It would seem that the old blog has suffered a minor setback. A few, I suppose. One, I’m not exactly in a permanent residence at the moment, so I don’t have all my hardware at my disposal. Two, my VPS provider took a shit on my slice and lost all my data (thanks, gais). Three, the most recent backup I have to work with isn’t all that recent.

In any case, let me know if you have any difficulty with this freaking blog. I haven’t run jekyll on Windows before. This is my first go. It’s a pain to update without rsync. Makes me want to kick puppies.

We’ve taken the liberty of recording a tiny “thump thump” and are more than happy to share it with the world.

I’ll keep it short. Small post, lots of love.

Presenting… Bean and his or her heartbeat.

I’ve been working seven days a week. On top of that, two computers do very well to reverse the cooling effect offered by air conditioners, so I’ve had both systems turned off nearly every day since my last update.

They’re going to be left on, however, for the next fews days. I have a big announcement to make, and I’m going to put pieces of the blog post together (ie. pictures and the like) so that I can fully and formerly release this big news that some of the readership here may already know.

Sleepless, tired, sleepless, tired. I think I’ve managed to smash those words together rather well with my currently screwed up schedule. Alternating between the two is making me rather… Irritable. I’m unable to make good use of the time I’m capable of finding, mostly because I’m too exhausted just as soon as it floats my way.

Blogging aids and abets what little sanity that’s able to manage the minefield that is my brain. Cognition beyond the simplest thoughts- No, rarely may I ascend beyond my own plane. Instead, I’m forced to watch all manner of pig smash words together in faux-English and pretend he’s a higher order animal. Twitter is the favorite, these days, of such swine. Trolls, they like to call themselves. They pretend they know things about social engineering. Condemning works does not equate to engineering. Engineering requires thought, requires building things. Not burning bridges. Yet these condescending assholes burn bridges, taunt, provoke, and when all else fails they flail their arms and scream loudly, “Victim! I’m being victimized! People are harassing me and my children!” No.

Not sure what this is. @cloudflaresys tweeted about a “small attack” about the same time this information was logged. Not sure if it was explicitly directed at me or what. Still funny, though. Would be interesting to see if they’re able to dump raw logs.

In any case, thought it was a humorous anecdote.

Minbif is minimal, flexible, easy to use, and best of all- IRC related. It’s really no more than an IRC interface to libpurple. The biggest difference between Bitlbee and minbif is that minbif uses a control scheme very similar to most popular IRCd’s. Bitlbee goes for a “connect via IRC and control with oddball channel commands” approach. I like minbif’s style a great deal more than bitlbee’s.

Here goes.

To compile/install minbif just do the usual:

I’m full of piss and vinegar today. I’m ready to bust some heads and kick some ass. The summer of truly living life has finally gone full swing. My employer needs to back the hell off of me a bit, but other than that I won’t complain too much. I won’t jinx myself to say that things are going “well”, but they certainly aren’t as dismal as they’ve appeared to be in the past.

When I attempt to connect to my Spotify account after establishing a VPN connection, it complains that my IP address doesn’t match my country of origin listed on my Spotify account. This is incredibly irritating. I shouldn’t have to choose between covering my ass and listening to music. The solution is easy, though. Still slightly irritating, but completely functional.

1. Ensure VPN is off and you’re connecting from your home IP.
2. Sign in to Spotify.
3. Establish your VPN connection.
4. ????
5. PROFIT.

Pretty simple. When I took those steps it didn’t even interrupt playback, but I started getting Swedish advertisements. Handy trick. As far as I can tell, the established connection retains all original functionality.