Crow

So, I've decided it's going to be better for me to just bring my blog back to blogspot.
Long story, I'll explain later.

So if you are used to tablet.druid628.com look for it to start using druid628.blogspot.com.

The First of the Last

This will be the first of last blog posts here on druid628.blogspot.com...
it will be moving soon a permanent location. This was originally supposed to be temporary in my mind when I started my blog here. That was May of 2005.
That post:

Testing!
Friday, May 6th, 2005
Well I’ve decided that I’m going to try this out and use blogspot for a while as my blog.
We’ll see how it goes.

Well here we go almost five years later and my blog is growing up. I just decided this as I pasted that post into this one that my roll-over date will be the 5 year anniversary of my first blogspot post. So there we go folks, 6 May, 2010 the druid tablet will be moving from blogspot to it's final location. "Make your time."

When it Snows It Pours

Well, let me begin by saying how unhappy I am.

Admission No. 1)
I've had three PC's at my house for varying lengths of time. I have been trying to reload/repair/do something with each of these PC's ever since they came into my possession. I have felt less than zealous to complete these PC's since they are all for family and I wasn't charging for these.

Admission No. 2)
My home office has been a disaster for some time. In recent history there has been a clear path from the door to my wife's desk and one from the door to my desk which then continues on to my closet door.


Yesterday, after church and visiting with family, I sat down in order to make a dent in my tasks of finishing these pc's and maybe cleaning up my office or at least my desk. I sat down and reloaded one of the pc's I already had the data backed up previously. Meanwhile, I am attempting to figure out why I am having trouble installing a new os (FreeBSD preferably but I'd settle with Ubuntu) on my 1.5 TB harddrive in my computer. DING! Reload finished. w00t! Ok now I go to stop what I was doing and hook my harddrive back up and move the old data back to the newly reloaded PC. All is fine. I then exclaim, “Oh Crap!” I realized that I had neglected to hook up the “broke drive” which is a 100gb sata drive I bought off a guy at a flea market. The reason I call it the broke drive is that the rail for the sata data connector to fit snuggly (not snuggie) into is broke so I just have to jimmy-rig it to stay in place. I do that and boot the PC back up. Comes back up. I start to click on “My Computer” (yes I know it's a windows pc – hush!) BLUE Screen-then-REBOOT “CRAP!”

Well when I boot it back up the computer is doing the good-ol' “Splash-screen - REBOOT” game which I hate oh-so-much! I disable reboot and it tells me, “Unmountable Boot Volume” well after 10 – 15 minutes of swearing. I grab the newly found 40GB drive that I had plans for, load it up crap now it cant find my network card. Oh wait, I have a slipstream that has my driver on it.

I'm going to pull a Kanye West on myself and interrupt myself. All this is after spending hours yesterday attempting to load BSD or Ubuntu onto my 1.5 TB drive, running MemTest 4 against the RAM and a myriad of other tests. None of which had the best video of all time.

Ok, so while I'm letting the slipstream disc run I went to put my daughter down for the night since my wife had been keeping an eye on her during all this. I get her to sleep and put her down. Then I go back into my office and it's rebooting, “cool it's ready!” XP splash screen... REBOOT!

Requiring all the energy in my body I restrain myself from shouting and picking my computer up to throw it through my window. After a bit of cool down I sit back down and start back to work on it.
Unfortunately, with no resolve.

I could have shortened this by saying, “ARGH!!!” but then you wouldn't really know what was going on would you?

Hopefully I'll get SOMETHING resolved soon.

Crazy Mac OS fun tonight...

So this evening I sat down to play on my MacBook Pro -- one which is among the many apple laptops which has issues with sleep/wake. I have tried multiple different solutions and the only one which seems to be the best fit is to let the machine hibernate when closing the lid and wake on power press.

I recently have been attempting to rectify this problem with out much luck. So back to where I started, I sat down this evening and lifted the lid on the laptop... black screen. I press a button, black screen. I press the power button, black screen. Frustrated but not bewildered, I press and hold the power button to power off the laptop. Then power it back on, everything appears normal,
Login Screen, i type my username, then my password, my password again, and my password again. I then am prompted with my password "hint" I try one more time and see that my Mac Book Pro is telling me, that I'm an idiot but it will let me login with a new password but I will not have access to my keychain, however should I relearn my old password I can have my keychain all I want...

WTF?

So I punch in a temporary password, nothing just the login box shaking at me.

WTF?

So I click cancel and login as root. I attempt to change the password and am cursed at in a foreign language (the language of error codes). So after a few minutes of poking around, I learn my home directory... is empty. NOOOOO!!!!!! I then spend several hours attempting to troubleshoot, debug and hack my Mac. Finally I am glad to report, I was able to get into my account with all my stuff in place. I plan to do a write up and add it to my Apple/Mac section of my site (which is seriously starved for content).

Anyway, I'm going to go to bed now.

Happy New Year!

DruiD628.com & Symfony

DruiD628 . com will soon feature a new expansion of the site built on Symfony (http://www.symfony-project.org/ ) for those who remember the Clan of the 628 app I had written previously and unfortunately lost due to the um... lack of backups by my old hosting company -- another story for another time.

This will be a rebirth of that app. However since air travel is not a big thing for me anymore the "DruiD tracking" feature will not be as prominate. It will have some of the same features as previously, I will have more to post soon as more details come available.

Important Info Regarding Emailing me

Beginning on the Ides of March (15 March, 2008) I will no longer be reading any emails sent to my primary email address druid628 {shift-2} comcast {.} net, unless they have been digitally signed or -- more-- preferably encrypted. I have been planning on doing this for sometime and have finally been... pressed... to making it a reality. I will be taking steps between now and the Ides of March to be migrating my mailing list subscriptions over to a different account that will be used specifically for that purpose.

For those who are not technical, this might be a bit of a hassle *initially* and for the inconvenience I am very sorry. It will require installing some software on your PC to make this encryption and digital signature possible. I will be setting up an area of my website dedicated to this information and including instructions for installing the software and configuring for both ThunderBird and Outlook Express.

For those of you who *are* more technical in nature and just felt your heart stop at the horror of having to buy PGP just to email me, fear not! My instructions will be for using Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG; GPG), guess what, it's free. I have used it for, almost a year now and it works well, unfortunately for the non-techie people, it is all CLI and no GUI (layman terms that means it's DOS like not a nice window).

Again I apologize for any inconvenience that this might cause, this is something I feel that I need to do and will become much more common for many more users. I will update again with a new posting when I post the pages with more information, tutorials and scripts.
For those who may already use PGP or GPG, my keys are already available (see below for keys) and I would appreciate you becoming an early adopter of this policy.

Thank you.

Awry Webhosting.

Recently (as in only about 3 days ago) I went to my website... Everything was normal. About eight (8) hours later I went to check something on my site... My entire website had reverted to... oh about a month and A HALF AGO!!!!!!!!!!!!! I mean WHAT THE HELL!?! That makes at least the third time in the past year. However... this is the final straw. I am currently looking for a new hosting provider for at least a temporary situation. My plan is to ... first get my Comcast bill under control, second upgrade my comcast internet to workplace and host my own website from my own home. Eventually one day I want to run a hosting company. One where we actually perform backups on our server and if we loose our clients website we admit that we Eff'd up and we compensate them for it... where we actually do what a hosting company is supposed to do.
ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I never had this kind of trouble with LoBall Hosting ARGH!

Yawn

Well I've decided to give blogspot about a 2month trial as being my blog. Knowing how much i use it that means that it'll be this post, the last post and maybe 2more in that time. :) Yes I'm lazy.
Who knows maybe if I have something that's not home-grown i'll like it better... I Kept saying i was gonna re-write mine anyway... If I like Blogspot I may not have to.
I have to bitch for a little bit I got kicked out of a raid today on wow I don't know if it was an accident or what but it pissed me off. If it was on purpose apparently resurrecting yourself after dieing UNKNOWING that the alliance is about to sweep in right where u rezzed is UNACCEPTABLE.. dumb ass. Eff u who ever you were that kicked me!

Anyway ok now that i'm over that... Well I guess that's all I really need to say right now...
later
-druid

Testing!

Well I've decided that I'm going to try this out and use blogspot for a while as my blog.
We'll see how it goes.