kNOppix

As One of the best hackers I know notes in his blog, I had the pleasure of being invited to a Geek-fest. As awful as I might look in the pictures (I tend to do that, look awful in pictures) I had a great time. I got to meet the now very famous Juan Luis, and Arhuaco, in the costeñan flesh

Aside from that I got a fresh copy of knoppix. The next day I found out I hadd 11 gigs of wasted disk lying around, so I tried to install it. However, Alejo's CD seems to have become physically damaged on it's trip from his home to mine. Still curious, I downloaded the whole thing all over again. 36 hours later I had yet another knoppix CD. I have to admire the guys, that LiveCD runs like a charm. When installing, it asks almost nothing, which is perfectly good for newbies. After the installation finished and it allegedly installed LILO I rebooted and tested. The thing was nowhere to e found among the other four options in my boot. No problem, I just redid LILO, and up I went. One reboot later I was looking at a screen that said Debian and asked for my login.

All is well, the thing loaded KDE, no problems at all, all the hardware was correctly detected. However.... when I tried to logout, the thing just died, the screen started blinking (as a message telling me no info was coming from the CPU) and it did nothing. When I rebooted I expected e2fsck to make me wait, but nothing major, However, e2fsck quit on me and told me I had to manually rerun it. I did, and after correcting some 20 mistakes in the drives I entered again. Again very nice KDE3, again, on logout, the thing died, and again it sends the hard drive to hell. Being a little faint of heart when it comes to IDE disks I decided to leave knoppix's pretty KDE interfaces to the LiveCD, and remain with my very old, very graphic, very mine, very configured Mandrake 8.1.

00:56:12

Last sunday I participated in a 12 KM run help by Bogota's very own, Clinica Palermo. The race started at the Clinic (Calle 47, Cra 22), went down Calle 26 up to Cra 68, and came back.

• 00:00 Cesar Augusto Londoño calls the departure, and the race starts as a human mass of about 2500 people crawls slowly, like a huge white snail.


• 03:25 The route takes us up Carrera 28's bridge, from there I can see a dense mass of people as far as my eyes get me


• 05:00 The sun starts heating up and everybody seems to have obtained their position in the race, surpasses are less frequent


• 12:00 The race really starts, I forget I'm running


• 15:35 I am about to pass carrera 50's bridge and the leaders of the race are already coming back from carrera 68. They run in a "pique'e choro" kind of way, all the time.


• 20:45I reach carrera 68, that marks the turning point


• 35:00By now there is no huge mass of people, just a few runners scatterd here and there. On the other side of Calle 26 all the people that were walking the race started jumping to the side I was in


• 47:05 We finally get out of carrera 26 and head into the parkway


• 56:12 Yee hay. I'm glad it's over


• finish + 15:00 It was a good race, we should do it again. Yeah, it was really great

So I'm not me

UP until this day I was a believer. I belived in electronical transference, in working coperatively through IM/chat/mail, in coding remotely through the use of internet; in being able to exist in a virtual world, where you didn't have to be physically present in order to be a part of something. However, this approach has it's dangers, as I noticed today.

I admit it, I'm some kind of mentally retracted moron that can remember ascii codes for ñ, > and < (and it's entity representation for HTML), but that is unable to retain the moronic four number PIN for his savings account. So, as one might imagine, I forgot the darned number for the third time and the card got blocked. Since it was far too late to do anything about it, I went to the Internet, and found out what I had to do. The answer was simple: "Go to any of our offices with your Citizenship Card (what the hell, Cédula de Ciudadanía) and the card and we will fix your ordeal in no time.
I effectively went to one of their offices, the lady who I spoke to made me fill a form, with the number of the account and my signature, and faxed it to the office my account was residenced in (which was about 1 hour away by any means of transportation). The fax had to be returned from this office, accepting the change and telling me the new PIN (or the old one, I don't even know). Fifteen minutes later, the fax was not yet there so I decided to leave and come back later.
About two hours later the fax came back: It said the signature didn't match the one they had in their files. To put it in simple terms: I was not me.
So tomorrow, I'll have to go directly to see if me, in the flesh, is really me.
Luckily (or unluckily) the thing is stored by physical means, which allows the physical me to receive the new code, no matter what (or so I hope). But what about electronical stuff?
What happens when we forget the password because SSH automatically introduced it for us in our key? May God help us then

I just remembered....
My kindashrink said I had no soul. Can you imagine? All the posibities that opens? I thing she meant for it to be a turning point in my life or some shit, but it hasn't been. I'll have to figure what to do in order to take advantage of not having a soul.

So what have you been doing?

I tought I had posted just a few days ago, but it wound up being about two weeks from my last post. But, what have I been up to? Geez. Looks like homo corporativus is taking his residence inside me. It seems like a million years ago when I was in school. Reading bluhelmet (whoever that guy is) reminded me of the time I was burning circuits, going to the novena in a hurry to buy that dammned PAL memory that would refuse to burn on the crappy PAL burner in labelec.

Problem with the job: You are always in the same place and your issues last longer. You have more time to solve them (the whole day, instead of the few mins you get), but they don't just die after a deadline. In school you either turned the paper in or didn't, but after the deadline it was gone. You knew that by may 14th all of it would be history.

Bored of meetings (most of the time I sleep through them), tool vendors telling developers that tools will do the job for them, wearing a tie

Happy with meeting a lot of interesting people, developing software, jogging in the mornings when I make it, not wearing a tie on fridays Salir a rumbiar sin pensar en la cuenta