From the looks of it right now, I've made up my mind who to vote for.

I can't totally rule out a change in that stance but I haven't yet seen anything that'll convince me that either one of these guys will provide any meaningful leadership and not drag us ever closer to a Socialist/Marxist nanny state.

I've changed the look of the blog. The old one was just thrown up as a quick solution when I switched to a different CMS and I've never been truly happy with it. Until now I hadn't found anything that I liked any better though. This one I kinda like, at least as a starting point.

Only a couple points of contention that need to be dealt with.

1. For some reason, the Currently Reading block (now on the left) on the doesn't seem to be grabbing it's title from the database. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but

I know this goes back quite a few years, but I love this song and was recently reminded of it.

If you've never heard it, read the lyrics and sing along at http://filkertom-itom.blogspot.com/2008/03/sounds-familiar-sheep-marketi....

If you heard it years ago, just relax, sit back and revel in all of it's sheepy goodness.

For whatever reason, I've started playing with Twitter. I'm still not sure why.

No - that's not entirely true. It started out with the thought that it might be an interesting way to keep folks informed about what my business is doing. So I set up an account under my company name. Then I figured I might as well set one up for personal stuff too. Why not, huh?

So if you're among the Twitter-inclined (and have any desire to do so), you can follow me at http://twitter.com/lorenlang. And if you want to follow developments at [……]

As some of you may know, I own and operate a small web solutions company (hosting, design, custom programming, etc.) and it is primarily powered by the Apache web server. Fair warning, what follows is techie crap and may make your eyes glaze over if you're not so inclined.

Best practice in system administration is to pare down the optional stuff running on your systems so as to free up as many of the resources as possible for the tasks that need to be performed. Uninstalling (or at least not running) services and daemons that aren't needed is a [……]

Apparently, there's a shell history thread making its way around the tech blogs and Dr. Bacchus put in his two cents. So in the spirit of "if you don't even really care about trying to beat them, you might as well join them," I submit mine from my web server:

[llang@jwsinteractive1 ~]# history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
274 ls
126 cd
104 vim
40 rm
32 cp
26 mv
20 mkdir
20 locate
19 ftp
19 exit

Being a remote server for a fledgling web business, I've spent [……]

This post on a friend's blog got my writing blood flowing again. This time, there's actually some substance to my rambling, which should scare anyone who knows me.

There are a couple of problems with the Second Amendment debate in this country beyond the fact that there is even a debate to begin with:

First, too many on the left view all guns to be bad and think that getting rid of them will reduce gun crimes. This is a naïve argument at best and fails to acknowledge that criminals by definition break the law and breaking one more isn't [……]

This site is hosted on a friend's server and last week it decided that it was tired and needed a nap.

I was editing a script and it started getting really slow. Then he logged in and it was REALLY slow. Eventually, it stopped responding at all and he couldn't log in at all. I was still logged in to my editing session and eventually vim crashed. It segfaulted when I tried to restart it. And I was pretty much dead in the water. A few bash internal commands worked but most things either segfaulted or complained that they could [……]

Those dudes in the Wendy's wigs freak me out more than that creepy, plastic-headed king ever did.

Toward the end of last year, I purchased a couple items from an online electronics vendor. I knew that they wouldn't arrive in time for Christmas but that wasn't a big issue. But since then, certain suspicions have been firmly cemented in my mind.

The vendor used something called FedEx SmartPost in which the package is sent via their FedEx account but delivered by the good ol' US Postal Service. This is only the second time I've bought something from this vendor but last time it came via FedEx Ground the whole way. And I was able to track it's progress, [……]