My Mind Laid Bare

Isn’t it amazing? How life just always seems to confirm your worst suspicions, even when you hope for the best. Today has left me feeling bitter, tired, disappointed and incredibly hurt. It’s also left me with a certain sense of inevitability that I had been putting aside (I thought) for the good of those closest to me. It now appears that an attempt at a power trip has taught me that I was wrong to hope for the best from people, and that instead I should just accept that some things I do not and will never have power over, and that I need to protect those things that I do. Read more »

OK… second post.

Well, I just got it confirmed and totally official; I’m going to VMworld this year in San Francisco! Woohoo! I can’t wait. I had a fantastic time last year meeting up with old friends and making new friends while I was at it. It was a truly incredible experience, at least in part because VMware are quite open to allowing competing vendors in.

There was a recent brouhaha on the blogosphere about the exhibitor agreement containing language that seemed to indicate that VMware was preventing competitors showing off their products… but it appears that was mostly generated by someone else trying to drive traffic to their own site. Figures;

1. Create a virtualization blog
2. Post deliberately inflammatory article
3. ???
4. Profit!

Hmm, now I know where I’m going wrong!!! Woohoo! Time to drive some traffic to my site with an inflammatory article about something no-one reads! Like newspapers

Life has taken loads of turns of late… for the better, and the worse. Still, I’m surviving, getting by and am actually still alive.

To who’ve emailed lately wondering if I’m OK… thank you… I am. It’s just been rather hectic and trying to respond to all the people who’ve been in touch is tough… but I WILL be in touch with all of you. I’m hoping to add much more to this blog going forward… and yes, I know I’ve said that before… but this time I’m serious.

More content coming up… stay tuned…

Dude!

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/07/star-trek-exper.html

Seems the Star Trek Experience is closing in Las Vegas. I guess when I go out there for VMworld in September I’d better make a point to go see!

Thanks, Jallarzie for the recommendation… bummer it’s closing!

Well, another blog entry… though sometimes I do wonder if anyone reads my prattlings.

I’ve been depressed lately. That’s part of the reason I’ve not been blogging. That and the fact that in order to combat the depression I’ve not been home much. As a result, since I don’t get online from work since I actually now have a job that requires me to actually DO some work (unlike my last one in which I was busy but could do the job blindfold).. well… that leads to blog stagnation. And that’s not a bad thing… it just means that anyone who DOES pay attention is not getting many updates
So what’s going on that’s making me depressed? Oh… the usual. Money worries, economy worries… plus there’s then the feeling that I’m suddenly surplus to requirements at home and not really needed any more. I know that’s not a fair thing to say, but it’s the way I’ve felt recently.

There’s other stuff of course… and those who know me best already know what they are. But the thing that kills me is that I have every reason to be happy, but I’m not. Anyone else feel like that occasionally? Sad thing is, I really don’t know what to do to fix it.

So for now, I’ll just blog occasionally when I have stuff to say. I just installed Flock on my Mac to manage my blogs and social networking stuff… awesome browser tuned to a VERY specific purpose and I think I like it. I think I’m going to use it to see if it’ll help me keep up with my Facebook, LinkedIn and other social network profiles that I have scattered all over the place.

Until next time… ciao… and email at the usual place if you wanna chat or give me feedback. Or just comment

[Cross posted from the Subaru SVX Club Site, because it’s just cool!]  Read more »

Yay! OK… for those who’ve followed my automotive adventures to-date, my car blew a head gasket back in January. Because of finances and stuff I had to hold off on repairing it because I already had three vehicles and didn’t feel fixing my E46 was worthwhile. For those who don’t know, an E46 is the internal BMW code for the model of 3 series I have; See here for more information if you’re interested in learning more about the E46.

Well, I got the money together and in March I put my car in the shop to replace the head gasket, seals and stuff. 

Fast forward… four weeks. Ack! Yesterday morning I got the call that my car was finally ready. I’m not happy about the time it’s taken to get it all back, but things are definitely better now that I can go get my car

Read more »

Well, OK… maybe not. Maybe I was just hacked by someone with a script and a desire to build his bot army. Either way, this site was hacked over the weekend. Yay. I think.

Apparently, there’s a bug in Coppermine (which I happen to use to host the picture gallery) which is currently allowing a scripted hack. This hack inserts an invisible frame into every page that hits some script, the usage of which is not known by me since it was down when I got hacked! I found a lot of good info here about exactly the hack I was hit with, but not much about what it actually does.

So, what did this mean for me? Well, it means those people I promised last week I’d send them email… well, I will this week… promise! I spent a good chunk of yesterday (Sunday) going through my site, securing it and cleaning up hacked pages. It affected every HTML and PHP file that was owned by the user that Apache runs under. Easily fixed; remove write access to the Apache user to all its files… it doesn’t need to write anything anyway!

Unfortunately, at the moment the fixed version of Coppermine (1.4.16) is not yet available through Gentoo’s Portage… so I must either download it myself or wait until it hits Portage. I think I’ll wait; keeps my system nice and clean and easy to work with

So, if you see anything amiss on the site, PLEASE let me know. I didn’t feel like cleaning up Wordpress or Coppermine, so I reinstalled them both on the site then secured them. So things may not be exactly as they were last week… but it ought to be close enough.

And if you visited my site after 9:19am on Saturday morning, make sure you scan for viruses and/or trojans! That’s when the hack hit.

That’s all for this update. End of line.

In part, to track my vehicles and the changes they go through, I’ve added a new “Automotive” category. That way, you can also ignore my posts if you don’t really care Read more if you’re interested, otherwise move along… nothing to see here. Read more »

 You know, I feel completely un-motivated today at work

I gues that’s what happens when you’re on notice and they’re working you right up to the last minute they can. Tomorrow’s my last day here and really I find myself lacking motivation to do anything.

My reasons aren’t because I’m lazy. Quite the contrary; I would rather be busy than bored any day of the week. However, the problem remains that I can’t get too deeply into anything because with tomorrow being my last day here, anything I start I won’t be able to finish. It’s like a presidential lame duck. Read more »