A journal and sounding board for a geek girl in Silicon Valley.

Gotta love it when developers forget to change URLs after QA, and the page ends up pointing users to an internal NT server.

I think there's something wrong with me. So far today I've cleaned the kitchen (I even wiped down the inside of the microwave), and my plan for the rest of the day is to go through some boxes, do the laundry, and whip up a website or two while I'm at it.

The problem with the website creation is that one is a personal site, and the other's sort of a "house" site. I've been looking through various personal websites to try and get some inspiration or ideas, but the problem I end up running into is that, to be perfectly frank, most personal websites suck. I've seen one geekhouse site worth looking at, and that's my girl lisha's site, Das Geek Haus. Ours is going to end up being completely different, but it's still interesting to see how they laid out their site. My own site is still waiting for some inspiration, and some neat fonts to use in Photoshop. (I'm a fool for cool fonts.) Jon has some on a cd somewhere, but when cheese fell over and died after the move, he ended up somewhat misplacing them.

I ended up talking today with a friend (FriendA) of mine about a mutual friend of ours (FriendB) (still following?) who, now that she has a boyfriend, seems to have completely immersed her life in all things significant-other. He's all she ever talks about anymore, and FriendA says that FriendB never asks about how FriendA is doing, and when she mentions things in her life, FriendB snaps at her to just deal with it, that she's sick of hearing about it. Yet we're supposed to hear about FriendB's boyfriend at great length. I haven't spoken with FriendB about this, as I had asked her once about it a short while ago, and FriendB suggested that there was nothing wrong, that she didn't have a problem with FriendA. I'm beginning to suspect that FriendB doesn't have a problem if FriendA keeps her mouth shut and just nods and smiles as FriendB yammers at length about the boyfriend.

I finally got the O2 working to some extent (still doesn't wanna find an NIS server though) and I convinced my coworker Paul to give me his video capture board from his O2, so I could snag an O2cam and use it. This means there might be a hedda-office-cam on the webcam or elsewhere, in the near future.
posted by Ciannait at 5:35 PM

Only Microsoft would need a Knowledge Base article such as this. I've heard of a lot of odd computer errors, but "Computer randomly plays classical music" wasn't one of them until now. Plus, if I were to be nitpicky, I'd point out that these don't really count as "classical" pieces. To be honest, when I hear "It's a Small, Small World" I don't automatically think, "Oh! My CPU fan is dying." I fail to see the connection here.
posted by Ciannait at 11:41 PM

Toys are good. Despite being broke (really, we are) we needed a new hard drive for Jon's it's-now-cheese so we went and bought a 45gig FireWire drive. (It wasn't as much as one might think.) This makes nearly 100gigs of storage on that machine alone.

But when Jon went to install the drive, he took down the files for the Shoutcast stream. So that was down all afternoon / evening. It's back up now. I was sort of expecting people to yell at me about it, but so far no one has. I did receive an email yesterday (didn't check it till today, bad girl) from a random listener who was complaining about a Capercaillie mp3 having skips in it. I'm amazed that such random people are listening. When I started this thing, I figured I'd tell a couple people about it, and some of them would listen and some wouldn't. I have a rather strange musical taste sometimes. As such, it's just incredible that I'm getting listeners through other methods than me saying, "HEY EVERYONE! Come listen to my mp3 stream!" It's gotten so far as my server filling up within minutes of the stream coming back from a downtime. I think I need to start pointing people to live365.com, else Jon will start complaining about me being a bandwidth hog. (Wait, he does that already.)

If I ever needed yet another place to put a webpage, I could do it from my Mac OS X box. That's very cool.. Not only that, but Netcraft says it's Apache / Darwin. Not just Apache, not Apache / BSD, but Apache / Darwin. How cool is that?
posted by Ciannait at 10:02 PM

I am suddenly very tired.

Jon set up cheese for me to put up a webpage on. I figure I'll put my "real" webpage up there, leave the blogger here at deep-thought, and leave my shoutcast page on blatz. I'm diversified, or something.

So I went to look for my webpage on the celeron, because I backed it up there when changing my hard drives around. (This was way back in like, May, when my 6.4 gig Quantum (who just got bought out by Maxtor, ew) bit the dust.) Turns out I did indeed back up the webpage, but not all of the associated pictures. And of course, as luck would have it, the missing photos are the ones I really wanted to keep. (They centered around my hair - can you blame me for wanting to keep them?) I think, I hope, that they're still on the digital camera. I just need to try and get them off of there.

I also kept really odd things in that backup, like little text notes my exboyfriend would leave me from time to time. I didn't keep them on purpose, but they were in the "My Documents" folder, and I kept that entire thing. It's strange, in a way, to see those, because it feels a world away from me, and where I am now. I can't say that California hasn't changed me - it has. But I still don't whine about a little rain like most Californians do.

My cube decoration continues tomorrow at work, when I take my little "floaty penguin thingie" that Damon gave me last year in to work. My cube is clean, all my machines work (even if the O2 won't see the network - it thinks it's a .229 machine and I think I got cabled to the .228 network) and I'm slowly but surely beginning to decorate and really make it mine. So far I've got a stuffed Dust Puppy, a stuffed Moz (Netscape seems to no longer have an online brand store), a Linus Torvalds OSDN poster, my Demotivators calendar, a giant iBook SE poster, an Electra Lamp, and my machines. Not nearly enough toys in my cube. What toys (no, not that kind, but thanks for the sentiment) should go in one's cube? Now that it's all clean and becoming populated with stuff, I should take a picture of it and take peoples' suggestions.
posted by Ciannait at 2:42 AM

Apparently it's a problem with our nameservers. Do a set debug in nslookup, and query the IP on a foreign nameserver, the reverse comes back as a CNAME, not as a PTR. Hence, none of it works. I guess we get to figure it out with QuickDNS on the 6100 in Sacramento. (It's not remote adminnable, to keep the skript kiddies at bay.)

Neal came home, finally. Of course, the first thing he wants to do is host a Diablo2 game. He then found out we NAT'd his box while he was gone - whoops! (Neal then says, "Let's just run IPv6! We'll be incompatible with everybody!" I mentioned this to Jon and he sounded baffled until I mentioned that well, we definitely wouldn't run out of IP's then....)

I finally saw Being John Malkovich tonight. I had borrowed it from the inimitable Gilbert and decided tonight was the night to watch it. I noticed Cameron Diaz was very obviously typecast as the ugly old hag. John Cusack, surprisingly enough, wasn't nearly as good as the puppet portraying him. All in all, it was the singular most original movie I think I've ever seen. Even the ubiquitous sex scenes were inventive. I was very impressed, and there's just something about John Malkovich (who I could've sworn was gay). He's certainly getting up there in years, but it's nice to see him in a movie that isn't hideously disgusting the way The Messenger was. And better still was the wonderful music on the DVD menus... I love a good chord progression. ("Movie? Who cares about the movie, what's the music like?!")

I had dinner at Cameron's last night. Cameron's boytoy Chris cooked, and it Did Not Suck. I think I ate too much of the alfredo sauce, as I felt a little iffy later, but it was worth it nonetheless. We sat around and watched "Dark Angel" on Fox, and despite it having the token Kick-Ass-Babe, it was a really neat show, I thought. Definitely not your usual TV fare.

I wanted to smack Cameron today, though. He took today off to take The Boy up to San Francisco, and he came to work not once but twice. The first time was to pick up the laptop or something, and the second time he came by to bring me a gift - "Chocolate Mint" perfume oil from The Body Shop. They said they saw it, and thought of me. Should I be worried? (Chris then proceeded to drool over my boss for a while. Typical boy. :)
posted by Ciannait at 12:00 AM

My DNS delegation from Concentric didn't happen.

The only thing worse than being stuck on eternal hold with these idiots is having to listen to bad muzack while doing it. I suppose they might think that playing Culture Club's "Do You Really Want To Hurt Me" is going to stave off the disgruntled customers who have to wait on hold for over an hour to talk to the first shaved orangutan who happens to deign to answer a phone. I doubt they have that much concern for their paying customers, though.

In other news, Solaris 8 is pretty neat. I haven't really had a Sun workstation for years, just servers, so getting my Ultra 5 to see 65 thousand colors and a resolution above 800x600 is novel to me, and very cool.

Netscape 4.7 for Solaris doesn't seem to play well with blogger.com, though. So there's at least one reason to keep the laptop around.

And tonight, I get to go to Cameron's so his... exboyfriend? boyfriend? I don't know anymore... can cook me dinner. I'm amazed he volunteered to do so in the first place, and I think Cameron was surprised that his apartment got volunteered. The food sounds good, and I think the plan after dinner is to sit around, drink, and watch TV. Sounds good to me...

It should be interesting. I think I shall try to beat up Concentric some more tonight, because they're a bunch of butt-monkeys.
posted by Ciannait at 5:51 PM

I figured out my RSA / ssh key issue. Turns out that if any of the file or directory permissions don't match, the server won't let you in. Mad props to Llarian for providing me with tonight's cluepon.
posted by Ciannait at 1:13 AM

Cool! IE didn't puke for once! Will wonders never cease...
posted by Ciannait at 12:02 AM

I'm giving IE5.5b2 one last chance to straighten up its act. Either way, I'll copy/paste this blog elsewhere in case it gets eaten. Again.

Today's been interesting. I finally got The Company Formerly Known as Concentric to give me control over my own DNS. Especially since they haven't been doing my DNS since day one, this was important to me. I'd had forward DNS through pbp.net but no reverse, which sucked. So once Concentric's changes propagate, I should have working reverse DNS - woo hoo! Considering it only took me a total of 112 minutes on the phone with them to work out.. An hour on hold, half an hour explaining the problem, another 15 minutes on hold, then came the gem, "Well, your block of 16 IP's is in the middle of a block of 64, and if we changed your 16, we'd have to change all 64." After spending way too long on the phone, I finally convinced them to let me do my own DNS.

I also stuck a counter on my shoutcast page and that's very neat. It increments on refresh, which inflates the numbers a bit, but that's okay really, I guess.

We went up to Walnut Creek / Pleasant Hill to look at apartments. I want a townhouse with a fireplace, two bedrooms, deck/patio, washer/dryer, etc. I'm not picky, really. We found a really nice complex, right by a Chevy's and an Outback, and a mall for Jon. (We're gender-switched in that respect, I could give two craps about malls, and he loves them. I guess the BFM jaded me.) After drooling over apartments, we went to Sacramento to grab cheese. We set up new DNS and brought that box down here, so we can probably use it as an AppleShareIP server for our rather large collection of mp3's. However, not everyone and their dog gets a login, so don't ask unless we offer. :)

In other news, if anyone reading this is an ssh / RSA god(dess), let me know. I can get RSA authentication to work one way, but not the other. It's highly frustrating.
posted by Ciannait at 12:02 AM

Oh dear me, this is just entirely too cute for words: moving_kitties.jpg

I want cute kitties like that. Not that Misha's not cute, but she's just cute in a much more subtle way. Those guys are Milo and Bailey, kitties of woden and his lovely wife, farm.

Gaze in wonder, then puke in a corner because they're so unbearably adorable.
posted by Ciannait at 12:31 AM