When Friends are Slain
Tags: irc, servers
Dear Diary:
It’s been awhile since my last entry, and a lot has happened.
An acquaintence and friend of mine was murdered yesterday. Rex, you will be missed. I was just in CT last week, and he was asking about me through another friend. I should have stopped by his place and talked to him. Maybe that would have been even harder to swallow if I had.
Talking to a friend of yours, and then hearing that he’s been slain two days later.
And then there were none…
- I have resigned my job at Linuxcare after 21 months working there. My future employment situation is uncertain. Sparing gory details, I was never tasked with doing what I was hired to do; develop, support, and promote Open Source software.
As a result of having no spare time to myself, my own Open Source projects suffered and lagged behind.
Turkey Day
- I spent Thanksgiving with my girlfriend and her family in Buffalo,
NY. Very cozy.
I don’t really have a family of my own, so this was a bit… new. I got to go to the Buffalo Zoo. I don’t ever recall being at a zoo before, so this was neat. There was a very active “rhino” there, chasing elk in
her pen, some very intelligent monkeys, and lots of other neat things.
I managed to surprise her with a new Alpine stereo when I borrowed her car. It made the 7-hour drive to Buffalo much more tolerable. Her stock Audi stereo was just not going to cut it with that cassette-to-cd-walkman contraption.
Security by Media Assertion
- Flying has gotten easier now since the September 11 tragedy. After being on 6 flights in less than 6 weeks, I have yet to stand in a line longer then a handful of people, and I’m in the airport and through the ticketing, check-in, and frisk-and-search procedures in under 30 minutes total. Quick and painless.
I’m used to the routine anyway though. It’s funny, the “random” searches that they execute are anything but.. I’ve been talking to the security guards and staff, and it’s purely visual profiling. I have been searched on 6 consecutive flights without a single lapse. The computer will pick out people who are flying one-way or paying cash for tickets, but the rest are picked out of a crowd visually.
SourceFubar.net
- Since the article on SourceForge drifting, I have received dozens of emails from people asking to relocate their projects from SourceForge to my public cvs respository instead. I should automate the signup soon. This is really getting interesting now.
Friends from a Forgotten Past
- I located someone online that I used to know about a decade ago, but cannot really recall details much. I am not sure if this is just flush() happening in my
brain, or if it’s due to the long-term memory loss I’ve been dealing with since 1992. I met up with her brother when I was in CT several months ago in an electronics store, but he and I weren’t really good friends. Weird how things always circle around like that.
I’ve been trying to piece together my life prior to 1992 slowly, and locating people I talked to, hung around with, or went to school with may help me put it all back together.
Another odd soap opera event is that someone [1] who had a major crush on me in high-school, and whom I [2] rejected all advances from, is now dating the roomate [3] of a friend of mine [4], who also had a crush on me [4], a roommate [3] with whom she [4] had a torrid relationship with for months. It would make a great book. When she reads this, she’ll [4] hate me, but not for long.
Open Sores Projects
- pilot-link rewrite is coming along. We have USB working now, and HEAD in cvs contains (or will be weekend’s end) the full GNU/autoconf conversion, as well as the cleaned up getopt() mess, so we can get rid of the “rotten cake” that we’ve inherited with the previous codebase.
Nimda Has Not Slowed Down
- I’m blocking about 20 new IP addresses a day now, Nimda definately has not slowed down. I think I have 612 hosts blocked total now with iptables. Nearly all of the
63.x.x.x, 64.x.x.x, and 66.x.x.x subnets are blocked now. Lovely. Thank you Microsoft.
New Things
- Next on the plate is the public ssl-wrapped irc servers, some more cleanup of the web goop, and then marching into the other projects I’ve left open and stagnant, so I can clean them up. PerlMonks has helped considerably. Lots of talent hangs out on the ChatterBox.
Now that I have more time to focus on the things that have been dormant, I can catch up with everything I need to, and start chopping my way through these books and cranking out some serious code (or trying to learn how to solve problems with code in different ways).
Lots to do.. lots to do.