Thanksgiving was really fun again this year. Good food, good company, and lots of pool. I think I played pool for 10 hours over the holiday.

We all came home last night because we wanted to beat the storm coming in. Then this morning I woke up to about 4" of snow! Woo hoo!

So I just had to get the Samurai out in it. I played in it for about four hours. There is still a lot of snow on the ground. I had a blast in it.

The only bad thing was the power went out this morning and my backup power doesn't do too well. About four of my servers were rebooted. It took about an hour to get everything running again. Then I didn't know that my web server was offline until I got home.

I had been working on some PHP upgrades and didn't have them totally installed when the server rebooted. Then I forgot that I was doing that so it took a while to figure out what happened. Anyway, it's all back up and running now.

Well, I think I'll go have some lunch.

Today my dad and I went wheeling around. We ended up in the north mountains of Stagecoach. There is a lot of trails over there. So the next weekend we get to wheel, we are going over there to do some exploring.

I've been checking out m0n0wall again. It has a captured portal with Radius authentication. So...

Friday night I wanted to setup m0n0wall firewall in between my router and my wireless network. Well, not realizing that it does not do transparent bridging firewall, I tried for many hours. m0n0wall will only do a NAT firewall, so my attempts were futile.

After figuring that out at about 2AM, I tried changing my whole network to work behind the NAT. All I did was blow up AP2 at Pipers. So, I called it a night at about 4:30AM.

Saturday morning. The phone is ringing off the hook. I head out to Pipers to fix the relay. I tried onsite for about 2 hours to get it to work right. Still not happening. So I pulled it down and took it back to the office.

I install m0n0wall on the relay. This will work because the relay is already NAT. I install the latest version of m0n0wall with the SSH shell pack. I configure it and it works great. I setup the firewall and limit P2P apps. It looked good so I hauled it back over to Pipers and installed it in the antenna array.

So now it's all working again. I have m0n0wall on the relay with the firewall blocking... everything but standard internet access. It's setup to slow down P2P applications to nothing so they don't disrupt the network. It has the captured portal setup and ready to go for when I get the Radius setup with all the usernames/passwords. I'll probably have that setup soon.

So it will stop people over on that side of town from stealing internet from me. Finally. Next is to get the other relays setup the same way.

So I find out today that my stylist for my Graphire is busted. I always wondered why the eraser on it did not work. So I'm sending it back for RMA. I thought that it was just a problem with the drivers or something.

So now I'll have to wait for that to get back here. I guess it will take like two weeks or something. I'm using the mouse right now and I'm remembering why I switched to the tablet. It still hurts my wrist to use the mouse.

America's Army...

I just found this really cool game. It's just like Delta Force, but it's totally free. It runs on Mac, Linux and even Windows.

So now my wrist is really going to hurt...

Day two on my new computer. Notes about setup. When I turned on my new Mac it asked me if I would like to copy my setup and data from my old computer. I said sure and clicked the Yes button. I connected the two computers together and booted the slave into Target mode. It did it's thing and copied a bunch of files over. The copy over had some errors coping my data over. I thought, no problem I'll just do it myself.

So, when I booted it up none of my settings were copied. The network was setup. My login was setup. Most of my data was missing. So I just copied it manually over. But then still my settings would not work. So here is the proper way of doing it:

Enable root login.
Log in as root.
Use the shell to copy all your data over to your new user dir.
chown all your files to your user id.
Logout.

That should do it. So I logged back in and everything was just like my old system. So don't use the finder, use the shell to copy everything. That way you will get all your hidden stuff too.

For a backup, make a disk image of your old system so you have access to it when it goes away.

I just finished setting up the Cube for Jane. She gave her iMac to her aunt. So I got the new iMac G5, Jane got the Cube with the 23" monitor, and Sam gets her first Apple computer.

I just got back home from picking up my new Samurai. It's a real pile of junk, but it has what I wanted. Deisel Engine, Racing Seats, and a few other items.

I'll probably sell what I don't use, like the axles. There is a bunch of other junk in it also. I'm not going to use the frame and the body. They are junked up real good. The roll cage is good, and the dash can be fixed up nice.

So when I got home, I found out that my new iMac arrived! I'm typing on it right now. The screen is the 20", and everything looks good on it. I installed my 1GB chip and now I'm transferring all my stuff from my old computer.

Fun, fun, fun.

Rack Space Fanatical Support means: Give them an arm and a leg to get hosting, then fingers and toes for any "extra" features.

"Fanatical Support" means that will do as little as possible, then charge you for everything else.

Gesh, I wish I never went to Rackspace.

OH, after paying 4x the price for the hardware, you don't get to keep it. $500 for a 1GB memory chip. That's retarded.

Saturday was a crazy day of wheeling. We started the day wanting to go over the mountain to the hidden valley. I brought a shovel and hoe to dig out one of the off camber sections. I was wanting to get the trail ready for when everyone comes up to wheel.

Anyway, we drove up Ruby and got to the trail head. We got about half way in and found some old guy stuck in the mud. Since he was blocking the whole trail we had to either wait for him to get out or pull him out.

We decided to pull him out of the mud so we could get on our way. That was our first mistake. First problem, he was backwards... Heading down the mountain. There is no way to turn him around. So we hooked the chain on and was going to just pull him out of the one spot and see if he could get out.

A Samurai is not known for it's ability to pull full size Chevy's out of the mud. I tried, and almost got him out, but I didn't count on him being an idiot. The guy just hit the gas and kept spinning his tires. I was doing OK until he started turning off the cliff. We all yelled for him to stop and that was that. If he went off the cliff, I would have been right behind him.

So now what we have is a idiot with a 2WD on a 4x4 trail stuck in the mud. I can't pull him out because he can't drive and I don't have a big enough rig.

So I told him to drive down to the Y in the road so he could turn around. All's well until we get to the Y in the road and he passes it. Then he tried to back up it. Yeah right. Not in this mud.

So now he is stuck again and even worse. So I called the local auto parts store to see if there was anyone that could pull him out. Ends up there was a few guys that wanted to get muddy. They came up in a full size Blazer and pulled the guy right out.

But, it was dark by that time and we never got to go to the trail. All well. It was probably too muddy there anyway and it was a good thing we came by or that guy probably would have never got out of there.