Heavy Networking Foo Foo

So, marxdarx and votania have both been getting frustrated at the computer situation in the household, to wit: there are two operable computers on the network, and one of them is mine, and one of them is technically marxdarx's but he's sharing.

So, I figured that with my new networking fu, I could get Neo on the network (Neo being my "new" Linux machine) (OK, he was new to me last year or the year before that, and he wasn't new then, being an old and sluggish Compaq with Red Hat in), as I'd failed to do before.

So, I exercised my Stuff-Lifting Fu, and soon had Neo ensconced in the living room. I'd thought that it would be a gradual exercise, involving the purchase of new cable, but I'd figured without my previous foresight in getting two cables for my room. It so happened that the green cable would do nicely, and soon Neo was all plugged in.

I turned him on, and it turned out that the hardware I'd selected for him was not up to snuff. Fine, whatevah, have your old nasty keyboard back, and stop giving me that fucking error.

So he started up, and I went into his network settings, and gave him Tigereye as DNS, default gateway, and the usual. I gave him his own IP, and we were settling down happily -- and http://mail.yahoo.com failed to be looked up. Same with Google. I grred, hsssed, started singing "I Need A Man" loudly and angrily, and tried pinging the gateway. [Dell.]

Mangled. Mangled, mutilated, and just plain bad. 54% loss. 46% loss. Mangled packets coming back. Bad. Bad, bad packets. Timing out getting to LJ. Not even trying to go to http://www.herald.co.uk. Bad, evil, mangled, munched, dropped packets. It didn't work better pinging the other computer on the network. It didn't work better with the other computer on the network unplugged. Cable and switch worked just fine on Tigereye.

I started singing again. This time, the song mutated some, and then a lot, until I got it into the final form that I was just now warbling in the shower: "Little NIC eth0, plugged into the network, picking up the packets, and dropping them on their heads. DOWN came the root fairy, and SHE said: 'Little NIC eth0, I don't want to see you picking up the packets and dropping them on their heads. I'll give you THREE CHANCES...' ..."

Tech support (crisavec, eng1ne, and I) decided that it was most likely the NIC, as the bastard had never ever ever written a song about Sibbie worked on the network.

So.

I'll be having some fun shortly... like, not today. Fortunately, we have another NIC lying around, though whether it'll work in there or not is another story entirely. Definitely not plug & play, and the source of the computer is ... not available for contact.

This should be interesting. I have g33x0rs on my friends list, though, so I imagine I'll be getting a surfeit of help. :-D

Rainy day happies!

Wednesdays are good days. First I have Career Development, which seems to be an excuse to tell the geeks to develop their people skills. Then I have History, which is much lecture. After that, COBOL lab.

I think Wednesdays are going to be my recovery days.

I never want the Little Fayoumis to sit through lab with me again. More later on the Mother/Geek interrupt conflict.

It started raining late last night; I opened the patio door while I baked the chicken. I left my window open all night, as is my wont in the winter months (as much as Arizona does winter). I woke up on time (versus too early), as the usual early-morning sounds were drowned in the rain.

Later, after I get home, I'll see if someone's home.

Things I just don't grok --

How can two people share a screen name and/or e-mail address, without having one of their own?

I just don't get it.

I just do not.

FLASH!

http://www.8legged.com/DeepFriedLive/Archive.html

Animated octopus. Kitchen. Carnage. Cooking lessons.

I love Dorothy Parker.

"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown with great force."

I could apply that to a few...

Cute kid bits

"Did you know that George Washington died? He died into a country that had a America flag."

Uh-huh.

War

I just had to explain war to Little Fayoumis. I explained it in terms he could understand.

He knows how scary it is when grown-ups fight and he knows how scary it is when someone is shooting. I told him that war was that scary. He said that he could be a grownup. I told him that war is still that scary.

I showed him on the map where we are. I showed him where Iraq is. I said that over there, there are grown-ups being mad at each other and fighting and shooting and using bombs, and over there, there are people getting hurt -- like when he scrapes his foot and he cries, only when he cries it hurts for a couple minutes. There, there are people who cry for hours.

And I told him that how war happens is when people are both saying "I'm right and you're wrong!" and they can't say, "Well, maybe I was wrong," or "Maybe we're both right." And how war really boils down to not being able to be nice.

There are further complexities, of course. I'll have to explain later that some things are worse than war, and that the only good reason to have a war is to make people stop doing things that are worse than war. ...Though I'm not sure I'm up to explaining "worse than war" just yet.

Snow?

Evidently the snow in Anchorage is all my fault.

Just something about that chicken...

Progress, if you can call it that...

LJ as coping mechanism, and the recovery process; drama on large friends lists; powers for awesome

The reason that turmoils in the Force over at shadesong (meaning also shadesong_nexus as well as 'Song herself) often mean me posting long, rambling, philosophical, and/or indignant things is because she reminds me no little of myself. Not because my childhood was hellish (it wasn't), but because we're both survivors with a penchant for text-based introspective recovery process, and we do it in public. Also, I have a friends list creeping up on as prolific/diverse/large (she's got 641 friends-of; I have 201 friends-of at the moment (it was 202 a bit ago, and 199 a bit before that); I recall when she was boggling over having 200 people reading her). So, I deal with no few of the issues she deals with, though sometimes on a smaller scale, or a less intense scale.

shadesong and I both have an uncommon twist on a relatively common coping mechanism: we write in order to process things, but for many reasons, instead of keeping our journals on paper, or private or friends-only, we leave large chunks of them on the internet, public, where anyone with the access and inclination can read them.

I was finally able to articulate to myself one of my primary reasons for doing so.

I grew up alternately believing that either everyone thought like me, or no one did. I started out thinking, as so many of us do, that of course everyone thought like me: if they understood me, they had to know what I meant, and how I'd gotten there. More slowly than some, I came to realize that I was not just individual (I'd gotten that bit early), but different. Not everyone remembers things like I do. Not everyone thinks so fast. Not everyone can translate matters of religion between a Mormon fundie and a Good Little Pagan Girl and leave everyone satisfied with the translation.

I don't deal with things the same way that most other people do. Not everyone else is as highly self-aware as I am; not everyone started their introspection as soon as or before age 10. Not everyone kept records of what they were up to inside themselves.

When I have something I have to figure out, the first thing I do is get down and write about it. I can write pages upon pages, detailing the event(s), if any, and every possible corner and wrinkle of my thoughts, associations, and reactions that I can figure out. Then I scoop up the details I wasn't able to think of on the first iteration, and sop out or reiterate reactions. After all that's done, I start looking at the impact on my life -- is this going to change anything with my important relationships? How does it work into my schedule? I re-read the past material and see if anything new hops into view, then I record that as well, and note down any similarities to situations others are having, or similarities to fiction. I speculate on how it's going to turn out. I'm reminded of a past situation that had some similar elements, and I search back through my journal for the exhaustive detailing that happened there, and I come up with a comparison, and I share any of the insights I may have had on the past situation in the interim -- if there was any resolution, or anything else that comes to mind. I chatter with friends, and I just keep going over and over things, recording the results at every step in my journal. I'm paranoid like hell that I'm going to lose my mind and forget things; the level of forgetfulness that comes with having an ordinary mind is just something that I cannot cope with. If I feel myself grasping for memories, I turn up the volume on the posting.

I post in detail with frequency for myself. I leave things public not so much because I want the attention, but because I don't mind it, and I think that if there is any way that what I have to say about my own experiences might help others, then I want it to be accessible to them without my having to research them and trust in them enough to admit them to my confidence and my friends list. I don't usually court attention, but I bask in it if it's given to me from a source I don't mind attention from (and there are enough good people out there that the occasional cracknut is dismissable) and I don't have to go out of my way to get it. There are certainly things that I post for audience -- this is, in part, one of them -- but my minutiae are left as-is because I am a Nobody who is Public -- like a Frog. I might like to be a Somebody, but I fear it would take too much of my time, and make it necessary for me to pay attention to people I don't feel like spending my time on, and that I don't think that I would like.

There are lots of things I pay attention to, and lots of things that I don't consider worth my attention. I consider my friends worth my attention, of course, and I consider ways to make people's lives better worth my attention, and there are things that amuse me...

I am genuinely curious as to why there's so little in the way of drama on and associated with my friends list. I mean, I have people with stuff happening in their lives -- unhappy romantic situations, people not getting along with other people, kid moments, medical fun, parental shit, biological hazards... and yet, I fail to have anonymous assholes making pricks of themselves in my journal to the point where I have to disable anonymous commenting on a regular basis, and I doubt that the people who have fallen off my friends list over the years have clubbed together in an "I hate azurelunatic and everything she stands for" effort.

Part of that is probably due to not starting out with enemies in the first place. I've made an effort to avoid BJ, we've avoided letting the biological hazards know that LJ even exists (my aunts and grandmother and sister (who are not hazards) know about this, but certain other people's relatives, like That Woman, are kept away from here), and I don't go into other people's journals or communities on purpose to stir up trouble. For the most part.

I know I've alienated people. My grammar-bitch posts drove one couple off my friends list, and I make no secret of thinking that anyone who mangles the English language in any number of ways that I'm peeved about sounds like an idiot, and those who choose to do so on purpose are sounding like morons, not sounding cute. And when garnetdagger attacks, she doesn't pull her punches, or her gut-stabs.

But I don't know what my magic secret against turning into a nexus of drama is. Anyone who has insight, do feel free to share it, because I'm probably too close to the issue to see the glaringly obvious.

I have surmised that there's a deeper well of he said/she said going on over there than I really want to touch with the proverbial Shrimpy-onna-stick. I know from my experience in other communities (lmbujold's e-mail component) that when there are two people faced off furiously against each other for reasons that no one else can quite discern, when they're having their battle loudly and furiously in a public forum, people will take sides, and people will defend the friends who have never done ill to them regardless of how they may be behaving to others in public or in private because they believe (wrong or right) that their friend would never champion an unjust cause. And when it comes down to quibbling over details and flaming and communicating in non-public channels and then flaming about it some more, then there's really not much to do about it but have quiet words with all of the participants and call pizza on it as loudly as possible. But the gulf between the combatants will rarely, if ever, heal...

My power is mediator, communicator, airer of issues, gatherer of your side/my side/truth.

I have reason to believe that I discourage drama. I haven't the foggiest how I do it, just that it tends to avoid me. If I wanted to court drama, what would I do? If I wanted to discourage it further, what would I do? If I'm doing it so well now, what am I doing?

Food, kid

I've been craving rice for a while. Tonight I was planning to make something featuring the leftover chicken from yesterday. However, since the chicken vanished in the interim, I made something else.

I started off with the rice, and then tossed chopped celery and ground turkey into the frying pan with thin-sliced, minced onions. Oil, rice vinegar, and some random spices came next, then a large can of cream-of-mushroom soup and a generous gloop from the current bottle of alfredo sauce. I cooked it for some time, until it was just the right consistency and the rice was done. I then teased the Little Fayoumis by having a large bowlful for myself, and telling him that he couldn't have any until he was done with his carrots. When he finished the last carrot, I gave him a portion with extra cheese (he loves cheese on rice), playing up the presence of cheese in the sauce, and downplaying the presence of onions and mushrooms.

He ate a bite, then quickly vacuumed the rest.

*boggle* He's usually very picky about new foods. But he evidently liked it, because he was wondering (positively) what that smell was when it was cooking, and said he liked it after the first bite -- and when a bit fell on his shorts, he scooped it up and shoved it in his mouth rather than leaving it disdainfully on the side of his plate.

I'm not going to argue. Not. Not. I just wish I could duplicate the results. I suspect that my not hinting that there was a possibility that he might not like it contributed.


Also, he likes listening to The Alan Parsons Project, and requested that I play the CD again when it stopped. Go, kid with good taste!

(oh, and.)

Did I mention that I'm inconsistent with myself about the grammar/usage issues? I use phrases like "t3h r0x0r", but I don't consider them subject to my rules, because they are imported words from another language/dialect, and therefore exempt. I don't speak that way normally; I borrow the phrase.

Characters (meta for NNWM novel)

Alia: our heroine
Drew: Alia's roommate. Hugs too hard. I think blond.
( Read more... )

Surreal:

Thanks for playing, people.

Hopefully, that'll be enough to rebind my brain when needed next. Thanks again. :)

There are some things that I just don't share.

[Poll #204185]

Why E2 and I don't get on

I was, what, 16? and pyrogenic told me I should come join E2.

I tried contributing, once I thought I had something to say. I was new, and I was trying really hard -- and my attempted node went POOF before I could reload to see how it had gone.

I tried a few times (like, once) more, and gave it up as a bad job. It was a closed, elite community, and n00bs weren't welcome.

I don't stay where I'm not welcome, so I didn't hang out there anymore.