Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Ptah Aegyptus' LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, May 9th, 2006
9:41 am	Gawd I am SO pathetic... I had gotten the Sims computer game ages ago, and got around to installing and playing with it. Intriguing, but a bit limited and a lot of bother, although my belief that a certain control-freak aunt-in-law ought to be given a copy to keep her out of everyone's hair WAS confirmed. I then decided to get The Sims II a month ago to see what the improvements were. Been too busy until last week to install and run it. MUUUCH better! You can actually DESIGN the sims themselves, and I had a lot of fun doing that. I'm a lot more pathetic at building houses, but I got something together that was affordable for the sims I made, since there are few starter homes in the supplied worlds. Played Friday night, half of Saturday, Sunday evening until 12, AND last night until 12 also. *yawns* I get up this morning, thinking I'm a bit too involved in the game, and rolling over in my mind why that is. Then it hit me: the young woman I designed looks exactly like what I thought the daughter we lost in my wife's seventh month would look like. *bangs head on floor* Half of me wants to say, "That's pathetic!", while the other half wants to post screencaps. Current Mood: ditzy (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 4th, 2006
8:16 am	I hate it when this happens... Okay, so here I am, thinking that I've whipped the sin of Lust, and just have Anger to work on, only to be informed last night that I've got a problem with Sloth. Sloth! I don't DO sloth! My BROTHER does sloth. #2 son (and virtual CLONE of my brother) does sloth. Me? Do Sloth? *sigh* The bad news: Yes. The good news: Things like this have a natural order of solution: to get from A to C, you gotta go through B. Very likely Anger's a problem that can't be solved until Sloth is. *sigh* conducting a psycho-religious revolution is tough work, but somebody's gotta do it... (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, April 28th, 2006
10:14 am	*sighs* poor kid... I felt kinda sorry for #1 son last Wednesday: he had a project in Spanish class, and told the teacher it would be the Mexican Capital Building in popsicle sticks. Ya heard that right. Popsicle sticks. His partner would do the write-up. I went on the internet and found the Mexican Palacio Nacionale: impressively WIDE, but a bit thin on the deep side. Still, I went ahead and printed some pictures and gave them to him. When he started building it, it was in the form of a HEXAGON. I kinda kept my silence as he went through several versions of the floor before he settled on what looked like a nice and orderly layout: I may have been mistaken, and he was building the Capital building of Mexico CITY, which could have been a different building. He built the floor, roof, walls, and even added the front entrance. Looked impressive. Last Wednesday, he comes to me in a panic: He can't find again on the internet where the picture was that was the model for the building, and he didn't think to download the picture to his harddrive. I looked through his disk caches, Internet explorer caches, and found nothing. Then I looked at his Ask.com search criteria and discovered a misspelling. I corrected it, and he whooped when he saw it in the search results. I clicked on it so I could save it and print it out on our color printer. (Ink jet printers are razors. The cartridges are the blades. However, the printers are priced like blades, while the cartridges are priced like razors.) I took one look at that picture, and MAN, he had done a GREAT JOB. The building was circular, rather than hexogonal, but other than that and the stucco coloring, it was a Terrific representation of the Capitol Building. Of NEW MEXICO STATE. In SANTA FE, not Mexico City. We couldn't find him for 15 minutes, and were worried he might have done something foolish to himself, but it turned out he had gone out running to work out his frustrations. I thought he had gone out back to work out his frustrations wielding his sledgehammer on that Piggly Wiggly shopping basket that had mysteriously shown up perched on our diving board several months ago. My wife argued he probably could quickly convert it into the six sided FOUNTAIN that's in the courtyard of the Palacio Nacional, but instead, he opted to take the project in a day in advance, show it to the spanish teacher, admit he goofed up (his partner was the one who told him which one it was, but it turns out he hadn't gone Googling himself either, and had BSed my son to preserve his ego), and asked for more time. *I* spent the evening locating and printing out pictures of the building. Man, it was GOOD. The teacher couldn't give more time, but told him to do the report himself, and his "partner" would have to write on the Palacio Nacionale alone, all by himself. Well, not quite all by himself: I spent THURSDAY evening locating references on the internet to the building, it's history, and its contents, and shooting the links to him via my Son's MSN IM account. Which is why I haven't responded to ANYONE yet. Oh, and the connection to Mexico? It used to be Mexican territory, but the US walked in and captured the region with hardly a fight after declaring war on Mexico in the 1840s. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 26th, 2006
5:23 pm	*BANGS HEAD* Yeah, yeah, I should have commented before this. what's to blame? Work. School. Sports. Only TWO mento/religous revolutions. Tends to make a man busy. Now the REAL reason for this post: it seems that when I moved sixies.net to a new webhoster, they had mucked up the e-mail reader I was using. To make my ptah@sixies.net e-mail addy work, I had to cross some wires in my configuration of the domain to uncross THEIR crossed wires and make everything work. Well, about October of 2005, they figured out that they had goofed up, and so uncrossed THEIR wires, but without telling ME to uncross MY wires, sending all e-mails sent to that e-mail addy to go into the deep-ether. Feh. And here I was, thinking how WONDERFUL their anti-spam filters were... (What happened sorta resembled what happened that kept Mr. Hyde from turning back to Dr. Jekyll.) ALL wires are uncrossed now, and I apologize if anyone with accounts with sixies.net couldn't get in touch with me. I've also sent e-mails to those owning accounts. Current Mood: distressed (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 13th, 2005
1:33 pm	Excellent!!!! I changed the DNS entry for sixies.net at about 9:03 AM this morning, and its already percolated through to my ISP's DNS. I tried linking to nightflower's site using the old URL (http://www.sixies.net/~nightflower), and it popped right up correctly to http://nightflower.sixie.net! Huzzah! Go to http://www.sixies.net: if the latest update is August 13, then your DNS has already updated. Two internet tricks were involved. The first was domain parking: I replicated the existing sixies.net web tree to http://sixies.sixie.net, and gave it the ability to park a domain. Today, I not only changed the DNS of sixies.net, but I "parked" it on top of http://sixies.sixie.net: all traffic going to sixies.net now goes to sixies.sixie.net, but your URL doesn't change. The second was URL re-direction: the following went into the site ".htaccess" file: RedirectMatch permanent ^/~nightflower(.*)$ http://nightflower.sixie.net$1 If you try going to "http://www.sixies.net/~nightflower/amanda_sword.jpg", the web server sees the "/~nightflower" after the web site name, takes everything afterwards up to the end (that's the "(.*)$", which matches the "/amanda_sword.jpg" part, then permanently redirects the source browser to go to "http://nightflower.sixie.net/amanda_sword.jpg" (the $1 means put in the stuff matched by the first left parenthesis). Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
Saturday, August 6th, 2005
7:11 am	Update on Sixies.net move I was tied up doing charity work for a local school, so I wasn't fully prepared to do the switchover. It's postponed to 9:00 AM August 13. (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 28th, 2005
6:25 am	I am on Vacation time today... ...and intent to pursue a policy of agressive indolence, with the exception of getting the C6 DVDs in the mail to Black Inque. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, July 22nd, 2005
5:55 pm	More info on the move... Already moved some people to sixie.net. Nightflower asked how I was going to handle the broken urls. Here's how: Since the sixies.org fiasco, I've spent the money to register my domain names with domain name registrars (register.com my-account-manager.com, etc.) These register my domain name and give me the ability to change the domain Name Service records myself. When you buy a domain name from an ISP, THEY control the DNS records themselves. One VERY important DNS record is a set of pointers to the ISP name servers. If a browser wants to know where sixies.net is, they go to the DNS name server, look up the nameserver for sixies.net, THEN goes to that nameserver to ask for the IP address. Whoever controls who the nameserver is for sixies.net controls who hosts sixies.net. If you're with an ISP, you MUST set the nameserver for your domain to the nameserver of the ISP, because he knows what IP address of the computer hosting your website is. By controlling the DNS records, the ISP can prevent you from using another ISP, since he will make sure the nameservers for your domain do not point to any other ISP's nameservers except his own. But, since I registered my domain name, and did not let someone else register it, I control when I can change and ISP. So, I create a sixies.net account on my new ISP, set it up with the Dr. Zack's Townhouse website, and change the DNS record for the sixies.net domain name to point to the nameservers of the new ISP, not the ones belonging to the old ISP. the change purcolates through the world in a few days, and soon everyone visiting the site will go to the new ISP. Even e-mail going to the old site will go to the new one. Before I do that, though, I set up my .htaccess file in the public_html directory of the new site to do URL re-directs. The skinny is here. It's all part of the design of the Apache web-server, which my ISP is using. Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 17th, 2005
2:21 pm	SIXIES.NET Announcement. Okay, everyone who has, or had, an account at sixies.net or sixies.org, read this! I'm getting annoyed by some of the problems with the hoster of sixies.net: frundock's site has become unreadable, and the oekaki and carpsy's sites are zeroed out. Enough is enough! Time to MOVE ON! Enter Sixie.net! I'm scheduling moving the IP of sixies.net from wyenet to the new host at 7:00 AM, Aug. 6. BIG improvments in privacy, manageability, and features! I'll be able to host some local organizations, like my church website and my boys' websites, with no incremental cost to me, which was the big drawback with the old system. Details are here, at sixie.net (not sixies.net!) I'll be moving those with existing websites to the new isp myself: not a problem. However, passwords can't be moved, so you won't be able to update them until I give you the new password. At the moment, all I want are current e-mails of everyone, along with user names (domains will be .sixies.net, like tripod/angelfire) and passwords. I'm taking a lot of time because I want to make sure I get hold of everyone. syberkat, I know you gave me an e-mail before, but could you e-mail it to me again? Sakura, could you please give a big hug to Dragonkey for me and let her know about the move? Forgive me if I butt into some people's threads to make sure they get the news I'm finally able to do this because **sound of trumpets** the big project that sent me to Edmonton lo these last few years is 10 xerox pages away from being completed! I'm actually GETTING MY LIFE BACK! Hoorah! (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 11th, 2005
8:07 am	What's worse than hate? Giving someone PERMISSION and a REASON to hate. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, April 8th, 2005
2:19 pm	*pant* *pant* I don't mind being, umm, "popular". But there is a point when I don't want to be TOO popular... Current Mood: Overworked (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 7th, 2005
8:04 am	Hiya... Work's bumped up another notch: as if I wasn't busy enough.  sigh.  At least baseball season for #2 son is over.  The team won region title, which is pretty good. I've been running a server out of my house for a long while, and finally came to the conclusion that renting an unmanaged server to replace sixies.net holds too many pitfalls.  A managed server costs more than I'd like to spend, and it would be quite bare-bones.  And there is the issue of backups to think about.  Well, while looking around, I found AceNet, and decided to try their reseller-plus package.  So far, I am quite impressed:  10GB space vs 5GB now, 100GB bandwidth vs 30GB now.  no limits on a lot of stuff, or pretty high limits.  And the cost is the same as the existing account, with the potential, if I pay ahead of time, to save $10.00 a month.  OR, I could upgrade to the next level, get 20GB space and 200GB bandwidth, pay ahead, and pay only $35.00/month.  I can handle a $5 increase, no problem. They have a special now that is much better than our current account, but I want to be able to host multiple websites with independent domain names.  Thus, I could host www.hate-love.net if Anay still had it. They offer CPanel.  I was wondering what the big to-do about it was, and now I know: it is one cool control panel system!  the one I use now is a custom one, and the difference shows.  Would you believe, if Java is enabled, that it provides an HTML editor?  You can actually edit the website AT THE WEBSITE using the file manager. Security is VERY well done: much better than what I could do on my own.  Downside: getting/granting ssh access is a pain: you have to fax/email a driver's license.  However, the account structure and CPanel features combine to lessen the pain: you can execute shell scripts from CGI scripts, and thus sorta do some of what you need ssh for.  For instance, I was able to take a look at the underlying Unix directory structure.  I'm sure I can move the site over using this trick without ssh. More later.  I'm too busy to really work on moving everything now.  Just playing around right now. Current Mood: busy (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 12th, 2005
8:23 pm	About Sixies.net Ummm, it appears that I let the domain name lapse on the 8th, so the name servers booted it. Luckily, I was notified via my old lycos.com e-mail, and revived it. Site's back now. By the way, I'm thinking of moving everything to a new server: It'll ALL be for ourselves (snicker), and can even host independent domain names. Still counting the cost, and will not be real sure for a while, but everyone please be sure to update your e-mail addys on your websites. Wuf y'all! (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 22nd, 2004
1:06 pm	My life is pathetic... The most exciting thing I'm able to come up with, at the moment, is sorting out M&Ms by color and eating batches of greens, oranges, yellows, browns, blues, and reds at one time. Paaaaatheic! But, I must count my blessings: A visit to the Emergency room would be exciting, but I'd prefer the M&Ms to THAT. Current Mood: Pathetic, I tell ya, pathetic (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 15th, 2004
9:36 am	I hate Walmart... WTF??? Christmas decorations on sale BEFORE HALLOWEEN? Will all the people shitting on Thanksgiving please STOP? Right now, at this very moment, this is the time of year when the people who have good reasons to be thankful for their blessings and celebrate their productivity should be making plans to help those who haven't been as fortunate this year. C'mon! Let's give them a good reason to count, On Thanksgiving, the blessing of having considerate and charitable neighbors. Current Mood: irritated (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 11th, 2004
7:58 pm	Life at 50, part 1 It probably was creeping up on me anyhow: the fact that life started getting busier and busier, and slowly there is less and less time for me. I suppose I could eke out more time by being hard-nosed, but that would mean shutting out time with family and church. Then again, I DO get pleasure from those sources, so I guess I must be feeling the lack of variety. Still, it DOES suck when I realize that Saturdays are the only real big block of time I have available, and it's spent cleaning up, washing clothes, working on the pool, working on the yard. At least soon I'll be closing the pool and winter will make it unnecessary to work in the yard, but still, things always seem to keep needing attention and I never seem to get the sense of being DONE with anything anymore. Strange that I never realized how apropos is the analogy of life to the weaver's shuttle: back and forth, back and forth, yet seeming never to go anywhere. Still, the analogy implies that progress is being made in an orthogonal dimension, in the form of the carpet/cloth being woven. I very much doubt that the shuttle itself is in any position to see what's being created. I have to take it on faith that The Weaver knows what He is doing, and that what's being weaved is beautiful and worth the *seeming* meaningless of it all. Current Mood: contemplative (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, September 27th, 2004
7:42 am	Predictability... Someone just tried to insult me by implying they could predict my reaction in a specific area. Actually, it's a compliment since I strive to be predictable in every facet of my life. In my mind, predictability ==> Reliability. The mystique of unpredictability is overblown. It also sets people up to be surprised when I display more facets than they give me credit for, since people delude themselves into thinking that they understand the whole when in fact they only have, with my active help, comprehended only a small part. Felix the cat's bag of tricks only LOOKS small. Thought for today: Each facet of the cut diamond is flat and has straight sides. But is the diamond comprehended in its entirety if only one facet is grasped? Current Mood: amused (Comment on this)
Monday, September 20th, 2004
9:07 am	Thanks y'all!! Appreciate the good wishes, and hope to keep engaged.... I don't normally mention my birthday, but this last one was for the BIG FIVE-OH! Yep, 50 years. About a billion seconds. Old fogey time. Now, for the pithy observation of Sunday: We always go to a Chinese Buffet restaurant Sundays after Church. Recently, the menu has included a rather tasty item called "Happy Chicken." Make no mistake about it, it IS tasty, although not as good as their honey chicken. However, It DOES make me think a bit morbidly: I mean, is the chicken REALLY HAPPY? How happy could you be after getting diced, boiled, breaded, fried, soaked in sauce and served in a stainless steel bucket? Tasty, yes! Happy? Hardly! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, September 18th, 2004
11:15 am	Well, guess what??? Today's my B-day. Got a cool programmable watch from my brother, some shirts and food from my mom, and my family got me a Zire 31 PDA. I'm downloading software now from palmsoft to program it in C. Been a long while since I updated this journal, so I think I'll try and put in one personal saying or observation each day. Here's one that's been with me for a couple of weeks: The key to action is the body. Well, I didn't say I'd MAKE SENSE. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 3rd, 2004
7:59 am	O.o??? WIERD dream... Not much to it. I was visiting the Sixies in Edmonton, at the park where we went the time before last, and Anay said she desperately needed some help on something. Okay, I said, and we PRACTICED DANCING MINUETS for the rest of the dream. The rest of the Sixies who were there cracked jokes... Sheesh, the things my subconscious is willing to do for my friends... (3 Comments |Comment on this)