Surprise, surprise. It's January in Minnesota and it is cold. High today expected to reach a scalding 4(F)!!!!!!! Our hot water to the sink upstairs is not currently running (read frozen). Makes washing the face a short , if not memorable, experience.

No, it's not cats and dogs sleeping together. It is possibly worse... So Dave and I were having a normal IM conversation when the following occurred..

(13:40:14) TnegreS: hold it
(13:40:18) TnegreS: wait..
(13:40:21) DaveZeisler: negative negative....
(13:40:22) TnegreS: jeeze..
(13:40:28) DaveZeisler: just impacted on the surface.....
(13:40:28) TnegreS: just impacted on the surface

I'd like you to notice that on exactly the same second Dave and I converged on precisely the same thought. If you don't know where the reference is from I might tell you if you ask nice and humble like. (or if you convince me you've been living under a rock since 1978) So watch out. There might be stranger things happening, but I doubt it.

So I finally found my ounce of motivation had hidden away. The two tapes of jams have been processed at last. They are in the /jams normal location

Last night Marty and Jason blew up from the south to attend a book reading/signing by William Gibson. It was exteremly cool, both to see them again and to see the genius that is Gibson. If you haven't read any of his books you should totally check them out! His site: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/ www.williamgibsonbooks.com My favorite: http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/books/zero.asp Count Zero Barnes and Noble (William Gibson): http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?userid=555BOHQPUY&path=William+Gibson www.barnesandnoble.com If you have a moment it is fun to read his http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/archive.asp blog . Props out to Jeremy who got stuck on the phone with work trouble shooting a printing issue of some sort. We still managed to get his book signed. On a side note - Jason brought his Dell pocket pc which was very very cool. The screens have come so far it's hard to believe. That gets the blood flowing again. Have to keep an eye on the Linux handhelds like the http://www.sharpusa.com/products/TypeLanding/0,1056,116,00.html Zaurus

Last weekend some friends managed to rent a bus for the http://www.schellsbrewery.com/news_bockfest.phpBock Fest in New Ulm, MN. It is sponsered by the http://www.schellsbrewery.com/ Schell Brewery . It was a total blast, but I swear if I hear Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash anytime soon I may go insane. As usual I will be posting the very few pictures I managed to take in the Image Database .

Have you ever honestly searched for yourself? Only to discover that no search engines seem to know or care about your existence? If I do not exist in a search engine do I exist at all? Well, maybe.. Maybe not.. But you still have to check this out. Doing a search on http://www.google.com/ Google for http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=dana+sergent&btnG=Google+Search Dana Sergent yields this site as the top result. I have finally made it. Sorry about the third person reference in the title

If you hadn't heard already Dave and Olivia are expecting! Dave has posted some early renderings of http://www.zeisler.org/baby/bambino.html Baby Z! So cute.. 8^)

This is one someone else's blog. It's a very interesting and informed take entitled The Tyranny of E-mail. It is definitely worth a read. It's a good take on trying to keep focused in this crazy instant access world we have going right now. On a side note I have to post this from the same site:
equation of life Seems to apply not only to programming, but to most things in life. Makes me smile.

On Friday March 28th, 2003 Jason and I embarked on a journey to hydration. It was a simple contest to see who could drink the most water in a given day (business hours only). Pictures can be found http://www.thesergents.net/imagedb/brows here . Here were the results on the white board from the picutre:

Dana Jason Time Quantity
9:08 1000ml 9:20 946ml
9:40 1000ml 10:27 946ml
10:28 1000ml 11:39 946ml
13:31 1000ml 13:59 946ml
14:36 1000ml 14:23 946ml
14:55 1000ml 16:20 946ml
16:20 1000ml 16:55 500ml
16:39 1000ml - 0ml
Total Total
8000ml 6176ml

I think it is clearly an advantage to have a larger container in this type of situation. Over the long haul it really adds up. And no . We did not measure output. :-P

As usual I have no idea how I ended up there, but it is very interesting. If you have a spare moment check out the FBI'a Freedom of Information Act site. They even have a section for famous people.
It is all in PDF format so you'll need Adobe's Acrobat to read them. Just go to www.acrobat.com to download it.

Still trying to spruce things up a bit here at The Sergents . I took sometime Saturday morning and rewrote some of the web site to work with http://www.modpython.org/ Mod_Python's Publisher interface. It's really slick. I remember looking at it before, but for some reason decided not to use it at the time. Maybe I had enough on my plate with the mod_python upgrade alone. So, what's new you ask? Here's a little list to get us going New logo Spiffy eh? New link addresses not many will notice, but it's nice for me Minute layout changes not many will notice this either.. Web Log Archive you can now view all the old web logs entries. You can either click the Web Log link to the left or click on the name of a category to view all previous entries. That's really about all I can think that actually changed. There were lots of little cleanups and html fixes here and there, but nothing to write home about. The last time I checked my pages all validated just fine according to the http://validator.w3.org/ W3C Validator .

The following is a translation of the previous web log which can also be viewed here. I went to babelfish and translated it from english to german, then from german to french, then from french back into english. It's about as good a laugh as one can get. I highly recommend this to anyone who needs a smile put on their face. My favorite line is - It is really equal! Here goes -

Spruce still testing things up a top here with the Sergeants. I lasted once of the mornings of Saturday and again wrote something of the Web site, to work of Mod_Pythons with the interface of editor. It is really equal. I remember to consider it ahead, however for a reason decided not to currently use it it. I had perhaps only enough on my plate with the mod_pythonaufsteigen.
Thus is what you ask again?
Here, is a small list active to receive to us

• new trademark of Spiffy how?
• New addresses of bond much do not consider, but it is not for me
• modifications of model minuzioese much does not consider gentillement either this one.
• Files of book of edge of apparatus of network you can now consider all the old recordings of book of edge of apparatus of network. They can either click on the left the relation of book of edge of apparatus of network, or to click above the names of a category, to consider all the preceding recordings.

It is true on all which I can think really modified of that. There was however nothing batches little cleanings and HTML-Verlegenheiten to write here and there at the house approximately. The last mark that I re-examined my sides, amends completely right validated in accordance with the W3C-Validator.

A little Thai.. yum A little Jammage.. Rock! A little Kung-Fu.. Shaolin Executioner Could you imagine a more complete night? The jams are in their new http://www.thesergents.net/jams usual place . Enjoy!

Our softball team won it's season opener! How do ya like them apples?!? After a disapointing season at the end of last year (I won't mention the record) we have come from the offseason in great shape. We need a little work on the offensive side, but the defense was looking spectacular!
Cedar Inn - 6
Local 63 - 3
Next week Cedar Inn plays Pizza Luce

This just in! Hot off the presses! Dave and Olivia are expecting a BOY!! How cool is that? I'll tell you how cool it is! It's super-duper-ultra-great-neato-marvelous-terrific-breathtaking cool. Put that in your hat and wear it!

Went and saw X-Men 2 this weekend with Jeremy. It was better than the first. I highly recommend it to anyone who was a fan of the comics, or anyone that just enjoys a good action flick. My favorite was the job they did with Nightcrawler. I always wondered what *BAMF* would really sound like. Now I know.

We had our first loss of the season. Pizza Luce came back to beat us in the final innings. It was a heartbreaker for sure. We were up 8-2 at one point. That is just the way it goes sometimes. Pizza Luce - 9 Cedar Inn - 8 Next week Cedar Inn plays The Animals .

I'm not a huge one for linking to other people's web logs, but this is pretty good stuff. Andres Torrez writes a pretty funny blog and this one is about the things he's learned in 30 years. All I could do was read and nod in agreement. Oh, and laugh.

This memorial weekend Kate and I voyaged to the BWCA. That's the B oundary W aters C anoe A rea for those of you not from these parts. There was a lot of time spent in the canoe and a little backpacking, but not enough to even notice. I had the chance to see four moose including a cow and her baby! My camera was conspicuously absent during all this, so no pictures I'm afraid. We had a great time and it was good to get away from civilization for a few days. A really great experience.

I can't honestly remember who we played, but it was a barn burner. After falling behind by 9 runs we came back with a 14 run inning! The bats were on fire! Cedar Inn - 22 Somebody - 21 Next week Cedar Inn plays Somebody Else I promise I'll get the schedule out of my car and update this someday

Window Maker has been my window manager/desktop environment of choice for over 2 years now. Possibly even longer. IceWM to BlackBox back to Window Maker, I've been all over the place, but always found myself searching for more. That is what prompted me to take my old Debian workstation and install the two big Linux desktop environments from source. I know it sounds like an ambitious undertaking, but trust me - in some bizarre way it is relaxing for me. Well, somewhat relaxing. Installing Gnome
So my first instict was to go for Gnome. I can't say why for sure, but it just felt like the right thing to do. I've always liked the more artistic look and feel of Gnome, but still have memories of trying to get it installed from a few years back. Dependency hell. Unfortunately I found the same hell awaiting me this time.
After downloading some 120+ tar balls there is no clear documentation that I could find easily that would tell me in what order I needed to install them. At that time it becomes a hit or miss proposition. If configure bailed and said it needed libgnomecanvas and then that one said it needed libgnomeui and that one needed... and so on and so on.
After much cursing and gnashing of teeth I was able to get most of the source packages to compile. Looking forward to seeing what I had accomplished I hacked away at my .xinitrc and fired up the desktop. What a dissappointment. The look of the desktop is incredible. The proposed functionality looks like it would be incredible, but unfortunately not much works. Editing menus proved to be almost impossible. Non of my changes would take. The nautilis file browser crashed constantly. It didn't even seem to know about some of it's own applications that I had installed.
Granted, there was probably much that I did incorreclty and not according to spec, but I'll be damned if I could find that information anywhere. Most of the news group postings concern the gnome installations that come with various Linux distributions and do not concern from scratch installs.
Very quickly I longed for my Window Maker again. It is home afterall.
But what is that on the horizon? It's KDE.. hmm. QT.. Different.. Stable? We'll see.

Here are the results of my most recent OS Personality Quiz. If you take it let me know what you are too. DaveZ is Amiga also.

• http://bbspot.com/News/2003/01/os_quiz.php

Which OS are You?

Jason pointed me to this site that has a perl module called Mail::RFC822::Address that will validate internet addresses. But take a look! Seriously!
To quote the site Implementing validation with regular expressions somewhat pushes the limits of what it is sensible to do with regular expressions Add to that the classic Jason quote: Visual Basic may make you stupid, but Perl apparently drives you insane Good stuff

Hey! We're there. Finally we have surpassed the one year mark for uptime. Behold!

bash$ uptime

08:33:30 up 365 days, 21:40, 6 users

One year is a long time to go without rebooting a computer. The last time it was rebooted was to add a new hard drive. A whole 8GB!! We're still cranking. Maybe we'll make 2 years? Here's hoping.

Josh and Thira had a baby on Wednesday (July 23rd) morning! Little baby Addie has joined the Green family! I'm late posting this because things have been a little crazy, but even so, I did get up there to hold her. She is gorgeous! You can check out pix on their web site http://www.greenz.net/ Congrats to Mom and Dad

After a few months of delay I have finally posted the most recent of the Jeremy and Dana jams. They can be found in http://www.thesergents.net/jams/ the normal spot . Of note is the Sand in My Shorts which I feel is probably the coolest thing we've done to date. Well, at least that I can remember.

I haven't posted much of the computer news that intrests me, but maybe I should start. So here we go. I was reading this article and it combines the best of many worlds. Get this - Ernie Ball, best known for their guitar strings and a few guitars, has dumped Microsoft in favor of Linux. The article can be found on C-Net. So we have a guitar manufacturer ditching Microsoft in favor of Linux! Put a smile on my face first thing in the morning. The article is an interview with their CEO Sterling Ball, he sounds like a pretty grounded guy who merely wanted to be treated with respect as a customer.

Well, this last weekend I finally did it. The Sergents is now running on a dual Pentium III. I have no more workstation at home, but that is a small price to pay to have a reliable server. The old Dell Optiplex that had been running the site for the past 3 years was showing signs of wear. After achieving running times of over a year the processor and/or motherboard were giving out. Eventually staying up for two weeks was becoming an accomplishment. Hopefully this new/old hardware will prove to be more robust. This will also mean there will be more of my ramblings on the web log now that I have a working server again.

Big news in our little circles. The other day Novell purchased Linux distributor SuSE. This is a huge deal considering the recent announcements from RedHat concerning the termination of their personal edition and a new focus on their enterprise line. This young market landscape is sure changing. There could be very exciting developments with Novell's interest in Linux taken to the next level. There is some good reading over at News Forge called Putting Novell's SuSE purchase into perspective While I understand RedHat's decision from a financial standpoint I believe they have irrevocably damaged their credibility with the geek masses. RedHat will be supporting a new community endeavor called Fedora Linux, but I'm not very confident in it's future. Time will tell. Many have asked which direction I'm going. Honestly, at this point, I have no idea. RedHat will continue support through April I believe. My support contract is up in March. Possibly that will be enough time to let the dust settle and see which direction Novell is going to take SuSE and if Fedora can break out. If nothing else it will be back from whence I came. Debian ran my servers for years and will do so again if necessary.

It's just one of those things I found funny.
The True Story of Idaho.
Read it for a giggle and ask yourself honestly. Do you really know anyone from Idaho? No offense to any Idahonianers.

In an effort to stay completely geeky I have written almost the entire site without using any tables. Thanks to http://www.csszengarden.com/ The Zen Garden , http://www.w3c.org/ the World Wide Web Consortium and many others for help in this tediously frustrating effort. What a pain. The price we pay for being geeks me thinks. Some things are still broken. This upgrade really wasn't very planned. In a bleary delirium I accidentally copied my development version right over top of the running "production" version. Should keep me on my toes for a bit whilst I work things out. Hang in there and don't be grumpy about it!

Aaron sent me this link. Thought I would share with the rest of the world - World's worst album covers. If the pictures didn't look so real I would have to believe they were made up. Not so. Too funny.