sprocket i/o

Clover enjoys a mid-saturday walk.

This weekend was a mix of house chores and geekery. Here are some of the more interesting things I did:

• Made my first ethernet (UTP) cable that worked the first try. If you knew what a goof I can sometimes be with things that require any amount of manual precision, you would understand the delay. It’s pretty embarassing as a system administrator, but I’ve always had network admins around at both home and the office to make the cables before me. Watch out world!
• Got to play with BlueZ, the Linux Bluetooth Stack. Getting Mandriva Linux and KDE on speaking terms with my phone was surprisingly easy. I ended up having to do other things before I could get my Linux laptop to get out onto the Internet via the Sony Ericsson P910. So far it appears that no one has yet accomplished this (which I have a very hard time believing). Once I do get it up and running, I’ll write a tutorial.
• Hung out in my attic for far too long, cleaning things up in preparation to add more insulation to lower our cooling costs. The high point was finding the squirrel skull in the attic, the low-point was all the dust that accumulated in Dane and I’s respitory system, even if we were wearing insulation masks.
• Went to UUMAN (Unitarian Universalist Metro Atlanta North), a Unitarian Universalist church here in Roswell. I’ve never been to a UU church before, and it reminded me a bit of a cross between the small Buddhist temples I’ve been to and the larger Luthern services I went to growing up. All in all a pretty neat group of folks with a diverse set of religious backgrounds. The sermon drew from many buddhist & transcendentalist themes.
• Had two great project ideas from my dreams: Re-writing Flash Attack in Python with TCP/IP support, and writing a generic clean-room set of UNIX system unit tests, that can be used by Nagios, Zabbix, OpenView, reporting tools, etc. Definitely two blue-sky projects.
• Watched Harold & Kumar go to White Castle and Anchorman. Both films were pretty bad, but they had their laughs. I did crave Krystal‘s afterwards though.
• Spent far too much time in Photoshop generating proof of concept paint colors for the walls in the bedroom. I’m trying to fit the color scheme of the wall hanging I had made for Dallas for Christmas.
• Closed the computer room window for the first time in 4 months. Previously, I was running the coax for the cable modem through the window. Dallas’s father and I drilled through the 24″ space between the floors so we could run it up into the computer room from a pre-existing hole for coax in the guest bedroom downstairs.