Zack of All Trades » Lionel

Tradenotes

Zack Williams — Mon, 19 May 2008 17:06:12 +0000

Belief in Aliens is now Vatican Approved.

Head swapping fun over at Manbabies

Lionel want a half dozen of these to go, with a selection of dipping sauces.

I logged into a server that I haven’t done work on in a while, but gets weekly use:

bash-2.05b# uptime
 6:17AM  up 1645 days,  2:05, 2 users, load averages: 1.13, 0.50, 0.24

Over 4.5 years without a reboot. That’s some good software.

This story is sad, but very poignant. I wish I had posted a link to it on Mothers Day.

Tradenotes

Zack Williams — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 15:21:45 +0000

Pictures of an entire factory under camo netting during WWII.

My ancient Toshiba cable modem (DOCSIS 1.0!) has been acting strangely (occasionally having 30-80% packet loss, etc.) for a few months now, and gave up the ghost about a week ago. I kind of knew this was coming – when we moved into this house 2 years ago, the only reason the Cox guys were willing to hook it up to the cable line was that it’s serial number was still in their system.

I bought a replacement (Linksys BEFCMU10 ver. 4 – DOCSIS 2.0) a short while ago. It works fine, but the neatest thing about it is when connected to fast sites downloading big files (system updates, video, etc.), I’m getting > 1.2MiB/s. I think this has something to do with Cox’s “Speed Boost” feature which ups the data rate for a short time under certain conditions. One other benefit is that the new modem has a diagnostic page up at http://192.168.100.1, which may prove useful sometime in the future.

Note to self – don’t start watching cute cat and/or rabbit videos online unless you have hours and hours to spend…

Speaking of cats, Lionel managed to con me and Amy into feeding him twice this morning, in flagrant disregard for his diet (he’s around 18-20 pounds, which is too much for a cat his size). Often, he’ll bug both of us for food indepenently when we come home in the evening, as in “oh, you’re home now, feed me!” even if he’s just been fed. We switched to diet food that you can only get from the vet, and that seems to be working – he doesn’t bug us about eating as much as usual.

Cat food flavors, as designed by cats

Zack Williams — Tue, 15 May 2007 14:22:27 +0000

Amy and I often joke that most Cat food flavors are given names that sound good to humans… but what if cats designed their own food flavors? I submit these as examples:

“Beef and Beaver”

“Rat cutlets with fur”

“Wild Weasel cutlet in gravy”

“Raw bits of miscellaneous entrails”

“Rhesus Monkey” (apologies to Get Fuzzy)

Picture update

Zack Williams — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 19:40:04 +0000

Ah, holidays. I’m off for today, and catching up on some stuff around the house, like paying bills and organizing.

I finally got around to posting a bunch of pictures on Flickr that I’ve been meaning to… Some highlights:

Sunset a few nights ago

Lionel eating watermelon

Amy climbing a tree (in Colorado)

The reason I didn’t post these earlier is that my Flickr account is tied to my Yahoo ID, and for some reason, my Yahoo password stopped working, and their automated system wouldn’t send a new password to the alternate email I specified. I tried their automated online system, but got caught in autoreply hell, so I finally tried calling a customer service number, got transfered, and finally got the phone number (408) 349-1572, which is Yahoo Customer Service. A nice guy named Ronald (hopefully not the burger salesman with the yellow suit and big red shoes) straightened things out, and I got a replacement password.

Other than that, things have been going pretty well. My dad is taking Amy and I along to a meeting in eastern Canada in a few days, so I’ll probably be posting a bunch of pictures and stuff about that trip soon.

Feeling ughhy.

Zack Williams — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 14:46:22 +0000

I was badly sick yesterday. I have no idea why, although I suspect it may have been the food I ate the previous day at Amy’s parents (fortunately, this theory doesn’t stand up well, as nobody else who ate it feels ill). Usually, when I’m sick, I’m somewhat functional. Yesterday, I wasn’t. I hate stomach/intestinal pain – it’s probably the worst out there.

I had a haircut in the morning, and was able to go to that without much trouble (even though I felt like crud), but when I got back, it just got worse. I think I slept for about 6 hours, and Lionel was very sweet and cuddled with me a good portion of that time.

When Amy got home (after being stuck in traffic due to a police roadblock near Miracle Mile), I felt a little bit better. She’s been bringing over movies and other stuff that’s at her parents place, and so we watched Little Women, which actually was quite good, despite being distracted by Christian Bale who I now completely associate with being Batman.

I’m feeling a bit better now, and if the headache goes away (I’m probably just dehydrated), I think today will actually be functional.

Uuugghhh…

Zack Williams — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 21:46:37 +0000

I caught a cold or something, and as a result I feel horrible – yesterday it was just a sore throat, but now it’s the full on nasal congestion and general gross feeling. I’ve spent a good deal of the day in bed or doing stuff around the house that needed to be done (like put away the tea and hot chocolate supplies that has been in a cardboard box since the move). I almost forgot to take the trash out, which would have been bad as it was full because the “sanitation engineers” half emptied our can last week for some reason.

Lionel has gotten in the habit of clawing the back of my leg when I’m in the kitchen. I think this is because we feed him human food too often. Today he did it when I was holding a mug of very hot tea and I almost spilled it on him.

Amy and I bought some new dance mats as our Christmas present to each other. They look OK, but the foam insert in them comes in 6 pieces, so it isn’t as durable as the 3 piece foam mats that I had before. I think I’m going to do a swaparoo on them to see if it helps, or put packing tape on where the mats connect together to help stiffen them. More on this in a future post.

I’m going back to bed…