Etherpunk

So yeah, for the past 3 weeks I've been sick with walking pneumonia. That's some serious suckage.

On top of that, lots of other things are about to get a might be hairy.

A Man said to the Universe: "Sir, I exist!" "However," Replied the Universe, "The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation." (Stephen Crane, 1899) or rather: 'So What?'

Allegory of the cave is something I think /everyone/ should read. It's something I wish senior high schoolers were forced to read. It has a very good idea behind it. It's old, but still very relevent.

So, yeah, I had an interview yesterday. They Googled my name and found some stuff about me. A couple of them wasn't all that great. It's been a while since I've done a search for myself, so I decided I would go check out the stuff I've said. Some of it was very good, most was average, and a few were quite mean or bad. Some of them I thought "wow.. I said that?!". Obvioulsy I did, as I don't recall any of my accounts being hacked.. so it /must/ have been me. Some of them I remember getting angry at certain people and getting sick and tired of their attitudes but others I fired on for no reason at all... which was entirely my fault (eek!). I've found I have about 450 posts on a couple it mailing lists... I remember that vividly.

I also decided to see how my originaly Thick Ass (TM) wiki came out (found here). That was the first real document I wrote and released to the ether. It took a very long time to complete (find the history, with earliest first here). Once I got OpenLDAP figured out, the next difficult part was the authentication... after that it was smooth sailing. To see the full list of commits then go here. A good bit later someone else wrote another document that covered how to do a virtual hosting for Postfix, which IMO is far better than mine. I remember deciding that the old document Gentoo had (found here) was too old and needed some updating.. it also missed stuff at the time. It looks complete now and reasonably up to date. From there I moved to OpenBSD which wasn't too terribly difficult to migrate that document too. The reason I left Linux to go to OpenBSD was because updating a Gentoo box SUCKED and once you got too far out of date, it was a nightmare.

hmm, I can't find the first document I wrote, but the second one is this. You'll notice the counter sucks.. it counts clicks on the main page. It's hit Slashdot many moons and seasons ago. Thank $DEITY that it wasn't on my webserver and was on SBC's. I have no idea why they haven't shut down that site.

One of my blogs on there was a rant... which has a ton of typos. I was hanging around an anti-linux guy who pretty much is full of himself... ALL THE TIME. He used to harrass someone I cared about (I'm delibertly avoiding his name, and no it's not you Gerall (you're anti Windows anyways, not Anti Linux...) -- it's the Anti-Gerall, only because I feel nice at the moment...) in ways that used to piss me off. I don't like people giving my friends or family greif (not like jokes, but I mean this dude was a dick. seriously.).

Go to spheretech.old.java if you want to see some of my ancient, really crappy and lacked a clue, code. At the time I didn't know how to really utilize SQL databases. I was very uninformed. I'd like to think I'm informed now, but I know there is much to learn about it.

ahh.. the mammaries... or is it memories? :-P

FWIW, the first Linux distro that hosted my first website, was Slackware. It was exceptionally simple. I even got Sendmail (*gasp*) running, although now I use Postfix -- which is /far/ easier to get running.

oh yeah, I just realized that their is another Etherpunk out there. His name is Gerall, who is the one who told me about that person. Although, I've yet to see any of his posts... I usually post as Nazadus and never Etherpunk. hmm, looks like I found another Etherpunk.. who is a Goth (Gerall?). Hot chicks in some image... (what? can you blame me?).

Wow, I've posted all over the 'net. Google etherpunk.com or nazadus. I almost forgot.. I wrote the first install guide for Sorcerer Linux back in 2002. Source Mage wanted it and I said they could have it, but because I didn't care to release it out (I just wasn't caring for the arguments anymore, so I left the channel) under a free license, they wrote their own. I never really looked in to it though.

Warning: Spoilers for Justice League the movie, Starcrossed So, I was able to watch Justice League: Starscrossed (a movie) from front to back (I've caught it half way through many times). As much as a love all the characters more and more I'm starting to like The Flash. As Gerall (a very close friend of mine) put it: He's the heart. He's optimistic, against horrible odds, he's funny, and most importantly -- he loves his fellow people. Hawkgirl did some back stabbin' (I love her attitude... she'll let you live.. just get out of her way. Stay in her way.. suffer the consequences... with her nth metal mace..) which made for some very interesting dynamics. The Flash, as always, gave his... immature input frequently, but it makes ya smile. At the end of the movie.. when all was said and done and Hawkgirl left (I'm told that the runs in to Doctor Strange or Doctor Fate.. I don't remember), The Flash was the only one (aside from Green Lantern, who fell in love with her), to show sadness when she left. I guess that's what I like about The Flash... he's very forgiving. Batman had a few really nice quotes in this movie... that make you think "yep, that's Batman". I love it when the group decides to show their secret identities to each other so they can get in to regular people's clothes (to blend in). Flash makes the remark about Batman being Bruce Wayne: "Ya know, for a rich playboy... you'd think he can at least smile more often". Theirs another episode that shows the true power of the Flash, where after all the other party members have been taking down by the Brainiac / Lex Luthor thing. Flash runs the opposite direction... only to run around *the entire planet* to get enough speed to punch him. Flash ends up... vaporizing himself, sort of. When I frst saw that, I was like "holy shit" and almost cried.. I kept thinking "well that's bullshit... fuck... fuck fuck... fuck fuck fuck fuck". Check it out: here. Even Supes came close to waxing Lex. I especially love his will power.. and his never giving up.. even after he got his ass totally kicked.. he still mouthes off. Another good one: here

I'm currently working on my servers. I want to make them even more ideal. I plan on nailing my firewall down to be a bit more strict. I'm also planning on putting some bandwidth caps on certain things (like torrents) and probably leave 10k upload speed for HTTP, 8k for SSH, and the rest for any.

I'm trying to figure out how I want backups to work. I've got two 160GB external USB drives that function, both of which have about 100GB of unique files, meaning this is going to get difficult.

OpenBSD 4.1 is going to be released around May 1, so that leaves a few more months to wait for that. Eventually I'm going to get or write some kind of Firefox extension or software that does these blogs better. I'm also going to try and write the modules I want. It's going to be a HUGE pain though.. but it's a project so time has no meaning.

Right now I have a Dell Dimension 2400 (acting as a firewall/nat/dhcp/dns), custom Athlon 2400xp + 1GB of memory, some cheapo computer a friend gave me, and my old laptop Dell Inspiron 8600. I'm fully expecting the laptop to not last long. The backlight is dead and laptop's aren't mean to be ran 24x7. Right now the Dell laptop is the test server, the cheapo is a half assed backup, and the custom one is the web / public server. I'm considering allowing FTP access, but I may just make a guest SSH account for those who may want to access some of my files (like friends or family).

So, I played MtG last weekend with my friends. It's got me hooked again.
I wouldn't say I'm going to go out and buy more than 1 deck, but I'm tempted to buy a preconstruct for Black. If I can find a black/white cleric/zombie deck, that would be awesome.

In the mean time, I'm tweaking my black creature / creature destroyer deck. It's the infamous deck that makes you sacrifice your own creatures, has 4 Dark Banishing's, Megrim (each turn discard a card), Bottomless pit combo (everytime an opponent discards a card, that deals 2 damage to him or her). I have two of those combo's. I was going through it and found some cheapo cards that I put for chump blocking, but I now think they aren't that useful.

I'm also working on a white life gain deck again. I found a rainbow deck from the Sunburst era. Sunburst had some _really_ cool things, it was just a bitch getting the colors you needed sometimes. I also had an artifact card called "Dark Steel Forge" -- made all artifacts indestructible (but I think you can still remove them from the game if a card says so, but they probably won't ever hit your graveyard).

I think I'll focus on a red direct damage deck next.

I think I may go out and find some stores that has some cards... hmm.

So, I started testing Drupal again to see if it is up to a level that I want.
My mistake was that I didn't list what I wanted ahead of time... so I'll do that now:

1.) Manage technical content that I learn / create
2.) Manage blogs
3.) Media library. I want to catalog all my movies and books. I don't know why either. I also want to catalog my images that I find on the net and have made.
4.) I want strict access control over all of the above.

1, 2, and 4 are easily found in Drupal. Taxnomoy Access Control lite appears to be what I want for access control, hopefully. I fear upgrading from security bugs though once I've installed something like that. I also need to be very anal about the custom modules I put in here, because they too must obey the TAC rules. Item 3 may conflict with item 4. I *love* the Gallery2 software, I just wonder if I can manage that with item 4.

Basically, my goal is to have *all* my content in a single system. I don't want 6 different logins. I don't want different subdrectories that are hidden and restricted based on .htaccess.

Other features I wouldn't mind seeing: stat tracking for personal items such as finance and nutrition from foods I intake. One could then easily fill in a certain amount of vitamins, minerals, and other information (calorie, fat, etc) per day and see if you aren't getting certain things via the cron module.
Would be nice to have an XML formatted file I could import from my PDA to Drupal and have it monitor my checking account and such. Hell, while I'm at it -- I want it to remind me to pay bills based on a recurring date -or- a certain amount of time (e.g. every 30 days). Item 4 of my first list would need to be able to restrict this info as well.

Let me re-iterate, I want a single application to take care of everything for me. Drupal is expandable enough to do this, but I don't think the last 25% is done. I could do it myself, but I would have to re-learn the core module information needed as well as the TACl requirements. That just seems like a lot of work, but maybe it's worth it.

Update (2007.02.15):

Basically I want one app to take care of all the needless thinking I need to do in life. I want to focus on something else one day with a computer telling me "you are low on vitamin c, you should consider having an apple" because it seems the last fruit I ate was an orange and it knows I get bored of oranged pretty quickly fruit (not really, but I'm just saying).

Ok, so the generic country breakfast goes like:

* eggs
* bacon
* toast
* orange juice
* go play outside

So, I've found a method to eat it -- and be healthy.

So, I've decided it's time to start getting more anal about my habits -- starting with money. I have *horrible* spending habits -- especially with impulse buying (e.g. when you go to purchase something at Fries Electronics, they bombard you with candy and misc thing). So, I decided I needed a method of tracking my money -- I would start with a technical item first, rather than habits, because without the means to *easily* record this information, I just wouldn't record it. Microsoft Money and Quicken flat out suck -- they visually impair you by throwing out WAY too much shit and over complicating things sometimes. A few years ago I purchased Microsoft Money: Basic -- and it was still a pain in the ass. To top it all off, they didn't offer a PDA version for Windows Mobile 5 (although I hear they offer one now -- which I'd like to research; I was able to get one working for a Dell Axim X51V but not my Cingular 8125). So, I decided to make one myself. Being that I'm not fond of writing a Windows app of this magnitude by myself (I have other hobbies I'd like to pursue at the moment) I decided I would use the next best thing -- Microsoft Excel. Ok, great idea. Ooooh, a PDA version of Excel comes with Windows Mobile 5 -- w00t. So my next goal was to decide what I wanted to keep track of.

Tab: Bills and Debt
I read somewhere on Digg about some minority getting money (mostly because they pulled the squeeky wheel crap -- which I *hate*; For those who don't know; The squeeky wheel gets the most greese, thusly those who bitch and complain the loudest get the most -- keyword being 'bitch') and they made the comment that this particular minority is horrible at saving money -- with the first rule being: If you can't recite your financial situation from memory (e.g. you are just going off the top of your head and ball parking things) then you are fucking up and don't expect to save. Hmm... while I don't fall into the minority he was talking about, I do fall into the financial issues he discussed. He made sense, so I should figure out what money goes to what on a monthly basis, how much credit I have available (and where), how much debt (and to whom), and what interest rate. That is tab number 1, we'll call it 'Bills and Debt'. I then made a list of *every* monthly payment I make. Credit Card(s), cell phone, internet, etc. I also noted the type of service, if it was adjustable (like Cingular and Internet). I then made a list of to whom I owed debts to (like my Capital One credit card), how much, and what interest rate. Debt tab was now complete.

Tab: %BANK NAME% Checking
I hate spending cash. Like my sister said, once you break a twenty -- the rest just disappears. Usually the logic of "it's just 4 bucks, it's just 5 bucks, it's just 50 cents) -- but they all add up to that $20 you spent. Cash in hand makes me feel like I have money to spend for some reason. Any more than $20 makes me feel unsafe carrying it around (at one point I was walking around with $400 in my wallet -- eek). I prefer to spend using my debit / check card. This makes it *really* easy to track as well. Simple stuff here. Date, to whom, amount, updated balance for checking account, updated balance for debt, notes (sometimes used for confirmation numbers). Items flow downwards, because inserting new rows at the time became very annoying. I wonder if I should make a macro for that... hmm... ah well, I'll worry about that later.Tab 'Amegy Banking' (Amegy is, of course, my bank) complete.

Tab: Monthly Bills
This tab will record what bills I've paid on what month. It will also repeat over and over, so I named it 'Bills-2007.01(Jan)'. In it I record the day a bill is due, name of company (the one I would write a check to if I had to write a check), it's use to me, expected monthly amount, how much I really paid, what day it was paid on, notes (might include check number or authorization number). This tab makes it easy for you to just open up and know if you need to pay anything *really* quick. I got this idea from my Uncle Greg.

Ok, now that I've wrote up all that I need to do to have this technically work, time to work on the habits. The first thing I need is see where useless monthly spending is going on. The only one I could find, that was reasonable, was my cell phone service. At one date I was dating some psycho person who was more of a habitual liar than psycho -- but I racked up the minutes, so I increased my plan. Time to drop that down. I also don't need internet on my phone, which was something I was considering getting but now changed my mind on. So I changed my plan from 900 minutes to 450 minutes. I decided to keep text messaging for a while longer, and I'll do the month in a few months to see if it's worth keeping. *sets date in PDA for reminder to do said event*.

One of the tougher parts to this is actually starting. Party because of changing your habits and recording everything and partly for trying to catch up for what you don't got. It's difficult knowing if you forgot something sometimes as transactions may take several weeks to complete depending on of the company has a bug up its ass or something. To my surprise, it only took about 4 days for me to catch up to 90%. Now that I was caught up (for the most part) and entering everything I bought, I found myself slowing down buying things and re-considering. Apparently when you have to sit down and enter this information, it makes you re-think if it was worth it and thusly next time you reconsider even harder.

Habit: Wanting something *now* / *faster*
So, I ordered a couple books off of Amazon.com (and one from Market Place, which is a third party type thing). I decided to do the 'shipping saver' which is basically free shipping but you wait a week and a day. I still twinge sometimes, because I want to spend the few extra bucks and get it here faster however this exercise wasn't about saving money as much as it was trying to slow down and be smarter. I don't *need* those books. I *want* them -- which translates into "it can wait if it saves money". For those that don't know me -- this is a HUGE step in slowing down.

This is about as far as I've gone now. I've only been doing this for a couple weeks so I'll keep posting on the things I learn.