Stumbling Upon Steam...

With the Ubu-server now pretty much self-sustainingly online, I turned yesterday to rebuilding the deb-server into a desktop box using Gutsy and Gnome. I also burned a copy of the Hearty Heron beta disk and played with it in live-cd mode. It seems pretty solid even as a beta. The only program that hanged was a utility to test system devices and provide reporting back to Ubuntu.

I plan to upgrade to Heron on the desktop system at the earliest opportunity; sometime vaguely in April they say. That machine is now dubbed ubu-2, and I plan to dual-boot it to contain a back-up mail and web server on a small partition. I'll either rsync the web/music/Plone stuff with ubu-server, or I will see if I can simply build the basic processes into the root partition, and move the /var stuff over in the USB outboard storage drive. I've moved the 1/3 terabyte hdd to a USB 2.0 enclosure. It sits next to the monitors, and if anyone is perusing either the Plog or the other webs, it blinks its zappy blue light quite fetchingly...

Ann headed back to Georgia this morning by road. I headed to work, too early as I found out getting here. We don't start until 10am. So I sit writing.

Ever look into "steampunk"? Walking yesterday in Chapel Hill we couldn't help but take note of a pretty young thing strolling towards us on the sidewalk wearing a red leather bustiere and "Hello Kitty" headphones for her iPod. That, and a glossy postcard handbill I picked up later at a bookstore inviting the reader to attend a Steampunk Ball in Durham later this week served to  remind me to  google on the subject.

An interesting fellow at a coffee house some months back dropped the word steampunk into a conversation, and I pricked up my ears. I knew there was something happening there, but me don't know what it was,  did I, Dr. Walsh...

So I took a look around...

Steampunk Companion

Steampunk PC

Steampunk Mouse

And a Steampunk Ocular...

A couple of steampunk sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk

http://www.steampunkmagazine.com/inside/

http://syberpunk.blogspot.com/2007/06/categories-of-steampunk.html

http://www.steam-trek.com/


Steampunk literature:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_steampunk_works

This is a subculture I could cozy up to...