banjoplayinnerd (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
banjoplayinnerd) wrote2012-07-16 02:22 pm
banjoplayinnerd) wrote2012-07-16 02:22 pm
I love living in the future
Middle of last week I got an email from my friend Jane Garthson, a Toronto filker. She said she and her husband Phil Mills were going to host a housefilk on Saturday, and would I be interested in attending via Skype?
Well, um, yeah.
So I dusted off my Skype account that I hadn't used in over a year, figured out my password and off I went. Connecting was more exciting than it should have been because my laptop suddenly forgot that it had a webcam attached, in either Linux or Windows. I had to go into my junkbox and dig out an old webcam that I'd bought on clearance somewhere or another for $5 that did an adequate, though by no means spectacular, job. Once that was hooked up everything went fairly smoothly. I wish the audio and video quality would have been better, but if it had been they might have been able to see the explosion-in-an-electronics-assembly-plant that is my desk/computer workstation, so maybe it's just as well.
For my part I got to do three songs in the three hours I was on: "You're A Hack," "Colour" and "The Frozen Logger." In return I got to hear and get copies of a spoken word piece allegedly from an 8th-century Irish warrior ("I love you more than Celtic knotwork. As practiced by Celtic Boy Scouts. Whatever they are."), a new song by Phil about the Hellhound from Pratchett and Gaiman's "Good Omens", and a verse for "Green Hills Of Earth" in Esperanto. I also got a pointer to a filk of Janis Ian's "At Seventeen" about the stories we know and love, with words by . . . Janis herself. (They're on her web page. I found them by Googling "janis ian asimov bradbury clarke".)
I did not get any of the peanut butter vodka Jane was passing around, but I don't drink anyway so that's all right. Especially since it was peanut butter vodka. That just sounds wrong.
It was a fun experience and something I'd like to try again with some other groups. I met some very nice people that I hope to see in person someday. And Jane said she'd love it if I could reciprocate. (I'll see what we can do about that.)
The rest of the weekend was spent doing computer stuff. The ham bands have been pretty awful of late, what with solar flares and the like, so I've been using the time to set up the Vectra I talked about in my last post as a firewall/router/DHCP/DNS machine. Everything I've tested so far is working in its current configuration, in which the machine is getting its connectivity through the current router. I did a quick test with the Vectra hooked up to the Comcast connection, and I was able to do an IPv6 ping to the outside world, so I think that part is working too. I spent parts of this morning tracking down how to configure the firewall to get rid of a bunch of annoying messages about dropped packets that really shouldn't have been dropped.
The package tracker tells me the 4-port Ethernet switch I ordered should be here today. I don't know if I'll have any time to play with it tonight, since we are planning on hauling the tribe off to go see "Chimpanzee" at the $3 theater, but the next step is to hook up the switch and see if my laptop can get an address through that port. If that works, the final step will be to disconnect the old router, hook the Comcast connection up to the Vectra, restart everything to make sure it all works as planned, plug the Ethernet cable from my wife's computer into the switch to make sure she can still connect to the net, and I can declare it a success. (She gets grumpy when she can't go hang out on Gaia Online. If you have an account, look for "Granny Sharleen." I have an account - something like "Banjo Gramps" - that my wife and daughter set up for me, but I never use it. Too much other stuff going on.)
This week is my son's birthday. He's been rather depressed lately, so we're going to go descend on him and cheer him up, because when you're depressed you absolutely love having people cheer you up, right? I've ordered a T-shirt for him for his birthday:
http://shirt.woot.com/offers/family-breakfast
Don't tell him, OK?
Well, um, yeah.
So I dusted off my Skype account that I hadn't used in over a year, figured out my password and off I went. Connecting was more exciting than it should have been because my laptop suddenly forgot that it had a webcam attached, in either Linux or Windows. I had to go into my junkbox and dig out an old webcam that I'd bought on clearance somewhere or another for $5 that did an adequate, though by no means spectacular, job. Once that was hooked up everything went fairly smoothly. I wish the audio and video quality would have been better, but if it had been they might have been able to see the explosion-in-an-electronics-assembly-plant that is my desk/computer workstation, so maybe it's just as well.
For my part I got to do three songs in the three hours I was on: "You're A Hack," "Colour" and "The Frozen Logger." In return I got to hear and get copies of a spoken word piece allegedly from an 8th-century Irish warrior ("I love you more than Celtic knotwork. As practiced by Celtic Boy Scouts. Whatever they are."), a new song by Phil about the Hellhound from Pratchett and Gaiman's "Good Omens", and a verse for "Green Hills Of Earth" in Esperanto. I also got a pointer to a filk of Janis Ian's "At Seventeen" about the stories we know and love, with words by . . . Janis herself. (They're on her web page. I found them by Googling "janis ian asimov bradbury clarke".)
I did not get any of the peanut butter vodka Jane was passing around, but I don't drink anyway so that's all right. Especially since it was peanut butter vodka. That just sounds wrong.
It was a fun experience and something I'd like to try again with some other groups. I met some very nice people that I hope to see in person someday. And Jane said she'd love it if I could reciprocate. (I'll see what we can do about that.)
The rest of the weekend was spent doing computer stuff. The ham bands have been pretty awful of late, what with solar flares and the like, so I've been using the time to set up the Vectra I talked about in my last post as a firewall/router/DHCP/DNS machine. Everything I've tested so far is working in its current configuration, in which the machine is getting its connectivity through the current router. I did a quick test with the Vectra hooked up to the Comcast connection, and I was able to do an IPv6 ping to the outside world, so I think that part is working too. I spent parts of this morning tracking down how to configure the firewall to get rid of a bunch of annoying messages about dropped packets that really shouldn't have been dropped.
The package tracker tells me the 4-port Ethernet switch I ordered should be here today. I don't know if I'll have any time to play with it tonight, since we are planning on hauling the tribe off to go see "Chimpanzee" at the $3 theater, but the next step is to hook up the switch and see if my laptop can get an address through that port. If that works, the final step will be to disconnect the old router, hook the Comcast connection up to the Vectra, restart everything to make sure it all works as planned, plug the Ethernet cable from my wife's computer into the switch to make sure she can still connect to the net, and I can declare it a success. (She gets grumpy when she can't go hang out on Gaia Online. If you have an account, look for "Granny Sharleen." I have an account - something like "Banjo Gramps" - that my wife and daughter set up for me, but I never use it. Too much other stuff going on.)
This week is my son's birthday. He's been rather depressed lately, so we're going to go descend on him and cheer him up, because when you're depressed you absolutely love having people cheer you up, right? I've ordered a T-shirt for him for his birthday:
http://shirt.woot.com/offers/family-breakfast
Don't tell him, OK?