half a cat

Sometimes the ol’ email box gives gifts of geeky fun! Today, the powers-that-be at Google gave me a Google Analytics account. This should supply an interesting picture of who comes to visit, etc.

So here is a little site admin amusement: The top monthly searches that have resulted in traffic to my site…

My favorites — poke my dog, milo the silo, and furburgers.

So…you might have noticed over the last day or so that the ol’ diary was MIA. No more! I’ve gotten it and the gallery moved over to the new server. Most of the email is moved as well, just the several gigs of backups to get done yet. There are several new features available for me now — webmail, decent stats on usage and referrers, not to mention I don’t have to pay for HD space here at home, backups, etc on a regular basis. Enjoy!

Hold on to your socks folks, unholymess.com is moving! For years and years (ok since 2002), unholymess.com has resided on a server in my closet/office/room of pain. This has always meant that I needed to keep decent hardware around for emergencies, manage updates and security maintanence, and make sure the internet connection was suitable. This is generally no problem, but when it comes time to move…well it gets to be a royal PITA. At the suggestion of one of my former co-workers, I’m going to migrate all of the items over to Dreamhost – mail, diary, gallery, etc. Email will be the last to go as I have to manually siphon the data out of the existing server and plow into the new one. If you get a bogus unholymess.com web presence for a few days,…well you won’t be reading this and will just have to suck it up.

Happy Trails….

So…you’ve probably noticed a ton of missing posts. Well….I lost them in a quite unfortunate harddrive crash – you might remember my earlier comments about a failing disk in the server…well it caught up with me and I had no backups. Sad really. Thankfully I only lost 3 months of weblog posts and some other “/var” metadata. Photos need to be reposted on the gallery, but at least none were lost permanently.

So…the real reason for me breaking my silence is that I’ve finally have achieved the next level of Zen in Killing Fuzzies. My youth was spent with various BB guns and smaller rifles/shotguns harassing sparrows and bunnies on the farm. In recent memory, bunnies are still fun to shoot — but the main drive has been for deer and elk. I used to fly back every Thanksgiving for the usual meal with the family, then would abandon them for 2 or 3 days to head up into the hills in search of fuzzies. I always managed to get a deer (and oh what joy it is to check a cooler full of venison and dry ice on an airplane), but elk eluded us — mainly because we are the Great White Truck Hunters. In 4 or 5 years of hunting Elk, we only saw 2. They were ~2000 yards away and just a bit out of range.

Last year marked me getting serious — I purchased a Browning Medallion 300 WSM, Leupold 3-10×40 scope for my hunting pleasures. For those who case — I am shooting a 180 grain Winchester Supreme Ballistic Tip. I got my deer with it last year, but was not having that great of luck this year — jsut an odd year of deer getting shot and then running away. Furburgers. I am chalking it up to the fact that I’ve moved back to Montana and was hunting earlier than my Karma was used to.

Well.. this last Friday turned my luck around. I went hunting with my sister’s beau and his father. Our main goal was to fill out our deer tags in this last weekend of hunting. To make a long story short…we didn’t see any deer right away, but found a nice big Elk for me to take home. It is likely the largest animal that I will ever shoot, future elk included. It even made the beast ride odd — the rear end had enough weight to make it bounce a bit on the highway when we hit dips. The 5×7 rack measured in with bases of 11.5″, spread of 39.5″ and longest side of 50.5″. Yes friends, it is getting mounted on the wall — But only a full European (skull & horns), mainly because it had a broken skull at one point and the horns are offset — very cool. It is now at the butcher and I should have the meat back in a day or two. Yummy! Oh yeah — I found the round in the Elk too — it was fully mushroomed (lead core missing) and just under the hide on the exit side — talk about it leaving all of the energy in the animal. Grunt

So, most people know that I work from home, well I am at ORNL in TN now…but anyways. I generally enjoy working from home a ton, but I’ve started to realize the deficiencies of the methods of communication we use on the internet. This really only became obvious quite recently and amusingly enough had nothing to do with work — I was chatting with someone who I really have great conversations with, the nice deep, insightful and mind expanding kinds that are so much fun and was feeling a bit frustrated in being limited to a chat window. In retrospect, I may have started along this train of thought after working in an office for 3 weeks with people again — it is amazing how fun that really can be. I’ve heard the reasoning that the time savings from not getting ready and commuting into work are real benefits in the work-from-home category. I’ve always been quite lucky and lived within a short bus ride or walk from work and haven’t added that into the list of pros. I even keep catching myself thinking ‘boy, wouldn’t it be nice…’ while working from home. It is probably general laziness…but that is sooooo another post.

So, yeah, the real point is that I realized how chatting via email or IRC/AIM/Yahoo/MSN is so limited. I think they work ‘OK’ for technical work, but the more I get involved with project management where the needs are more on a personal and not a technical level, that the comms used really lack the ability to fully communicate The Messsage. I’d like to think that I am pretty good about communicating on a personal level with people when I am face to face, but when it comes to email or chat, that level of connection, mutual understanding, or whatever you’d like to call it, seems to really go missing and I feel like either I’ve not gotten the point across or that the other person(s) have not acknowledged that I have. Who knows, this might just be my brain craving more personal interaction and showing it by disliking the non-personal interactions.

I have found that voice conversations are pretty good for most things, especially as far as communicating raw data or discussing something is concerned, but the rhythm can be difficult to find and the conversations can get quite skewed towards one person talking more than the other, as there is no out of band (body language) way to change that.

On a slightly related note, I believe someone made the comment “Honestly, what year is it again?” in reference to some sort of technical project that did not go as expected. This whole chat thing has me thinking too — why hasn’t the technology for this really exploded ? Or has it, and has been seen in the last 5 years, the USA is just lagging behind the tech acceptance curve ? For instance, you hear all about these crazy Japanese or Finish people who use these nifty G3 cell phone features every day. Perhaps if the US had a better (read cheaper, faster and generally less sucky) broadband solution, perhaps we would have a higher incident rate of video conferencing or similar conversation applications ? Speaking of which — has anyone ever used an iSight ? I’m really quite expecting that for most anything I want to do it will be either Windows or Apple based, as Linux solutions tend to interoperate pretty poorly. I’m so willing to be proven wrong though. I’m also curious as to how well using a webcam type thingy will do for Yahoo or MSN type chatting. Hrm, food for thought, that is.

Ok, got a wild hair, now under ‘Blackmail Data’, you can find a link to a page that displays the last 50 tunes I’ve played through iTunes.

Thank god! It looks like Tivo is trying to squirm out of the coffin that everyone seems so ready to place them in. Tivo and Comcast have signed a deal to get the Tivo software on Comcast’s existing DVR hardware.

I, for one, am estatic about this. If you have Tivo, you know the sweet sweet bliss that it is. Those who don’t, shame on you!

So, I’ve fired up the shuttle again, as it has quite a bit of horsepower. The basics are Radeon 9800 Pro, 2.8Ghz P4, 1GB Dual Channel DDR, 60G SATA, DVD+RW burrner, gigE, firewire, USB2, etc. etc. To complicate the matters of switching primary workstations, I’ve a ton of music squirrled away in iTunes on my powerbook G4, and we use crossover office for work, I figured I’d give the whole linux-faking-as-in-orgasm-iTunes-server a whirl.

Details that might help:

• iTunes under cxoffice works well
  • don’t forget to turn on hardware emulation
  • it will do the whole rendevous thing and allow you to play music from any iTunes machine, OS X or Windows
• linux iTunes Server — fakes being an iTunes export
  • several links gentoo wiki & macosxhints & linux gazette
  • you might need lame or faac
  • Rendezvous compile instructions
  • you want to use Rendezvous-58.8 not the latest, as it works better on linux
  • line for firewall changes
  • Remember: it will take some time for daapd to plow through your library, so be patient and wait before trying to use the export that shows up in iTunes.
• mt-daapd looks to work much better than regular daapd
  • mt-daapd homepage
  • great link on setting up mt-dappd on linux

Hey! As if you did not already notice, I’ve upgraded to WordPress 1.5 and changed the look of the site. Please direct all praise and adulation in the comments, thank you very much.