willfe.com

It's always funny to me how vacations are meant to be relaxing, unwinding affairs, meant to strip away the stresses of the daily grind and freshen up the brain for a triumphant return to work (and/or school), and yet it always ends up that you need a few days to "recuperate" after you get home from it.

I'm in that boat right now -- I'm exhausted, though I had a great time out there. I'll write up something more detailed tomorrow evening once I've gotten all caught up with domestic affairs and rested up a little. In the meantime, here's a few choice photographs from my trip. Click through any of them to view the full album.

Woke up this morning and encountered this scene on the back porch at my folks' place:

From Pahrump Trip

Sweet.

Well, that's better. I've updated the template to automatically truncate things for me on the main page, while still showing the real content on the full pages (along with a read more link to them). Disqus is more fully integrated now as well, showing the number of comments and reactions to each post.

It's starting to feel like a real website again :)

I'm not too sure what captivates me so much about this photograph, but I wanted to post it to let folks see it for themselves. There's plenty of whiny angst-filled explanations on the image's caption, so I'll leave it to you to decide whether you want to click through to read it (or to see the full-size version).

I shot this a few days ago on campus, and just got around to grabbing everything off the camera this evening. The image is unaltered from the camera; no adjustments were made.

From Photography Tests

Like all Picasa-hosted images I've published, you should be able to fetch the full size version by clicking through to the Picasaweb service and selecting "Download -> Download ...

With a few days of experience under my belt with django-mingus, overall I have to say I'm very pleased and happy. I even submitted a tiny fix for a tiny little bug to the author/maintainer, who seems to like the change. Django, of course, is bloody fast, and hopefully the regulars who visit the site should be seeing monstrous performance improvements.

There's a couple little things nagging at me at the moment, but since this is all open-source and easy to modify (it's really just a pile of Django apps all mushed together into a useful collection), I think I can fix them pretty easily. One fix depends on an external API (and whether that API supports what I want it ...

In many (most?) instances, encrypting an entire computer system is both overkill and not as useful as it might initially sound (specifically, if you trust that encryption and don't take any other steps to protect valuable/confidential data, your entire system and all its data is exposed if your decryption passphrase is ever stolen, guessed, etc.). There are times, though, that it's useful to have certain data on a workstation encrypted when you're not physically at the machine, but accessible and transparently decrypted (in memory, not on disk) when you are sitting there.

Ubuntu supports this stuff out of the box these days, and it has for a couple of years now, but I never quite manage to commit the process to ...

As I settle in this evening after a quick round of solo racquetball (I'm just getting started, so I'm not wasting anybody else's time right now while I get some practice in) to write this and then watch some MST3k, the only sounds in the apartment are the quiet hum of the clothes dryer and the distant trickle of a water filter in a 55 gallon fish tank.

Apart from the clothes in the dryer and the dishes air drying in the dishwasher, all the chores are done for the week. I've hauled out a bunch of trash, cleaned up the "dining room" area (small thing that it is), changed the rodents' cage bedding, taken care of the cats, and vacuumed ...

Welcome to the new Willfe.com! Yet again I've decided to wipe the slate clean, install new software to run this on this old dog, and see where it leads.

Please accept my apologies for the downtime. Over the past couple of weeks I've been feeling very "ranty" and whiny, and having a blog out there in the open was far too big a temptation for me to resist, so taking the old site down seemed the best option. I had a lot in my mind and heart that's probably better off staying there, so I decided not to publish any of it. I'm hurt, lonely, and pretty miserable right now, and it is indeed because of a woman (when isn ...