Archive for the ‘Online’ Category

New CentOS 5.0 Xen Server Live

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007

Our new virtual server is live! Pound’s handling the connections and routing to the appropriate destination, Xen does the VM’ing, and Apache’s still working its server mojo.

All this being served up off a beefy (and more efficient) Red Hat Linux machine. Now I just have to get the processor power controls up and we’ll be all set.

Asians are Funny

Thursday, May 10th, 2007

Having just been to Japan I can confirm this. Asians are funny. Of course, you can only pull off wacky stunts like that on Asian TV.

Be amazed as a large group of people pour out of nowhere on top of unsuspecting salary men.

**Update** Even more wackiness from Japanese game shows at YouTube

Matt Ian Talks about .22 Rifles Not Killing People, Looses Job

Wednesday, May 9th, 2007

Yea. That about sums it up. His three panel comic on how it went down is here.

Now, what bothers me here is the fact that he got fired for talking about it being hard to kill someone with a .22 rifle.

This is a conversation I’ve had before.

And oddly, the content of it wasn’t much different. Basically, the same context with a “yea, a .22 caliber rifle is great for target practice.. you’d have to really try to kill someone with it, not just accidentally misfire or something.”

I’m kinda shocked someone could mis-construe that, with the “have to shoot them in the face” added on, as being some kind of warning that you might be a psychopath. Psychopath’s *don’t* casually talk about the dangers of firearm ownership, they simply start shooting people with them.

This, folks, is why they’re psychopathic. Stating you picked out a target practice rifle based on it’s improbability of harming someone (yes, even with a colorful metaphor) shouldn’t raise any red flags here.

Is it just me, or are people starting to witch hunt because of a infinitesimally small number of deranged individuals?

Jeffree Star @ the Webster Underground

Wednesday, May 9th, 2007

So the sometime internet icon and sometimes offensive Jeffree Star (Queen of Myspace? Maybe?) was playing over at the Webster. And Miss E was running the show, so I figured on dropping by and saying hi (since I usually hang out at the coffee spot in Borders down the street after work.. and she *did* come all the way out from CA :) .

Right. That was fun and all. Naturally I forgot the camera -_-. No more accredited press photos for me!

Before going over though (since I remembered the name) I gave the internet a quick troll to remember who I should attach it too. And noticed there’s no Wikipedia entry for Jeffree Star.

Which is odd. There are Wikipedia entries for popular sayings (see You’re the man now, dog entry) yet no Wikipedia entry for a popular internet persona?

Yea. So. Freaky as it may seem his entries been getting more delete action than elephants and is actually banned from being added.

So apparently we can document important memes like.. ah.. you being the man. Now. But not actual people.

Echos from the Well of Souls

Tuesday, April 24th, 2007

Strange things tend to happen with this online medium. Looking around today and following up to see if Jack L. Chalker had released anything new(ish) prior to his untimely demise I noticed that his website hadn’t been updated or even kept running smoothly after his departure.

How I found out about his bout of heart troubles and unfortunate end is also a bit odd. It was in the forward to a book on programming AJAX, one written by someone apparently influenced by the accomplished Science Fiction writer, teacher, and from all accounts good guy. But I digress.

One of the stranger things about all of this is that writings online tend to collect up like so much electronic floatsom washing up on the shore. Even if they’re not officially run by anyone sites stay up long after their authors slip the mortal coil.

Writings on forums get cataloged forever.

With all it’s various archives no antagonistic Usenet statement about someones affiliation with fascism or resemblance to mustached dictators will ever be lost. Just forgotten.

Postings about Usenet I find particularly funny, as they’re always written in the present tense. The reason that’s funny, for those of you who don’t use, don’t know about, and have no inclination of ever using Usenet news forums is that they’re all dated circa the late nineties.

And always proclaim that their subject matter, alt.fiction.literature or whatever, is still a vibrant community of writers that’s just waiting for you to drop in. There’s still people loitering on Usenet mind, it just hasn’t scaled. In fact, it appears to have shrunk quite a bit since the endless deluge of AOL users back when (see Eternal September on wikipedia).

Speaking of which the font of Cyber Punk genre fiction at the Tea Bowl mirror being maintained by Joel Benford. Ken Stone seems to have disappeared, washed under the tide of data. Or maybe just forgotten by Google. He ran Anime.net back at the dawn of time.

I’ll mirror it once again when Villa-Straylight is back online or Doombook’s main page gets cleaned up. Just to keep it from getting too dusty.

Because that’s all that happens. For a medium with such a short shelf life on “new” content it’s funny how things are starting to disappear less as the network spreads out. Although it’s freaky to see someone’s last writings lingering around with no tidy closing notice put on them.

–Fin

Ill Will Press: New Foamy

Thursday, October 5th, 2006

Neurotically Yours has a new installment of Foamy and The Hatta’ over at Ill Will Press. Something about an over-used ethnically specific catch phrase. Hillarity ensues.

Sure. It’s not a book. But it’s generally humerous and media related. I’m all about the 21st century media.

DoomBook Now Open

Wednesday, August 30th, 2006

It needs some thematic elements added in. Aside from that DoomBook is now ready to roll. After considering quite a few CMS packages for the site, WordPress still seems to be the best option.

Joomla was okay, but lacked the advanced features that a proper weblog needs these days. It doesn’t really have a “weblog” integrated per-say and seems to be geared toward a much heavier format, such as a corporate intranet’s hub.

Typo looked much lighter, but unfortunately it also looked to be totally undocumented. While I’m all for doing a bit of hacking (I had to with Joomla), I’m not all for having to learn the CMSs programming language every time I need to do an update. PCBurn provides all the site code whacking fun I need in my day.

So there we have it. I tried a few others, checked out even more, and gave them a thorough thrashing. WP came out on top even with it’s sometimes-kludgy method of getting things done. It integrates all the features, where none of the other CMSs I looked at even come close.