Sometimes people ask was your greatest success, what you are the most proud of, or your greatest accomplishment.  That type of thing.  It was just a game, but this is the story I come back to in my mind.

I do not listen to all the new cool music like the cool kids do here.  I don't buy or even steal very much music these days, I even let my coveted oink account expire.  But I heard of Radiohead's new pay-what-you-want experiment now that they are off-label, so I figured what the heck and pre-ordered.  I like Radiohead, why not chip in a few bucks to celebrate them being off-label.

I got my download email this morning.  It's good.  It's very good.  It's more than good.  It's so good it hurts.  I can't remember a time I've enjoyed an album so much since I was in high school, and this was my first listen.

So, it seems I've recently become a DBA.  I'm pretty excited about this, but one of the key responsibilities is to take care of the precious servers when they fall over.  Ideally I'd like to get some sort of mobile device that would let me investigate the problem and fix it via ssh terminal.  So what are my options here?

My list is biased towards more current shows, but that's because older shows suck in comparison to the best of shows today.

My laptop is falling apart.  When I say that, I really do mean that literally.  Speakers don't work, wireless card cracked and holding together by a thread, lcd hinge broken and held together literally by velcro.  Hard drive constantly fills logfiles up with i/o errors.  I've already replaced the screen and the keyboard on it.  AC adaptor held together with duct tape.  Pretty much the only thing it has going for it are my beloved dinosaur comic stickers.

So when I hear of these new Dellbuntu machines coming out, that's great news for me.  I don't have to shell out $50 to microsoft* and I really like Dell's new accidental warranty coverage (you can see why from the preceding paragraph).  I convince the lovely wife to let me get one, and so I try only to realize that Dell conveniently withdrew warranty support from these machines.

Inside: TV season finale reviews, and the word "fuck"

* which I hate so much

I'm going to the MySQL conference which brings me to San Jose in a bit.  Any chance that we can set up a hangout in/near San Francisco for Fri Apr 27 or Sat Apr 28?

Anyone here have some expertise in the world of linux networking?  I'm having a hell of a time connecting to my work VPN using PPTP.  Fun times with "route" ahead.

Update [2007-1-21 18:7:21 by theantix]: ni, ruler of the known universe, solved this problem for me. Did I mention he rules?

Everything seems to be going right.

My dear HuSi infidels, the time has come yet again for me to beg for your mercy.  Have any of you had to bear the burden the pleasure of hacking in Perl on MySQL's stored procedures?  Because I'm frigging stumped!

I remember reading a story, perhaps years ago, which claimed that a guy lived to be pretty old. In his entire life he had eaten pretty much only hot dogs. One problem with this story: I can't find any reference to the story anywhere and I have pretty strong google-fu so I'm kind of baffled as to why I can't find this story regardless of if it's true or false.

Do any of you out there in the audience know of this story, or better yet have better google-fu skills than I and can find a reference to it?

Inside: zombies!