In case you haven’t seen it, I moved back to my mom’s place at the end of January, where I will be living for the last two months before I move to Japan. Back in April 2007, I switched ISP and went with some offer they had. The offer unfortunately bound me to use their service for 12 months. That is, until the end of April. With my move to my mom’s place, I was more or less forced to take the ISP with me (or pay for February, March, and April without actually using the service).

So my mom canceled her internet and I requested that mine was moved to her apartment. This was to take place at February 1st (i.e. her expired “end of January” and the move was to take place “the first of February”). In theory, that was supposed to happen, but around noon, January 31st, the net connection went down. And didn’t get back up again until yesterday, roughly 2 weeks later.

During these 2 weeks I couldn’t do anything at all. So I played offline games, like Starcraft (good game), Diablo 2 (um. Obsolete version of WoW, at this point), and Neverwinter Nights (um. Deranged and buggy version of WoW, especially since I couldn’t grab any of the updates online, so I played the release-version). Let me tell you… my appreciation for World of Warcraft has taken on new levels after this experience. There are so many things in WoW that improve upon the things that exist in the older games. Despite that, once I got back into WoW, I kept trying to hit ‘r’ to rest, when I was wounded in WoW. I also tried clicking on spots on the ground to “go there”.

Starcraft was good fun though. I enjoyed the story line almost as much as I did when I played it for the first time. I played through the whole first game, and  got to the Terrans in Broodwar, but at that point I sort of lost interest. The repetitiveness of “take out the whole map which is filled with enemy bases” missions just got boring after 3-4 times in a row.

Once I got back online, I was struck, as always, by the “so what now?” daze. While offline there were so many things I wanted to do online, but when it came down to it, I only really checked email, talked to friends, played some WoW, and that’s about it. I was a bit worried about the visa application for my Japan trip (the school will receive the visa at the end of February, and will notify me shortly after, they say) and I was kind of concerned about the various projects I have going that need finishing before I leave Sweden.

I mostly slept. With all that time on my hands, I kind of lost the motivation to do anything useful. I did get most of my things packed away (the things I won’t bring with me to Japan) and I did some hiragana practice and so, but not as much as I could have. Nothing I’ll beat myself with a stick over, but still. I am ever reminded of the necessity to be busy, for me to be productive. If I end up not being overly busy, I seem to shut down or something.

Anyway, I’m back in case you wondered (but with the infrequency at which I blog, I highly doubt you did).

Anyone use it?

Highlight of the day is: Getting paid to whack Steve Ballmer over the head on an iPhone (fun4iphone.com).

My ISP:

1. blocks outgoing port 25.
2. screws their own sendmail servers up and doesn’t manage to fix them in 24+ hours.

Go Bredbandsbolaget!

http://xkcd.com/c279.html

Just read it.

Customer service is an interesting phenomenon. Most of the time it doesn’t work. Most of the time it makes the situation worse for the customer, at least at the times when they don’t get what they want, and sometimes even then. Anyway, the reasons I switched to DreamHost are numerous; Nino’d switched and was happy with their service, I’m moving abroad so I can’t maintain enrogue anymore on my own, and the DreamHost blog is hilarious… That last part is probably not a wise reason to switch over to some company, but to me it made a big difference.

So, speaking of customer service, since I switched I’ve played around a lot and ended up sending up a file using the Files Forever feature… which I didn’t really understand what it was, so I ended up having a $0.01 bill waiting for me. I was concerned with the penalty fees my bank would charge me for such a small transaction, so I emailed DreamHost about it, and here’s the discussion (3 emails):

—

Hello Kalle,

Tell you what…pull that file down, shoot me back a reply, and I’ll credit your account to even it out. Not too worried about the penny.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Thanks!

Jeffrey

—

Hi Jeffrey,

I’ve set the file to “hidden (I can’t even see it)” as I didn’t see a way to actually remove it.

Very sorry for the trouble, and thanks for the help. I’ll double-read the instructions the next time, you have my word.

-Kalle.

—

Hello Kalle,

Hey…no need to apologize. To show just how much we DON’T mind, I went ahead and credited you $0.02!! How’s THAT for customer service?

Let it be known that DreamHost is the best hosting company EVER!

Heh…anyway, we’re square. Let me know if you need anything else!

Thanks!

Jeffrey

—

So funny!

zwoc@zabre:~$ enrogue
Linux enrogue 2.6.8-2-686 #1 Tue Aug 16 13:22:48 UTC 2005 i686 GNU/Linux
n.
1. An unprincipled, deceitful, and unreliable person; a scoundrel or rascal.
2. One who is playfully mischievous; a scamp.
3. A wandering beggar; a vagrant.
4. A vicious and solitary animal, especially an elephant that has separated itself from its herd.
5. An organism, especially a plant, that shows an undesirable variation from a standard.

adj.

1. Vicious and solitary. Used of an animal, especially an elephant.
2. Large, destructive, and anomalous or unpredictable: a rogue wave; a rogue tornado.
3. Operating outside normal or desirable How could a single rogue trader bring down an otherwise profitable and well-regarded (Saul Hansell).

v. rogued, rogu-ing, rogues
v. tr.

1. To defraud.
2. To remove (diseased or abnormal specimens) from a group of plants of the same variety.

v. intr.

To remove diseased or abnormal plants.

[Origin unknown.]

(dictionary.com)

Last login: Sun Jun 3 02:04:38 2007 from zabre
zwoc@enrogue:~$ sudo halt
Password:

Broadcast message from root (pts/0) (Sun Jun 3 02:05:04 2007):

The system is going down for system halt NOW!
zwoc@enrogue:~$ who
zwoc pts/0 2007-06-03 02:04 (zabre)
zwoc@enrogue:~$ Connection to enrogue closed by remote host.
Connection to enrogue closed.
zwoc@zabre:~$

And thus my reign (heh) as sys admin ends after over 4 years of keeping enrogue running at my home. I’m hoping a lot of people benefited from it all, and it was all good fun. The reason I chose to stop is not because it got boring (although hardware needed replacing) but moreso because I won’t be able to maintain things once I move to another country.

Blog went down a couple of days before I realized why I kept getting the old host (hard-coded /etc/hosts ftw!). Now on DreamHost, instead of Enrogue, so this blog might survive after all.

It just strikes me so clearly sometimes that we’re all fucking doomed. We can’t even agree on how to tell the day and time, even though this is pretty damn important, so how the hell are we gonna agree on a way to keep ourselves from being blown up, eh? 03/02/2007 for the win.

It struck me earlier today that the word Asia comes from the Japanese word “Ajia” (亜細亜). I had no cluuuuuuuuuue!

Edited: Then I properly looked into it and was completely wrong. But somehow, the word for the asian region is the same in both Japanese (ajia) and in Europe (from latin/greek). [wikipedia article]