D A L I F . C O M - Net Life

Dalif.com nearly suffers premature death

nospam@example.com (Dalif) — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 12:01:18 +0100

Ye, I suddenly realized I had been given a 2 weeks notice for renewing this domain. And that was like.. 9 days ago. My Visa card has been inactive for some time, and I wasn't able to renew it myself, since only a credit card could do it. Had put it off long enough, and it soon became apparent to me, that had I not in fact renewed it before Tuesday, I might very well lose it. And that wasn't a comforting thought, seing as I've had it since 2001.

I spoke to Rancor, and he agreed to renew it for me. But for some reason, the renewing process also required access to webbanking. Right, we tried from his box, but a technical error made it impossible to write the login information in the designated areas on the webbanking page. The textboxes were outside the pop up windows frame, and with no scrollbars, getting them in focus proved impossible.

I was getting somewhat desperate by this time. Then my brother, who happened to be visiting, offered to provide the service required. He had a different bank, one where the webbanking wasn't tied to one computer, and where the coding was sufficient enough to allow him to actually follow the payment through. I opted for a 5 year deal, for the lowly sum of USD 60, meaning this fucker won't expire til 15-01-2013. That's right, baby. 2k13. Howzabout that? Spiffing indeed.

So, now I'm off to do the final corrections on the webpage I just finished up, effectively allowing me to buy a new laptop. I'll be back with you guys in the not too distant future. Be good!

New toys equals fun

nospam@example.com (Dalif) — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 02:51:00 +0100

Got a job done with today, that's been hanging over my head for a long time. One of those that kept me with a bad conscious. I didn't particularly want to do it in the first place, but I agreed anyway, because I always try my best to help out. The job was creating a website, something I'm not particularly adept in when push comes to shove. Modify existing stuff, check. Creating stuff from scratch.. not cool. But I managed to pull it off after months of back and forth. And as payment, I get a new laptop. One I pick out for myself. Some people could argue that I don't really have anything special to use a laptop for, and while I sometimes agree with that statement, I must admit, having a laptop that is speedy and smooth does have advantages. I'm at work now, for example, and if the laptop I have with me was faster, I might be able to do more stuff on it than just blog, chat and surf. I'd like to anyway.

So that job is out of the way. Splendid. Got a few more annoying tasks I need to complete, then I'm almost back to status quo in terms of things hanging over my head. Looking forward to it. It was a load off completing this today. I'll need to do a little more when proof reading comes back, but it's done, designwise. And it's my last day in a 5 night working streak, with 4 days off in front of me. It's sweet, all in all.

New laptop tho... can you believe it? I'm looking quite forward to it. The fun I can have with a brand new piece of equipment. Marie tried to convince me to buy a macbook. I told her my needs differed from hers. 5 minutes and a lot of sexual innuendo later, I think she realized that our needs were indeed different. So she let the macbook go. I used to dislike macs just because they were macs. I'm not like that anymore. I know lots of the reasons people would use macs, and that's fine. I just don't think they will ever be my choice in computer hardware. I just don't dig it, kno' wut I'm sayin'? PC laptop with a dual boot of Winblows XP and Ubuntu will do me up quite nicely. mmmm new hardware... weeeeee

Dalif plus new disk equals mayhem

nospam@example.com (Dalif) — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 03:49:24 +0100

What follows may or may not be an incredibly dull and boring tale of how I bought, installed and set up a harddrive. Let me promise you this tho, it's not all technical data, seing as I did in fact have to leave my house and encounter other people in order to achieve the task of setting up my brand new hard disk. If you want to catch a glimpse into a gripping tale of lies, love, deceit and the transferring of megabytes, do click the below link.

Continue reading "Dalif plus new disk equals mayhem"

Rambling heads and the Irish

nospam@example.com (Dalif) — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 05:47:36 +0200

I recently stumbled upon a blog of what appears to be an Irish senior citizen. I say appears to be, because of course I accept anything posted in the interweb at face value, and I'm ready to believe anything posted on any page. Or perhaps I just don't care if this is some little girl posting as a senior citizen just for the attention. Whatever may be the case, I found the stumbled article pretty nifty (it was about surviving the fine art of ordering a pint (a pint being synonym to a pint of Guiness) in an Irish pub, without being made as a tourist). Granted, I don't like Guiness much, but I sure was tempted to go to Ireland again, and give Guiness the benefit of doubt.

Anywho, I just now realized Google also has a decent RSS Aggregator, meaning I can load all the rss feeds into that, and it'll keep track of my feeds and allow me to access them from anywhere in the world. Rss feeds are what pages on the web use to send out information and/or headers when a new item is posted. I'm sure there's a more technical explanation, and I'm also sure somebody reading this could go "Omfg l0ser, that is what you newbs use rss aggregators for.. back in 1985 they were so much used for blah blah whatever". If you're a person thinking something along the lines of that, I'd urge you to eat hormone neutralizing pills, seing as no kid should grow up with you as a parent. ANYWAY.. I'm straying from the point here. So Google has this here rss reader, which is nifty, and I loaded in the rss feed for Head Rambles (the page), and happened to read a few articles I hadn't seen before.

This, in turn, made me think about some experiences I had with Ireland. It's not relevant to the prior article. But as always, when I say I'll do something later on tonight, it usually gets pushed off for various reasons. Point is, when I was in Ireland, I never really felt as if I was made out as a tourist. I'm sure I was, but I never quite felt like anybody noticed or cared. Of course, I refrained from wearing touristy things, like green tshirts or scarfs or anything else people from Japan might find inconspicuous. And no, I didn't just stay in Dublin, where most people appear to be from across some sort of body of water. I was out in the country side (so green it was), talking to the locals.. or at least observing them. This leads me to another event that took place right here in the home town of yours truly. I was wearing an Irish National Rugby shirt, I had bought while in Dublin (or my mum got it for me.. technicalities, but it's nice to have the facts straight, isn't it?) to a local subcultured club I went to with my brother. It's green and, I'll admit in all modesty, looks stunning on my large frame. So I'm standing in the lobby type thing, just getting away from the heat of the dancefloor and to clear my eyes from the flashing lights. In stumbles what appears to be an Irishman.

*Freeze frame*
<Dalif has a flashback>
Dalif: For as long as I can remember, I've always attracted the attention of randoms on the street and/or in shops. I can't count the number of times I've been asked where the milk is located or if we have any more of those cushions that were on sale last week, when going to supermarkets... and I'm always the one the drunk guy speaks to, when given the choice between 3-5 people on the street. I dunno what it is about me that just commends the need to speak out. I've often wondered... (dramatic pause).. or have I?
<Flashback comes to a premature end>
*Motion recommences*

He enters the door, and spots me straight away. Moves towards me, with that oh so special "Hey, don't move, I want to say something extremely witty and important to you" look upon his scarred and drunkard face. I briefly, as I always do, flash a number of possible ways out of the situation through my quick-thinking mind. I draw a blank, and stays motionless. What he actually ended up saying, I cannot remember clearly. But it was something to the effect of "So how about those Irish Rugby players"... and then something about it being to to see another irishman around here. I inform him of the fact that I'm not Irish, nor do I watch rugby. I merely happened to like the shirt. He looks befuddled, as if I had just told him his wife and kids died in a horrible boating accident. I shrug... I mean, I'm not really sorry. It's just the way life is. I pat him on the shoulder, and send him on his way.

Now this leads me to the final point of this entry, which, I'll admit, was written mostly because I like to see myself write stuff. The point is, that had I worn that shirt in Ireland, the bloke would've thought I was a filthy tourist being a nuisance and a general annoyance. But if I wear it in any other country in the world, bar Equatorial Guinea perhaps, I'll be marked as an Irishman straight off the bat, and honored for flying the green colors. I find that, if not hugely amusing, then at least a little nifty. You gotta give me a little credit for making that cool and interesting observation. Conclusively, I'd urge you to give Head Rambles a go. Grandad is a fairly amusing fella. And I'm sure he'd have a few fun stories to tell down the pub (if you could sneak past his foreigner-filters).

Get your facebook out of my facebook

nospam@example.com (Dalif) — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 13:18:45 +0200

I've never been a huge fan of community sites, but a while back I was presented with the following dilemma by an old friend: Either you create a facebook profile, or I WILL create one for you.

What was I to do? Had to create a damned profile. So off I went. Now, while I can't say Facebook has changed my life, I was actually positively surprised at the amount of people using it. Amongst them, I found a few I hadn't spoken to in far too long. Old family from the states that I've been meaning to get back in tough with for some time, but just haven't been able to find mail addresses of etc. etc.

Anywho, since I'm like... the kind of hardcore geek who frowns upon virtual bling bling, I kept my profile dull and boring. Of course that garnered quite a lot of complaints from people who thought it was... well dull and boring. So I figured... there's no such way as the golden inbetween with things like this. So I went from dull and boring to all out bling bling hyped up coked up facebooking. It's basically me installing every god forsaken widget I can get my greasy little nerd fingers on.

Took a load of tests yesterday, and installed a bunch of crap. I'm going to be the facebook mastah of teh universe!

Wi to the Fi, pendejo

nospam@example.com (Dalif) — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 21:30:53 +0200

Yup. WiFi just got set up here. Dunno if I mentioned it, but on my birthday my mom got me a wireless access point, as well as a nice evening with some of the best food I, and my few select guests, had had in a long time. Anyway, that was almost a month ago. Today, I got that access point working. Or rather, with Ranc's aid, I got it working. Apparently, what the manuel figured wasn't important was, that the comp connecting to the access point had to be outside the DHCP range (x.x.0.1 ip) seing as the access point itself was out of range (x.x.0.50). Anyway, that's all jibberish to the layman I guess. Point is, we set up a completely new comp, and after the usual problems of getting things to work correctly, we had an active connection via cable. Fixed the settings, hooked it up to the router, and I was able to log into it from my own box.

Now we've got a wireless network going. Naming things like that is always a problem for people like us, because basically we go through a billion different stupid names before coming up with something that was said right at the start. In this case, the network was named 'Pindemad' which is the danish word for a type of horse d'oeuvre you often get at the likes of gallery openings, and other public get-togethers. I dunno why that word comes up a lot. It's just a fun word, I guess.

Anyway, WiFi for us here at Dalif.com Headquarters. Yay... Now I just need to spend another month getting the PCMCIA WiFi card working in Ubuntu. Anti-yay. I'll get it tho, don't you people worry for even the shortest of seconds about that. I'll get it.

The proverbial show must go on

nospam@example.com (Dalif) — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:03:00 +0200

Well it isn't all bad today. And I feel this whole situation shouldn't cast a dark and inpenetrable shadow over our respective lives. It's sad, but of course we must go on.

And it's in the spirit of that notion that I'll go ahead and wish our top international correspondant, Holden, the happiest of birthdays. He turns into a throbbing young man of an undisclosed age today, and for that, the entire staff here at dalif.com would like to extent a plethora of well wishes.

Happy birthday old chap. I hope your day will be one of enjoyment, and that you'll get some wicked presents :)

mail at dalif

nospam@example.com (Dalif) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:25:56 +0200

Those of you who really really REALLY love this site and are here everyday, merrily punching the refresh button, wishing upon everything that you hold dear, a new entry has been made to this glorious blog, will notice a new clickable option in the top navigation bar, namely the mail option.

Now, for most of you (ie. everybody in the world but me), clicking this link will bring you to a page of little than less interest to you... for now. What it is, is me trying hard to setup a mailserver and thus enabling me to restore the old @dalif.com mail to it's former glory. Back in the days, ages before this blog ever came into being, I tried my hand at different projects. I was interested in the web, but lacked the skills, knowhow and disciplin to really make anything worth while. I still lack those skills, but thankfully others do not, and their hard work enables me to bother the general websurfing public with inane bablings and random lame. Nuff said 'bout tha'. But I did have a few @dalif.com mails going. While they were mostly used to piss about with, I would actually like to get them back, and perhaps even use them. Or at least one of them. And since paying for mail hosting isn't something I'm prepared to do, and since setting up a server by yourself is fun (altho hard and frustrating), it is ultimately rewarding in as much as I get to control every aspect of my mail receiving and sending, myself. I have unlimited possibilities. I like that.

For now, I'm going with a postfix/dovecot/iloha combo... hoping I'll manage to make it work. Anyway, the link is there, and you can have a look at it, but I fear you'll have nothing else to do but glare at the moment. The future tho... who knows what will happen :)

The daily readups

nospam@example.com (Dalif) — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 09:00:04 +0200

Monday... what a shit day really. Weekend was rough, and today I'm just tired. I doubt I'll do any actual work here today, seeing as there hardly is any for me to do. So naturally, I'll grab at anything remotely interesting to do for the next 8 hours. Or... 7 hours by the time of writing. Dull prospects for a dull monday. It even looks like it's gonna rain.

So what is a man to do? Well there is a number of sites and things I read on a daily basis. Like the imdb frontpage, along with the 16-20 news stories from the industry. Most of it is mindless drivel like who's been divorced, or who's suing who etc. etc. but once in a while there's something interesting. I do the quiz and take the poll. Then there's my rss ticker. A plugin in firefox that lets me subscribe to rss feeds and have them scroll at the bottom of my browser. It's a really good way of staying up to date with sites you don't necessarily visit daily.

One of these sites is xkcd.com - a web comic strip. I forget when I stumbled upon this first, but I'm following it adamantly afterwards. It's one of my favorite webcomics. It paints a picture of geeks that isn't stereotypical, and thus true to life. It's tagline is "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language", and that hits the spot well. Apparently it's made by a former roboticist from NASA, a guy who's now doing this comic thing fulltime. I've much admiration for this dude. Check his comic out. It's a fun read.

Passing out the virtual cigars

nospam@example.com (Dalif) — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 02:26:52 +0200

As if it wasn't enough with just one birthday here on dalif.com just now, I was informed just today, of another birthday, albeit one of a different nature. Holden, my buddy from the Golden SWG days, with whom a lot of you are no doubt familiar by now, is now officially a dad. Thursday the 6th of September, Holden's wife gave birth to a baby girl. I'm not yet informed in regards to the name of the tiny girl, but I do know she was, as Holden expressed it, "awesome, no sleep and all". The mother and child are both healthy and all the usual blahblah said when talking about births.

So here's to you, bud, and to the very good health of you and your family, from the crew here on dalif.com, but first and foremost myself, congratulations! I sense her awesomeness already, since she chose a nice a month as September, to grace our fucked up earth with her presence :D

of late

nospam@example.com (Dalif) — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 09:45:01 +0200

Brief update on my recent doings around these parts. Can't say it's terribly interesting, but what the hey... it's good enough for this blog, so it'll be good enough for you, thank you very much Mr. High and "I've got something interesting to say everyday" Mighty. Where's your blog then? No? Not so largemouthed now, are we?

Aaaaanyhoo, last week might possibly have been the slowest and most dreadful week of me life. It was insanely dull and boring, and generally just a huge pile of salamander feces to traverse. I managed as usual by my quick wit and runny mind, to get through it, but it was hard, folks, lemme tell ya. Work is about as much fun as walking around in waist high sewage, and no less vomit inducing. And my sparetime is mostly spent messing with the server and stuff. Good ole mgb has put me on to music player deamon - a program running on eg. a server. It sets up a webbased and network enabled streaming possibility for your music, meaning you can listen to it through any browser any place in the world. Also, you can use one of many media players to access your music across the network at home. It's nifty, and it's something I'm gonna be utilizing soon. Being able to listen to my own music while at work or anywhere, really, through any old browser, is pretty damn cool.

Gonna set up some wireless at home in the not so distant future. As soon as I have the cash to shell out for an access point and a PCMCIA wireless card for me laptop. Neither are expenssive purchases by any means, but still it's money out of the budget. Ranc recently announced the arrival in our home, of 1gbit switches. So we're gonna install them at some point. "Install a switch? Isn't it just a matter of switching them, as it were, with the old ones?" you might very well be inquiring at this point. Of course, I've no chance in hell actually hearing you or react to that question unless you email it to me. BUT, since I'm a pretty brilliant guy, I've gone pro-active on your rear end, and anticipated you pondering this very thing. And yes, yes it is just a matter of performing a simple switch. But you have to consider who you're dealing with now. Ranc and I are pretty notorious in our ways, when it comes to doing stuff pertaining to crawling around underneath the table, with wires and stuff. Also, it'd mean going offline for X amount of minutes. And nobody likes offlinetime. But yeah, we'll give it a go, and see how fast stuff is transferred... at some point.

This weekend I was with mum in her summer residence. Was nice enough to get away for a day and just kick back. Weather was pretty nice, sun being it's usual shiny self, but not too hot. We watched the entire Season 10 of Friends, which neither of us had seen yet. I had, through various channels, learned that Rachel and Ross eventually made up, but it was still nice to see. Yeah I know, I'm a sentimental mofo when it comes to my Friends. But it's been 10 years in the company of these 6 quirky NYC pals, and it's hard not to take a sympathetic point of view regarding Rachel and Ross' off and on relationship. Of course we had to finish off with the classic get-off-the-plane stint, but it was nice.. it was good. At least I've seen all the 10 seasons now. S10 wasn't my fav season by far, but it had a lot of the classic laugh out loud moments, so enjoyable overall.

Also, I acquired, from mum, the 7th, and so far final, installment of the Harry Potter series of books. Read 150 pages or so that day, and another 120 at home last night. It's a pretty decent read, something I've been looking forward to for some time. Not being a fanatic, I couldn't be arsed shelling out 300 bigones for a book on opening night, so getting it now and reading it quietly will do me just fine.

Right... that's about it. Interesting, huh? You got to hear about wireless stuff, servers, Harry Potter and Friends. Even the least adamant of readers won't be able to say no to a blog post like this. It's what dreams are made of, folks... dreams are made of. Until next time, keep your pants dry.

Bigger, better, faster, stronger

nospam@example.com (Dalif) — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 22:32:08 +0200

Stumbled upon this vid today, and was mesmerized by it. She's got some FUNKY moves going on, and she's pretty fit as well. Also, the music was recognizable. I later found out it was Daft Punk, and later again realized it actually said so on the page itself. Here's to short attentionspan. Anyway, I spent a few hours wading through ALL the vids on that site, skipping a fair number that didn't look that cool. Mainly the "somebody singing a cover of something" and the striptease ones, which grew boring fast. The breakdance and dance stuff was cool tho.

Unixing up

nospam@example.com (Dalif) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 19:12:49 +0200

Well.. I'm about to gear up completely. Been stumbling a bit lately, and since my most preferred returns from stumbleupon (the best damn firefox extension out there), are humor and tech stuff, I've found a lot of guides for doing cool stuff in Ubuntu. Running many games and win applications under Ubuntu, which is one of my main grievances with the switch for Unix.

I had tried, unsuccesfully, installing Ubuntu on the laptop a few months back or so. Ubuntu uses a little something called liveCD, which is basically the whole OS on a bootable CD. So when you plug it in the drive and boot from it, you're in the actual OS, with a fully functional interface. Network is configured, so you can browse the web. It's slow tho, because it's being run from the CD. Too slow, in fact, for the laptop to handle. Pissed me off something awful. But, when I went to download the newest version of Ubuntu yesterday, I noticed a little check box with the text "alternate text based installer". Fuck yeah, thinks I, and after getting the first CD, I get the alternate as well, thinking I'll give the laptop another go.

I've basically been looking forward to this the entire day (my day was even more boring than yesterday). And here I am now, it's configuring languages atm, and the installer is just running smoothly and swiftly, it's a doozy. Hoping things will be cool, so I'll have a fully functional Ubuntu powered laptop when I get home. It's mom's old machine, and while it's nowhere near as fast as today's monsters, it's still a pretty good little piece of hardware. It has a pink line splitting the screen in halves, but besides that, everything is in tip top condition. If things work out, I'm gonna give a wireless network a shot. Need a wireless router tho, but they should be fairly easy to obtain. Oh boy, the little tech-geek in me is literally over the top happy with this new development. And has also been rambling on for far too long about Unix and laptops. I'll probably try the switchover for my main box as well, when I can be arsed. Gonna try out some of the cool things I've found. Mmmmm geeking is phun!

Post Holiday +1

nospam@example.com (Dalif) — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 23:25:37 +0200

First day done with... let me tell you folks, I wish I had gone for the head against a brick wall option yesterday... I was bored shitless. Couldn't focus. I got, as tradition would have it, shit assignments, and while I started one of them, I just couldn't be arsed to finish it or work a lot on it.. I have three weeks for this. I think I can handle that.

On a slightly related note, my cousin sent me an email today, regarding a job at EA Games.. as a games tester. Now, this might not be what I had in mind, but it's not a totally bad idea, that's for sure. I meet the requirements (yes, there are actually requirements), but I've a hard time figuring out what exactly the job is about, and where.. as far as I can read, it's in Spain. Granted, Spain isn't like my favorite country in the world, but I'd not mind going there for some time, to work in games testing.

It's not something I'll go after for 100% sure, but taken the first paragraph of this post, and a LOT of other post into consideration, I'd say it was safe to say I'd like out of my current employment. It's grinding me down, to be honest, and I'm not liking that one bit. Going to Spain for like a few months or perhaps half a year, might be a breath of fresh air. Especially if I'd be working for EA, testing computer games. Can any of you imagine a better habitat? Surely I can't grow tired of that.... or can I? Oh well, it's something to consider.

Boredom 4 teh lose

nospam@example.com (Dalif) — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 15:59:17 +0200

I'm bored... With a capital b. Bored to within an inch of my life here.. Don't you know those days? It's like.. I've seen everything, done everything, tried everything. Found and read through every page on teh interweb. Nobody around to talk to, nobody online.. NOTHING.. gaah.. and it's warm and stuffy in here too, despite open windows and a fan going.

Oh well.. I guess I'll prowl through youtube for lord knows what time.