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Month: July 2013

(Very Short) Crisis of Faith

07/22/2013 Daily Minutiae - Gaming - Writing

For the briefest of moments I toyed with the idea of quitting video games for a year. Two seconds total. Maybe three but I think the heart crushing depression that came with that idea slowed down my cognitive processes somewhat. The reasons that lead to the point where I would even consider doing something so drastic are pretty common and may be something everyone experiences at one point in their lives.

I love being creative. Whether that’s writing, game designing or even thinking up some nifty (yet utterly futile) new feature to add on my blog that I barely use. I love thinking that I made something that I enjoy or if I’m lucky, something other people might enjoy. I derive a great amount of pleasure from the creative process especially the beginning. The middle is a tad tedious but necessary and I hardly ever make it to the end but that is one of the reasons why I think I need to devote less time to video games. I’d like to finish more of those creative projects that I start. I’m far too easily distracted and if I’ve had a bad day or stressful day at work (which happens more and more and more) I tend to just do something mindless and non-productive. It helps in the short term I think, taking my mind off that bad day, but eventually I’d like to change my mindset to do something creative instead.

What makes it hard though is that I love to play games. Whenever Steam has a sale, it takes quite a bit of discipline to not buy everything in sight even if I know I’m not going to get to it. Just the knowledge that I have it available whenever I want is akin to eating a big bowl o’comfort food. That’s another reason to try and stop or maybe even just cut back. Spend less money. Between board games and video games I’d need at least three full time jobs to pay for all the games and hardware I want.

The end goal for me in all this would be to get to a point where I am good enough and disciplined enough to write and game design in order to make enough money to live on. Or even just enough of a side income to get in to job where I might actually look forward to going to work.

So anyway I’ve been playing The Walking Dead that was just on sale on Steam and…

aw crap.

-v- out.

The Great Migration is Over

07/04/2013 Daily Minutiae

I have finally moved off all the hosted virtual machines from Cyndi’s mac-mini over to an older unused computer running Solaris 11.1.  I figured I might as well work on keeping up with some Solaris skillz in some form or another just in case.   I had a little trouble copying over the vmdk/vdi files from one host to another which was unexpected.  I tried using a USB drive but the only filesystem on Solaris by default that is readable by OS X is fat32 and that unfortunately had a 4gb filesize limit.  I then tried to ssh the files over (after plugging in a cat 5 to the mac so it wasn’t over wireless) but even that didn’t work due to some kind of communication error over ssh.  I then tried to set up nfs and just could not get anything talking properly.  Finally I ended up using wget+ftp and transferred the files over while watching a movie and folding laundry.   Whew!

I’ve also updated the webserver to the latest and greatest version of Gentoo with a completely clean emerge as part of the migration and that wasn’t as painful as I thought it would be.  I had been working on a Gentoo template for a while now and keeping it up to date.  I installed fresh versions of all the applications I could think of that would be needed on the new webserver and left off stuff that I know I’ve installed but never used so hopefully that keeps it nice and clean.  Luckily, I had moved all the “important” web directories to their own filesystems/disks a while back so just assigning the vmdk files from one host to another was all it took.  Yay!

I look forward to playing with zfs and zones on the Solaris box and continuing to update my Gentoo virtual machine template for future fun and excitement!

-v-. out.

P.S. If you don’t care about any of that stuff above then its unfortunate for you that you’re already finished. If you’re hoping to read an apology here then you’re doubly screwed.