Why My Life Sucks

Let’s start with my car.  Well, the battery.  It’s dead.  Need to get that fixed ASAP.  dur.  Should have done it this weekend.

Which brings us to “I feel like shit.”  More or less literally, given that I’m taking a crap about once every 45 minutes or so.  For the last 3 days.  “Lots of that virus going around” the doctor says.  My crapping eating habits, due to the various anti-freak out meds I take may also have something to do with it.

Then there is my VoIP provider.  I’ve got 2 routers, and two number, one one each router.  Each router has two phone ports.  I wanted to add a 3rd number to the second phone port of the first router.  This should be simple.  It wasn’t.  6 (six) calls, average time 40 minutes each, and 2 (two) supervisor level personages.  This did not make me a happy camper.  There service if first rate, assuming you don’t have to change any thing.

The Craptop’s hard drive died.  However, I have a cunning plan, and the fact that I know what to do with Gentoo now should make it an faster rebuild.  Bonus, the cunning plan will make the hard drive bigger.  Score all around!

Got a Doctor’s appointment later this week.  Need to tweak my Cymalta I think.  Current load doesn’t seem to be working quite right.

$WeSellUsedMacs is becoming more and more surreal.  Average life span of a tech working there seems to be about 3 weeks. When I’m the most knowledgeable person about Mac hardware/Software in the building they have problems.

Google.  Go back to the way iGoogle was before you fucked it up.  It fails to read RSS titles about 70% of the time and each freaking tab has it’s own settings.  This does not make me a happy camper.  Actually, just fix the RSS feed issue and give and option to apply setting and theams to all tabs and that would fix it.   I may need to go look at my Google Lab stuff, this might be a side effect of those.  More later.

Spammers.  “Comment Spammers” in particular.  Please use software to comment spam that at least tries to make it look like a real comment. The “comment” on the top of the Spam Karma reject pile is ‘22gy2zo5g0a0f8lg paucyh yhtrg’. This, of course, is really a link to really random web sites, but, come on, what happened to “This is very interesting web site. I will be back later” comment spam?

Well, off to see if the Jump Buddy has enough juice yet.

It sucks now.   Cold wet and raining.   It’s like it’s the middle of November or something….

Makes my knees feel like, well, painful.   Thank God I’m back on diclofenac.   I don’t want to think about what I would feel like with out it.

You know yet another reason why my life sucks.   The boss and I can’t seem to be in the same building at the same time long enough to get my invoice turned in and a check issued.   Caused a lot of bills to pile up, the server bill being one of them.

Fixed for a year, so that not going to be a issue, however I might start with a donate button some time.

I’m posting this from Firefox 3.0.3 on the craptop.   All I’ve got left to do is get the sound working and I’m done with this machine.     Woot!     Now to get my mother’s working….

The uber build failed, with some sort of error about video card drivers for a card it doesn’t have not being the correct kernel version.

Ah, yeah.   Thought the whole point of Gentoo was to avoid that sort of crap, if not, why would any one do this?     I’m a geek, and this is way more than I think any rational person should do to get a machine up and running.   At this point, I’ve put enough into it that I’m going to make it fucking work.   So one more “emerge –verbose –update –ask –newuse world” then the uber build again and see what’s up. In theory, unless I have to dink with stuff it should work, but the smart money is on “will need to dink.”

It is an important note that I did this, in part, to myself, by attempting to do parallel install of packages that need each other to work correctly, mainly because it would let me (vs apt-get, which will not let you do two installs at that same time.).

More details later, once the update is done.

Well, this morning I issued an ungodly long command line to get every thing I think I need on it all at once, then spent some quality time looking over the various flags and setting them in my /etc/make.conf file.

It wants to down load 245 files now, which, I thought, wasn’t as bad as I thought, given that XFCE4, gimp, php, DigiKam and MySql were in the list to get.

Well, it’s bad, in fact, it’s worse.   Item number 3 is the freaking Linux kernel.   It’s going to rebuild the kernel, again…   I hope this thing gets down by the time we get back from the Game today…

First off, why am I doing this instead of installing Umbutu or even debian Linux

Well, there are 2 reasons.

1. The machine really is rather limited, so a kitchen sink “it just works” install, while an option, is sub-optimal.
2. It’s A Project.   I need projects.   It’s been far to long and I can feel my brain getting better as we speak.

So, that being said, on with the live blogging

It’s 11:27 in morning.   It looks like X, MySQL, Apache2 and PHP5 all emerged while I slept.     I’ve configured X, which was more or less painless and now I need to install a window manager that doens’t make your eyes bleed.   I’m going to use XFCE4, which is a 69 part project.   That’s running on the tuxbook (the craptop hostname) proper.   While that is going on, I’m going to attempt to get the servers up and running.

MySql first, I think.  
[11:37] Odd.   I thought I emerged MySql last night.   Seems I didn’t.   Doing that now.

[12:10]   Apache2 is set up and configured to work as a basic HTTP server.   Working on getting it to server PHP pages now

[12:45]   Just made an important discovery.   Don’t emerge via multiple logins.   Doesn’t do what you think it’s going to do.   I think what I need to do is do something like emerge phpmyadmin and let it deal with all the backdrop, after I run a
“emerge –verbose –update –ask –newuse world” to deal with the mangled install(s)

OK, this is going to take some time.   More later.

Well, bonus points are awarded!   At least the first compile is done when I got back.     On to configuration!

Just did the standard /etc/fstab and network files, and now I get to do my next emerge.   Need to make those PCMCIA slots work!

OK, did that, now setting up passwords and such like.

Installing the “must have” tools now.     Syslog etc.

Watching compiles is mind numbing.     I’ve been working with scripting languages to long, I’ve forgotten what it’s like.

Completely unrelated note.   The Darling Wife made Cherry tarts.   Very nummy (and, so far) I’m keeping them down.   More than a bit messy however.

As expected, networking failed.   Off to do the genkernel thing now.

[approx 7:30PM]The only thing more brain numbing than watching a compile go zipping by is watching one that doesn’t puke to the screen as you do it.   I don’t like that sort of compile…

[Approx 8:50PM] It’s still going.   It’s been doing modules for the last 30 or so minutes.   I’m not going to do this very often, once I get it up and running, at least I hope I don’t have to.

[9:15] OK.   We have penguin-lust which means I’m up and have a booting system that has a network.   I’m hyper!
Starting to install vi/vim now.   That’s a 7 step operation, it seems.   At least it’s a puke to the screen type of compile so I know it’s not dead.

[9:28] I’ve got vi installed and I’m got the frame buffer working. Woot!   Screen looks good.   Added my day to day user account.   Starting to add mc, ssh and ncftp,   which will make it a functioning work machine, less web-browser.

[10:13] got outbound ssh working, need to find the magic tweak for inbound.   Dur.   Need to start the server…

[10:38] I’ve been poking about a bit, I’ve got what I think are the bare mininamum text based things installed and I’m trying to clean up the install just a hair.

119 items to install X11?   I’ll be back in a while.     Going to go else where for a while.   See y’all later.

As I said a day or so ago, I listen to XM Radio a lot.   Channel 41 aka “The Boneyard” in particular.   I’ve been pretty smug about how much better “my” music is than most current stuff.

Well, that stopped this morning.   Two words for you Motley Crew.   I forgot how much they sucked.   Large object through small straws.   They pull mega-lovelaces of suck.

Oh well, it’s mostly better.

I’m coming up on a birthday. A fairly important one, most likely my last prime square, but not a LRN just yet.

So, Yeah, I’m an old fart. What music station do I find my self using most? XM radio 41. “The Boneyard”.

It’s for classic metal,   things that sound like classic metal, and prog-rock. It’s target audience is high school class of , ‘76 through ‘86, more or less. It’s old music, or at least an old style. It’s mainly listened to by old farts. You would not know this if you listened to the self promo spots they run. You would think it’s for class of 2015.

Adults, as a general rule, don’t really have to make a semi-sexual pun on “bone me” several times an hour. That’s a twelve year old thing.