Searching for Tao, 7573 Kilometres from Home

January 11, 2004 08:32 +0000 | Miscellaneous 1

at about 2:30am the fire alarm went off in my building. a loud, blistering noise not fit for this earth. it would appear that my building was on fire and we had to vacate immediately... from my 21st floor apartment. bits of clothing were thrown about in an effort to secure a sustained level of acceptable warmth in the -20degree weather outside... and what about insurace??? i don't have any! we walked down all 21 flights of stairs to find only 5% of the building residents waiting downstairs... the rest apparently sleeping through the ungodly noise unfit for this earth.

it was then we decided to go for pizza. this would likely take a while.

after pizza @amato down the street, we returned and chatted with the building manager. apparently some pipes downstairs had frozen and burst, filling the corridor downstairs with 3 feet of water... hot water. water so hot that the steam set off the fire alarm and the chaos ensued.... i would imagine that the whole episode would have been upsetting had we actually been sleeping.

January 10, 2004 17:14 +0000 | Employment Personal Life 0

angela came out last night and we went out with some local friends of hers. i got to meet the infamous "jen" and have unfortunately yet to recieve the "jen test"... apparently it's something like the usual set of questions any concerned friend uses to grill a new significant other, but souped up like tim taylor's lawn mower. i met darren, a movie maker / geek for hire that maintains servers to help corporations launder their own money (he's still cool though) and a few other nice young men that didn't talk much.

i've also finished my first week at the new job. it's kinda frustrating right now, 'cause i've not yet nailed down the "command structure" i need to function properly. i've got one guy in vancouver giving me orders from his office, and another guy in my office issuing (often very different) orders. i'm not sure who takes precident yet, so things are confusing. i have a pretty smokin' machine though, and i actually get to do development work too (as oppsoed to my last job that just had me fixing crackt-out buggy code). i got cvs and my sound card working now, so i'm pretty happy where i am. sure, it's advertising, and sure i'm helping rich people get richer... but we all have to pick our battles, and my passion isn't for that fight. i wish the best of luck to those who do -- maybe one day, when i'm finished with my own fight, i'll join you.

January 08, 2004 06:11 +0000 | Personal Life 4

there's new stuff all over the place. i've added links to two new blogs that i semi-frequent, so check them out if you've got the time. i've also put up two new pictures on my imager, the first of MANY brought back from vancouver, kelowna & calgary. as always you'll have to log in to the imager to see the pics (working on a better system as i write this), but in the mean time, i've included the two new ones here. hope the parents are reading this, they'll like:

oo! and there's more! check out my "time until i see angela" module on the left ;-)

January 07, 2004 02:43 +0000 | Nifty Links 0

go here right now.
my personal favourite is #2 "in my country".

January 05, 2004 02:22 +0000 | Personal Life 1

i'm just finished packing up now for my trip home. i should arrive in toronto around 5am and will have to somehow summon the stamina to stay awake 'till evening soas to help smoothe out my already confused body clock. i'm going to miss home -- in a way, i already do. i'm a cancer, and ask any of us -- we're all close to our family. i miss my cousins, and my grandparents, and most of all, my parents. they're good people who've done a wonderful job raising me to the person i am now... and here i am leaving them on the other side of the country to persue a personal destiny. i know it's what everyone wants for me, but we both have days when we just wish we were together -- screw the world, screw fate. family is just more important.

but i'll come home. i promise. i just have work to do first.

January 05, 2004 02:13 +0000 | Geek Stuff 0

somehow, magically, anarchy is responding again. i tried to login today at around 5pm pst and somehow, everything works. i don't know why, and i'm going to have to spend a few hours finding out, but for now, i'm just happy my cpu isn't dead ;-)

January 02, 2004 21:32 +0000 | Geek Stuff 4

this post is strictly a geek rant, so if you don't know what ssh, x11, or linux is, you probably don't want to keep reading.

my desktop is not responding.
it's been 3days of me trying to get in, to figure out what's broken. my yahoo mail account is almost full and if i don't get in and run kmail soon, yahoo will likely start bouncing emails.

so what's wrong?
essentially the box is up and running, but the cpu load is at 4 and has been there for an unknown number of days. something (i'm thinking it's arts from kde 3.2-beta2) has run away with my cpu. linux is nifty there friends, but stay the hell away from that beta stuff. of course any number of other processes might have blown up, but without a working shell, i can't really speculate.

however, it would seem that the gods were indeed smiling last night (or maybe just taunting and laughing) 'cause after repeated login attempts, i actually got in. see, it basically lets me login, then waits..... forever. then dies with "connection closed by ". but this one time, it actually let me in. slowly going through each stage of the login until i finally got my prompt (this is where i saw the cpuload). so what did i do? diagnosing the problem seemed somewhat improbable, since just typing "su" took about 10min. so i just put in the following:

su
[password]
reboot

i got the "this system is going down now!" bit and got kicked out. yay! i thought, now my box will work again! but it would seem that the box never actually rebooted 'cause my continuous pings never dropped a single packet.... i'm trying something similar now and if i get in again i'll let you know if it works. otherwise, i'll be doing this half-awake when i get home in a few days.

January 02, 2004 05:49 +0000 | Personal Life 0

sometimes i forget how very beautiful british columbia is. mountains, rivers, lakes... and this time out: snow! nearly a foot of it in fact. i've not been all over ontario yet, but somehow i doubt that i'll ever find anything that tops the sight of the rocky mountains overlooking english bay.

i'm on "the big stinky bus" now, heading back up to kelowna to stay with the parents a few more days before my return "home" to toronto. i'm sorry i didn't get to see everyone this time out, but i'm glad i got to spend time with those i could scrouge together for a new years party (well, jeanie did most of the scrounging really). my grandparents were very hospitable, but chris rhodes' computer just wouldn't behave. overall though, i think the trip worked out alright. i even got to hang out with quinn & paula -- two of my more entertaining friends. i miss you all. maybe now's a good time to think about saving up your cash and vacationing out in toronto eh?

January 01, 2004 09:35 +0000 | Geek Stuff Personal Life 3

i'm downstairs in jeanie's room trying to fix a number of seemingly broken things that blew up for the new year. my blogger's theme engine broke and right now, i've just hacked it to *look* like it's working. not only that, but my desktop box isn't responding to my login attempts, even though i can ping it... not sure what's going on there, but it can't be good.

new years here @ the sebastian household was kinda nice. i got to hang out with family #2 and quinn @ paula even came out to the party. i've missed everyone terribly and it was really great to see them. we're all spending the night and i'm looking forward to waffles come morning. then, if the roads are friendly, i'll be getting on a big smelly bus and heading back up to kelowna to spend my final days in western Canada. it's a beautiful place to live and i'm sure i'll end up here again someday.

when i was younger, i used to use new years to look back on the stuff i did over the year. and typically it was centred around the ladies in my life (why is this not surprising?). i think for now though, i'll end it here -- 'cause apparently "god" is calling for me to come upstairs. i think we're going to watch "pirates of the carribean". i'm sure jeanie's excited.

December 28, 2003 07:23 +0000 | Geek Stuff Personal Life 1

it's late saturday night here and i'm just piecing together the bits of my father's computer as i download the bulk of his backups i uploaded to my server yesterday. windows98 sucks dude. and getting it to work with scsi stuff is just plain bad. it seems that every time i nuke n' pave this box, i forget how i got it to work the last time... if anyone has scsi tips for this stupid os please let me know eh?

anyway, the trip up here with the parents has been really wonderful. kelowna is beautiful, though don't let the locals fool you, it's not a real city. everyone here still has that small town mentality, people know their neighbours and the weather isn't nearly as hostile as ottawa's.

meeting with the family has been great. it seems that i'd forgotten the special relationship i have with my cousins, namely ashley to whom i've long been very close. it's always nice to see them all around christmas and catch up on the details of their lives that i've been missing on the other side of the country. i hope one day that they'll find the time (and i suppose, the money) to make their way out to my place in toronto to visit.

lastly, i've found and fixt another bug in my blogger. this one being an issue with the calendar module that displayed links to blog entries outside of a user's privilege. once the thing's considered done i'll have to write up a changelog for this stuf.....