If it wasn’t for Stoaty, I wouldn’t have anything to blog about. Her weekend post about Spam’s 30th birthday sent me to my bookcase to retrieve an old geek book:
Almost 40-year-old DEC manual
Almost 40-year-old DEC manual, side view
That’s it. Nothing to say. Just some geek reminiscences.
So I was over at Stoaty’s place, catching up on stuff I’ve missed because I’ve been too busy whining about my life, and I came across a post about New York’s new Governor.
A good bit of the post was devoted to the Rules for Blues. Like
5. Blues cars: Chevys and Cadillacs and broken down trucks. Blues don’t travel in Volvos, BMWs, or Sport Utility Vehicles. Most Blues transportation is a Greyhound bus or a southbound train. Jet aircraft and state-sponsored motor pools ain’t even in the running. Walkin’ plays a major part in the blues lifestyle. So does fixin’ to die.
and
11. Good places for the Blues: a) highway b) jailhouse c) empty bed
Bad places: a) Nordstrom’s b) gallery openings c) Ivy League institutions d) golf courses.
and
13. Do you have the right to sing the Blues? Yes, if: a) you’re older than dirt b) you’re blind c) you shot a man in Memphis d) you can’t be satisfied.
No, if: a) you have all your teeth b) you were once blind but now can see c) the man in Memphis lived d) you have a retirement plan or trust fund.
and
19. I don’t care how tragic your life: you own a computer, you cannot sing the blues. You best destroy it - with fire, a spilled bottle of Mad Dog, or get out a shotgun. Maybe your big woman just done sat on it. I don’t care.
In my typically defiant, adolescent-in-an-old-man’s-body manner, I yelled, “Fooey! I can, too!” Or words that were a close approximation. And then I cranked out the following:
Lethargic Limon Lizardbrain’s Palm Beach Golf Cart Blues
Well I opened up my laptop, and it sure did make me sad
Yes I opened up my laptop, Lord, it make me feel so bad
Got a email from my baby
Say she left me for my dad
I got a little trust fund; I don’t have to drive no Ford
I ride around in limos; I don’t have to drive no Ford
But my daddy gots the money
And he’s Chairman of the Board
So I made my way to Palm Beach in the Corporation plane
Oh, I hitched a ride to Palm Beach in the Corporation plane
Had to take the doggone Lear
‘Cause the Gulfstream was in Spain
Then I went out to the golf course and I shot a hole in one
Yeah, I jumped into a golf cart and I shot that hole in one
And the po-lice came and got me
‘Cause I shot him with my gun
If you go down to Palm Beach, keep your lawyer on speed dial
If you travelin’ to Palm Beach, keep your lawyer on speed dial
‘Cause in the Palm Beach lockup
The brunch they serve is vile
Well I opened up my laptop, and it sure did make me sad
Yes I opened up my laptop, Lord, it make me feel so bad
Got a email from my baby
Say she left me for my dad
So there!
Winter. In all its ugly, homicidal dreariness. It’s been a long, snowy one here, and every year my ability to cope with it diminishes.
Across the street, for the last two weeks, they’ve been working at clearing the snow off the new plastic athletic field. The huge price tag on it was justified by the claim that it would be used almost non-stop by various groups; now the crews are out desperately trying to make the field live up to the hype.
Snow removal on Memorial Field
Less than half the field cleared in almost 2 weeks. If we luck into some really warm weather, it might be ready for use sometime in April.
Snow removal as seen from ground level
Thanx for asking, Joan. You may see me next month as I roll by on my way to the Gulf. I need to thaw out before next winter strikes, around the middle of August.
Ok, I got lazy this morning and asked other people to choose which images from this morning’s shoot I should post. Here they are, with a minimum of comment, because another storm is moving in and I gotta finish my errands before the snow flies.
Fort Allen Park at Dawn
ditto
ditto
Fort Gorges and Lobster Boat on Casco Bay
Fort Allen Park
ditto
Ooo! The colors!
I’m also too lazy to narrow it down to a reasonable amount, so y’all got a bonus today. Try not to remember all the days I didn’t post images.
I’ve been reluctant to ditch Quickbooks Pro because, outside of full-blown accounting/bookkeeping programs, there are no open-source equivalents that allow me to track my time. But I finally figured out that, since I don’t have to worry about payroll, I can make the switch to GnuCash and just enter my hours as invoice items.
Not that I’m completely comfortable with that, mind you; my obsessive-compulsive record-keeping implant is screaming at me that something is missing if I do it this way. I’m the guy who can’t discard 16 year old phone bills because, well, you never know when you might need ‘em.
So today I sent out my last Quickbooks-generated invoice.
That means that, as of today, I am officially Windoze-free!
I started my move away from Windoze when I turned the old computer into a dual-boot machine and then found that I was seldom booting to the Windoze side because the Linux side never crashed and didn’t require hours of labor every week just to keep it from being infected with malware. Lately, I’ve only been firing up Old 98 about once a month, just to do my books. It’s taken me a while, but I’ve managed to find applications to replace every program I needed the Windoze box for. Quickbooks was the last one.
Not that I’ll get rid of the faithful, if flawed, computer I built in December of 1998. It’s only 9 years old, and even though every component in it is obsolete and it’s kind of noisy, it still runs every time I power it up.
And it’s sitting there. Silently waiting for me to press the “Power” button. How can I just ditch it, when we have so much history together?
Besides, I might need it. You never know.
…and you know what that means.
That’s right! Crappy pictures of fall foliage! Man, am I getting lazy. I only walked 50 feet out my back door to get these.
The East coast of the U.S. is infested with these: red maples (acer rubrum). Only the southern tip of Florida is free of ‘em.
Red Maple in October
Same Maple, Different View
Some goodies from the garden. Technically, it’s not my garden, but since I select the plants, plant ‘em, nurture ‘em and harvest ‘em (all for someone else), I refer to it as mine.
I goofed off too long. I wanted to catch the colors in the pepper as they were turning from green to streaky red. Alas, procrastination, as usual, is my downfall.
The countertop is 1970 all the way. Same color as the Bradys’ kitchen counters.
Alice is getting ready to make a salad.
Here’s another shot of ‘em that’s not quite so nasty on the eyes:
The colors look better on the cutting board.
Hmm… this ‘posting’ doesn’t seem to be as difficult as I imagined it would be. Let’s see how I feel about it tomorrow.
Update: Apparently, “Brady Bunch” is Cockney rhyming slang for “lunch.” You find some strange things when you Clusty your posts’ titles.
So does that make the title a pun, or redundant, or what?
Busy geeking. Here’s an old one to hold you over for awhile:
Everglades Sunset
Lesson: After running emerge –update, pay close attention to the the changes in configuration files proposed by etc-update. I didn’t, and caused myself a lot of avoidable grief. During one of my system-wide updates, I trashed Apache’s config files. Being the slightly retarded geek wannabe that I am, I had a heck of a time tracking down the information I needed to get my LAMP server running the way I wanted it to.
After much Clustying, file editing, head-banging, hair-pulling and cussing, I found out that it was pretty much working in the first place. All it needed was a couple of minor tweaks.
I first noticed something was wrong when I fired up the test website I have lurking in my /home/lizardbrain/public_html directory. The pages all loaded, but instead of being interpreted, the PHP script was rendered as text. It didn’t take me long to find that I needed to add some stuff to /etc/conf.d/apache2 (file paths are the ones on my Gentoo box; your distro may stash the files in other places). The first thing I did was add “-D PHP5″ to the APACHE2_OPTS line in /etc/conf.d/apache2. It still didn’t work — I kept getting “Not Found” error messages. Actually, I had fixed about half the problem and didn’t know it, so I continued to clusty and tweak the config files. Most of what I did was unnecessary, but at least didn’t break anything. What finally gave me the clue that I was on the wrong track was when I restored /etc/apache2/httpd.conf to its original condition and copied a .php file from my public_html directory to the server’s home directory: it worked. All I needed to do from that point was get Apache to serve pages to my test site.
For those of you who got here by querying the search term “apache2 Invalid command ‘UserDir’,” /etc/apache2/httpd.conf does not allow the setting of “UserDir public_html.” What I had to do was add another option, “-D USERDIR,” to /etc/conf.d/apache2. Then I had to edit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf to add UserDir instructions.
Here’s what it boiled down to:
In /etc/conf.d/apache2, add
-D PHP5 -D USERDIR
to the APACHE2_OPTS line. Make sure you add these options within the existing quotation marks.
In /etc/apache2/httpd.conf, add
<IfModule mod_userdir.c>
UserDir public_html
</IfModule>
This gave me basic functionality. Since there is no public access to this computer, I didn’t bother to add anything else to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf to restrict access. For those who need more security, I got this from the Gentoo Forums:
<IfModule mod_userdir.c>
UserDir public_html
#
# Control access to UserDir directories. The following is an example
# for a site where these directories are restricted to read-only.
#
# <Directory /home/*/public_html*gt;
# AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit Indexes
# Options MultiViews Indexes SymLinksIfOwnerMatch IncludesNoExec
# <Limit GET POST OPTIONS PROPFIND>
# Order allow,deny
# Allow from all
# </Limit>
# <LimitExcept GET POST OPTIONS PROPFIND>
# Order deny,allow
# Deny from all
# </LimitExcept>
# </Directory>
# Enable this additional section if you would like to make use of a
# suexec-enabled cgi-bin directory on a per-user basis.
#
#<Directory /home/*/public_html/cgi-bin>
# Options ExecCGI
# SetHandler cgi-script
#</Directory>
</IfModule>
Now, when I point my browser to http://mygentoobox/~lizardbrain/, my test site appears, and php scripts are rendered correctly. As usual, the Gentoo Forums were my best friend, once I figured out the correct search terms.
