AC Capehart capehart

I’ve spent a reasonable amount of time in each of Windows XP, Ubuntu and MacOS X for desktop computing, and I have all three available to me right now. But mostly, I find myself in the MacOS. Partly this is a machine issue — the Intel box that dual boots XP/Ubuntu I built years ago and sounds like… well like someone who wanted to put a lot of hardware in and so needed a lot of fans.

The Go-Kart racing. That was fun, but I’m still sore. A bunch of Lindens went down to Burlingame, CA where we went to GoKart Racer Where you do the racing (I guess at other GoKart places, your mom does the racing?)There were roughly 30 of us there for racing. The sign-in process wasn’t bad, but was a little slow as we all had to go through a process for which there are a few computers, and of course we arrived as a bunch.

I wanted to jot down some quick notes as I play Second Life about the nature of online relationships. As I started to write, I felt like I needed to include a little back story. Writing this intro paragraph, I realize that already what follows is too long for a single blog post, and I’m not even out of the back story yet. That said, I’m not going to break it up further.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a fan of the free market. I was disappointed to learn from the blog of godaddy.com founder Bob Parsons that ICANN apparently just handed Verisign a ticket to a monopoly unchecked by a competitive bidding process.

I have just finished my first WordPress plugin. If you’ve noticed Sam’s age popping up at the bottom of posts in the Childhood & Fatherhood category, that’s my plugin at work. If you’ve noticed pages not acting quite right, well, that’s my plugin when it wasn’t working. 🙂 I think I’ve gotten it all fixed up now, and am releasing it to the relatively small community of people who read my blog.

We’ve taken some grief recently over SamTrak. People seem to think it’s a bit beyond the pale to be tracking Sam’s feeding and elimination habits on the Internet. But, there is reason to my madness. Because of her size, we needed to track feeding and elimination. Because it’s me, it seemed easiest to do this online (access from any computer instead of “Where’s the little black poop notebook?”). Now, I could have done it on my private house-network, but then Carolyn couldn’t have accessed the information from work.

In response to this query, I ended up with a 15″ powerbook. It’s a pretty sweet machine even if they did just replace it with the “4-times more powerful MacBook.” I tried an Ubuntu install, but it failed to recognize the Superdrive as a source for the CD — apparently Apple made some change to the drive with the October(’05) model updates. There’s a patch in Gentoo, but not (yet?) in Ubuntu.

I tend to think of the server that my in-laws use for their business: http://www.fayrealestate.com/ as falling in the same category as my other “personal” machines — like the one that hosts this blog, and http://www.santaal.com/ and so forth. I need to start thinking of them as clients instead. Yesterday, they were having some trouble. I did some investigation and found that a awstats vulnerability had been exploited. I was sure I’d password-protected the awstats pages, but when I looked through the apache configs, I found no such thing.

I don’t think he reads my blog, at least not with any regularity, but yesterday my brother-in-law IM’ed me this URL: a newsgroup I posted to in 1991, in which I discuss a variety of topics from the LPMud I was helping run at the time, to the future of VR, to teledildonics — all on a thread started by Howard Rheingold. Does anything on the internet ever really die? Who reads a nntp://sci.

This is a geeky post. Non-geeks may safely skip over this post and still have a full breadth of understanding of my life (and Sam’s, and to a lesser extent Carolyn’s), or at least as full a one as can be had from this blog. There, now that that’s out of the way, let me fill you in on what’s up. I’ve seen a few blogs (mostly LJ, but some others) that have a “mood” emoticon, and a little “What I’m listening to” bar wherein users can type in the tunes they are currently jamming to.