GizmoLA.com

It's been a while since I updated. I have plans to move the site to a new server I bought and have been configuring. Part of the process involved getting my new ISP in place (thankfully, and after numerous false starts) I now have DSL again, courtesy of Megapath Networks. The new server is setup with RedHat 7, and is hosting several small gaming sites: Cali Tribes Players and LaLa-Lan. Eventually I plan to move Gizmola.com onto it. So obviously, I've been working on a few side ventures.

I'm also playing a lot of Ice Hockey at Culver city and Burbank, and learning PHP and MySQL in the process. I think I can now be considered officially nocturnal, as I find myself up most nights. Lately I've been playing a fair amount of Tribes2, and my Tribes2 team has climbed into the top 10 of the teamwarfare ladder. This is somewhat contributory to the nocturnal lifestyle, although I think the primary reason is that I'm just basically a night person, and without the constraints of a regular job to attend, my free running cycle allows for me to sleep when I'm tired. As I write this, it's 5:40am and I'm still awake.

I bought and assembled a Smith machine, which is a sorta home gym weight rack a while back, and set it up in our basement room. Gizmo likes to sit out on the porch entrance and monitor the stairway while I'm working out.

It's been a long time since I updated, primarily thanks to the demise of my DSL Internet connection when Northpoint went bankrupt. Apparently, my house is just a bit too far to from the local pacbell central office for me to get reliable DSL service (even though I had it for over a year from Northpoint!). I tried two seperate ISP's and in both cases waited weeks only to find out at the last minute that they couldn't provide me service.

I've found a new one and am keeping my fingers crossed. Fortunately, I was able to colocate the gizmola server with Kent Bulza, who has been nice enough to help get it and my mail going again. Thanks Kent!

Ah unemployment. Lately I find myself with plenty of time to read, work on little projects, and scan negatives. I've done another RedHat Linux upgrade on Gizmola, and added some notes on using rpm. Tracy recently snapped some 35mm photos of the Scrapples, and we liked one in particular. I scanned the negative, and with a little help from photoshop, we have the thumbnail on the left. Click on it to see the photo gallery.

Deadly Embrace is just about done, so I've been working a lot on the ZForums to support it. I wanted to have some fun with the embedding capabilities. Let me introduce you to the Gizbot, the stupid dancing flash robot. I extracted him from an animated gif and added music by Prodigy. You never know where he might pop up.

In the recent past, someone broke into Gizmola.com, and basically planted a bunch of backdoor software. I don't know what they hoped to gain from access to what is essentially a personal server with limited bandwidth available to it. Fortunately for me, they did a pretty crappy job of covering up their tracks, even locking me out of my own server (bright script kiddies!). Since then, I've been meaning to upgrade my version of Linux in order to try and recover from the damage. I finally got around to it, and upgraded to version 6.x of Redhat Linux. The upgrade was so easy, I'm wondering why I was dreading it for so long. With the exception of a tweak to a couple of config files, everything seems to be running again as usual.

Gizmola is sometime running a Shoutcast radio station called AlternaPop. When the station is broadcasting, you'll see it listed here.
The latest version of Winamp will let you connect just by clicking on the link on the Shoutcast page.

Gave up on this all long ago.