Sunday, August 24, 2003

I've been absent from the CoG forums for the past few days because I'm having computer problems at home. After more than a decade of miraculously avoiding any lightning damage to my computer stuff, on Thursday an electrical storm blew out my Linksys router's WAN port, rendering it useless as a NAT gateway. I took the opportunity to do something that I'd been wanting to do for a long time--build a Linux firewall box.

I settled on Astaro Linux Security as my Linux firewall package of choice and installed it on my spare computer with two NICs. Setup and configuration went great--it's a very full-featured package, and free for home users. Unfortunately, after I had everything set up and ready to go, I ran into a problem--my downstream bandwidth is basicially ZERO. My internet connectivity is behaving as if I've got an MTU problem, in that pages will start to load and usually display some text, but then just sit there without loading any images and eventually time out. This affects FTP sites, as well--I can pull directory listings, but attempting to download a file yields downstream file transfer speeds of like 0.25KB/sec or worse.

I've jiggled around with MaxMTU settings with no joy so far, and I'm going to keep researching the problem. Pages that have basically no images--like my blog entry form and, fortunately, Astaro's bulletin board pages, where I've asked for help--work fine, but just about everything else times out.

Bleah. Stupid computers.

Posted by Keeper @ 11:33 AM CST [Link]

Friday, August 15, 2003

As I walked from the parking lot back to work after lunch, I was struck dumb--and nearly deaf--by the sight and sound of five F-16s taking off, one after the other, from Ellington Field. They roared low, right at the building where I work, circled once, then formed into a wedge and tore off across Clear Lake.

If freedom has a sound, then it's probably something like the deafening roar of those engines.

Posted by Keeper @ 12:44 PM CST [Link]

Tuesday, August 12, 2003

Today's Moment of Zen:

A few minutes ago, I was here in my cube, talking to my wife. She put me on hold for a moment to take care of something and hold music began playing, and at that moment my favorite Asian Lady, Mrs. How-He-Get-The-Oracle, walked up and began talking to--or, rather, talking at--the gentleman in the cube behind me. In my right ear blared the latest Jennifer Lopez rap song, made flat and tinny by the 3000 Hz filtering of the telephone, and in my left ear all I could hear was terribly mangled half-English.

It would be difficult to say which one of them was less understandable. My brain tried to sort through the noise for about three seconds, and then shut down. I had, quite suddenly, acheved satori.

Posted by Keeper @ 02:00 PM CST [Link]

Monday, August 4, 2003

I took the MSF Basic Riders' Course this weekend. It was difficult--in fact, it was damn-near impossible. The riding wasn't that hard, nor was the classroom stuff. No, the difficult part was dealing with the HEAT. We started on Saturday and on Sunday both at 06:30 (which meant I had to get up at 05:30 Saturday morning and Sunday morning--goodbye, weekend!), but by 09:00, the temperature had already reached near-unbearable levels. By 14:00, the hottest part of the day, the ambient air temperature on the blacktop where we were riding was 120 degrees (Fahrenheit). Throw in a 90% humidity reading, and you have a typical August day in Houston.

Then, toss in fifteen morons--us--standing around in jeans and long-sleeved shirts and jackets with gloves and boots and helmets. It was sweaty. We took water breaks every ten to fifteen minutes, but even with that, I don't think I urinated once. Plus, even with the frequent application of SPF45 sunblock, I am sunburned beyond belief--my skin is funny like that.

We rode until 17:00, both days, and on Sunday we took another hour after that for the practical test. Everyone passed, even the sixty-five year-old ex-biker grandmother, who took the course just to see if she could still ride like she could when she was twenty. She did great, too. She actually dropped her bike twice during the course and crashed into a chainlink fence once, but she picked herself back up and kept on going, and during the test when it counted, she performed flawlessly.

The only other eventful thing that happened this weekend occurred at 02:37 Friday night (or Saturday morning, rather). The Wife and I had gone to bed at around 22:00, since I had to be awake at 05:30, but we were shocked out of sleep at 02:37 by a tremendous pounding on our bedroom window. I sat bolt-upright and slurred something like, "Whathfuckwazzat?", and then went and searched around the apartment with my 6 D-cell Police Brutality Special Edition Maglight. Nothing appeared to be amiss and there were no further disturbances, but I lay awake for another hour while the adrenaline leeched out of my system.

I found out Saturday night that the mysterious window-pounder may have been a pair of my friends, out wandering and looking for someone to play with. One buddy of mine revealed that he too had been visited around 02:00 by the pair, and another buddy confirmed that someone pounded on his door at around quarter after two (in response to the pounding, he called the cops). I don't know if the two friends were drunk or high or what.

I'm looking forward to going to bed way early every day this week. I hurt, and my sunburn hurts.

Posted by Keeper @ 08:41 AM CST [Link]