NHL Preseason

Here's a good question out my my fellow minority hockey fans. Why is hockey treated like a bastard stepchild? They hide NHL preseason like XXX live shows with midgets. seriously. I have to dig all over the internet to find online radio stations so I can listen to all the games that I want to see. granted, I'm only a few more days until center ice kicks in but still. I'm an obsessive hockey fan, I'm sure that there are a few more thousands like me who want more hockey coverage, summer, all of preseason. 365 days a year. I quit having anything to do with ESPN because we get to hear every time a MLB player farts. Who gives a shit. Barry bonds is out with a sprained right toe. I'm not a Pittsburgh fan but didn't Crosby play in the playoffs with a broken toe? I think most players play with some sort of pain. Hey barry, put down those needles and play for your f'ckn salary you big fat pussy.
One more thing, NHL changed their scoring on their update page. Now I know pretty much show is going to start in goal, but for the love of god, you changed it so much that this preseason I don't know who is starting in goal, how many shots against and when they changed goal tenders. WTF? OK, thats enough for one day. Lets go Sens!, err Habs!, err Flames!, dammit, Lets go NHL. Lets start already!!

10 More Days

10 more until the start of the NHL. OMG I'm so ready its pathetic. As much as I hate to say it, bless comcast for showing the Sens - flyers preseason last night. I felt the game went pretty well. I thought Gerber looked pretty good but I would have liked him matched up against Gagne and and briere. But for making an argument for more starts this season i felt gerby looked pretty sharp. Some more players I'm excited about, watching Ryan Smyth for the avs. Now I'm a huge calgary fan and im going to be watching more av's games this year for sure. This season im going all out and going to be working my myth box to be nabbing some center ice action. I would like to hit all the every canadian team this year. I'm looking to see what kind of damage jason blake can do with toronto. I'm really hoping i can manage my vacation right and nab either a Toronto or sens game within the season. Montreal seems to be hit or miss during the preseason so I'm concerned about them. they seriously needed to add more firepower during the off season. if they don't get to scoring some goals, get mike Ryder and Kovalev off their asses and get out there, they aren't going to be challenging for any northeast league again. Although i think Huet should have a decent year. I cant wait for Price to get some games in. I'm looking forward to what he is capable of. On a side note, im getting ready to take over the head sys admin spot at my work. Im going to see if I can finally get my company to see the light and work some linux boxes in. I'f I really had my way, we would see some Sun boxes get mixed in. I've about had it with the linux people. anyways, 10 more days. I cant wait any longer

mike.moritorium

I think it goes without saying to remember Jerry Garcia today but in the mean time i was sitting here thinking about life before and think beyond. Some nights i really miss being on the road and the days remind me that I dont. The last few days here I'v ereally been thinking about it. Unfortunately i have songs stuck in my head that just drag out the past and make me relive the days that i loved. On top of that, I'm thinking about the future with my daughter Taylor and of the stories i get to tell. lol. Anyone out there with a child ever think about starting to tell your child about your life from the beginning? Granted, I've lived a life more interesting than most. So I was thinking about starting from what I remember and can put together. I don't think my life got interesting until i hit the road. I'd be the first to tell you i love it, I miss it and i hate it, in the same sentence. I spent 7 years in hell that intertwined with heaven. If any driver ever runs upon this drop me a line and I'll buy you a beer when you're having to pull to the east coast; I know what you go through. I pulled dry van with Schneider, pulled reefer from my beloved California and Washington, pulled chickens into Brooklyn, pulled Werner ladders to bay area home depot's. I've been to all 48 and about all provinces of Canada. When someone says chain up, I drug out the real iron, not the rubber bands. I've spent more days getting drunk in Laredo than I would like to admit. I've gotten so shitfaced in Nogales that even my crazy friend mike smith thought i was losing it. On top of all this, I really miss the live that I used to have with my friends. Should something ever go wrong with my career as a systems admin, i would go back into driving. Preferably for Copp trucking out of Kansas city ( Copp you listening? make me an offer!!) I would go back into hauling chickens as well. To tell you the truth, i got alot of respect hauling chickens. No one fucked with you. Don't fuck with with guy who hasn't seen a bed in 4 days. ever. Chickens paid really well though. And I was home every day, albeit 4 hours a day; I was still home. So to start the record for Taylor and that I can begin to remember what a long strange trip it's been. My driver trainer was named Gary Andrews who hailed from Tennessee.In 2 weeks of driver training, i got to take my second week off. Gary said, you've drove before, theres something about the way you whip the truck around. I said, well let me tell you a story. Taylor, you're going to meet my cousin Keith. Prepare yourself. You'll need it.

Citrix and Debian Etch

I've been waiting a while and testing Debian etch before upgrading my main desktop from sarge to etch. So far the upgrade has went well. Instead of using ice weasel, I just loaded Firefox and Thunderbird with the lightning plug in for my calendar. One of the biggest hitches so far is adding my new citrix client so I can use my citrix server here at home. First off, libmotif3 isn't loaded and i havent been able to find it in the debian repository. If try to run ICA 10, you'll get libXm.so.3 errors due to no openmotif2.3 libs installed. No worrys. Go to here and download the libmotif2.2.3 deb and install it using dpkg. You will find the libXmso.3 in /usr/X11/lib directory. I've found its just as easy to create a soft link to it in /usr/lib. I had where it wasnt in my path. Download the new citrix ICA client for Linux. I keep with the rpm download and just convert it to deb using alien -d. Easy enough; You may have to hit the repository to get a few tools. I forget the list off the top of my head though. If you get the error: FONTLIST_DEFAULT_TAG_STRING., use xset fp rehash to reset your X fonts. You should have a working citrix client. All you need to do now is do your drive mappings. I map c: to my home dir and you should be all set.

Tips for massive decoding and tagging files

I recently had a dilemma of wanting to decode and tag my entire live show collection and upload them to my ampache music server. I've fiddled around trying to get ampache play my flac files and was so- so successful. Being that most of my older collection of shows was strictly shorten files, ampache has no means to play them at all. So I sat down and wrote some simple scripts to do all my dirty work of decoding and tagging and another to upload the show via ftp if anyone is interested in using them. Clearly linux / unix only.
To decode shorten, you must use a tool called shnwrapper available from sourceforge.
#!/bin/sh
folder=`pwd | cut -b 20-29`
picture=/home/share/panic.jpg
flac -d *.flac
#shnwrap -x *.shn
oggenc -q 8 *.wav
rm -f *.wav
mkdir $folder
cp *.ogg $folder
cp $picture $folder
cp -r $folder /home/share/wsogg
rm *.ogg
rm -rf $folder
exit 0


Here is a simple script to tag using the id3v2 tool.

#!/bin/bash
FILES=`pwd`/*.ogg
artist=Phish
year=`pwd | cut -b 20-23`
album=Live-Phish" "`pwd | cut -b 22-31`
count=0
for file in $FILES
do
count=`expr $count + 1`
echo "Track $count is [$file]"
id3v2 -T $count -g 17 --year $year -A "$album" -a $artist $file
done


I also have some scripts to determine whether the files are flac or shorten and run the right script on the files as needed. I used these scripts to rip about 250 gigs of music and upload it and works well. The only thing you have to watch is empty spaces in the file names. Im working on script to get rid of that as well. I'm sure ive borrowed code ive seen by googleing so any resemblance, many thanks to the original authors.

Thankful

As I sit here and listen to Trey tearing it up on a Phish show from 1998, I think back over my live and cant believe how magical it has been. I got to see the Phish reunion show at MSG in 2002 and loved every minute of it. At the time i found myself critiquing practically every minute of it because I held Phish up to such a high standard that I never allowed for mistakes or off nights. I did not make the trip up to the Phish show but I secretly regret it. I know trey has tossed out random bits about Phish getting back together in the future and I catch myself dismissing it. but secretly, you know as well as I do, Ill be shitfaced at one of those shows if it happens. Anyways.. I just really miss the experience of being at a Phish show tonight.
This week I managed to finally get my Citrix server up and running. So far I have it singing along pretty good. I have my drive mapping all figured out on my Debian box and so far have had good luck with it. I really wish we could introduce a few Linux machines at work in our Citrix environment. Currently I'm doing my homework at getting everything squared away at integrating Linux in a windows citrix environment. Since Citrix is allowing me to run a dev box I can use office 2003 as well as dreamweaver and just about every other windows app on both my Linux and Solaris boxes. So far it works great. I want to do more research on Citrix NIS authentication as I'm having issues with integrating it with my NIS / LDAP setup I have at home. Is there anyone running Citrix with Sun's ldap server out there? I think I may be able to get the NDS setting to see my sun ldap box so thats what IM going to try in the future.
Anyway, I think I need to start going to the linux group meetings again.

I love my new machine

I recently purchased a Sun Blade 1000 off eBay by accident; I made a bid figuring to be outbid and lo and behold, no one did and I managed to get it pretty cheap. It's a dual 750, gig of ram with 2 FC drives. In an effort to move my main home server to Solaris 10, I immediately ordered a SAS raid controller for it and hoping it arrives this next week. I'll be able to run 4 sata drives and use ZFS to move my whole music collection (300+ GB) on to a raidZ sata array. So far, I love it. I've wanted a bigger sun blade than my 100 I had just because of the dual procs and heftier case. Solaris 10 is just an awesome, awesome piece of software. Ive been a Linux bigot for so long and have always had aleast 1-2 sun boxen that ive worked on. Solaris 10 11/06 made me rethink my current Linux installations enough to trust putting all my storage, backups and pretty much everything else on it. If i was a developer I would love to get more involved with the open solaris project. I guess I could take on some documentation project to help out with. I just want to become more involved with open solaris.
In NHL news, I loved watching Luc Robitaille's jersey get retired. Luc was one of my favorite Kings, and it makes me sad to think I'll never get to watch him play again. I have to say I now love watching Kopitar play and is one of my favorite players to watch. I guess thats why I will always be addicted to center ice due to the fact I live on the east coast and love watching west coast teams play. Being that Calgary is my shared favorite team along with Montreal and Ottawa, I love being able to catch every game on center ice. My new upcoming project is to build a Myth box so that I can archive all the games I want on the solaris storage server and watch NHL year round. maybe record games that I know I will miss and watch them. I just need to have myth record them and store them.
Again.. do yourself a favor and check out Solaris 10. unfreakenbelivable.

On a sour note. Macy's credit department. I recently bought a few things in Macy's and signed up for Macy's credit so I could get the discount at purchase. not only did Macy's not send me the bill for my purchases but had their collections department call me at work and told me I was behind on my payments. I never received a bill; I got the shiny new credit card in the mail, but no bill; SO after talking to their credit department, I told them explicitly, i had not received a bill, the worker verified this as I had not been sent a statement and that I would receive one within 7 days. She said everything would be straightened up since I called. Lo and be hold, a fat $25 late fee applied to my total. I dont tolerate liars and those who make it difficult to do business with. I don't care if they are giving away gold off the racks. Once this bill is paid for, $25 cost Macy's a customer for life. I don't care, Ill avoid them at any cost over this.

Wow, its been so long that when I manage to remember my password and sign in, i had to switch it over to Google. Probably in order is who I am and what I do. I'm graduate from Bloomsburg University with a degree in Computer information science. I used to drive truck now I'm a systems administrator for a credit union. I own entirely too many computers and servers. They take up the majority of my time other than watching NHL hockey. When it's nice out, I go archery hunting. I used to be an avid archer and then driving took up too much time and I got out of it. This year I bought a new Martin bow and practiced a few times a week until it got cold out again. I did manage to get out and go hunting a few times though. I found my old love of fishing as well. I'm looking forward to the first day of fishing in April.
What all do I currently do? I work with a transaction system called Symitar. We are primarily a Windows and Citrix shop. My big project now is working with an informations system called Silvercloud. I wanted to run it on Linux or Solaris but my wonderful company said if i left, no one would work on it so I had to keep it on Windows as well.
My current project I am working on at home is a new Solaris file server. I've read up on ZFS enough to really be interested in it but haven't had the chance to try it. I've been working with Solaris for a while but I'm not quite as proficient at it as I am Linux. Ive been using Linux since 1999. I've loved it from the first day I used it. I've come a long way since then. My current desktop is Debian Sarge and I run my home servers with Centos, Freebsd, and Solaris 9 and 10. I've been asked a million times why not just upgrade to Ubuntu on my desktop. I'm a stickler for stability and the ability for a machine to crash and be rebuilt. This system started out as Debian woody in 2002 and been upgraded to Sarge in late 2005. Ive managed to break it about 3-4 times and have been able to fix it and keep going. When I upgraded frm the 2.4 kernel, I thought I killed it, but alas, to this day it still runs like a top. I have yet also jump on the 64bit bandwagon. I'm waiting for the Etch to be released and then migrate over with a new Raptor and dual core system. I have most of the parts needed, I'm just waiting for Etch to be released. Given the opportunity, I would migrate my desktop to FreeBSD. My biggest drawback is getting performance out of Unreal 2004. I'm sure I managed to foul something up on something when I tried it last. But for me, I play so much unreal, I need the performance to be equal or better than what I currently have. So if anyone else out there is squeezing awesome performance out of UT2K4on bsd, I'd surely be interested in what you did. I even tried adding the nvidia drivers from ports as well as from nvidia. No dice. It drug so much it made me feel like I was on ketamine. At some point I would also like to do some testing with Solaris 10 and either try to get UT to work or within a brandz zone. I've looked around and seen it attempted but not successful, or at least not reported to be.
Anyways.. I'm glad to see Monkey radio finally moved and is back on the air again.