Insert Funny Name Here

Jimmy Carl Black, the original drummer for Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, died on November 1st. He actually brought Zappa into the band that became the Mothers, and played with the group until 1969, when Zappa disbanded the original Mothers. If you have it, dig out your old copy of “Freak Out!” and listen to the world’s first concept album again, in honor of one of the men who made it possible. If you don’t have it, go get it. You need an education.

I use SSH all the time for general admin work, and for most things, PuTTY (or Plink, if I don’t need to bother with a terminal) gets the job done with no muss and no fuss. But recently, I needed a solution to replace a VPN from our colo to our HQ, and decided I could get the job done with an SSH tunnel. However, since the tunnel needs to be up 24/7, just using PuTTY or Plink wouldn’t do the trick. That’s where MyEnTunnel comes in. MyEnTunnel is a wrapper for Plink that monitors the SSH connection and reestablishes it when it times out. It’s written in Delphi by someone who refers to himself as “Nemesis][” and describes himself as “old soul in this world of techno babble“. The product works well, is easy to understand and set up, and actually outdoes PuTTY’s own interface for managing tunnels. The only downside is that it doesn’t run as a service, but my particular needs were on a box that is already running logged-in 24/7 anyway, so that didn’t matter to me. If you need a high-quality easy to use SSH Tunnel Manager, definitely take a look at MyEnTunnel.

I’ve been piddling around with the Intrepid Ibex beta on an Acer Aspire 5735 laptop that I picked up from Best Buy for a couple of weeks ago. I’ve got VirtualBox installed, and I’m running OpenSolaris, AsteriskNOW!, and Slax 6.0.7 simultaneously in virtual machines. I was setting up NAT port forwarding so that I could use certain services on the virtual hosts from my MacBook Pro over the wireless LAN when it hit me that for my first “real” job in IT about twelve years ago, I was a sysadmin in charge of (among other things) a couple of SPARCstations and a Nortel Meridian phone switch. Those boxes cost multiple tens of thousands of dollars when they were purchased way back when (although they were getting a bit long in the tooth by the time they got to me), and now I am able to set up essentially the same services in a completely virtualized environment on a computer that cost less that $400. In fact, if I wanted to, I could use a service like EC2 and skip the hardware altogether. It’s scary what you can do with very little money from a technology standpoint these days.

New Rule: You must be at least this tall to fire the submachine gun.

The only reason to wish for a McCain victory in November is to see more of Tina Fey as Sarah Palin.

Putting a blue screen behind McCain = FAIL

The Republicans were for Bristol Palin’s privacy before they were against it:

On Wednesday morning, a teenage boy from Alaska stood in a receiving line on an airport tarmac, being glad-handed by the potential next president of the United States — because he got his girlfriend pregnant.

The sheer gall of these people amazes me.

Stryde Hax, a new blog popped up yesterday claiming to show definitive proof that one of the gold-medal winning Chinese gymnasts is much younger than her officially claimed age of 16. Young enough that it’s actually against the rules for her to be competing in the Olympic Games. The blogger, known as “Stryde” searched Google for Excel documents on Chinese websites listing the name “He Kexin” and the date “January 1, 1994″. Google had a single hit, but the underlying document no longer existed on the Chinese government servers that Google had previously indexed it on, and the cache of the document had expired. However, Stryde hit pay dirt on the Chinese search engine Baidu, turning up two registration spreadsheets that listed He’s name with the 1/1/1994 birthdate.
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Actually, I was just in Philadelphia this past weekend, for a little bit of sightseeing, some fine-dining, and a show. My wife is currently working on a project that puts her in Pennsylvania for at least a part of most weeks, so we’ve been trying to arrange a trip where I would join her up there and we’d spend the weekend exploring the city. We found the perfect excuse when we saw a show at the Electric Factory with Andrew Bird and the New Pornographers on the same bill. Mona loves Andrew Bird, and I am a huge New Pornographers fan, so this was a great excuse to get on a plane. Philly rolled out the welcome mat for us - great weather, beautiful sunny days, and early fall temperatures during what should have been the dog days of summer. More on our Philadelphia adventure after the jump!
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Ever since my weight loss stalled at the beginning of the year, I’ve drifted away from this blog as a tool to track my weight loss journey, and used it more as a scratchpad for whatever I was thinking about at the time. As a result, I’ve regained almost half the weight I lost, and I’m running slam up against the 400 pound mark, which I thought I would never see again. I’m drawing a line in the sand, and as of tonight, the fridge is stocked with the food I ate when I started losing weight back in October. This is my life we’re talking about here, it shouldn’t be too much trouble to eat right. I’m going to use this diary entry to go over some of the bad habits I’ve picked up over the past few months, and how I plan to correct them.
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