purg.atory – a personal blog by elyograg

Earlier tonight (before the clock rolled over to a new day), I was driving to the video store to return Joe vs. the Volcano. Suddenly over a house in the distance, I saw some illegal fireworks – a single purple flower burst. It occurred to me that November 3rd is a very strange day to…

I need this movie. Props to anyone who can place the quote without a search engine. You can bask in your own coolness.

My junior admin at work has been helping me try to figure out a new setup on our firewall in the UK. This is his first foray into figuring out the Cisco PIX firewall. On my way home, he sent me a text message that said “My years of PIX knowledge thinks it’s a routing…

I am catching up on slashdot, wherein an article about the GIMP can be found. One of the developers on the project is named Øvind Kolås. I have little to actually say about this, except that it’s an unusual name outside of the Scandinavian countries. Mynd you, møøse bites kan be pretty nastï …

Pete Ashdown owns and runs XMission, the largest and oldest surviving Internet Service Provider in Utah. They were my first ISP, and after a long hiatus because I was heavily involved in running two of their competitors (Wolsi and 1fn.net), I am back in the fold as an XMission subscriber. I usually refrain from getting…

At the Smith’s Chinese place, the woman who runs the cash register always gives me two fortune cookies, every time I ask for “a” fortune cookie. I’ve decided that it’s because my order is always a two item combo. You are talented in many ways. The heart commonly triumphs in every struggle with understanding.

There is an open source product called OpenNMS that I am trying to get working in our enterprise. It’s a great product, and they even have packages for Debian, my Linux distro of choice. Unfortunately for me, the server that I am using is running a pre-release version of Debian, the “testing” release called etch.…

I came across two neat sentences during my travels around the Internet. You can find my source here. A pangram is a sentence that contains all twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Today’s post title can be found by double-clicking on some of the fonts you might find on your computer. Most of the fonts have…

Life is a soap opera. It may be even more of a soap opera in the online world. I’ve been watching a big drama in Kathy’s life unfold for the last few days. There is a private online community that was created as a safe haven for like-minded people. It is an interesting community, started…

I’m configuring up a new(er) machine to replace the aging one that currently serves all my domains. One of the little details I’m trying to perfect is what happens if a particular address is pointed at my server, but I haven’t yet configured that address on the server. I finally got that mostly worked out,…

The company I work for has to deal with satellite outages twice a year that we can do absolutely nothing about. Wikipedia article on the topic Help page from a satellite provider Our individual downlink sites, because of their small dish size, are completely blocked out for a few minutes each day while this happens.…

The linux program that is capable of reading the SPD bits from memory chips is called ‘lshw.’ Description: information about hardware configuration A small tool to provide detailed information on the hardware configuration of the machine. It can report exact memory configuration, firmware version, mainboard configuration, CPU version and speed, cache configuration, bus speed, etc.…

These two came from Smiths, two days ago. As the wallet grows, so do the needs. Your strength will grow stronger by being tried. If you add the usual suffix, the first one inspires me to think of this:  “Is that a wallet in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

MIT is doing heavy research into replacing batteries with tiny turbine engines. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/microengines.html This is an interesting idea. I do wonder how much waste heat they would produce, though. My personal laptop has a 150W power supply, which is pretty damn big for a laptop. The thing makes so much heat that it is regularly…

Cafe Trang is yummy. Sometimes the wisest person is dressed in the rudest clothing.

Hopefully tomorrow I will remember to bring my sandwich gear to work. From the chinese takeout place in the Smith’s on 8th south and 9th east: Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom. A well-directed imagination is the source of great deeds.

$7 at Shopko. ISBN 0792190505, UPC code 0 97360 11934 3. Enhanced for 16×9 widescreen televisions and 5.1 surround. I’m much more familiar with this sequel than the original, and I think that’s why I like it better. Then again, it might just be Michelle Pfeiffer in her first starring role. I’ve just confirmed that…