Sure, my office is a small cubicle with computers, a telephone, and some other office supplies. Yet, when I work, I enter the virtual space of the server and I wonder off and explore. It is a world like many others, but not accessible by anyone, only the privileged.

I get to meet the processor, oh the processor AKA CPU has a lot of jobs to do and is mostly quite busy but we get to chat a bit. I get to look at all the jobs the CPU is doing. I might sometimes give the CPU a hand and kill off any process that is troubling the CPU.

I get to walk around the file system. Oh the file system! What a great place, It is so easy to find a map and ask around for different paths. There are these little helpers you see, that give directions and information of the different paths and files all over.

Sometimes I design the place as I walk around making changes here and there, by moving files and paths around and create a file system that can do many different things! Other times I give the CPU more tasks to do and do what I can to make it work without being too overloaded.

My job as a System Administrator may lack the typical human contact element, but it is a world of its own out there, a whole world, Geeksville.

Aksimet doesn’t detect them because they are normal people. They can bypass the captcha and every other spam blocking mechanism. Now, I’ve decided to block them completely before they even reach my blog, how? I’ll tell you.

I installed WP-Ban and added the following IPs:

122.163.161.*
122.161.93.*
121.246.81.*
64.53.129.110

78.47.125.152 – 78.47.125.159

It is sad if a legitimate person in those segements was curious and decided to read and comment on my blog, but frankly spam comments are annoying. It doesn’t matter if you get a regular person to do the dirty work rather than a script, a spam comment is still a spam comment!

So there…

In another note, I’m more active on twitter than I am on my blog. 140 characters seem more than convenient for whatever I have to say. You can find me here;

http://twitter.com/oneortheother

I have mentioned earlier on twitter that I was planning on getting the company I work for to buy into the corporate social networking. Blogs, twittering, wikis, the works! Of course, it is not easy, neither will it be, but imagine the potential this strategy has.

What many do not understand is that building an image is not only the PR people’s job! We as a department that provide services to other departments and to our customers as well can have a great (positive) effect on the workplace. Sure, not everything is shiny and sure we are bound to be hit by a backlash, but why not? Don’t people deserve to know about certain events? I’m sure they’d like to see how we are actually working pretty hard on getting great services out there to the people.

I’m working on it, we shall see where this will go.

P.S. I’m very much contemplating posting about my extreme geekism, but I’m sure I’m going to lose my primary readers because it is too technical and geeky =P

This configuration has only been tested with my current Apache 2.2.8 version, so give it a go, and it could work with your version.

Just to note, most of these commands need root access so use sudo or su if you get an access denied message.

What you need to do is go to the Apache configuration files in the sites enabled folder:

$ cd /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/

Use nano or vi to create a new file, call it myshare or whatever you like:

$ nano myshare

Then add the following configuration and replace the _WEBDIR, _USER, _SHARED with the information from your machine.

Alias /_WEBDIR "/home/_USER/_SHARED/"
<Directory "/home/_USER/_SHARED/">
          Order allow,deny
          Options Indexes
          Allow from 127.0.0.1
          Allow from All
</Directory>

Save the file and enable the configuration using the a2ensite command:

$ a2ensite myshare

Then restart apache:

$ apache2ctl restart

And there you have it!

What’s more amazing is how the Taco Bells guy actually managed to get all the food down!

I do admit, I do enjoy connecting with people, and I have my fair number of social websites. I’m on Flickr and twitter, and Facebook. This is minimal compared to others who enjoy a much wider social presence online.

However, even with this many social networks, I ask myself…

…I got my photos on Flickr. Now I want to upload more… wait, I can put those on Facebook. Hmm, but can’t I put them on both Facebook and Flickr? I can, but why should I? I’ll just install the Flickr app on Facebook. What about personal pictures? Oh.. I’m not even sure if I should put those up there, or anywhere! I guess I’ll keep them locally. Oh but wait, I can always upload the public ones to my Google Picasa web thingie, can’t I? And upload the personal ones and set them as hidden? Or wait, can’t I integrate that somehow with the rest of the social websites? Bleh!

…I need to update my status, something happened and I need to share it with the world. I’ll blog about it. Nah, it isn’t worth a blog post, how about I tweet it. Hold on, I can also update on Facebook, at least I am not limited by 140 characters. Bummer, if only I can update both at the same time… oh wait, I can do that! Great.. so what now?

Alright, I admit, it isn’t as chaotic as I had suspected, but still… very troublesome none the less. If only there was a way to put it ALL together…. *staring at the blog*

…welcome to the Internet.

I’m mostly a TV person, even though I love to read and like listening to stories. So I wonder, had I not been introduced to the TV a long time ago, and had not seen what I had seen all these years, what would I be like now? Would I be who I am? Or would I be different in some way?

Growing up I loved watching TV. Cartoons were my life! With time I slowly started to see the real world. I began to be aware of the differences between real life and fairy tales, or stories on TV. I found out that life isn’t as pretty as we imaged it to be. It was never as fair… or as just… or as easy.

It didn’t take long for me to adjust, but it was a very large culture shock. Also, the fact that we live in this country and have these type of people around, makes it all the more shocking. Life, here, is far from a fairy tale.

Had I not been influenced by TV, would I have been more prepared for the real world?

Sometimes these stories motivate us, they push us forward giving us a charge of energy. However it does not last, soon enough when we are back in the real world facing real world issues, the motivation dies.

My plan now, is to find a way to keep that motivation running. It is a great feeling when something such as a story motivates us. But what is worse is when it fades away. There has to be away to sustain it.

…I have to.

Poll Question: Ever had a dream about a superhero? vote on the right please!

I doubt that there any cooler dreams for a guy than those that involve Superman. The number one dream would be that the person dreaming would actually be Superman himself.

Last night, I was Superman.

I wasn’t actually the Superman, but Clark Kent from SmallVille the TV series. The funny thing is, I couldn’t fly but only leap and my laser eyes were busted, and my first encounter was with a hotel security guard (guarding the roof) who was also; from another planet, looked human, but could turn into solid gold, and has a spear that can cut through anything and turn it into gold dust.

The scene commences: Not only was the guard protecting the exit to the roof, but the roof door was huge and made with a type of Kryptonian alloy. With one swoop with his spear, I was mere gold dust slithering down the stairs trying to move away from the Kryptonian roof to regain my strength and go through that door.

I woke up mid way through the fight, but the dream was awesome.

Other characters men like to dream include but are not limited to; Maifa Bosses, any person with a special ability, leader of some sort, a badass, and fictional heroes.

What’s your favorite dream character?

Does no one use the word nifty anymore? Really?

The image above is from Joud’s tag.

Here are the rules:

STEP 1 – NAME OF YOUR ARTIST/BAND
Go to "Wikipedia.com", hit "Random Article" (or just click the following link) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random Wikipedia article is "The name of your Artist/Band".

STEP 2 – ALBUM NAME
Go to "Quotationspage.com", then click on "Random quotations" (or just click the following link) http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the "Title of your first album".

STEP 3 – ALBUM ART
Go to Flickr.com, click on "Explore", then click on "The last seven days" (or just click the following link) http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

STEP 4 – PUT IT TOGETHER
Crop the image to a square format. Use Photoshop or similar programs to put the text together in any way you like.

I tag; Amethyst, G, Laialy, Miss-Informed, KJ… have I missed anyone?

Now on to more pressing matters. Seriously.

This is the type of day I hate the most. I wake up early, after a good sleep, and I’m all ready to work and be productive – then, I freeze. I don’t feel like doing much, but I force myself anyway.

I open up a few windows on my laptop; My email, my reader, my downloads of the day, a couple of other websites for entertainment purposes, and a couple of programs related to work. I sit there staring at the screen. For the life of me, I don’t know why, but I can’t get myself to start anything.

Alright alright. I’ll start with the easy stuff. I go through my email.

Oh nice. 3 unread. Read them, check.

Next. The reader. Now, ever since a couple of days ago, I cleared my reader so today I had only about 150 articles and blog posts to go through, most of which are comments and uninteresting articles so I go through only the headlines.

Reader status? 0 new. Excellent.

Next. Hmm, downloads? Got that done pretty quick anyway, and after that? Work? Read (work related stuff, or other interesting articles)? Surf? Chat? No. None seem quite interesting at the moment (even the interesting articles.)

What now?

I know. I’ll blog about being unmotivated.

There you have it folks.

But wait. Blogging? Done. Now what?

Bullocks.