Actually school isn't that bad, but I mean, seriously, when I so meticulously prepare a policy speech on why the US gov. should repeal the DMCA, and I lose 45 out of 100 points for going overtime by two minutes and fifteen seconds, I feel like . . . dunno, moving to Switzerland. (Actually, I always feel that way. Odd.) Seriously, it's not optimal. Technically it's my own fault . . . but the people MUST KNOW!!

Oh yes and I am having much fun with my AlphaServer 1000A 5/400 I got from my boss for a PIII-1.1GHz and a Mac LSII. Pretty sweet deal, considering it came with 7 SCSI RAIDed hard drives (5 functional as of now) and enough SCSI controllers to handle about 53 SCSI devs. Tried Debian -- CD didn't even have a bootloader or else the image was corrupt . Gentoo panicked every hour or so, which was very annoying, plus disconcerting, 'cuz it's my favorite. I even tried Free- and NetBSD, but they complained that my DEC Tulip was unsupported, and an Alpha is pretty much useless to me without network. I was starting to run out of choices of distros on alpha when I tried Redhat 7.0. Works, but it's binary, and RPM too (duh) of all the atrocities. 2.2 kernel too. I'm thinking about "Linux-From-Scratch"ing it.

Oh yeah and since I now have some extra hard drive space on the alpha and I like to pretend I'm a netadmin or something, you nice people can have some ftp space if you so wish. I've got piddly DSL, so 30KB/s up/down if you're lucky but hey, free online storage is nearly impossible to find (in the quantities I'm offering -- how's a gig for starters? 2? ok). Of course, as of yet I promise no security, no uptime, no backups...yet. Eventually this thing will have a DDS-3, a newer kernel, encrypted filesystems, shell access . . .

"Antitrust" is on TBS right now. Man, I'm such a sucker for bad hacker movies. Of course, "Hackers" is fabulously bad, but this is pretty good, especially the open source software reference. Makes me feel like I'm back in the dot com days.



Speaking of IT issues, Les has a very well worded rant about why the Navy sucks. It's specifically targetted at their poorly run attempt to get all commands running under one IT infrastructure. Check it out; this kind of boneheaded crap is going on in the government (and probably plenty of regular companies) every day.

I guess what I'm really asking is why I can't have my hindsight be foresight instead. Oh well.



After the rock show yesterday, I told myself that I wasn't going to pick up an instrument today. Nevertheless, this evening went Lisa went to a work mandated Halloween gettogether, I found myself getting bored, yet unwilling (and too broke anyway) to go out. After catching up with my friend Brian and Les on the phone, I got bored so I tuned up the fake Charvel and played around for a bit. The more I use it, the more I enjoy the Rocktron Metal Planet distortion pedal I picked up a couple of weeks ago over the objections of the condescending jerk at Ted Brown Music. It absolutely screams, and makes my tiny little Yamaha guitar amp sound as close to a Marshall stack as it's going to get. While I'm thinking about that, I'm not sure I ever posted pictures of my new bass rig, but I took a picture of it after I got the rack case for the amp and tuner and you can see it here.

Good god! It's 4:24am, and I'm just now getting my equipment put away and things straightened up around here (as much as they ever are).



The Halloween show of Slow Goat Riot was a definite success. The band simply rocked; we played better than we ever have in practice, and the sound with the big amplifiers was just killer. The PA in the first set was cutting in and out because I had it cranked just too much, but I backed off the master volume, and the trusty Peavey Vegas 400 I still have haunting me made up the difference when the limiter would kick in on the PA amp. Say what you want about Peavey products; they're never particularly great sounding but they take a phoenomenal amount of abuse and continue to operate.

This would have been a well-worded, articulate post, but as I was writing it last night, I made the mistake of visiting a website written in FrontpageXP in a different Mozilla tab, and it took Mozilla down like a tornado destroys a trailer park. I was not happy. So, from my hazy memory, here's what's up:



Whit left navy city yesterday on terminal leave. He's not quite out yet, but effectively, he is. Congrats Whit; It was a pleasure to serve with you and I know you gave that place quite a bit of work in spite of your personal feelings.

Man, KernelTrap has been busy in the past week. It seems like there have been more new stories posted than ever before. The story I was interested in was the journaling file system benchmarking; I'm pretty hardcore on ReiserFS, and it's treated me well, but I do run ext3 on my rsync backup box for the sake of diversity. (For Whit's benefit:) I find it very amusing that a fs test suite is called Bonnie; apparently she'll test your hard drive like the real Bonnie tests your patience....

But what do you figure, it's 3am here...



So time for the updates.

• Lisa, my wife, just started a blog here. Her entry on metric time is pretty amusing.
• Brian and Greg of Kvasir have decided to kick Mo out of the band, and they're joining up with Winston and I. Greg is shifting from guitar to drums. So, we're all playing together at the Old Town Pub in Silverdale as Slow Goat Riot in a week. It should be a good show; we'll definitely play the Wicked Asylum favorites (including "Wally") and we're going to try to play some of the Kvasir songs too. What I was planning on doing was taking my minidisc recorder and plugging into the outputs from the board, but then I realized that we don't mike the drums for a small venue. So, maybe I'll just do it with a microphone and see how it turns out.
  

Tomorrow I wrap up the last test of the week. Which will be a nice thing; I can finish up my Flash midterm and keep working on the preparations for the big rock show next Friday. I went to go practice with Kvasir tonight, and as I pulled in, Mo and Brian were leaving. WTF? So, I ended up working with Greg on the drum parts for all the new songs. The big surprise was that things went really well; there were no tempo changes whatsoever. I think playing with a guitar player was screwing with him. I think it's a curse when guitar players try to play drums; I swear they have the worst sense of timing. It's all I can do to get them to count through the measures where they need to rest or whatever. They start listening to the guitar player or zoning off and spontaneous tempo changes result.

It really was ridiculously rainy yesterday! We set records here in Western Washington; over 5 inches of rain yesterday. Skagit and Mason counties are pretty well flooded out, and I'm surprised we haven't had more roads wash out here.



The testing season starts today; I've got a stats test in 45 minutes. I'm really looking forward to the next week when the tests are done and I can get ready for the Halloween show. Yesterday I went looking for drum machines to cover just in case we have a drummer involved in a "bizarre gardening accident" or some other weird nonsense. After looking around, I settled on a Boss DR-3 that my local Ted Brown music was selling surprisingly for the same price as most online retailers. Of course, the Silverdale store can never seem to stock anything, so I've got to wait to pick it up. I also picked up some Audio-Technica monitor headphones, some cables, and a Rocktron Metal Planet distortion pedal for my guitar. It sounds terrific, and it let me re-bias the amp so my clean channel is once again clean.

It is ridiculously rainy today; I guess that's our penance for having a relatively nice weekend.



I'm staying busy. A statistics test tomorrow, a poli-sci test Thursday, an animation project due today, and a Flash project due next week. Between that and trying to rehearse with two bands, and the car stuff, I don't have a lot of free time.



Last night I passed out at 10pm. Which is pretty weird, because normally I'm up until about 5am every night. I took advantage of the opportunity, and slept until about 4:30 this morning. Then for no particular reason at all, I felt compelled to clean up around the house a bit, and do the laundry that didn't get done over the weekend. Then I actually made it to my 9am stats class, and learned that the test is tomorrow. I'm still going strong; I just hope I don't crash too hard and that I can sleep well again tonight.

I just spent an hour and a half trying to be as clear as I could on how I felt on yet another band disagreement. At this point, I would simply love to have a band where everybody wants to do the same thing. It sucks to be going along thinking everything is going fine, and then "bam!" someone is pissed because we haven't been paying attention to their needs or playing songs they want to play or whatever, and it's the first time the rest of the band has heard about it.

After my stressed out Sunday, I recouped by sleeping almost the entire day away. I'm not entirely sure why; my body must have been telling me to do so. Sometime around 4pm, after getting 4 phone calls, and a knock at the door, I decided to wake up. After screwing off for a couple of hours, Lisa got home. She was exhausted too, and admitted that the full-on Bremerton winter weather was starting to get to her. An obvious solution to us was to hop in the car and head over to Seattle for a dinner at Belltown Pizza. I absolutely love that place; great atmosphere, a cool bar, and music at all times. Sometimes a bit loud, but if it's not loud, it's no good, right? They have the absolute best Caesar salad I've ever had. It's not all goopy with too much dressing like others; it's just enough to give you a nice flavor on the greens, and with fresh ground pepper, it's awesome! Also of note was the Carol's garlic pie I ordered. I admit my ordering is not very interesting, but I don't think it gets much better than Carol's, except for maybe with olives, which Lisa doesn't care for.

It's a good thing O.C. treats Columbus day as a holiday. I need the downtime.



The car situation is rectified. Greg, one of the members in the current band, had a Mazda 323 that he didn't particularly care for. He was interested in Lisa's Honda though. He wants to turn it into "the 4-door that everybody wants to race." He gave us a very good deal on the Mazda, and we signed over the Honda to him.

I happily set up my new "Urban Compost Tumbler" today... Quite simple, looks like a backyard creation. Just a black 50(ish) gallon pickle bin, a metal rod, and a stand. I filled it up with newspapers and paper bags (it says it can be half full of those!), last week's lawn clippings, sweet potatoe greens, and various remnants of the past couple weeks dinners. I'm eager to see what comes out the other side in a few weeks...

For those who didn't catch my last entry, Lisa's car was doing a bit of steaming and losing water. I had yet to find the leak. My big fear was that the car might have blown a head gasket since the water was coming from an area where there aren't water hoses.



Today, when Lisa got home, she informed me that she found the leaking hose. I was thrilled; I'd much rather be wrong and find that it's a $20 fix. So I skipped out on the last 1/2 hour of a lecture on Socrates and went home to take a look.