The Shadows on My Wall Don't Sleep

Actually I got in around 2am Tuesday morning, I just didn't get around to posting here yesterday.

Dad bounced back and was actually doing very well before I even got there. No one told me this so I was rather stressed for the drive thinking I might not get there in time. I suppose I should be grateful that someone actually called me when he first went to the hospital since there have been numerous incidents where I found out about a hospitalization well after he was discharged. Still, a call saying he wasn't on the threshold of death's door any longer would have been nice.

While dad's medical situation turned out to be a relative non-issue (we've had several he-might-not-survive moments over the last decade) it was fortunate I was there to help my brother with his medical situation. Unfortunately this has alerted the family to how handy it is to have another person with a license, and no pesky job, around the house. Right before I left dad made an ominous comment about needing someone around the house because of the visiting nurses not living up to his standards and how mom might have to quit her job so I might have to come back soon so she can keep working....

Good gods, NO! My brother was trying my patience but having both him an dad home and laid up was pushing me close to homicidal, add in how mom reacts to them and I'm quite certain I would have snapped in some way. Homicide, suicide, hell at times genocide started to sound good. There's a reason I live 1000 miles away.

And now for some entertaining content, something the fans of good writing will appreciate (and have probably seen). Linked to the original page (where it is large enough to read).

I got home around midnight last night. Visits to the folks always run long for some reason.

The "kittens" (now a year old) have gone from fuzzballs to furry butterballs in the 20 days I was gone.

I had not intended to be offline for my entire trip. I've mostly finished catching up my email (over 500 messages, which once again makes me wonder how I managed to deal with over 1500 messages a day back when I was really active online) but I expect LJ will take me a bit longer.

One side effect of being offline far longer than I planned is that I missed some of my webcomics that don't have open archives. If anyone saved Digger page 214 I'd love to see it (hafoc managed to save the others for me so I didn't miss as much as I might have). Likewise with Eversummer Eve, page 30 of chapter 9 (which apparently is a settings/character change page and has left me going "who are these people").

toshirodragon should expect me to beg for things of interest I have missed on yaoi_daily, but not until after I get a bit more caught up. I'm grabbing the episodes of Tsubasa Chronicle that I missed right now. BitTorrent is geek crack.

So why did a geek like me end up offline for so long? Well it started out with the unpleasant discovery that my laptop upgrade from SuSE 7.2 to 9.1 apparently lost the ability to use my PCMCIA modem card. Since we don't have dialup anymore it never occurred to me to try setting up the modem after the upgrade, the ethernet card worked so I was all set for home use. Kdialer has been replaced with kInternet which is never less user friendly as well.

No problem, I'd just use my brother's PC.

Which he had just had upgraded, more RAM, new case fan, clean install of Windows ME... I think you see where this is going. I'll skip the rant on baby Gateway boxen and WinME and jump right to the fact that it could indeed connect to the ISP, it just couldn't manage to handle DNS resolution, even with several DNS servers to choose from. I spent many hours with tech support (something I view as a failing of my geek training) to come to the conclusion it had to be something wonky with Windows. Now if I could have hunted up the IPs of anything useful I might have been able to make do, but I generally don't keep things like the IP of my mail server (which is privately owned and I think uses a dynamic address anyway), LJ servers, or any other server I frequent in my head. The only way I knew that the connection was working at all was with ipconfig and the fact that I do have the IP of my old college server memorized. Good thing MHC has kept that old server around (or at least maintained a server with that IP address). Bad thing that I couldn't telnet to it from that windows box. They've probably switched to SSH, which WinME definitely doesn't have, and was lost on my brother's machine when the guy that worked on it only saved the stuff in "My Documents" as a backup.

I really need to pick up a cheap USB drive key ring or something. A floppy would have more than enough space for puTTY and pscp. Though that wouldn't have helped much with the DNS issue, but at least I would have had more tools at hand.

I took a cute picture of Shadow (a floofy "black" cat) in the window watching a black squirrel in the tree and the Mavica informed me that the disk was full. Popped out the floppy and turned to my PC.... Oh right, the new PC doesn't have a floppy drive.

Next computer related project: get file sharing to work in the house LAN again.

( Mini-ramble on names )

Today I learned about the Grey King and milgwn. I can now blissfully geek out comparing fox legends around the world and wander off into fanfic-y ideas regarding a certain sexy kitsune.

I still like the idea of demon bowls, so I must find a use for them somewhere in art or prose. They remind me of witch orbs, I need to find a use for them too.

My training makes me hate saying "I" so much but my english teachers would faint if they saw how much I write in fragments these days.

I must be really weird. One of my favorite things in the world is "recreational research." The feeling I get when I link up the history, mythology, and language of a culture and somehow link up parallels to another culture or cultures is just.... It's a geekgasm I swear.

I know I had more rambles in mind when I first thought of making an entry a couple hours ago.

[Edit: Oops, forgot one, and I might as well have one visible. From The Eyes of the Assassin, by I have no idea who.]

Icons! There are a lot of them so you get an LJ cut. ( Lots of pretty, pretty boys... some kissing )

Icon making is addictive. @.@

Yes, I have a new webcomic addiction, a couple actually, but this one is the one that I managed to read from start to current today. Schism could be called cyberpunk I guess, the 'net crashed, taking a lot of data and technical knowledge with it in an event called the Schism. Post-Schism society has strict control of net traffic and computers, to the point where there is no such thing as user performed hardware upgrades or wireless connections.

The other new addiction is Friendly Hostility, the sequel to Boy Meets Boy (which is completed).

All of the above contain male/male relationships (subtle at this point in Schism, not at all subtle in the other two).

I adore Riff.

And I admit that this strip makes me warm and fuzzy, and a disappointed Riff/Zoe shipper.

Which Saturnalia Character are you?

Saturnalia is my new comic obsession. I just finished going through the entire archive (most of that was yesterday).

In case you've been wondering about my string of music selections, I have 6 CDs of SMG in mp3 on my PC, WinAmp is mixing through them. I've been listening to Burn and Revolution a lot lately during my commute, particularly Burn. I like the jazz/blues influence.