Not much has been happening lately, well apart from the conspiracy theory that was spawned by them selling the remembrance day poppies on the wrong damn day. Yep I guess the diggers have finally forgotten which day it was. Or they are all members of al-queda conspiring to destroy the world. I choose you pikachu, err I mean the latter.

Also due to a small glitch in my order the hard drives haven’t arrived yet. This could be partly my fault as I clearly ordered more than Samsung Australia had in stock. How was I supposed to know their stock levels before ordering. Subsequently I’m having to order Western Digital drives which cost a bundle more than Samsung ones, spin faster, make more noise and more heat. Luckily the WD Special Edition drives still have a 3 year warrenty, that is if you buy them from a decent place (Netplus and Austin only offer 12 months on these drives! Smells dodgy to me).

I managed to BSOD Windows 2000 really bad at work, I was only compiling a smallish C++ app and managed to get a “Page fault in unpaged area”. The BSOD didn’t even hang around, it auto rebooted for me. It didn’t do it the next time I tried so it was just one of those things. Work has been good. I’ve learned a lot and I’m now able to do stuff I never thought I’d ever be doing, not just database stuff either, some really cool C++ goodies.

Lan’s are rapidly approaching. Not much has been done my end at this stage, the rego code was updated to suit php 4.1 and above better and now emails out lost passwords to the tards who lose them. This hopefully will reduce the number of single use accounts, but never under-estimate the tard factor.

I saw 2 movies at the megaplex recently, Reign of Fire and K-19: The Widowmaker, and I have the Super Mega Bonus cup to prove it. Both were sorta ma-ma desu if you know what I mean. I guess I’m hanging out for the 10am Thursday Senstadium showing of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. If it’s half as good as the book it should be worth seeing, and I’m planing on seeing that session.

Still no Gentoo 1.4 I downloaded RC1 so I’m going to give that a whirl while waiting for 1.4 final.

I never pirated it….it was donated, by the file fairy. I put a blank CD under my pillow…

The other plan that I didn’t write about is coming together well. This being the file server plan. I’ve managed to aquire a new case, one more suited to a server than the Aopen server case (barf) it was in previously, more ram so it will be back to a gig and the hard drives are on their way. The beefy power supply is, well beefy. I’ve managed to mod in some more hard drive mounts so construction of the new file server will begin shortly. The install however is waiting as Gentoo 1.4 isn’t out just yet. I’ve planned out the storage structure and the partitioning schemes to be used. I’m not going to raid the whole thing, though I will be creating 2 RAID5 volumes, and all data store volumes will be XFS. If things keep going well, I’ll have to start planning a pre-reload leech lan.

In totally unrelated news, my parents PC’s hard drive failed this week. It makes made it about the longest 98 install I’ve saw seen that still worked properly. Perhaps this was the other way Windows fails, if the software doesn’t fail, it causes hardware to fail.

The wireless job I scored went totally pear shaped. I mean I’ve never previously come across people who when asked What version of Windows does each PC run? and give the response 2 with Windows XP and 1 with Windows 95 with so much confidence yet so lacking in truth. Not only was there a Windows Me PC rather than an XP PC, there was also an extra pc with 98 on it. These people are so far out there they even got the number of PC’s wrong. Now don’t get me wrong. I have to stop and think when someone asks me how many PC’s I have, (or I just say too many) but this is different. Oh and the icing on the cake here was the desktop PC (I was told it ran 95, it actually ran 98), when asked what sort of PC it was, they said Oh just a common everyday generic one which I thought Oh good something normal but how wrong could I have been. It was an HP. Needless to say HP PC’s frequently use Torx screws and not the conventional Phillips head. But stupid me decided to play the odds and remove the case cover first to make sure the stupidity of the HP company stopped years before this PC came out and secondly to fit the PCMCIA socket. I was hoping to find Phillips head screws but was sadly mistaken, this after spending a good 10 minutes trying to open the screwless case, I was 1 step away from using a can opener. This was following the broken Win Me install of the Enterasys roamabout card drivers which appears to only work with the seconds on the clock are divisible by 2, and the rest of the time the card has failed. Though the card works fine 100% of the time in every other PC. The flip side of this peary shaped thingo is I got rid of the Linksys ADSL router Wireless AP switch all in one box for about what I paid for it. Goodie. I tested it first, and as an ADSL router it’s not too bad, I was able to leech at full speed with it, I had all 30 or so port mapping entries in there so I could get P2P to work. Also I noticed with the latest firmware in it, it *fineally* has a wireless MAC filter.

My adventures further continued in the Perth city side (well country side wouldn’t have been correct); to get to the wireless job (which was in upmarket East Perth, really posh place I tell you) I rode the CAT to get there. Believe me, when people say the CAT is slow it’s true. It was only slightly faster than walking there but I got to stand up all the way and see a bit more of Perth so it was ok, at least it’s free. (Well free if your time is worthless and your not in a rush.) Later adventures resulted in Kebab land in Leederville on Wednesday night catching up with an old friend and dedicated splat reader. Updates have been fewer and far between but I try to make it worthwhile these days. Rather than the ever so short and to the point update (eg ” I’m bored. ” or ” I’m broke ” or ” Im drunk ” (note the variation in grammar with the last one)).

Big things are about to happen.

you know you’re in trouble when your server load is higher than your stock price