Apparently it’s called Go Texan Day. I’ve been informed that “Redneck Cosplay Day” is not an acceptable alternative.
Tag: Autobiographical
Retina Scan
More medical imaging. I present for your consideration the insides of my eyeballs. (Click thumbnails to view original full-size images.) The images shown were taken on Jun 25, 2014 using an Optomap wide-field retina scanner, probably the 200Dx model.
So now I have plausible deniability for anything that I’m alleged to have done on a system using retina scans for biometric authentication…
Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS: Recovering from a Broken libc
Note: Reasonably heavy UNIX-geekery ahead. Mostly Linux-specific, somewhat Debian-specific and a little bit Ubuntu-specific. Skip if that isn’t your cup of ichor.
I recently did something incredibly ill-considered while logged in (as root, natch) to my Ubuntu server box at home. In essence, I told the package manager to uninstall libc.
On a scale from good to bad, this is bad.
Now, I could have booted up from a rescue disk and fixed it. I could have re-installed easily enough (using the trick where you just keep your existing partitions and don’t format them — though this would have inevitably led to some fallout as various config files and customizations got clobbered). Heck, I even had a reasonably recent backup at hand. None of these sounded especially fun, mostly because the machine was in a place where it’s a hassle to stick a head on it. I had three things working in my favor: an open root-privileged shell prompt, Internet connectivity and my native cunning.
Read on after the jump for the full tale.
Dem Bones
The foot-bone’s connected to the… whole lot of other stuff, it turns out. I sprained my ankle recently (at fair, whilst doing something completely stupid reasonable and prudent), and got some nifty digital X-rays to make sure nothing was broken. (Nothing was.) Original-resolution lossless PNG also available (1.5MB download). Original DICOM data files on request.
Gazebo, Part II
Our backyard gazebo, finally nearing completion. Since it’s been so long, I started a new post rather than just updating the old one. Most recent picture to the right, and more below the break. Click pictures for a bigger version.
Peptic Salve and Adrenaline
Now You’re Drinking with Portals.™
(Idea: Greg Erskine at Metafilter.)
Plywood: The Silent Killer
I bought a couple of pieces of plywood today. You know the stuff: Useful, made of wood, pretty boring, kinda flat, deadly. Wait, what? Yep. Says so right on it:
Warning: This product may generate wood dust, a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer.
I Shoot an Arrow at It
Last Update: Saturday, 14 May 2011
Our backyard gazebo: a work in progress. Updates here in a more recent post as they happen (and I remember to take pictures). Most recent picture to the right. More after the jump:
Media: The Eagle (Bryan / College Station)
Sat down this Saturday afternoon at TRF for a nice plate of bees (right), and had a lovely chat 
with Michelle Casady of The Eagle (Bryan / College Station). We talked about renaissance fairs, and what might possess people to go to them, how many times we’ve been (“Is there even a number that big?”), and the details of our attire. (“My costume is itching me. Do I have to wear this? I don’t wanna wear this.”)
Despite her persistent questioning, I kept quiet about the fact that pretty much every other shop has an opium den in the back, not to mention the place being a non-stop orgy after closing. She wrote a nice article for her newspaper, one that may well lure more unsuspecting victims into the louche and depraved life of the regular renaissance fair patron.
Wherein the author both tests WordPress and inaugurates the site…
Is this thing on?
I’ve been henke@insync.net for a long damn time.
To the best of my ability to recall, my first email address was something or other @lanl.gov. This would be around or about 1987. After a four-year (somewhat overlapping) stint as something boring @rice.edu (Go Owls!), I wallowed in low-grade snark and minor infamy as henke@netcom.com and henke@scaly.ssc.gov. This would bring our timeline to approximately 1993.
After that, it was a move to Houston and henke@phoenix.net. I have fond memories of the phoenix account, notably the improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio of my email stream stemming from the inability of stupid people to spell “phoenix”. This was about the time spam was becoming a real problem, so although I was a frequent poster to UseNet, I munged addresses.
That brings us to 1999 (party as though it were same) and henke@insync.net. As of this writing, that account it still active. As of the dawn of 2010, it will not be. Alas, the fantastic, local, hacker-run insync.net was too good for this troubled world, and was gobbled up by texas.net lo, these many years ago. While the original domain still stands, I’ve grown tired of shelling out the Croessian sum of twenty bucks a month for a simple email forward and POP mailbox.
Thus, I’ve hired hostmonster and registered the domain ‘mythopoeic.org’, at which I’m dhenke (as there’s an ahenke also, with whom I desire email parity — while I’m still Henke of Clan Henke, that’s only for formal occasions).
While hand-crafting HTML (and/or XHTML) with a plain old text editor has long been my habit, I have come around to the view that time spent on that sort of attention to detail is time that would serve both my readers and myself better were I to spend it on content. And, Hostmonster had an easy way to install WordPress, so, well… here we are.