Hugh's Worthless Blog

Well, at least the city of St. Louis has one sports team to cheer for this fall. The Cards have won five in a row (okay, it was over the Rockies and Brewers, but still it's five in a row!) so they should hopefully keep up the momentum going into the playoffs. They looked a big sluggish the week or so before, so I was worried they might just coast through the rest of the season since they knew they had won the division. But luckily I was wrong and they are not coasting at all. If the starting pitching can keep up and Scott Rolen can get healthy in time we should have a good playoff run. But some folks who are running on a slow cruise control speed are the Rams defense. They looked pretty pathetic in the last two games against some okay but not top notch offenses (Atlanta and New Orleans). Mike Martz continues to make idiotic calls since he believes we can pass our way to victory on every play and that our defense can actually stop somebody. Our rushing defense in particular looks...

First off, it appears that now my wife's GMail account has finally received her 6 free invites, as has my sons' account. Plus I have 6, my daughter has 6 and the account I set up to catch the department's spam has earned 6 too! That makes a grand total of 30 GMail accounts for my whole family. These things multiply like rabbits! I've asked some folks here in the department if they want one and they amazingly aren't interested. Go figure. Well, WUARCHIVE's RAID controller died, but it sounds like we will be getting a new box by the end of October. Since I really am not in charge of things I'll have to see what new box we are getting. Hopefully it will be back up soon, and with much more modern hardware (and I bet it will run Linux.) On the sports front the Cards won game number 100 last night. Let's just hope they keep going strong into the playoffs.

Well, in typical fashion the Cards came from behind and won late in the game over the Brewers, claiming absolute control over the NL Central as the Cubs split a doubleheader. With 98 wins now, they will likely end the regular season with 102~106 wins, the best in the majors unless the Yankess end on a tear. Hopefully their starting pitching can win them through the playoffs. We will see. I have been noticing increased traffic on my Linux Mirrors site, primarily from folks who download the new Knoppix 3.7 ISO from PC-Welt magazine. It looks like most of the references are actually coming from this worthless blog! Wow, is someone really reading this? My Feather Linux ISO mirror there has always been pretty popular (especially after every release, like the recent 0.5.9 version this week), but the other distros were pretty low in traffic. Now Knoppix is using up more bandwidth than Feather Linux (especially since its ISO is so much larger). The 3.7 release is pretty neat. English speak...

Well, Google has replenished my supply of GMail invites to 6 again, and surprisingly my daughter received 6 although her account has hardly been used. My wife's account (which was started the same day as my daughter's) did not receive any, although she has been using it as her primary e-mail account now. So I am not sure how they decide to give out invites to people. It seems odd. In any case, my wife is ready to make her GMail account her primary account, and I am as well since my primary personal e-mail server at hughchou.org has been really flakey lately. Even our departmental server at the university has a 4GB filesystem for over 100 e-mail accounts. At GMail I get 1/4 of that all to myself. Amazing. I have even started to divert all our departmental spam to a special GMail account. Why use up our own disk space, when we can use GMail?

Well, the Cardinals have statistically won the NL Central Division, but they remain in a recent rut. The lack of Scott Rolen doesn't help, but for some reason they couldn't even sweep the Diamondbacks yesterday. Their starting pitching has been in a bit of a slump the last couple weeks, and the bats a little cooler than usual. Let's hope things pick up with the Brewers series starting today. They did win 2 of 3 from the Diamondbacks this weekend, but us spoiled Cards fans are now used to them sweeping teams like that. Whereas the Cardinals still have 14 more games this season to redeem themselves, the Rams are looking not too impressive. After a shaky win over the hapless Arizona Cardinals, they lost with gusto to the Falcons yesterday. Despite a nice 3rd quarter comeback they faltered at the end, when the fairly solid looking Falcon defense knew they were going to throw, throw, throw. With Bulger always going for the jugular with Bruce or Holt, they knew who to cover, a...

Our lovely old UltraSPARC server's RAID controller seems to be on the blink and WUARCHIVE is temporarily out of service. This is a pretty old UltraSPARC 2 system with a recent addition of disks, but still old! Since I help support the archive I was sad to see it go. Hopefully it will be back up soon. In the meantime, people looking for Linux distribution ISO images can check out my site here .

The Knoppix folks in Germany just released version 3.7, but only as included in the German mag PC-Welt. Luckily someone ripped it into an ISO image and posted it as a torrent, so anyone can grab it at my Linux mirrors site . eNews has reported that the Mozilla folks are also just about ready to release the first "final" version of Firefox. Frankly, I think 0.93 is multiples or orders of magnitude better than IE anyway, so I'm curious to see what they add in 1.0.

I was curious how long it would take, and after only 6 days of using Gmail, I received 6 invites, so I signed up my wife and two lovely kiddies (who had been using Yahoo mail before), but still have three left. I'll have to say after using Gmail for a few days it is has some really nice features I like more than Yahoo mail, so I'll probably be using it more. I had originally started this blog since I heard if you had a blog at blogger.com you'd get an invite, but I don't think I have received one yet that way. Oh well...

Well, depsite having a less than impressive 2-4 road trip, the Cards won last night over the Dodgers to prevent a sweep. Still 17 games ahead of the Cubs and Astros, they should lock the division title sometime this week. The Rams beat the Arizona Cardinals in football as expected, but not without some bad turnovers, and with only one TD over a medicore Arizona defense. At least it was good to see Faulk make some good runs, and Stephen Jackson looked very good too.

Amazing, I finally have my own Gmail account . It seems like a pretty nice Web interface, but it will take some time to mess with and test out to compare to my Yahoo Mail Account. I actually got it completely free from a kind fellow on eBay who was giving them out totally free. It is a shame that folks are actually selling invites when this is supposed to be a free service. Once I actually have invites to give out, I will have to find a novel way to give them out, after I set one up for my wife, kids, the cat and possibly kind folks here at my university department...

Warren has officially released the 2004.01 version of SimplyMEPIS (which had been available publicly since August 27) on the MEPIS Home page . It is really a well put together 1 CD distribution. The Cardinals won again too, lowering their magic number to 10. How are these related? They aren't except that I think they are both good news, and this is my blog so deal with it.

hello people.i am alive.please send pictures of your kool cars to www.hughchou.org cause we like 'em.

It is Labor Day and time for another worthless post. The Cardinals are still winning, having swept both the Padres and the Dodgers, and Mandrake just released 10.1 RC1. Interested parties can download it here . Otherwise, nothing of note has occurred except for disaster and destruction in Florida and in Russia.