Wachowski brothers are going to have a real hard time selling Matrix2. I hope for their, and our sake, that they don't pander to the majority.

The server's now been up for two days solid, which isn't a record yet but it equals my previous best :) To be honest I wish I'd had time to install a "proper" linux distro, but it was a case of "get the server up as quick as possible so nobody comes round with flaming torches because they can't look at pr0n"

Plus, it means that steven can do simple admin tasks without having to learn linux networking.

The server threw two kernel panics today, so I got really annoyed and just enabled static routing on the ADSL modem. I then installed Smoothwall 2.0beta4, and used it's Static routing features to NAT the rest of the network. Seems to be working very well so far (although pingtimes occasionally increase randomly... odd). An added bonus with this method is that I may actually be able to make use of the 8 IP addresses that Zen gave me. Dunno what though.

Anyway, it's 4am, I have classes tomorrow, and I need some sleep. Zzzzz...

Yeap, the server went down again last night, with the same kernel panic. This time it went down while I was using it.

I've replaced the Internet-side network card with another one using a different chipset (it got detected as a NE2000 clone, it's actually a RealTek). This card has NEVER given me any problems (it used to be in my workstation).

Hopefully that'll stop the kernel panics, as I went googling for SKPUT and it seems to be associated with people trying out network cards for the first time.

If it doesn't do any good, I might see if I can get my modem to do RFC1483 bridging and simply use the server as a firewall/NAT box between two network cards.

Debz phoned me twice last night, and I realised that it's the first time I'd spoken to her in about two days. It was nice to hear her voice again.

About an hour ago, I found an old Nokia 5130 in a bag under my bed. It gave me an idea for a kind of remote network monitoring system. Basically I hooked the phone up to my workstation via a compatible data cable that I just happened to have lying around, stuck an old PAYG sim card in it, and wrote a little shell script to ping a couple of internet sites and SMS me on my new mobile if neither of them reply.

It now seems to be working pretty well. I've tested it by simply removing the default route from my workstation.

The script checks to see if it's just the Internet or the whole network that's gone down (it pings the Access Point, which should be on 24/7). Only problem is it costs 10p a message, but then again that's more incentive to keep the Internet up I suppose :)

Seems the server lasted the night. This is good news. I'm left wondering if the computer going into standby mode could have crashed it, as it seems odd that it would go into standby mode when the network traffic is so high, pretty much 24/7. I know there was net traffic on saturday night, because I left MLDonkey running over the weekend. On sunday night I turned off my workstation so I could sleep, so I can understand it happening then, even though I find it hard to beleive that SOMEONE didn't leave their computer on all night downloading stuff. I guess it's at least possible.

As a side note, the net was down last night and I couldn't figure out why. I personally blame zen, but resetting the router seemed to fix the problem. I reckon zen just came back up in the time it took to reconfigure everything.

Skipped my first two classes today, simply because I was too tired. About to go to my third one.

I discovered these haikus when I visited my old high school a few days ago. They were in my old network account (which is rather oddly still in existence).

I am a housewife
Husband takes pictures of me
When I'm in the bath

I like oranges
I have a cool orange hat
That is made of peels

Libraries are fun
We can think up lame haikus
When we should do work

The chairs here are blue
Unless we were to paint them
Then they'd be different

Chemicals are fun
Cos you can spill them on the
Heads of young children

Suicide is bad
It is often quite painful
And it stunts your growth

I must have been in a very strange mood when I wrote these...

Got my soundcard to work with the via-83xx alsa drivers, and now Deus Ex runs in WineX with sound. Crashes whenever I try and cheat, but I'm not really complaining about that. Some parts actually seem to run faster (such as when viewing security cameras). Tomorrow I might try Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, although rumour has it the keyboard doesn't work under WineX.

Becoming slightly annoyed with TransGaming's business practices. The Sims doesn't work under WineX, and the only way to get the native version is to buy it bundled with Mandrake gaming edition. I don't like Mandrake at all.

Changed the distro on the server to IpCop 1.2.0. Seems slightly better designed than smoothwall was, and the interface is nicer. Still, I think the Dial, Hangup and Shutdown buttons should all be on the same page. I think I'll redesign the interface either tomorrow afternoon or (if I don't sleep) tonight.

I discovered that deoderant sprays remove the ink that they use in CDR pens, probably due to the butane content. I guess lighter fluid would probably work even better.

As a side note, the deoderant I used was Lynx Voodoo. It kinda combines the spicy aroma of Africa with the more fresh scent of phoenix or gravity. Although if I'm going clubbing I prefer Phoenix, as people have begun to associate me with it :)