thisStrangeEngine.com

While I was waiting for some work on my tires to get done this morning, I went to a nearby Starbucks to get breakfast. I’m actually not a coffee drinker. I get through my mornings completely on my own morning peppiness (or what I can scrounge of it). When I’m at a Starbucks, I usually get a chai tea or a lemonade tea or something like that. I just don’t care for a MochaFrappaWakkaLatte or whatever. However, this morning, I decided maybe I’d just have a vanilla iced coffee for a change of pace. It was also relatively cheap, so I went for it. I had it and a scone, picked up my car, and then went to work.

And then, like 10 minutes after getting to work, I was actually feeling a little jittery. Since I’m not a coffee drinker, I wasn’t used to having so much caffeine coursing through my veins that early in the day. It was only one cup (or maybe two, a grande size?). I guess most people’s bodies are used to it, but it was a very odd feeling for me. It was like I should’ve been nervous about something. It wouldn’t go away until I had something for lunch, and even then I probably couldn’t bring myself to get a soda until about 3pm.

I mentioned that I thought I heard somewhere that a soda had as much caffeine as coffee, so I was a little confused, to which one of my coworkers replied that that was a load of crock. He also said that Starbucks coffee has about twice the caffeine as most coffee, so it was like I guzzled about four or five cups of Folgers.

Honestly, kids, I don’t see how you do it, but I guess it goes the other way around, too.

As you may have noticed, the site has been shuffled around a bit and I’ve toyed with the design (i.e. picked out a new theme) and have essentially decided to make Wordpress front and center (not like it wasn’t already, really.)  I’m also going to try again with the separate music blog, which I’m working on in the background.  It’s turning out to be a really nuts year for live music.  I’ve already gone to three concerts since Spring has arrived, and I’m currently planning/have tickets for about ten more until the summer with one or two undecided shows.  The interesting releases are starting to pour in after a relatively slow start, so there’s lots to talk about.

I will also be out and about a lot in the month of April.  I’m due for a visit to Houston, Nacogdoches, and Dallas (possibly twice) starting next weekend.  Unfortunately, I will probably be in and out of Dallas both times, so I won’t have enough time outside of doing what I’m going to do there and perhaps seeing my brother and sister-in-law, so I can’t promise to see any of you Dallas folk (maybe on some other random weekend).

As usual, work and life is busy, and I hope all is well with you guys.

…and things are going to start happening to me now!

I spent my whole evening today setting up the Linux-based open source firewall/router IPCop with an old machine my brother gave me and some NICs I had lying around. I actually first spent about an hour rearranging my computer room. I decided it made more sense having the firewall box and my server boxes on the same side of the room as my computer, which was not true in my previous configuration.

I struggled for a while to get the firewall set up the way I wanted it, and even now it’s not 100% perfect. One of my NICs seem to be faulty, so I currently don’t have an “orange” zone for the webserver. Instead, I’m poking a hole for port 80 into my “green” zone where the server currently resides. I hope to rectify that little issue soon. I also spent about an hour and a half figuring out why I couldn’t get my wireless to work, only to discover one small but crucial step needed to let my wireless router talk with the outside world. It’s always the small stuff.

Another thing currently bothering me is that I can’t seem to get it to pick up OpenDNS as the DNS servers, even when I specify them. It still assigns the DNS servers it retrieves from my ISP’s DHCP. I’m thinking it may be a bug. It’s not a big deal, but I liked using OpenDNS as it made web browsing just a little snappier.

But all in all it looks good. I have a firewall now that acts as an awesome router with different subnets for my wired and wireless machines and just enough pinholes between them to do the things I want. Hopefully, we will no longer see a port 80 forwarding issue, so the website should be much more available now. It now also serves as my personal time-sync (ntp) server which itself syncs with the NTP Pool Project once daily.

Technobabble aside, all you really need to know is now the site should be up regularly and hopefully you should see more posts from me soon.

Tags: firewall, ipcop, Linux+GNU/BSD, router, webserver

Hey gang, I’ve been at the SxSW interactive festival for the past several days. This is the first time I’ve come back to the conference since 2005, and it’s both bigger and more fun than I remembered. I’ll talk about (maybe?) in more detail when things settle down. In the mean time, I have to say I’ve been inspired to perhaps hit the reset button on my technological presence with this site and others. This site is down about 50% of the time due to my faulty router’s port forwarding issues, so it’s clear no one’s going to miss it much if I take it down for a little restructuring maintenance. First thing, of course, would be to replace that router…

Tags: sxswi

I’m hanging out in Nacogdoches right now. I’ve been here for the past four or five days, and all in all I have had a relaxing and extremely fun time with most of the usual suspects and a handful of unusual suspects. Coming back to this town and milling around is a necessary recharge of my mental and spiritual batteries, and I think the idea of tackling on a new year with a renewed vigor would be near impossible if I couldn’t come back here. I think everyone who comes here over the holidays know that moments like this will only become more rare as time goes by, so we always make the best of it and it become a big love fest around here. Great times. I actually took ZERO pictures this time around, which is an indicator of the fact that I’ve been having too good of a time to think about taking pictures.

The combined Christmas and New Year’s break went very well this year. Christmas with the family was particularly good as we actually had a lot to do and everyone and everything got along without a hitch. Everybody had an idea of what should be in the Christmas dinner, so we compromised and put everything in the Christmas dinner. It was way too much to eat but easily the best holiday/family dinner we’ve had in some time. By some sort of default, I ended up manning the gas barbecue grill too cook about half of the dinner, and the Christmas miracle was everything came out (eh, well, chicken was a little pink near the bone…)

It’ll be difficult for me to go back to the grindstone at work tomorrow. We’re supposed to be hitting the ground running, and my co-workers are getting a day’s head start on me as I type this. I’ll be heading back to Austin sometime today.

My year can be summarized by a lot of the usual things: went through some interesting things, faced some interesting challenges, a lot of sucked, but a lot of good times were there as well, and all in all I learned a lot and came out, I hope, a better and wiser person. I’m hoping for more of the same in the new year.

Coming up soon: favorite albums of 2007.