vale[ blog ] diary of the last hollow soul

After using the last bits of my Sumatra coffee, i rushed off to buy one of the limited ones: first Sumatra Mandheling. It's really nice. Soft. Kind of reminds me of the spirit made out of paprika that a classmate of mine brought along to one of the highschool class trips. It was damn hot, i could still recall the feeling. Now, in case of the Mandheling, it's only the flavor. Although the coffee is being sold as extra-bold, it's nowhere as bold as the normal Sumatra coffee or an Italian blend. It's surely not light, but it's very soft, and warm. It feels serious, something that you would imagine for a meeting of governments discussing a war situation. It tastes red and hot, but without actually being that spicy hot. Also, it smells very nice, foreshadowing its taste.
I really will be interested to try out the other three new Sumatra coffees as well.

This afternoon my internet provider managed to scare me pretty well. I was trying various benefits of the linux environment (ssh and stuff), when suddenly i was no longer able to access valerauko.net—nor any of the other websites that share the same ip address. After asking around if it's accessible for others and checking Google Translate (it works server-side, thus even if an address is blocked from me, i can translate it and see the contents—true it doesn't really work with logins), i had to realize that the university router apparently blocked my website for no reason. (At least not one i could figure.) For a while, i didn't bother, just looked for a web ftp, because i wanted to quickly fix a layout bug in the blog. But i forgot my ftp pass. So i installed Wine, and tried connecting with Total Commander. It didn't work. Then i extracted my pass from the Total Commander ftp memory, and using that i managed to finally connect via a web ftp and fix the bug.
Then, i started working on how to actually access my own website. It became obvious that i have no control whatsoever over the router, and also there's nothing else blocked (even though my torrent client is running non-stop for Stargate SG-1). I had to go with a proxy, but i only know one: the servers of my home university. Luckily they didn't erase my access codes, so using that and help from Shamalt i was able to route my browser through there. Ironically, as soon as i managed to do that, out of nowhere i was able to access valerauko.net without using the proxy as well. Work for nothing. Well, at least i know how to do it, now. Had i been trying to do this from Windows, i couldn't have, i'm sure of it.

A mistaken rm -r and so disappeared half of my documents folder. Luckily i had lots of junk in the early letters, so only my backups and received files (folder name also started with b) are gone—and probably a bunch of files i will never miss (now i recall, probably all my never-used Photoshop brushes as well, but i have the raw downloads of those). So now my first way is to the phpMyAdmin of valerauko.net and backup my database. I really wouldn't like it if my blog contents disappeared just how they already did once three years ago.
Also, tomorrow i'm going to disappear in the morning, because we're heading for Tokyo. We, meaning a bunch of us living around this region west of the Biwa lake, Gifu, Nagoya, Hikone… The EEM provides me the cheap methods for travel, though of course it won't be nowhere as fast as going by shinkansen.
My linux is complete as well. The only thing left is to change the minor details of appearance, such as menu font size and the like, to my tastes. The defaults are a bit too big, taking up too much of the not-so-big laptop screen. I started using all four desktop workplaces as well, the first being for browsing and such, the second for instant messengers, the third always has a sudo'd terminal open fullscreen and the torrent client is running in the fourth. I really will be going under Windows only for playing and browser testing.