Wed, Jan 17, 2001 12:37AM -0600

Thought I'd get some last thoughts in.

cat /dev/random

Xanadu1826: "Reading Calvin and Hobbes makes you realize how shallow the world is."

It might spoil the magic for you, but for some literary criticism, read the Tenth Anniversary Edition of Calvin and Hobbes. Bill Watterson gives some insight to the creative process and to the difficulties of not selling out.

More tech bullsh-t

Apparently someone exploited a bug in my system on January 7th. Thank God for syslog. But I can't believe this fool hacked into my system while I was on a dial-up connection. Talk about desperation. Here's the relevant bit of /var/log/messages:

Jan 7 15:56:50 heartofwonder rpc.statd[419]: gethostbyname error for <random high ASCII garbage snipped>
Jan 7 15:57:22 heartofwonder useradd[1980]: new group: name=qwerty, gid=504
Jan 7 15:57:22 heartofwonder useradd[1980]: new user: name=qwerty, uid=504, gid=504, home=/home/qwerty, shell=/bin/bash
Jan 7 15:58:17 heartofwonder PAM_pwdb[1982]: password for (qwerty/504) changed by ((null)/0)
Jan 7 15:58:29 heartofwonder useradd[1986]: new user: name=cgi, uid=0, gid=0, home=/home/cgi, shell=/bin/bash
Jan 7 15:58:55 heartofwonder PAM_pwdb[1987]: password for (cgi/0) changed by ((null)/0)
Jan 7 15:58:56 heartofwonder PAM_pwdb[1984]: (login) session opened for user qwerty by (uid=0)
Jan 7 15:59:27 heartofwonder PAM_pwdb[2010]: (su) session opened for user cgi by qwerty(uid=504)
Jan 7 15:59:31 heartofwonder PAM_pwdb[2011]: password for (operator/11) changed by ((null)/0)
Jan 7 16:00:24 heartofwonder PAM_pwdb[2023]: password for (qwerty/504) changed by (qwerty/0)
Jan 7 16:01:00 heartofwonder PAM_pwdb[2027]: password for (cgi/0) changed by (qwerty/0)

This is in case anyone really cares. He got at most 45 minutes of play time, when I finally logged off. I'm partly annoyed, partly paranoid. I just upgraded my distro (originally Red Hat 6.2) which took about a day because of how painful it is downloading hundreds of megabytes on a dial-up. So hopefully it's fixed now. I also decided to install my brother's discarded 3D Blaster Banshee AGP, which is much nicer than my Diamond Viper 330 PCI, except for the fact that it runs excessively hot for some reason and it's SGRAM eventually gets corrupted and the display goes to hell. I had to get a third fan, but it doesn't make that much of a difference. I also repartitioned my hard drives just for the hell of it. GNU parted is pretty good. I trust it more than Partition Magic, which doesn't start half the time and can't handle Linux partitions anyway. (OK, so it can. But not the version I'm using)

OK, I'm sure your sick of this tech crap. Nothing else really exciting today. For some reason I just don't feel like sleeping. I know that I have exams in about two weeks, but I don't feel like studying either. I need some inspiration.

Backlog flow

I thought I'd put up links for "The Gladiator" since I've been obsessed with it lately: Entry on the IMDB Official website

A couple days ago I talked about how me and some of my closest college friends try to review the year just past by making a CD. I've also added my 1998 playlist and my 1997 playlist. I'm also going to start keeping a song journal so my lists won't be so biased towards the end of the year. Maybe some day I'll go into my schpiel of how I use music to keep track of time. But right now I'm actually getting sleepy.

Let's put two more up: Here's a URL to the book that one of my favorite movies is based on: The Princess Bride. It came up as I was looking for more The Last Unicorn stuff. If you haven't noticed, I put up a link to my favorite The Last Unicorn quotes. Last one: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (yes, they are trying to put a real one together) actually has a little footnote about aswang in this article about Vampires

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