purg.atory – a personal blog by elyograg

We’ve had fairly clear skies the last few nights with a waxing moon. I finally managed to get out and get pictures. Below is a picture taken tonight and one that I took last year. I think both are good pictures, for different reasons.

As described in other posts, I spend my workdays logged into an chat room conducted on AOL’s instant messenger application. Marv, who is the link for almost everyone in the chat, expressed a desire to have an online spreadsheet for keeping track of some information about chat members. One of the best ways for a…

In October of 2004 I undertook a semi-major project – turning part of our basement into a Network Operations Center. One section of the basement is a small room, about 6 feet by 15 feet, not counting the area under the stairs, which is only usable for storage of oddly-shaped things. The conduit that we…

Yesterday I attended a funeral. Marv’s father passed away earlier in the week. In February of last year, Marv moved to North Carolina to get a job at Cisco. Because of this, he wasn’t here when it happened, but was able to get on a flight back to SLC very quickly. I know Marv fairly…

Here are some pictures of me in the suit I wore to the funeral yesterday. My wife tells me that I clean up pretty well. Unfortunately, I ran out of time as I was getting ready, and was not able to shave properly.

I’ve updated to WordPress 2.0, and managed to get my theme updated so my fancy header graphic is back. I’ve also updated my captcha plugin, which generates those funky codes you have to enter to post a comment.

I saw a news article today, the first line of which says this: A space tourism group developing a suborbital rocket ship is now taking aim at orbital trips with a new spacecraft that doubles as a hypersonic glider. The article itself is pretty cool in its own right, but I have a followup question…

On Monday I helped one of my friends fix a cgi execution problem with an Apache server. This sort of thing happens a lot, and afterwards I was greeted with a common side effect – a promise of a free meal, this time for me AND my wife. I’ve been promised a great many lunches…

Most of the rooms in the house have Benjamin artwork on at least one wall, in everything from pencil to permanent marker. We have learned that the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser will remove most of it, but it takes a layer of paint with it. There are also several places where the walls get touched…

Last month, my good friend Scott, who got me my current job, left the company for greener pastures. October 19th was his last day. Scott built the entire Cisco IP infrastructure here at the company, and aside from the firewall connecting everything, understands it better than anyone else on the planet. The last year has…

Knife of Dreams is taunting me, but I’m stuck on the Path of Daggers.

With regard to the Doom movie line party thing this Friday, availability of key attendees and my own executive decision has placed the showtime we will attend as the 9:35 PM showing at Century 16. Please be responsible for purchasing your own tickets, which you can do from the link above or directly from the…

This morning I walked out to my car to go to work, and found it covered in frost. At first I was grumbling about the extra five minutes it would take to get the car ready to go, until I got to the door and saw the top of the car. Click on the picture…

Yesterday afternoon I went down to Game Stop and bought Doom 3 and its expansion pack. This is a very difficult game. I suspect that you have to be an excellent FPS player to do well at the game, but that doesn’t really describe me these days. I always did really really well at the…

I’m convinced that the sidewalks in my neighborhood are broken in some subtle way that is invisible to me. They look perfectly fine to me, but maybe the concrete is inferior in some way, making it unable to support more than a flea or two. Perhaps the problem has been explained in church, where I…

I have learned that there’s a movie version of Doom coming out! Here’s a link to good version of the trailer: http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/doomqt.html I would like to organize a ‘guys night out’ to see this movie. Most wives or girlfriends will have no interest in seeing it. It would be perfect to see with friends, especially…

My first computer (though it wasn’t really mine) was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I, which my dad got in 1978, when I was 8 years old. It had a whopping 4K of RAM when we first got it. By the time we were done with it, my dad had that system fully tricked out.…