signifying nothing.

I just finished "Mission of Honor" by David Weber. The last book that has been published in the "Honor Harrington" series. I started this series because the other series that I was reading didn't have any new books out.

So now, I have yet another series that I am waiting for an author to publish the next book in. Yup, I did it to myself, again.

Books I am currently waiting for:

"Cold Days" of "The Dresden Files". Like any good author that isn't done with a series, Jim Butcher has left us hanging with what in the heck is going to happen next. "The Dresden Files" is currently my favorite series of books.

A Memory of Light" of "The Wheel of Time" series. This should be the last book in said series. Brandon Sanderson has done an awesome job taking this series over after the death of Robert Jordan. Based on his treatment of these books, I am tempted to pick up his "Mistborne" series. I am pretty sure that if I do that I will end up adding his other books to my library as well.

I initially started these series to be fillers while I waited for Jim Butcher and Brandon Sanderson to publish the next books in their series. Now I am torn as to which one I wish would come out next.

"Tricked" of "The Iron Druid Chronicles". Kevin Hearne and Jim Butcher I think both had the same teachers when it comes to endings to books.

"Raven Calls" of "The Walker Papers" by C. E. Murphy. Is anyone else noticing a trend of "Urban Fantasy" here? "The Iron Druid Chronicles", "The Walker Papers" and "The Dresden Files" are all about magic users set in our current history and society. They each approach it from a slightly different perspective, a crossover with all three would probably break the world, in more ways than one.

"A Rising Thunder" the next in the Honorverse of David Weber. This has been a very good series for me. I'm not sure if it is because I have been listening to the audiobooks of it or just because the writing is that good, or more likely, a combination of both, but I find myself having some very emotional reactions to things that happen in the book to various characters.

"A Song of Ice and Fire" or "The Game of Thrones" books by George R. R. Martin. I like these books, but due to the frequency, or lack there of, at which he releases new titles, I am not exactly looking forward to this with bated breath. For reasons that others who have read the books will understand, I personally beleive that the end of the series will end in a massive cracking of the world, killing everyone.

The problem now, is that none of these authors are due to release anything in these series for the next several months. So what is an addict to do? I am most likely going to take a page from what I used to do every year. I would re-read "The Dresden Files" books, normally timed so that I would finish the last book just before the new one was published. Thankfully, I think, I have plenty of books to get through if I want to get all of them done again.

• "The Dresden Files", 13 books.
• "The Wheel of Time", 13 books.
• "The Honorverse", 12 books.
• "The Walker Papers", 6 books.
• "The Iron Druid Chronicles", 3 books.

That should keep me busy for a while, right? If not I can go back and read the 6 books in the "Codex Alera" series also by Jim Butcher again. And if even that is not enough to keep me occupied until one of these authors publishes another book, I do have plenty of other books to read. I could also spend some time getting my entire library dumped into goodreads.com.

I saw this in an opensource operating system support channel on a popular IRC network today.

user1 | how do I automount a HDD on boot? putting "sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/backup" in .bashrc probably wont work, since its a sudo command?
user2 | user1: man fstab has good instructions.
user1 | can I just add /dev/sdb1 /mnt/backup to the end of it? without all those ext3 and other specs in the end
user2 | no. you need some of them options, or it won't be valid.
user2 | also, you might well want to find out the UUID of the filesystem.
user1 | ouch
user1 | considering making one big LVM of all my disks

I know that I should have jumped into this conversation, but... I was at a loss at how to approach the level of the lack of understanding of things that I consider basic. I want people to realize that there are alternatives to closed systems. I want people to experiment, to learn. But I shudder when things like this come up.

That someone knows enough to be able to use 'LVM' in a sentance, but doesn't know how to use /etc/fstab scares the hell out of me.

There is a petition over at We the People, the White House online petition website asking for an investigation into statements made by Chris Dodd of the MPAA regarding funding for politicians.

The story has been picked up in a few places.

While I am probably just a little jaded and think this won't actually accomplish anything, I also think this may actually get the ball rolling, if enough people actually get involved. I would really, really like for our elected representatives to actually listen to us instead of basing decisions on how much money they can get for the reelection campaign.

For those of you that play World of Warcraft, Lunar Festival has started today. For those of you that know my wife, you may have some sympathy for what I am going to be putting up with.

Who knows, I may even get some of that achievement done myself, at least on a couple characters.

Thomas Gideon mentioned duply today. Since I used duplicity a few years ago for backups, I think I may have to take a look at it.

Aleksey Tsalolikhin over on the LOPSA mailing list mentioned nwdiag for drawing out network diagrams. Aleksey asked a little while ago on the mailing list about network diagram tools and I had suggested graphviz since I had used that along with some perl scripting to mangle 'show cdp neighbors' out of a couple of routers to get a network diagram of sorts.

Now I am looking forward to poking at this while at work on Monday to see if I can get an easier to use/maintain network map going.

Linked on the same site is another tool, rackdiag, which I can see great potential for as well.

Here we go again, blowing up the blog, going back to nanoblogger. I know that I keep saying that doing things to my blog is about trying to actually USE this as a place to keep notes, ideas, whatever. And that it keeps falling short of that. Much like my goals of getting organized. But if I don't try, I can't improve. So, here we go again.