Fair warning: This post is a bunch of self-indulgent complaining. I've debated whether to even write it, but I'm hoping maybe it will be cathartic to put in words all of the godawful stuff that happened to me and - more importantly - my loved ones this year. I'm not in a glass-half-full kind of mood though, so I'm not holding my breath.
As I was going through cleaning up all of the spam accounts created on this blog over the holidays, it occurred to me that there have been precisely zero legitimate comments made in the approximately five years that it has existed. This makes me think that the time I've spent cleaning up after spammers has been wasted, and I'm no longer going to do it. As a result, user registration is now limited to administrators (me) so if you really want to comment on a post you'll need to ask me for an account through one of the contact methods listed in the About page
This is just a quick update to note that this blog migrated to a new host last night. Everything seems to have gone pretty smoothly, other than the fact that they didn't tell me when they were going to do it and shut down the old host immediately. As a result, there was some downtime. If you do happen to notice anything still not working correctly please let me know.
My laptop has 12 GB of memory and is largely used for web, email, IRC, and ssh to other systems. You might think that would be sufficient. You would be wrong.
Update 2018-10-17: The plugin I discuss below no longer works with current versions of Thunderbird. Fortunately, there is another that provides the same functionality and is still compatible. See my followup post for details.
Quite a while ago my corporate calendar got switched from an internally hosted system to THE CLOUD!!!!
Ahem. Sorry, my buzzword detector went off and I flinched and hit caps lock. Don't ask me how that resulted in all of the !'s. ;-)
It turns out I've had spammers registering accounts on this site for quite a while now. Fortunately, I require admin verification of any new accounts, so none of the spammers got anywhere. Unfortunately, I had failed to configure my email address, so I wasn't getting notified of any user registrations.
A little less than a year ago I picked up an old Dell CS24-SC 1U server from EBay. It's got a ton of power - dual quad core, 24 GB of RAM, 4 146 GB 15k SAS drives, and an integrated BMC. That last is something I've struggled with though. Because this is a server, I really don't want to leave a keyboard and mouse plugged in to it all the time. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get the remote KVM functionality working. Until now, that is.
It's a rule that I have to use this title for my first post, right? ;-)
In any case, if you're wondering who I am, what this is, and why any of this matters to you, check the About page. It might not answer all of your questions, but it'll be a start. Beyond that, watch this space for more - and hopefully more interesting - content in the future. I have some ideas for things I'd like to throw up here for the world to see, but these things take time and there never seems to be enough of that.
