Month: January 2008

Looks like my adventurous daughter is having lots of fun in Australia. Traveling so far away while still young is not easy, but as you can tell from the picture below, she's making the best of it. In a couple months she'll be back.

Those regular ssh attacks to my web server have been bugging me now for some time. Those jerks needed to be taught a lesson.

This evening I gathered up my courage and decided to finally do something about it. Printed out a document about firewalling, studied them well and became an expert in no time.

So I fired up the good old PF packet filter firewall, added a simple pass rule which inserts the baddies into a table, blocking them for good.

That's more like it.

One of the most important phases of growing up occurs during early puberty when one makes the painful discovery that ones parents are not as perfect and invincible as once imagined.

The natural reaction to this is to revolt by becoming even more independent in an exaggerated way, resulting in increased irascibility, fits of anger, and being against everything for the sake of proving some imagined point.

For parents this is a most difficult period, but realizing that this is a natural path to becoming oneself and surviving better in the big bad world, makes it just a little bit easier to deal with.

Ironically, once they grow up and become adults going off to live on their own, that is when they become closer again and feel an urge to come back more often than not.

Well I finally finished the long and daunting Dan Simmons tetrology Hyperion Cantos consisting of the following four books: Hyperion (482 pages), The Fall of Hyperion (517 pages), Endymion (563 pages) and The Rise of Endymion (709 pages).

After having made my way through these 2271 pages, I would not dare expose whether or not The Shrike made it nor what important role he ended up playing together with Aenea, Raul Endymion and the blue android A. Bettik and the survival of the universe, not to mention Old Earth.

Looks mean but has a good soul.

Developing a sense of a separate, anonymous self is a never-ending pursuit which should never be neglected, otherwise one runs the risk of doing and thinking what one wrongly assumes are the opinions of others.

More often than not so many people unknowingly think that they want to do what others might expect of them rather than what they really want to do let alone what they really are meant to become.