Well, the people who make the app that enables spamming blogs with comments just cracked the cat captcha.  It is a sad day.

Well this entry will be short because I have to go eat soon, and then get back to team time.  Long story short, Servutron is no longer running this site, or any site at all.  In fact, it's been turned off.  It's power supply fan won't spin, so I re-enabled the Dreamhost account and I'm back with them.  It's sort of a bummer, and it wouldn't be hard to fix, but I don't know how much money I want to sink into that machine anymore.  I'll write up a more detailed goodbye post later listing the amazing number of things that computer did, but until then... RIP, Compaqutron.

So I found another use for my server this weekend... hosting music that I can then play on my playstation (or on any playstation / 360 on the network).  This quiets the roar of my desktop for times when I just need to read or write some emails, and is fun because it's sort of nerdy and complex.  The best part about the whole system, though, is the working icon for the software I use -- it's a skull who's eyes glow red or orange depending on the cpu load.  The software is called MediaTomb, and it was unbelievably easy to set up, uses the trendy sqlite for its backend (though you can use MySQL if you'd like), and has a really slick web interface to control what files are indexed (and thus available).

Speaking of the servutron, its power supply fan stopped spinning earlier this weekend (or maybe it hadn't been spinning since I moved it... I'm not sure) but I got to spinning again with the classic grate removal and kickstarting it with a bic pen trick.  All of this was done while the power was on so that not only would my precious uptime counter be undisturbed, but also so that I could honor my ozarkian roots with an act of questionable safety in the name of repairing an item that should be replaced but isn't because "it's still good, dammit."  I'm still not even sure the computer needs that fan to run -- it never gets very warm at all.  Regardless, I have class time soon, so... take 'er easy.  And don't be scared to comment, srsly.

Well the new spam filtering cat-captcha thing that I've put into place seems to be working quite well.  Too well in fact -- no one has commented on any posts since it's been installed.  Maybe it's a turn off to have to jump through some hoops just to post your comment, but really, if you don't like pictures of cats and dogs, I'm not sure who you are or why you're on this site.  The animals are adorable, and they have cut the spam to 0 -- and the spammers are still trying.

In other news, I'm back at my dorm for my senior year.  The internet is much better here, and I can run my website off a normal port.  Hooray for actually seeing skorchedearth.com in the address bar!  Otherwise, the year just started so I don't have much to report.  The new class of freshman seem cool enough, and everybody is pretty happy to be back.  Classes don't look too hard (well, except the one I had to drop) so... hopefully something fun will happen and I'll write about it here.  My nights have been consumed with a mixture of work, school, WoW, and talking to people in the halls until 4.30 in the morning.

So, I was cruising the internet, like you do, and I ran across a video from the website cspanjunkie.org.  Now sure, this title is a little preposterous, I mean, come on, who is a "junkie" for political tv.  I watch cspan just as much, if not more, than the next guy (hence my tracking down this video) but look at that watermark.  It's huge!  It's green and pink!  It's in some goofy font!  Seems to me that the watermark was made for 7 year old girls, while the website was made for... well... a lot of people, but certainly not 7 year olds.

I don't really have anything else to report.  This is the price everyone pays for more frequent updates -- you get more posts, but they're lamer.

In truly the lamest of news, my cat Leo died today.  Now his sister cat Boo will be lonely. :'(

I'm going to bet no one noticed, but while implementing a new "edit posts" feature so I don't have to fix typos by hand at the MySQL prompt, I deleted (well, overwrote) every post, ever.  So, luckily I still had the sql backup from when I migrated from dreamhost.  Three Four lessons to be learned from this:

1. Always use a "where" in your update statements.
2. Keep regular backups.
3. Don't play with production data.
4. Edit: The edit function now works. :D

Phew.

After a long nap following thanksgiving dinner, I have returned.  I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this site... it seems like a blog is far less exciting than something nice and web 2.0-ish... database driven... shiny graphics... php... mmm.  Delightful.  Regardless, this probably won't have the work info that the current site does -- I'll probably build a second site for that, or use something nice and professional sounding like http://www.cse.unl.edu/~sprocter or a similar name.  Either way... I'm alive.

So, Thanksgiving break is almost here, which is really nice.

It's going to be a super-crammed 5 days, and between hanging out with friends and relatives, I'm not sure how much sleep I'll be getting.  But, as you can see by the time, I'm not getting all that much anyway :\.  We had a warmup of thanksgiving dinner here on Thursday, and holy cow, I had forgotten how much fun it was to eat way too much really good food.  And by fun I mean delicious at first, but then tiring and sort of quease-inducing.  Slight malaise or no, I'll press on and enjoy large amounts of turkey in only five days time.  I'm excited.  One thing I'm not excited about, however, is my geology lab.  It goes until 9.30 at night the day that thanksgiving break starts, and I'm not allowed to do the lab early.  Uggh.

In other news, Pearls Before Swine is seriously the greatest comic ever.  My blog's avatar, I've decided, is Goat, since he has a blog that no one reads -- that's him in the picture on the right side.  For now, though, remember that though Stephen Pastis (author of Pearls Before Swine) is god, and I commune with him nightly through seance, he hasn't endorsed my use of goat as avatar.  So... we'll just call him my "unofficial" avatar.  Until next time, don't be too hard on yourself.

So... been a lil while since I've posted anything here.

School is going well enough, but it's not as fun as summer and that's sad.  I'm actually home on Fall Break now, which will definitely involve some fun, but there's a lot of work to do as well.  There's a book I'm reading for geology, and some Spanish stuff, but since that isn't fun I won't bore you with any more of it.

Unfortunately, I'm not really sure what people want to read here.  I could talk about WoW, but that's pretty boring too.  I could talk about upcoming videogames or movies, but I don't really know that much, and again, that runs the risk of being boring.  So, gentle readers, you let me know what you're wanting to read and I'll do what I can.

In the meantime, here's some fun stuff that's either happened or will soon happen (hopefully):

• I got Ninja Gaiden Sigma for my ps3.  It's really really hard.
• I've become quite epic-tacular in Warcraft, and my guild begins 25-mans in Gruul's lair on Sunday.  I'm pumped.
• Fed up with sad framerates and unimpressive visuals, I've decided to buy an 8800 GTS.  Hopefully I'll get to order it this weekend.
• I got to see our cats today and heard Molly bark... I'll talk to her tomorrow.

So, yeah.  There you have it, an update.  Huzzah!

Well summer is about over, and that's pretty sad.  I've had a lot of fun fighting epic bugs / problems at my job.  Though there are still some left, I'm getting pretty excited about going with the SAnToS crew to present DejaVu to Lockheed Martin.  Work has taken a lot of my time, which is definitely a good thing in its own right, but it's also allowed me to buy some nice things to spend my hours off with, like a Playstation 3.  I don't have many games for it (ok, only one) but it's still a ton of fun and the games arriving in the coming months look really really cool.

I've also still been playing quite a bit of World of Warcraft... as you can see by the awesome collar I have in the picture on the right.  I got it in a sort of convoluted way (the person who would have got it got suddenly disconnected and couldn't reconnect) but oh well, it's mine now .

Finally, I've been doing plenty of stuff in real life too.  I've (re)watched all the episodes of Entourage through season 3 part 1, and have seen some interesting movies with my buddies as well (Hot Fuzz -- funny, but very strange.  And loud.).  There's also been the requisite swimming, shooting pool and general cavorting about town.

It's getting pretty late and I need to be in prime form for bug-stomping at work tomorrow (and no, I don't mean the plague-like levels of roaches and crickets, although they need stomping too) so I'm gunna sign off.  Later dudes (and dude-ets)!