For those who know what it is, here’s my public key. I’m going to start signing my email with it, so you can use it to verify me, and feel free to encrypt email to me with it. Contact me via any other channel you like to get my fingerprint to verify that it matches this, to make sure someone hasn’t compromised my web site and changed it. It’s a bit longer than usual because it has a JPEG of my smilin’ mug encrypted in it, for another possible way to verify it.
The first time I used the Unix shell, I was hooked. The idea of having all these little programs, each of which did one thing, and being able to chain them together to do more complicated things, made perfect sense. Coming from an 8-bit background, where you were always up against the limits of the machine and waiting for programs to load, keeping everything small and focused was great. I still reach for the toolchain on my own systems on a daily basis.
I’ve been doing FreeBSD sysadmin work and using it on my own systems since about 1998. I like its no-nonsene, professional attitude and the simplicity and openness of its licensing. I can build the kernel and OS from source (though that’s not necessary as often as it used to be). Other skills: System and security updates Security auditing Installing and configuring ports Networks (including wireless) and firewalls Installing and administering services (web, email, etc.
After using for a while (see that page for instructions on setting up the org-mode template), I realized I’d like to have org-mode clock the time I spend commenting on blogs. I already have a ‘Reading Blogs’ task that I clock in for that, but it’d be nice to clock commenting separately, since that’s creating content. Plus, org-mode’s clocking is so nice that I like to use it as well as possible.
Update: I added clocking as a feature later. I like to save my blog comments and other things I post to the web, for a couple reasons. First, once in a while a comment form fails, especially at sites like Blogspot. You spend 20 minutes writing and proofreading a comment, press the submit button, and poof – an error page and your comment is lost. So saving them provides a backup.
I’ve been getting into http://orgmode.org|org-mode over the last couple years, using it to organize my work and as many other things as possible. Org-mode is an organizer (and much more) that runs in Emacs, which I use for many other things, so it’s a great fit. I owe a great deal of thanks to online with detailed explanation and instructions. He uses it in a very http://gettingthingsdone.com|GTD-style way, which is exactly what I wanted, so I cut-and-pasted much of his base configuration at first, but since then I’ve done some tinkering of my own.
I made the mistake of telling the kids that their recent literature assignment might be more difficult than anything of the sort that I had to do in school. That gave them an opening to insist that it was impossible, and challenge me to prove that it wasn’t by doing it myself. Oops. The assignment was to write a 25-line poem in dactylic hexameter, the verse-form the Iliad was written in.
I occasionally use the wget utility with the -m option to download a mirror of an entire website. This is very handy, but wget respects the robots.txt file, so it won’t mirror a site if robots.txt disallows it. Obviously, you should respect the downloading restrictions of other sites, but there are times when you have a valid reason to ignore them (when it’s your site, for instance, but you don’t want to change robots.
I ran across this link called How to Care for Introverts today and realized I’ve never written about being an introvert, although I’ve mentioned it in passing a couple times. That link goes to a very crummy scanned image, so I thought I’d type it in here, and then add my own thoughts. First of all, for those who don’t know what an introvert is, the best definition I know is: “someone for whom spending time with other people is tiring.
We had some new people at the 8:00 Mass this Sunday, and I discovered afterward that we’re not doing a very good job of helping newbies get started and follow along. After you’ve been going a while, it’s easy to forget how confusing it was the first time, but it doesn’t have to be that way if people are helped a little. So for people who are thinking about joining us at St.