this girl drives a tank

Today I set up a computer for the guys downstairs, running Debian unstable. I wanted them to have access to the music on the server so NFS seemed like the easiest way to go. I have set it in the past but needed to find a guide this time around as I had forgotten some of the steps. After about an hour however I was getting nowhere. My exports file was correct seemingly, I had added stuff to hosts.allow and host.deny on both the server and client, installed portmap and twiddled with a couple of other things but still no go.

I don't recall NFS being this hard to configure. Eventually I gave up, purging all the NFS software and backing out of all the files I had edited. Then it occurred to me that as Sarah's Windows computer was already using Samba to see the files, I could just use that but with a Linux client instead of a Windows one. I made SMB passwords for the boy's accounts and restarted samba and there was the music all ready to go. It bothers me that I couldn't export a share using NFS, at this point that sort of thing shouldn't be hard for me to do but oh well.

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I want to make Rice Pudding. The old fashioned kind with a touch of nutmeg and some cinnamon and of course raisins. I am not sure if stove top or baked is the way to go though and my Mom, the recipe queen has never made it from scratch. Maybe Donna knows...

We returned last night from Mont-Tremblant which is a few hours north of Montreal. I had a great time, the snow, while not as deep and fluffy as one would like, was deep enough to ski all day. I even tried snowboarding. That turned out to be a too little tricky for me and I quickly decided to stick with regular skis. We also wend for a dog sled ride through the woods which was really amazing, the dogs were adorable, hyper and so friendly.

My boyfriend then presented me with an engagement ring. It wasn't sprung on me however, we had gotten unofficially engaged over the holidays but this kind of made it official. We will get married early next year if all goes according to plans. I am quite happy ;-)

I do not know what this means for my computer studies. I know it will mean less time in many cases, but I am pretty stubborn sometimes and actually get upset with myself if a week goes by and I have learnt nothing. Perhaps I can make my fiancé a geek which would solve everything :-)

The hotel we stayed in had free wireless but I was unable to connect to it under linux. I could see the AP's with iwspy but it reported that it was an 802.11b network and my card is an 802.11g, I am not sure if that was the problem or it was my /etc/network/interfaces file.

# The primary network interface
#allow-hotplug eth0
#iface eth0 inet dhcp




# home wireless
#auto wlan0
#iface wlan0 inet dhcp
#wireless-essid  EAC 
#wireless-channel 6
#wireless-key ea5ab771eb58606c654241g462




# Fairmont Tremblant 
wireless-essid  datavalet
wireless-channel 6
wireless-mode Ad-Hoc

I wasn't sure what to put for wireless-mode and I suspect Ad-Hoc is incorrect, but not being able to google at the time it was difficult to figure out. I might install something like gnomes network manager to handle this in the future.

There are several geeky news sites out there, digg, delicio and reddit for example but I don't really have time to read all three top to bottom. Luckily for me newspyle aggregates them for me using a quite clever keyboard driven interface.

I really wish other sites would get on the keyboard friendly bandwagon. It would also be nice if newspyle would allow you to add your own sites, like slashdot perhaps or metafilter. I must admit quirky little stories one finds on the net can be quite addictive. Where else would I hear about the worlds coolest ping pong table?

I have been kind of hooked recently on `the show' with Zefrank. He makes me laugh which is always a good thing. If you have never seen these little shows, start with some of the more popular ones found in the side link. This one for example.

My boyfriend and I had planned to go to Cuba for a week long getaway. We originally decided this in the fall but with Christmas rushing towards us, I had neglected to renew my passport and now as it turns out, because of some new regulations mainly imposed by the USA's new laws, thousands of Canadians are applying for passports before the law goes into effect this Tuesday.

Our vacation was scheduled for the end of January, but now I think because my passport won't be ready in time we are probably going skiing in Québec and also try to take in some of the Carnival De Québec. This means we might leave a little earlier, perhaps as early as this coming Monday. Yay!.



I have mentioned before about where I really would like to vacation, and noticed this review of Huvafen Fushi, one of the many Maldives resorts. Quite decadent....

For the amount of time my boyfriend stays with me now, it would be reasonable to say we live together. We kind of agreed this would happen anyway and neither of us have a problem with it, but it wasn't really planned as much as it just happened.

My roommate Sarah's younger brother and his friend are also staying with us for the time being so the house is quite full now. I had forgotten how much guys eat :-) Sarah and I eat like little birds but the guys seem to have bottomless pits. I notice for example that the time between eating is quite short. We can have supper and within an hour of eating it, they are snacking on something or another. Tonight I am making a huge pot of Chile in the slow cooker. I have never tried using the slow cooker for this, so it's a fun experiment. I am not sure if tomatoes go in chili either, there seems to be some conflicting recipes on the internet, I decided to put them in anyway.

The guys decided to go ahead and order cable for us. Despite the fact that neither Sarah or I actually watch much TV. I don't really mind though as now I don't have to download the few shows that I try to watch regularly.

The disadvantage of all this household activity is that I now get very little quality computer time. I have been very slack in studying and hardly get on irc at all. It is a disturbing trend that makes me uneasy a bit. In a way, I feel like I am being pulled away from something I like.

I have started working my way through the The C Programming Language book, which I am told is the bible of C programming. I find it somewhat terse but at the moment manageable. I am only 40 pages or so into the book and already am having some trouble completing some of the exercises but luckily I can read the answers online if I get really stuck.

Usually I feel this is cheating a little bit, but life is too short to spend a week spinning your wheels over some little exercises and perhaps sometimes it is better to look at the answer and try to figure out why it was that you could not get it correct.

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The Stars are a Canadian band that contain three members of Broken Social Scene. I recently bought the `Set Yourself On Fire' album and have been playing it to death as I am prone to doing. For example, I really like this song.

In Ontario, one can buy beer only from the Beer Store retail outlets. The Beer Store is owned by the 3 largest breweries but is heavily regulated by our government. Liquor, wine and spirits however are sold in a separate chain of stores known as the LCBO. The LCBO is allowed to sell beer, but you cannot return the empty bottles there. The Beer Store is not allowed to sell liquor, but you can return empty liquor bottles to the Beer Store.

To add to this confusion, many Beer Stores and LCBO's keep different hours of operation, some stores close at 8pm, others 9pm and some are open until 11pm.

My proposal would be to do away with one of the retailers and be left with one chain of stores, The Drinking Store perhaps, where you can buy anything and return any kind of bottle and the hours are uniform province-wide. Unfortunately no body in charge listens to my proposals.

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Photographer Gregory Colbert's latest exhibition is quite beautiful.. He introduces the concept of `animal copyright' whereby advertisers who use animals should somehow compensate nature. I am not holding my breath that this sentiment will catch on, but it is a nice idea.

Amaya's post reminded me of this..

As described by WFMU:

A sassy stash of 60s and 70s soul sisters bust out the baddest and bitchiest man-eating monologues, raunchy raps and "tell it like it is" tracks. Dedicated to the fine art of homewreckin', heartbreakin', and all other manner of down low drama. Let the door knob hit ya where the good lord split ya.

They have 14 mp3's. I really like Denise La Salle and Millie Jackson

I have stopped using irssi for my IRC client in favour or ERC. I am very used to irssi and never thought I would need anything else but ultimately having Emacs taking care of my email, IRC, editing and music playing makes things easier for me. I do much less `moving around' between windows and now all my copy and paste operations, plus configuration, documentation and searches use the same familiar key bindings. ERC will take some getting used to but I will get the hang it I am sure.

I will try also to remove myself from channels that I don't really participate in, but this might prove difficult as I consider myself the consumate lurker and hate to miss anything exciting. It would be nice though to only have say five or six channels to manage. We will see how that goes.

Now that I have finished sorting through the CD's my friend lent me, it is time to transfer them onto an external USB that I can give to him. It needs to be Windows formatted (NTFS) so I was thinking of using Samba but I recall doing this before took over a day and that was not with the 165GB that I have now. I might try putting the music onto dual layer DVD discs. That way I can copy them to his computer relatively quickly, plus I would have a third backup on removable media that I could easily store somewhere in case of something awful happening to my hard drives.

I estimate I would need about 19 discs for this, which is quite expensive but the real problem is knowing how much to put on each disc to use the minimum of discs and to make each disc useful in itself, in other words not to `span' discs so that you'd need all of them to recover one disc. Sounds like a good little programming exercise.

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When your team is trailing, late in the hockey game, you can do what is known as `pulling the goalie', the phrase has another connotation, when a couple decide not to continue using contraception, but I digress..

Basically, you remove your goalie in favour of an extra attacker and hope to even the score, however it is a risky move as it is very easy (so one would think) to score a goal against a team with no goaltender. Last week poor Patrik Stefan found out how difficult the empty net is to score against.

Worst album covers ever:

Lamest super heroes ever:

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Last night I watched The Illusionist and thought it was thoroughly enjoyable. Really, a great and entertaining movie. It didn't hurt that two of my favorite actors, Paul Giamatti and Edward Norton were in it. The set design was also very good, reminiscent of Polanski's Oliver Twist.

Thanks to those of you that wrote to me about ripping vinyl LP's. I have several options now it seems. Think Geek has a `Instant Music Vinyl & Cassette Ripper' which looks like its for Windows or Mac, but it is USB so perhaps it would work in Linux. A USB turntable is another option, they can be pricey but it would be pretty cool to have :-) Lastly, getting a regular turntable and a small pre amp, would let me use anyone of the many Linux audio recorders, such as Ardour which I am somewhat familiar with.

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On my trip, I took along a usb hard drive with all my music, it was formatted with FAT32. I needed a Windows filesystem that I could write to in Linux and I wasn't sure how far write support for NTFS has come along since I last checked. (ntfs-3g looks promising though)

I copied all my music onto the drive with rsync but didn't have time to check it with a Windows PC, but it mounted in Linux under /dev/sda1 and all the files listed ok but when I tried to read the drive on my laptop the partition had disappeared. I have no idea what exactly happened. Today I reformatted it using ext3 and rsync'ed the music back onto the drive. Maybe there is Windows software that will read ext3 partitions. (Googling tells me that had I chosen ext2, Windows might be able to read it. sigh.)