best picture ever

I laughed and laughed and laughed. This is a look-alike, photographed by Alison Jackson. I actually saw the photograph in this month's Out Magazine, and had to share.

Time Machine and netatalk

So after deleting all of my data, and after Patrick (heareafter to be known as The Hero) recovered much of it for me, I finally got Time Machine to start backing up my Macbook to my network storage device (NAS). This was not simple. Here are the steps I followed in case anyone is interested. They may or may not all be necessary.

1. Get netatalk working on your NAS, compiling the code yourself to include SSL support. I have a D-Link DNS-323.
2. On your NAS, edit your /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default to include the share points. Basically, you just add lines with the full path to a folder you want to share, followed by a tab (or spaces), followed by the name, in double-quotes, of what you want to call the share point that users will connect to in order to access that folder. That took a long time for me to understand, though. There's way too much info here.
3. Get some sort of zeroconf server to advertise AFP. Note that these instructions include editing your /etc/netatalk.afpd.conf file to deviate from the defaults. I did that.
4. Create a user on your NAS to correspond with each Mac user (hint: use the adduser command). Create a .passwd file in the home directories of all users connecting with Leopard that contains the user's password. Found here.
5. Put a file named ".com.apple.timemachine.supported" at the root of the AFP volume. Found here.
6. Type the following in Terminal on your Mac:
   defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

After all this, and waiting for a bit after remounting the afp share I'm using for the backup (since it didn't work right away but then it did after waiting for a while), I was able to select the afp share in Time Machine as the backup device. I feel completely and totally geeked out. Time to go do something else while the Time Machine backup (hopefully) completes.

you look too much

I caught myself taking a second look at an attractive new contractor at work today, and had a flashback to the change room in high school.

Gym class was painful in the extreme, more because of the change room than anything else. It's really no wonder at all that young gay athletes were fairly rare. Just imagine it... you're in the middle of hormone hell, and you're told that you have to get naked in front people that you're helplessly sexually attracted to without displaying any physical evidence of that attraction. This at an age when even an errant breeze is enough to prompt said evidence.

My reaction to all this pressure was to "forget" almost every day my gym clothes. This got me out of participating, and showering, but it didn't get me out of that damn change room. I still remember sitting on the floor in a corner, trying to read, trying not to look, trying at least not not be seen looking. I obviously wasn't succeeding very well, as Tim looked at me askance and said slowly, "You look too much." It was said almost jokingly, almost, and I wasn't beat up that time or ever, but it stuck with me, and even now, at work, in passing, I worry just a tiny little bit, that maybe I'm looking too much.

tribute bands don't suck

Or maybe it's just that not all tribute bands suck. My experience is now up to 1, so I clearly don't have a broad experience base to draw on.

When I saw on Facebook that Jeff was going to go see Elevate, a U2 tribute band, at Jeff Healey's on Saturday, I realized that, despite my total lack of experience at the time, I certainly had expectations. Not all of them good.

I decided I wanted to go, because I like live music, because I like watching audiences at live music, because I like U2, and because I wanted to meet Jeff, who had been until then only negligibly "real", as I'd only before "met" him online. Welcome to the world of Facebook friends. Then I started noticing my biases. I expected the band to be kind of fun, kind of good, kind of camp, and kind of lame. Yes, I know... despite zero experience.

What actually happened completely blew away my expectations, and has totally changed how I will approach tribute shows in future. First off, the band was actually good. Really good. Kevin Strom ("The Edge") in particular impressed me, but the whole band was great. Second, the band was fired up, genuine, and enthusiastic. Third, the audience was fired up, genuine, and enthusiastic. Fourth, and this was something that hadn't occurred to me at all beforehand, this was as much about the band loving U2 as it was about the audience loving U2.

All in all, it was a remarkable, unique experience. Check 'em out if they're coming anywhere near you.

moving right along

I just deleted all of my personal data at home. Unrecoverably. I think. While attempting to set up a backup system. The irony is no lost on me, even though my data is.

See, I installed Debian Etch on my NAS drive because I was trying to get afp on there so I could use Spotlight and Time Machine. At some point, while telnetted into the NAS box I did:

cd /mnt/HD_a2
mount --bind /mnt/HD_a2 etch/mnt/HD_a2

I did this because I was blindly following instructions, without really knowing what --bind does. Then today I did

rm -r etch

because I was replacing etch with sarge. I had forgotten, though, about that mount --bind. The problem is that /mnt/HD_a2 is the root of my data disk, so even though I thought I was only deleting a folder, that folder had a pointer to the root of my data disk, and deleted everything.

What did I lose? Pretty much all data I had except for mail, since my mail is on my laptop's hard drive. Sigh. I thought I was safe because my data was on a mirrored drive, but sadly, there is no protection from one's own stupidity.

Moving right along...