Well, I hadn't been to Busch Gardens since 1990 or so. In other words, back when it was still pretty tame. I must say it has changed considerably since then, and is loads better.

The new roller coaster SheikRa is stunning. They take you up 200 feet at a 45 degree angle, turn you around slowly with an awesome view of Tampa, then drop you 200 feet into one hell of an awesome track. It was definitely worth the ridiculously long wait in line! You got a solid several seconds of zero-G and travel fast as hell!

Some of the other roller coasters were great, too. Kumba, which was also built since the last time I went, was almost as good as Sheikra. Not quite as outrageous, but lots of great turns and more G-force.

There was also a wooden roller coaster which nearly rattled my brain out of my head. It left me with a slight headache, but was worth it.

I'm amazed at how smooth Busch Gardens rollercoasters are. They're good at maintanining them so they don't become clunky death traps, like some of the stuff at the local annual fair. I'll surely be back there at least once every couple of years.

Now I must go sky diving. Someday...

I miss the VSW kitties! I'll be back there next weekend for sure...

A relatively uneventful weekend...

Crappy weather Saturday kept me indoors. Visited some friends and hung out watching TV and eating pizza, but nothing much exciting happened.

I picked up "Father of the Pride" on DVD. For those with short memories, this was a computer animated prime time TV show last year on NBC, about the private lives of the animals that live with Siegfried and Roy in Las Vegas. It was a really fun show, but it didn't make high enough ratings to justify the $1.5 million per-episode production cost, so it was cancelled. The quality of the DVD is astounding, though, and they even have an additional episode that was storyboarded and recorded, but never animated; it's fun to watch an episode in boarded form. I guess my inner animation geek is coming out here. }:)

I got an iPod recently. Fun toy! I don't use it with iTunes, but rather with GTKpod, which is vastly superior. It lets you do nifty things that iTunes doesn't, and is cross-platform to boot!

Didn't make it out to VSW this weekend, and I'm smacking myself for that. However, I needed to take a break from it; was neglecting too many other things I was falling behind on.

So, some asswipes have decided to start spamming comments into this site, advertising things like gambling sites, jewelry, and viagra. I've deleted all the comments and found it was all coming from one IP, and banned it from talking to my site (along with everything else in that /24).

It's unbelievable. Spammers don't stop with e-mail, they insist on spamming people's PERSONAL WEBSITES too. If it keeps up, I'm gonna have to set up captchas, or change the posting method so that robots can't spam as easily. Arrrrgh.

So the Busch Gardens trip was postponed a week due to a potentially incoming tropical storm. Major suckage; I was really looking forward to it! Of course, a shut-down park due to storms is no fun at all either! A whole other week to wait... Arrgh. In any case, hopefully I'll get some time in at VSW this weekend, if the weather holds up.

I discovered an old anime called "Daishizen no Majyuu Bagi", or "Bagi, the Monster of Mighty Nature". A reasonably high quality fan-sub of it can be downloaded via BitTorrent here. It's an interesting story about a guy's friendship with a genetically engineered cat/human hybrid. It was made in 1984, and thus has that "old style" anime look, but is still a very enjoyable story.

Been working on mail servers, file servers, and more at work. We have recently purchased three SATA-based Dell Poweredge 1800 servers, each with 1.25TB of useable disk space, for various projects. It's amazing when you realize how much space 1.25TB really is; 1,250GB or 1.2 *MILLION* megabytes. Remember when the biggest hard drives were 10MB and cost as much as a new car? Yeow!

Our new tape system is also finally ordered and I'll be setting that up sometime in the next few weeks. Definitely looking forward to supercharging our backup system...

Was watching Teen Titans and this wacky episode came on. Bunny Raven! Of course, you have to have seen the show to get the irony of this...

It's not a bad show. Warner Bros is still producing somewhat decent TV animation here, though it doesn't come anywhere near the quality of writing that Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, and Freakazoid enjoyed in the early 90s. The staff producing Teen Titans probably has none of the same members that originally produced those shows.

It's also interesting that these decent shows are cable exclusives; back in the early 90s, the good stuff was on off-the-air TV, and cable TV primarily got reruns and low-budget crap, except for the premium channels.

Speaking of which, where's Animaniacs on DVD? That show was one of the most popular animated shows of last decade; it seems bizarre that it's not on DVD yet...

I'm sure we're all familiar with phish sites, which are basically scam sites set up to bilk people out of the credit card information or PayPal account so the thieves can rip them off...

Well, I figured I might as well start messing with the phishers.

The full text for the fields where you can't see it all was:

• Not only do you want to steal the eBay account, but the actual CC info too
• Why don't you get a job instead of ripping people off?
• Yeah, they may be dumbasses to fall for this, but they don't really deserve it....

I recommend everyone start doing this; if we start sending the phishers lots of bad data, it'll make their scam-pulling more difficult. }:)

I just had to share these beautiful pictures of lynxes I was pointed to on the net...

• Best Friends!
• Nice whiskers...
• Regally surveying his territory...

It seems that good pictures of lynxes are hard to find, so this was a nice surprise. Too bad there was no photographer credit for the photos!

Lotsa stuff in one post here...

Saw the season finales of 24 and Lost this week. 24 answered all the questions, and Lost created a bunch of new ones, just as I expected. Hopefully the next seasons will be even better; I haven't been hooked on TV shows like this in a long time!

I discovered something spiffy for Linux today, sshfs-FUSE. In short, it lets you mount, as a filesystem, any directory you want on any system you can SSH to! I've already used it to mount zorin.org's web and my home directory there on my home machine so I can easily move files back and forth without having to use clunky ol' scp!

It supports pretty much all functions, and I haven't found any major issues so far. The only caveats are that it doesn't do directory sizing (so du doesn't work) and that it can't check free space on the disk, so df doesn't work either. Not a big loss, though...

On Saturday June 11th, I shall be roadtripping up to Tampa with some friends to ride this. Sheikra is the biggest roller coaster in Florida, so obviously I can't miss out. I wonder if I can smuggle a video camera on board.... probably not a good idea as it may decide to disappear, then conk some poor guy in the head while he stands on the ground. Heh.

Lots to look forward to! Whoo!

This trouble ticket came in today. Seriously, you just can't make this up...

I am a student at university park and I am trying to upload my database
onto my unix account at solix. I am having a little trouble getting the codic
from my diskette to the unix server. First I tried loading the files onto the
pc then cutting and pasting them onto the unix account using the pico command.
I found that I could not cut or paste.
SO now what I am trying to do is open a vax account with the pine command and
sending the codic via email, but I cannot login to pine. the username and
password are invalid. please help me find a way to upload my database. there
are alot of programs for the gcc complier in c++.

Here's an explanation of what's wrong with this, for the non-technically minded:

• We don't support solix, only Computer Science systems. But barring that...
• What the heck is a "codic"? And if he meant codec, what does that have to do with databases?
• You're trying to cut and paste files through pico? pico is a text editor! Unless it's a text file, good luck!
• A VAX account? We haven't had a VAX system on this campus in about seven years.
• Even if we had a VAX system still, since when do you use PINE to open an account on them?
• If you can't log into your email account, how in the heck did you send this message? (yes, it came from their campus email account)
• Yes, there's a lot of C++ programs out there. What does this have to do with anything?

Wow. Seriously, every time you think you've seen it all, something like this surprises you again. Jeeez!