School has been trying its damned hardest to finish me off, but I refuse to go down without a fight. Gotta be quick though, still way too much homework to do and too much Futurama to watch tonight. Sorry for the delay in updates everyone (*ahem* Rebecca :P).

I’ve been trying out the last couple alphas and currently the beta of Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex on my laptop. The only complaint I have besides the beta-ness of it is that I haven’t been able to hack together the tablet PC fuctionality on my laptop (a Thinkpad X60 Tablet; the fingerprint reader has also been tricky, but that’s more likely to be fixed by the final release). The new version of X.org included in Intrepid uses HAL by default instead of xorg.conf to detect and configure input devices—but it can’t detect serial Wacom tablets, a.k.a. tablet PC screens. It is possible to override that and use an xorg.conf file, but I’ve been too busy and too lazy to put together a workaround. Only a few days until the release candidate though, so that could change, but I’m planning on having to just use the xorg.conf workaround. Other than that, and the fact that OpenOffice.org 3.0 didn’t make it in, I love it.

Oh, and speaking of Rebecca (mentioned above), I think since she beat me to saying it I can safely announce that she will be baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on November 15, four weeks from yesterday. I’m very proud of her for making this decision (and I also know I’m partially to blame for it); I’ve been so glad to see her coming to church with me starting just this past January, and watching her faith and testimony grow exponentially in that time has helped strengthen my own. No word yet on what time or who will be doing what, but keep an eye on either my blog or hers for more details as the big day approaches.

So how about them Rays?

My web site is now (mostly, anyway) migrated to my new server package, which as previously mentioned is a NetworkRedux Silver Virtual Private Server, paid for yearly (yeesh). Additionally, all of my domain names are now with GoDaddy, and I’m hosting my own BIND and nameservers—meaning, no dealing with NetworkRedux or having to go through a slow and buggy server control panel which shall go unnamed to create subdomains or make other DNS configurations. I am now in complete control of my web server and all online access to it, and am managing it all by hand (primarily via SSH through the command line).

It did take a little longer than I had anticipated to get things put back together to their current state. I went through a couple of minor configuration crises that I did manage to resolve eventually, and just when I thouht I had everything put together—Drupal up and running and everything—I managed to bork it all again. But my perserverance and late nights have paid off, and tada: the site is back online. Two posts still have yet to be migrated over: one because I’m considering how to attack formatting the large blocks of code it contains, and another because I’ll be rewriting it to include lots of images, which is dependent on the subject in the next paragraph. Any old links (except those to the two aforementioned posts) should still work fine thanks to a little mod_rewrite magic, and the RSS feed is still in the same place as before, so no need to update any old links; it’s all taken care of.

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