post x-mas post

[slamlander]

Still in Coppet,CH. The in-laws are now down in Aigues-Mortes because it’s warmer down there (7C v. –4C here). We stayed here to house-sit for a few days and will be going back on the 28^th.

Zhinn is having a wonderful time even if it is damned cold outside. This is good as he isn’t completely an apartment cat. He’s now a 6 kilo adult male athletic Tabby that keeps himself amazingly fit. He’s also turning out to be a pretty good mouser. Although he gets fairly disappointed when the new active bat-toys break. He keeps bringing them to me for repairs. He did that with sparrows for a while too but gave up on them because they break too easy. He is now easier on the mice and voles, even letting a few voles get away.

Zhinn is the sort of cat that will not eat raw meat. We get him the gushy food with veg in because that is what he prefers. He prefers it to the point that he picks out the veg first. Strange cat, that. Obligate carnivore? Yeah … sure. The only way he would eat a mouse is sauté in butter and garlic. Zhinn likes burrito filling, chili, curried anything, cheddar cheese, cooked turkey (new discovery, that), gushy food with veg in it (mostly zucchini, peas, and carrots; try to get your child to each much of any of that), shrimps in butter and garlic, sardines, tuna, and grilled chicken with lots of paprika and cayenne. He otherwise shies away from most human prepared food, straight all-meat cat food, and any form of raw meat. We definitely have a strange cat here however, his coat is gorgeous so the diet must be okay.

Tech: Goshawk—>Gyrfalcon

The night before Christmas Eve, I finally got around to rebuilding Goshawk. Goshawk was my main Web Applications Server for years but it’s always had this memory problem that required me to reset it at least once per week. Last month, right before NaNoWriMo, it finally died due to a corrupted boot sector. There is a long story behind Goshawk but Ï plugged in a spare 30GB PATA drive and installed a new Win2K server OS, leaving the old drive in place, as a slave.

Due to the fact that Goshawk was a Domain Controller on my Active Directory Domain, it’s sudden demise left an orphaned object in the AD which I couldn’t assign to the resurrected Goshawk. Therefore I took the expedient of naming Goshawk to Gyrfalcon instead, and will delete the old Goshawk objects later. The really weird thing is that the memory glitch seems to have gone away, or is successfully hiding from me. In either case, that’s a task necessarily left until I finally get back to Nyon.

Yes, my VPN setup is working really well from here in Coppet. It was a PITA to initially setup but I am very glad that I did it. I have a 300GHz, host (Eagle) that is dedicated communications controller, with RADIUS, MS RSA, etc. It’s not much of a host (slow) but that’s all it does and has been working reliably for years (I think of Apweiler fondly for sending me that old motherboard).

New Year wishes

Anyway, the new year’s acommin’ and I hope that it treats everyone well. From here, things have a much better chance of looking better than worse. Keep working at whatever is working for you, mitigate your losses as best as you can, and don’t take on any risks that you don’t have to. There are still economic storm clouds on the horizon, both here in Europe and in the US.

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