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okay so after many mind-bending months in Rochester of having basically no contact with any sort of music/art/theater/creative people I seem to have made a breakthrough. The story is laden with all sorts of tiny-thread connections where if even one small detail had changed about my day (i.e. I spent 5 minutes longer in the shower or something) I would not be involved in this at all.

Let me start here: I received a call from Jess’s mom one day about two weeks ago because she’d had a dream and couldn’t get it out of her head and she simply felt compelled to tell me about it. It was basically just a story about me and some sort of art/scene magazine. I mean I work at a print shop and she’s knows my interests so it wasnt like it was anything too out of the ordinary and who HADN’T thought about making a little newsletter or something at some point in their high-school career? I humored her and basically closed the conversation quickly and didnt think about it after that. 2 days later some people came in to the shop who were OBVIOUSLY musicians or scenesters of some kind. Big baggy clothes, tattoos and piercings, one guy (Jordan) had an ENOURMOUS set of dreadlocks on his 6′3″ frame. I saw what was in their hand and was all over it. some hacked together artwork for a show flyer. I talked to them for awhile, gave them an incredible deal on the photocopies and told them to come back anytime for printing. 2 days after that Jordan and his friend Kevin came back in to the shop for some color printing and show flyer copies and I got a chance to talk to them a little longer. It turns out they are sound-techs (for a large audio company) and show promoters and have been booking shows around town trying to create and help solidify a Rochester music scene. I told them I wanted to talk to them more and we set up a time to have a beer at an establishment about 3 blocks from where I work. I met up with them later and got the full scoop on what it is that they are doing and what they want to see happen. We had a lot in common with our frustation in Rochester (only they have been here for YEARS) and the obvious ownership of the town. They had been getting their quick printing done at Office Max and I told them “not anymore.” I’d cut them deals left and right for copies and printing and such because I ALSO want to see things change and it doesnt even make sense to let anyone else print their promotional materials. I NEED THEM TO SUCCEED if I’m going to be able to maintain sanity. Well at this point in the conversation (a couple of hours later) I’m looking to take off but Jordan wants me to hang around and meet his girlfriend Meghan. (also someone who works very hard at booking and promoting shows.) I really wanted to take off but thought it might be rude so I stuck around for another 15 minutes. Meghan showed and she and I started talking about the same sorts of things (music/art/culture/blah blah blah) and she asks me if I’ve ever heard of MNBuzz a little magazine her friend Rick puts together. I’d never heard of it and she just happened to have a copy in her little satchel that she pulled out and let me see. I opened it up and at this point I realized HOLY CRAP THIS IS IT! I’m still skeptical about a dream from Jess’s mom, but now I HAVE to follow this rabbit and find out where the rabbit hole goes. Its a fully functional EXTREMELY well put together magazine about skateboarding, street culture, punk rock, politics, ideas, and Minnesota life with an existing set of sponsors and advertisers. I knew that I had to print this thing. “Where’s he getting this printed right now?” I asked. “Office max or Staples or something.” “No. that absolutely can’t happen anymore. I don’t care what he’s paying them to do it I can do it cheaper. There is just no reason why anyone but me should get to produce this thing.” She gave me rick’s number and I made her promise to introduce me to him soon.

Another two days pass and Jess and I went out to play some Southpark pinball at the Brickyard(where Jordan and pals book shows for the most part.) Rick showed up, we met, talked, swapped ideas, and planned to hook up again. It turns out they are making about 200 copies of MNBuzz at this point. We need to figure out how to cut costs, increase the number of copies, and push distribution if this is going to be succuessful. My plan is clear - get this magazine to 1000 copies as quickly as possible and make it sustainable. Things were rolling now. Rick by the way had a crazy tweaked out mohawk and as it turns out had managed the local skate park for like 6 years before shutting down a few weeks ago. He also has an advanced degree in business finance and as you can imagine has an insane network of connections in the minneapolis and midwest skateboard community. This guy is the one who has put every single pixel in place in this magazine and its quite obvious that its his voice that is making this magazine what it is. He’s promoted shows, skaters, products, brand names, dvds, etc for years and is pretty damned good at it. He’s also a darn good Photoshop hack and html kung-fu grasshopper.

Dave (my boss) and I talk about the project extensively that weekend and I tell him my intentions. He’s totally behind me and on top of it all wants to buy ad space. Several phone calls, emails, and meetings later Rick and I are set to print Issue #3 this week and its going to be badass. We’re making all sorts of changes to how its produced with the goal of A. making it as rad as possible. B. driving up advertising rates and C. increasing distribution.

For whatever reason I happen to be working at a printshop and am in the position to make this happen. I fully intend on finding out where it takes me. I’m very excited to be a part of a creative project like this. Its just what I needed to make my stay in Rochester worthwhile. Thanks for listening to my ramblings and I hope you forgive any gaping holes in the story since I’m not even going to go back and read what I’ve written. oh yeah, one more time: MNBUZZ

While waiting for some emerge’s to finish up, I thought I’d share this clip…most likely staged, but funny regardless

Explain this to your boss (wmv)

seriously, i need a 66 blade to punch down some telco wiring and I’m having the hardest time finding one. Home Depot sells the blocks themselves, but no tools and/or blade. I decided to try Graybar in downtown only to find they’re no longer located in downtown so I drive to their location on Riverside only to find that it’s a giant distribution center, not a retail location. Then I called Micro Center and spoke with some complete idiot who insisted on looking it up in his “database” instead of actually walking to the department and checking it out! ugh…I’m frustrated. I’m half tempted to use the pete method of just stripping wires and wrapping them around the terminals…hehehee, maybe I’ll just solder them on. lol.

This has been a crazy week. On Wed, our employees from our remote office started complaining about not being able to send email attachments through our mail server. I tried nearly everything I could think of but kept getting postfix errors:

“timeout after DATA from xxxxx”

After beating my head against the wall, I ran across the Postfix FAQ which attributed the cause to a MTU issue. I tried a few workarounds they mentioned to no avail. No one else in the building was experiencing a problem with email and I could send email through our server from home just fine. After enumerating all my options and failing, I finally decided to upgrade to the latest linksys firmware (v3.1_4.00.7_US). I walked a coworker through the upgrade over the phone and the firmware was upgraded successfully. Yeah, at least it didn’t bork, I thought, but guess what? We get an IP through DHCP but the router isn’t sending any packets out the WAN interface…just great, freakin’ great. Luckily, after several reboots, and a changing to a static WAP IP the router started working again. We tested sending some large attachments and sure enough, everything works slick now.

I’m a fan of linksys but this kind of crap really pisses a guy off. I essentially wasted two days trying to solve this stupid thing and since I don’t have access to the firewall in the building and can’t drive 5 hours each way, I had to do it all over the phone. really, really, frustrating! Thankfully, we’re up and running now and I can go home happy today

“we’re the scientists of sound. we’re mathmatically puttin’ it down. when lighnting strikes, best grab a ground. gotta get up to get down.”

“i wear permanent press so I’m alwasy creased.”

:)

wow, I just realized it’s been exactly 1 year since I started work here at BC. It’s really hard to believe that I’ve been in Minneapolis for an entire year now. A lot of cool stuff has happened in the past year, and despite the fact that I miss hanging out with Bader, Shaner, Mitchem, Trav, Lar, and the MS crew, I’m a whole lot happier now than back in Fargo. Change is good (especially when that change involves leaving microsoft).

is that Willie Nelson was spotted jogging through our parking lot this morning. He and Bob Dyland are playing a show at Midway Stadium (where the Saints play) and staying at the Sheraton next to our office building.

In a related story, I ran across a Yahoo article yesterday about how Willie’s new reggae album will be released with two different album covers. The mainstream one has a big pot leaf on the front while the Wal-Mart version has a palm tree. I’m so glad Wal-Mart is looking out for the kids. What a great corporatation…</sarcasm>

hahahahahha, I’m so tough.

I ran across an interesting piece of sotware yesterday called rrs. rrs is a reverse connecting shell. I had a need for a tool like this since I have a box that will be 5.5 hours away with no way to remotely administer it since it’ll be sitting behind a NAT. I have no control over the router at that location so punching holes through the firewall for SSH just isn’t going to cut it. It turns out this software works perfectly. Here’s how it works…

Machine A: this box is sitting behind a NAT with a private, dynamic IP and no way of accessing it externally.

Machine B: a machine on a network that I control which allows incoming TCP connections.

On machine A, I startup the connector piece in daemon mode:
rrs -s -P rrs.pem -D –infinite-reconnect 15 flyhouse.homelinux.org 2222

The options are: s) use SSL P) public key D) daemon mode –infinite-reconnect) attempt to reconect every 15 seconds and don’t close after a successful connection

The above command will attempt to initiate a connection with my machine at home. It retry ever 15 seconds until my machine accepts the connection.

On machine B (flyhouse in this case), I startup the listener:
rrs -ls -P rrs.pem
The options are: l) listen for a connection s) use ssl P) private key

After I execute the listen command, I wait a few seconds and bam! I’ve got a shell from machine A.

Obvoiously, this isn’t rocket science but the only time I’ve actually used a reverse shell is when playing around with metasploit. I thought it was a cool idea and I’m really glad someone has written this excellent utility which will save me from a 5.5 hour drive if something ever breaks

so I was bored the other day and decided to learn to type on a dvorak keyboard. wow…it’s amazing how programmed the mind becomes and how difficult it is to change one’s habits…I’m typing using the dvorak layout now and this post has taken WAAAAAYY to long to post! I have to say, it’s a fun mindgame though! hehehehehe….

I traveled up to WI today for the project I’m working on. It was a super long drive (5.5hrs). My two coworkers and I are staying in a quaint little inn in downtown Sturgeon Bay. I have the room with a jacuzzi….hahahha, yeah, I’ll be using that…Thankfully, they have wireless here, which is fantastic, so I decided to post a quick message. Anyway, here are some pics of the room that I took with my new phone….

peace out.

UPDATE: so Qwest _did_ come by yesterday to install our circuit but just didn’t bother to let me know. They did let our vendor know, though I’m not sure exactly when. Seriously, how hard would it have been to ride the elevator up 3 floors, knock on the door, and say “we’ve installed your circuit. Thank you.”

yet again, I’ve been disappointed by Qwest. A tech was supposed to come out to install our DS1 circuit today and he STILL hasn’t shown up. I tried calling Qwest this morning to get an update on where the tech was or when he would show up. Since we ordered the line through a vendor, Qwest retail customer service couldn’t even “see” our record. I was told to contact or vendor.

I called our vendor (who I’ll call Pat), who in turn called Qwest. Pat was told that the technician was “in the hub testing the circuit” and would visit our office when he was done testing. Pat asked if she could get the tech’s phone number or if the tech could call me when he was on his way, but Qwest wouldn’t provide that to her! AAAAAHHHHHHH!

So now we’ve essentially slipped a day in our installation and I may have to reschedule everything. Why can’t these fools stick to there stinkin’ dates! Or at least have the decency to call and tell me WHY THEY’RE NOT HERE!? idiots!

I’m back in Mpls after a few days in Sturgeon Bay, WI. The trip went well but the drive was really long. I went to Door County to install some equipment in the office space we’re temporarily using. I setup a PC, vonage telephone, wireless AP, and a printer and I was done. Essentially, I spent approx 12 hours in a vehicle for 2 hours of actual work.

I did get to see my friend Dave on Sunday night when I got into town. We visited the local watering hole and hung out for a bit. It was nice and quiet (it was Sunday after all) and the bartender kept playing fantastic music (Phish, Sublime, Marley, Chili Peppers). After hearing the fourth good song in a row, I just about asked her out…but then I remembered that I’m me…and me doesn’t do that.

I’m back at work today and actually being productive. We’re finally getting a DS1 (T1) installed next week so I had a conf call with our T1 vendor and PBX vendor to make sure everything is cosher. I’m so pumped about getting a decent connection in here @ work…this 256k DSL is killing me! I’m also anxious to see how well our telephony works. The DS1 is a “converged” T1 meaning voice traffic flows over the data pipe instead of a dedicated 64k channel. The voice service is billed according to the number of simultaneous G.711 calls. All the equipment is Cisco so I’m sure it’s using SCCP. This is a nice solution since you get a full T1 when no one is on the phone and the T1 can support 31 simultaneous calls…which means each voice call requires approx 48k of bandwidth.

ok, enough nerd-talk…i’m out!

the last couple of days, I’ve been working on getting openswan setup so we can have an IPSec VPN at work. I tested the setup on my gentoo box at home and it was relatively simple to setup. Creating the x.509 certificates was a pain, but thankfully others documented the process nicely.

Once everything worked on my box at home, I tried to duplicate the setup on the firewall at work. Wow, what a pain that was! Whenever I started the VPN, the process core dumped. I found a thread online mentioning a similar problem caused by compiling gmp (GNU Multiple Precision Math Library) incorrect compiler flags. I tried changing my $CFLAGS to sane values and recompiling everything with no luck. I even tried compling the package on my gentoo box and emerging the binary on the firewall at work…

Finally, I realized the stupid mistake….the CHOST in make.conf was set to i686-pc-linux-gnu but this is a freakin’ k6-2 which should have a CHOST of i586-pc-linux-gnu! doh! After rebuilding gcc (which took pretty much all day), I emerged gmp and openswan and everything works great. Note to self…pay more attention to the make.conf docs…

One final note…if any of you homies have a need to tunnel through my machine, let me know and I’ll get you a cert and password.

well, the weekend is almost here and you know what that means…time for my servers to start acting up

After being notified by a coworker about the henious burnt-electronics smell coming from the server room, I decided to investigate. The source of the odor appears to be an old Netgear 24-port switch who’s fans had failed. The switch was nearly too hot to touch but it was still functioning ok. I moved it away from another switch to help with cooling. I suppose I could go crazy and actually buy a new switch or replace the fans, but hey, it’s Friday. Why do on Friday what can be done on Monday?

Now that darn smell is burned into my nostrils…ish!