triv.org

Do not underestimate the power of Supply Side Jesus!

My house is in an undisclosed location. I can't just give someone an address - google maps will lead them astray. It's like one of those bars that you can't find until someone tells you about it. You can't find my house until someone tells you about it. I rather like this. I'm very close to downtown Ann Arbor, which is a great place to be close to. I'm tucked away however. Tucked into a little corner of calm in the middle of the hustle and bustle.

A good deal of the seclusion of my house comes from being behind other houses. There's the typical row of houses on the street, but my house is behind those. This leads to an interesting side effect: I share a driveway with two other houses. Those two houses are rental houses. For the last 3 years, there's been a constant group of people in one of the houses. I generally liked the people in that house. One of them is now my girlfriend. (Her moving in was the longest distance move... ever.).

That group has left the house, and now there is a new group. I haven't really gotten to know them yet. They're still moving in, and I've been busy as school is about the start. However, the car situation is like lord of the flies. People parking in the driveway, on my property, or blocking the center of the whole parking area.

Aren't there any grownups at all?
I don't think so.

I'm hoping that it's just ignorance. They'll realize that they have to park in spots, and that their guests need to follow the rules too. Hopefully they'll clue up, because I'm on good terms with their landlord and I have an egress/ingress easement.Until then, I'll just enjoy the show as a detached observer. Play the how-many-points-will-this-turn-be game. Will-they-move-before-the-tow-truck-comes roulette. Jack or Ralph?

The worst kept secret in American politics is that the voters are idiots. It's been true since the beginning. The founding fathers were completely scared by the masses, which is why they had states appoint the senators and why to this day there is still an electoral collage. People voted for Bush the first time because he said he wouldn't get us into nation building, and a second time because he said he wouldn't get us out of nation building. We accept a national discourse where lying is expected strategy and those candidates that dare to speak the truth are pushed to the edges as "issue candidates."

We push reality TV to the top of the ratings. We use too much oil. We can't find the USA on a map. We don't why that is.

History works in cycles, and one of the most compelling cycles is The Crowd and The Screamer. It goes something like this: The crowd knows that water is brown. "The water has always been brown. The water will always be brown. That is simply the way things work. Water is brown." Meanwhile the screamer is on the sidelines. "You fools! You're drinking mud. Water should be clear. Crisp, clean and clear. Mud!!"

This is exchange is often followed by a burning or inquisition. Some time later the crowd realizes that clear water is superior, and screamer is redeemed in the history books. Soon after, some crazy assed guy starts going off about the rotting meat for dinner.

Over time the screamer has given us evolution, orbits, cubism, laughter, and a little religion known as Christianity. In fact the screamer is the expert, and the crowd is usually anything but. The problem is that you don't always know about the screamer, and even if you do there is an automatic tendency to ignore him. After all, if water was supposed to be clear we would have all known that the whole time.

Now with the internet, we're all screamers. Everyone one of us with our hypertext soapboxes and wikipedia accounts. Even Walter Cronkite has a blog. (That may be mentioned somewhere in the book of revelations, I'll have to check.) If everyone is a screamer, than no one is. If we are all experts, then there are no experts. We've created a cycle where a person with the right blog can get something onto the nightly news. History and the present has taught us that the crowd is filled with idiots, but the screamers are now just people from the crowd that have wifi! We don't know who to trust anymore. We're all screamers now, and we're all in the crowd. We've thrown the wheel of history off its axle.

For this one moment though, because I am writing and you are reading, you are the crowd and I the screamer. Only for a moment though. That's the way it is on the internet. We slip into one role or the other. We don't have enough time to get good at either role, we're always so busy switching between the two. I worry that we might be spending so much time switching between the two that we don't see the real screamers out there. I worry that we might not have screamers anymore. That job may have been crowdsourced.

Oh, and if you hadn't noticed. I lied about my blog ending. That's the internet for you. Can't trust anything.

You are reading the last entry of this journal.

When I started writing on this website, in June of 2002, I was depressed. I was living alone in an apartment in East Lansing; socially disengaged, fighting insomnia, and basically bored out of my mind. This seemed to give me a lot to say.

Now, I sleep well, have too much to do, and haven't been depressed for a long time. As a good friend of mine once said, "I stopped drinking and suddenly didn't have anything to write about."

More than that though, I find myself no longer spending time on the computer for the sake of spending time on the computer. I still am at the keyboard for a good chunk of time each day, but I have a task to complete. I get in, I do it, I get out. There's something about pursuits that don't involve typing or electricity, gravitas or something.

It's been a long strange ride with this site. In the end, I'm proud of most of the things I did, and ashamed of a few. Mostly, I'm saddened by the people that are no longer in my life. As of right now, there is not one person from my WPI days that I keep in regular contact with. Around WPI hinges that great question in my life, "How would things have been different if I had stayed?"

At its peak, this site had a few thousand readers. That was years ago. As my interest in the site waned, naturally the readership did as well. So to the ten or so people that read this, that's all folks.

Liberals think if they ban guns no one will get shot.

Conservatives think if they have a gun they won't get shot.

Neither side is particularly well connected to reality when it comes to this issue.

I installed OpenBSD 4.0 on my firewall last night. The install went without a hitch, and I'm rather pleased with the results. Some thoughts:

• The install is a bit more intimidating than FreeBSD's, but is actually no harder to use – it just looks harder.
• For a while I put off doing the install because I didn't want to order the CD and didn't want my network down for an FTP install. Turns out that the OS is pretty small, and my local mirror was pretty fast.
• Having used FreeBSD for years, I felt perfectly at home with OpenBSD. In fact, the only thing about the OS that I don't like is the RC system. FreeBSD is using NetBSD's new rc system, and I've been spoiled by it. OpenBSD's rc seems primitive and hackish in comparison. (Though, I do see why the OpenBSD developers haven't included it...)
• PF is the shit. I realize that I could have ran PF under FreeBSD, but given 6.x's poor UDP performance... Anyways, PF is the nicest firewall I've ever used. Fast, powerful, and easy to configure.

So I did a long overdue upgrade to my server tonight. It was running FreeBSD 4.11, which is two years old. It was time to upgrade. So I grabbed a 6.2 ISO and reinstalled the OS.

I made one critical error: I didn't test the backup tarball.

See, tar doesn't follow symlinks. My website was at the end of a symlink. No more website. D'oh!

I think a lot of this misery is because I haven't really done anything like this in a long time. You get rusty. You take things for granted. You break your website.

Luckily all the journal entries where in the database, which I did back up. The images in the posts are gone, but I have a thought on tracking those down. Emily's site is down for the moment as well, I'll get that back up tomorrow. I do like that I now have everything running under Apache 2.2. I used to have a funky two level setup with Apache 1 and 2. This was due to my reluctance to use mod_perl2.

Next on my list is upgrading the firewall/gateway to OpenBSD 4.