Debian, Anime, festing.org

Date: 2002-04-13 12:52:53

Wednesday night I was at Gem's apartment and felt a profound need to be useless. Somehow or another, Gem ended up with a handful of 2.5-inch notebook hard drives. (One 2-gig and two 4-gig, I think.) They were bigger than Yukon's tiny, 500-meg drive, and Gem had no use for them. She used them on occasion to swap operating systems; one was Zaida, which was a short-lived RedHat 7.1 install back in the Kiesa days; one was Tyr, which was Gem's test Windows 2000 install the first week of this quarter; and one was Charlemagne, which was the Windows 98 drive Gem swapped with Elssbett's 18 gig Linux drive when she acquired Elssbett sometime fall quarter. I hunted down all of these drives and plugged them into Yukon to see what they would do. I decided that Tyr would be an excellent drive to appropriate for Yukon.

Yesterday morning I started the install process, which involved copying off all files I actually wanted (conveniently, I didn't have to nuke Yukon's existing drive, so I could conveniently and easily copy files off should I forget some of them) and creating Debian bootfloppies, since Yukon lacks a cdrom drive and I need to do a network install. I realized that I'm running low on floppies in my possession, so I was forced to head to Walmart to acquire a small package of floppies. (Fortunately, they were cheap. You have no idea how stupid I felt acquiring floppies in 2002.)

I created working rescue, root, and driver floppies, and the rest of the install went smoothly, albeit quite slowly. I'm now running testing (Woody) on Yukon, which is rather exciting. Next I get to reconfigure Yukon to my tastes.

Starting Thursday evening, when I thought Rage might come back up at its new ip, I started pinging Rage, with no response. Rage finally responded ten seconds before I was about ready to run off to class yesterday morning, which meant that I stuck around to reconfigure everything. I think everything's working again. (As always, let me know if anything breaks. Bitscape just informed me of a bug in PostgreSQL's configuration which thwarted his remote database access.)

After my first class of the day (parallel and distributed computing), I queried Swinyar (one of the three local Teds; all of us are in networking, which is amusing) about his epic anime collection. Since he lives conveniently across the street from Kretschmar Hall (he's technically off-campus, but he's a whole lot closer to Kretschmar than I am), we ran across the street, successfully dodging cars on Fourth Street (I always thought I'd get run down on College Avenue, not Fourth Street, but I think Fourth is scarier), and he handed me a great big cd case filled with ninety cds of DivX :) anime. (He hasn't even watched all of it; he copied someone else's collection.)

So obviously I had to indulge, so I watched the first episode available of Cowboy Bebop. It was sufficiently amusing, so I watched the next three. I may be hooked. (This could be bad, since I would like to do something useful this quarter.)

I threw together a tiny little redesign of festing.org in an attempt to re-brand it as the master site for Content Solutions. You'll observe that Content Solutions headlines show up in chronological order. I have some vague delusion that maybe this will encourage content production because suddenly everyone wants to have their content on top. (This will obviously spawn a quantity vs quality debate, but that's besides the point at the moment.)