Older blog entries for rybolov (starting at number 8)

Biking, biked across town, climbed Dillard, and launched my body down a cool singletrack/switchbacks. On the way back, I rode through some of the ritziest houses in town, and it really made me feel weird because here are these people who think they've got it all, but they live packed right up against each other. I guess the Idaho boy in me keeps popping out at unexpected times.

Well, I worked some more on my project for Paul... retrieving info from a MySQL database with php. It's simpler than we originally figured it would be, but I'm doing it in my "spare" time so it ends up taking forever to get something done on it.

So here it is early in the Friday morning, and I'm going to sleep.

Blah... another day where not much happened. I guess I was too busy over the weekend, and now I have to make up for it.

I got a NDA/Noncompete rough draft from a company I most likely will do contractor work for... I'll check it out and see what I think. They want me to secure up a few boxen, do some installation/auditing, all for whatever rate is fair, and then see if they like what I do to it.

I've been thinking alot, and I finally came to a conclusion. I think my tower box died because it got jealous. I spent Saturday out on the town with the sexy, thin, low-maintenance laptop, and in a jealous rage, the tower box blew a fuse. Oh well, sometimes lovers do that. That's what I get for not beating down the beast from time to time, and it got too attached to me. It's always ugly when a good machine turns down the dark and twisted path.

What else? Well, I spent alot of time being the responsible adult on call while Alyse ran amok and made a parade float. I applied to a webmaster/sysad job for the local school district, doing advising and running the webserver.

Well, this was an interesting day. I installed a shopping cart for Adam, and got that all working, at least database wise.

in the afternoon, I went with all the Gaming Geeks (sethcohn, kbob, Paul, and others) to Emerald park, where we had a picnic/BBQ. Cooper Stevenson and his wife Kassetra came down from Corvallis to ostensibly coordinate LUG things (Corvallis and Eugene LUG's). I've been talking to Kassetra on POSIXnap, an opennap server network, and she's pretty cool. I had also emailed cooper a few times, and it's funny that the two are married, because I know them from different places.

When I got home, my workstation/mail box was dead. I ran it over to Paul's, and he couldn't revive it. So, I've got an almost new box and the RAM, HD, and proc out of the old one.... it's all for the best probably, because I might have to give the box to my former employer in the future.

At any rate, it's way late and I'm tired and I need to talk to alot of people tomorrow... so I'm stumbling to bed.

God, it's 0330 and I'm still up. Well, I just finished getting "The Beautiful Gift of Linux" online. I'm tired, and I'm off to sleep. Hope somebody reads this and at least gets a laugh out of it.

Much later... I went to Corvallis and dinked around with my friend, Kass, and the Mid-Willamette LUG. They're having a booth at the County Fair, and I was able to share some "Lessons Learned" from last year's Oregon Country Fair

I also passed around some of the "Beautiful Gift of Linux" tracts, to much amusement, but still there was a point to it all, because they have contact info for the LUG, so if you put them in a CD that you then hand out for free, you also gave them a way to get help.

I remember this one guy at the Country Fair who came all the way from Albany. He was in the process of downloading the RH6.1 iso on his dialup modem. We were giving out RH CD's, and I handed him a RH6.2 for free. He just about broke down and cried in front of me... talk about gratitude.

I tried not to be too disruptive to the Corvallis guys, but sometimes I can't help but interject funny, off-the-wall comments at opportune times.

However, I did meet several people that I know from email only, so that's really sweet, and I hooked them up with our swag contact, sethcohn

Called around everywhere, but didn't reach anything of anybody of consequence, so I played phone tag all day.

Yesterday I had a talk about a part-time web development position with somebody... I think maybe a part-time gig would be pretty good because I can freelance on the side to make things happen for myself, and still get a bit of income. I'll think about it and see. I also applied for a couple of jobs in town, and I need to do followup calls on Monday, so I'm doing it with my fingers crossed.

I got a call last night at 0100 from a friend of mine who crashed her Debian box (or at least uninstalled lots of packages that she needed). So, I talked her through installing them back on. She's a total guix but her husband is a linux diehard (nazi) and she has broken her box about 12 times so far, and she didn't want to tell him that she broke it again. Well, anyway, I'm fixing boxes in the late hours of the night, and I think it's funny. At any rate, I'm off to Corvallis to meet her tomorrow and do some LUG stuff there.... I'll take some more "religious tracts" to distribute.

Speaking of religious tracts, I should scan one of the little buggers and throw it up someplace along with a history of it. Maybe I'll take that up as my next offbeat project.

I ripped some mp3's from some Russian CD's I had lying around... that's about the only thing that I'll digitize, just because not many people would have them. These are CD's I got when I was in Moscow... one Vladimir Vysotskij and a compilation of pop music from one of the Russian recording houses. I had to write the CDDB entries all myself even, so I'm pretty impressed at how rare they are.

Made a logo for a friend's project... duskster. It's basically a napster client written in Perl.

I feel like I should start calling people, but I'm just not feeling like it today, and I don't know who actually is at work today since alot of them took today off too. I don't feel like playing phone tag today, I guess that's an easy way to say it.

Well, overall a slow day. I did some online job searching and applied to a couple here in town. Sometimes it drives me nuts that Eugene is such a little techie backwater, when it's got so much potential to make it big. Sometimes, I think the town's still stuck in the rut of being the small logging town that it was 40 years ago, and they can't just get out of it. They have a highly educated population, but they can't figure it out, and all the intellectual elite either work for the uni or are too worried about chasing their pet cause-du-jour that they can't see any of this. Or... I'm so globally-brained I can't see the details and why it wouldn't work.

I did some more on the chezgeek index page, tweaking it to the standards of the gaming geeks. It's an internet cliche, but it's still "under construction"

I had to ditch my mountain bike a few days ago off of a trail and into some bushes (OK, I hit a bump wrong and I tipped over slowly), and now I've got more poison oak on my upper arms. It's funny to me, though. I've never gotten poison oak before, but this year I'm running into it all over the place.

Paul got my truck-truck fixed by trading services (possibly some web stuff and setting up a samba server) for repairs. I just got it back yesterday, but it seems like they fixed it up well.

As for the gaming geeks themselves, they are up in the Cascades fishing and "camping". They wanted me to go, but I don't like to go into the woods with more than 20 people at a time unless they are armed and looking for Charlie, if you know what I mean.

Later today, my goals are to set up a couple virtual hosts and start installing a shopping cart for Adam, the interiors guru, and his company, of which I am the go-to guy for his web development.

Well, today is more of the same, different day.

I learned about wiki-wacky-wonky from sethcohn.... He believes, and I agree with him, that trust metrics are the way of the future, in as much as we are being bombarded by information daily, and a really good tool to filter this raw knowledge is through trust metrics.

On a different note, I installed a samba server and helped move an office this weekend, and that's pretty good. I hadn't worked with Samba until now, and it's a really good piece of software.

My car died, so I made a deal through Paul to install maybe a server or two and maybe some web stuff for repairs. It should be fixed already, or at least pretty close.

I spent the evening today talking ecommerce with a guy who's a mastermind when it comes to home interiors....(floors, carpet, drapes, etc) I think it might be a good deal, but more to see later.

Well, azimuth check time for me...

I'm being a bum, sort-of. The company that I used to work for didn't have any money to pay me, so last month I said "bye". I now have a wage claim pending. Life gets ugly sometimes.

In other news, I have a cool skillset in the areas of web applications development and ecommerce. Woohoo!!

I set up php-nuke for my friend Paul's kid so he could have a portal-type site about skating in Eugene. www.sk8eugene.com