guod.net

Life in the Fales' server closet has been anything but stable lately. I think my old pentium OBSD box knows its time is short, so it's intentionally being difficult. The Mac Mini is here and I am getting it set up as I write this. In a momentary lapse of judgment a couple nights ago, I decided it would be smart to upgrade to the latest version of rails on my soon-to-be-dead server. As usual, I had some problems (my mod_rewrite skillz are anything but 'leet'). The last couple of days I just shut this beast (httpd) down because I'd rather have people get "connection refused' than some half-working blog site. But now I've got to get serious since our article may be published soon.

You might have noticed, but since I got things working again, there is a tiny new feature on the blog: categories. They're still very beta, but since I had an updated version of the blog that had already been ported to the newest version of rails, I might as well just use that. So, behold the categories. I have an even newer version of this blog which I hope to install on the Mac Mini once it is operational...stay tuned. Right now I'm going to get back to setting up lighttpd and an svn server.

This interview/article that Ara and I are doing for Linux Journal is taking forever, but it's almost done. I just finished what I hope is the last graphic, and now I'm going to go downstairs and finish the rest of Motorcycle Diaries. This weekend I'm going to have to do some major work on this site (hopefully before the article is published), since the article references guod.net quite a bit. Maybe my mac mini will be here by then! Yes! Awesome!

So this morning I woke up very early to go down to denver and get a second gingival graft in three months. Rush hour traffic sucks, I forgot how much I hated commuting. But the surgery went great (even better than last time), and I was out of the office in under a couple of hours. I had a much longer grace period before the anesthetic wore off this time, which was very nice. Being stuck in the Target pharmacy waiting for my vicodin was not a fond memory from last time. Something else good about getting this work done today was that it reminded me of just how much of an improvement the first couple of surgeries were. I used to have some pain when eating and drinking near the teeth with the recession, but I realized today that the pain is gone on those teeth where I had the grafts. So that was encouraging. It's not just a whole lot of work for no reward.

I took today off to recover from the bloodbath, and I'm hoping to work more on some rails stuff, but so far I've been watching Tova most of the day. Elly went to get her haircut at a beauty school because it was way cheaper. What I didn't realize was that getting your hair dyed and cut at a beauty school is a 6 hour evolution. But it has been good training for me. Tova and I played for a while, I taught her about the ice pack I had on the side of my head, then we watched Finding Nemo for the 2.3e2323th time, and finally I fed her some fruit stuff and put her to bed. So far so good. Once you take the breastfeeding out of the equation, I'm almost a Mom-equal.

In other news, my Soekris box came today. It looks very nice. I neglected to read the fine print, so I'm missing a power supply, and I think I'll be wanting to order a network card as well. But at least I've got the ball rolling--there's no turning back now. After about a year of technolust over this thing, I finally have it. Although, I must admit, it will be a sad day when I have to say goodbye to my $10 web server and 10BaseT hub (circa 1989, I believe). Those two have been a winning pair for me over the last three years. The Soekris-MacMini combination that will be replacing them will have a lot to live up to.

Time for me to go port this silly blog to rails 0.10 and then eat more ice cream (doctor's orders!).