Tims Blog

My friend Will and I hung out at my place the other day. The last time I saw him was back in high school I think. We had a great time though and he’s still a really cool guy. I look forward to hanging out with him again while he’s still in town.

In other news, I finally got around to making the broccoli and cheddar soup only to realize that the broccoli was bad. Great. Kinda hard to make broccoli and cheddar soup without broccoli. I improvised and substituted broccoli with onion and garlic. Say what? Ok, so it’s not broccoli, but it make for an interesting taste. Plus I had to get rid of the onion soon anyway.

I can’t even begin to explain how hard I got served by Joe this last week. There’s this silly program called P2P Marshal which claims to be a tool that can analyze disks/disk images for contraband gained from P2P software; warez dude.

When it was first announced (and I forget where I read about it) Joe and I had a damn good laugh because the app is such a complete waste of time. It’s a glorified “find -name *.mp3″ that runs exclusively on Windows.

Anyways, they (humorously) provide training for how to use the app. What’s more humorous is that the training costs ~500 bucks. And what’s even more humorous is that I got an email from them saying that they’re offering it, and would I like to attend.

So I forwarded the email to Joe, jokingly saying “if you sign me up for this, I will kill you”.

Well, he signed me up…not funny

I got a supposed email from them that looked like the type of reply email you might get from a conference after you have registered. Any other time I would have disregarded it as spam, but since I had received the offer so recently, I thought that the email confirmation was indeed legit.

I can only imagine the look on my face, overlaid with the shadow of total hopelessness and despair. Joe can probably explain my reaction pretty accurately.

On top of that, he said he was going to schedule me for the red-eye flight out to Georgia for the training (he knows how much I hate to fly and how much of a stickler I am for punctuality). Every word that came out of his mouth just made me sink deeper and deeper. “What the hell did I do to deserve this?” I thought. “It was a joke. An innocent joke gone horribly wrong” I said.

I tried to make the best of my obviously terrible situation by saying “oh yeah well I’d show up with my linux laptop and play stupid” or “show up with an external drive full of pirated movies and music and play it non-stop during the training”; anything to light a fire at the training.

I forget how things panned out, but at one point Joe mentioned that I check the email headers to see where the mail came from and that maybe I could poke around their site beforehand or something; I forget.

I checked out the headers and something didn’t look right. It never left our domain. In fact, it came from lolcat; Joe’s desktop.

Wait a second…

I then saw the reply-to and it was tar...@localhost.domain.com….

I slowly turned my head around to see Mr Spanky McSpank Spank. He stared ahead at his monitor, then his eyes darted over to look at me. He obviously caught the look of “why I aught-a…” scrawled on my face because shortly after he cracked a big smile.

Dude

…

Dude…I…just…got…served.

He then proceeded to inform me that that was for the packing peanuts thing I did to him during furlough. I was totally amazed at how much I just got served. I was dazed. In fact, I needed to leave the office right then and there.

Mission accomplished. Totally owned. lol

So yeah, words cannot explain how I felt after I came to the sudden realization that it was all just a massive dose of Joe trickery. I’m glad it was Friday.

You win Joe

Man I feel crappy. Phil and some random asshole driver the other day aren’t helping things.

• usb batman spotlight
• synchronizing fireflies ng
• gimper
• illustrated guide to kaminsky dns vuln
• using gnupg with php
• review board
• openremote
• monthly home and auto maintenance checklist
• how to setup dnsmasq for local caching

For one who is so in love with PHP, I think it’s kinda silly that I always turned a blind eye to the Zend Framework. Well, that ended tonight I guess. It’s really cool! It’s like PEAR…except it’s maintained! :p

It’s a bit frustrating to get down pat at first, but for a couple of the apps I maintain, I’ve cut over several critical functions that relied on outdated and buggy PEAR packages.

Cool stuff!

So the webserver was offline for a couple days while I grounded the outlet it’s UPS is plugged in to. Apparently I never did that when I installed it (it’s a really ghetto setup, lemme tell ya) so the UPS has been saying “building wiring fault” for quite some time.

I bought a new UPS (since the last one couldn’t sustain the load during the last power outage) and figured now would be as good a time as any to do the switch-a-roo and fix the lack-o-ground.

Anyways, everything should be back up for now. I’ll need to do another downtime in the near future to backup the server. It’s got some bad blocks on it, so it needs to be replaced.

I missed the Chicago 2600 users group meeting again! I thought it was the first Wednesday of the month, but it seems it’s the first Friday or something? Anyways, it was August 1st, : (

I finally got bags for my bike; no more backpack, woo! Natalie and I went out riding yesterday to look at motorcycles. She found this awesome Shadow that was _just_ outside her price range. She was really bummed (it looked really cool) but I pointed out that it’s getting close to the end of summer anyways, so to hold off for now. She’ll find a really nice one next summer, and this gives her a chance to figure out the insurance and other things. After all, we just went out that day with the intention to _look_, not buy.

Joe was in a bad mood a couple days ago. I figure it was because

• I didn’t take him for a motorcycle ride
• I borrowed all his good Wii games

Or it could be neither of the two (maybe it was anti-Joe who came into work that day while Joe stayed home and watched the kid)

My toe is progressively getting better. It’s tough to break bad habits though. It’s funny how I react to temptation though if I’m trying to kick a habit. I get the impression that I treat myself like two people; brain vs personality. I’ll get tempted to do something and then just say to myself “no, stop it” like I’m scolding someone else