EmmonsNet

I have a friend who I recently turned on to Linux. A few months ago his frustration level with Windows prompted him to call me - begging to help him install Linux on a second drive he just dropped into his home desktop computer. A few hours later we had the latest release of Fedora installed.

Since that day, he has called me up for a few tips from time to time on how to do things. Until last night, all of his queries were easily answered over the phone or instant messanger. But last night, he called me frantic.

'My terminal console is Fracked!!! I just echos garbage characters.'

This I had to see. Ten minutes later I was sitting in front of his desktop and sure enough, his terminal session was echoing nothing but unreadable characters.

'What was the last thing you did before this started happening?' 

'I wanted to know more about "cat", so I typed "/usr/bin/man cat"'.

Right then, I knew what we did. Why did I know? Because when I was a linux neophyte ( aka NEWB ), I did the same thing myself more than once. I inverted words at the command line and sometimes it gave spectacular and terrifying results.

Meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center are keeping an eye on an ominous brewing of clouds in the western edge of the Gulf Of Mexico - just north of the Yucatan Peninsula.

Those of you living near the coast in Mexico and South Texas can relax. The eggheads at the NHC are projecting less than a 30% chance of this cloud system developing any tropical cyclone activity within the next fourty-eight hours. For now, it looks like some Mexicans are going to get some nice showers in this summer heat.

As a precaution, those of you local to this system, keep your radios and televisions tuned to catch any alerts just in case this weather system gets any larger or more organized.

I got tired of using one of the default templates that comes with Joomla. The template is called JA_Purity and though it may look nice to a lot of people, I personally did not like the choice of colors or how the pages laid out.

Even though I could have created a whole new custom template for the site, I just do not have the time to do that right now. I am not saying I won't in the future - but at this time I opted to use a pre-made template.

I opted to use the jw_clean_pro template from JoomlaWeb. I have to do a few tweeks to the custom code module that wraps the Google 'Computer Word Of The Day' Gagdet - but that will take me less time that building a whole new template.

Years ago, I used to play a table top role playing game called 'Werewolf : The Apocolypse'. Weekly a half dozen or so of my friends and I would gather around a table and engage in interactive story telling. Spinning yarns of passion and horror that enabled us to rage and 'get medieval' on what we felt were the grim and excess monotony of our contemporary world.

We would try to pick theme music to fit the game. Living in New Orleans at the time and most of us being into industrial music - a heavy grinding tempo punctuated by the likes of NIN, Ministry and Thrill Kill Kult is what got played the most.

Recently I discovered a band that I like a lot! TV On The Radio. The song 'Wolf Like Me' would have fit perfectly with our imaginations that created rabid beasts driven as a furious pack down Esplanage Ave ready to rip into any demon or leech that was dumb enough not hide its scent well enough.

With lyrics like these, what's not to love about this song?