Tomorrow I'll fly to Austria, for just under two weeks. Updates will be even more sparse than usual. Half of me is looking forward to the visit (but certainly not the trip), half of me wants to be back and done with it already. Sigh.

From worth1000.com comes this contest entry titled "an early art project by young MC Escher".

...but I make up for it with loads of stubbornness!
click here for the rest of the story...

These bastards and these crooks have no conscience, and I have learned a lesson.
click here for the rest of the story...

The last few weeks were character forming in Calvin's sense.

I have a new desktop at work: our boxes are leased, and every two years I have to move everything to a new box with new problems - as it's always the cheapest Dell crap you can buy. The assorted annoyances one has to put up with until the thing works reliably make me really hate the new hardware... this time it only needed one home-soldered Y power splitter, one ethernet card without slot bracket, a full move to the X.org X11 suite, a new kernel with loads of "new improved" shite enabled, and about two very long evenings to get things working (and I even convinced the crap i965 "graphics" chip on board to display at 1504x1128 on my 20" Sun CRT...).

My serverhousing box is still dead, the spare Ultra1 here has dumped its PSU, and I'm very much looking forward to the hardware twiddling in three weeks in Vienna. This is unfortunately not my serverhousing box:

This is my^Wthe Unix Guerilla's new backup-and-assorted-stuff-of-our-choice server. (That's my group of weirdos at work.) I've called the box "pachyderm", as it's got a nice thick-skinned case (and it replaces "elephant"). rho has already threatened me over the name, but I prefer it over his usual theme of female music artists. Getting debian installed and working on that fellow took some work, though: the sarge netinstall cd doesn't have a proper fdisk, only bloody partman, and that has a bug that makes it impossible to produce raid or lvm partitions - which I wanted, TYVM, given the 6x18gb discs. Also, partman is a menu-in-a-menu-after-other-menus-in-various-menus-and-menus-after-menus-followed-by-menus-piece-of-menu-SHITE, which sucks especially when you're working on a 9k6 serial console. I wgot an fdisk binary onto the ramdisk and got cracking (and totally circumvented partman and 50% of the installation procedure, but hey, it worked).

The last two weekends were so-so, the earlier one had a cyclone keep us from flying and this weekend I felt shitty and not in any mood for aerial fun. Rob told me that I didn't miss much, though.

In other news, some dimwit politicians are currently pondering a plan to require ISPs to provide only a violence-and-obscenity filtered Internet. Fortunately, there's voices of reason.

In still other news, I had a very bad day a few days ago, blew my cool in a mail to the flying club people I do infrastructure for, and also bought a few cool/nasty/elitist/geeky tshirts, among others the first one over there.