So what else does a guy do with his massive taglines collection other than use it for random email signatures? Why, he grafts it into his website, of course. At the moment it’s just a raw text dump; given some free time I’ll turn it into something a little more appealing.

Yes, this is the kind of nonsense I just adore adding to my website. Deep down inside I’m probably very ashamed of myself.
Random quote generator

For the most part, I’m very pleased with the service I get from Invite.net. They might want to look into changing how they roll out new domains, however. By default, they provide a version of formmail.pl that is hugely susceptible to being used as a spam relay.

I discovered this, of course, when I found several dozen “undeliverable” notices in my mailbox this evening. Luckily, one of the offending messages included a link to the means of transmission. Otherwise I’d still be sitting here at home scratching my head in wonder. Instead I’ve simply taken the step of making all of the scripts Invite provided me with non-executable. I also renamed formmail.pl to be safe.

While a big chunk of blame lands on Invite for this snafu, it bears mentioning that I could and should have investigated and disabled any scripts I had no intention of using right when I first rolled out the website. Let this be a lesson to anyone who sets up hosting on someone else’s machine: Remove or disable anything you aren’t actually going to need. You never know which services and scripts are vulnerable to abuse.

At some point the people behind Progress Quest, the greatest computer game of all time, decided to split the multiplayer gaming into three realms. So now I feel somewhat obligated to have characters on each of those realms. Now when you check the stats for GreyDuck you get the rankings for any realms that my character is in. I’ve got a pretty good ranking in Knoram, the original realm…

I don’t remember why I did it. I should have known better than to do it. A few weeks ago I converted the D: drive in Ryoko from FAT32 to NTFS.

And now I can’t delete or install anything on that drive. I’m going to have to back up what I can and blow that partition straight to hell. Waaah! All those games! Er, I mean, all of that important data!

Let this be a lesson to you, my followers. Thou shalt not put thine faith in the tools of Microsoft. To do so is to risk eternal damnation, or at least a lot of lost data.

This probably ranks quite low on the scale of “Things Geeks Should Do With Their Linux Boxen,” but I’ve been wanting to see working anti-aliased Truetype fonts under Linux for years. Thanks to the instructions on this page I was able to do just that. Actually, I had to read the gdkxft documentation thoroughly and repeatedly as there were some quirks on my newly-rebuilt Zero that made it a bit more difficult to implement.

As of now, Zero has a nearly complete set of software and interfaces. My next move is to set up some more of the guts-level stuff, mostly so that when the machine is restarted everything comes back up that’s supposed to. (Email, webserver, etc.)

At long last, I have audio and visual cable TV on my computer. Again. This time around, though, it’s the new ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder card that’s providing the TV tuning. It took some hoop-jumping to get working, including a switch to the Alsa sound drivers. Turns out that yes, Virginia, the internal audio cables on the AiW Radeon are just like those on earlier AiW models.

In other news, I’ve stocked my Mozilla 1.0.0-rc1 install with the usual slate of plugins; Acrobat Reader, RealPlayer and the Java Runtime Environment 1.4.0 are all installed on the box; Evolution is working perfectly. It kind of balances out the parts of my workday that were totally crappy…