After two and a half years of wasting way too much of my life away (/played: 142 days, 15 hours), it’s finally time to move on.
Leaving it all behind isn’t as hard as I thought… though it’s a shame I never got to see Illidan go down. But dancing with my pet by the dead bodies of Lord Victor Nefarious and Prince Kael’thas Sunstrider was good.
Maybe I’ll even have some more time to write random stuff here (even though the title has suddenly become obsolete).
Categories: WoW
Time: 1:23am on the 15th of June, 2008
Got myself a new toy. The seller was nice enough to supply the root password and IP, but unfortunately he didn’t know a username/password pair, so I couldn’t simply login over the network. And I didn’t have a DB9-25 null-modem adapter to connect a USB serial adapter to the machine.
But hey, the machine has an Elite 3D-m6 graphics card… and some USB connectors. The next line of attack was clear. I borrowed a keyboard, a Sun-VGA adapter and a VGA cable from the office and set about connecting the box to the LCD TV in my apartment (which sports a VGA socket). Unfortunately it turned out the resolution and/or refresh rate being pushed out by the Sun box is incompatible with TV, so I had no display.
But… I had a working keyboard. After all, a CLI is a CLI, isn’t it? Let’s see.. CTRL-Break to interrupt the boot sequence (this being a PC USB keyboard), enter root password , remount rootfs RW, create a user, set a password, remount rootfs RO, sync, reboot, ssh…
Sunday evening: ordered a 3.5 Mbit connection from Cablecom and a Linksys WRT54GC WiFi AP/router.
Tuesday afternoon: came home to find the router in the mailbox (in the unlocked section, for an added bit of culture shock) and a slip saying to pick up the cable modem at the post office. 30 minutes later everything was online and running.
The 3.5 Mbit service delivers about 425KB/s downstream and 45 KB/s upstream, which is rather nice. And there are no silly monthly limits on amount of data transmitted. All in all, not bad.
On the plus side, the room is OK, it’s bright, has a reasonable view from the balcony, and is quieter than the old one (which had a railway line 50 metres from the balcony). And it’s the actually the very next building on the same street, so the move was quick and access to public transportation is as good as before. Oh, and it’s half the price of the other one, and I have my own Cablecom net connection as opposed to a shared ADSL line which tended to become bogged down on evenings.
On the minus side, the kitchen is tiny and looks like a low-budget 60-s movie stage, and there’s only one washing machine and one dryer for the entire building, with no posted schedule, so getting washing done is a bit of a nuisance.
Still, it’s only for a couple of months anyway… could be worse.
Categories: Zurich , personal and photos
Time: 3:20pm on the 8th of December, 2007
Note to self: if the installation procedure says to apply patches in multi-user mode, do so. Even if this goes against what you’ve been taught earlier. Else Things May Blow Up Spectacularly.
And they did.
A kernel patch failed to apply, the machine refused to come up. Fortunately, being a clever bastard, I did the install on a degraded mirror. A quick reboot & resync later [FSVO quick - even though a PrimePower 850 is a beefy machine, the internal drives aren't that fast] I was back in business.
SVM is nice. Cyclades is nice. OBP is nice. Words can hardly express the joy of working in a proper environment, instead of on commodity-class machines running Windows. Even recovering from a serious braino is so much easier.
Categories: sysadmin and work
Time: 7:28pm on the 3rd of December, 2007
opening an account denominated in Euro took exactly one 2 minute phone call; the account was instantly active and available in all channels (ATM/Multimat/ebanking)
some ATMs offer withdrawal in EUR as well as in CHF; some offer GBP as well. A select few (mostly in brick&mortar branches) also offer CHF/EUR deposits.
a Multimat is quite handy - an automated teller, allowing the customer all sorts of operations (transfers, balance checking, investment, history etc). Quite handy if you don’t have e-banking access or if you need a verified print-out of a transaction (the Multimat features a built-in printer and a scanner for payment slips)
the login/authorization procedure to e-banking is unnecessarily complicated. You receive a smartcard and a reader (which doubles a pocket calculator). You go to the e-banking site, enter your contract number (which is completely unrelated to your account number, but at least the browser manages to remember it) and get a 6-digit number, which serves as a challenge for the smartcard-reader combo. Then you read the response from the SC reader (obviously after authorizing yourself with a PIN) and finally get access to the e-banking site.All this begs the question why they couldn’t simply use a RSA SecurID token… it would be much more portable and rugged than the current contraption
Categories: Switzerland
Time: 10:33pm on the 2nd of December, 2007
Taking advantage of the good weather (which, this time of year in Zurich, means only partly overcast and only 50% chance of rain), I borrowed a great lens from Sal and went out to see if I liked it.
It’s going to be hard, giving this baby back. It’s by far the best lens I’ve ever used (although it sure feels funny on a EOS 300D, making the whole contraption totally unbalanced and somewhat awkward to handle).
