Misc

Doesn’t anybody in Chicago eat at home?

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

So I’m in Chicago (actually Oakbrook) for a class this week.

My hotel is really close to Oakbrook Center. Oakbrook Center is a really tony shopping mall. It has a Neiman Marcus, a Nordstroms and a Lord and Taylor.

High end stuff.

It also has a bunch of good restaurants. I had dinner at Mon Ami Gabi (a french ‘bistro’) the first night. I had dinner at Papagus (a greek place) last night.

Both nights it was really busy, but I got in and seated pretty quickly.

Not so tonight. It’s Wednesday. Why is Wednesday so busy? I went to five different restaurants tonight and the lines were almost out the doors at all of them.

So I ended up having a pretty good rib eye steak at the hotel.

Why is the human body designed to love fat and salt so much? The steak was good and rare and had a nice rind of fat around it. Oh my gawd did that fat taste good… It’s been a while since I had anything like that.

If we are not supposed to eat animals, then why the hell do they taste so good?

I’m still drooling just thinking about it.

Computers

Google Maps Kicks Ass

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

I just have to say that Google Maps kicks serious ass.

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Chicago (actually in Oakbrook, a suburb) and I wanted to buy some single malt scotch.

So I go to Google Maps and enter the hotel address.

Then I click on search near by and type in liquor.

Ba-da-bing! Ardbeg Single Malt Scotch is located.

Way too cool.

Computers

Squid – More Geek Fun

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

So now that Rosalyn has proven that she can’t be trusted to surf unfettered it’s time to setup the Squid Proxy server again.

I had the kids computer running through it before with a whitelist of sites they could visit, but now they are using Mom’s conputer a lot to surf and it doesn’t get proxied.

I needed to setup the proxy server so that the kids could only go to the whitelisted sites, but Liz could go anywhere. So I set it up to ask for authorization to visit anything not on the whitelist.

Here are the relevant lines in the conf file:

auth_param basic program /usr/lib/squid/ncsa_auth /usr/etc/passwd
auth_param basic children 5
auth_param basic realm Dad says NO
auth_param basic credentialsttl 2 hours

acl whitelist dstdomain “/etc/squid/whitelist”
acl password proxy_auth REQUIRED
http_access allow whitelist
http_access allow password

# And finally deny all other access to this proxy
http_access allow localhost
http_access deny all

So this reads in a list of domains from a file and allows access to them. If the domain is not in the file, then it password prompts you for access.

Computers

Big Geeky Update

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Lots of computer fun on Saturday. I finally managed to move the last two services (DHCP and Squid) off of the old server on Saturday and turned it off.

Then I thought it would be a good plan to upgrade the firewall (currently a Pentium 133MHz with 64MB of RAM) by replacing it with the old server’s husk (a 200Mhz Pentium Pro with 128MB RAM and an old Dell PowerEdge II RAID controller with dual SCSI drives.)

So I started playing around. Sean dug up an open souce firewall called Smoothwall and gave me a CD, so I booted that up.

Unfortunately, the ‘free’ version doesn’t support SCSI drives. Only IDE. So, just to see what it was like I stuffed an old 4GB IDE drive in and installed it.

Smoothwall looks cool, but it’s not suited for what I want. It’s designed for a home network that only has one IP address. It only does port forwarding and no inbound NAT. I have an 8 IP block for my home (because I can) and Smoothwall won’t deal with it. So that’s one down.

Continue reading →

Family

Naughty Rosalyn…

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Well, well, well. Rosalyn has managed to get herself kicked off the computer for a week again.

Yesterday I caught her on the signup page to create an eBay account. I told her in no uncertain terms that she was not to sign up for an account. I told her she had to be 18 years old to use eBay and that if there was something she wanted to buy we could look at it and I would bid on it for her.

Last night Liz got an email from eBay congratulating her on being the high bidder on an auction. Liz doesn’t have an eBay account, and if she did the name wouldn’t be neopets_rule1234.

So this morning we had another little chat with Roz.

She won the auction too. All of $0.75 for 10 Pokemon cards. Not a bad deal actually.

So now I have to figure out Squid some more so I can send Liz’s computer through it and have it authenticate so Liz can go anywhere and the kids can’t.

Sigh.

Misc

The way my brain works

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

I was on an IRC channel the other day and someone described the way they thought their brain worked. I realized that it sounded a lot like the way my brain works…

_timm_ i think my brain is like a gigantic library
_timm_ ran by morons
_timm_ and possibly a bunch of tards
_timm_ like you know beach balls are supposed to go in the b section
_timm_ but the morons in charge of my memory
_timm_ are like beachballs?
_timm_ lets file that under q
_timm_ so im like, hey brain
_timm_ go find memories about beachballs
_timm_ and the brain is like
_timm_ beachballs? b… b…. nope nothing
_timm_ then after a while your brain puts that on the backburner
_timm_ like runs it in the background
_timm_ while youre doing something else
_timm_ and the morons go
_timm_ oh shit
_timm_ we filed that under q
_timm_ and then you remember the memory
_timm_ and they refile it

Motorcycles

I sooooo want to build one of these…

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

A few years ago I came across an article on the internet about this custom BMW someone built.

The thing was beautiful! They had hacked the frame and made the motor a stressed member. They had done really nice work.

Then I lost the link. 🙁 No amount of Googling could find it again.

Today a friend (thanks Gus!) sent me a link to a different site that had a photo of this bike on it with enough information to find the original site!

Whoo-hoo!

This is a beautifully constructed custom bike. Not like those hacks on American Chopper build.

Unfortunately the Team Incomplete site does not have as many photos as the on-line article about them had, but it still makes me want to build one…

After I win the lottery and retire I guess…