Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in unix_vicky's LiveJournal:

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Friday, November 13th, 2009
2:38 am	Pretty good concert I had a (mostly) good time at the concert. Good things were Eluveitie and Alestorm (as expected) and Kivimetsän Druidi (a fairly good Norse/Finnish folk metal band). From the Ashes of My Sins seems like an up-and-coming band with good potential. Vried was a bit heavier than I like, but pretty good. The subject matter of their songs ranged from Norway defending itself during World War I, to Norway defending itself during World War II. The bad parts: Jaxx is not a big place. It just really doesn't have room for a mosh pit, but that didn't stop some annoying people from starting one anyway. And no matter where I moved, I seemed to be right on the edge of it. The other bad bit was the band between Eluveitie and Alestorm. I won't name them, just because... I'd have to invent new words to describe their awfulness. "Sucktacular" springs to mind. Imagine taking generic death metal, then moving any last traces of melody or intelligent lyrics. I'd have paid extra to not hear them. Current Mood: content Current Music: Xandria - Save My Life (Comment on this)
Saturday, October 17th, 2009
10:25 pm	Cool concert at Jaxx Two of my newer favorite bands, Alestorm and Eluveitie, are playing at Jaxx, Nov. 12th (a Thursday). Who would like to go? Tickets are only $20 in advance, or $25 at the door. It's general admission, so we don't have to buy tickets as a group if you decide later. Current Mood: excited Current Music: Forever Slave - Dreams and Dust (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 14th, 2009
9:17 pm	Darwin Movie *sigh* Sometimes this country makes me sad. If it isn't idiots protesting our "socialist" president, it's movie distributors not picking up an interesting sounding movie about Darwin, because it might be "controversial". Current Mood: sad Current Music: Leave's Eyes - "Solemn Sea" (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
1:05 am	Household fileserver replaced Ok... I should be asleep now, but I'm not. So, I thought I'd post an update. As a temporary measure, I'm using my main home desktop PC as our replacement fileserver (and print server). For the most part, all I had to do was get a longer USB cable to run from the printer. I then installed the new 1.5TB drive we'd gotten at one of those computer shows they have in this area. Then I mounted the old drives (one at a time) from the old file server in a USB-connected external case, and tried to restore the files. Got 99.99% of the files restored from the first two drives. The third drive (naturally, the one with my files on it) won't mount at all however. I'll try the "old freezer trick" on it before I give up. Oh, yeah, and I setup Samba so other people in the house can get to their files. Edit: June 23, 2009: No luck with the freezer trick. Fortunately, that was mostly just Linux (and *BSD) ISO files. Current Mood: tired Current Music: Eluveitie - Inis Mona (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, June 5th, 2009
2:58 am	Steeds Primary DNS You may remember when last we left our heroine, she was planning on fixing her primary DNS server, and the household file server. Tonight, I finally got some workspace cleared off to open up Clydesdale (yes, all our computers are named after horse breeds, or at least beasts of burden). I took out the old hard-drives and labeled them (hda, hdb, hdd... hdc was the DVD drive). Installed the new 1.5TB SATA drive (fortunately, Clydesdale has both IDE and SATA interfaces), Tried to start it up. Nothing. Finally, I noticed that the CPU fan would start spinning, but stop right away. Bad fan? Dead CPU? Dead motherboard? Replacing the fan is the cheap thing to do, so I'll stop by Microcenter "tomorrow" (Friday) night. Tarpan, our old Primary DNS server just wasn't starting. It being an old Pentium 90MHz, I wasn't inclined to put money into fixing it, even if I could find the parts. So, I decided to bring Arabian out of retirement. It's an old SparcStation 2. Slow, but damn reliable. Finally got the DNS zone files copied over, installed, BIND configured. I decided to set its IP address to that of the old server (meaning I wouldn't have to ask our ISP to mess with the reverse DNS record, and wouldn't have to update the NS1 records for umpteen domains at GoDaddy. Got that done about half an hour ago. Suddenly DNS wasn't working at all. No lookups (forward or reverse) were succeeding. Turns out I needed to restart named after changing the IP address (via ifconfig) as it was still listening to the old address. That done, things were AOK. Time for bed. Current Mood: tired Current Music: Alestorm - Over the Seas (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 29th, 2009
4:21 am	Home network hosed We had a power outage for a couple hours tonight. From about 12:39am until about 2:50am. Once power came back on, I had to go around and turn computers (and the UPSs they're on) back on... as none of them last for 2 hours. I had to kick some ethernet switches, and some routers to get the private network back up (our personal computers and cable modem). The T1/public network mostly came back up once I hit the right power switches. But not our main server, nor our hosted server (that we're getting paid for). Nor our private fileserver (which has the serial console connection to our main server). So, we're pretty hosed. I don't foresee getting any sleep tonight. Update: Got our main server back online (for some reason it was stuck at the boot PROM prompt - "ok" - you Sun users know what I mean). Then managed to get our hosted server booted into single user, and a bit of fscking, and it's up and running now. Also had to replace one of the downstairs ethernet switches (fortunately, had a spare). Still down for the count: our private file server (I'd planned to do surgery on it anyway, to install a new 1.5TB drive), and our primary DNS server (it was living way past its prime... a 90MHz Pentium, with 32MB of RAM). We can live without both until this weekend. May try to get a little sleep before work "tomorrow" (i.e. later today). Current Mood: aggravated (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 21st, 2009
1:19 am	Anyone need RAM for an old laptop? I have a 512MB SoDIMM of PC133 RAM that I got for Jenny's mom, but it turns out her laptop is a bit more modern than I thought, and it needs DDR RAM. If anyone can use it, they can have it. Current Mood: geeky (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 3rd, 2009
3:53 am	Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival Jenny and I went to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival today (Saturday). After a 2-hour drive there, we were rather hungry, so we had some early lunch of, what else, lamb. I had the lamb sausage, which in addition to taking longer to prepare, was not as good. Then, we met our friend, Valerie, her mom, and her son, Alan. After meeting. we watched some sheep dog demos. Then Valerie and her mom went shopping while Jenny and I watched Alan. We caught the end of a shearing demonstration. We then reunited Alan with his family. They left to get Alan home for his nap, while we continued looking through all the sheep stalls, hearing about lots of breeds (some we knew about, some we didn't). ( I took lots of pictures, only some of which turned out ok ) Current Mood: tired Current Music: Alestorm - Wolves of the Sea (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009
7:51 pm	Animation Meme ...a list of animated (or partially animated) movies, with notes about which I've seen, not seen, and of the ones I've seen, which ones l liked or disliked. [ ] what you haven't seen or haven't finished [X] or Bold what you loved [also have XX for double-love] [O] or Strike for what you disliked [-] what you thought was just okay or neutral ( the list ) There may be some on this list that I've seen, but don't remember. Current Mood: tired Current Music: Visions of Atlantis - "Cast Away" (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, February 22nd, 2009
3:52 am	Weird Dream Went to sleep early (for me) this evening. And got up just a minute ago for a bathroom break. Not usual, so something unusual happened: I remembered a dream. In this dream, my boss was a woman. And we were interviewing someone for a position as programmer. We were finishing interviewing some guy who may well have been a decent programmer, but he was egotistical enough that it would have been painful working with him. In fact, we really hadn't asked him many technical questions when we stopped. After he left, my boss said, "At least we still have Chris* to interview." I said "Who's Chris?". "Chris is my sibling." "Oh, when can we meet Chris?" It turned out Chris was in the building, so a meeting was arranged. I walked in to see something like looked like a toy robot, except more solid and professionally build. But quite small. The robot proceeded to introduce itself as Chris, an AI containing the thoughts and learning of my boss's deceased brother. The dream ended as I started interviewing the robot. Note: The name may not have been Chris, but it was something like that. Current Mood: sleepy Current Music: Xandria - Eversleeping (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 30th, 2008
1:42 am	Last Cruise Pictures ( A few miscellaneous pictures ) Current Mood: sleepy (1 Comment |Comment on this)
12:35 am	Dolphin Pictures When we were in Cozumel, we went to Chankanaab park, where they have several "swim with dolphin" packages. mammasteed posted some info in her journal. ( Dolphin Pictures ) Current Mood: tired (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 29th, 2008
11:09 pm	Yet More Pictures From The Cruise The ship had a formal night the second night on the ship (after Key West, before Cozumel). Everyone got to dress up as much as they wanted, and the ship had professional photographers available (well, they had them available most of the time... I'll post more of those pictures later). ( fancy pictures ) Current Mood: tired (Comment on this)
7:55 pm	More Wildlife from Cruise Its only known prey is plaque, its only enemy - bristle-wear. This elusive native of Cozumel is normally seen helping tourists with their dental hygiene. ( But we managed to capture this image ) Current Mood: silly (6 Comments |Comment on this)
3:13 am	Pictures from Cruise - Part 2 Ok... here are pictures, with brief descriptions, from the rest of the trip. I may expand on the descriptions later. Also, we bought some pictures from the professional photographers on the ship and at the dolphin swim, so those will be posted soon as well. ( Cruise pictures ) Current Mood: satisfied Current Music: Within Temptation - Hand Of Sorrow (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 27th, 2008
11:36 pm	Home! We finally made it home, after 9 1/3 days total (4 1/2 days of cruise), and just under 2200 miles of driving. Sometime tomorrow I should be posting pictures, and a summary of the vacation/cruise (leaving off where my previous posting did. Current Mood: sleepy (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 21st, 2008
6:29 am	Trip Pictures As promised, here are some pictures from the trip... ( Pictures ) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 19th, 2008
11:27 pm	In Miami We made it! After 18 hours of driving (well, including stops for gas and food), starting yesterday at 3pm, we arrived at the hotel tonight at 8pm. We had a nice dinner, and mammasteed is already asleep. I'll post some pictures tomorrow. We hang out here for the weekend, then leave on the cruise Monday afternoon. mammasteed will be posting in great detail soon. She was typing away in the car (we even got a power inverter so she wasn't limited by her laptop's battery (which hadn't been recharged anyway). Current Mood: exhausted (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
12:09 pm	Voted Well, I voted. It was quite painless. I drove the 10 minutes to the (middle?) school which was my polling place, parked right in front of the door. (Many people seemed to have parked further away for some reason.) I walked in the door right at 10:01, and was walking out the door at 10:17. The only races on our ballot were President, US Senate, and US Representative... so I was familiar with all the candidates. And the machine gave me no (visible) problems, it told me I'd voted for the correct people. So, crossing my fingers for good results today. Edit: All 3 of the candidates for which I voted won. Yeeehaw! Current Mood: hopeful Current Music: Blackmore's Night - "Under A Violet Moon" (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
3:44 am	Not enough hours in a day Whew. I'm about to go to bed after a very long day... Got to work around lunch time, as usual. Had to add some debug logging to our system for the field techs so they can debug a problem (someone else's program is not successfully getting our program to do something, so we need to isolate whose program is broken). Then got back to mocking up an interface, partly by editing HTML and CSS (gah!), and partly by taking the screenshot and dragging things around to where they should be. Anyway, got out of work between 8:30 and 9. Got home about 9:30. Waited for mammasteed to get her bath. Then we went out to IHOP for dinner (becoming a gym night tradition). Got to the gym around 11:30. A full workout (warm-up on treadmill, about 12 stop weight-lifting circuit, then 20 minutes of cardio) takes about 2 hours. (By the way, did a rockin' cardio workout tonight... 318 calories burned, 1.01 miles). Then came home and took a bath, after which it was nearly 2:30. Random musical thoughts: Elf's "I'm Coming Back For You" is suprisingly good as a workout song. Judas Priest's "Desert Plains" is the best heavy metal love song ever. Current Mood: tired Current Music: Elf - I'm Coming Back For You (2 Comments |Comment on this)