2005-10-30

Freaknight 9

Freaknight was awesome.

I got there at 8 (when the doors were supposed to open) and it took about an hour and a half to get in, during which time it was cold and I had to pee. While I was in the mob outside, I think I about died of second hand smoke (inside it was second hand pot and rogue kissing booths).

I must have looked like a dealer because people were asking me for drugs all night, starting with the guy running the parking lot asking me for ecstasy. Normally they try to sell them to me.

Oakenfold was the highlight – I haven’t listened to him in years. Crystal Meth could have been better.

The projected visuals were very disappointing (although the green laser was pretty sweet). They were the same at all areas and started to repeat about 45 minutes in. Not only that, but they weren’t that creative in the first place – mostly just clips from old horror movies.

I suppose I also should mention that this was my first indoor rave. All in all I think forest and desert parties are better. PhoenixFest was $35 (as opposed to Freaknight’s $40), had twice as many stages, was 5 nights, and had way better visuals. Not to say I didn’t enjoy Freaknight, but give me tents and geodesics over parking garages and warehouses any day.

Next up: Apocalypse.

This article was modified 2012-09-15.

2005-10-28

Firefly

I finished watching Firefly today. It was really good. I liked it a lot. Now I want to see Serenity again.

This article was modified 2012-09-15.

2005-10-25

Take the quick way down

I fell off a cliff today.

This article was modified 2012-09-15.

2005-10-23

Doom

I saw Doom yesterday. It was pretty bad, but the FPS part entertaining – they should have cut out the first hour or so of the movie and skipped straight to that. All in all, they successfully bastardized the game.

This article was modified 2012-09-15.

2005-10-20

Jabber updates

I’ve been messing around with Jabber a lot the past few weeks. My new account is now pm@pig-monkey.com (the same as my email), as opposed to the old pigmonkey@pig-monkey.com. I can also be found at pigmonkey@jabber.ccc.de (sometimes).

This article was modified 2012-09-15.

2005-10-17

Happy Badger

Both my problems with Breezy Badger have been fixed. It ended up they were user error, so I can’t blame Ubuntu for them.

This article was modified 2012-09-15.

2005-10-15

Badger Woes

I have all my backups restored and most additional software installed, but I’m still having two rather large problems. One, the Firestarter tray icon will not launch at login and two, running SSH via Startup Programs is broken. All in all, I’m not as impressed with 5.10 as I thought I would be – it does feel a little rushed. That said, there are many improvements over 5.04 and none of the problems I’m experiencing are enough to make me pop the Slackware disc back in.

If you’re currently running 5.04, I’d recommend holding off upgrading for a few weeks till some patches come out.

This article was modified 2012-09-15.

2005-10-13

FiberCloud

I just discovered that FiberCloud has a data center here in Bellingham.

I want a tour.

This article was modified 2012-09-15.

2005-10-13

Time to format

I thought Breezy Badger was supposed to be released on the 15th, not the 13th. Oops. I downloaded the iso this morning, which was interesting – I’m always worried now that whenever I wget large files at high speeds, I’m going to get another call saying that I’m eating up 25% of the bandwidth (this time it looks like my average bandwidth consumption was only about 2.1Mb, so I’m safe).

I’ve been planning on using this new release as an excuse to format instead of just upgrading with apt, so I did a backup during class.

rsync -rav --delete --stats /home/pigmonkey /media/usbdisk-1/backup/nyx/

I was also thinking about going home this weekend, so now I’m going to do that, update the backup I have stored on Wintermute, and format.

This article was modified 2012-09-15.

2005-10-11

crypto

Tunneling SMTP through SSH

Since Dreamhost doesn’t support any sort of secure SMTP, I’ve been tunneling it through ssh for the past month or so.

ssh -f -N -L 9999:mail.myserver.com:25 myserver.com -l user

9999 is the local port, mail.myserver.com is the mail server, 25 is the remote port, myserver.com is where your shell is, user is your username on the server. Then, just tell Thunderbird (or whatever mail app you use) that your smtp server is localhost:9999

I have this run at bootup, so that all I have to do is type in my key when I boot up and all my mail is encrypted (Dreamhost does support IMAPS).

You could, of course, setup your ssh account to have no key, but this is a rather large sacrifice of security (as soon as the attacker acquires your private key, he has access to your ssh account)– especially if your primary computer is a laptop, like mine.

This article was modified 2012-10-12.

2005-10-08

Minor updates

I’ve made a few more minor changes to the stylesheet, most notably the textured background. There’s also a couple new banner images above.

This article was modified 2012-09-15.

2005-10-07

I'm a data whore

ResTek Nick called me last night to say I was eating up 25% of the bandwidth. Oops. Sorry about that. Wget is an aggressive little bugger.

In other news, the IAEA won the Nobel Peace Prize.

This article was modified 2012-09-15.

2005-10-07

Shifty drugs

I seem to have acquired a cold, so I decided that this was the perfect time to try the random drugs I picked up on a street corner in a nondescript brown paper envelope.

Ok, so it was a street corner – it was red square. And the women who gave it to me was wearing a lab coat (at least she looked like a doctor). They’re supposed to be a homeopathic cold remedy. The envelope says it includes Echinacea, Calendula, and Chelidonium. We’ll see if it works.

This article was modified 2012-09-15.

2005-10-06

More deer in the parking lot

I went to a slideshow last night of some guy’s mountain climbing in Nepal. It was cool.

This article was modified 2012-09-15.

2005-10-03

Pretty pictures

I picked up a Max Headroom poster today. The guy who was selling the Max Headroom poster on ebay also happened to have a Network 23 patch, so I bought that, too.

This article was modified 2012-09-15.

2005-10-02

review, books

No Logo

I’ve finally finished reading Naomi Klein’s No Logo. It’s been on my bookshelf for over a year, and I’ve been reading it for about a month. For some reason it was really slow reading for me, but overall it is a good book – if slightly dated (pre Seattle and pree 9/11).

It can be summed up in a few statements:

1) Modern advertising = evil
2) Corporate outsourcing = evil
3) Reclaim the Streets, Adbusting, Culture Jamming = Good

This article was modified 2012-12-22.

2005-10-02

The toilet paper is much better there

I went home today and picked up a couple posters I’d found on ebay. One is Equilibrium and the other is Max Headroom. I’ll take some pictures tomorrow.

This article was modified 2012-09-15.