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Be forewarned, this will not be in any way technical or ColdFusion related at all.

I follow Alton Brown, Scott Mosier, Jason Mewes, and Kevin Smith and Bruce Campbell on social media.  That's it, as far as celebrities go.  Alton is the only TV personality. Mewes, Smith and Mosier are all kick ass Viewaskew folks.  Bruce?  C'mon, Xiana, Evil Dead, Brisco County... guy is just witty as hell.  Even on twitter.

Alton is going on a book tour to promote his latest book, and he's released a fanifesto on what he expects from his fans.  It's mostly common sense, but it brings to mind something I think about on a semi-casual basis.

That thought, as boring as it may be, is this.  I'd LOVE to meet some of the celebs that make great art that enriches my life. But to meet them, I mean nothing more than a smile, handshake, and a "Thanks.  Thanks for making a difference, even just for 90 minutes, in my life".  That's honestly where it would end for me. And maybe that's strange to most folks, but I cannot ever see being able to make small talk with folks outside the technical community.  I don't ever want to be "friends" with these folks, as I just don't see there being a common view point for sharing.

I felt a bit like this at NCDevCon as well.  It was great just to shake Ray and Ben's hands.  I guess the only difference there, is they're far more interactive within the social community.  And that again works for me, as that's the best medium for me to communicate.

Color me strange, but just some random thoughts for the end of the day.

Well, I finally got hacked. This is a first for me, and proves that my Linux skills are just not quite as up there as my windows admin skills. And what was the vector? The lack of queryparams inside CFshopkart. The only upside is that there were no transactions inside the cart, and no sensitive data to steal. But the defacement did muck about with several system files. Bah.

Last night I had an argument with some lady that's some damn stupid, that it bares repeating.

Every now and then the missus and I have a brain lapse and take the kids to Chuck E Cheese. They enjoy it, but I don't know of many parents that do ;). At any rate, I was put in charge of holding a twin and following one of the older kids around. At the time I was shadowing our two year old.

My daughter decided to play some skeeball. Now, I don't mind skeeball. It's fairly fun, and I used to enjoy a good round in my youth. We show up at the lanes (they have maybe 6?) to find a youth and her grandmum... least, that's seemed to be the correct age grouping. This pair was using the middle lanes, and grammy's purse was occupying a third. The purse isn't actually beside grammy, it's another lane over yet (why? beats me). Beside the purse, some dude is using the ball drop area to hold his cup of coins whilst playing the basketball game. So, that leaves my daughter and I the lane next to grammy.

Alright, we shoot in our coin, and the two year old gives it a fair try. She didn't get a single ball up the lane but I threw the missed balls back up the ramp for her. And for the first time in my life, actually hit one of those blasted 100k holes. Sweeeet. Anyway, we finish up at 300k points, grab our tickets and start walking away. And that's when the fun started...

Ignorant Woman: "Excuse me, you're taking my tickets"

Me: "No ma'am, these are our tickets"

IW: "No, you're taking my tickets"

Me: "Ma'am, these are our tickets. They came from this machine"

IW: "No, they're mine."

Me: "Ma'am, you're tickets come out beside you. Look."

IW: "No, those are her tickets. Your's must be broken"

Me: "Ma'am... look at the machine. You can see where they're connected. These are our tickets."

IW: "No, those are my tickets"

And it's at this point I realized that Ron White is correct. You can get a face lift, a boob job, cosmetically address imperfections. But you can't fix stupid. My brain just tripped a circuit. I found myself thinking, "wait... we're arguing about the equivalent of 25 cents... maybe 20 tickets? WTF??". So I said to the ignorant woman, "you know what? You can have the tickets. Allie, (the two year old this woman was effectively taking tickets from) give her the tickets." And damn, if she didn't do me proud. My two year old just threw the tickets at this woman's feet and we just walked away.

Honestly, I was thinking on it later, and my point would have been proved by putting another quarter in the machine. It would have spit another ticket or two out as your "freebie". However, this just wasn't a teachable moment. At this point I'm just happy we didn't get thrown out of chuck's (well... am I really happy about that? hmmm), but damn I hate ignorant folks.

After reading a blog entry about another CF guy moving over to Linode, I got to asking myself "what the heck is a linode"? Well, it's a XEN based VPS that's really, really freakin' cheap! I signed up for their 1080 plan (which is way more traffic then I'll likely see), and decided it was time to move from shared hosting to my own VPS. The reasons abound, one of which being I'm going to be fielding all of the hosting/billing for future projects for Meteorsite, LLC. I'd also planned on moving to Railo/Resin to do this hosting, and it seemed like a great fit. Oh, and I was also planning on using GroundWorks with Nagios to monitor all our various and sundry hosting solutions (to also get that crap off my own home network ;) ).

Things went great at first. I got GroundWorks installed, but then I realized that GroundWorks wants to gloom onto and possess MySQL and Apache. Well, that's a pain in the ass and had to go. I only really wanted Nagios anyway. I'll generate the nagios configs on my local machine and just migrate them over. Fine, and done. Next step, configure a mail server with some sort of web front end. My old host used Plesk and that seemed to also include Horde. Great! I can deal with Horde. I usually pull everything into google mail for online viewing anyway, but I like having that option. So... I found 1, 2, a ton of tutorials on installing Horde on Ubuntu. The only problem is, not a damn one worked. Postfix would install correctly, but in the end I could never get IMAP (dovecot or courrier) to talk nice-nice to Postfix.

Three tutorials, and several hours later, I decided to start looking for a one touch install type system. Since I'll be hosting sites later it made sense to find a Plesk/CPanel/Helm type open source solution. And behold, I started my quest towards making ISPconfig work. There is at least 10 hours of my life I'm never getting back. Good lord... after about 50 steps, I just could not get ISPconfig to authenticate against IMP. And as soon as I changed the authentication method, I couldn't get back into the system. No matter what I tried, I could not get it to work. In between all of this, it's likely that I blew away my VPS about 20 times.

And then, I found Citadel and Easy Host Control Panel. I tried Citadel first, and currently have EHCP running on a test machine. Citadel (and EHCP) just worked. One installer, and that's it. Yes, you have to answer questions, but they're of the variety of "what's your system DNS" and "what's your mysql root passwor". Each have domain management for mail. Citadel really does far more than I require, and I think for hosting other sites, EHCP makes more sense, but at least I have something up and running! Yay. I do, however, still want my weekend back.

I just can't seem to get into the swing of this blog post a day deal. Heck, I barely have enough time to even get enough sleep throughout a day. How the heck do ya'll bang out so many blog posts over the course of a week?

Even though it appears that no one cares about my FarCry railo install piece, it'll likely take me about 8-10 hours of total setup time to get a working install done. I don't really mind if no one sees it... I'm doing this because I have to have a working install within the next few weeks to satisfy a customer project. Maybe I need to start aiming for the lower hanging fruit or something?

Well, my host hopes to have finally resolved the problems that have been plaguing the shared sever that my site resides on. It took a rebuild of the entire server to do it.... in the middle of the week (not so happy about that), but things should be smooth sailing from this point forward. I doubt it though. Technology will rear it's ugly head again, no doubt ;).

UPDATE:

Meh, jokes on me. Site went down today as soon as my blog entry got picked up by fullasagoog. Figures ;).

Why, oh why does that guy/gal in the passing lane believe it his right, no.. his duty to determine the speed of travel for the interstate? You have four-five lanes to choose from, but your express lane evangelical butt is glued in that left hand lane, isn't it?

The fact traffic is clear for a mile in front of you should be the first clue to move into another lane. The fact that the majority of traffic is also passing you on the right hand side should be the second. And for those that feel that doing this is justification to "save lives" should take into account that having to pass on the right might prove more dangerous than if the speeder du jour had just been left in peace in that left hand lane to begin with.

Think about it, most of the other slower moving traffic is going to be in those right hand lanes. Forcing someone to go around in those lanes is just begging for a mishap.

So ends the rant for the day...