Month: May 2008

i recently “upgraded” my fedora box to fedora 9. i did a basic, no-frills, from-scratch install, then followed some of the good suggestions found on mjmwired.net to personalize it. i then tried following my own suggestions for installing the citrix ica client 10.6 on linux fedora 7 (entry) just to see if it’d work (which i kind of doubted), or if things would go horribly awry (which is what i kind of figured). amazingly, it worked just fine. so here’s what i did:
[1] grab the openmotif rpm for an older fedora version (4, for example):
wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/\
core/updates/4/i386/openmotif-2.2.3-10.FC4.2.i386.rpm
[2] openmotif has a dependency so it won’t install via “yum localinstall blah.rpm” — so use the rpm command itself with “nodeps”:
rpm –nodeps -ivh openmotif-2.2.3-10.FC4.2.i386.rpm
[3] you also need libXp.so.6, and it’s available for fedora 9, so use yum to install it (if you don’t have it already).
if you trust me (hey! it’s a random guy on the internet! what’s not to trust!?), run one of these two commands (as root, of course):
if [ `yum list | grep -c ‘^libXp\.’` -eq 1 ]; then echo “libXp installed”; else yum install libXp; fi
OR
if [ -f /usr/lib/libXp.so.6 ]; then echo “libXp.so.6 exists”; else yum install libXp; fi
the first checks to see if the libXp package is installed. if so, it tells you; otherwise it runs yum to install it. the second checks for the libXp.so.6 file, and if it’s there it tells you; otherwise it runs yum to install the libXp package. you really don’t need to do both commands. really.
or if you don’t trust me (hey! it’s a random guy on the internet! what’s to trust!?) run this command instead (as root, of course):
yum install libXp
if you’ve already got it, it’ll tell you. if not, it’ll install it.
if for some reason you need the actual rpm file, you can get it at: http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/\
releases/9/Everything/i386/os/Packages/libXp-1.0.0-11.fc9.i386.rpm
[4] now you can install the citrix icaclient 10.6 (get the rpm file from the citrix site, silly)
rpm -ivh ICAClient-10.6-1.i386.rpm
the ica client is installed in /usr/lib/ICAClient
(that means wfcmgr, wfica, and so on are in that dir)
it’ll show up in your menu in Applications -> Internet -> Citrix Presentation Server Client
run it, accept the license agreement. now you’ve got your citrix client.
but wait! there’s more! another thing you might want to do, which i did:
[5] as root, ln -s /usr/lib/ICAClient/npica.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/
(or put it in your own personal mozilla plugins area if you don’t want to do it as root. that would be ~/.mozilla/plugins if you didn’t know. create it if it doesn’t exist.)
[5a] if you kept selinux active, it will end up complaining later on. if so, do this:
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t /usr/lib/ICAClient/npica.so
[6] restart firefox.
in the address bar, type “about:plugins” and look for the citrix client in the list.
the only part of citrix i use is the web-based apps (metaframe or wts or whatever it’s called. i’m not a citrix admin or anything, so don’t get all up in my grill about your l33t c!trix skillz and how i’m a c!trix n00b, yo.) so this seems to work for me.
one new event was that i connected to a newer citrix system and got an error:
You have not chosen to trust the “Thawte Premium Server CA”, the issuer of the server’s security certificate (SSL error 61).
a quick google search reveals all: turns out my citrix ica client needs a new thawte root cert. to resolve this, i download ThawteRoot.crt from http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/computing/windows/services/citrix/linux_client.htm and placed it under /usr/lib/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts.
in other words, if you find yourself in a similar situation just do this (as root):
# cd /usr/lib/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts
# wget http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/computing/windows/\
services/citrix/downloads/ThawteRoot.crt
enjoy.
as before, i claim no responsibility for any accidental citrixide that may occur by following these steps, or if your fedora install gets borked, or if your cat gets feline diabetes from this, or whatever else may result. you’re a big boy or girl and you chose to run linux. figure it out yourself, you lazy good-for-nothing freeloader!

i guess last week must have been uneventful, or i’m forgetful, because i don’t recall anything i feel a burning need to note or comment on. or maybe it’s all the booze, partying, and sex — you know, just the normal week of a jet-setter such as myself. or maybe i’m on a super-secret mission and i can’t talk about it.
friday i went in to work in the afternoon because electrical work was being done in our data center so i was working an evening shift. fortunately, i didn’t have to stay all that late (around 11:30pm). but i did have to get up at around 5am saturday morning to go back in. yuck! i was done around 10:30am, except for some forgotten things here and there — but my sleep schedule was evidently totally jacked up. i took a nap in the early evening, then got up and headed over to natalie’s for her house warming party. i didn’t actually see much of her house, but i was there until around 3am. i met a couple that seemed really cool — he was a programmer and she was an artist. i’ll probably never see them again. 🙂 i got home and went to bed around 4am.
i slept most of sunday. sunday night i went over to the potts and had a root beer float and watched bandits. sue’s brother is in town for the summer i think, and had brought it. it was okay. it has bruce willis and billy bob thorton as inmates who escape from prison and start robbing banks.
today i got up and decided to have brunch at le peep. i walked there and ate, then from there i walked to academy. i almost bought a pistol. but i decided i should probably wait, since i’m trying to get up the gumption to pull the trigger on buying a new tv. at some point last week i went to a best buy to compare the samsung ln46a650 and sony bravia kdl-46xbr4. i should have gone to circuit city: i stood in the best buy for 40+ minutes and no one ever said a word to me. oh well, i’ve pretty much decided i’m going to order online anyway…i can get either set for probably $700 less than i’d pay if i bought it locally. that’s a lot of money, and i’m not sure having someone local to deal with problems is worth that much money. and i don’t think i could haggle them low enough to make buying locally worth it. plus i don’t like haggling.
a while back i logged into my cafepress account and looked at the history on my items. i thought they’d mail me when something sold, but i guess maybe it’s only when you have the price marked above their base price. it turns out other than my own purchases, they’ve sold one “christian rtfm” shirt, two “fsck the system” shirts, and about 26 “bob wills is still the king” bumper stickers.
and one of these days i’ll take my car, motorcycle, and pickup in to get them worked on. i hope. maybe in that order. or maybe not.
now i’ll go join jack and chip at the house of pies…

the following entry was originally written 05.26.2006 — two years ago today. i decided at the time to set it aside. i probably thought it was a bit snarky, and even though i still had a lot of animosity toward things i almost always ended up feeling bad when i went at tamara, and usually ended up toning it down a lot. (i did say “almost always”.) plus there was still some legal stuff that was unsettled, and i didn’t really want to cause more problems for myself with the money- and blood-sucking lawyers.
i decided a while back i’d start posting stuff i’d held back over the years. not because i still feel the same — or even because i really feel good about some of the things i said (or the way i said them), but because i felt that way at the time and i figure it gives a snapshot into where i was then. if you don’t care to read me being pissed off about the financial/legal issues surrounding my divorce and trashing my ex some, then skip following the link.
looking back at the blog for context, the may 2006 entries leading up to this day are void of this issue, and the one that would have followed it takes a bit of a different tone (link). some of other june entries deal with it somewhat though. that said, here it is, unedited…

Continue reading “the dark side of friendship (from the unposted archives)”

friday i was able to go into work late due to a maintenance window, so i had a nice lunch at brasil. i had originally planned to drop a bunch of stuff off at the westpark recycle center, but i didn’t get around to that. oh well, there’s always other days.
saturday morning i got up around 8:20am (geh!) so i could go help sue with soccer. jack was shooting a wedding, so she was supposed to be coaching and mothering simultaneously. unfortunately, simcha only likes mom, so i couldn’t help much with her and sue ended up having to take care of her while being a coach. after the games they left for a nap then a birthday party. i figured since i was already in the general vicinity, and it was lunchtime, i’d head to sylvia’s. mmm. on the way back home, i stopped at a couple of places and looked at tvs. i’m still not sure what to do, but right now i’m leaning toward a sony bravia – xbr4 or xbr5, 46″ or 52″. they’re more than i really wanted to spend, but they’re considered the best lcd screens. maybe i’m just being hypercritical, but it seems like lcds have really good pictures but don’t handle rapid motion and scene changes well. even the really expensive ones with the 120hz and other bells and whistles. it makes it difficult for me to want to drop that kind of money. my tube picture may be inferior and lack clarity/detail, but it doesn’t pixelate or ghost or such.
whilst driving around looking at tvs, i was talking on the phone and hopped a curb. i’d been thinking about getting one of those infernal bluetooth headsets for awhile now, just for when i’d like to be on the phone and still need the use of both hands — so i decided to bite. i ended up going to the apple store in the galleria and buying an iphone bluetooth headset. it’s a pretty slick looking little device, and it seems to pair with my ancient razr okay. although i’m still trying to figure out some of how it pairs, whether it is active or not, and how quickly it drains my phone battery. hopefully within the next few months i’ll be getting a g3 iphone, and then the full benefits of the apple bluetooth headset will be realized.
another thing i picked up while looking at tvs was a western digital “my book” external hard drive (320gig). it was around $90, and it now serves the purpose of being my time machine backup drive. it hangs off of my airport extreme’s usb port. i had to reformat the drive as hfs+, but after i did that and shared it through the airport utility admin tool i was able to choose it as the backup drive in time machine. so now both my power mac and macbook air are being backed up to it. i’m not sure i like this responsible life i’m now living, what with backups and all.
saturday night i headed over to el pueblito on richmond for myat’s grad party. he and a few other folk who just got their mba’s were celebrating there. there were a lot of the regulars from that crowd there, along with a fair number of people i didn’t know. steve davis showed up, which was a cool surprise. myat spent most of the several times he talked to me trying to set me up with some girl there. not sure why he thought that’s how things should be, but he was persistent. i managed to avoid talking to her the whole time though. (yea, me?) i left around 1am and headed home.
today i got up and was messing around with my power mac, trying to figure out why it has seemed so sluggish lately. suddenly i realized it was showing it only had 256mb or memory. egads! i have a couple of 512mb crucial ballistix modules in there, but it evidently wasn’t seeing them. i powered the box off and tried every memory variation i could think of, but it never saw the crucial sticks. i guess they’re dead. *sigh* i searched around online, but i kind of wanted memory now, so i ended up trekking around town. i started off at microcenter, where they only sold “lifetime” memory or something, which was twice the price of the crucial i’d looked up. the microcenter guy tried to insist other memory isn’t good with apple, even if it says it is. whatever. next i dropped by a circuit city, but they didn’t have any for apple. then i went to best buy, but they didn’t have any either. so i gave up and drove to fry’s. at fry’s the guy argued about how any memory works in apples, and “certified” just means they tried it and it worked. whatever. (“guaranteed to work” means something when you have to return/exchange things if they don’t.) but i was tired of driving around and wanted something right then, so i gave up and bought a 2-pack of 1gig corsair memory modules. with a $30 mail-in rebate they work out to about $50, so i figure that’s okay. i got them home and put them in and they are okay so far. i may go ahead and order a pair of crucial 1gig sticks online as well. that’ll max out my box.
in the afternoon i finally went to eat. i’d woke up this morning craving a bagel for some reason, so i went to einstein bagels and had some kind of hot open-faced bagel sandwich and an iced tea. i sat there until they were closing, then the manager came by and said they had a bunch of bagels they were going to have to toss so i could have a bag if i wanted. he gave me probably 15 bagels. i kept a few and gave the rest to the potts this evening.

based on a comment i made during the show tonight…

(original photo appears to be by mark lennihan, associated press)
last night i watched eternal sunshine of the spotless mind again. i think maybe it really is a story about me.
tonight at the radio show robb zipp showed up. i hadn’t seen him in awhile so i walked out of the studio and talked with him in the lobby. while we were talking he said “hey, your ex-wife didn’t happen to have a tattoo in hebrew on her arm, did she?” i was wondering how he’d know that. i said she did. he said he was thinking about some people saying i was kind of religious, and thought maybe he’d met me and my wife years ago through some guys in a band. (it was josh and miles and the rest of the guys from segway (sic.) then feedback.) “she had blond hair, dyed black on the bottom.” yeah, that was her. “yeah, she was pretty hot. i remember thinking ‘man, how did she end up with that guy?'” haha. ha. i said “she was crazy.” to which he replied “(pause) well, still, (pause) i guess at least you had that for awhile.” still, kind of a small world. that probably would have been in 1999 or 2000 or something when he would have met us. we talked a bit about josh (he called him “oatmeal” because for some reason some people started calling him that for awhile) and miles. kind of weird.
UPDATE (May 15, 2008) — i’ve gotten several comments about what robb said, but i’m not going to approve them. i wasn’t intending to make robb look bad, or suggest i was upset by what he said. i don’t know that i even quoted him exactly right. he meant it lightheartedly, and when he realized what he’d said/implied might hurt/offend me, he looked slightly horrified and apologized. don’t hate robb – he’s a cool guy. : ) we’re both self-deprecating fellows who think we’re lucky if we’re dating attractive women (at least i’m pretty sure that’s his position as well), so he didn’t mean it maliciously or anything.

i’ve continued cleaning up and sanitizing my cubicle at work. i replaced my name on the nameplate on my cube with my employee id. (i’ll refrain from explaining hopefully obvious implications.) humorously, over the next couple of hours i had numerous people coming by and showing it to people. they all seemed to like it. i guess maybe there is some general dissatisfaction at work. (or maybe they all just like seeing someone else doing something like that.) i heard some other people were going to be talked to about spending too much time away from their cubes/workspace. and i think they did. but then an email was sent out to my whole group that said we had so many projects and so much work that we all needed to limit our personal breaks to two 10 minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. not surprisingly, that went over like a pumped up, contentious steve ballmer at a linux convention. in fact, i think that may have gone too far. i think a lot of others thought so too. we shall see what happens.
friday night i went to blanco’s to see dale watson. unfortunately, i just wasn’t really into it. i stayed for a couple of hours. when the band took a break, i went outside and smoked my pipe. the band started playing again, but after i finished my pipe i just went ahead and left. i went by taco cabana and picked up some food, then came home and watched the last episode of season two of “dead like me”. (do you put tv shows in quotes or underline them? i don’t remember. oh well, whatever. screw nit-picky grammatical rules.) the hot russian chick at work let me borrow seasons one and two of the show because she really liked the series, so i just finished watching them all. i think it was a good series, but not phenomenal or anything. she also recently loaned me the firefly dvd boxset, so i guess i’ll start watching those soon.
i spent most of saturday with the potts. i ate brunch with them at ihop, went to the bohemian photography loft for a couple of hours, then took sue to the apple store because her iphone had developed this annoying trait of echoing back to people calling her everything they were saying. (a software reload of the phone fixed it.) i agreed to take her to the apple store because i was thinking about buying some stuff. i had some money from various holidays and such, plus the money from selling my laptop. i was originally going to buy a time capsule, but i asked a person there if there was any benefit or features to the time capsule versus an extreme with a usb-attached drive and he said “no.” i was in the process of talking myself out of buying anything at all, but then sue asked me what i wanted and why and how much it cost and said i should just buy it. so i bought an airport extreme 802.11n and an airport express 802.11n. from the apple store i took sue back home, and i hung out and ate supper with them.
when i got home last night i broke out my new toys and started configuring them. i successfully managed to replace my old linksys wrt54g with the extreme, and i managed to get the new express set up and working. i was having some problems figuring out how to get the old 802.11g express to work, so eventually i gave up and went and read crime and punishment.
today i went back to it and figured out the issue with the g express. the airport utility makes it look/sound like when you tell the express to join a wireless network it should show up in the drop-down list, and if it doesn’t you need to make sure the wireless network is turned on and functioning properly. i never could get my wireless network to show up in the list. in fact, nothing showed up. (unless i had the g set up to create a wireless network, in which case it showed itself in the list.) i thought maybe it was a n vs. g thing and kept trying to change configurations and all kinds of junk to get the wireless network to show up in the list. eventually at some point i realized you could just type it in by hand and ignore the empty list. *sigh* it worked. i then spent an hour or something looking for an 8 ft or longer 1/8″ male stereo to 1/8″ male stereo cable. i was sure i had one somewhere, but i never found it.
so i called my grandmother, then went and ate at goode company bbq. from there i went by radio shack, figuring that would be a good place to get a long cable. nope. 3 ft and 6 ft. *sigh* from looking through all my cables earlier, i remembered i had a couple of 1/8″ stereo to rca cables, so i instead bought a pair of female-to-female rca couplers. i came home and put it all together. and it’s all set up and working now.
so what did i get for all of my troubles? the ability to play itunes on my computer, my home stereo, and the speakers on the front porch — all at the same time. of course, i also got two 802.11n devices, but since my old express is g it sort of defeats some of that. but my macbook air is 802.11n also, so i now have the ability to be all 802.11n at some point in the future. oh yeah, and i got gigabit ethernet connections. and a pretty much all-apple network. steve jobs would be proud.

today is the 10 year anniversary of failure.net. that’s right, 10 years ago today i plopped down $70 for two years of ownership of the domain failure.net. it had never existed before. i didn’t buy it from anyone. you see, the internet was still slightly fresh and somewhat untamed back then. even though i’d wanted my own domain for a while, ownership was more expensive (and less common) in those days, and i didn’t have nearly as much expendable income. by the time i decided to do it, a number of other domains i was interested in were already gone. but i finally broke down and did it. and i was pretty happy with what i got. and it’s been nothing but failure after stupendous failure since. makes a domain owner proud, it does.

on tuesday i took a day off from work and took a trip to austin to visit my brother and nephew. he took the month off to stay at home with his son, so he had a lot of time to fill. i decided to take my motorcycle since it’d get me ~40 mpg, as compared to around ~10 mpg in my car or pickup. (at $3/gal that’s quite a bit.) it was the first longer trip i’d been on this season. as such, i made some good decisions and some poor ones. first, it was still kind of chilly. i made the good decision of wearing my leather jacket and taking my 8-bit flame beanie. but the first 2/3 of the trip up and the last 2/3 of the trip back was still a little nippy. in the poor category, i must have never used the googles i took on a long trip before — they let way too much air in. my eyes were tearing up most of the ride. even more poorly, the googles are tinted and chromed and i forgot to take some clear googles for after dark. coming home at night, the combination of tinted googles and tearing up made my vision very poor — when i could see, i was only seeing about 50 feet in front of me. fortunately nothing was in the road. 🙂
the visit was only for the day, and it ended up being kind of weird. miles (my nephew) is sort of fussy, plus my brother was running a fever, plus i fell asleep on the couch for about an hour and a half. but we did go to the alamo draft house and we ate and saw big man japan. it’s a fake documentary about a guy that is one of the giant super-sized heroes that protects japan from giant monsters. he grows from normal size (just like his father, grandfather, etc.) by being electrocuted at a power station. but the problem is no one really likes the giant heroes any more, and he’s pretty much the last one, and his life kind of sucks. the monsters he fought were weird and disturbing, but it was funny. the best part was the ending. although it seemed disjointed from the rest of the movie, it was a group of poor quality tv show costumed japanese superheroes beating the crap out of a guy dressed up in a monster outfit. i was crying i was laughing so hard. this will make sense to those of you who know i kind of have an irrational fascination with people fighting mascots or mascots fighting each other. oh man, the last 10 minutes or whatever were side-splitting because of that. i mean, it was seriously hilarious.
as we were walking out of alamo, i looked over at a display stand for the ironman movie coming out. they had a daniel johnston ironman drawing on a t-shirt. but then i noticed a black work shirt with the “s.h.i.e.l.d.” logo real big on the back of it. holy. crap. that was it, i had to have that. for whatever reason, i became a fan of nick fury when i was a kid. i had one nova comic book that nick made an appearance in. and i think he may have shown up in a fantastic four comic book my brother and i had too. we didn’t have many comic books. but for whatever reason, the eye-patched, cigar-smoking, gruff guy with grey hair on the sides was fascinating to me. when i got to college and first started using the net (bitnet/decnet, then internet) i quickly picked the handle of “nick fury, agent of s.h.i.e.l.d.”. i dropped it probably 1992 or 1993, but it’s my past.
(as an aside, this makes clarence’s discussion of nick fury at the comic shop with alabama in true romance endear me even more to clarence and increase my identifying with him. as another aside, jack recently shot a wedding where the couple used music and themes from the movie for their wedding. that’s pretty cool. as a further aside, the theme music for true romance — the marimba piece — was borrowed from badlands, which is a terrence malick film. you should check it out.)
one day last week (i don’t recall which day) someone broke into the potts’ house. it appears all they really took was an apple laptop and two laptop chargers that were near the place they came in. having been a victim of home theft, i’m aware of how much it sucks. so a couple of days ago the potts’ got a new dog. he’s a hound/shar pei mix. anyway, i’m going to sell them my old 12″ ibook laptop.
wednesday i got talked to at work about the fact that i’ve been spending too much time away from my desk. which i didn’t deny. but after a couple of hours stewing on it, it really started annoying me. i don’t really like criticism, positive or negative, deserved or not. and i don’t like negative attention either. plus the issue wasn’t that they weren’t happy with my work, or i wasn’t getting enough done. so i started taking down the stuff in and around my cubicle that makes my space unique and my own. i continued doing it on thursday. my actions appear to be really scaring and/or freaking out a lot of people at work. i think a lot of them think i’m indicating that i’m leaving. but that wasn’t really what it was about. in fact, on thursday i had to talk with three managers in my group. and on thursday and friday i probably had at least twelve to fifteen people ask me what was going on and what happened. some of them thought i was told to clean up my cube. i gave away a couple of computers that i had. i’ve cleaned/hidden probably 2/3 of the stuff that was on my desk, and i’ve removed at least 3/4 of the stuff that was “personalization” of my space. i told some people they wanted a corporate cog, so i was going underground. we’ll see what happens i suppose.
friday evening was the geek gathering. we had it at the petrol station in the heights instead of the usual tropioca. turnout was pretty decent, but i got there an hour and a half or two late. some people were going to joystix from there, but i decided to bow out and head home.
last night i was hanging out at the potts. i started getting tired and decided i was going to go home. this was around 10pm, which is odd for me. but then brad texted me to see if i was riding. i hadn’t gone riding with brad or others in several months, so i couldn’t help myself. i went home and got my bike and met up with brad. we met at mcelroy’s near my house, rode a bit, then hung out at the dark horse. i ended up not getting home until around 2:45am. so much for being tired.
last weekend i took my sha-sha blue flame leather shoes (the ones in the picture in the previous blog entry) and my chocolate brown tony lama western boots to a shoe shop. i got the boots resoled, and i got the shoes reconditioned and the soles re-glued. i picked them up yesterday. i think i’m going to not use the boots on my motorcycle anymore. in fact, i’m probably about to order a new pair of motorcycle boots to replace the frye harness boots that finally fell apart too much a few months ago. i think i may get some pretty awesome boots. we’ll see.
friday my oldest pair of pants started shredding. so today i went to old navy and picked up a new pair of jeans so the number in my rotation would stay consistent. i also picked up a pair of really dark brown/greyish loose khakis, and a few pair of interesting socks (stripes, squares, skulls). we’ll see if i wear the socks or not.


inez: (concerned) how are you, jerry?
dignan: (flat, emotionless) i feel great, inez.
anthony: he’s…uh…under the weather a little bit. so i, uh…
(from bottle rocket)