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Mindless Conversation

Paintball

I used to play paintball years ago (around 2002-2003). I was never very good, but it was fun and was a way to spent time with friends and be outdoors for the afternoon. Recently I have been playing with co-workers, and a few friends. I have two markers, a Spyder Aggressor XT and a Spyder Pilot ACS, allowing me to play and loan one to a friend. The Aggressor XT is a semi-auto while the Pilot is an electonic marker (allowing for semi, 3 shot burst, 6 shot burst and full auto). I am having fun playing with the markers and upgrading parts here and there as I break or wear out the bits and pieces. I have gotten a new barrel for the Pilot, replace o-rings on both markers, and made other repairs.
I have been really having fun. Each upgrade, or tweak to the markers improves the capabilities of the marker. Actionvillage.com is a great place to find parts, markers and other paintball equipment. If you have a Kingman Spyder, the Spyder forums are a good place to get information, and ottersccustoms.com is a good place to read up on upgrading your marker.
Even with the upgrades I wouldn’t say I have gotten any better, but I have been having fun. I think that is the most important part.

Wifi on the Cheap and virtual machines

I am not able to run cabling through the walls and floors at my house (my parents frown at me cutting holes in the walls and stringing cable from room to room). Because of this, I use wireless networking. I have a WRT54G v4 router (using DD-WRT)located at one end of the house (Windstream would only allow me to install the DSL drop at the most useless location.) I need to have wireless access in the opposite side on the house, so I upgraded the antennas with 7dbi rubber ducks from Hyperlink Technologies. This greatly improved the signal through the house but my Powerbook still has a weak signal. Thinking a little directionality would solve the problem I found the wave surfer, it is free and you just need some aluminum foil to put on the back of the reflector. Fit the reflector over the antenna and you have instant directional antennas.

On another note, I have been playing with Xen. It is a Hypervisor for virtualization, and will work with windows and Linux VMs. I have been using the Citrix XenServer Express version to test different setups. I have to say that I am impressed, the Xen software was easy to setup. I did have a problem with the install program not seeing the CD install media. A quick change to installing from a HTTP server fixed the problem and off I went. I was able to install Windows and Linux. I used CentOS 5.1 for the linux install, which popped up another bug (Feature?) in which I was installing the linux distro from an ISO image across a samba share. For some reason when installing the linux images the user logged into the samba share must have read and write permissions, even though the share is mounted as retinal. After fixing the permissions on the server the system started and installed centigrade. Now I have to learn if there are limitations and what, generally, can be done with Xen

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