Belated Birthday lunch.

Today I had a late birthday lunch with some of the folks from my lan party group, Chris , Doug, Jimmy and the other Doug.

Fun lunch at Pei-Wei, had the Honey Seared chicken which Doug paid for.

Got a gift, Doom3, It came wrapped in a printout of a playboy centerfold, Now that was a interesting thing to have at the table at the restraunt.

Time taken to drive home

Using the frontage roads from Silverlake to Grant took 41 minutes 54 seconds. This was with exiting on Sunrise and taking the river train crossing.

Game Night

Another Great night last night.

Two games of Ground Control Two and HOURS of Starwars Battlefront.

Rich did not get on my shit list this time as he didnt steal my name, Infact I cant really think of anyone who got on my shit list.

Chuck was awesome, he brought a extra PC for me to use as mine is still not working corectly, You Rock Chuck!

Tylers Birthday

Today we celebrated Tylers Birthday.

First we went to El Greco's Grecian Gardens.

Nice place, Run by a family I guess, They knew Gus.

In attendance were Tyler, A woman who's name I can not remember, Matt, Matt's brother, Gus, Alex, Jon Shay, Steph Shay, Madison Shay, and briefly Jack. Oh and myself.

I'm not sure how the food was, I only had a small salad which I couldn't finish, It didn't agree with me.

The dish with the fried cheese was really good however.

Next we went to the Fox and Hound.

At the Fox and Hound we had Tyler, Alex, The woman who's name I can not remember, and Myself initially.

We ran into a Co-worker Amy, I hope she doesn't feel offended or anything by the way we acted, It was nice seeing her but I had no clue what to say or talk about.

Oh and I also introduced Alex as Gus which seemed to piss him off a lot, Sorry Alex!

We got a pool table finally and started playing, initially it was Tyler vs Alex, Alex one.

Next up was the woman who's name I can not remember vs Myself.

We were evenly matched, Both doing really poorly.

Still it was fun, She won.

At this point in time the Grossman brothers, Gus, and a guy from Login named Ryan showed up.

Next up was Gus vs Ryan from Login.

I'm afraid I don't know the outcome of the game as I had to go home at this point in time as the smoke in the Fox and Hound made me very sick :(

Sakura

Tonight we went to Sakura,

Jack, Matt, Tyler, Gus and Myself.

Damn cool place, We went to the east side one which they all siad was gheto on comparison to the West one but I still had a lot of fun.

Having a dude cook the food at your table is neat, and he was amusing.

I voted today.

Today I voted for the first time.

Not as cool as I thought, I was expecting digital voting machines, or something with chad atleast.

Nope, Felt tipped pen and a scantron sheet.

Well maybe it'll be cooler next time.

GNU screen

screen has to be one of the most usefull tools in my sysadmin arsonal.

It lets me move terminals from work to home, from home to work.
It lets me run jobs overnight without worring about them not completing
It lets me not worry about my desktop crashing and taking out whatever I was doing on the servers.

Today I wrote a new .screenrc and I think I'll share it with the world.

#make scrollback work in terminals
termcapinfo xterm*|rxvt* 'ti@:te@'
#use my .bashrc and .bash_profile
shell -$SHELL
#kill the nag
startup_message off
#scrollback
defscrollback 1024
#status line
caption always "%{.bW}%-w%{.rW}%n %t%{-}%+w %=%{..G} %l %{..Y} %m/%d %C%a "
# remap w to the selectable list
bind 'w' windowlist -b
bind 'W' windows

Crushed

I just broke my 512mb SD card.

I'm quite unhappy with myself now, I dropped it on the floor and rolled my chair back from my desk so I could get up and look for it.

*CRUNCH*

There the card was, under the wheel of my chair.

No visiable sign of breakage, but it no longer shows up on the Zaurus or my Mac or my Linux Box.

Mysql Reminder

I can never remember how to change the value of a table from the mysql cli.

update table set field1='value1' where field2='value2';

insert into table values ("one", "two", "Three", "Four", "Five", "Six");

Is Work making me sick?

Am I sick because I don't want to go to work?

Is this my body's way of trying to cope with the stress of the office?

Back in Jr. High and HighSchool I used to get sick a lot, When I dropped out of school my sickness magically went away.

I won the Attendance award at work years ago before I got promoted into this position.

I also don't think I was this sick when I was working for Rob or Doug.

Is it something about my current work environment that is making me sick?

I will admit I'm not happy currently at work, I feel unappreciated and overworked.

I want things to be back like they used to, I want to work on cool projects and have fun again.

I don't even feel like I'm part of the team, I feel like I'm a burden to my boss and that he does not like me or the work I do.

Fortune Cookies

My co-workers found the fortunes I received at work today quite humorous.

You have unusual equipment for success, use it properly.

Your creativity will take you to unexpected places.

Scam or Stuff?

Today I found a link to FreeFlatScreens.com and I thought in the name of Science I'd try it out.

Currently I've found 7 people to help me out, I still need a 8th.

I picked the Ebay signup as my offer to do as it's free and doesnt even need a Credit Card which isnt true about the other offers.

I'll update with details as things progress, They claim it'll be 5 days or so before the Ebay signup registers.

Hacking Tivo

Tonight I hacked my friends Tivo.

We replaced the 14 gig disk in his Series 1 with a 40 gig disk.

The Tivo is much faster now with its 7200RPM disk and he appreciated the additional 24 hours the upgrade gained him.

We also installed some of the hacks for a series 1, He doesnt have a Ethernet card yet so we hope that everything will be OK.

Stargate Atlantis

I'm enjoying the new Stargate series, The characters are starting to get fleshed out a little and it's a good thing.

Tonight I half expected the thing that would remove the creature to be the chocolate bar that McKay was eating.

I wonder if we will see him use the shield device from last week again.

Nice explination about their lack of inertia being a problem, and a reasonable sollution as well.

Tivo

I ordered a Refurbished Series 2 Tivo yesterday.

$49 from tivo.com after rebate.

Would have been nice if it was in my hands tonight, I look foward to the ability to pause live tv.

Registered to vote

Today I filled out the paperwork to register to vote.

I've not voted before, I'm not sure what I was doing last presidential election but this time I plan to take part in the process.

Currently I feel I'm very uninformed about issues, I spend too much time watching tech news and alike but I've never really paid attention to politics, I hope to change this.

John Kerry looks to be my candidate of choice, He rated a 81% match with my answers on Presidentmatch and I like the things his website say.

Trying out Flickr

This service sounded like a neat way to add Photo's to this Blog. Here is one from the Oranski Wedding.

Mike and Jen Originally uploaded by johnkiniston.

Perl FTP

Here is the first program I'm giving the source for, it's a FTP upload script that is designed to run from Cron.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

use Net::FTP;

use File::Copy;

#Setup the variables

$ftphost = "ftp.hostname.com";

$username = "user";

$password = "password";

$remotedirectory = "public_html";

$outputdirectory = "~/transfered/";

$localdirectory = "~/dropbox/";

$fromaddress = "username\@host.com";

$toaddress = "tousername\@host.com";

$subject = "Automated FTP Transfer";

# Build the filelist

@files=`ls -1 $localdirectory`;



#Connect to the FTP Server

$ftp = Net::FTP->new("$ftphost", Timeout => 30, Debug   => 1) or $erroroutput = $erroroutput."Can't connect: $@\n";



#Login with the username and password

$ftp->login($username, $password) or $erroroutput = $erroroutput."Couldn't authenticate, even with explicit username and password.\n";



#Set Binary Mode

$ftp->type(I);



#Change Directories

$ftp->cwd($remotedirectory) or $erroroutput = $erroroutput."Couldn't change directory\n";



#Upload the files if everything is OK So far.

if (!$erroroutput){

        foreach $file (@files) {

                chomp $file;

                $ftp->put ($localdirectory.$file) or $erroroutput = $erroroutput."couldn't upload $file\n";

        }

}



#Close the FTP Connection

$ftp->quit();



#Mail the results

$mailer = "/usr/lib/sendmail -f$fromaddress -oi";

open(MAIL, "|$mailer -t") || die;

print MAIL "To: $toaddress\n";

print MAIL "Subject: $subject\n\n";

if ($erroroutput) {

        print MAIL "Error $erroroutput";

        foreach $file (@files) {

                print MAIL "Did not transfer $file\n";

        }

}

else {

        foreach $file (@files) {

                chomp $file;

                print MAIL "Transferred $file\n";

                move ("$localdirectory$file", "$outputdirectory$file");

        }

}

close (MAIL);

Rippoff Alert!

reservationrewards.com just put an unauthorized Charge on my Visa.

See http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff97160.htm for more info about these people.

Code I've written

From now on I plan to share anything that I write be it Perl, Shell or PHP here in my Blog so it may be usfull for other people.

Off the top of my head I've written a quick FTP droplet in Applescript, Several FTP transfer Shell and Perl scripts (Both FTP and SFTP), A module for a webpage that shows a random graphic based on the Time of day and Day of week from a predefined set, A graphical forum signature that grabs information about the current viewer and displays it,And a image watermarking program.

I'll be adding the sources to these programs to here as time permits.