13 steps

I saw that line in an artbook last week and I’ve been thinking about it since. It’s weird how the mind works.
Maybe it’s because of the impending disaster otherwise known as my 30th birthday. *shivers*

After some brainstorming with Corvo the idea came up to boost the wallpaper section, which is why I’ve been making them like crazy over the past week.
If any of you happen to have collections of pictures sorted per series, zip them up and send them my way. The more the better.
And ofcourse everyone is welcome to join in the madness and make some wallpapers yourself.

In general we’ve been looking at the site and I’m planning to beef up everything one way or the other, so everyone is always welcome to join in and contribute, be it for the gallery, the forums, the blogs or FFMO.

The site’s doing remarkably well in terms of the traffic we’re getting, so people seem to find something of their liking here.

Yesterday I worked 20 hours, today 9. Between yesterday and today; 3 hours of sleep tops.
The ancient NT4.0 Small Business Server finally croaked, so we spent the night setting up the new 2003SBS from scratch. Fuck planning, fuck migration, fuck it all.
We had to set up a new domain, all useraccounts, all mailaccounts, all groups, all printers, everything… from scratch. And we had to log every single computer onto the new domain to add it and finish the useraccounts.
50 or so users, and we got it all done overnight.
It was a bloody nightmare but it was a great feeling when I opened the mail floodgates and mail started pouring in and appearing on dozens of computers at about 3:30am.
I hope I’ll be able to wake up in time in the morning ¬.¬

Today was supposed to be the start of my final Linux training but I’ve now had to move that (last minute) to June. Ah well… time to book that MCSA fasttrack, I’m still amazed we managed to get everything up and running.

We rock.

2 albums are released which I know will be among my 3 faves of the year without even having heard them yet.
First up is VNV Nation’s new album “Matter and form” which I hope will rival “Empires”, which is definately one of my favourite albums ever.
And secondly at last the new Diorama cd, titled “Amaroid”. At last because their last album dates back to 2002 and I love both that one and the older “Her liquid arms”.

It’s rather cool, to me at least, that both are being released at roughly the same time because I stumbled across Empires and Her liquid arms at the end of 2002 and both grew on me so much, because of their lyrics, music and the mood coupled with my state of being at the time. So I’m looking forward to see if the 2 new ones will live up to my expectations.

Yay for EBM/synthpop/Darkwave or whatever it’s called these days.

Well, here goes… I’m posting this here seeing as I doubt this would last 5 minutes if I’d post it at AO.
I finally, formally, quit as admin at Avalanche Online, and for the following reasons:
- conflict in management. Personally I think allowing spammers to stay just so the board appears alive is a perfect way to fuck up the community.
And it has been fucked up. Everyone but a few has long since moved on and the forum is a joke compared to the old days.
- Non-involvement of the admin. Edgar was gone for a year. We’re all busy, and we all found time to moderate the place anyhow. If you don’t care just shut the place. And copying bits and pieces from all over the web now to make up ‘content’ is a joke.
- The whole bandwidth soap and the asking for money. I had full admin access to the site, I’ve seen the bandwidth usage. Even after removing the mp3’s it was claimed the site still did way over 100GB a month. It didn’t, it barely scratched 30, and even at that… I pay $10 a month for this site, and that includes 205GB/month bandwidth. Do the math…
- Dragon627 getting booted. He was still active and was removed as super moderator without even getting a notice, with Edgar claiming he couldn’t get a hold of D. Dragon’s always in our chatroom and nearly always on AIM. More bullshit.
- CommS borrowed Edgar a few hundred so he could get his wife over. That was early 2003, to this day Edgar hasn’t spoken to C about paying him back… and he’s borrowed money from more people…

Thanks to everyone at AO who made it a fun place when I started there 4 years ago, but given said points I think it’s time I finally call it officially quits.

And Edgar, you seriously need to change your attitude towards friends who’ve always been there for you. And contact CommS about the money, you don’t live that far away amigo…

In a totally random moment I decided to post this pic of the view I have for a rather large part of my waking moments, my workspace:

I could have dumped this in the gallery but I figured it was more blog material given my recent comp/OS posts in here (not to mention my rants about work ; )
3 screens, left one belongs to my testmachine, here running the Suse 9.2 proxy/firewall which has already gone live. I reinstalled it yesterday and it’s now running the latest preview release of Ubuntu, which is a GREAT distro for every Linux lover who wants to play with the latest versions of any and all software. Make sure you don’t get the preview release but a stable one unless you absolutely know what you’re doing as things seem to be broken quite a bit (as is to be expected in a beta release). But Gnome 2.10 and KDE 3.4 are very yummy.
Moving on…. the central screen is my main box, running XP (with an OsX flavored theme ofcourse). It’s a pain in the butt and I use it as little as possible, Outlook still makes me vomit and I’m still twitching for Lotus Domino every now and again.
And finally on the right is the screen which is hooked up to 4 of the servers via a KVM switch.

Halfway through March again, time to smell spring.
I’m also halfway through the Novell Certified Linux Professional training having just completed the second administration course. Very interesting stuff, but a bit much to take in all at once during 5 days.
I seem to be fiddling with half a dozen operating systems at the moment, which is cool, I just get random waves of information overkill every now and again.
After having picked up the Mac a few weeks ago I’ve been playing with it a lot and I must say, I’m very impressed. It’s a lot faster than I thought an old G4/350Mhz would be and it’s almost good enough for daily use. Almost, because ofcourse I couldn’t resist diving into the BSD side of things and the poor little box is currently spending a lot of time compiling software using the incredible Fink Commander. Le Mac really does offer the best of both worlds. The standard Mac apps are all beautifully integrated in ways that make the whole end user experience a lot more enjoyable than I thought possible. The ‘it just works’ credo holds true.
And there’s a lot more freeware available than I had imagined. Some of the things I’ve installed and use at the moment include Adium, VLC, SubEthaEdit, Cyberduck, MenuMeters, Growl & TigerLaunch, and that’s not counting all the software I know from Linux.
Some things seem to be noticeably missing for reasons I can’t comprehend.
Everyone seems to be so much in love with iTunes that there’s no real Winamp port. Now ok, iTunes does run a whole lot faster on the Mac but still, I can’t stand the interface compared to Winamp. I want my damn ‘normal’ playlist! I also have yet to find anything that comes even remotely close to Grabit, my favourite Usenet binary grabber.
Still, with the amount of buzz Apple is generating at the moment and switchers crawling out of the woodworks by the thousands (or so it seems), it can’t be long before more of that kind of software surfaces. And if not I still have my linux ports, hehe.

The new version of Os X, codename Tiger is rumoured to be released in April at which time all the Macs will be bumped to 512MB standard, so anyone wishing to buy one would be wise to wait another month.

I’m not getting one because I’m broke as f00k and I got shafted with my contract renewal. A lousy $50 a month rise…. whoopdee-fucking-doodaa. That’s inflation correction, not a raise. That still leaves me about $500 short compared to what I used to make. *grumbles* In a bizarre twist of fate they have agreed to pay me a MCSA training so I’ll actually know what I’m doing with the new SBS 2003 server we just got, I’m looking forward to that. so in a few months time I’ll have done enough and had enough training to go from admin n00b to fully qualified Linux and Windows sysadmin.
Not bad. Now if I could just afford the car check up next week life would look a whole lot sunnier.

C’est la vie.

I’m starting to get to that point where that line between work and hobby fade, quite possibly for the first time in my ‘career’, which I’m starting to like.
So the money’s not all that, but I kinda like the fact that I’m driving to work wondering what I’m going to fiddle with today.

Spent a lot of time this week on a Suse box which has been setup as a proxy and firewall for the second DSL line. And it’s working beautifully. I’m using Squid for the proxy, which took quite a while to figure out. It works out of the box but seeing as I’m using 2 NIC’s to bridge between the local network and the web and I wanted to set it up in a particular way that the proxy isn’t visible from the outside, all the traffic to the box HAS to go through the proxy and I wanted to implement access control lists so the main users only have limited access whereas me and my colleague have full access plus several other more advanced thingies I won’t bore you with… it took a while. Especially seeing as the config file is a (well documented) 55 page monster.
Ntop is a beautiful script for network stats with all the details and lovely views you could possibly ask for.

So all of this fiddling is making me like Linux more and more. It may take a little more time to set it up correctly than on Windows but it sure as hell is worth the effort.
Hehe, I still have to figure out why the damn thing is able to send out mails over the net without me having configured anything for mail. No smtp, no nothing, and trust me, I’ve checked everywhere, but when I use the mail command it still manages to send it out.

Meanwhile we upgraded our fileserver last week which was chugging along on Fedora Core 1 (don’t look at me, it wasn’t my idea) and spitting out 5MB worth of errorlogs on Samba alone each day to Core 3 and it’s been running silky smooth eversince. Ofcourse I plan on moving that to Suse as well eventually but for now this’ll do.

I have my second training in about 2 weeks, I’m looking forward to that, more tips and tricks and another step closer to becoming a NCLP.

In other random news, I bought an Apple! By accident, sort of…
I’d been bidding on some for a while, always making low bids and hoping I’d get lucky. But with the busyness and financial setbacks I’d forgotten about them, until some dude mailed me saying I’d won. So I went ‘eh’ and had to scroll back through my mail to see exactly what he was referring to, at which time the ‘eh’ changed to ‘ooooh’. So I’m now the proud new owner of a G4 PowerMac. It’s an old thing, running at 350Mhz, but it’s My First Mac so I’m still pretty damn pleased with it. Thanks to Commie for picking it up for me.

maak plaats maak plaats maak plaats, we hebben ongelofelijke haast.

*dramatic pause*
IT’S THE FUCKING END OF JANUARY ALREADY!
So… what’s new? Well, I’ve been rather down with the flu which was fun (lost some weight in all the right places, mwaha), and had my first course for Novell Linux Certified Professional last week.
It was cool, and boring.
Cool because I learned a few nifty tricks, boring because I already knew most of the stuff. Which is good I suppose because it’s nice to see your knowledge validated in a group of peers. Next month the second course, and then the month after that the third. After which I hope to pass the exam, and which will also mark the end of my 6 month contract… interesting times.
Work’s interesting, still learning new stuff each day. Some people need a major attitude adjustment though. Barking at me to fix something they b0rked in the first place is _not_ the best way to get me to move my butt.
What else… well, a lot, or not much, depending on your point of view.
On the surface not much, but…
I’m testing a CVS (pre-alpha) release of the new phpBB3, codename Olympus, which is remarkably stable and which has enough features and novelties to make any site admin go ‘Sjwwwwwing’.
First beta is expected for March, don’t hold your breath though, their milestones have been slipping and sliding all over the calendar. Still, kudos for them saying fuck it and continueing work despite all the whinos and for sticking to their high level of excellence.
Any and all potential new features for X111.com are on hold until that version gets here, so that’s leaving me with a site I feel is getting a little stale at times.
Once upon a long time ago this started as my personal php experiment which I (and Corvo) fiddled on, but these days I can’t just do that anymore because a lot of people come here, have their blogs and forum here and I want to make sure all of that is available at any time.
So I’m probably going to start a little subcorner for myself around here somewhere soon just so I can scratch my itch whenever I feel like experimenting with gfx/php a bit.
Semi-random topic switch: it’s time for summer. I’ve had it with winter. It’s not enough to be broke and have no time or anything, nooooo, the weather’s gotta suck as well. Well damn it, enough. I want sun and a few nights off with a couple of mates sipping cool ones or cruisin’.
Hmmm, time to poke everyone else perhaps.

And I want a Mac, so if anyone has a spare one… Mehehe, right. Ah well, I had to try.

Nicked from Huntress.

Ah yeah, and happy New Year!

[ mood | happy ]
[ music | Within Temptation - Angels ]