glarbl_blarbl's Journal: Procrastination or Prioritization?

So it's after four in the morning here. I have nearly a quarter's worth of work in four classes which I should be working on... Distance Education. Basically a pile of IBM cdroms published with an old version of shockwave, only runs in IE, arrgh.

Instead of working at the pace specified on the course pages, I went and got my band (a meta-genre (alternative country/rock/funk/jazz/pop/reggae coming soon) band called Madrona) going on our debut album (untitled at this point). You can listen to some rough mixes here: http://209.166.73.160/~g/ .. I plan on selling the cd once it's all done, so don't hold it against me that the tags aren't set :P

We've been working on those songs and a few more for about a month now. Unfortunately, my mother has been suffering from some health problems over about the same time period. More important things than Assembler, Job Control Language, and intro to OS/390- I think.

The band I'm playing with now is the best group of guys I've played with yet. Jake Johnson and I have been jamming for a few years now (with Velveteen and Pervert Hero), and he still amazes me with his ear and memory for songs. Not to mention his killer pipes. Thats him on "Trippin" and "Prelude", I sing lead on "Psyche's Swing" and "Ice Ages. Conan Holroyd plays drums like a wildman, and is totally versitile- he used to play with a regionally poplular punk band called So Much Untold. Brandon Schmidt will be playing bass and guitar with us live, and he just wrote a killer Roy Orbison-style song which I can't wait to record.

We plan on finishing the album before the end of the year. We have only to mix and make some transitions before it's done. We're going to put up an ad at AIS for a music business student looking to learn how to set up a tour, or at the very least some shows in Seattle. It's been a few years since I played the Ballard Firehouse (though I think they closed down, unfortunately).

I have a friend who promised to help us make a webpage, he's currently doing the Computer Animation program at the Art Institute of Seattle (the same place I went to get my AAA in Audio Production), which seems to keep him too busy to reply to my emails... :/ So if there's anyone out there who digs our tunes and wants to design a website- please please please send me an email or an IM!!

I have a slackware10 box where my webserver lives, but without anything good to put up it still has the Apache start page. I'm waiting till Maret uploads what he's done before I go and get a domain name... It bums me out that he hasn't written me back, cause he's one of my favorite artists.

I did get a kickass open-source forum/weblog program called WordPress. It took me a little while to uncomment the right lines in the apache config files to make php go (damn, how I love slackware!), and to make MySQL secure and ready to go (the MySQL online manual could use some proofreading, but I don't have time)- but it wasn't all that hard. Wordpress has a fucking huge list of plugins, most of which I probably won't use.

So I have the apache default page up at the top-level, and then an empty blog/forum under a directory... I feel like I should wait before I start putting stuff in the forums until I get a css for the rest of the site. Maybe I'll just let my subconsious work on it until I get an actual webpage up.

I'm planning on setting up a couple of databases for my dad sometime early next year. I'm going to take over my sister's old computer (PIII 800MHz) when she goes to Australia for a year. I plan on making it into a server, most likely to replace the webserver. That will leave me with a couple of K6-III 500MHz boxes doing nothing- so I'm going to put one in the garage as a wireless AP/MySQL server for my dad to keep track of his farm equipment and vehicle maintenance. I've also found some linux software which will interface with his Davis Weather Monitor and will be able to do backups much more easily than the M$ software which came from Davis. Should make it easy enough to make a web-based interface for looking at the data and working with his fleet information.

The hard part here will be deciding how to distribute the disk space. I tried to get NFS to work a few times - back when I was running RedHat (Tried it on 6, 9 and FC1- gave up on RH when FC2 came out and I realized that they had totally revamped the /etc layout and renamed all the curses-based config apps which I had gotten used to) and never got it to go. I also tried it on Debian Woody, but I probably could have picked a better time to try it again- I was on vacation, trying to do it remotely via SSH heheh..

When I ran apt-get update and it wouldn't reboot I learned my lesson. When I got home, I found that it had upgraded the kernel - leaving the old one in LILO as the default, and of course it wouldn't boot. Luckily, I had two servers running so as soon as I could get in to change the firewall I was able to upload enough stuff so I didn't have to bum any DVD-Rs from my friends.

So after that I moved to Slack10 and never looked back. Now I have those 2 500MHz boxes and a nearly-antique Comcraq laptop (188MHz Cyrix/48MB) running slack10.

I don't know if I would have liked slack as much as I do if I hadn't been playing with RH for five years and debian for six months prior. Once I started reading all the files in the /etc/rc.d directory, though, and I was in love. When my pcmcia ethernet card pooped out (the dongle died, actually) and I decided to try doing a serial connection I wasn't sure how hard it would be. So I pulled up tldp.org and looked for a HOWTO. Found it, and without any specific slack instructions I was a little worried at first... but then I read it and did a grep in the /etc for the proper instructions, uncommented two lines on each computer (one line in rc.M and one in inittab) and added a reminder to their rc.local files to run the ppp proxyarp setup scripts. The hardest part for me was remembering how grep likes its command line, so the whole thing took me less than a day.

The only problem is that I haven't set up any routing, so I can only access the computer directly attached to the serial cable. But once I ssh in, I can access the rest of the LAN and the internet. This is a temporary solution, so I probably won't bother with routing- I'll just save up for a wireless card.

Now that I think about it, I can probably do a little cutting-and-pasting from this journal entry for my first blog post.. heh.