My Wushu Blog

I can be a glutton for punishment for a nearly trivial amount of gain. So lets bring on the two-factor authentication for my personal FreeBSD server. I’ve been using Google’s 2-step verification since Jenny told me about it, along with my android powered phone. What is nice about Google’s Authenticator app is its availability for multiple smartphone platforms: Android version 1.5 or later BlackBerry OS 4.2 - 4.7 iPhone iOS 4 or later How it works is pretty simple.

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To follow up on two previous posts, the Buckethead concert and making your own YouTube bootlegs, I’m going to add just a little more. As I mentioned, the concert was great. If I were to pick out one part, it would have been this lengthy untitled (as far as I know) freestyle jam he did with a simple looping beat. I cannot think of anything worse than falling in love with a song at a concert, and not knowing the name of it.

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Outside the GAMH Since I say this after almost every concert I go to, I’ll not forget to repeat it again: This was the BEST show I’ve ever seen. There are many aspects why: smaller venue, and our seats were on the balcony. This gave us a great view of the show, and we were pretty darn close to everything. Oh, and you know, it is one of my favorite artist doing what he does best.

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I’ve been using Puppet at work for the handful of FreeBSD and, recently, Ubuntu desktops. Aside from some very simple system configuration management (I’ve not yet dived too deep into puppet. I mostly use it for configuring system authentication and ensuring a particular computer security baseline), I though it would have been great to store the client’s “facts” into a accessable database. Sometime last year, Puppet added the ability to store facts into a Couch Database: http://www.

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Every year, for the last 12 years or so, the National Laboratories have held a technical conference for IT. A different lab hosts it each year, and the National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado was nice enough to volunteer. I should point out, this conference is not in any way funded by the Department of Energy. It is sponsored by Vendors. I have never been to NLIT before, but this year I felt I had a significant contribution to make and it was worth the effort of submitting an abstract and putting together a nice presentation.

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We lost a great companion on Friday. Our super awesome dog, Zoey, passed away due to a heart complication (cardiomyopathy). She was just over 6 years old ( 05-04-2005 to 06-10-2011). She was diagnosed two weeks ago, and we knew what to expect. It was terribly sad to see her in such poor shape, however, I’m glad I had two weeks to hug her, feed her delicious food, and tell her that I love her.

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It has been 2 years since I’ve regularly practiced Wushu. The last class I attended was around Christmas 2009 when I took Caralyne, but I had stopped around early June of 2009 when most of the class left for China. Over the past year, my conscious mind has told me it really enjoys just going to work, and then back home, with no interruptions. It has told me that I’m not young enough, or good enough to continue with martial arts, and I might as well accept that and embrace my more passive hobbies.

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todo I’m excited. The best part will be going into work on the Friday saying “WHAT?!”

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todo Amazon recently announced their Cloud Drive, and I feel it is interesting for the following reasons: The ability to play the same music from my phone, my computer at work, my computer at home is pretty cool Everyone gets 5GB of space for free, and you can pay for more When you purchase (DRM free) mp3’s from Amazon, it does not count against your Cloud Drive storage The player is web based, and the tools to download purchased music are usable on Windows, OS X and Linux So, I uploaded some music, bought two songs from the comfort of my phone to play around with it.

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A chilly and misty space center We did a night hike, and spent the night at the Chabot Space Center in Oakland the other week. The weather did not permit us to use the large telescopes they have there, but we did get to see the perigee-syzygy of the Moon. It was quite large and nice looking, but too bad the camera does not duplicate the same optical illusion our brains produce by making it look REALLY big: A nice full moon The hike was fun, even when our guide quietly announced “I think we miss our turn…”

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