Author: David Pierron

I am done the Out On the Town and the extraneous things that I have to do at times … Mike is still here rushing his butt off through the body copy and whatever else needs to be done to complete the paper … I heard him estimate to someone that he will be here until 5:30PM, so in Mike time, he’ll probably be here until 7 or 8PM … I could have easily been done this issue by Tuesday afternoon, but I have the mentality of why bust my ass when I know this is how the paper is going to end up … Plus the added fact that Mike didn’t have the last of the ads to me until midnght Tuesday night … Oh well, you be the judge …

Well, there’s some sort of exploit that allows people to crash HLDS servers .. Unfortunately, this includes my Counter-Strike server … I was reading the mailing list about all these guys who rent servers saying how they were being crashed, etc … The CPU runs at 100% and the HLDS screen just sits there … Well, it finally happened to me … I did a server query via the http://cs.wombatsweb.com web site and there was no response … The XP flag kept waving … So I flipped over there and fixed the server … It’s only a matter of time before it happens again I guess … VALVe says they should have a release today … We’ll see …

Mike gave me the last of the ads about midnight last night … So of course, I immediately took another nap, and woke up about 4 or something and spent about 2 hours messing around with ‘net stuff … The biggest was when I was checking the root messages from the BSD boxes, I was curious if there was a way to manage the log files so I cracked the new FreeBSD book … I didn’t find anything really about log files, but “keeping the right time” caught my eye …

For the first time, I got ntpd to work on the FreeBSD boxes, and ntpdate … So now, all the BSD boxes have had ntpdate run on them bring the clocks to the correct time. Now I just have to decide how to implement ntpd … I can have one box query the net and then broadcast the result to the other boxes via the .255 broadcast, or I could just let each box hit the net themselves … either way, it still requires that ntpd be running … I decided to abandon editing all the files to set it up this morning and started in one the ads …

I have 3 ads left … They’re the color ones that Mike doesn’t have to place in the paper, so I can work on them without hindering him from doing anything to the paper … I usually do leave those for last cause he’s always doing something after I’m done … He was hardly in here yesterday at all … I think he waits until the last minute to complete things, but I don’t know why … He’s usually working several hours after I’m done …

The 4 color disk was ready by 9am so I decided to take a nap and wait for Mike to show up … Kelly had to take Frank over for his swimming lessons so she wasn’t home … I made my way upstairs to get away from the noisy kids … I didn’t make it back downstairs so I missed Mike’s knock whenever that was … About noon the USPS delivered the two new books I ordered … PHP MySQL Website Programming: Problem – Design – Solution and The Complete FreeBSD … I am hoping the PHP book will help in the way of the travel agency app … The FreeBSD is another book to help me on my way to be a master at FreeBSD …

Anywho, so Kel stopped back home and my father called … Mike resorted to contacting my father cause no one was answering the door and the car was gone, so he thought something may have happened … So when he finally got here, he said there was another 4 color ad that I knew nothing about and I had already burned the 4 color disk for the printer … Because of the layout of the ad, we could just send the disk as is and I will print the seps on the laser … So, we’re back on track to completing the paper by what should be a Tuesday (today) night deadline …

Also got a call from a reseller and added two more web sites to the hosting … One site at a time, we are on our way to millions …

… and people wonder why I never get anything done …

A topic that has come up a lot with me has been about beating your kids … Somewhere someone said it wasn’t okay to beat your kids and instead of giving a spanking, you should give them a “time out” … In this issue of the Out On the Town, there is a benefit concert to be held for kids by kids … One of the promotional things they’re using is the “We Are The World” song that I think was put together by Michael Jackson a ways back … When I saw this, it moved me and I put it up at www.wombatsweb.com … I also threw a link to the concert on the www.ootweb.com page … and one thing I recently found interesting was a web page pointed out by a guy in S. Il …

http://maddox.xmission.com/beat.html … I think he starts off with a valid point that at some point someone forgot where discipline stopped and child abuse begins … Of course maddox puts his spins on things and goes on to suggest methods of whacking your kids, but I think his point is made … We all grew up being “beat” by our parents … Most of us probably didn’t end up in the hospital as a result of it …

I watched Bill Cosby, Himself one night while flipping around on the tube … Amost the whole routine is about him “beating” his kids … I think a lot of people forgot that Mr. Black America talked about this openly and full of humor … I remember a Damon Wayans show where he talked about this as well … I’m not trying to single out black comedians, but they’re the ones that stuck, and I think they made the point as well …

I proved this point myself … I have a 17 year old son who was not disciplined with the hand, but rather by depravation … It didn’t work … There was nothing to deprive him of … When spanking was tried later on in his life, it had no effect … My 5 year old however had this habit of being mean to his younger brother … I think it was a form of jealousy as well as him not knowing what to do with his feelings as well … I mean when sat down and asked why he did what he did, he said ‘I don’t know’ … That’s what we used to do, make him sit on the couch and not get up until we told him he could …

One day it came to a head … He was being mean to his brother, so I put him over my knee and gave him a spanking … Surprised the crap out of him … That worked for a while, but then we caught him again poking or prodding his brother … Pushing him … again, he went over the knee … He hasn’t been mean to his brother since (and this was 2 or 3 months ago), and we are finding that in other areas of him misbehaving, the threat of a spanking would help to persuade good behavior …

So I have come to the conclusion that spanking a child when they’re bad as I was is the way to go … the “time out” didn’t work obviously, cause we did that a lot … Ultimately, the pain to the posterior was the solution … I didn’t pull down his pants and smack his bare behind … I didn’t find a weapon such as a shoe or belt, I used my hand on his clothed butt … and my hand did hurt … about 10 smacks to the butt in a systematic regular interval … He now knows we mean business, and his behavior has gotten much better … Does he live in fear of us? I don’t think so, but I’m sure he does a little … I think if you have the threat of a spanking in your armory, it helps a lot when in situations where sometimes kids get away with discipline … When we’re in public, and beating the crap out of your kid just seems to be socially unacceptable …

In the store, your kid is being bad … You look straight into their face, grit your teeth, “Do you want a spanking?” BOOM! Instant turnaround in behavior … Maddox ends his beat post with “If you love your kids, love them enough to beat them so they don’t grow up to be idiots.”

Tell me why …

Of course hardly anything ever gets done on a Monday … Don’t really know why, but that’s the way it’s seemed to have been with working on the paper all these years … The content used to come in much sooner, now it’s dumped in a little pile sometime over the course of the afternoon … Then, the magical elves come in overnight and fire up CorelDRAW and do all the ads … It’s really neat coming down in the morning and catching the pointy-eared freaks sometimes … Well, at least at this point there is enough to complete the CD with the 4 color ads to go up to the printer …

I found myself playing with the colors and stuff with this blog … Trying to get it to sort of match my resume that I did so long ago … Being that they don’t use tables at all, it’s a little weird altering the css file … I don’t know why they felt the need to remove tables entirely … I know it’s sort of a movement and all, but I am really comfortable with tables and can manipulate them really well …

Anyway, I did find out that the last 5 entries are the ones to be displayed on the first page here, and you can change it, so that’s pretty cool … I did add some links and stuff to the right over there, so that’s a good thing as well … I also made this my home page when I fire up my browser, so maybe that will help me to keep this thing updated … Again, I can’t imagine that anyone would have the time to read all my crap and still have time to life their own life … I don’t know … Maybe it doesn’t take so long to read this stuff as it took to happen …

After an early dinner, I took a nap waiting for Mike to come back from doing his radio show and junk … While I was sleeping, Alex was applying SP4 to his Windows box … Of course this isn’t something you should do using Terminal Server and something you shouldn’t do as well is shut down all your ports so you lose access to the machine … Kelly attempted to wake me and told me to give Alex a call cause he needed help with the box … Well, when I woke up, Alex was at the door making the 40 minute trek to the server location …

Mission accomplished … server fixed up and Mike came back … We’re good to go … again … Zero ads completed, but did get this blog up for Franco … So, we’re both messing with this thing to see how it works out … I’ve already decided that if it doesn’t do the simple things like paging when you get so many entries, I will write one from scratch … The other thing that doesn’t seem to be prominent about this is that it doesn’t really focus on web links which seems to be the primary goal of blogs, or weblogs … To post a link to a web site and to add your personal comments about the link …

I’m sure I would steal (well, borrow) the code use to syndicate your blog (if that’s what’s required) and I think that has to do with the RSS links I see on this blog … Either that, or some form of XML … Anyway … I haven’t even made it through the day yet … Interested to see what happens after midnight …

I put the old HD into my desktop machine and was able to access it after two reboots … The first boot found the drive, but I couldn’t access it … Then went into device manager, and it said something about rebooting, so I canceled and rebooted … I could then access the old HD as the slave drive …

I installed all the fonts from the old Windows /fonts directory … I am now able to access all the cdr files for the Out On the Town … What’s interesting is that now the screen matches the output colors where the colors used to be way off, now they look a lot closer to what the finished output should look like .. I’m happy about that …

Mike gave me 14 ads about 1PM, so I am now ready to start working on the paper …

Suppose I try to link to a picture here and see it display in the blog? Okay, here we go:

… did that work? Yeah, it did … I shrunk it from 640×480 using the height and width tags. You could drag to your address bar and see the full sized pic … This is Dominic from W@B with some ladies hanging out at Finnigan’s Wake … Dominic later brought up the girl with the American flag shirt to be on stage while he played the National Anthem on guitar … We have more pictures of the American flag shirt …