Category Archives: Beware of Leopard

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2015 Nov 15

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This last week was a blast at LISA 15, the annual USENIX all things system administration conference. I averaged 12 hour days over the 6 day run, so I’m still decompressing a bit. More of a report on that in a day or few.

Nothing else of particular importance going on in our part of the world just now. Terrorists killing random innocents for kicks seems to be increasing the world suck factor by a billion elsewhere at the moment, though. That makes me sad. Condolences to those who suffered loss in Paris, Beruit, and everywhere else in the world where people kill other people to make a point religious, political, or for reasons psychopathic. Redundant much? Sigh.

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DoD reported no new military casualties in the last week, for which I am grateful.

Suicide by BMW

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At 0635 EDT (pre-dawn at this time of year), a deer tried to commit BMW-assisted suicide while I was driving to work. I’d have to say, that deer is a failure. It got up and ran off, and my car is in the body shop for the next few days. Bummer, I know. It jumped out of the bushes ten feet in front of my car or less. I barely got to the brakes before the deer was in my grill. Torso to the grill, neck took out the headlight, and the head dented the driver-side front quarter panel. And me with no venison!

That event rather owned my week, sadly. Still, yesterday we puttered on up to the Maryland Home Show up at the fairgrounds in Timonium, MD. We wandered about for a couple of hours, and spent much more time on the crafts side, and less being pursued by rabid window and siding salesmen on the home-show side. A nice little half-day trip.

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Our condolences to the families and friends of these fallen warriors:

  • Maj. Phyllis J. Pelky, 45, of Rio Rancho, New Mexico, died Oct. 11 in the crash of a British Puma Mk2 helicopter in Kabul, Afghanistan.
  • Master Sgt. Gregory T. Kuhse, 38, of Kalamazoo, Michigan, died Oct. 11 in the crash of a British Puma Mk2 helicopter in Kabul, Afghanistan.

I’d better not get the flu…

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I’d better not get the flu this season, because I’ve already paid the cover charge and over-tipped all the bouncers. Seriously. Thursday I got the regular dose (as opposed to high dose) quadrivalent flu vaccine for the season. Friday, I had the day off. I was taking the day to handle a couple of chores, and then attend Capclave for the two and a half days of programming, Friday through today. Yeah, that didn’t happen.

By midnight Thursday, I had aches and pains in the large muscles and joints, and a mild fever afflicted me. I was “fine” by Saturday morning, but all washed out. Much better, finally, this evening, having missed the whole thing. Sigh. So if this was my reaction to the vaccine this year, my antibodies sure better be ready for the real thing, should it look my way.

In other news… well, there is no other news. Three days of my life lost to the sofa and television.

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DoD has reported no new casualties in the last week. Ciao!

Oddly Low-key Introduction

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If you play in Apple’s sandbox, you’ll know that today was release day for the latest version of OS X: El Capitan. For a variety of reasons, I decided to upgrade on release day (admittedly after pulling a full, bootable, copy of my system using my favorite tool for the purpose, SuperDuper! Highly Recommended!).  An hour or so to pull down the 6 GB download, another 30 minutes or so to apply the new OS, and my Mac Air was rebooting!

Happily, I got a login prompt at the far end. That’s always a good start. I typed in the credentials, expecting a splash screen all about El Capitan, OS X 10.11, and what insanely great things I had installed on my hardware. Well, um, no. Not as such. Credentials for iCloud – gotta enter them, even though I barely use iCloud. Then I was regaled with legalia – four different many-page things on privacy, etc that I was to pretend I agreed to. I “agreed.” Now, surely, on to the good stuff…

Well, um, no. Not at all. For some reason, the system just dropped onto my desktop, with the VPN prompting me for credentials, a copy of Word opened (weird, haven’t had to use Word on this box in months), and a dialog telling me that Mail had failed to upgrade, click to continue. So I did, and boom. Error message and close. No Mail for you. Well, fine, I use Thunderbird anyway, but I restarted Mail to get that refresh done. 15 minutes later, all good. So I shut down, started up, and logged back in … Now, surely, I can have lights and music and frighteningly good looking young people in videos telling me about my new OS… Nope.

#WTF, Apple. Losing your touch, much?

The new OS is “working”, I suppose. I haven’t found anything broken yet (having hardly looked). Not breaking anything would be sort of the minimum bar, I guess. But what’s the upgrade? Or, more pointedly, “Where’s the beef?” Yes, that ad for Wendy’s came out the same year as that wonderful Ridley Scott-directed Apple Mac 1984 advertisement. Where. Is. Beef?

Apple, you’re welcome to reply in the comments…

About daynotes.com

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Carl Sanders wrote:

Was wondering why www.daynotes.com was down.

The registration for the site expired on 23 September 2015. It’s in limbo for a while, then it’ll go on the block.

Daynotes.com was a domain purchased by, and leading to a website designed by, and originally maintained by Tom Syroid, back in September 1999. By sometime around the mid-naught’ies, Tom dropped off the Internet, and with few exceptions, has not resurfaced. A few times we tried to get the site registration transferred from his name (and with difficulty, since the email address he registered with exists no more), so that we could transfer it to a less-expensive registrar than Network Solutions. Those efforts failed. So, over the years, as often as not, I’ve footed the bill to keep that site up and alive. I only find out it is expiring when someone asks, because I’m not any of the registered people.

So … Daynotes.com:

  1. I used to be able to go to the NSI site and renew without logging in. That appears to not be the case any longer.
  2. There is still daynotes.net, which is nearly identical in content, and I am the registrant, and continue to foot that bill.
  3. If someone wishes to figure out how to pay NSI to renew the site, go for it. I’ll continue the hosting – that’s very little effort.

So there you go.

Quiet times

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It’s going to be busy soon, what with Capclave, and LISA15 … but this weekend was quiet. We went to supper and played Trival Pursuit with Mike and Linda last night. The rest of the time? Chores, a spot of shopping, a bit of telly, a dash of early morning system administration for work. Boring, really. But necessary. Oh, and I’m working on migrating the underpinnings of this site to FreeBSD. But not tonight.

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DoD reported no new casualties in the last week. Ciao!

Mailing list etiquette, updated

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I am pleased to report that the Contact Conference mailing list owner got back to me, pleasantly and quickly, apologetically acknowledging the faux pas. One can merely hope that others will pay heed. Mailing list membership should always be recipient-instigated, and double-opt-in.

If you’re going to Contact, btw, I’m jealous. Just sayin’ …

Magic Blue

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Or some silly color name like that. Anyway, that’s the exterior color of Marcia’s new car. She decided that hauling around her quilting friends and her quilting stuff in a low-slung, two door convertible was getting less and less convenient. So after driving a few different vehicles, she ended up with a Volvo V60T5 – one of their little sport wagons. Nice lines, I think, and she’s happy, which is a good thing.

I’ve spend a number of hours this weekend working on a project for $OFFICE, and got the front yard brown stuff mowed a bit flatter, too. Mostly brown, anyway: we’re hoping for some more rain sooner or later. We wrapped up June with about 14 inches of rain, which is about 4 month’s worth. Since then, only a couple of inches all told, and everything is dry. The trees are dropping leaves, too.

In entertainment news, Marcia and I are watching the modern Doctor Who series front to back, working on catching up to today by sometime in the middle of the coming current season. We started off with Eccleston’s 2005 doctor, and we’re a couple of episodes into Tennant run. Additionally, I finished a play-through of Witcher 3. Fun game.

Labor Day weekend here, so tomorrow’s a day off, and I plan on doing not much of anything, if I have any say in the matter. Wish me luck with that.

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DoD has reported no new casualties in the last week. Ciao!

Toilets and Sewing Machines

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A toilet, and a sewing machine: these are both things I worked on repairing today. I was successful in repairing the toilet.  However, I don’t have the specialized knowledge I need to safely work on Marcia’s quilting machine. If I could have fixed this, it’d save us 50 or a hundred bucks. But I can do ever so much more damage than that … so I tried, and then I stopped.

I also had a fair amount of outside-of-business-hours work this week; Some yesterday, and more of that starting around 0645 this morning and going on for a couple of hours. That’s my excuse for not doing any yardwork at all. But since I can rarely talk about work, it’s boring here as a topic.

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Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors:

  • Capt. Matthew D. Roland, 27, of Lexington, Kentucky, died of wounds suffered Aug. 26 when the vehicle he was traveling in was attacked near Camp Antonik, Afghanistan.
  • Staff Sgt. Forrest B. Sibley, 31, of Pensacola, Florida, died of wounds suffered Aug. 26 when the vehicle he was traveling in was attacked near Camp Antonik, Afghanistan.

Returns with a Vengeance

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Summer, that is. We’re in a pattern of high heat and humidity right now, which makes working outside (and walking the dog) less than utterly pleasant activities. I strive, however, to not let that stop me. Today, after shopping and such, I managed a 3-gallon harvest out of the garden, much of which turned into the contents of these jars:

Mmmmm. Salsa.

Mmmmm. Salsa.

Yep, there’s still salsa coming out of the garden. It’s been winding down for a week or more, but there may be one more batch before the year’s production is done.

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My dance card was full last week because Marcia was travelling. She did an eight day trip to Michigan, spending time with family and going to a quilt show in Grand Rapids. She tells me she had a good time. I won’t know how good a time until I’ve seen the credit card bill, however (grin).

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DoD has reported no new casualties in the last few days. Ciao!