Generic Joe

09:22 am: A Minor Update
Seems some rumours are going around about Tam and I; nothing bad, just not true.

I realized that Tam doesn't read LJ anymore, really, and I don't write here. I like LJ for it's keep-in-touch-with-distant-friends kind of idea, but am using RSS feeds for most of the other stuff I read. Well and LJ has some decent amateur porn;)

For our friends

Tam and I are doing pretty well. She has a new job, and is working at home again (You probably don't know she wasn't working at home laugh!).

I've gone back to work at the county, in the job I didn't take last year because it paid too little, and I would be stuck with a contractor watching my every step. It no longer pays too little, and the contractor (the person who held this posisiton before me) is completely gone. The truly miraculous thing is that this job feeds me; I'm making plans for 1-,2-, and 3- years out, knowing I may not fulfill the plans, but I want them good enough in case I am. I've never thought this far ahead in any real job before.

I'm missing J and Viv, but in a couple of weeks, I'm buying a ticket to go see them around Labor Day. Hopefully, I'll be able to go out for longer soon, once I'm a real employee and have some time off. Or I'll bite the bullet and just go:)

It feels a bit that our friends and contact are spreading thin and moving away from us. Some just physically like Viv and J, but others emotionally. I haven't really talked to or seen most of the caw-folk in Ohio since Jim's funeral. I pulled away from the lists because they were too drama-filled for me, and still largely feel that way.

We still have lovers in town, and a Goddess-daughter we love to death, even when she's bad, but then she'll be 4 next month, and we all know how Leos are ;)

Writing and stuff

I haven't been writing at work, I've been just too busy! However, I am learning a lot about AJAX coding, and have built a couple of blogs using it, and will be writing there. I don't even have the RSS feed working, and one of the blogs is completly NSFW, the other is boring computer-geekery (or will be).

However, I've challenged myself to write a few longer pieces. The first piece should be in the 40-50K words range, closer to 40K depending on the length and complexity of the sex scenes. To trick myself into this feat, I'm using a world created by someone else, actually, more of a device. The trick here is that I can't publish this except for free. It keeps my mind on the writing, and hopefully will give me the confidence to tackle some longer works that are completely my own creation. That stuff will be published several places on the net, but you can keep up with that part of my life on my sex blog

Life und so weiter

Some days I can't believe the depth of the debt we're in. Other days I can't believe that we can actually see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's not good to be depressed and self-employed, unless you've got the financial resources to keep things going. We were barely spinning the plates, lost power a few times, and borrowed a lot of money from friends and family. By the end of August, we'll be caught up on our rent after paying double rent for three or four months. The other bills will be settled, and we'll be off the Cinci' folks phone service, somehow. Then we start paying everyone else back, and figure out what we're goign to do about taxes. It doesn't help that unemployment income (as little as it is) is 1099 income. That's crazy, actually, if you ask me, but it's the way of the world.

Since I'm finally in a job that keeps me interested (I've been here almost three months now, and I haven't "figured it out" completely yet), and where I have the authority to manage myself and set directions -- and am respected to do so, I can see that I'll be here for the long haul. And that means I can start planning for the future, know that we'll be debt free in the foreseeable future, and start spreading the love that we received from our friends back out in the world.

And with me coming out of depression, I'll probably be talking to some of you guys a bit more.

But probably not here. LJ feels like high school half the time. I'm not closing my account, I still want to hear from you; I will probably post comments, but I'm not going to be posting here any more than I have in the last year. I just wanted to catch up a bit, and say "hi".

So, well.

"Hi"

TTFN

08:16 pm: On iTunes tonight
Is the Beatles' acapella version of "Because"

The next piece is the exitingly titled "Instrumental No. 1" From the soundtrack to "The Incredible True Story of 2 Girls in Love".


I miss you vivien.

03:42 am: Oh my aching brain (and back)
An update/reinstall of the OS on sarah to Fedora Core 5 left me with no space to complete the install. That meant that I needed to adjust the partitions so that I had enough space. Two problems with that, really, 1) I didn't know how much space I needed, and 2) adjuding partitions is done at your own risk.

Most of my writing would be ok, but I'd have lost all my music (including Viv's music, which I was serving as a back-up for) That and a half dozen million other things that might only exist in one fiile on that hard drive.

I took a break to think about it, and to hang out with _kit for a while, and while we had a good time, my mind just wasn't on our creative diversion. So I went back to my desk to see what I could do. The neighbors were making an awful racket. Well, not awful, I guess, it just sounded either like good sex or someone with asthma, and was comign from the directoin of the CrazyCatLady's house. Or so I thought. I'd never heard a computer make that noise before, but nevertheless, she was.

The CDR that was in the box I got from book_wyrm's husband was giving up the ghost -- I fiddled with it for a while until it spat up a little rubber belt before finally admitting defeat. I did dscover that there was another drive in there, though, and it was 6.4 gig, certainly enough to hold the new OS. But now, I was down a CDRom drive. There was another in the case that didn't seem to work, and I had one in my computer I didn't need since I isntalled the DVD burner. Crawling around on the floor was killing my back, so I went to bed once Tam came home.

The stress was getting to me, and fidning out I wasn't getting work that day didn't help. I don't like to take tests when I'm tired, and I don't install Operating Systems either, so I played some Thief: Deadly Shadows until I was about to fall over, and went to bed.

This morning I attacked it again.

Not five minutes on the floor, and my back was so bad I didn't much want to get up, or climb stairs, or go down them. After the remainign CDROM didn't work, I tried the one from my PC, which also didn't work. I shut my PC down, and transferred the DVD, which did work, which means I have 3 broken CDROMs. I'd downloaded the 5 CD-set of Fedora Core yesterday (since I had to use the DVD player, I wished I'd just gotten teh DVD iso, but oh well). I disk monkeyed through it to cd 4, about an hour and a half into the install, and there was some sort of script error in the install program.

So I did it again, being more careful with my options (since it was installing X for some reason I didn't know). This time it worked, but took longer, mainly because I decided to soak my back in ibuprofen and hot water. This time, it did work, and I finally had a running system. Back to the floor, I moved the DVD player back, and plugged in the original hard drive, and got to work.

The advantage to upgrading would have been keeping all the ancillary programs, postfix for mail, squirrelmail, apache, all configured and nice (for the most part) and keeping all my already set-up users and groups. The disadvantage to upgrading was that I didn't know what I would be leaving behind, untouched that the Skr1pt K1ddi3 left behind. As it was, I didn't have a choice, so I've spent the rest of my day man-handling postfix into place, and IMAP and enough of apache that squirrelmail will work, if not the wikis or any of the alternate domains (right now it's just www.otbp.org)

I was able to send myself a mail from gmail, and read it in a browser. Everyone's email is catching up now, but no one else can actually read their mail yet.

Since the compromised account was someone who hadn't used the system, maybe ever, and who didn't have any mail, I've decided to restrict logins some. Basically it used to be that anyone who had an email account could ssh into the box and do shell-based things. That's my preference, and until now it was great. Now, however, I'm the only one who can log in at all. There are a couple of people who probably want shell access, and that's not a problem to restore, but more on that later.

The other thing was that I didn't just want to copy the passwd file over (and to be honest, I didn't know if it would work or not). Everyone's home directories are there, alogn with their mail, but no one has a password, not in the sense of "anyone can get in" but more of "No one can get in." Even to squirrelmail on the web. Once again, in the interest of being conservative with the security, there's no access.

But I know at least three or four people actually use the email I offer: a copule have forwards to GMail, and those are working fine -- there's no need to have a login if that's all you care about. A couple of other people use pop, or squirrelmail or some other imap option, they'll need to let me know they want it, and I'll give it to them. I've added a plugin for squirrelmail that will let you change your password (I need to test it on the new system), so if those (new or old) people who want to have an email at one of my domains will contact me, I'll send them a generic password that they'll want/need to change right away.

Apache isn't configured yet, so the websites for everythign but www.otbp.org are down. Anything with a database will just laugh at you as it spews error messages. Not ap roblem, really, just not something I've gotten to yet. Nothing has been deleted, except for some pr0n that I needed to clear out for space (alas, my poor pr0n), so if something is missing or desired, let me know, and I'll try to find it and put it somewhere youc an get to it.

I'm exhausted and goign to bed. May be Sat/Sun before the rest of this is up and runnig properly (or that I get to making it work, rather).

Sorry about this, and hope it's all working now

08:42 pm: OK, I think everything is backed up and safe, as regards datbases, email, users, and websites. Including my httpd and procmail config. (mysql used a default config, iirc).

I don't know what else to do, so I'm trying to upgrade the system to Fedora Core 5.

Pray with me now to gods that protect information and/or wear red hats.

02:02 pm: Not my freakin' day, and maybe not yours either.
Just FYI, someoen hacked into Ms. Sarah Bellum last night. I've taken her down, and I'm giving her a nice lube and OS job. That means that if you use email for any of the domains I serve(otbp.org, flamingbisexual.com, sexforpeace.com, lapisdragonfly.com, strangerinastrangeland.com, uglysocks.net,cultoftheturtle.com) it will not work.

I'm doing the best to preserve what is there, including logins, etc, I admit I've never had to do this before -- in the past when I rebuilt her, it was always jjust me using it, and just my mail to save. Trust me that my mail is my life, and it's right next to yours so, I'm doing the best I can.

GRRRRRR.

I'll post here again when things are working, and sarah is back online

09:58 pm: The fanboy in me is stoked
Saturday's episode of Doctor Who will have Elizabeth Sladen in it (aka "Sarah Jane" one of the compainions of both the third (Pertwee) and fourth(Tom Baker) Doctors. Even better, looking at the trailer, it'll have K-9 in it! This is appropriate, as any good fanboy knows, Sarah Jane got one of the copies of K-9 (along with a horrible spinoff of the show).

Woot!

Sci-Fi was so stupid not to pick this up for American release. But then, that's why there's BitTorrent, I guess

11:13 pm: Thos of us who play WoW
Should take a look at this link.

Evidently, according to our friends at Blizzard, advertising a GLBT friendly guild is harrassment.

Tags: glbt, wow

11:02 pm: Well this was kind of interesting
Kind suggests boobs to me, but that's not surprising no matter how you look at it.

Get your own spectral analysis from Area 23®

Tags: meme

02:13 pm: Crawling out of the hole
Things have been a bit crazy/mad for me since Christmas. I'm not ok, and to top it all off my dear sarahbellum's motherboard when ptooie. OR something did, that's just the current theory. *pulls non-existant hair out*.

For those who need to reach me via email, please use genericjoe@gmail.com Yeah, I know I'm opening myself up to buttloads of spam. Gmail is good for that.

05:54 pm: Girl genius short story
For dreamsofthewyrd, annaoj, and book_wyrm, I proffer this link:

Fan Fiction a story in the GirlGenius world, written by Shaenon Garrity of Narbonic fame.

It even has a character named "Mary".

05:45 pm: I'd have to say that our trip out to see the foliage yesterday probably influenced the part that I wrote next. It's out of sequence, and up on the OTBP wiki.

10,270 / 50,000 (20.5%)

Tags: erotica, nano, writing

09:24 pm: NaNo UpDate
I got the wiki pages up, so you can read the progress. Yes, it needs proofing and everything, but it's fun, I think.



Tags: erotica, nano, writing

11:04 am: I don't know why
I thin it was the "good pictures" appellation

Take the quiz: "Which Starbucks Drink Are You? (Great Pictures)"

Starbucks Caramel Apple Cider
Starbucks Caramel Apple Cider(www.myspace.com/andrew2)

Tags: meme

06:37 pm: Here I am jumping into the fray as an excuse to write.

The trip to Minneapolis combined with a lull from my client, has spurred me to write. It's November, so I offer you this:


I'm not giving myself much pressure "to win", and I'm not really writing a Novel, but with the Zokutou Clause, it still counts, in my mind.

These could be wrapped up in an anthology-esque novel and all revolve around the same characters (so maybe I'm getting the idea of scenes better).

Lots of erotica too, appearing on my wiki soon.

Tags: erotica, nano, writing

11:16 pm: The Late Billdate
Very Late Indeed!

Too much more and it would be time for a new one.

( And on with the news )

Tags: life, weekend update

02:16 am: All The Bill That's Fit to Print
Man, a busy and screwed up week!
( The week in re-view )

Tags: life, weekend update

05:58 am: Weekend Bill-date
(without any SNL members)

( Man it's been a short week... )

Tags: life

05:59 am: No such thing as
Too much Diesel Sweeties

Tags: mlp

12:38 am: Bookmarklet...
Well, saw this interesting link about reserving books from your library while you are browing Amazon Basically, it helps you construct a bookmarlet that parses the URL from amazon and opens a new window to your local library's ISBN search (from which you can usually reserve the book).

Well, I couldn't find "webpac" on his list of servers, but given that Columbus Metropolitan Library doesn't checl POST vs GET urls, I'll took apart their form and made my own.


Just save this as a favorite or bookmark, and if you're browing a site that has an isbn in it (I verified it works on Amazon), it'll run that search against CML's catalog. Nifty!

LJ won't let me post it here, since it's a javascript URL, You can get it from my blog here:
CML library lookup

I'll probably crosspost this to columbus_geeks

Tags: geek, teehee

12:22 am: Nominated
So, Um, whoever did this Hunks of Hanukka thing thanks. I have my theories about who it was.;)

I accepted (why not? :), but that's what I know about it at this time.

*TeeHee*

Tags: meme, teehee