there are some rendering problems with my blog right now and it is putting the sidebar - usually on the right side here, all the way at the bottom - very annoying. Just wanted to let you know where it is.

Photo Sharing

Photo Sharing

Cosplay, for the uninitiated, is dressing up as a fictional character; in the US it tends to specifically mean dressing up as anime or video game characters. Anime Conventions are known for the fans cosplaying and coming up with elaborate costumes which can sometimes take months to develop. I missed Otakon (Baltimore Anime Convention) for the second year in a row. I know it’s my fault for no longer having my finger on the pulse of anime culture in the US, but I was hoping to catch it this year to get some great cosplay pics. Instead I had to just linger in the lobby of the convention center and take some snaps. I took about ten shots and here are two of my better ones.

This server is now running on a FreeBSD box instead of Fedora Core 1. It’s also 1 GHz instead of 300Mhz. Man, I have gone from being scared to install anything that wasn’t an RPM package a few years ago to where yesterday I compiled a custom kernel for the first time ever!! That is a right of passage all free and open source hackers go through on their way to fully grokking the OS. It always sounded a bit scary and risky to me - recompiling the one program that determines how EVERYTHING on your computer talks to the hardware. But I did it after just two tries! This whole experience has been a lot of fun and now we FINALLY have enough space on the server to allow the members to post all they need to and I can post more screenshots, pictures, and civ4 save files!

Well, I’ll tell you one thing - FreeBSD does NOT hold your hand like Linux does. This has had both frustrating and enlightening effects. On the one hand, it’s been very annoying to have to deal with all manner of config files I never had to deal with before. Apache and MySQL didn’t just work as soon as I compiled them. Apache needed me to change the server’s name to an name actually resolvable and MySQL needed me to chown the directory it had installed to. Webalizer wasn’t automatically installed and I had to manually configure it.

I’ve been accused by some of having an asian fetish, but I don’t. I think I just have an asian preference. Mere mincing of words? I don’t think so. To me a fetish implies a desire for asian things (culture, people, etc) that accepts all things asian and rejects most things non-asian. Let’s start with culture, for example. There are a lot of things I like about the asian culture, especially the respect for elders and strong family ties. I also like the fact that, at least in Japan, people take a much more lax attitude towards things like nudity. As long as it’s not porn, what’s wrong with the female (or male) nude? I mean, here in the US, people got mad when a magazine printed a cover with a baby being breastfed. What’s more innocent than a baby being breastfed? Yet, American (puritan-based) culture finds it so offensive.

I now have a FreeBSD 6.1 computer which will eventually take over the job of the server. It could take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to get everything set up correctly, but I’ll be sure to make a post when it’s ready.