Ethan’s Journal

I just happened upon a nice bit of copy from O’Reilly’s Mac OSX Panther in a Nutshell. It is in reference to using the -s flag with the sudo command from the terminal prompt:

This convenience can go wrong for you if you forget that the root user is all-powerful, turning typos into tragedy.

I’ve put up our our little wedding website. So, with one notable exception, I’ve finished everything on this week’s to-do list.

Once again that’s www.plutino.net/wedding.

And I just realized that the content logic code I used is the same stuff developed by Veronica Washken Michael Hoffman way back when we both worked on FuseTV.

Gosh, I think I even managed to bore myself with that last little tidbit.


$page=$_REQUEST["p"];
if (!(isset($page))) $page="home"; // default page is home

switch($page) {
case "getting_there":
$layout="standard";
$nice_title="Getting There";
$page_content=$DOCUMENT_ROOT."/wedding/content/display/getting_there.php";
break;
case "where_to_stay":
$layout="standard";
$nice_title="Where To Stay";
$page_content=$DOCUMENT_ROOT."/wedding/content/display/where_to_stay.php";
break;
case "what_to_do":
$layout="standard";
$nice_title="What To Do";
$page_content=$DOCUMENT_ROOT."/wedding/content/display/what_to_do.php";
break;
case "about_austin":
$layout="standard";
$nice_title="About Austin";
$page_content=$DOCUMENT_ROOT."/wedding/content/display/about_austin.php";
break;
case "contact":
$layout="standard";
$nice_title="Contact";
$page_content=$DOCUMENT_ROOT."/wedding/content/display/contact.php";
break;
//default to Home
default:
$layout="standard";
$nice_title="The Wedding";
$page_content=$DOCUMENT_ROOT."/wedding/content/display/home.php";
break;
}


In one of her early posts, Amy mentioned the Saad Hariri political posters featuring Rafik as a ghostly figure in the background. I was going through our photos and I stumbled across this one, which is hands-down my all-time favorite.

Yesterday I opted not to go to the beach with Amy in favor of futilely emailing, IMing, and paying visits to my ISP in hopes of getting them to re-open port 10000, by beloved VPN via TCP port.

In the interests of not wasting the entire 24 hours, Amy and I decided to go out. We went to Gemmayze, and to the Gemmayze Cafe, where we ate brochettes, fattoush, and hommos and were entertained by a gnomish accordian player and a truly proficient oud player. The oud is a really elegant, lute-like instrument and once I’m actually making money again, I hope to purchase a hand-made one and learn to play.

There was a huge party happening at the Cafe, with lots of dancing. One guy in particular kept dancing with chairs and canes balanced in his mouth and on his nose, respectively. It was a nice touch.

I haven’t written any posts here since Monday, because I’ve mostly been dealing with continuing continual connectivity problems. Consequently, the content of my musings hasn’t exactly been family-fare. I can sum up the past week thusly:

Secure VPN Connection terminated locally by client.
Reason 414: Failed to establish a TCP connection.

Today we were on our way out in search of a gas bottle for the grill and we stopped by our landlord’s apartment to ask where might be a good place to find such an item. Osman said, “You need a gas bottle? Go back to your apartment, I will send a man.” I have to say that the Sidanis have all been so good to us as landlords and as hosts in general. While he was up here with the gas guy, Osman looked around and said, “What else do you need?” I should add that we came upon our patio table in much the same way as the gas bottle.

So, we finally took the grill for a test lap. On the menu:

steak (w/ dry and wet marinade)
garlic mashed potatoes
corn-on-the-cob
Prieure Ksara 2002
Twix icecream

Again, much thanks to Kelly and Nazih for the grill.

In the spirit of true bloggery, I present this week’s Top 5 To-Do Tasks:

1. Get a propane tank for our “new” gas grill (many, many thanks to Kelly and Nazih).
2. Get fast internet, VPN, and remote desktop working simultaneously and in an acceptable fashion so I can finally get some work done around here.
3. Install Ruby/Rails on my webserver.
4. Move these journals over to a more “robust environment,” whatever that might be.
5. Make a wedding website.

Right now I am on the back patio IMing Amy, who is on the mac in the dining room. Technology, man.

Earlier this evening we saw a fella driving in a smart convertible with a very familiar-looking monkey perched on the passenger-side rear-view mirror. Later, whilst at a certain “leftist den” dining on hommos, fatoush, and a kebbeh that can only be described as minted raw lamb paste served w/ bulgar and olive oil, they played the Travelling Wilburys song “Tweeter and the Monkey Man.” End transmission.