The Killing Joke

Well, Memorial Weekend is almost over. I really needed the rest. I had to work on Saturday morning 6:00am after getting off work Friday night at 10pm. That didn't work out so well for me.
I came home Friday night, ate, watched some TV, read, took a shower and went to bed. Unfortunately, by the time I'd wound down and gone to bed it was 3:00 am. I couldn't get to sleep and ended up getting up to use the bathroom at about 3:30. I wasn't feeling tired, so I read some more. At 4:15 I decided to just get dressed and go back to work. So I went in early and did some paperwork that I hadn't been able to get to earlier and then stayed and did inventory. I got out of there at noon and went home.
By 4 on Saturday we were out at Lake Pahoja with Michele's brother Greg, his 3 kids and his girlfriend Brandi's 2 girls. It was too windy to fish. I sat in my bag chair and read.
I finished Greg Bear's "Quantico" by about 7. Very good book, by the way. Set in the recent future, it touches on Amerithrax and goes into other bio-terror scenerios. We came home at about 8 and watched Saving Private Ryan.
We went back out to the lake yesterday and ate supper with the naughty children.
Today I did some laundry and we're probably going to X-Men (X-Persons?) III later this evening.

I hope everyone had a happy and safe holiday.

LINCOLN' S GETTYSBURG ADDRESS (1863)
written by Abraham Lincoln

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on
this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that
nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.
We are met on a great battle field of that war. We have come to
dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those
who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is
altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not
consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men living
and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor
power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long
remember, what we say here, but it will never forget what they did
here. It is for this the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the
unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly
advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task
remaining before us -- that from thse honored dead we take increased
devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of
devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have
died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of
freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the
people, shall not perish from the earth.

Posted by The Joker at 03:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm finally done with configurations. I set up a DNS server and am now running a POP3/SMTP server so that I can control my own email. I guess I'm really not done. I have to set up spam filters and stuff still. I have them, just haven't configured them yet.

Thanks, Led, for complimenting the layout of the blog. I still have to work on the "News" website. Michele will probably kill me if I spend 2 more weeks sitting in front of the computer every morning and night. I'll wait a while on that. I was just going to parse info from other sites anyway, so it's no hurry.

I should get ready for bed, I guess. I get to work on Saturday too. Lucky me. I'm the only non-volunteer. I guess that goes with being the new guy.

I'm currently reading Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End. Very cyberpunk and set in the not too distant future. The second or maybe third chapter was actually a short story at one time. I read that part of the book a year or two ago in the "Year's Best Science Fiction" anthology. It's not "Snow Crash" but it's very good.

Posted by The Joker at 01:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Happy birthday Led. I'm a little late with that announcement, but I was there to wish you a happy b-day on the evening of.

Thank you to Dr. Strangelove for supplying me with additional resources to "Three Men in a Boat". I was able to get it added to my reading site here. Please feel free to read it or any other titles listed there.

I was thinking about how I came to read Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat and his Three Men on a Bummel. My desire to find these books stemmed from reading Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog in which a young man becomes delirious from

too many time jumps while looking for the Bishop's Birdstump to complete the restoration of Coventry Cathedral. He is sent back to England's Victorian era for a much needed rest and to return a cat which was mistakenly removed from that era and brought to the future -- threatening the Space-Time Continuum. Unfortuneatly, in his delirium, he has no idea what he was instructed to do besides rest. So instead of trying to fix the space time continuum right away, he goes for a boat ride on the Thames during which he sees Jerome, George, W.S. Harris and Montmorency. He also looses the cat.

The only reason I bought "To Say Nothing of the Dog" is because Connie Willis's "Doomsday Book" impressed me so much. In the Doomsday Book, a young woman goes back in time to study the effects of the Bubonic Plague or Black Death. Of course, something goes wrong and she gets stuck there which is why it's a book and not a 1 page web article.

Posted by The Joker at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Well, it took a lot longer than I expected but I thing I've kind of figured out the MT templates and stuff. The site, in my opinion, looks pretty nice. Since I'm the only one who looks at it, then my opinion is the only one I need to worry about.

What a long day today. But feeling pretty good now. I guess I'll eat and go to bed.

Anyone going out Friday night?? Anyone? Well, I am but I'm NOT going to stay at frying pan until after 6am again especially since I have to work Saturday again. Saturday was pretty nasty last week.

I'm currently reading a book called Dr. Norrell and Mr. Strange. It's pretty good if you like Dickens or writing about England in Victorian times. This book is entirely fictional -- about magicians -- but it contains characters who were real people at the time. It's kind of long winded like Dickens but reminds me more of Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog). I picked it up because so many of the reviewers who sounded stupid hated it and like Harry Potter (nothing against the HP movies or novels but if they're that mainstream then they're probably written at a 4th to 5th grade level) and many of the people who liked this book sounded like educated adults. Go figure. Anyway another gripe in the reviews was about the footnotes which are often take up more room on the page than the actual story. I find them interesting... and they remind me of Terry Pratchett (Diskworld) and Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat).

Yes, you shoud go read Three Men in a Boat. And pack a can opener.

Posted by The Joker at 12:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Had to go to work at 6:30 for the managers meeting and now I have to go back for the safety commitee meeting at 1 so I better get going.
Starting to figure out the templates on this thing but I have a few left to rebuild. My home page is kind of funny and I couldn't find the text decoration on the banner in the time I had left so I guess I'll do them later.

I better eat, if I'm going to

Posted by The Joker at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's about time for some warmer weather. I got to spend a little time outside--cigarette breaks--and it was very nice today. I haven't had hardly any sun yet this year. We had a good day at work--blew the production goal out of the water today. We had a bad week last week so we kind of needed that. Everyone worked hard (even me, I'm tired) and since everyone did so well, I get to buy them food. I'm thinking party subs rather than fried chicken from Wal-Mart (although the chicken is very good). The stupid safety meeting with the fire extinguisher guys is tomorrow, I guess. That's fine. We made up a lot of lost ground since we didn't stop for an hour today.

Yep, that's how tired I am. I'm talking about work like it's interesting.

Posted by The Joker at 12:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, I'm not on the A-Team but I'm startting to get some of the CSS figured out. I can't believe that the default template was grey on grey with grey text. I guess that's what you get with the free version of MT. Now I guess I'll have to post more. I might even post info on how I got this thing going since I had to reconfigure a few things in MT and on my server.

Anyone interested? I was. If I wasn't, I wouldn't have spend 2 weeks doing all this crap. I know the results don't seem that spectacular, but I'm happy with it.

Today is our Fire Extinguisher Safety Meeting. We get to put out fires. It's a controlled burn but it's still a fire. Working with cardboard is so very interesting!

Posted by The Joker at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, I finally got everything up and running. It's not all pretty yet, but it's working. As my one reader knows, I had a power outage that took out my Linux system. I was running Mandrake 9.0 ... which is about 5 years old. The system would only boot part way into Linux. After further investigation, I found that the video card and cdrom were bad on top of the corrupted data on my hard drive.

I decided to upgrade. I'm now running Fedora Core 5 and Apache 2.2. That comes with Perl 5.8.8 and I was able to take advantage of mod_perl. I then decided to use MovableType for my blog since no one was using the phpforum anymore.

It's been an adventure. After getting the system up and running, I had to get it configured to proxy serve csccdigital.net -- my book site-- which is on another system behind the firewall. It took me 3 days to get that done and in the end, it was so amazingly simple that I couldn't even be happy that it was working.

Getting MySQL and Perl configured correctly for MovableType was my next adventure that took another 3 days. MovableType's documentation is so vague it can't even be called vague. It' more like something vague in the fog at night. After much fighting and reconfiguring, I finally figured out that MT can't be run using mod_perl and has to be configured the old fasioned way in Apache using a ScriptAlias. That was my main problem. The MT-Config file didn't like my entry for "Hostname" either. POS! But it's all running now. Finally!

I hate it when my webstuff isn't working. I'm like a Obsessive Compulsive with an uncorrected stigmatism when something's broken. I just can't quit messing with it.

Now... to make it pretty. I wonder if I can get a little help from Led...

Posted by The Joker at 12:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)