Minimally Exceptional

We had to do something hard this week: Rascal (affectionately nicknamed ‘ferrito’,) our oldest ferret and newest addition to the clan, had to be put to sleep.

It’s sad – he’s the first pet that I’ve ever had to put to sleep. I never had pets as a kid, so this was the first time. He’s been riddled with health problems for quite some time now. When we first adopted him, he had an enlarged spleen and was always a little, uh, explosive when it came to the litterbox.

Recently, we took him to the vet as it seemed like he was losing weight and his litterbox problems seemed to be getting much worse. The vet put him on some medicines, including an antibiotic, prednizone, and pepcid ac. She also determined that he probably had insulinoma, which was basically a tumor on his pancreas resulting in critically low blood sugar. He had a few low sugar crashes, and we had to snap him out of it with karo syrup more than once, but otherwise he seemed like he was getting better. The medicine worked great and within a few days his litterbox issues were under control.

But then the bizarre happened – a week after the vet visit, he suddenly became totally paralyzed in his rear legs, also meaning that he had no bladder/bowel control. We moved him to the pet carrier where we could keep him from hurting himself (the ferret cage is multi-leveled and over 6 feet tall) and took him back to the vet. She said that there could be half a dozen different things that could be causing it, but at long as he was acting like our ferret (stealing tennis balls and try to run away) we should continue to work with him. We did – for a long time, he would still steal tennis balls from us, and try to run away, scooting his little ferrity ass behind him as he tried to run.

We had to clean him up about 3 or so times per day, and give him some clean bedding each time, but he was doing OK. I left for our family vacation to Mexico the last week of May, and Laura took care of him while I was gone. When I came back I could tell something was different. Not only had he lost a huge amount of weight – he was seriously nothing but skin and bones – but he was weakening, he was tired, and he wasn’t happy. We couldn’t get him to eat his food, eat his treats, or even steal a tennis ball, and that’s how we knew it was time. A few days later we took him out to the vet and had the little fella put to sleep.

It was sad, but it was time to do it, and everyone knew it.

This picture is the reason why Laura was able to convince me to adopt Rascal & Kylie:

Come on, look at the melon on that guy! It’s huge! Not to mention the ferrett pot belly… Rascal was our gentle giant – you didn’t have a choice – you HAD to like him!

I recently switched hosting services. Previously, I was using Hasweb, which when I signed up with them four or so years ago, they were a great deal. If I pay for a year in advance, I get 5GB of storage and 100GB of transfer for about eight bucks a month.

I wanted to be able to upload and make available for download the concert recordings and DVDs that Laura and I have put together – I want to distribute them, but my upload is capped at a low enough speed that seeding through bittorrent isn’t feasable. Obviously, HTTP access isn’t happening on 5gb of space.

I started looking for a new host a few weeks ago, and found HostMonster. Their plan looked great, had lots of storage, and tons a bandwidth all for a reasonable price. Sounded great, until I read the terms of service. No profanity, not offensive content.

Fuck, I guess that’s out.

Eventually my search lead me to Hostgator. Hostgator also had a great plan. I’m paying $15 a month for 200GB of storage and 2TB of bandwidth – more than enough for what I want to do. I signed up, changed name servers on my domain, and was up and running within a few days. Overall, the process was much less painless than I expected it to be. I was expecting flurries of emails to and from support desks and techies trying to move all of my stuff from host A to host B. This was much easier than the other web change I made, which was registering Laura’s domain at somethingferretrelated.com and changing the main domain associated with my hasweb account. That was a little more painful.

Anyway, after a few days of uploading, downloading, md5 checking, et cetera – the first set is available online. Info files aren’t there yet but they will be after this weekend.

In the downloads section there is now the Greg Howard 2005-07-15 DVD, the Tim Reynolds 2005-07-15 Early DVD, and the Tim Reynolds 2005-07-15 Late DVD. The Matt Nathanson / Graham Colton / Kyle Riabko show at the Gargoyle in 2004 will be going up next, as soon as the graham and kyle discs are ready. Yes, this is the ripped pants show.

So anyway, I’d like to think that’s a pretty significant improvement/addition to the site. There’s finally content available here other than my petty bitching and geeking out. Go nuts and download them if you want them – I’ll password lock the directories if/when I run out of bandwidth.

Once it’s common for computers to have one or more terabytes of storage, what will we call it?

Will we call it a ‘ter,’ kind of like a ‘gig’ or a ‘meg?’ Will we call it a Tera? Or will we just refer to it by it’s common name – a ‘metric shit ton’?

I have crossed the magical 1T mark on my home computer. I already had a 250 and a 300 in my desktop, and last night I bought a 500gb external drive. It’s pretty neat, actually. It connects to my router and is a network enabled device, so I can hook it up to any computer on my home network, including my laptop with wireless networking.

As neat as it is, I have a little bit of a bitch about it: Proprietary software.

It uses the MIOnet service to connect the hard drive to your computer. It also uses MIOnet for remote access. If I leave my modem, router, and drive powered on and connected, I can access the contents of the drive from any internet connected computer by grabbing the MIOnet client off of their website.

Neat concept, but it really irks me that I have to install and use their bullshit just to get the basic functionality out of the device. Especially considering that the software wants to be connected to the internet all the time. I just didn’t want to use it, and it’s kind of a deal breaker.

Fortunately I was able to get around it. I’m actually really pleased with myself that I figured it out. Since I’m not much of a techie these days, I’m always a little worried that I’m losing the little bit of tech savvy that I still have.

It’s a Western Digital MyBook world edition. I haven’t been able to find anything about how to get around the proprietary software, so here’s how I did it just in case anyone is out there googling for answers.

Here’s some basic network information. I have 4 devices on my home network. Two desktop PCs (one running XP Pro and one running XP Home), a laptop running XP Media Center 2005, and a nintendo Wii. I use Earthlink DSL for my internet connection, and I have a netgear wireless router. I can’t remember the model number on the router.

So I sat here for a long time last night trying to map a network drive to the mybook. No luck. Windows network could detect the device, and see that it had two folders, but neither of them would map to a drive letter. I was prompted for a username and password, and the login information that I had set up when I initially installed the device didn’t work.

Then, on a whim, I logged into my router configuration, where I could check the status of connected devices.

I guess it’s worth mentioning that I manually assign local IP addresses to all of my devices. I need to do this so that I can open specific ports to use with bittorrent, which I use quite a bit. So all of my devices are 192.168.1.XXX, where I assign the XXX. My Wii is 192.168.1.4, my PC is 192.168.1.2, et cetera. The myBook was being automatically assigned an IP address of 192.168.1.4 (the Wii was off and so the address was not in use.)

That’s when something useful hit me – what if I just tried access that address via firefox?

Well I did – and it took me to a manual configuration screen for the mybook and prompted me for a login and password.

Here the login and password from the initial setup worked. Within the config pages of the drive, I was able to do all kinds of stuff. Set up users and passwords, manage file shares, and manually assign the drive an IP address. So I did all those things. I set up a username and password, I set up a file share (essentially just a folder on the root of the drive that will serve as the ‘root’ of the share,) and I forced the IP address to be the next in the sequence of available numbers.

Well guess what? If I try to map a network drive, let’s call it Y:, to \\192.168.1.X\SHARE, it prompts me for a username and password. If I use the name and password that I set up in advanced settings, the SHARE folder maps to y: as the root.

Perfect. Exactly what I was looking for. I uninstalled the crappy software, rebooted all computers, and mapped the drive to each computer just to make sure it works.

My initial thoughts on the drive itself is that it’s very asthetically pleasing. It’s glossy white with blue accent lights – think the Wii – and isn’t nearly as big as I’d expected it to be. It’s a little noisy depending on how you stand it up and what you have it set on, but it’s no louder than a cpu fan. Performance wise, I haven’t had a lot of time to do anything with it as it’s only been a day, but it seems to be a little on the slow with write speeds. I’m not really suprised. I’m not using gigabit networking or anything. Probably no slower than a connection to a standard external USB drive.

So anyway, that’s my story. I’m going to go see how quickly I can fill a .5 terabyte drive.

I don’t think that I’ve ever adequately professed the awesomeness of Matt Nathanson in the history of this website. So, without any further ado:

Matt Nathanson is fantastic. Sure, he’s not for everyone, and I know that there’s lots of people who are turned off on him for a handful of reasons (he’s too vulgar on stage, he covers 80′s hair band songs, whatever,) but he’s been writing some great songs the past few years and he has absolutely one of the best live shows that I’ve ever seen. He’s fun, energetic, he always interacts with the crowd, and he works his ass off to make sure that crowd leaves talking about how great the show was.

So in April of 05 he did a short little record store tour promoting the live album he just released. One of the stops on the tour was Streetside Records (at the Loop.) The recording and setlist can be found at the archive, here: http://www.archive.org/details/mn2006-04-29.instore.

Pluses and minuses to this, obviously. The plus here is that it’s free, and it would be a relatively intimate setting compared to the normal stage-concert.

The cons: A very much abridged setlist, likely not to clock in at over half an hour, the possibility of having way too many people crammed into a record store, and (as we would find out later) Matt’s manager/crew/whoever being a total pain in the ass about taping the show.

Laura, Christine, and myself all went to this. It was at about 10:30 in the morning (and Christine’s first live matt experience) and he stars absolutely came into alignment for this. The weather was bad – it was the coldest day we’d had in a few weeks, and it was raining and gloomy all day. So needless to say, everyone who was there wanted to be there.

Not only was it a very small crowd, but everyone was perfectly behaved. They laughed when he was funny, they were quiet when he sang, and they didn’t talk on cell phones during songs. Matt was funnier than usual, played some stuff that was neat to hear in that setting, and the recording sounds fantastic – really worth checking out if you’re even just a little bit of a fan. The whole show is worth having, but Car Crash, Detroit Waves, and Suspended are especially fantastic if you only want to check out a few.

The Matt Nathanson trifecta is now complete – I’ve professed the greatness of Matt, reviewed the Matt show that we went to, and made a shameless plug for one of my own Matt recordings.