2009-12-31 11:34:00
Dana's been developing all kinds of fun new traits! :)
"Yeah" is her current, favourite word. Supposedly kids will start saying "no" to everything at a certain age, but right now everythings "yeah!" or "ya!". It's so much fun :)
*waking up Dana*
> Hi Dana! Did you have a nice nap?
< Ya!
> Wanna get dressed and have some breakfast?
< Yea.
> You hungry for some porridge?
< Ya!
It's too cute :)
In her playpen she's learnt that she loves standing on top of things, preferably the biggest item in there. Build a stack of big Lego blocks and she'll climb right on top of it! No Lego blocks available? No problem, because she'll stand on the top of her wooden toy truck. I guess she likes being tall :)
She's also caught a cold (with her fever going up to 39.1 last night), but she's happier than I usually am when I'm ill. She's a trooper :D
kilala.nl tags: baby,
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2009-12-29 20:54:00
Yup, I still haven't recuperated completely from my flu so I'm still stuck at home. My head's clogged with crap, though the fevers have gone completely. Hopefully I'll be 100% OK again when it's time to go back to work in the new year.
In the mean time I'm reading Yotsuba& again, picking up where I left off last month. It's still a great manga and I just loved the moment shown above. Remember kids, you read the panels right-to-left ;)
EDIT:
Speaking of Yotsuba, I laughed my ass off with these spoofs done by folks at Japanator.
Yotsuba & lists. Fuuka is addicted to
Yotsbua & moe, protesting the current moe-mania in recent anime.
Yotsuba & Bakemonogatari. Apparently the show sucked, despite being awesome :D
kilala.nl tags: health, manga,
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2009-12-27 09:42:00
Yesterday Marli cooked up a wonderful meal for us and her mom/stepdad. An entree of chicken salad, a shepherd's pie for the main course and a white chocolate mousse for desert. The shepherd's pie was absolutely wonderful and Marli can definitely make that more often! :9
I had to go to bed early though, because the stupid whatever-it-is-illness is still with me. I reckon it could be a form of flu. Might not be a good idea to go to the office on Monday. I don't want to go infecting my colleagues, nor do I want to remain ill for New Year's :/
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2009-12-26 11:04:00
After a fellow forum member recently got hacked I decided to quickly check the status of my own website's PHP security. Thankfully, using the free PHPsecinfo tool this becomes trivial. The resulting output quickly gives you an overview of quick wins you can implement to greatly improve your site's security.
All of these fixes require changes to your server's php.ini file, which can be troublesome if you're in a shared server situation. However, Dreamhost have gracefully provided a way of loading your custom php.ini file on their servers.
kilala.nl tags: website,
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2009-12-26 07:06:00
(Image is clickable for more detail)
Recently I'd complained that I was oversleeping systematically. Fed up with that and getting woken brusquely by buzzing alarms I decided to try something different. Just at the right time, this thread at GoT came by, so the past week or so I've been using the Sleep Cycle iPhone app to wake me up in the morning. What the app does is look for an opportune window in the half hour before you absolutely must get up, to wake you up in a gentler fashion. The theory goes that you'll feel much better when you get woken at a time that your body was already trying to wake up.
So far the app's worked pretty well, though I needed to battle Marli in order to get her to change her alarm clock times a bit ^_^ Once that was settled I have to say it's nice to get woken up by Sleep Cycle as it usually -does- figure out the right time to wake me.
One nice side effect of the app is that it lets you track your sleeping patterns with a nifty graph. The image below clearly shows that my nights aren't always as restful as they should be ^_^;
Everything labeled as a "D" is Dana, waking me up by crying. Usually she just needs to be tucket in again, but Thursday's graph clearly shows the fuss she made that night. Everything labeled "M" is Marli and me talking, while all the "T"s are usually me waking up by myself.
kilala.nl tags: apple, other tech,
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2009-12-26 06:42:00
Nothing to see here, just keeping track of things. Dana woke me this morning around four. I got back to bed within a minute and felt the onset of an attack with a hot pricking/tingling at the back of my neck. I fought off anything worse by just sticking my head under the covers and trying to fall asleep again. It worked.
kilala.nl tags: hyperventilation, health,
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2009-12-25 19:58:00
I was... =_=
I managed to miss our family Christmas dinner yesterday, being stuck in bed with a fever and nausea up the wazoo. Joy. Today wasn't much better either. Oh well.
At least Dana and Marli had a good time, which makes it worth it to me. It's great to see how taken with Dana my family is <3
kilala.nl tags: health,
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2009-12-18 07:04:00
*groan* =_=
This morning around 0230 Dana woke up crying and never went back to sleep again. She's now whining and whimpering and moaning beside me in the living room. We tried many, many things to get her to go back to sleep but no dice. Oddly, when she's in our arms it's all fun and games, but put her down at all and the crying starts again. I guess it's a phase... Or something. I dunno.
Either way, I've now been awake for almost five hours and it's highly unlikely that I'll go to the office today. Marli went back to sleep around 0530, so she's fresh for the later parts of the day.
kilala.nl tags: baby,
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2009-12-17 20:45:00
Just a few days ago, Marli spent five minutes examining our daughter checking for known scars and blemishes to make sure it was her ^_^ Dana's growing up and the shape of her eyes is changing, which seriously impacts her face. Put a hoodie on her and you'd hardly recognize her. But then, after a few seconds, you would :)
Dana had her second taco cough shot yesterday, which went just like the last time: a little bit of crying, but by the time we'd put her coat on everything was fine again. She's a champ :) She had a mild temperature today, but we hope she'll be 100% healthy again tomorrow.
She's also just about ready to stand on her own. She's been zipping around the living room, holding onto sofas and tables for support. But just last saturday she actually balanced on her legs without holding onto anything for a few seconds. Then today, while playing outside in the snow, she actually stood for almost ten seconds! Nearly there! ^_^
Speaking of snow: she likes it :)
kilala.nl tags: baby,
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2009-12-17 05:43:00
If there was any doubt about the fact whether winter has arrived, it has now been obliterated. Winter is -definitely- here!
This morning I woke to a mute world, with no sounds from the outside reaching me at all. Only my own breathing and movement could be heard. The windows were also bright with orange light, brighter than usual as if it had been refracted by something big. Could it have? ... Heheh, it -must- have! And it did. It had snowed overnight. Not a piddly snow like we had back in Utrecht, but an actual 2cm layer of snow /o/
Lovely! ^_^
kilala.nl tags: life,
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2009-12-15 08:21:00
One upside to me oversleeping is that I get to share the train with school-going kids. This morning, the seats across the aisle had three kids from eighth grade and one high school junior traveling together to Amsterdam. They'd been chatting for half an hour when one of them jokingly mentioned the "chicken-vs-egg" problem.
The high school junior, proud to display his new found knowledge of evolution, quickly launched in with how obviously the chicken-like-dinosaur-that-laid-a-chicken-egg was first. Or actually it was more of a fish-that-came-to-land-that-laid-a-chicken-egg. Or something. He was a bit confused as well, though completely convinced of the truth of the matter.
"Syeah, helloooo! As if a fish would one day say: let's get out of the water and lay our eggs on land. Duuhhh!" exclaimed one of the girls, adding a waggle of the butt and a pooping noise which obviously spoke to the imagination of one of the others. "Nono, the fish adapted to the environment and then moved to land." tried the boy. "Then why don't I adapt back to the water then?!" "Because you're all adapted to your environment." "Syeah, right."
"I don't buy it. The egg came first. This whole adapting stuff sounds like crap." concluded the third girl. "Well, most scientist says this is true and..." starts the boy. "Well what do I care what scientists say?! I'm not a scientist! And I don't believe one word of it!" concluded the girl.
I left the train laughing my ass off; it was a great conversation and I should've taped it. As I got off, the third girl was still berating the boy and making sneering and condescending faces at him. Oh, if only the boy had brought frogs into the discussion!
Now I remember why I wanted to go into teaching ^_^
kilala.nl tags: school,
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2009-12-15 08:18:00
Winter has definitely arrived: I've overslept tremendously the past week.
Thursday: torrential rains @ 0500
Friday: bed was nice and warm
Saturday: woke at normal time /o/
Sunday: exhaustion from the weekend
Monday: first frost of the year
Tuesday: more frost
In all cases I overslept by an hour to finally get woken by Marli's alarm clock, which is a good thing. I need to snap out of this though, because it's eating up my overtime :/
kilala.nl tags: life,
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2009-12-14 14:01:00
Re-org, upon re-org, upon re-org, upon re-org, upon... At $CLIENT, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
kilala.nl tags: work,
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2009-12-10 20:59:00
I'm a lucky, lucky otaku ^_^ While Marli might not be as big a geek as I am she's definitely got a geeky streak running through her. What's even better is that she actually understands many of the visual gags that occur in anime and manga. This means that I will never get confronted with a list of confused questions like this one.
Some examples from the list that Japanator compiled:
* Why are their eyes all scribbly?
* Why are their eyes sparkling?
* What is that one sweatdrop/tear/etc...?
* What's that mark on their head?
* Why did her boobs bounce for no reason?
* Why is he on fire?
* Why is that nose blood spraying?
* Why is snot coming out of his nose?
* Why is he slithering like a snake?
* Why did the art style just change?
And obviously:
* How old is that girl supposed to be?!?
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2009-12-10 20:35:00
We've been in this house for half a year now and today I've finally installed drapes in the living room. It's been this long in coming because we wanted to "do it right", meaning that we wanted something that fit well with the rest of the house and that wasn't as cheap as the ones we had in Utrecht.
We shopped around a few times, but were deterred by the high prices in "real" window decoration shops. It wasn't uncommon to get quoted in excess of five hundred euros for just the large window in back. Nuts! So instead we went to Hema to get a cheaper set, custom made. In this case five hundred euros bought us drapes for the large window and the back door as well as roll-up drapes for the windows in front. Not bad.
Sorry for the crappy picture; the Lumix TZ series sucks at indoor lighting ;) The drapes are liver coloured and match the sofas near-perfect.
kilala.nl tags: house,
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2009-12-07 21:27:00
Going back to Murakami's A wild sheep chase it's still as good as the first time, though obviously most of the surprise-factor has worn off. I still love his writing, the surreality of the story and the sense of loss that's conveyed. I still tear up at the final paragraph.
I walked along the river to its mouth. I sat down on the last fifty yards of beach, and I cried. I never cried so much in my life.
Because sheep is actually the third book in a trilogy I really wanted to read the first two as well. Both books were never published in english outside Japan, which is why I recently ordered the first book from Japan. The second book however is very, very rare and fetches insane prices on the web. So (and I'm not proud to admit this) I bootlegged it.
Pinball, 1973 is available as a PDF from various sources. Using the awesome and free CreateBooklet PDF plugin for OS X I printed it for easy reading on the train.
Here's two quotes from Pinball that struck me.
I could go on like this forever, but would I ever find a place that was meant for me? Like, for example, where? After lengthy consideration, the only place I could think of was the cockpit of a two-seater Kamikaze torpedo-plane. Of all the dumb ideas. In the first place, all the torpedo-planes were scrapped thirty years ago.
==================
Dreamily she closed her eyes and pressed against the Rat. From his shoulder on down, the Rat felt the supple weight of her body. An odd sensation, that weight. This being that could love a man, bear children, grow old and die; to think one whole existence was in this weight.
kilala.nl tags: reading,
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2009-12-06 10:10:00
My oldest piece of clothing currently still in use is my LA Kings hockey jersey, which is virtually indestructible. Save a few details it looks exactly the same as when my mother bought it for me fifteen years ago. I was fourteen or fifteen at the time and she'd made a trip to Finland with my brother. As a souvenir I'd asked for a jersey of the Finnish national hockey team, but apparently they were prohibitively expensive. Instead, the LA Kings shirt was more affordable and still good looking
At the time the shirt was way too large for me and the sleeves reached well beyond my wrists. The hemline also reached below my hips. These days the shirt still looks fine, though obviously I've grown in all directions making it a much better fit
So here's to you, fifteen year old jersey! May we be together for fifteen years more!
kilala.nl tags: life, childhood,
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2009-12-05 22:10:00
Why the frag does the IPv4 networking setup on Red Hat and Fedora Linii need to be so damn complicated? I've just spent half an hour Googling to find the right commands to ensure that my Fedora 12 VM in Parallels configures its eth0 at boot time. Seriously, compare the two:
Solaris 10:
1. Enter hostname and IP in /etc/hosts
2. Enter hostname in /etc/hostname.ni0
3. Enter network base IP and netmask in /etc/netmasks
Fedora 12:
1. Run system-config-network. Fill out all details.
2. Enter hostname and IP in /etc/hosts
3. Enter hostname in /etc/sysconfig/network
4. Set "ONBOOT" to yes in /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ifcfg-eth0
5. Run: chkconfig --level 35 network on
Seriously, who the fsck comes up with that last line?! I already have the network startup scripts in /etc/init.d and everything in /etc/sysconfig is set up and I -still- need to enable the network config to be loaded at boot time? WTF?! A few years back I had the same fights with setting up static routes that needed to be carried over reboots.
I fscking hate Red Hat.
kilala.nl tags: sysadmin, unix,
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2009-12-05 07:53:00
Well, scratch another two items off my .plan. I've upgraded my BoKS master and replica servers to Solaris 10/09 and I'll be hardening them both with JASS/SST. The Parallels tech support team also came through with a solution for my network problems after upgrading to Parallels Desktop 5. In the end the solution was pretty easy but it's not something I would've come up with.
Mmm, I need to polish up my Solaris-fu.
Today I'll spend a few hours at work, migrating one (possibly three) servers from one legacy BoKS domain to another. Unfortunately it's going to need some tweaking and massaging because there's inconsistencies between the two domains when it comes to user and group IDs. Oh well, we'll manage :)
kilala.nl tags: work, sysadmin,
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2009-12-04 18:33:00
The Parallels support team finally came through. Earlier, I reported network problems with Solaris 10 and Parallels Desktop 5. After upgrading to Parallels 5 my virtual NICs were not getting detected anymore and ifconfig was completely unable to plumb my ni0 or ni1 interfaces.
It took us over three weeks of mailing back and forth, but finally the Parallels team were able to both reproduce the issue and to provide a fix. Here's the summary of what tech support told me.
Cause of the problem
Parallels Desktop 5 now supports 64-bit operating systems. Furthermore, it will now by default boot any capable OS into 64-bit mode. This means that all of my Solaris 10 VMs that had been running in 32-bit mode all of a sudden switched over to 64-bit. This also means that any 32-bit only drivers are rendered unusable. This is what broke the usage of Parallels' virtual network interfaces.
Solution 1: forcing the OS back to 32-bit mode
1. Stop the VM
2. Go to VM configuration -> Hardware -> Boot order.
3. In the "boot parameters" field enter: devices.apic.disable=1
3a. Alternatively, add the following to /etc/system: set pcplusmp:apic_forceload = -1
4. Boot the VM.
5. As root run: /usr/sbin/eeprom boot-file="kernel/unix"
Solution 2: recompiling the RTL3829 drivers as 64-bit
1. Start the VM
2. Remove the old drivers. Run: rem_drv ni
3. Mount the Parallels tools CDROM ISO image on /cdrom.
4. Run: cd /cdrom/Drivers/Network/RTL3829
5. Run: cp -rp SOLARIS /tmp
6. Run: cd /tmp/SOLARIS
7. Edit the network.sh file and add the following lines right before the echo of "Compiling driver".
PATH=$PATH:/usr/sfw/bin
rm $driver/Makefile
ln -s $tmpdir/$driver/Makefile.amd64_gcc $tmpdir/$driver/Makefile
8. Save the file and run: ./network.sh
9. Answer the usual questions to configure the NIC. Then reboot.
I went with the second solution (might as well stay running in 64-bit mode now that I can). I can confirm that it works and that my NI interface is now back. You may find that network.sh configured the ni0 interface, while it's actually called ni1. Reconfigure if needed by moving /etc/hostname.ni0 to /etc/hostname.ni1.
kilala.nl tags: sysadmin, unix, meh,
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2009-12-04 05:47:00
Oh dear... It seems that we're going to Japan a year too late.
It's probably to celebrate the ending of the final season of the Inuyasha TV anime: from 16/12 till 4/01 a special, one-time Inuyasha store will open in Tokyo. After that, it's gone.
In the previous years it was very hard to get any Inuyasha merch because the series' popularity had died down ages ago. No figurines, no toys, no collectible cards, no nothing. And now, the only year that the show gets big again we are -not- in Japan.
I reckon I may have to use that new Tokyo address of mine :)
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2009-12-03 22:31:00
It's almost like clockwork! Three years after getting my current glasses I'm fitting new ones.
For the past two to three weeks I've been having problems with my eyes. They don't seem to focus that well anymore and I feel like I'm constantly squinting. Driving the car gets exhausting really quickly and reading a book or my computer screen makes me go fuzzy. Meh.
My eyes always were crappy and now they've gone a little bit crappier. This time around it's not so much the spherical value that's changing but instead it's the cylinder. The english Wikipedia page on eyeglass prescriptions actually gives a wonderful explanation of sphere versus cylinder versus axis. Very interesting and I finally understand what the cylindrical value means and how the axis ties into it. Interesting stuff!
The fact that my eyes need more cylindrical adjustment became very clear when the optician had plugged my current values into the phoropter. At first I couldn't see worth crap. However, one flick of a switch made everything nearly crystal clear. "What the heck did you just do?!", I exclaimed in surprise :)
So... Thank god for nationalized health care and such, because my insurer will carry at least a fraction of the costs involved with the new glasses. I'm getting two identical pairs at the same time, so I always have a backup handy. We were also lucky enough that the shop had some leftovers of the Polaroid Expert Clip System, our 100% most favorite system for clip-on shades. It seems this model has been discontinued.
EDIT:
For those curious enough to read on.
L: Sp = -9.50, Cy = -2.50, Ax = 134 (was Sp = -9.00, Cy = -2.00, Ax = 130)
R: Sp = -9.75, Cy = -2.75, Ax = 55 (was Sp = -9.50, Cy = -2.00, Ax = 60)
kilala.nl tags: health, body, glasses,
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2009-12-03 22:16:00
A few months ago I discovered Tenso.com, a mail forwarding service in Japan. They market their services to both Japanese ex-pats and foreign folk who want to receive mail from Japan at lower postage rates than usual. One great example is the ordering of books and toys/figurines, which can often be pricy.
In my case I can cut my shipping rates from Amazon.co.jp in half, simply by having Amazon send my books to my address in Tokyo. Tenso then forwards my parcel to me through EMS, which is about 50% cheaper than Amazon's normal methods. In addition they charge a nominal handling fee of Y490 (about E3.70).
Goodygoody! On their way to me now are two rare books which cannot be had outside Japan. Thanks to Tenso's lower rates I'm now paying a "normal" instead of "exorbitant" amount of money for two books.
Haruki Murakami's first novel Hear the wind sing. The book was written in the year I was born and the english translation was only made for Japanese students learning english. The book never was meant for the international market.
Part two of the Alps hiroba manga. I'm a big fan of the series, even though I don't understand most of what's going on ^_^;
kilala.nl tags: japan, internet,
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All content, with exception of "borrowed" blogpost images, or unless otherwise indicated, is copyright of Thomas Sluyter. The character Kilala the cat-demon is copyright of Rumiko Takahashi and used here without permission.