I have a remote server running Ubuntu that I rarely use. I pay something like thirty bucks a month to have it and really only use it as a squid proxy to get around my office’s firewall and in public wifi situations where I might need some privacy.

I’ve been using the anonymous proxy service, Tor for about three years. I don’t use it regularly, but I like having it around and knowing it’s there to use. Every once and a while, I see a reason to use it, but it’s the idea of Tor that has me installing it on all my computers.

So, I decided that I should install Tor on my underused server to give a little back to the service. By installing Tor, my server joins the many others out there, providing anonymous gateways to the web, without leaving traces. I’ve no idea what people may do using Tor through my server—be it shady or innocent, which is good because this lack of knowledge keeps me from being liable for any misuse.

While I was going through the grind of getting Tor running properly, I also decided to install Boinc, or the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (phew!). I’ve been contributing to the Seti@home project, assisting in the search for extraterrestrial intellignece for about four years with my desktop computers. Since the server is always on, I figured it was a great idea. Trying to run a boinc client via command line is pretty fucking annoying, but once I found a decent howto, I was up and running pretty fast.

I also attached the boinc client on my server to the Rosetta@home project, calculating the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins so that researches can hopefully find some cures for various diseases.

Fun.

This past weekend, I bit the bed-rail and picked up a copy of World of WarCraft. Having been a moderate EverQuest and EQ2 junkie, I’d thought I quit the MMORPG habit cold, but after seeing some statistics stating that over fifty percent of the MMORPG players worldwide are on WoW, I decided to give it a try. It seems the numerous weekends spent chained to a computer, fingers nervously twitching from an overdose of caffeine, nicotine and sleep deprivation while farming beasts to improve my leather-working skills was just not enough for me.

As with EQ, the install and initial update took well over an hour to finish and the monthly account fee is the same fifteen bucks I could be donating to save some village of crippled, blind children in Africa, but hey…I’m already going to Hell anyway.

In EQ, my main was a Wood-Elf Druid and I really got to liking the soloing capabilities of that class, so in keeping with tradition, I chose a Night-Elf Druid to be my first character. The huge Minotaur-like Tauren, Trolls, Orcs and Undead were really appealing since I generally like to keep it evil, but I decided to stick with what I know, at least for now. I’ve played Druids for about two years and I know that class’s place, alone or in groups pretty down-pat. Tree-hugger, I am not, but I know what I know.

I was very surprised to see how very similar WoW is to EQ2. The gameplay and mechanics are in many ways nearly the same. You’d think someone at Sony would’ve sued by now. Maybe they have or perhaps Sony ripped off someone else first—I’ve no idea, but the similarities had me up and running right away, killing and running all over the place.

The only real differences I see—aside from the basic stuff like graphics, races and zones is that questing seems to be better set up in WoW. I rarely finished any quests in EQ, but over the course of the weekend, I’d managed to get something over twenty complete quests under my belt in WoW. In a matter of a few hours (I did get some sleep), I managed to work my way up to level 12.

I missed MMORPGs. There’s a reason EQ was dubbed EverCrack. I’m not sure what the slang for WoW would be…”WarCrack”? I’m not sure how long I’m willing to invest in playing WoW, but for now, I’m all about it. If you’re in the neighborhood, drop me a /tell. My main’s name is Abbath (ripped straight from the Norwegian Black Metal gods, Immortal) on the Anvilmar server.

Last night, I came home and booted my Kubuntu box as I usually do. About five minutes into checking my email, my beloved and enormous CRT monitor went black. I tried Alt+F’ing to a command line, thinking it was an X issue, but I couldn’t get anything on the monitor. So, I tried a reboot—no luck. All I had was a blank and black screen, yet the little green light on the monitor was telling me that the monitor seemed to be getting a signal. I tried the monitor on another Ubuntu box I keep lying around. Nothing. Blackness as dark as my soul at that thin, bleak moment, faced with the prospect of getting through the night deprived of that warm and lovely cathode glow.

At this point I fell back upon the time honored and trusted method of hardware repair known as “Smacking the Shit Out of Your Gear”. I began placing several surgical and precise whompings along the sides of the monitor casing. My inner caveman assured me that he knew what he was doing.

Suddenly, while in the midst of whacking, there came a loud pop from the guts of my monitor and a curl of smoke drifted out of the vents in the back. The damn thing was dead. I told myself that my whacking was a mercy killing, rather than the coup de grâce.

I now have a schmancy flatpanel LCD. My lovely cathode ray tan is starting to fade. I miss my old monitor.

A couple nights ago, on a whim coupled with a deep whiff or two of paint thinner (figuratively), I wiped my trusty and much-loved Ubuntu installation (after properly backing up my shit, of course—what kind of midget-humping idiot do you take me for?) and tried a fresh install of Kubuntu.

I’ve always been a user of the Gnome desktop and while I’ve flirted with others like XFCE, Fluxbox and KDE, I’ve stuck to it, mainly because it worked and I was used to it and rather lazy. Gnome’s been good to me. So, why the switch? Honestly, I’ve no real excuse aside from a constant need to tweak shit, an overwhelming feeling of boredom and a desire to peel myself away from my PlayStation for more than five minutes.

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