Tag Archives: Personal

Dreaaaam.. Dream Dream Dream!

Posted on by
Reply

I had the weirdest (and historically inaccurate) dream last night.

I am going to share it here for the intrigue and amusement of any and all who read it.

Now, I don’t know how, but I travelled back in time (and location?) and ended up in 1920’s England, at the primary/elementary school of my Grandad. I had my big camera with me, which was clearly out of place (Digital camera pre 1990 is very out of place!) in the time period so I was trying to take photos and being discreet as possible.

Anyway, I was in a lunchroom kinda thing, it was very grey and dull, and my 7-8 year old grandfather was at a table with 3 other boys talking quietly (I was across the room, my big 22 year old self). I recognized him almost immediately, as he looked pretty much like the photos of seen of my Dad as a young boy, and a few times he turned his head I noticed characteristics and resemblances of how he looks and acts as I’ve known him. The people I was there with decided it was time to leave, but I mustered up the courage to ask my young grandfather for confirmation that he was who I thought he was.

“Is your name Brian?”

“Yes, it is.”

“That’s your middle name isn’t it?”

“Not any more!”

“Do you mind if I ask what your first name used to be?”

“Coraline!” (I have NO clue where that came from.. I saw the movie like…a month ago and haven’t really thought about it since. Now that I think about it though, I played Tic-tac-toe/naughts and crosses with a 5 year old girl the other night, only we used pink and blue ‘buttons’ on a board of 9 squares, each containing the picture of a character from the movie. I digress..)

At this point I really had to follow the rest of my group out the door (they were all late teens/adults) but I took the opportunity to snap some more photos of my granddad across the room, he wasn’t watching having returned to the conversation with his friends.

I was led outside, and it was kindof like a gameshow. I’m not sure if I’ve had similar dreams before, or if it really is something I’ve seen on TV or in a movie, but I was to be given challenges to complete either for money or for the people I was working with (they were all teens I think) to live, big difference but I don’t remember which. May have even been both!

It was then that I realized there was snow on the ground, and my first challenge was related to one of the people on my team sliding around the school, I just wasn’t allowed to let him damage any classrooms in any way. You can probably tell by now that while my dreams are fairly specific, there isn’t a lot of detail as to how things happen, I just know they do. I guided the guy between buildings and managed to get him out onto the open sports fields, which I realised too late was a bad thing to do, as the fields themselves were/are a classroom (for PhysEd! Whether that even existed in the 20’s I doubt… We’d also slid along the inside edge of a clearly marked football field). Anyway, it was at this point where the host/gamemaster was walking along the field either with cameramen or henchmen and was about to reveal some kind of information when I woke up.

It was a weird night last night – I wasn’t sleepy, then I was really sleepy so I rolled over to sleep and couldn’t, then I got awake and somewhere in that mix (and a lot of “Are you OK?’s” from Kelly (who was also having a difficult time sleeping)) I fell asleep. Then had to get up at around 8:30 to go let the chickens out (I HATE CHICKENS.. more on them later) and came back and fell asleep awkwardly on the yellow chair, where the dream continued.

So there you have it, my weird dream of weirdness, laugh or analyze, or if you REALLY must, do both 😉

IPv6: The Way Of The Future

Posted on by
Reply

Tonight I set up IPv6 on my home network. While it feeds a house of 5, only 1 will notice any difference whatsoever!

Basically I loaded the IPv6 HomeBrew customization for SmoothWall (See the forums at community.smoothwall.org), and got myself an IPv6 block (/64) assigned and a tunnel to use it through (see Hurricane Electric, or TunnelBroker). I’ve set up Yoda (smoothwall), Telly (Debian) and Big Bird (macbook) to use IPv6 addresses and so far everything works wonderfully. It still relies on my router as a SPOF, but they have their own world-accessable IP(v6) addresses. I guess I should work on firewalls etc..

If anyone is interested in testing my IPv6 IRC server, it’s linked to the United Christian Chat Network and is accessible at ipv6.i-al.net! (6667 for standard, 6697 for SSL)

thePortal

Posted on by
Reply

I started work late last night on my 4th concurrent coding project, something I’ve been thinking about for a loong time and it was brought up by Ninex on chat again, confirming that it isn’t a bad idea.

It needs a lot more integration with things, ideally it’ll probably work a lot better once Anope supports real-time SQL. For now it just feeds of the statistics database.

So, check out http://chat.i-al.net/portal/. and tell me what you think!

The final product is intended to have configurable colors, background images, header images, as well as channel-owner-configured ‘about us’ information. There’ll also be a few statistics blocks available, and possibly logging on request? Unsure at this point how to make it integrate!

Should I Really Be Laughing?

Posted on by
Reply

My wife showed me this today, and I thought it was hilarious. Not sure if I should be laughing or not, it’s a turtle using a shoe for pleasure, so called ‘shoe-raping.’ Check it out, and tell me what you think!

In other news, I’m still working on several PHP/MySQL projects

Firstly, there is ZcP, a module based control panel for linux (mostly debian) to handle Bind, Apache and qmail (with vpopmail) and PureFTPd (with MySQL auth). I haven’t found anything yet that meets my needs, so I’m writing it myself. It is intended to support multiple servers (IE a web server, primary and secondary mail servers, and primary and secondary DNS servers). It’s also modular based on task, it’ll just call a function and pass the relevant information so it should be pretty easy to create extra modules for postfix or djbdns, for example.

Second, I haven’t named it yet but a support/ticket management system. I have found two existing systems that I like, but none are quite good enough. SiT is good looking and works well, Eventum works well and has an IRC bot attached that sits in support channels and reports updates and new tickets etc. I may have to give up pretty or the bot, but I’d also enjoy the challenge of writing my own.

The third and final project is a database system for my old church, Life City, whose access database was lost in a hard disk crash (had been talking about a new one for a while). It’ll probably be a social-network type system, where we’ll create a house-hold, and individuals and then assign them to households and assign each other relationships (probably based on head-of-house, but not necessarily).

Screw You, Nature

Posted on by
Reply

Saturday was the day of arrival for my work permit, and today we had planned to go and get social security numbers sorted etc. That would allow Kelly to file her taxes and I start working on a driving permit, as well as getting the bank out of trouble (they were told last month that they had 12 months to get a SSN from me, which was difficult since I don’t have one!)

We probably would have also stopped in at some of the thrift stores and looked at what cameras they had available. But no! It snowed last night. Great news for school kids because it takes less than an inch to get them out for the day, but not so great since most government buildings are closed! Oh well, try again tomorrow I guess 😉

Cause to Celebrate

Posted on by
1

One: I fixed a computer tonight. Probably still some work to do, left it installing SP3 on XP, but still needs verification that sound works (not hopeful), that the virus is actually gone (BEWARE, ANTI-VIRUS-1 IS A VIRUS. Found removal instructions online through google and following them in safe mode seemed to work a charm.)

Two: I’ve put up a photoblog at photoblog.i-al.net, and theres nearly 2 months of photos stacked back waiting to appear. Some of these are up at DailySerene, but others are photos that weren’t appropriate for DS for whatever reason.

Three: The chances increased over the last three weeks that my work authorization card would arrive this week, as it did not arrive in any of those.

Fourth: (this one needs a quote)

Application Type: I485, APPLICATION TO REGISTER PERMANENT RESIDENCE OR TO ADJUST STATUS

Current Status: This case is now pending at the office to which it was transferred.

The I485 APPLICATION TO REGISTER PERMANENT RESIDENCE OR TO ADJUST STATUS was transferred and is now pending standard processing at a USCIS office. You will be notified by mail when a decision is made, or if the office needs something from you. If you move while this case is pending, please use our Change of Address online tool to update your case with your new address. We process cases in the order we receive them. You can use our processing dates to estimate when this case will be done, counting from when USCIS received it.

Basically what this means is that we finally have all the paperwork needed and it’s been forwarded to a USCIS office for processing rather than at the National Benefits Service Center where we were posting everything.

For those interested in tracking it further, the application was received on either July 2nd, 2008 or February 25th 2009 (depending whether they are counting from initial receipt of our application, or the acknowledgement of receipt of everything they asked for), and it is at the CALIFORNIA SERVICE CENTER. I’ll try and keep you up to date with any changes and events that occur.

Inadequite Biblical Characters

Posted on by
Reply

I heard this at a youth conference a few years ago, and it came up the other day, so here it is being blogged.

When God Sends People They Make Excuses:

Abraham was too old, and Moses stuttered.

Miriam was a gossip, and Jacob was a liar.

Gideon doubted, and Elijah was burned out.

First David’s armor didn’t fit, then he had an affair, and had someone killed.

Solomon was too rich, Jesus too poor.

Isaiah had unclean lips, Jonah ran the wrong way.

Jeremiah was too young, Noah too old.

Amos’s only training was in the school of fig-tree pruning.

Naomi was a widow and Peter was afraid of death.

Paul was a murderer, and Mark was rejected him.

Timothy had ulcers, Martha was a worry-wart.

And Lazarus? He was dead.

Geeky zEkEy – Ticket Resolution Systems

Posted on by
Reply

I just realised that I haven’t posted in a couple of days, and also that I haven’t posted anything remotely computer-geeky at all. It is time to rectify this.

As I’m not likely to have a work permit until some time in December, I’ve had a lot of free time on my hands. This has mostly been spent lazing around with little to no purpose, but I’ve also been thinking up various idea’s and projects to work on.

I’ve been able to implement a few network-changes at UCCN, including remote-includes (and a web interface for staff to make network-wide configuration changes, still in testing), and the safetyNet server (intended to allow young people to chat in a more secure environment than most IRC networks would otherwise permit).

I’ve also been doing some work on some small scripting projects, including the safetyNet bot in mIRC (still needs a lot of work, and may port to PHP at some point). The one I’m working on most is a complete rewrite of a 2-week old project, the Fault Management and Resolution System. This started as being a PHP-based IRC bot that would detect netsplits and send emails to admins, or even text messages if the servers were split for long time periods. It seemed to work in practice, and I then came up with the idea of a ticket-system, where admins would be able to put in notes and ‘close’ incidents whereby they had resolved a problem, so we could keep track of where problems were occuring.

Anyway, the number of ideas being implemented were fast making the code messier than it was ever expected to be, and I fast reached the limitations of the core of the project. With that being a fast-growing problem, I shut down the old system, copied aspects of it, and began work on the new one.

The new system allows much more flexibility with regard to monitoring things. It will allow for staff to be in groups (one or multiple), and where there is a fault or a request it can be assigned to a group (such as server admins, services staff, etc) and to individuals within the groups. It can also be reassigned between groups/individuals as required.

I hope to include some method of tracking how long issues take to be resolved, including as well as excluding how long we wait for other factors, such as an ISP responding to a question, or a user returning our email.

It’s not limited to faults either, tickets for faults or change requests can be manually created by staff, and potentially added by users themselves. The new system will also be much more flexible and hopefully more scalable, allowing for more organisations to utilise the software.

Sitting Duck

Posted on by
1

During my final days in New Zealand I spent a few driving around the Wellington Area in particular taking photos of the landscape that I hadn’t thought to photograph before. While being rained out at the south end of the airport runway I happened upon this cute little toy duck sitting on a bench, wistfully looking out to sea as it were.

Taken with a Fujifilm Finepix S9600 Digital, Shutter Speed 1/170s, a Focal Length of 66.7mm and an F-stop set at F/4.9, on ISO400.