A New Theme

Yesterday I applied for a summer job at a Christian camp a few miles away, I’m hoping to be a counselor (leader) for the summer, should be about 10-12 weeks of having fun with kids. I’ll be staying there overnight the whole time, though Kelly will be able to come and visit when she gets off babysitting and we can have Saturdays together too. Initially she didn’t like the idea, but just kinda realized that it’ll probably be good for us and we’ll appreciate the time we do get together rather than spending every other minute in the same house.

It’ll also be nice to actually do some real work and earn some real money. Against my will, though there was nothing I could do about it, I’ve spent nearly a year in the US and not been able to work, so while it has been nice to do nothing at all, I also feel as though I’m letting down the team and taking advantage of people and their generosity. While that is the case, and to a large degree I have been, it’s not by choice, and given the chance I would have been doing a lot more to earn my keep. Also, while it is hardly IT related, I’m glad to have another stateside work reference with a real organization with standards etc. While I try to work to high standards when working with friends and family doing computer repair etc, there is hardly a gauge to measure by how well I did something.

I was also getting bored with the old theme on my blog, and felt it was time for a change here too. The photo in the header may change some until I find something I like that fits and works, but for now it is a crop of this image:

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I took this during the Assemblies of God New Zealand National Conference in October 2007, the week I had my interview with Gen-i. A couple of the guys in the music team are jamming, in the immediate foreground are the power, video signal and communication cables for the stage roaming camera, resting on the base for one of the front speaker towers. I think Mike was programming lights, or he may have just been playing. I know I was the photographer and only touched the lighting board if it was absolutely necessary (mostly “TURN OFF NUMBER 11, TURN ON NUMBER 12” while he was wandering the stage checking things).

In other news I have successfully installed Xen on Debian, so I have a Debian Dom0. I also have a Debian DomU that I’m playing with LDAP with, in an attempt to setup a prototype for web/shell hosting. I’m trying to figure out how to create DomU’s from ISO’s under the Debian Dom0, I have some FreeBSD CD’s that I’d like to build a VM from if possible. Otherwise I can install QEMU back on the Mac and create QEMU images for Xen that way.

Also trying to debug a regex in my logcheck system on Telly. Ever since I installed IPv6 I’m getting annoying messages in the logs every hour that I’m trying to make logcheck ignore (they’re not important, thus I don’t want to see them – unlike people trying to bruteforce my SSH or Mail servers). I have one more thing to try before I go looking for help, as soon as my apt-get dist-upgrade is done (because opening a new tab and SSH’ing a new session is *so* difficult!)

{Last Minute Update!} Just had a phone call from the camp director, he’s put out all my references and is waiting to hear back, then will set up an interview next week perhaps.