Explore LJ - threat or menace?

As most of my flist probably knows by now, LJ has added a controversial new feature called Explore LJ - you can see the actual page here. It looks a lot like Google News, only restricted to LJ.

Although I think it's a transparent attempt to monetize user-generated content, I don't think it's a privacy violation, and I'm not going to opt out. Here's why: I want my blog to be noticed.

Sitting in my front closet right now are about 500 copies of Coffee, Computers, and Song. If a few thousand more people get pointed to it and a few dozen of them decide to buy a copy, I'm not going to complain. At all.

For similar reasons, my LJ is indexed on Google and any other search engine that cares to drink from the firehose of LJ's live feed. I rarely friends-lock, and consider anything I post to be public. I have a long history of this, going back to my days in alt.callahans, and it's too late to back out now even if I wanted to.

(I'm in the process of setting up a private journal, where I can control access separately to every post. That's different: it'll be encrypted, unsearchable by anyone but me, and on servers totally under my control.)

Damn the torpedos search engines, full speed ahead!

Quack!

When I started out for my walk this morning it was overcast but basically clear. About 45 minutes later, somewhere into my third circuit of the Rose Garden, it started to rain. It was a very gentle rain, with no wind, but it did get steadily heavier. By the time I got home I was intensely aware of the fact that my raincoat needs to be re-waterproofed.

On the other hand, I don't particularly mind walking in the rain (as long as it isn't too cold or too heavy), and I needed to put those clothes in the laundry today anyway.

Well, that was comparatively easy

Went to Fry's and bought a new CPU/Motherboard bundle for the fileserver: it's a comparatively crappy ECS MB with an AMD X2 BE-2330 processor. Under $90 with tax. Not terribly fast, but I don't need fast. Only one IDE connector, but 4 SATA, so that's OK. 100MB Ethernet, but it has two PCI slots, so that's OK. NVidia video, but it's a server, so I'm not using X. Swapped boards with the old one, and it just fscking worked.

Only thing that really needs fixing is the kernel -- the default kernel doesn't recognize the second core. (And of course it's in 32-bit mode -- fixing that would require a complete re-install, so I'm going to wait.)

The nice, quiet 1GHz VIA board that it replaced is, for some reason, not working particularly well: newer kernels don't seem to recognize the ethernet controller, and older ones don't see the mouse. Grump. May have to add an ethernet adapter and use it as a NAS box. Or maybe try Ubuntu.

Better yet

The Wolfling is getting tutoring in math now. Hopefully that will get her through the two classes she needs to graduate. Since her tutor (a family friend) lives most of the way to Palo Alto, the Cat and I proceeded from dropping her off to dinner at Chef Chu's in honor of Chinese New Year. We decided going in that a whole fish, while tempting, wouldn't have given us enough variety, so we had hot and sour soup, tangerine peel chicken, eggplant in garlic sauce, and fried bananas for desert. Yum!

Chef Chu's was my intro to Szechuan cooking when I first came out to California for grad school, 29 years ago.

Coming home, I found that the VIA board had successfully started up X, after the various network-dependent processes timed out. Thus encouraged, I hacked on it for a while and discovered that the onboard ethernet was now eth2. Go figure. I think it has something to do with the hotplug code that I stopped using because it seemed flaky. But it works now: not super fast, but more useable than its predecessor, and totally silent.

The runtime on my UPS is now down from somewhere north of 45 minutes to 39; not too bad, considering.

Hopefully I'll be able to get back to actual (music) work soon.