Phasy

Some people came over to look at the house we’re selling today. We had to make sure the entire place looked fantastic and stuff, and when they were here it felt like one of those games where your not allowed to say yes or no, having to think three times about everything they say.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t that bad. I’m still hungry though!

Amused to Death and Radio Kaos. If there are 2 CD’s you must hear at least 3 times before you die, these are it. I’d say you just need to hear them to experience it, but really, you need to listen to it all day long for a week to experience it. Roger Waters is an artist that, in my honest opinion, fits right inbetween Mozart and Beethoven. He has a brilliant mind and an amazing look at things (you can hear this in his music).

In his music he not only describes our current world in a beautifully made peace of artwork, he also objects and protests against the way things are going. In these two albums he comes across subjects like war, death, tragedy, but also the way mass media are dealing with things. He doesn’t do this by just ‘talking’, or singing, he’s bringing the message with so much feeling it’s very easy to miss it.

You should only listen to this if you’re planning to listen. And don’t stop it halfway through.

Update: 2 samples

My blog titles just keep getting better and better don’t they?

Anyway, a look at my blog calendar thing somewhere on the right side of this page (I swear to god, I left it right THERE) has informed me that this blog is nearly one year old!

I bet you were expecting more about that. Hehe.

Anyway, I’m kinda getting the feeling of Web 2.0, or rather Internet 2.0. So I might do a really big blog post about new technologies lately if I feel like it and get the time to do so, because there’s some really exciting stuff happening out there.

Two men, both seriously ill, occupied the same hospital room. One man was allowed to sit up in his bed for an hour each afternoon to help drain the fluid from his lungs. His bed was next to the room’s only window. The other man had to spend all his time flat on his back. The men talked for hours on end. They spoke of their wives and families, their homes, their jobs, their involvement in the military service, where they had been on vacation. Every afternoon, when the man in the bed by the window could sit up, he would pass the time by describing to his roommate all the things he could see outside the window. The man in the other bed began to live for those one hour periods where his world would be broadened and enlivened by all the activity and color of the world outside.

The window overlooked a park with a lovely lake. Ducks and swans played on the water while children sailed their model boats. Young lovers walked arm in arm amidst flowers of every color and a fine view of the city skyline could be seen in the distance. As the man by the window described all this in exquisite details, the man on the other side of the room would close his eyes and imagine this
picturesque scene. One warm afternoon, the man by the window described a parade passing by. Although the other man could not hear the band - he could see it in his mind’s eye as the gentleman by the window portrayed it with descriptive words.

Days, weeks and months passed.

One morning, the day nurse arrived to bring water for their baths only to find the lifeless body of the man by the window, who had died peacefully in his sleep. She was saddened and called the hospital attendants to take the body away. As soon as it seemed appropriate, the other man asked if he could be moved next to the window. The nurse was happy to make the switch, and after
making sure he was comfortable, she left him alone. Slowly, painfully, he propped himself up on one elbow to take his first look at the real world outside. He strained to slowly turn to look out the window besides the bed. It faced a blank wall. The man asked the nurse what could have compelled his deceased roommate who had described such wonderful things outside this window. The nurse responded that the man was blind and could not even see the wall. She said, ‘Perhaps he just wanted to encourage you.’

Epilogue:
There is tremendous happiness in making others happy, despite our own situations. Shared grief is half the sorrow, but happiness when shared, is doubled. If you want to feel rich, just count all the things you have that money can’t buy. ‘Today is a gift, that is why it is called The Present. The origin of this letter is unknown, but it brings good luck to everyone who passes it on.

(the part where it asks you to forward to as many people as possible is removed, it’s about the message, I don’t support forward e-mails)

I haven’t had much time to post lately. Before I continue, this is not a whining post. I haven’t had much time to post lately, that said, let’s continue on.

Yesterday I replaced the server at the Twinning Centre (the old laptop I keep talking about). Consider me beaten, this laptop is too strong for me, it’s cursed.

Anyway, replacing a server is tricky business. First I had to take the monstrous PC all the way over there.

By bike.

Then I had to remove all malicious software and install server stuff I’ll be needing.

Without a screen.

Or a keyboard.

And I succeeded! Then the tricky part was to change the IP adresses to work with the internet connection I was about to connect the server to, and I only had one shot at it. I had been connecting to the server by remote desktop all that time, and I was able to because I connected it to a router with a DHCP server, so I could find out it’s ip adress easily. Now I was going to connect it to an open, unprotected connection, with a very static IP adress, and if I missed a setting I wouldn’t be able to correct it later on.

These things -always- go wrong with me.

Now you’d think with all these settings and things that can possibly go wrong, I’d mess up.

No really, you thought that, admit it.

However, the server didn’t fit. In the server case. The server didn’t fit in the server case. I don’t know how else to express it, my monstrous PC was too big.

Think that’d beat me? I’ve dealt with a cursed overheating laptop! So I removed the case from the PC, so it was just a few centimeters smaller, and it fit. I connected the two cables, power and internet, and went back to my laptop to see if it’d come online.

And it did.

I love it when something works exactly as planned, right from the start. (it doesn’t happen that often with me though)

It’s also fast as hell, check out the awesomeness!

So the server went down again several times. I went over to the twinning center, and figured out the timer is malfunctioning. So I hooked up another, a little more solid timer, and I hope this will be the last of it!

And if it won’t… I’ll be able to beat it someday.

It’s done! Well not really, but nearly anyways. I’ll keep updating it to get out the bugs as they show up, until it becomes the ‘perfect’ resource. It’s been online for a couple of hours while I applied the final touches, but now it’s public. Go check it out right now! And add it to your bookmarks as well.

On another note: the laptop server is currently down… I wonder how it’ll do when it starts up again after the power gets cut in a couple of hours.
Update: it just came back online, exactly at the scheduled cut-power time! Seems my system is working!

I have this very old laptop that used to belong to my mother. I believe it’s a 2.6 Ghz machine, with 512 MB ram and low overall specifications. I’ve been using it as a little server for several things, which has always worked well except for one problem: it freezes at random times. It seems to be temperature related, as in my tests I was never able to freeze it unless I placed it in a warm environment for a longer period of time, or simply blocked off all the air vents. I made it calculate Pi to 2 million decimals to get it hot in the progress.

The problem arrives when I place the server at the Twinning Center, which is a business location with 100 mbit/s internet speeds, in order to reach it I have to cycle 30 minutes to get there. So a server that randomly freezes every few days isn’t an option.

I’ve never met a computer that caused me so much trouble as this one, it just refuses to properly work, but I think I may have finally found a solution. See the problem with a laptop, is that you can’t just periodically cut the power and make it restart automatically, since it won’t boot up by itself at all. This behavior wouldn’t make any sense for a laptop, since it’s supposed to have a battery.

I have tried fixing it in many different ways before today. One of the solutions I thought of was to open the entire thing up, remove the keyboard and mouse and use those as ventilation holes. The lack of accessibility wasn’t really worth it though. So I tried placing it on plastic cups. That reduced the Time To Freeze to about 1 month. As it became warmer outside with the summer approaching, this time got shorted fast though, so I took the laptop home and decided to take it apart completely. So I did, and all went well until I took out the processor cooling, and found an empty processor socket. I found the processor burned into the cooler, it was becoming that hot. I had to use a hammer to gently tap it loose, and after that miraculously it still worked. So I put that disgusting grey-ish cooling stuff all over it, and put the entire thing back together. I ran tests in my own server room at home, and discovered that I was also unable to lock it up if I took the battery out… So, thinking I had solved the problem, I put the laptop back in it’s cage at the Twinning Center, and without much surprise… three days later I found myself back there at a frozen laptop. I have to admit, it was hot in that server room. There are 3 air-conditioning units in there, all cooling the place like crazy, but it’s still so hot inside it makes you sweat within a minute. Obviously every standard-grade server is able to withstand as little heat as that, they’re tested on much worse conditions, but my laptop is a peice of junk compared to that stuff.

So I took it back home, and decided to run it off home for a while until I would find the ‘perfect’ solution. Meanwhile, my father decided to cancel the location at the Twinning Center, which means in about 4 months from now, this high speed internet will no longer be available to me. When we move over to the new house though, we’ll be getting the exact same connection in our own server room, so that’s going to be awesome. Until then, I still want to beat this laptop, and I found a very simply solution using a standard light timer switch. One of those things that turns around, and you can set pins for when it has to be off or on, that’s used for garden lights and such. But how do I do this? The laptop doesn’t turn on by itself when the power is plugged in… So I opened it back up, and tried turning it on the same way I did before when I turned it on, by connecting two pins with my screwdriver. Well that worked, but to test my theory I didn’t remove the screwdriver… And guess what, unlike what I expected it to do, the laptop didn’t turn off after 5 seconds of power. Although I don’t understand this behavior, it’s very lucky that it does. After some customizing, I was able to connect the two pins using a standard jumper, one of those things you put on the back of a hard-drive.

And it works perfectly. I’m setting it so it turns off for about 15 minutes every day, to give it a short time to cool down as well. The only problem in this is that it’ll be offline for about 20 minutes every day, and if it does happen to freeze in-between shutdowns, there’s nothing I can do but hope it’ll come back up.

That’s enough solution talk. It really did sound a lot more clever when I first wrote it… oh well. I’ll take the server up to the twinning center tomorrow. For the rest of my ‘holiday’ week, I’m going to be finishing the resources site, followed by the 2nd Shoqs movie, followed by some school work.

This post is long enough as it is. I’ll talk about other things later on.

A few days ago I spent two hours searching online for something weird that’s been happening to me for quite a few years now, some black lines and dots on my vision. I found out they’re called Floaters. Apparently caused by normally healthy stuff, that gets packed together and sits on the back of your eyeball, floating in some liquid stuff sitting there. I read it’s completely harmless, most of the time, and usually only annoying. Sometimes it can be a side-effect of other things, including retinal detachment though, so I’ve read the side effects and established I don’t have any of them. Treatment is very very dangerous, and should only be done in extreme circumstances, so I’m just going to continue living with them as I have for the past years, now knowing what they are and accepting they will be a part of me for the rest of my life.

Work on the resources page continues, I am adding several tutorials and separate documents written by myself as well now, so it just keeps getting more awesome and bigger every day. By the way, if anybody has some resource pages, which can be ANYTHING (from tutorials, to documents, to wallpapers, photoshop resources, programs, games, name it), please leave a comment! Your chances of me adding a suggestion, and including a reference to your name, are extremely high!