Author: Brian

Oops. I heard back from Caleb and it seems he’s moving to Boulder sooner than I expected. He’s going to take dante offline on the 16th – this coming Thursday.

There may be interruptions in service for my site this week as I scramble to get it all moved over. My apologies.

Also, again, I have to tell everyone reading this:

Please update my email address to my Gmail account!

The email switch is a permanent change. If you don’t have my Gmail address right now, visit my contact page immediately to ask me to update you!

You’ve been warned!

…oh, who’m I kidding? I don’t get that much email.

…you can’t just have one.

I just bought another domain: welcome impoverty.com to the Lunar Obverse family of domains.

For now it will just point to my sub-blog for NaNoWriMo ’06, the one with updates for my novel, also named “Impoverty”. Clever, yes?

If and when the novel ever gets published, that domain will be the marketing page for it, allowing you to peruse samples and perhaps even order copies. Just sayin’.

OK, I’m planning some site changes, and this is the first notice. Or maybe. I might’ve posted about some of this before but I can’t find a post on it. Sorry if some of this is redundant info.

I’m moving webservers. Caleb, my most excellent webhost for the last several years, is moving dante, his trusted *NIX server, to Boulder, CO in September, when he starts graduate school at the University of Colorado.

There’s no real reason dante couldn’t continue to serve my sites from Boulder, but during the move the server will be unavailable, and Caleb isn’t entirely certain what bandwidth or connection he’ll have there. It seemed like a valid excuse for me to move. And since I’d rather have more control than less control, I’ve been looking into setting up my own server… somewhere.

I can’t do it from home because of the restrictive EULA that Comcast imposes on my home cable modem connection. What I need is a business-level connection. So what I’ve done is make a deal with my sister, who has a small office in NW Portland. I’m going to pay for her DSL, in exchange for letting me put my own server on her network.

By fiat, I’ve decided that the official cut-over date is Saturday, August 25th 2007, two weeks from today. But I’m starting the move this week. Caleb provided a lot of extras, like site monitoring and text updates of downtime both planned and unplanned, and useage statistics, and backups… it’s going to take a lot of work to match what I had with Caleb’s Open Hand Hosting. But it’s fun work, barely even “work”, actually. It’s tinkering and learning and that’s always joyful to me.

It’s funny to me that I’ve been so resistant to this idea. In my head it was far more complicated than I thought. It’s not that setting up a webserver is easy: I wouldn’t want to teach someone else how to do it from scratch. But it was easier for me than I thought because I have a lot more knowledge than I give myself credit for. The most complicated part, I thought, was setting up multiple named domains (like bamoon.com, runmoonrun.com, etc.) to be served from one IP address. Silly me! Apache virtual hosts are just a matter of editing a text file. Easy-peasy.

Likewise, I was worried about configuring a non-server install of Mac OS X to be a webserver… and then getting my configuration wiped out after installing my first security patch or update from Apple. Again, that’s not likely to happen, and if I’d just sat down and thought about it I’d’ve realized that none of my preferences and configuration gets wiped out for a security patch, so why would my webserver configuration? I was worried over nothing.

One more thing: I won’t be running a mail server on my own for a while, so I’m permanently making my Gmail account my main email. Don’t use the bamoon.com address anymore. I’ll be forwarding all that email to my Gmail inbox for now, and including an automatic message to remind people to update, for the forseeable future. If you’re reading this now, and you email me, update your address books now! No, seriously. Right now. Do it.

There’s more to say, like the fact that I want to update the look of the site to go along with the move, and how I might switch around my domains. My “business” or professional name is Lunar Obverse, so it would make sense to have a site dedicated to my professional work served from lunarobverse.com – whether that be my computer consulting, my writing, or whatever. But my blog is named Lunar Obverse, too, so it might make more sense to have that domain. I’ve also got bamoon.com, brian-moon.com, liefactory.com, runmoonrun.com… what do I do with those? I’ve used them in the past for different things, but haven’t really come to a consensus about what their future should be.

runmoonrun.com will always be my running and exercise stuff, though I haven’t posted much there lately. But liefactory.com… It was originally my political rants. However, I think the domain name might come across too negative, and maybe even undermine what I would want to accomplish. I’ve had a thought to move all my strip club stories (of which I have many) to liefactory.com. That’s a better fit, I think.

But I also realized today that “The Lie Factory” would make an excellent title for my next novel, seeing that the story revolves around Portland’s uniquely corrupt local government and strip clubs. So many choices…

As for the site design, there’s some things I want to tweak and add. Some of the formatting is difficult to read for some folks, and I’d like to add options to make it more readable for them. I also want to have one page that collects my blog posts (from all blogs), any comments I make on other sites (if people are interested), and my Twitter and Last.fm feeds, and maybe start using Flickr for my photo gallery and put that on one page… Collecting all that is going to take a large re-design, or at least a design if I want to keep the main blog the same and collect all that under a different domain. Again… more decisions to be made.

I will keep everyone posted, but barring any catastrophes, the actual move won’t be noticeable except for some brief downtime.

I took the first, small step towards running my own server.

If you point your browser at the domain lunarobverse.com, strangely, you end up in my living room. Virtually.

Nifty, huh?

Yesterday I:

• Met a friend for lunch;
• Invited another friend along;
• Made a serious co-worker laugh;
• Gave directions to another friend to pick me up;
• Navigated to my sister’s office;
• Fixed a printer;
• Bought two new books;
• Ate sensibly for dinner;
• Discussed philosophy;
• Watched a kick-ass movie;
• Slept without dreaming.

I can’t bake. But if I could I would totally make these:

Beer Cupcakes

Cake

• 1 cup Guinness
• 1 stick, plus 1 tb, unsalted butter
• 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
• 2 cups dark brown sugar
• 3/4 cup sour cream
• 2 eggs
• 1 tb vanilla extract
• 2 cups flour
• 2 1/2 tsp baking soda

Glaze*

• 8 oz cream cheese
• 1 1/4 cups confectioners’ sugar
• 1/3 cup milk

Preheat oven to 350; butter a muffin tin.

Combine the Guinness and the butter, chopped into 1-inch chunks, in a large sauce pan, and heat to melt the butter. Remove from heat, and whisk in the cocoa and sugar. In a bowl, whisk the sour cream with the eggs and vanilla, then add to the beer mixture. Sift together the flour and baking soda, and fold into the batter. Pour into muffin molds and bake for 25 minutes, or until inserted cake tester comes out clean. Let stand 10 minutes, remove from muffin tin, and cool completely on a rack.

Using a mixer, whip cream cheese until smooth, sift in sugar, and beat. Add milk, and beat until smooth. Spread glaze over cooled cupcakes.

*To create a thinner glaze, use a tablespoon or two more milk; for a topping more akin to icing, use less milk, and perhaps more sugar. In either case, add a little sugar or milk at a time, mix, and check for desired consistency

Just thinking about them, I feel the same way Homer did when he invented Skittle Brau. Except I didn’t invent these.

Hey, I just found SkittleBrau.net! That rocks. I should send them the recipe for Beer Cupcakes!

Ken and I were cleaning out his new cubicle. He handed me a box, a large one. It felt mostly empty.

“Just drop it in the corner,” he said.

I turned in place, and, smiling, dropped it from waist height.

BAM!

I turned back to him, smiling. Ken looked shocked.

“There… there was a computer in there.” He said it slowly, unbelieving.

My smile froze on my face. I thought it was papers and stuff, not electronics.

As that thought was sinking in, I felt a hand on my shoulder. One of the Emergency Management folk, with whom we were sharing our new space in the basement of the Multnomah Building, was standing behind me, leaning over slightly. She was a woman in her 50s (I’m guessing), tall, thin, wiry. She had just returned to county employ after serving several tours of duty in Iraq, and, I believe, as a training instructor in the concentration camps at Abu Graib and Gitmo.

She spoke in a friendly whisper. “It’s OK, you’re all right. No problem.” She sounded controlled, but winded. “Now that I know you’re just moving boxes around, it’s OK. I’m still getting used to it. The other day Pascal dropped a box, and I jumped out of my chair.” She shook her head at the memory. “If I’d had a gun… well… But I didn’t.” She chuckled. She was trying, and failing, to come across as collegial and warm.

“Oh… right.” I was frozen into place. I was still processing the fact that I may have damaged a perfectly good computer just for being a smart-ass, and now I realized that I had startled this woman into some kind of post-traumatic stress reaction. I was already more than a bit empathetic for her serving multiple terms of duty for an illegal and immoral war. And knowing the black arts of torture that have been perpetrated on the humans in those prisons, many of whom were tossed in there just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and are even now being denied the most basic of human rights… and knowing that this woman was part of the bureaucracy that enabled and sustained it… and hearing her try to shrug off the extreme reaction she had just had to the sound of a box being dropped…

I felt my empathy clouded through fear. “Right” I said “Iraq.”

She laughed again, a release of stress that I could only imagine. “Yeah!” She straightened up, her hand still on my shoulder. She towered over me. I wondered if she needed the contact as much as I was now repulsed by it. “That box just sounded like small-arms fire!” Her hand dropped. “I’m OK, I’m OK. I just fell out of my chair. No problem.” She got up, and instead of crossing the aisle back to her desk, she left the room.

I turned to Ken. “That’s great.” I pantomimed typing while I faux-dictated a memo to my boss: “Dear Stan, Ken and I are mostly moved in to our new area. And by the way, I may need to requisition a bullet-proof vest for the next few weeks. The end.”

This week at Firefly at the Mission, I discovered that Matt, the guy who spit on me two weeks ago, worked at Stream, just like I did.

Huh. Small world.

I also saw the girl who doesn’t have an iPhone, but didn’t get a chance to talk to her. Apparently she’s a huge Firefly fan, too. Maybe I’ll talk to her next week.

Very small world.

My arms were wrapped around her waist, in the cold night, on the darkened street, my lips still warm with her kiss, feeling a mixture of happiness, concern, fear, recognition and gratitude as the next-to-last woman with whom I’ve exchanged vows of love sadly smiled and told me of how happy she’d become after seeking out therapy and being put on prescription anti-depressants.

…I think I could go all Marcel Proust and spend the remaining years of my life trying to capture and describe all the events, feelings, memories, and sensations that led up to, and have descended from, the moment described in the preceding sentence.

I don’t know why, but that moment, just a few short years past, is stuck in my head tonight. I’m not even sure what connection it has with my present mental state. Although, being human, I’m sure if I think about it long enough I can find one (or create one out of whole cloth).

Instead of writing it all out, though… I’m going to stop with the single, albeit complicated, sentence, and hope that the feeling leaves me now that I’ve written it out.

Since Hollie asked – no. Smacky has not come home.

I guess it’s remotely possible he still might, so I should add “yet”. He’s chipped, and if anyone finds him and brings him to a vet or shelter they should be able to read the chip and return him to me…