December 27, 2025
Reading my 2024 retrospective was a little depressing, yet I’m happy to report that despite this year having its challenges, they were nothing like last year. What an amazing way to feel gratitude… remembering the things you’ve gone through and seeing that …
December 26, 2024
After recently reading my 2023 retrospective, I’ve come to the conclusion that as we age, things just get harder. 2024 was a brutal year. It was busy, stressful, and sad. In a lot of ways it was still a good year and by no means am I ungrateful. A lot was accomplished at …
February 2, 2024
It’s been a fantastic 15 years at Red Hat as of today. Started as a Senior Software Engineer on a very small team focused on incident response for two products (RHEL and JBoss EAP) to end up leading a large organization focused on a significant number of products and …
December 26, 2023
It’s the end of 2023 and, as is my custom, I always read my retrospective from the prior year. And… umm… 2023 was not better than 2022. Well, in some ways perhaps but in many ways it was not what I was hoping it would be. But, I’m resolved to look on …
December 9, 2023
I’ve been using GTD (Getting Things Done) as a methodology for how I work for a number of years. I revisit the systems I use occasionally, particularly when I don’t feel they’re working out for me or my needs have changed. And lately one of the biggest challenge …
November 26, 2023
This is both a test and awareness. I’ve moved the site from PythonAnywhere to GitHub Pages because I’m cheap and it’s a static site, so it doesn’t need to be on PythonAnywhere anymore. I changed the theme at the same time to make it a bit more readable. …
December 28, 2022
Well, here we are at the end of 2022 and frankly, I’m hoping 2023 will be better. Is it just me or do things seem to continue getting worse? The economic uncertainty, war, inept governments, broken medical systems, intolerance across the board, and everyone seeming angry …
December 22, 2022
For a number of years, since getting more and more into management, I’ve had less time to do any real programming. So a highlight of the year, for the first few years at least, was to take time during the Christmas break to do some work, mostly on this blog and for a few …
January 3, 2022
I think, like many people, I did not expect to be writing this at the end of 2021 and still be in the COVID-19 pandemic. Simply to get it out of the way because COVID certainly wasn’t the most exciting thing this year, the entire family got COVID in the summer. It wasn’t …
March 6, 2021
It’s taken me some time to even get to the place where I wanted to stop and think about 2020. We’re just over 2 months into 2021 and I’ve been thinking about writing this since December, but between being plain old tired (physically and mentally) and being …
November 7, 2020
While the Alberta government has some excellent visualizations about COVID-19 statistics in Alberta, I felt there was a little too much missing. The province is quite transparent and you can export the data in CSV. Since these days most of my “technical work” is …
May 9, 2020
Yesterday we had someone at our home to look at replacing the front and back doors. The rep for the company was exceptionally personable and we probably spent more time with him than the simple transaction of selecting and ordering new doors for our home warranted, but my wife …
January 2, 2020
I’ve enjoyed reading (and writing) these annual retrospectives. This will be the fourth that I’ve written. There are two recurring themes I read from the past retrospectives: tough and hope. Life is tough – be that in work or personal life. But there is hope. …
November 18, 2019
I recently got another yubikey and due to poor handling of the old key (can’t load it onto the new card) I’ve generated a new key. I’ve revoked my old 2017 key (key id 0xBD51CB9670DF9DE7) and replaced with my new key (key id 0xDAE4D06F77191ACD) My new …
December 28, 2018
As I sit here taking my first real break of the year, suffering with fever, chills and a ridiculously stuffy nose that has lasted since before the holidays began, I turn once again to a retrospective of 2018 after reading the one I wrote last year. Once again, life provided no …
August 15, 2018
Have you heard the parable of the stonecutters? This is one of my favourite parables/stories because it speaks of purpose and passion in a very simple to understand way. If you’ve not heard the parable before, let me relay it briefly. There are three stonecutters doing the same, …
June 1, 2018
Finally I got the pictures of Israel up. Apologies once again for those who have been waiting… I didn’t intend for it to take this long, but they are up now! Favourite places in Israel were the Garden of Gethsemane, Madasa, Shiloh (who wouldn’t want to stand …
May 5, 2018
Apologies for this taking so long… I know there are quite a few people who have been after me to post the pictures. Unfortunately due to time constraints I have skipped to the end of the trip to post pictures from Jordan (since there are less than those of Israel). One of …
March 18, 2018
There are far too many pictures taken of my recent trip, but since I’m being (graciously!) hounded by friends I figured I’d note when some of them were available so I’ve gotten the first few up, just of the Egypt part. The Israel part will take longer though as …
March 3, 2018
This past last half of February I took a trip with my family and members of our church on a tour of the “land of the Bible” (Egypt, Israel, and Jordan). This was a 15 day trip that took us to and through five countries in four continents. It was a whirlwind …
December 30, 2017
Last year I wrote a retrospective and was interesting to read it at the end of this year so I’ve decided to do it again. What can I say about 2017? From a work perspective, this was a crazy year. The vulnerabilities we had to deal with this year were pretty significant, …
September 30, 2017
I’ve read a few articles lately about working from home and some best practices for working remotely, and other topical guidance around the subject of working from home. I always find these articles fascinating because I want to see if there’s something I am missing …
February 12, 2017
Quick note to indicate that I’ve revoked my old GPG key (key id 0x94BE833CE8B86CAB ) and replaced it with my new one (key id 0xBD51CB9670DF9DE7 ). My new key’s fingerprint is: 1810 81E8 178E 4692 03F6 BFD0 BD51 CB96 70DF 9DE7 and it is signed with the old (revoked) …
December 30, 2016
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about this past year and all of its challenges and accomplishments, the moments of growth and clarity, the opportunities taken and the opportunities missed. I’m not one to get deeply personal in public, and won’t get …
July 22, 2016
This is the first post on my new blogging platform that I’ve written from scratch using Flask and Python. I’ve been using Drupal to host annvix.com for quite some time (mostly for consulting client information) and have used WordPress for years on linsec.ca. To be …
January 16, 2016
Just a quick note to say that I’ve shifted things around and have put most of the mediawiki content on as pages on the blog. This way I don’t have to worry about updating both mediawiki and wordpress. I’m getting older and have less interest in patching things …
August 15, 2015
It was a long day; my daughter got back from youth camp this afternoon, I got home from being in Raleigh at 2am, and we’re all beat. So we had some fun with the cat. And now I just need to share it so I never forget. =)
December 23, 2014
I just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, from my family to yours. My wife found the most awesome card for my teammates at work and it is just too good not to share with everyone – for those who are programmers or into IT, this is perhaps one of …
February 1, 2014
So this year I’m going to be 38, which means that I’ve been collecting tattoos for 20 years. The biggest “rush” of ink has been in the last 5-6 years as I’ve actually been able to afford it, whereas before it was getting a piece done whenever I could …
January 31, 2014
I’ve been collecting tattoos for 20 years. In that time, Angela has never gotten a tattoo. Her sisters and her brother all have, but she was the last of the great holdouts. I’m pleased to announce that as of January 29th, that is no longer the case! Angela has lost …
January 6, 2014
Being sick this Christmas season with a cold and a middle ear infection caused me to spend more time than I normally would have on Twitter and Facebook because it was a complete time-killer and I didn’t have energy for anything productive. In fact, my one goal for this week …
December 24, 2013
Merry Christmas to all my friends, family, co-workers, partners-in-crime, and just generally everyone else out there. I share a wonderful eCard with you all. May it bring you much joy and laughter. God bless the faithful! Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!
October 31, 2013
Today I got more work done on my sleeve, but I’d neglected to post (and even take!) pictures of the next-to-last session. So if you look at Flickr you’ll see the last bits I got done (the flaming cross and re-darkening the tribal Jesus), but not the stuff before that …
October 10, 2013
The blog needed an updated look. I think I kinda like this new look. Much cleaner and sharper. I think I’m going to be doing more “life” blogging from this point forward. The tech stuff is important, but so is “real life”. So there should be more …
October 10, 2013
I saw this on Facebook today and, thankfully, it’s also on their blog. I’ve always liked the idea of “Inbox Zero” and have even gotten my inbox to zero a few times since I started (mostly)-seriously using GTD. Sadly, I’m not there anymore due to how …
March 13, 2013
This really makes me sad: http://googlereader.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/powering-down-google-reader.html. Does anyone know of a similar service? I’ve gotten so used to using Google Reader (not the web interface, but the actual syncing and being able to connect to the account …
February 8, 2013
Spent a few hours last night laying some of the groundwork for getting more of the second sleeve done. This is was re-lining and darkening of my existing cross, and I think the flames look pretty darn sweet. This is re-lining and darkening of my tribal Jesus, and fixing the J …
June 7, 2012
I don’t normally post things like this… how could you? With so much need in the world, you could post about kids every day, multiple times a day, and still not cover them all. But this one is special. Teagan is a family friend, and so I have to mention it in the …
March 10, 2012
So this past Wednesday I started on finishing up the second sleeve (my right arm). Unfortunately, with my wife’s new business, she’s been too busy to take pictures and I’m not one of these “take pictures of yourself in the mirror” guys. So I’m …
January 4, 2012
So I had about a week and a half off this year around Christmas. My initial plans were to do the family things one normally does around Christmas time, and there was plenty of that… visits with the parents and in-laws, dinners and whatnot. Too much food as usual, but …
December 22, 2011
So today I spent a lot of time manually merging the annvix.org mediawiki data into my linsec.ca wiki (in a new Annvix namespace). There are some various automated tools and mediawiki import/export stuff, but I didn’t have a lot in terms of pages so taking a few hours to do …
December 7, 2011
The blog is going all new, which means it’ll probably change over the next few days as I find time to tweak it and make it look the way I want it to. I like the theme I’ve got at the moment, but it needs some more personalization, so keep an eye out for new stuff and …
December 24, 2010
Well, it’s early on Christmas Eve day here, but I realize that for some of my friends and co-workers, it’s Christmas Day already (well, really early Christmas Day anyways) so figured that if they are at all like me and checking on things instead of relaxing, I would …
September 13, 2010
And this is why I have randomly generated passwords on all sites and services… this is funny, but sadly way too true.
July 17, 2010
Seems like I fill quite a few of these roles… so how come I don’t have all the spare time these guys do? Maybe I need to have a single role, so that instead of switching roles while one is “busy” I can have one role with blockers. Hmmmm…. Only one …
June 19, 2010
This is perhaps one of the coolest things I have ever seen: http://www.woehr.de/en/projekte/budapest_m730/index.htm. I wish I could embed it but I can’t (sadly, you need flash to watch it). It’s the parking system in Budapest. I can see this solving all kinds of …
December 25, 2009
Merry Christmas to all my compatriots, friends, and (strangely enough) the folks who find my blog interesting enough to read! =) Got spoiled something fierce this year. Feels nice. =) wOO! 25th anniversary Transformers boxed set! I’ll be reliving my childhood for a long …
November 13, 2009
Well, I bought a new computer about a month ago or so, and got my Win7 upgrade disc today. I’ve got Vista on one drive, and Fedora 12 on the other (Vista is around for gaming and that’s about it). So I decided to go through the steps of the Win7 upgrade. Well.. the HP …
November 7, 2009
I’m in crunch mode right now… wrote 2400 words today, another 4300 to get back on target (need to write 1167 words per day to make the 50k target at the end of the month). Not an excuse, really, but this was a stupid work week with stupid little things going on that …
October 31, 2009
So last year I participated in National Novel Writing Month but didn’t pull it off. The idea is to go nuts and write a 50k word novel during the month of November. People all around the world do it, and it’s quite fun but very time consuming and pretty crazy. Last …
October 30, 2009
Every time you turn around someone is posting about, talking about, writing about, or otherwise having something to do with H1N1. While I get this is a new flu, and the media have a job to do in increasing sales and readership, the sheer volume of “OMG! H1N1!” is …
September 22, 2009
Blogging has been on my short list the last two weeks. Yesterday the contractor we hired finally finished putting up new insulation and vinyl siding on the house, and I have to admit he did a fantastic job and it looks bloody sharp. Pics to come (the eavestrough isn’t up …
September 2, 2009
My Flickr account now has pictures of the work I got done last Saturday. The sleeve is getting close to completion! Yikes… three sittings in 2 weeks. What was I thinking? Feels like as soon as the burning and peeling and itching settle down I’m off to do it again. =) …
August 23, 2009
So my Flickr account now has pictures of my new in-progress sleeve. The first session was just the line work and that was done on July 18th and took 5hrs. Sessions 2 and 3 added color; session 2 was done this past Monday (the 17th of August) and took 6.5hrs, and session 3 was …
June 3, 2009
Last night I attained “Legendary Status” on Rock Band by doing the never ending setlist (84 songs), on the drums, on hard (not good enough to do more than a handful on expert). It took me about 30hrs to accomplish (left the xbox on overnight hoping it wouldn’t …
May 28, 2009
Read an interesting piece on Lifehacker that pointed to an article entitled Working From Home: 10 Unconscious Cues to Create a Work-Life Balance. Being a remote worker for Red Hat, and before that Mandriva, I’ve worked full-time at home for about 10 years now. (Man, I feel …
May 15, 2009
Yeah, this is one of those sappy posts. But I like to think it’s worth the few minutes of my time to write it, and it’s something I’ve really noticed and I’d like to share my appreciation. I’ve made it past my first 90 days at Red Hat and I sure am …
May 3, 2009
I was hunting around yesterday to find some themes for my Blackberry Storm. When I first got it, there was one theme to choose from, but now there’s a whole bunch of them, so I figured I’d note them here so I don’t have to look for them again when I get bored of …
April 14, 2009
Well, maybe not but there’s an interesting survey of college students that correlates Facebook usage with grades, and how people (keeping in mind this is just a survey, and there are no real conclusions by the authors) who spend more time on Facebook have lower grades. So, …
March 21, 2009
Well, this past Thursday I got my 11th tattoo (although it only looks like I have 9 in total, two were to extend earlier tattoos). Every other tattoo was pretty good pain-wise… no big deal. This one wasn’t too bad either, except in a few tender spots… base of …
March 11, 2009
A post on Planet Fedora from Nicu (What is YOUR Elvish name?) caught my attention this morning and since I’m a big Tolkien fan, I embarked to find out how cool (or not) my elvish name would be. Using the same references (thanks, Nicu, for linking them all!) I found out that …
February 4, 2009
Well, I took my first trip to the USA, ever, this week and it was down to Raleigh, NC, for orientation with Red Hat. I’d like to say it was an experience (meaning the trip), but it wasn’t… I was mostly fighting too hard to stay awake so it all really seems like …
January 30, 2009
Well, today is my last day and so without much fanfare I say “adieu” to Mandriva. As the title indicates, never a dull moment. You get spoiled with new stuff, then have to go back and re-setup old stuff. Part of this switch for Oden is that the build system goes with …
January 23, 2009
So, I’ve gotten quite a few emails about what I’m going to be up to, so to save myself having to type the same thing over and over, here’s the lowdown. I’ll be hanging out with Adam for two days in February… you can see where he’s going to be …
January 22, 2009
Well, due to some changing circumstances, I decided I’d try to get a better handle on my email and maybe move to using IMAP instead of downloading all my mail. There are some really irritating reasons why this is a bad idea (in my case). Google’s use of labels is …
January 21, 2009
All of my reading of reviews lead me to believe that Ninja Gaiden Sigma is one of the hardest games out there. Well I can tell you it’s true. Man, this game is really starting to drive me nuts! I enjoy doing the odd bit of gaming, and I certainly don’t mind a …
January 19, 2009
A friend pointed me to a really cool blog post called The Larry Test. It basically talks about when done is Done. I.e. an engineer will keep working stuff until it’s perfect, likely because it’s in our nature (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve rewritten …
December 18, 2008
Decided to change the theme of the site as I upgraded to the latest WordPress. Also stuck a picture of my kitties on there (Tika, who’s 16 (and grey), and Pepper, who’s about 1.5 (and black, obviously)).
December 17, 2008
Found this really cute/funny blog post today about programming languages being religions, or the comparison of programming languages to religions (i.e. C being Judaism, Visual Basic being Satanism, etc.). Quite funny. Here’s the link: If programming languages were …
November 27, 2008
Well, I received some horrid news today. As of December 31st, my contract with Mandriva will be terminated and I will no longer be working for Mandriva. We’ve got a new CEO now, and he’s determined there is to be no remote contractors, and as a result I’ve been …
November 20, 2008
This one may be a bit long, because I’m going to use it to vent. =) I won’t make it all “front page news”, tho. On Monday I signed up with a new provider, WiredTree. I still have a few accounts with my old provider, WebHostingBuzz, but they are being …
October 28, 2008
Well, actually, I just found about it this week. The NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is “contest” to encourage people to write a novel. The goal is to write 50k words in one month.. from scratch, starting at 00:01 on Nov 1st with the deadline being 23:59 on …
October 1, 2008
The Canadian national do not call list is up which basically prevents telemarketers from phoning you, by registering your phone number(s) in the registry. All I can say is “about damn time”. Anyways, if you’re Canadian and as annoyed by those yahoo telemarketers …
September 22, 2008
“Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behaviour. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behaviour.” – Dee Hock I’m reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done book and this quote really stuck …
July 26, 2008
Hey, just a question for you guys out there. Don’t know how many of you are with a hosting outfit rather than running your own server (be it at home, work, or at a colocation), but I have a bit of an issue here when I reported a problem with my web hosting outfit’s …
July 25, 2008
If there’s one thing that irked me about WordPress, which I more or less ignored for months, was the inability to change the “From” address on emails it sent. It’s hard-coded to “wordpress@${sitename}” and when you have some… …
June 21, 2008
As I was poking around the Amazon website to find the name of a certain Venom album I had owned when I was younger, I cam across an amusing forum thread entitled What is the best band of the 80’s, in the metal forum. Presumably they would be discussing metal here and by …
June 18, 2008
Now that people have let me know where that OpenSSL comic came from, I’ve been looking at xkcd.com more this morning and found one that is utterly priceless and totally reminds me of me. If you have time to kill, I suggest checking the site out but in the meantime, …
June 17, 2008
Has anyone encountered this, or more specifically, know how to fix it? I’m using gmail to host my linsec.ca mail, and accessing it via POP3 (fetchmail->procmail->mutt). When I send mail out, I send it out via gmail’s SMTP server. The problem is that I never see …
May 30, 2008
Sitting in the Paris office, working across from Oden with Pascal not five feet away, Thomas in the same room, and Pixel, Thierry, and ColinG in the room next to me. Talk about wierd. Some of these guys I’ve worked with for 8 years and never met them before yesterday. I …
May 28, 2008
I’m off to the airport now. Should be in France tomorrow at 9am their time (1am my time). Praying for a good flight! For the first time in eight years I will be meeting my co-workers face-to-face. Quite exciting stuff!
May 25, 2008
Industry Canada has posted a study entitled The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study for Industry Canada, the description of which is: Industry Canada undertook a music file sharing study during 2006-07 to measure the extent to which …
March 28, 2008
Well, a friend sent one of those app invites on Facebook today and largely I ignore them but this one was “which bible character are you most like” and she said it was “scary accurate”. So I answered the 5-6 questions, stuff like “do you believe in …
March 25, 2008
Sorry for the little bit of downtime… I finally got around to moving the linsec.ca site from home to the hosting provider that has the rest of my sites (except for annvix.*). A few little hiccups but nothing major.
March 14, 2008
I love this gif. Has to be one of my all-time favourites. Was doing some file cleaning, found it, and figured I’d stick it up here so I never lose it. =)
March 1, 2008
I read this really eye-opening piece on the death of HD-DVD to Blu-ray, and Microsoft’s stakes, involvement, and (typically) underhanded activity regarding it. The piece is called Lessons from the Death of HD-DVD. I didn’t pay much attention to the next-gen hi-def …
February 2, 2008
If you’ve ever wondered exactly who it is that Microsoft is catering their operating system, wonder no further. For those of who have bought Vista and haven’t been able to figure out how to open the box, I have the answer for you. Don’t feel bad if you’ve …
January 28, 2008
A friend of mine has moved his domains over to Google mail, which can now do full domain support for email amongst their other appliances. Standard edition is free, but the premier edition is fairly pricy ($50USD per year per email account). So I signed up for the standard …
January 27, 2008
Well, yesterday was pretty nice considering it’s nearing the end of January.. had a high of about -2C. Today.. drastic difference. Woke up and the thermometer read -15C and it was blizzard-like conditions… not heavy snow, but a pretty brisk wind. Currently it’s …
January 27, 2008
Well, it’s a little bit early for easter, but I’m cleaning my desktop and came across the following graphic, which is perhaps one of the amusing things that has made it’s way to my email recently that sets me to grinning every time I look at it. Enjoy!
January 8, 2008
Forgot to close the guinea pig cage top last night, and this is what I woke up to: Seems like the two get along just fine… I’ve had them together in a “controlled” environment before, and Peekaboo (the rodent) is pretty familiar with cats (we’ve had …
January 7, 2008
Remember having to write an essay in school with that same title? I do. Had to do it a few times… no longer, but it makes for a nice nostalgic title so let’s just go with it. Today was my first day “back” after three weeks of holidays. It was definitely a …
December 10, 2007
According to Michael Geist’s blog, the Canadian DMCA… nonsense… is being delayed. I guess sending that email did more than just show me as a zealot, eh? Yeah, I’m pointing at you Adam. =) Why wait for it to be introduced to raise a fit? Better do it …
November 29, 2007
I read a moment ago on /. Canada’s New DMCA Considered Worst Copyright Law and was horrified. The link is to this article on the Globe and Mail: A new copyright law is coming. All Canadians need to do their part to protest this obscene piece of potential legislature. …
November 21, 2007
The cool thing about Guitar Hero III is that you can view stats online. This is nice because the stat-viewer in the game sucks compared to Guitar Hero II. Anyways, here’s the link to my Guitar Hero statistics. On a side note, I’ve found that in some ways GH3 is both …
October 24, 2007
According to most gaming sites, Guitar Hero III is supposed to be released on October 28th. Either it got pushed forward, or I lucked out and my local Walmart screwed up big because when I was out buying picture frames, I decided to see if Conan (which was supposed to be released …
October 15, 2007
I’ve been on Facebook for a few weeks now and while I think it’s great in that I’ve gotten to connect with old friends that I’ve not had contact with for years, I also find it really bizarre. For instance, with Facebook you can set your status.. a little …
October 9, 2007
Well, I’ve decided to move the blog to wordpress instead of serendipity. I liked serendipity a lot, but… well, wordpress is more popular and I wouldn’t to see if I could make trackbacks actually work. Seems a little simpler and straightforward, once you get …
August 31, 2007
Well, I’ve decided to try and take the plunge and implement some GTD philosophies in my life. While it encompasses a lot of different things, the first thing I aim to try is to reclaim my email, which has been getting way out of hand lately. I remember about 2 years ago I …
August 18, 2007
I’ve been really busy with a few side jobs this week, as well as regular work for Mandriva (playing catchup from a few days in Drumheller (Alberta’s dinosaur capital) last week). However, last week I bought Guitar Hero II with the guitar controller when we got back …
May 18, 2007
As part of the consulting business that I run, I do some web hosting on the side, usually for clients I take from start to finish; those I design/develop the site for and then end up hosting it for them. I used to do this with a box at a colocation facility close to me and it was …
April 26, 2007
Well, I’ve played WoW for about 2 years now… it doesn’t do much for me anymore. I had hopes with the Burning Crusade expansion and it was pretty neat playing an over-sized smurf for a while, but now it’s pretty much all the same old thing. Kinda …
March 20, 2007
I came across an interesting editorial today entitled Vista - Arrogance & Stupidity. It was an extremely interesting read. So interesting, in fact, that I had to share it just because it astounds me what Microsoft is (or isn’t, as the case may be) thinking. Disclaimer: …
February 26, 2007
I’ve reorganized my main linsec.ca site a bit. I’ve moved everything into MediaWiki (yes, I’m finding I’m in love with that silly thing). Mostly because it’s just more convenient to edit and nicer to keep track of statistics with. I’ve also …
January 23, 2007
Title says it all. I love smoking, but it’s not good for me. I have to start hating it. At any rate, I feel like a sh*t because my daughter thinks I don’t smoke and the other day she said “well, my daddy doesn’t smoke” to her aunt who graciously …
January 15, 2007
Well, last night I got my druid to level 55. This is a pretty amazing feat for me considering how little time I spend playing WoW these days. But I’m all psyched for the expansion, so I’m sure I’ll go overboard on it for the next week or two and then it’ll …
January 15, 2007
I love hearing about the iPhone. I’ve seen pictures. It’s pretty slick. Looks really nice. Now throw Palm OS on there and then we’re talking. Sorry, but I’ve already got an ipod (well, two actually… no… three including the wife’s …
October 30, 2006
Well, I’ve had it. Spam is driving me nuts. My spamassassin/RBL lists/etc. setup was working really well for a long time but now more and more spam is getting through and it’s nothing if not pissing me off. Strange thing is, I get a lot more spam on my Mandriva email …
September 22, 2006
Well, it’s been over a week since I got my wisdom teeth yanked (last Wed, the 13th). That was just about the most fun I’ve ever had. First off they put me completely out (and I’ve never been under anisthetic before) which was… wierd. I didn’t have …
September 4, 2006
I’ve got a lot of trees in my backyard… specifically, about 6 really huge pine trees that I’d love to get rid of. Unfortunately, do to how they are and how the layout of my place is, I can’t pull them down easily… either they’ll go into power …
August 29, 2006
I’m a huge fantasy nut… one of my biggest hobbies is reading. I love reading fantasy books; I have for years. I own a few hundred fantasy books and buy at least 1-2 books a month. One author that I’ve always found interesting is David Eddings. He’s not …
July 4, 2006
This is kind of funny but as I was going through my CVE mails to figure out what needs to be patched, I came across CVE-2006-3244, with this reference: http://secunia.com/advisories/20838. Actually, Secunia has some nice statiscs (I should look at some other programs because …
June 3, 2006
Well, I’ve been on holidays for two weeks now, with just a little less than a week to go. Talk about busy vacations! That first week I spent a fair amount of time working on Annvix just because I don’t have time otherwise to really get in there and work on it, …
May 1, 2006
I like to call this entry “The problem with incentives for new clients” or, the title I really like, “Why companies screw over the companies who’ve supported them for years”. In this particular instance I’m talking about Bell ExpressVu, my …
April 24, 2006
Legacies are a good thing. Everyone wants to leave a legacy… in the most basic form it’s being a parent to a child who will carry on a physical legacy. Almost everyone has a legacy, will have a legacy, or is someone else’s legacy. There are, of course, other …
April 22, 2006
Good God… I’ve just deleted nearly 70 spam comments originating in the last 2 weeks. This is retarded. Makes me almost want to disable comments altogether, although, fortunately, I have it set that every single comment requires moderation. But still… what a …
April 19, 2006
Well, the one thing I love about being an independant consultant is that I get to do lots of different things, not just work on Mandriva stuff. One of the things I hate doing is Windows maintenance and it seems like there is a lot of that going around. Inevitably it’s the …
March 18, 2006
I think if the Egyptians had a plague of snow first instead of water turning into blood, those Israelites would have been let go right away. We’ve had about two feet of snow since midnight last night (might have been later but that’s when I went to bed and there was …
March 15, 2006
Well, only had to go down to the colo twice for this migration… =) Phoned the wife to check on it, reported all connections were good, so happily put stuff back, cleaned up the closet, etc. only to find when I got back home that I couldn’t connect anymore. I think …
March 8, 2006
This is a sweet little machine… 1U opteron 146 (2GHz). Only comes with 512MB stock, but I’m putting 2GB of RAM in it, and two 300GB SATA II drives (acting as a RAID1 mirror). Comes with two gigabit ethernet cards (forcedeth and tg3) and uses sata_nv. vdanen@newhades …
March 2, 2006
I found my new license with which I will license everything: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~avar/cvs/COPYING The DWTFYWWI license is my kind of license.
February 23, 2006
Last week when I had my little hard drive fiasco, and about 15 minutes after writing my blog entry, I realized I had lost my phone… a motorola v710. Figuring that it was either at the colo or at the one convenience store I had stopped at on my home, I went out at 1:30am to …
February 15, 2006
Funny the timing of these things. When I got my ANNVIX license plate it was within a day (if I remember correctly) of 1.1-RELEASE going out. Looks like it’s the same this time. Picked up the Annvix-mobile this afternoon after about 2.5 months of being in the shop since it …
February 7, 2006
Well, I’ve been playing WoW for a while now… since the summer of last year. I finally managed to get my druid up to level 40. Yeah, you young guys with nothing but homework are laughing at me now since it’s taken me so long to hit, but whatever… …
January 10, 2006
I find the computer industry, as pertaining to Microsoft “innovation” quite laughable. But the thing I find most amusing is that people buy this whole “we’re Microsoft and we innovate”. I don’t think Redmond has come out with an original idea …
January 5, 2006
It’s come to my attention that some folks seem to think I’m Theo de Raadt in disguise… that I’m somewhat volatile in email. Nope… I’m not Theo. But I do get irritated fairly easily… maybe I’ve got a hidden God-complex somewhere …
December 7, 2005
Well, the wife managed to mash the Annvixmobile yesterday morning… geez, dealing with a car accident is no fun. Insurance, police reports… waiting 4hrs for a tow truck (yeah, yesterday was a great day for accidents). Wasn’t her fault at all… and no big …
December 5, 2005
Well, this is my first machine moving to the new colo facility. Should be interesting. Been farting around all day getting ready for it.. it’s amazing how lazy you get when the server is in the next room. Now that it’s going to be 15 minutes away, I have to behave a …
November 29, 2005
This cracks me up. I hate ABBA. My wife likes ABBA… I can’t stand them. I find them… irritating. So it was quite amusing for me to hear a cover song by the band Diablo… they do a cover of “Dancing Queen”. This has got to be the funniest …
November 21, 2005
Good Lord… I just found out from the owner of the house next door (who was renting the house to her step-son and his friends for the last 2 years) that they’ve been growing pot in the basement and have been selling ecstasy and crystal meth out of the house. And one …
November 11, 2005
I swear… if another spitting venom thingamajobby kills me I will freak right out. Trying to kill this level 30 furbolg with a bunch of level 27-28 body guards is one thing… (I’m only level 27 myself) but for those fricking spiders to come wandering around and …
October 29, 2005
Here I figured with Annvix 1.1-RELEASE done I could get cracking on some WoW finally… been missing it and haven’t had much time to play. I did get a little bit in, then found a few problems with some packages (well, 3 isn’t so bad I guess) so I did that, then I …
October 29, 2005
Hmmm… looks like I built php-xml wrong and the rss feeds weren’t working so this is just a test to see if my rss reader picks things up now.
October 28, 2005
Well, I’ve always had Tux hanging around the rear-view mirror of my Jetta and when we got the Sportage I had to fight with the wife to (ahem) borrow the Tux that my daughter had… aquired… from my office and hang it from the rear-view mirror of the Sportage. Of …
September 10, 2005
Haven’t posted in this section for a bit… but I have to admit that ever since I gave World of Warcaft a go, I haven’t missed EverQuest or EverQuest2 at all. WoW gives me all the MMoRPG junkiness I need and although I don’t have time to play it as much as …
June 20, 2005
This may be of interest to some people, but it’s more of interest to me. Below are links to my current EQ2 characters. Yes, most of them are pretty sucky right now, but I’m working on it (it’s not like I have tonnes of spare time!). Right now my main is a druid …
June 20, 2005
Well, I ditched the old static-page iBlog software in order to use Serendipity, which is PHP-based, hackable, and moveable in that I can add entries wherever I am. iBlog had a stupid licensing thing so I could only use it on my desktop machine. Oh well. Anyways, I’m hoping …
May 9, 2005
Hopefully no one will have noticed, but earlier this weekend I moved the Annvix (and linsec.ca, mandriva.vmlinuz.ca, and other sites) over to an x86_64 system from an x86 system. With a spanky powerful build system now (dual Opteron), I had an extra athlon64 system no longer …
March 26, 2005
Spammers irritate the heck out of me. And due to the open nature of TWiki, they’ve begun to take advantage of it and start including little hidden spam links on the site. I’m sorry to generalize, but every one of these spammers have been Chinese. It’s very very …
March 21, 2005
The linsec.ca site has had a few changes and this is due primarily to the fact that chinese spammers are abusing the wiki. So, in the interests of keeping my sanity, I’ve decided to make all the articles on linsec.ca static meaning no more wiki…. This may make for a …