When working on a team of system administrators it is important to teach the junior members an important lesson: DON'T LEAVE YOUR WORKSTATION UNLOCKED! Even though physical office areas are frequently reasonably secure, leaving a workstation unlocked does have the potential to expose sensitive information or worse... get one's Facebook profile hacked with an embarrassing status update!

One common way to indoctrinate new members it to make use of their unattended workstation to browse a less than appropriate web site and leave it up on the screen for casual passers-by to notice.

Unfortunately, this browser-based method of team indoctrination does not work well on team members who are always buried in a dozen terminal windows, are running some foul desktop environment without any of the usual hotkey commands, use elinks to browse the web, or they guy who wonders why nobody else is using emacs to read their Microsoft Exchange email.

Solution? An ASCII art cat meme for your console window!




The live site is best viewed from a console shell or terminal with fixed font width (e.g. Using the "curl" command from a terminal):

http://cat.thatlinuxbox.com


p.s. I was hoping to find a nice happy domain name for this ascii art cat meme that was easy to remember. Sadly, cat.me and pretty much every other domain name containing the word "cat" are already taken...

Ogre! Huge! Awesome!



Allen helped to fund this project on Kickstarter and totally scored. Steve Jackson Games wanted to do a re-print of the Ogre boardgame originally created back in 1977. This sixth edition, the Designer's Edition, is a really great example of how to use Kickstarter. The project was seeking $20k to help fund a re-print and in the end received over $920k! You can read all about the Kickstarter campaign here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/8...rs-edition


The game includes nicely detailed, high quality cardboard 3d models of the Ogres, which are giant tank war machines:








The basic game can be set up and played in 30 minutes to an hour which makes it suitable for a lunchtime gaming session at work. Here are some pictures from a longer multi-day lunchtime game:

I finished my first 50k race, The John Holmes 50k Trail Run.


Photo via http://www.jimbodoh.com

If it hadn't been pitch black prior to the 7 am race start, this is the sign that would have greeted me at the Tucker Hill Trailhead of the The Croom Tract at Withlacoochee State Forest.




The 50k course is essentially four 7.5 mile loops with a little tacked on at the beginning and at the end. Runners are allowed to leave a drop bag at the aid station nearest the start/finish area. I planned to run the first loop of the course without my handheld water bottles or gel flasks. I did carry my ziploc bag of dried dates from the beginning. I guzzled half a bottled water just before the race start.

I have upgraded my blog here at http://thatlinuxbox.com to Geeklog 2.0. You may have noticed that I am still tweaking the layout and theme (yay for mobile-friendly).

For compatibility reasons I upgraded to the latest version of the following plugins:

CAPTCHA 3.4.1
http://www.geeklog.net/filemgmt/index.php/1109

SocialShare 1.2
http://www.geeklog.net/filemgmt/index.php/1053

Autotags 1.1.0
http://www.geeklog.net/filemgmt/index.php/1061

This week I was chosen to be the Interim Team Lead over the Linux Team in our little section of UFIT.

Our existing team lead is heading off to greener pastures to do cloud stuff and to perform all kinds of SysAdmin wizardry at Rackspace.

Martin Smith, we will miss you!

This was the second annual Cross Country (XC) race that Fit2Run Gainesville held at The Rock Trails property. The course was mostly well-groomed field grass and was soft due to all of the rains (but still very runnable). There were a few nice muddy sections thrown in just for fun. This year there were options for both a 5k and 10k and I think I chose wisely by running the 10k.

I finished the 10k in 38:16 and earned 2nd place overall. This is the first time I can remember getting to stand on an actual podium!


Photo by "Captured Memories by Esta Eberhardt"

The 5k and 10k runners started at the same time so pacing was just a little bit tricky. I went out fairly relaxed and didn't let the 5k runners pull me out too fast. Most of the fast runners opted for the 5k distance, so when they turned toward the finish line and I started into the second lap, there was nobody in sight ahead of me. Dan Clark was out there somewhere but I never saw him.


Photo by "Captured Memories by Esta Eberhardt"