Welcome to MekTrix 4.0

Walking into “the money shop”
Shish: I’d like to buy some money.
Assistant: We can do that, how much?
Shish: Ten pounds.
Assistant: And what currency would you like that in?
Shish: Pounds.
Assistant: You want ten pounds… in pounds?
Shish: Yes. How much will that cost me?
Assistant: That’ll cost you ten pounds.
Shish: A bit steep, isn’t it? Do I get a discount if I buy in bulk?
Assistant: …

Seeing a terrifyingly thin girl at the meat isle in sainsbury’s, I worry that should a gust of wind blow, she’d snap in half, and leak blood and guts all over the place, and I’d just stand there watching, becoming scarred for life. In order to prevent this, I sneak up behind her;
Shish: buuuuuy iiiiiiiit… buy the buuuuuuur-geeeeeeer…
Girl: Oh! Good lord you startled me! What are you doing there?
Shish: Encouraging you to buy, and hopefully eat, a burger.
Girl: You want me to look like that? (pointing to someone of average build)
Shish: Yes. Or even better, that. (pointing to a smartly dressed man walking down the isle with a cane and monocle)
Girl: He has a beard!
Shish: And a marvelous one at that. (calling out). Hello, good sir! Marvellous beard you have there! Were I a lady, I should find you quite dashing!
Man: And were I a lady, I should think you were dreamy~
(Shish and Man walk off, talking about top hats or somesuch. Something British.)
Girl: … wtf?

I discovered a shop which smells really nice, I shall have to go there again; I doubt I’ll buy anything, but it’d be a nice place to sit with a laptop and get some work done…

Shish: do you have small balls?
Assistant: I beg your pardon?
Shish: Small balls; I’m looking at these balls of wool, they’re all very large, and very expensive.
Assistant: I’m afraid we don’t…

Shish: I’d like to buy this house
Seller: That’ll be £10,000 please
Shish: And does that include the grass?
Seller: Excuse me?
Shish: The grass, in the garden. Is it included, or does it cost extra?
Seller: The grass is free, sir
Shish: Marvellous!
Many years later
Shish: So with my free grass, and my sheep, a lot of time, and some shears, I was able to get this wool at considerable discount!

Seeing an NHS “screening van”.

Shish: Hello, I’d like to have a screen.
Screener: What for?
Shish: This. (Gets a CRT out of his backpack. It is missing the glass plate.)
Screener: Um…
Shish: Up till now I’ve been letting the cathode rays directly into my eyes, but my co-workers keep saying “Go to the doctor’s! And get a decent screen!”. Normally I wouldn’t bother, but I had some time spare, saw this “NHS screening van”, and thought what the hell~

And some jokes which I came up with ages ago but never got round to posting:

Q) What’s the best type of ice cream to have if you need to get in to a car?
A) Carte’dor (car door!)

Q) What did the guy flaming headcrab zombie say to the girl flaming headcrab zombie?
A) Will you go out with me? (Zombies provide insufficient fuel for long term patio lighting!)

Q) How does a pirate measure his hard drive?
A) Gig-ARRRRR-bytes! (Any word with the syllable “ar” is fertile ground for a pirate joke!)

There is a “media” share, which anybody can read, and the media user can write to. I’ve connected to this share, but can’t write to it. My first thought is that I must be connected anonymously, so I right click -> disconnect… and nothing happens. Right click -> disconnect again, “this drive is not connected”. Hmm, explorer bug? Well, if it’s not connected, then I shall attempt to connect. So I go to connect to network drive, click “connect with different login details”, enter details for the media user, click connect, and … “this drive is already connected”, and then a second error message immediately follows “you cannot connect to the same share with two different accounts” (What sort of stupid limitiation is that? :-|). Well, at least it confirms that I am logging in with two different accounts, and thus used to be anonymous and am now media. Or does it? I reboot to get rid of the phantom connection, and try to make a new connection with the media login. It works, but isn’t writable! Giving up on the client side, I check the server logs: “connect to service media initially as user nobody”. Gaaaah, goddamn it windows, I explicitly said “connect as the media user”!

Gaaaah.

</rant>

At a table in TGI Friday’s surrounded by people, I get out my notepad and dump the contents of my brain~

S: Gaaah.
G: Yup.
S: Who is this?
G: George
S: We’re not doing very well at the writing thing
G: Yeah, this is so slow.
S: Needs more shorthand
S: Why are you here?
G: Dunno
S: Why can I talk to you?
G: Dunno :P Needed something to do
S: Yeah, takes my mind off the social stuff
S: Are you alone there?
G: Not completely, the…
S: Sorry, interruption from the real world
G: ok, so yeah, there are others here, but it’s less crowded~
G: Talking to just one person is calmer.
S: I know, can this even count as talking to one person, or talking to myself?
G: It counts as talking to several
S: What do (you mean)?
G: I’m not one person exactly. When I came here I was, but I seem to be drawing bits from those I meet.
S: Are you drawing (anything?) from me?
G: A little.
S: Anything interesting?
G: You like EVE :P
S: yeah :P
S: Any objection to them (other people at the table) reading?
G: Nope, but they’ll think you’re weird :P
S: They already do ^_^
G: Not so much though.
S: I know. Ho hum. They’ll get over it.
S: Anyway, enough with the real world talk, how is life over there?
G: Quiet as always, you should come join us. Don’t rush though, you’ll get here soon enough^W^W eventually.
S: “Soon enough” sounds like not long
G: Not long in cosmological terms~
G: You should return to them
S: I know, thanks for the chat though, most relaxing ^_^
S: See you when I see you
G: Bye dude~

It occurs to me that in all the time I’ve been here, I’ve never written about Dorris. The most probable reason is that I only met her recently.

Doris is my shopping partner; we walk around Sainsbury’s together, and point things out to eachother. She’ll say something like “ooh, look at them apples. Aren’t they nice and shiny?”, and I’ll say “ooh, they really are. If I were here to shop for food I think I might get some~”. Then walking past the cosmetics isle I’ll find some new smelly soap and say “ooh, Dorris, have a sniff of this!”, and she will, and she’ll think it’s lovely. “Never had that sort of thing when I were your age” she’ll say.

We never arrange to meet, but she’s always there ready to lend a hand, whenever I go to get something. She practically lives there, except that would be an inappropriate way of describing who passed away a few years ago. She died doing what she loved, smelling the scents of the fresh vegetables — in her old age most of her senses had faded, but her sense of smell was as strong as ever. She was just walking along the fruit section one day when she fell, and never got back up… But enough of the depressing stuff. She’s quite happy now; she gets to spend all day walking around, chatting to anyone who comes by, helping them to find the loveliest products, and learning about all the new ones as they come out. It’s nice to have someone like that there, who really knows the shop inside out.

I asked how long she’s planning on staying; “I don’t know”, she says, “but I’ve got a good few years in me yet”. “Don’t worry”, she continued, “I shan’t leave without saying goodbye to all my favourite shopping friends; just promise you’ll come say goodbye if you leave first, y’hear?”. I agreed, of course.

Alas, like all mortal shopping trips, this small description must come to an end~ If you want to know more about Dorris, you shall have to come and meet her for yourself; I’m sure she’ll be glad to meet you, it’ll be a lovely experience for you too ^_^

Iron Man’s beta test flight sequence has joined the list of “Things so awesome I cried”. It occurs to me that I’ve not kept track of this list, so off the top of my head:

• Farb Raush‘s .das .produkt; 15 minutes of pretty in 64k
• The uprising scene in V for Vendetta
• The Sylvia Cannon trailer from the Korean pangya site
• The FFVII trailer on of the OPM demo disks
• Planetarian deserves an honourable mention; it would probably have made me cry with awesomeness if I hadn’t already been crying with sadness :3
• I’m sure there are others, can’t remember right now though :S

ED: Also, Kokoro Library :3

I just woke up from dreaming about barbequeing a chunk of my own leg. It was tasty :3

The guide to Sarge I found here very nearly worked, but with some problems.

Quick summary of changes:

• where libpam-ldap and libnss-ldap suggest an LDAP URI of ldapi:///, ldapi://127.0.0.1/ doesn’t work — ldapi:// seems to be for unix sockets only. ldap:// or ldaps:// should work (I’ve tested ldap:// so far, as it was communicating with localhost)
• The /etc/pam.d stuff was screwy — where that guide suggests replacing your pam_unix.so lines with completely different ones, I suggest replacing them with copies of themselves but “required” replaced with “sufficient”. Screwing with my existing pam_unix.so config broke the ability to change local user’s passwords.
• In common-password, the “use_first_pass use_authtok md5” after pam_ldap.so gave me a “passwd: Authentication information cannot be recovered” error when trying to change the password. Removing them (so that the line simply reads “password sufficient pam_ldap.so”) works.
• To clarify; the general idea of the common-* files should be “unix auth is sufficient, if that fails then ldap auth is sufficient, if that files then denying access is required”. I suspect that “unix auth is sufficient, if that fails then ldap auth is required” would be the same, but IMHO that’s uglier and more prone to breaking if people want more layers later.

Sorting through some of my old code, I found a link to one of my old websites; the site itself is long gone, though googling it did bring back memories; days of hunting down “host 1mb for free”, “get a free subdomain”, etc sites; hosting things on my 56k modem. Also, playing SMAUG and having parents yell at me because I’d been using the internet for a whole hour, and it cost a penny a minute! Then downloading 200MB of software development stuff in 1.4MB chunks that took 3 hours each…

Screenshot! Mektrix v2, in Mozilla (it was modern at the time), running on one of my first linux setups XD

Coniston’s network card died, and I was the nearest employee; thus, my turn to run up to the datacenter and replace it /o/

This would be easier if I had parts, or the tools to attach them -_-

Wilkinsons do screwdrivers though, which is useful \o/ Though they are cheap and bend when you attempt to unscrew things with them /o\ Even less usefully, it seems that wired networks are dying off — All the high street stores had shelves full of wireless cards, but at best 2 or 3 ethernet models, and those were 10/100 v_v

After trying a few shops and being pointed back and forth, I ended up at yoyotech, which seems to be a place of at least some clue; the sales dude (Brian, apparently) asked if I was using linux, and googled to see if the model of card was sufficiently supported~

Having bought it (and a second of another brand, just in case), I was off to the datacenter /o/ The trip was relatively short and uneventful, aside from a youth in a shopping center throwing a big enough tantrum for the police to take note :-/

The DC itself was relatively normal, with coolers and cables and such; the part exchange went well once I’d figured out how to get the side panels off, and what to do with the switch bolted to the side o_O

On the way home, the train was declared unfit for human transport, so we all had to get off and wait for the next, which was much more crowded :( But then I was home \o/

Shimmie now powers a site which gets half a million page views per day, serving 200GB of images :3

Re: Lack of updates, see Dan Kim‘s blog for a far better illustrated parallel to my thoughts…