Laugh with me! Laugh with me!

And no, I don't mean Montana Max. This particular Monty is Sierra's brother, a 3 month old bundle of pure energy that did nothing but play almost the entire day today at Sawgrass.

This has been a pretty cool weekend; I spent half of Saturday at Sawgrass, then the rest at the property helping clean and feed, and almost the entire day Sunday at Sawgrass. Being able to get quality time with Montana was great; he was a blast, batting random objects all over the place. He has a bad habit of trying to jump up on your shoulders; although this is cute now, we consider it a bad habit because when he's full grown at 150lbs or more, he can seriously hurt you doing that!

Ann-Marie, Montana's big sister at 13 months, was also at Sawgrass today. She was in a grouchy mood, jealous of her little brother and being a bit anti-social. She kept making this "grouse" sound, sort of a cross between a purr and a growl, which is kind of cute, but it means "Dammit, I'm not in a good mood, stay back unless you want to bleed." I heeded her warnings, of course.

Oh well... back to work tomorrow; looks like we have a failing disk on one of our systems that I'm going to have to replace, bleah.

Saturday Pictures

Sunday Pictures

So, my cat Lynxie was sleeping innocently on top of my Powerbook. I stuffed my celphone under him, set on vibrate, and proceeded to call him.

Watch what happened!

I expected him to jump two vertical feet, or something, but it was a lot less exciting than that. Still hilarious and adorable, though!

Note that you need codecs that can view XviD to see this video, or you can just use VideoLan Client.

This has got to be the catchiest song ever recorded in the history of the universe. It's been going through my head all day yesterday and today. I need to play other music to mask it out!

Click here if you dare

Just be sure you keep an iPod or something on you to play other music later.. You were warned!

I'm really getting tired of seeing this crap spammed all over the net. This is simply a new method of spamming, in which the companies get Internet users to do the spamming instead of doing it themselves. The companies doing this really love it; they basically promise someone a free gadget, and that person will spam for them until the ends of the earth!

Yes, I realize that a few folks actually are getting free PSPs and iPods and the like, but only at the cost of annoying millions of people (collectively) with all this extra spam. Just think: In order to get a free gadget with these deals, you have to get at least 3-5 other people to sign up as well; this leads to exponential amounts of extra SPAM!

Folks, pleeeease avoid the "Free xxxx" deals. All they're doing is paying you to spam, and this makes you NO BETTER than your typical junk E-mail spammer. Also, avoid helping others when they post these links, as this just continues to encourage the problem. I can't even read online forums and usenet anymore without seeing "FREE PSP!" or "FREE IPOD!" plastered all over the place!

So lately, at work, I've been fiddling with CentOS 4. CentOS is a group of developers who took the sources of RedHat Enterprise Linux (which Redhat is required to distribute freely, by the GPL), and recompiled them into a distribution that's completely binary compatible with RHEL.

This is nice, because you can't even get the real RHEL without paying a fortune to Red Hat in support costs, and RHEL has a nice long development cycle, so CentOS is good for servers and other systems that you don't want to have to upgrade constantly.

Both CentOS and Fedora Core 3 use the new yum package update software, which is greatly improved. They seem like solid systems, even if the out-of-the-box experience isn't as nice as SuSE. The nice thing about Linux is you can customize the system infinitely; try that with closed-source Windows and you'll have a hard time!

The semester break will be busy, upgrading our multitude of user workstations from FC2 to FC3. Server upgrades will probably happen in the break before next Fall; that is not going to be pleasant...

Feeling much better, so I went to Sawgrass today. I got to hear La La the parrot sing with Leah, which was quite hilarious. Junior was in a grumpy mood pretty much the whole time, and didn't really want me to get too close, but I managed to get a few pets in when he was sleepy and cheered up some.

I got some neat photos of some dragonflies on the back fence. They're tricky to photograph because they can sense your movement and fly off unless you approach veeeeeery slowly. Dragonflies have huge compound eyes, with hundreds of thousands of facets that let them see in every direction, pretty much; you can see them clearly in the photos.

Yesterday I saw the director's cut of the movie "The Butterfly Effect" on DVD. This movie is absolutely enthralling and thrilling; I highly recommend it to anyone into suspenseful movies. It really keeps you on your toes for most of the film!

Alas, back to work tomorrow. Hopefully the new tape system arrives soon so I can build our new backup server; I'm looking forward to discovering the world of Ultrium LTO2.

Today's Photos

Well, I've been sick for the past week or so, with an irritating cough and sore throat. Finally went to see the doc, and he said it was bacterial and prescribed antibiotics. On the second pill and already feeling better!

Of course, due to that it hasn't been too eventful. I celebrated my tenth anniversary on FurryMUCK yesterday (4/7/1995 - 4/7/2005), and that was fun. I morphed back into the original squirrel character I had when I started on the MUCK, and visited the park and reminisced about old times with other players. Of course, those of you not on TinyMUCKs probably have no clue what I'm talking about. It's a text-based interactive social environment, kind of like IRC but with actual rooms, describable objects, programmability, and more. If you're interested, click here.

On the photography front, I rediscovered a photo I took nearly a year ago, and have posted it on my photography page. It's amazing how beautiful the white whiskers look against the dark fur. I can't believe I let this gem be buried in my private archives for so long! I need to dig through them and see if there's any other photos yearning for the world to see... I also need to reorganize that page and move it to sarabi. Alas, I shall get to it some day...

I was bored a couple nights ago and slapped together this image. You'll only get it if you're a UNIX geek, but it shows how good standards can stick with us for a long time. The VT100 terminal is emulated by pretty much every platform out there, and is still the basis for modern access to UNIX systems today!

Anyway, hopefully I'll feel better enough to hit Sawgrass this weekend. I miss the kitties, and I also want to work at the property and chuff with the tigers some. It's been way too long...

Well, right around now is my ten year getting-on-the-net anniversary. Wow, it feels like it was only yesterday, piggy-backing on the FIU-FAU LAT net and jacking into cybernet.cse.fau.edu, an open-access Internet BBS that existed at the time.

Some Internet related things that I dealt with back in the early days (1994-1996)...

• alt.tv.animaniacs (Hellooooooo Usenet!)
• alt.fan.lion-king (Hakuna Ma-what-a?)
• cybernet.cse.fau.edu, Cybernet BBS (Anyone got a WAFFLE-iron?)
• CyberGate, AIX (first UNIX system I ever use), that larry@gate.net account
• (305)348-1196 (old FIU 9600 baud dialin to a DECserver)
• TIN (who needs a GUI to read news???)
• Trying to convince my high school to get Internet access because it was "educational" (though I just wanted it so I could goof off on the net during lunch)
• wakko.gil.net (Jeff, thanks for the free access!)
• sarabi.gil.net (I had a real hostname when most people didn't even have real access!)
• FurryMUCK (still there! 10 years as of 4/7/2005!)
• Zorin the Squirrel
• CU-SeeMe (Hi Milva!)
• PointCast (How utterly useless. But I still had fun with it!)
• FurToonia (Hello Kaja, Selane, Shakeera, if you're still out there!)
• FluffMUCK (Hello Inkypaws, Rieshal, Paws, and others.. StH TinyPlot, Mban, Town Hall meetings, speaking staff, flying phonebooths, etc. etc. etc.)
• Windows 3.1 and Trumpet Winsock (shudder)
• EWAN (a telnet client for Windows... the only decent one at the time)
• Netscape 1.1N (Holy crap! HTML is COOL!)
• Linux (kernel 1.2.8 was the first I ever booted! Yeah I came in a bit late, SO WHAT? }:) )
• As a Linux newbie, figuring out how to get PPP to work under Linux (pulled an all-nighter, success was the greatest feeling in the world!)
• ICQ (5327238 -- nice small UIN!)
• My First Router (386DX/33 running Linux in 5MB of RAM off a 20MB MFM disk, fun!)
• Doing all of this at 14.4kbps
• solix.fiu.edu, serss0.fiu.edu, xlab1.fiu.edu, (305)348-3282, those darn SPARCClassics in PC-415, the cheap VT220 clones in the terminal lab, SERVAX...
• Running Linux on a Floppy on open student lab 486s so I could telnet out
• Getting a job at FIU, vixen.cs.fiu.edu, SCS, getting paid to be a geek, learning how this Internet stuff actually WORKS...
• Getting banned from the EIC lab (Engineering) at FIU for swiping an IP address so I could get on the Internet. The irony is I was hired for the SCS department only months later and ended up dismantling that lab since we took over the building. :)
• ...

Well, that's enough for now. I'll add more as I think of it over the next few days. It's been a good run, and here's hoping for another ten years of cool stuff!

I can't help it! He's too cute! I was getting ready to leave to the fair to help out at VSW, when I turned around and saw him in the most adorable pose leaning on a pillow.

I grabbed the camera and flash, and managed to set it up for a nice bounce-flash photo just in time; right after I got the photo, he got up and into another position.

Perfect!!

Cats... I just can't get tired of them. The fun and cuteness never stops, whether it's a domestic kitty, or big fluffy tigers!