-Finegan
Dear Mr. Jobs,
Alright sparky, on the day that you made your big announcement, I was debating with my co-workers what the new piece of iShit might be. Having listened to the ramblings of some joker for the past few years as he descended deeper and deeper into your bizarre cult, I valued his opinion that you were not in fact after satan's ass, and just wanted to kick Sony in the junk. So we joked and chuckled about what the Developer's conference would bring about, and I was big on the theory that you were going to resurrect the long stagnant PDA market with a new Darwin running an Intel Xscale chip that would make the existing and archaic Palm look like a walkman next to your iM'cool. Well, I was let down once again, and you've decided to chuck the cool and brilliant PPC architecture for not just x86, but Intel x86. That's like telling Buckminster Fuller that well, "Those Geodesic domes are nice, but I was thinking something more along the lines of Romanesque columns and flying buttresses." If you're going to go archaic, at least have some balls man. Well, there are plenty of theories about whether this fustercluck will shoot you in the ass, but that's not why I'm writing today. I'm here to give you the new flagship product of Apple. Now that you've given me the ability to pirate a copy of your nifty little UNIX OS and run it on my cheap PC instead of having to shell out for some pretty luccite, I'm going to give you a new revenue stream. Think really hard (not differently) for a moment. What has the Mac been missing since the 90's? What has every Mac user wished you still had? It's time to square up and kick Sony right in the junk. That's right Stevey boy, I hereby direct you to make a Mac game console. The reviews on the PS3 suck, the xBox 360 can bite my left nut, even if I can boot SuSe on it. Come on Jobsey you hippy brown acid munching sandaled wuss, grow some cajones and start rolling the iPwn off of the line from 1 Inifite Loop. All the cool kids will buy it, just to be cool, so shit... you won't even have to sweat the fact that no one will make games for it for a few years. Alright, you get to work on the iPwn, and I'll get back to being a pontificating misanthropic asshole.
-Finegan
l-r: Jack, Saneesh, myself, Twi and Jer, who graciously accompanied me on this year's stop by a Broadcom building so that we cou$ for the outstanding lack of any help whatsoever this year with their wireless cards working natively under the Linux kernel. The picture is a fe$ old now, taken just after LWE in San Francisco. Right now I've just returned from LWE London, a strange 54 hours in the UK, which I'll write abo$
Here's a polaroid, courtesy of Leisure, of our house implement.
Working the graveyard is not what it used to be. Of course, the last time I worked the graveyard I was serving coffee to cute college girls...
Only slightly more upsetting to me then finding out I was an Elvis man was realizing that I think my favorite action star may indeed be Will Smith.
I don't drink nearly as much as I used to, which is sad.
I am a badass with first impressions, its everything afterwards that needs work.
If you're not running Slackware, you're not running Linux... unless its Debian... or something else.
For some reason I never seem to fill my zippo anymore.
Six days away from vacation and LWE, let's hope this time around I'm not out getting coffee when Linus stops by.
Its been a few months since I last updated this increasingly archaic page. My lack of interest in HTML long ago spurned one my fellow Clockwatchers, Wilson, to make a Fin'd version of his page, (its down and to the left under "themes", seems I'm too lazy to figure out how to link to it directly.) What's new kids? Well, I'm employed again, at a pretty badass little job. The hours are vicious, the co-workers are awesome, and I don't stop running around for sometimes 12 hours at a stretch. Damn did I ever miss being busy. Geeklife is fun, work is fun, and my favorite bar is always there when it needs me. Who would have thought after an undergrad of reading dead white guys and a few years slinging coffee and then desk squatting as a clerk in a library that my once luddite ass would be one of eight guys responsible for 800+ servers. The Clock has been good to me. Soon I'll be headed up to DC to visit with some old Auburn friends, then on to California (hopefully) for another great time fetching coffee while everyone else gets to meet Linus at LWE.
I spent the holidays down with the Flu, but before I succumbed, Will and Gavin rolled into town for a weekend. Against all odds Ty Taylor showed up, so we gathered together what other Auburn refugees we had on hand, Chris, Jack, Leisure and myself and headed down to the Highlander for a few... uh, dozen drinks.
In other news, I don't not like DC anymore after a nutty night partying around the District with FreeWill; we moved the Clock to a new Undisclosed Location, as in I think its somewhere in downtown Atlanta, and I finally quit my job at the Library after 4 years. It was about time. So, if you need a geek to hack something *Nixy together, give me a call. I'm headed for LinuxWorld East in late January and sometime after that up to DC to see if I don't not not like town enough to work there. Yeah, that made sense alright.
After a lot of fighting with little pieces of steel we finally got Melchoir on the job. James Joyce and the Netscape Lizard watch over it now. Damn this machine is loud.
Its been a few months since I updated this page, I guess its about time to get around to fixing some things in ernest, like those horrible artifacts of 2001. Its not like I've learned better html, I've just learned how to cheat better.
So, like I was sayin', about a week ago I called Leisure out of the blue, hadn't talked to him since the the somewhat awkward 'Clockwatcher's invade Richmond' festival last May. We talked on the phone for a few hours, played the usual old friend catchup. Yet again I offered to pay his way for a visit down here to hang about with Nick and I at the ghetto-colo. Allowing for some time to sort housing and job issues in Richmond, we agreed on a Greydog at the end of the Summer. I didn't buy it, Leisure just can't make visit plans, it doesn't work, but it doesn't matter. Richmond is between here and both my family and Nick's, so we always see him around the holidays. On Tuesday he mailed to find out if my three year old offer of a couch and a relocation was still valid. That being the most rhetorical question I had ever heard, I cleared it with Nick and shot Leisure a brief, "The couch is yours (if we had one)." The timetable got moved up, the 'Welcome' Guiness got purchased when Jackrabbit and I went and fucked up the local Kroger. So, if you haven't seen him for a while, call the ghetto-colo.
Orwell day 2003 is behind us. Thanks to the contribution campaign we were able to pick up three 80Gb drives. Unfortunately I forgot that I had purchased OEM drives, and hence, no IDE cables, so a short run out to GIM's for those, and Saneesh and I sat down at the ghetto-colo at 4pm to get to work on Orwell. Then we realized Orwell's case sucked and its 250 Watt PSU was a little weak to handle a RAID 5 array, so back to GIM's for a new case and powersupply. An hour or so to parrallelize the array and then a format and install revealed that, by the way, Linux SelfDetecting RAID is a different partition type then just plain Linux. Oh well, no big loss, just a lot of running around, and then a Slack 9.0 install, about 20 updates, a compile of Postfix, and some tweaking of PHP and I think our shit is officially sorted now. We gave up on caring about anything else around 2am. So, 10 hours of non-stop geekin'.
Well, I've been to the Hillary-EvilMatt wedding, survived the overclocked golf-cart, closed the Highlander (again) but this time with Ty Taylor. I went to Virginia again to catch Erin's last show, and somehow dodged the sequel flu season here in Atlanta. Now I'm in the middle of moving Matt and Charlie, a few days off, and hopefully the whole of May without making any trips anywhere.
So Atlanta got a visit this weekend from two of my undergraduate friends. Between setting foot in the Intermezzo for the first time in about six months to meet them, and then numerous calls with Evil Matt coordinating the Atlanta side of his wedding cavalcade, hanging about with FreeWill and Gavin made for a pretty nostalgia slammed weekend, and not a lot of sleep. Will (left), is off to Europe for a month or so and plans to beat up cops for a living when he gets back (combat trainer for the FBI academy), and Gavin just graduated from Army helicopter flight school (no shit, they got him halfway through BlackHawk training and then told him they were switching him to Apaches). So aside from learning how to calculate my ground speed relative to headwind this weekend, other news: The Clock turned 2 years old, I'm about to break down and actually spend money on the ghetto-colo, Linuxquestions seems to be on for LinuxWorld in August, and Nick moves in to the apartment built around the ghetto-colo at the end of the month.
February
15th, 2003
This is a picture of bacon wrapped around some shrimp
and cream cheese. Nick ate all four of them as I remember. Well, its the
day after Valentine's Day. I'm sitting here in front of Tyler, drinking
coffee at midnight, and I gotta say: its good to be the king. LQ keeps
chuggin' along, we're all gearing up for a west coast romp to LinuxWorld
where I'll get to hang about with Jeremy again for the first time in ages.
More later I guess, maybe sooner than 4 months this time... who knows.
November 13th, 2002
figured I should throw in an update before we hit the new year. As
always I've been up to doing strange things with old hardware. The music archive is coming along, Joshy's webmail project keeps me
entertained, I've got the Ultra 5 switched to OpenBSD, the Clock is running well, geeklife keeps beeping along. Work keeps being work. With my peon status I haven't got the
Admin/root rights to anything and its hard not to unleash evil kung-fu when something breaks.
July 25th,
I made a realization the other day while staring at my gloriously ugly webpage: I don't like HTML. I
never have, I've never been good with it, and I don't really have the urge to get any better. Every time I've felt like
sticking something online, I never get around to it because I realize it will involve HTML, mucking about with CSS, images and
borders and blah blah blah blah crap.
Then I realized that there was one page I got a kick out of updating, machines.html, and now I know why: its simple, braindead simple. So, I'm starting from the bottom. No
more poorly organized attempts at pretty shit.
June 9, 2002
Okay, I got out of the house a lot this
weekend. This four day work week is strange for me. I haven't gotten much site maintenance done lately. Pretty soon its time for a
little re-structuring, toss some of the redundant sections, set up an archiving section because this page is getting a little long. The
home connection is solid, the sites are up, the ghetto-colo is working well, and I finally finished the Blacksburg series.
May 28, 2002
I got out of the house that weekend. It was
about a month ago so I have no recollection of what I did, but I definately got out of the house.$moved, my Birthday passed by, my hours
at work went wonko kazoo, and Saneesh, Nick, Ferrous and I want up to see Leisure in Richmond. Now tha$home again, I hope to have more
up soon. Oh, and oddly enough I actually got around to the mailform... about three weeks ago.
April 24, 2002
I realized shortly after I had caught up on
my sleep, that I had re-built the entire page using the windows background color. This shit just wasn't going to fly. That, and I
finally figured out transparent Gifs. I've been a bit bored as of late. The critical downshot to running Clockwatching on Slackware and
an old Pentium Pro is that everything tends not to break. Yeah, I gotta get out of the house this weekend.
April 21, 2002
I feel just a little braindead after the
past 8 hours of fiddling with the Gimp, breaking my site twice over, and compiling apache on a Sparc.
I was quite surprised to find that KDE came with a nice little HTML editor, Kwrite. With that, Pico, the online Gimp manual, 2 pots of coffee, Dominos, a pile of old movies, and Joshy's music archive, I think I've made a start at getting a better site together.
This weekend has been full of a lot of geek shit: getting libcss to work [poorly], so I could watch DVDs under Linux, hacking away at getting the 2.5.7 and 2.5.8 kernels to compile [Error 1], playing D&D with the geeks, and finally everything I've been up to today. I think I'm going to go work on a mail form next. Next weekend I need to get out of the house.
April 20th:
A long night of The Gimp, coffee and HTML has see a rebuild of the
Clockwatcher's pages... and the reminder that I need to get more pictures of
them up as we now number something around 30. I also rebuilt my index, sacked a
few of the other pages that didn't fit, and finally put up the old Auburn shots
that had been public for a while. I actually got the journal thingy running a
while ago on Greymatter, but never had the inclination to add an entry,m so I'll
just see if I can get something going by hand-hacking the index page every once
in a while.
Word,
Finegan
January 18th:
I fought with Wireless Drivers on Tenacious for the past few days and
totally neglected to get that Listserver running for Grant like I said I would.
Similar to last week, Nick came by and we had another flurry of pages thrown
together in the midst of pizza and coffee. This time I fixed the Old Auburn pictures section, and added a ton of
material. I'll make the link from the picture index page live after I get some
content in the table above each shot. Next I think I'm going to try and get the
clockwatcher's section up to date with all of the current accounts... yeah, and
learn how to build that journal thingy.
Solidarity,
Finegan
January 12th:
Nick and I went on a bit of an HTML frenzy this evening. I finally put
together the Boston collection, including
the unfortunate thing that happened to Hartman.
We also did a little work on Porch
Sitting, and fiddled about with Photoshop. Oh yeah, and Nick, Matt and I
devoured a couple pizzas. I also fixed a number of issues with the Picture Index [7-02, gone, now here], and added a few banners and
links.
Next up should be a few more fixes to the pictures on the Clockwatcher's
section, a serious addition to the Auburn archive as soon as we figure out why
the scanner makes everything blue, and maybe I'll get that journal started
again.
Cheers,
Finegan
January 6th:
I figured it was about time the site got a makeover. Well, okay,
really just a few extra arms and legs. Consider this a start as my workhorse
machine, Jack, is a little to broken right now for me to start fiddling with
pictures. I'll get more done in the days ahead I hope.
2001 is in the can, and hopefully someone will put a potted plant over
it. The year started out hard, as anyone that has tracked down my defunct web
journal well knows, but took an upturn as I relaxed, drank the coffee, fiddled
with the Clock, and basically learned how to loaf.
Shortly I should have up a few more photo series; including the Boston
trip with Hartman, Nick, and Mr. Cream and Sugar, some goofing about at the
Library, a few more Clockshots as we now have 26 users, and the events
surrounding how I accidently ended up with Hartman's soul.
Also I hope to add a few dozen links as my daily slack habits have
changed quite a lot. Also, I have to get around to sticking up more banners in
the off chance that someone off the Clock may actually use one some day.
There has also been some murmuring about the dial that I may actually
start the journal back up again, hosted locally, with a different section for
geek things and normal things, although this may be just more good
intentions.
Cheers,
Fin