Long day today (yesterday, actually, but I'm post-dating this in the interest of chronological flow). The baby's having a hard time coming off of West Coast time; she got up late and took a loooong nap till half-past three. Which was fine, because I needed the time to work on my NSLU2, which needed some attention.
The NSLU2, or "Slug", is a tiny Linux computer from Linksys, about the size of a two packs of Marlboros laid side-by-side. My brother Nate gave me one last year for Christmas (thanks, nate), and I've been using it for network backups, but on our trip to SF Nate showed me that he's running all kinds of wild services off of his. So I decided to start shifting over some responsibilities to the little bugger.
Which was just about time. Sometime during our trip to San Francisco, my main home server started having fan problems; it kept overheating and shutting itself down. It's going to take some time to diagnose the problem, but I figured that this was as good a time as any to move the critical services over to the Slug.
The main one that needed budging was DNS. Maj's main domain, as well as my two .san-francisco.ca.us domains, run from home, because it's too hard to get the registrar to change them. The Unslung system I use for the Slug has a BIND package, which is a good thing to run, anyways. I was running MaraDNS on the big server, because I always root for the underdog, but there wasn't a MaraDNS package for the Slug. So I rewrote my zone files and things are up and running now.
I don't know what else I'm going to put on there. Jabberd? Asterisk? A home wiki? Just not sure.
Blah blah blah
When the baby got up, we went to our local Loblaws, out towards the end of rue Rachel across from Canadian Tire. It's a pretty fantastic place to buy groceries -- it's the old CPR Angus Shops, a repair and maintenance facility for the Canadian Pacific Railway. The building is huge, with giant cranes and beams still attached to the roof.
Amita and I grabbed a crapload of groceries and brought them home to Maj, who'd just had a massage at the centre around the corner and was feeling really good. She'd rented Tristram Shandy, the 2005 movie based on the 18th-century level-twisting novel. Me and Amita June made some baked potatoes, and we all watched the movie, and a good time was had.
tags: tristram shandy loblaws angus shops movie maj amitajune
H****e en vrac
One thing I always want to buy when I'm at the store in Quebec is the quite commonly available communion wafers. Yeah, really! big ol' 5-inches-diameter communion wafers, in the snack section next to the Doritos and the Humpty Dumpty potato chips.
Quebec society has a had a precipitous secularization -- from around 90% church attendance in the 1950s to less than 10% today. But Catholicism still infuses all parts of life. For example, in Quebec, you cuss by using words from the church, including, of course, hostie ("the host").
So I can't figure out why hostie are a tasty snack treat. Is it a deliberate snub to the sacrament of communion by a secular society? Or did the practice antedate the Quiet Revolution, and did the formerly religious Quebecois eat communion wafers for fun? Or is it just a snork-snork funny thing to do, when the name of the food is actually a naughty word?
I dunno. I'm fascinated, but not enough to buy a big bag of communion wafers to eat. (They're never cheese- or BBQ-flavored, by the way; they have a pristine seriousness to them.) More info solicited.
tags: hostie quebec snack food
Opinity
One of the services mentioned in the Web 2.0 Summit infrastructure workshop was Opinity. Opinity seems to be a distributed reputation system, kind of like claimID but with a little more soft information. I think it looks pretty cool, and I'm glad to see another addition to the growing OpenID identity provider market.
tags: openid opinity identity reputation