Here’s a photo from the front:

And here’s a photo of my computer setup. Dual screens for the win, soon to be triple:

I am so sick of dialup…

Two months ago I got made redundant, so the first thing I did was cut a mohawk as in the last entry. Since then its pretty much been a big holiday. I’ve applied for a few jobs. Had an interview at Woosh for 3rd/4th level System Engineer but unfortunately my networking experience wasn’t up to it. That would have been a sweet job. Applied for a 1st level support position at AUT supporting students and staff, but they haven’t contacted me back on them so I’m still looking.

Here’s what I’ve been up to:

Beach Hop: Easter Weekend

Went with Nick and Tesh and Brad and Jess to Beach Hop in Whangamata (Big hot rod show), stayed at nicks uncles and met Shelley down there as well a few other DF locals. Lots of nice cars there something like 70,000 people attended. Unfortunately we couldn’t get the classic car we were going to take going in time so it was another van mission.

Karipito Forest ride: Week before my birthday

Went with Nick and Tesh down to Wellington. Nick had a contact course to do so me and Tesh accompanied him. We stayed at Nick’s mates house in Upper Hutt. Much hilarity ensued. Bas is a fucking crack-up. Me and Tesh bought our bikes, which was a mission fitting a KX80 and a YFZ450 in one van, but we managed it, not without damaging one of the speakers in the van tho.

Ended up going riding in Karipito Forest not far from Upper Hutt with Tesh and Bas. I had my first crash. Came round a corner quite fast and couldn’t stop in time for some concrete blocks serving as a 4WD blockade. Bent my bullbars in quite badly but bike was sweet as, so kept going. Awesome riding. Very scenic with big uphills and big downhills, river crossings, we even rode up a creek at one time. It’s all rocks tho, big chunky limestones.

Wilsons Road trail ride: Weekend after my birthday
After going for a quick cane at the bike park on my birthday I went to a trail ride out in South Head that was 6k farm loop and 50k forest loop. The riding was excellent, forest enduro stuff, and most of it was sand tracks. There was even a track right out the back that I found that was just a huge long sandy straight through the long grass for ages, with little whoops every now and then. I was going full speed all the way along it.. was KICKASS!

LAN Party

Went to a LAN at my mate Jason’s, got a heap of new stuff and played Left4Dead for the first time, and loved it.

Bombing range

I been out the bombing range twice. Once with Shelley from Wilson’s road and once with Iydden from Rimmers. Both times was pretty good, hid the gas and lunch in the bushes and played around. Shelley had a bit of a hard time but it was her first time on sand so can’t blame her. Did a bit of forest riding with Iydden, got surprised by what we thought was a ranger driving down one of the forest tracks, and gapped it ask fast we could. Later we found that they were tourists as they were walking round the dunes.

Server Upgrade

Alkaif very kindly gave me his old server board and processor to use in my file server that died. I now have a nice Gigabyte board with a Athlon 64 3000+ processor and a gig of ram. I also bought a few hard drives and swapped some over with my system so now the server has 3 x 500gigs and 2 x 320gig. I’m currently have 1.1 TB of stuff shared. Probably not much compared to some people but I’m happy with it. Currently I have 3 computers in my room, with dual LCD’s setup on my computer which makes web development a whole lot easier.

Web Development

I have been working on a new site which is very close to being done. It is something I feel very strongly about and hopefully it will help other people become informed. But more on that when I launch it. Unfortunately the Telescum overhaul I was working on fell behind.

I am also currently playing with screen scrapers, spiders and web bots. I am currently scraping information from the web that I can use for at least 2 sites! But more info on that later as well.

Chopper

Went and saw Chopper live at Skycity Theatre during the comedy festival. Was absolute crackup. He was selling wristbands like the WWJD (What would Jesus Do) band you see, but they said on them HARDEN THE FUCK UP. He commented on the WWJD wristbands by saying something like “Hmmm.. what would Jesus do.. in this situation… Well surely, Jesus would just miracle himself the fuck out of there. ‘Argh I’m drowning!’ *flash of light* ‘Not anymore, hahaha!’”

Taupo trip

Went to Taupo on friday with my family to a timeshare down there. Then the next morning me and Mope went up Ruapehu to see the snow. Unfortunately all we found was ice but it looked like snow. We mucked around the moutainside, despite it being freezing as fuck up there. Altimeter said 1433m above sea level. Man I love the cold. Got back in the van, then got back out again to go for another walk.

Trail ride in Woodhill

Unfortunately I leave Taupo on Saturday to go a trail ride yesterday in Woodhill forest. It wasn’t that great. Mostly real tight forest enduro tracks but there was some open stuff where I got my speed up. I went on all the tracks even the highest difficulty. Still tricky as on a quad. Real technical steering and shit have to dodge stumps all the time. My chain fell of twice and I ripped off the plastic swingarm guard which I knew wouldn’t last 2 seconds. Overheard some guys talking and one of them said to his mate “Fuck doing that on a quad.”

And yeah, thats about it. Still looking for a place to live and still looking for jobs. Constantly being turned down for both is getting annoying as fuck though. So many people are looking for jobs. And landlords are completely age-discriminating, don’t want young people living in their houses so we’ve missed out on some real mint places.

Played it for about 5 minutes and quit.

You could liken it to Most Wanted. Except with crappy car control, crappy graphics, dumbass police AI, and no difficulty level. It is made for n00bs.

What the fuck are you up to EA?! You fucking butchered this series from Carbon, maybe even earlier.

EA sucks ass.

Edit: OK, I actually gave this a decent go and although its really “arcadey” its not too bad. The car models are good, the cop AI is not so bad. But the graphics are a little choppy.

An MR2 for sale in germany with all the gauges and console replaced with LCD screen hooked up to a carputer and every sensor imaginable. Crazy.

Such simple things like creating a custom list are screwed!

For instance, when you want to create a column in a list, you can’t call it “Type” or “Name” because that column is already in use.  I am guessing by Sharepoints table for each list.  You think, if Microsoft was so “innovative” they would have called their columns something “sps_name” or “sps_type”.

Another thing that is just insanely stupid, is when creating a document library, you can’t call any of the folders in there “Forms” because “Forms” is already in the folder as a hidden item as it contains all the ASP pages that control the views for that document library.  Once again, you think they could have called the folder “sps_forms” or something.  Who’s going to name their folder “sps_forms”?

Looks like Sharepoint is another product that has just been bashed out without no thought whatsoever into what the customers needs are, and no ingenuity.

Fucking right on Microsoft… you fucking douchebags….

I was like wtf? So I looked at the connection and somehow the plug from the Molex–>SATA had gotten “un-keyed” and managed to get itself plugged in the wrong way. So I was shooting 12v up the 5v and 5 volt up the 12v. Needless to say the drive don’t go.

But I tried plugging it into my portable molex PSU, a little powerpack with a 240 in and comes out in a 12v/5v molex and it didn’t turn off – not that advanced. However some little voltage regulators on the hard drive’s logic board got very hot very quickly! So I quickly turned that off.

So guess what I will have to do is buy another 320gb, swap the logic boards, grab the data off it, swap the boards back and biff it

Waste of $190 (a couple months ago).

Anyway, the screen is awesome booted, up Fedora, changed the res to 1280×1024 and it looks beautiful. You really need an LCD for linux (well, gnome anyway) cos the title bars and stuff are a bit chunky. Beryl and Emerald look beautiful! Its incredible how nice this screen is.

The one thing I don’t like about it is that it doesn’t raise as high as I’d like it to but its OK. Still have both my 17″ CRT’s sitting on the desk, the screen is just on one of my servers (a converted D510). Other than that that its wicked, I can watch a movie, surf trademe, and something else at the same time. Kickass!

My main problem is that I can’t get internet on my laptop at home. I’m on dialup and my external modem only connects by serial, which my laptop doesn’t have. Problem.

Solution. I can ssh into my main box which has the modem, connect it to the net and run firefox and it will open it on my laptop screen, using the network. This is a built in feature of X, the display manager for linux.

This HOWTO assumes the following:

1. You already have ssh setup on the main box
2. The main box is called serj with an IP of 10.0.0.1
3. The other box is called malakian with an IP of 10.0.0.4

Here’s how ya do it:

1. Open up a console window
2. Add the other box to your X “allow” list by typing the following:
   xhost serj

   
   

3. Find out your display number and remember it (lets say it is 1). Type:
   echo $DISPLAY

   
   

4. SSH into your main box from the other box
   ssh serj -l <em>username</em>

   
   

5. Once you’ve logged in, you need to edit the DISPLAY variable to be the IP and display number (1) of the box you’re on and export it:
   DISPLAY=10.0.0.4:1; export DISPLAY

   
   

6. Once you’ve done that check that it is set properly by echo’ing the DISPLAY variable again. It should show 10.0.0.4:1
   echo $DISPLAY
7. Now simply run a program like firefox from the command line and the window will open on your box:
   firefox

When you run a program it will open with all the settings from your main box. Unfortunately it won’t work with 3D games but there are a few things it could be useful for e.g.:

1. Administering one of your screenless servers through an actual GUI (provided you installed with KDE/gnome/some other window manager)
2. Opening dirty sites on your friends/workmates PC. Open a console, set your display to your workmates IP/display and run
   firefox http://nastyjapanesegirls.com

   . Of course it will be running of your profile so he won’t get done for porn if you do this at work… you will.

There is one draw back though, all sound will run on the main box.