I’ve long been meaning to install a new operating system and services on my home server, cheshirecat. Mostly it only exists to host my big old RAID that stores ~rjbs, my MP3’s, and a few other personal things. It used to host my website, the primary MX for manxome.org, and some other important things, so replacing it was going to be a pain. Still, it was running Slackware 7, dating from 1999, and it had only been patchily upgraded here and there.

I’ve been wanted to get rid of the stupid concrete walkway in my back yard ever since (or before) we moved in. Last week I found a local place that does concrete recycling. I mentioned this to Kip and asked if, at some unspecified time in the future, he’d give me a hand getting rid of the walkway.

So, I’ve done a bit more hacking on addex, some of which was to make it usable by a larger group of people. More on that in another entry, though.

Gabor recenly posted some reports about what version of what CPAN dists were in what OS distributions.

Recently, Daniel Jalkut was doing that thing that has, sadly, become pretty popular in modern blogging: announcing his hot new product before telling us what it’s for. (Did this start with Segway? I’m sure there are some prior examples that I can’t think of.) Anyway, it turned out to be Black Ink, a really nice looking Cocoa-based crossword puzzle program. It started out pretty buggy, but has gotten a little better. It costs $25, which probably isn’t too unreasonable, but I can’t see myself spending that much on a game that I’ll only play now and then.

A few years ago, I received a plain brown box in the mail. It came from my ISP, Speakeasy, and contained a nice Speakeasy-branded mug. There was nothing else in the box, and no explanation as to why I’d been sent the mug. I logged into their IRC servers and asked about it. I found my logs of this conversation today while looking for something else:

Ruben Navarrete, Junior, is a syndicated columnist who frequently writes about the problems of Hispanics in America. I often agree with him, either entirely or to a limited extent. Sometimes I think he’s nuts. Today, I’m pretty disgusted.

I know that most people know how much email addresses suck, but I found this message in Mutt while looking for something else, and I thought it was a nice illustration.

I am now fulfilling my long-time dream of using almost exclusively $2 bils as spending money.

In case you, like I, wonder what a “natural George” or “Sherlock” is, this will help. (Well, it won’t help with Sherlock. Apparently the dictionary is out of date.)