How I spent my Wednesday

Spent most of the day configuring a firewall for a client… which I just installed yesterday evening before dinner on a rush order. Basically more blundering at work. Whatever, things all worked out, despite piss-poor planning and complete lack of responsibility.

FreeS/WAN kind of pisses me off. Because I had an IP wrong in one connection a particular firewall wouldn’t start up any of its connections. Further it left messages that some might consider misleading in the logs about “wrong key.” Yes, it was the wrong key, for the random host you were trying to communicate with, of course; it still left me scratching my head for a bit before I decided to disregard the error message. The configuration of FreeS/WAN seems a bit fragile, perhaps. Once it’s up and running, though, it’ll pretty much stay that way forever, in my experience.

Picked my Donnie Darko soundtrack back up. I think I decided it was ready, so I’m burning it to CD now. Then I’m going to take it off to WAVs with EAC. This will have all my CD Architect EQ and pauses and stuff in there. I would rather just have CD Architect write it out with this information to new WAV files for me, but it quite seriously doesn’t have this functionality as near as I can tell. Ripping it off a CD-R might be the next best thing. It think I’ll initially only distribute it in Vorbis and maybe FLAC. Maybe I’ll make MP3s later.

I do have this issue of what to do with the extra songs some nice person mailed me about. I think I mentioned this before. On one hand I’d like to include these songs, but on the other hand… I just realized I don’t have the room for them. So I think this version of the soundtrack will be released as-is, and maybe I’ll go back later and include some of these missing tracks. Doing a bit more searching on the web — and I don’t know how I didn’t find these the first time through — got me more references to people talking about the missing tracks. EOFFTV’s Donnie Darko listing seems to include the tracks, as does IMDB in its credits I’m told. Some strange page at Geocities also lists all these songs, though in a bit more readable fashion. This page also claims that the songs weren’t distributed as a soundtrack because of the money involved in licensing them, which I expected. Some entity’s “CD club” has a track listing they propose for a Donnie Darko soundtrack. Finally, here’s A Google cached page of some weird Donnie Darko listing including tracks from the score and the songs credited in the movie. So whatever.

I just moved my Donnie Darko working directory over to verin. Seems to be working just fine. Now to EAC to that drive. (My local disks are pretty damn full.) It’s fast enough for my tastes.

Oh, I forgot to mention: emacs-w3m doesn’t quite work all the time. Once I realized it doesn’t seem to be capable of keeping track of the cookies that PhpWiki is sending it to (presumably) store my user ID in, I didn’t care to keep it around. Too many things just weren’t working right with it. So I’m not using w3m from a terminal window with emacsclient as my external editor for <TEXTAREA>s and a bit of help from auto-mode-alist in my ~/.emacs. I’ll update my .emacs on this web site some time in the near future perhaps.