MindlessCode.net

Maybe the internet can help me…

I’m on the search for colleges. I’m looking for something with a good CS program, but also something with decent music, language, and drama. And on the Left-Hand coast is best. And not too much $$$, cuz I don’t got that much.

Anybody got suggestions? I wish I did. Leave a comment. Thanks.

Yay, Fireworks last night to ring in 2007! It was a lot of fun and fairly uneventful except for the launching platform burning up and 2 fireworks falling on their sides and going off pointing right at us. Pictures (click to enlarge, of course):

Purple Rain Tipped Over	This thing spun around, launched itself into the air and came down right next to our Seed Drying Facility
Mortar-Style Shells Explode and Light up the Entire Sky

Special Burning Paper–After it burns almost to the end it will lift off, fly to the ceiling, and float back down. (More New Years Entertainment)

Year in Review: No. You don’t care and I don’t either. However, I will say this: All 3 fiddle camps I went to this year (Mt Shasta Camp, and O’Connor Camp, and Booher Camp) all totally rocked. I learned so much, but I also got to be with friends for an extended period of time. I swear, those two weeks of O’Connor and Booher camp were the best 2 weeks of my life. Two whole weeks of just being with friends–learning, jamming, eating, playing games, talking, staying up until 2AM–it was the best.

The rest of the year was good too–I got my GED, my learners permit, took Drivers Ed, learned a lot, spent too much time on the computer, the usual, you know. I’m way too tired (and sick too :-() to post anything longer, but I’d hate to not post anything at all on New Years. (Brian: It’s your fault I posted this, hope you enjoy it :-))

Onto 2007!

We’ve been trying to get all our seed in over the past week. Rain threatened (and happened too) earlier this week which made stuff even more exciting.

More random pictures (click to enlarge):

Wow, that’s a lot of lettuce…	…to flip over by hand (it’s very dusty too)…
…and to thresh by hand with sticks.	…Of course, we have fun too. Laurie and Me taking a quick rest on the way over to unload the lettuce seed (in the blue tarp we’re laying on)
The Motley Seed Crew of 2006 at 5:04 PM (we’re actually a lot more tired than we look)	For some reason, you can never have too many dog pictures.

I’m not getting much work done other than seed work because I’m sooo tired when I get home… One more day this week, just 1 more day! Saturday is almost here. Actually, it is fun to “mutilate helpless little plants with clubs like some botanical serial killer”, as someone put it.

Man, this CD is awesome.

I had CYS “Camp” over the past 4 days. CYS is the local school orchestra for high school students…it’s a great program.

I guess I didn’t remember how much fun orchestra could be. Last year I was in a different (younger) orchestra, and I just didn’t seem to have much fun…I donno why. But CYS seems like it’s just going to be a blast. It’s just so much fun to play music with 65 other kids. The music is fun, the people are great, we actually sound fairly OK for only having practiced for 4 days…

Anyway, it was a blast. I can’t wait to start rehearsals in September. I met some new people, but really haven’t made any new friends yet. It seems fairly cliquish, but I just have to insert myself into a clique…or start the “outcasts clique.” Whatever, I’m sure I’ll meet some great people.

Oh, and here’s a question for all ye technical people: What do you do when some one’s email server (actually, and ISPs) won’t talk to you? I’m talking about the good folks over at c-zone. A while ago, I tried to send an email to someone@c-zone.net, and never got a reply. At first, I assumed they were just busy, but after 3 weeks, I began to wonder a bit. So, I sent an email to 14f16244dc0815420b307fce305fd241@c-zone.net to see if I would get a bounce message (14f16244dc0815420b307fce305fd241 is the md5 hash of some string, I forgot what…). The bounce never arrived. I tried from 2 email servers (gmail and wildgardenseed). This intrigued me a bit, so I used telnet to debug:

taj@moria:~$ telnet mail.c-zone.net 25
Trying 63.172.74.216...
Connected to mail.c-zone.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 mail.c-zone.net ESMTP
MAIL FROM:<tajmorton@gmail.com>
250 ok
RCPT TO:<email-address@c-zone.net>
553 sorry, that domain isn't in my list of allowed rcpthosts (#5.7.1)
QUIT
221 mail.c-zone.net
Connection closed by foreign host.
taj@moria:~$

Uhh..yeah. Looks like they’re using a mal-configured qmail setup. I think it’s weird that none of the techs have noticed it yet. Huh, we’re not receiving any email…I wonder why?

So, how do you contact these people? They’re support email is @c-zone.net is obviously of no value (since I can’t send email to that domain). I called them a few minutes ago, and got a slightly knowledgeable support person (after navigating a phone system that would hang up if you pressed the option number after the voice had stopped speaking), but they we’re of no help. He said “I’ll open a ticket if I get any more calls.” Ugg… Is there anybody who has c-zone.net as their ISP? If so, PLEASE, PLEASE, get ahold of them somehow… Call them, go to their office, whatever….send them a link to this post, send them the telnet session above, or something. This poor person I tried to email 3 weeks ago probably thinks I’m ignoring then. No, I’m not! Really!

Oh, technology.
Again, I’m up far to late. Night!

It’s amazing what you find on your backup CDs sometimes:
<>!*”# ^@`$$- *!’$_ %*<>#4 &)../ {~ **SYSTEM HALTED

In other words:
waka waka bang splat tick tick hash
carat at back-tick dollar dollar dash
splat bang tick dollar underscore
percent splat waka waka number four
amperstand right-paren dot dot slash
curly bracket tilde pipe
splat splat crash

I finally got around to upgrading this blog to Wordpress 2.0.2 from 1.5.0. I’ve wanted to do it for a long time because Akismet (an anti-spam tool) requires that you have at least 1.5.2. Usually, upgrading Wordpress would be easy, however because I feel a need to make everything complicated, my install of wordpress is somewhat hax0red for boring stuff like “Now Playing” and a few other changes.

Not that it looks any different…oh, I should really make a real design for this blog sometime.

Terribly incrimination photo of Kit and me taking an HP laptop apart:

Man, I forgot how fun it is to take apart computers. This particular computer is “having issues”, it is randomly shutting off. New “System Boards” (this computer has everything on one PCB) run about $300. Sometimes I miss “real” computers where everything is on its own board.

Happy Birthday:
To Eli! (Apr 12)
And to Dave! (Apr 14)
And to Mike! (Apr 17)
And me too, I guess (Apr 16)

Uhh…I forgot the point of this post. We’ve picked The Red Headed League (a Sherlock Holmes story) for this years Spanish play, and so the translating to Spanish has begun, as well as the scene painting. We’re reusing most of last years scene…should be interesting.

/me returns to hacking on KDEDIRS for Autopackage

Wow, I haven’t posted in here for a month or something. Not that it really matters, this is just the uninteresting rambleings of a Linux Geek. Hmm, two ‘ing’ words right after each other…isn’t there a rule against that or something?

(Little voice in head says: “Shut up Taj! Focus, write, find silly bug, go to bed!”)
Erm, OK, I’ll try…

Just got back from 2 days at Ki-Aikido camp, wow, totally a great camp! The camp was in Tigard (near Portland, OR) and about 50 people attended. There were people who came all the way down from Calgary, AB, Canada, and Vancouver, BC, Canada. (/me looks at map) Man, that is a long way!

Anyway, it was a blast, there were just as many instructors with black belts as there were students, and it was a lot of fun to train with lots of different people. I also learned that there are people who are a geeky/nerdy as me. That is, real, living, breathing, people who actually know what TCP/IP is, who have no clue about pop culture, catalog lots of useless information (for example, the kind of plastic your cup is made out of, the number of paved runways in Albania (3!, no I didn’t check), and the UPC code of any product on the table), and don’t need to shop at a mall for junk. Yeah, that about sums me up. Possibly other people too…heh–know anybody?

Anyway, if you were at camp and found this (how!?), please leave a comment and say hi! Leave your email address too if you want, it won’t be published, but I’ll have it.

I came home to 75 comment spams…ugg, stupid things clogging up my inbox. Like I actually write anything, anyway. Yes, I have Bad Behaviour installed (here I am talking like a Brit again, when will it ever end?), it helps a lot, but a few still slip through every now and then (mostly people who are paid to do it…they load the style sheet).

Oh, and before I go to bed, why do cell phones always suck? I don’t own a mobile (shock, horrer, I must be the only person in the world without one), but every single time I use one the call is all choppy and full of static so it’s impossible to hear. I mean, I was in the middle of down-town Tigard, OR (pop 44,000), which is right next to Portland, OR, with ~2 million in the MSA. Ugg, I hate cell phones.

This is so wrong…Snow in March, 150m above sea-level, just south of the 45^th parallel. That just doesn’t around here, even in December.
Sorry the thumb nails so crappy, it’s too early in the morning for me to make a decent one…

Now I get to go write some PHP interface between www.wildgardenseed.com and the USPS Zipcode Lookup API… Fun. More XML parsing.