After I came home from work I finished installing and updating Panther with software updates. I enabled the root user in netinfo manager so that terminal wouldn’t throw an error if I had to ‘su’ something. I installed Xtools… the required packages, OS X developer tools and the X11 SDK. I made sure to deselect gcc 3.1 since I had no use for it, that was the problem I think.

I downloaded fink again and set up the path in my .profile file and copied the xinitrc file from ‘/private/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc’ to ‘~/.xinitrc’ and once again added ‘source /sw/bin/init.sh’ so that X11 would have the right path. I checked my path in both and checked gcc… I got a reply of gcc3.3 from apple computer. Yay! So far so good!

I went back to fink and ran ‘fink scanpackages’ followed by ‘fink index’. No problems yet. Ran ‘fink selfupdate-rsync’. Still good. Set up fink to use unstable packages as well as stable ones (some of the apps I want to install don’t have a stable version for 10.3 yet) then went back and ran ‘fink index’ again.

Now for the moment of truth, did it pay off? I typed in ‘fink install ethereal’… do I want to download and install 45 dependencies.. sure why not (I need them to run it)… I waited a minute as it downloaded them (thank God for broadband)… it went through its usual checks… gcc ok… BANG! It started compiling. I’m so frekin happy that I managed to do it right this time around. Right now it’s compiling ethereal. Should take a few hours. I’ll let it go and come back to check on it. The important thing is that it Is compiling!

Well I managed to miss a step or miss something last night in my installation of fink. Everything installed correctly and I went to install ethereal. Still good, downloads all the dependencies, checks for gcc… checks for gcc… shit, I forgot something and it couldn’t compile the source.

I popped the Xcode cd back in and installed developer tools (includes gcc3.3) rebooted and went to install ethereal. Error 77 cannot do some bullshit. WTF? Now i’m getting pissed. I tried a ‘fink reinstall fink’ that went ok, checked my $PATH variable and it said everything was right. checked to see if it picked up gcc.. yup, told me gcc3.3

So now it’s about 12:30 and I’m trying to figure out whats going on. I tried another package. Same error. By this time I had given up to my need of sleep. I popped in the Panther install CD, rebooted and started to install all over again. Tomorrow is another day.

Looks like it’s going to be an interesting holiday season for my family this year. As many of you haven’t heard yet… my mom, unfortunately, lost her job a few weeks ago. My parents have been toying with the idea of moving into a cheaper house and partially retiring.

We’ve already begun the search for a new house and work on our house so we can get it up for sale. It was a sad day the other night when I started taking all my posters and pictures off the walls of my room. My room is already starting to look empty. This week I’ve been planning on finishing that up, patching the holes in my walls and then repainting my room so it looks nice when we put it up for sale. I still have alot of work left in my room and that will consume alot of my time the next week or so. I’ll try and maybe post some pictures of my room as I go through the process. As I try and get done what I need to get done, my dad wants me to do some outside painting and yard work to get things tidied up.

We’ve been looking at moving to either Morgantown or Shillington. Either way, Caitlin is going to have to change schools with only her Junior/Senior years left and maybe part of her current Sophomore year depending on how soon we move.

I have a feeling for me it’s going to be a box up of my stuff, then only unpack what I need for the next few months then pack up again when Kim and I are done school and we go to move in together. I had already started cleaning my room over and over again about 6 months ago. I have consistently gone through things and re-gone through things weeding out all the things I’ll never need again and shrink the ammount of crap I have laying around, most of which I’ve sold on eBay.

As many of you do know, I only have 9 months left of school before I get my degree. This upcoming term is going to be a hard one for me and having to deal with all the stuff at home is going to limit my time to study for my school work.

I resigned my job at Clemens via letter 2 weeks ago and yesterday was my final day. The timing happened to help out because I’m really going to need that extra day to get things done in the coming months. I just want to go ahead and thank everybody that supports us as we deal with this. Your thoughts and help is greatly appreciated by myself and my family.

I sat down on friday night and started to reinstall OS X on my iBook. I installed Panther then copied the .dmg file from my server to my laptop so I could install the WWDC Preview of Tiger. Everything went well and I restarted so that I could boot to Tiger and try it out. Bummer. I didn’t see many new features. Supposedly the preview has the new version of Safari with a RSS reader built in. Didn’t notice, but I’ll have to check it out. I did notice the new search bar up in the corner. I’ll copy my files back over some night this week and try that out to see how quick it is. The other new ‘cool’ feature they built in is called “Dashboard”. It’s a bunch of widgets (yes, like Konfabulator) built into the OS. I’ll have to do a review of these and see how it stacks up to Konfabulator. Lastly, theres the new support for 3 people in iChat. I don’t have a camera and don’t do video conferencing so I’m not sure if I’ll ever use it. Oh well.

I’m working on a list of apps I need to install again for war driving. I need to get with Ray and see what he recommends and uses. Maybe if I find time this week I’ll get around to it. I got alot on my plate still and even though I don’t have class this week, I’m still extremely frekin busy.

I think I’m about ready to wipe my iBook and start fresh with some network utilities for fink. I was reading Ray’s website the other day and talking to him on AIM about some of the new programs he’s discovered.

I think I’ll set it up with Panther and install x11 and fink. I might even leave a second partition to install the Tiger pre-release and see what it’s like. As far as my network utilities go I’m going to install ethereal again and try and getting a working installation of ettercap, driftnet, and this new program called tcpreplay that Ray just told me about. Supposedly it will replay your driftnet and ethereal logs and allow you to re-sniff the information like you were there doing it when it happened. Neat.

I’ll let you all know how this goes. I’m pretty excited cuz my buddy Josh now wants to go out wardriving sometime. He’s finally got a laptop so he can go with. He’s changed since we went to high school together. We’ll see how far I get with this project and maybe we’ll get to go next Thursday. I’ll report back and let you know how it goes.

Did you ever do the right thing even though you really didn’t want to do it? I did. Today. This new guy at work who thinks he knows everything decided to take the forklift down the ramp into the parking lot. Since it was an electric forklift and wasn’t fully charged it wouldn’t make it back up the ramp.

He tried and tried and finally got it stuck almost sideways on the ramp. The only thing keeping it from swinging around and rolling over is the fact it had caught the concrete lip on the edge of the ramp. I knew what was going to happen and that he needed to swing the back end around so he could go back down the ramp.

Since he knows everything he tried to tell me that I needed to operate the forklift so they could push on it so it won’t roll. There was no way in hell I was going to put myself on a 6,000 lb forklift and operate it with 2 guys below me when I knew as soon as it released it was going to roll. The angle of the ramp put the center of gravity far enough over that as soon as it got completely sideways on the ramp it would roll.

He insisted that I do it and I told him no way in hell. I stood back as he tried the first time and lucky for him he caught the concrete again but barely. The next time he tried it was going to let loose. I grabbed the 50′ of nylon rope we had and tied one end to the top of the forklift cage. I took the other end and wrapped it around a concrete pillar at the warehouse entrance and then around a steel beam that supported the building.

He tried again and when it let loose the rope was the only thing that kept enough pull on the top to keep it from rolling over. I slowly let the rope release from around the steal beam and let the forklift swing down until it was far enough that it wouldn’t roll over.

I ended up saving this guys life and job and never got a thanks out of it. A co-worker who was standing there watching asked me how tempted I was to let the rope go… I answered “very.”

I told him the only was they were going to get it up was to push it over the lip with the company van. He didn’t want to listen and finally drove it up the opposite direction we told him but with the assistance of the van. I wasn’t around for that part, but he came back and informed me that he took it up the way he wanted and that I was still wrong in what I said. I was so tempted to just pop him in his big fat mouth but I managed to bite my tounge and ignore him til he walked off.

I really hope I have the patience to deal with this jackoff on the days I have to work with him. He’s rubbed on me a few too many times.

Hey there everybody. I didn’t forget about this already. Believe it or not, i’m still really busy. I have alot on my plate with my stupid Professional Development class. I’m so behind on my assignments I just can’t keep up. Every time I try to work on one and get it done she gives us another two assignments. I’ve been putting some stuff up on eBay lately and have been busy packing up and sending out a couple packages a day.

We had a family picnic on Monday. That was cool, but it kept me busy in the days prior. Now that that’s over I’m still dealing with the kittens we caught that were living under our shed. Maybe if I get a chance I’ll take a few pictures of them this weekend before we give them away.

I’m still trying to add a few mods to wordpress and create a new theme for my site. Keep posted for that in the future. I also need to write a mod to show my mailing list again so you can all sign up for that. I have Chad’s senior movie, Chauncey’s Revenge that I’ll be posting in a little while along with some other short, funny and disgusting video clips. Leave comments and let me know what you guys want to see here.

I’d like to get a photo gallery started here where I can post things that I’m doing in my daily life and maybe integrate a moblog where I can post images from my camera phone.

Anyway, I should get back to work soon. If I get time during work in the next few weeks I’ll try and catch up with this and add some more info.