From Canada to Kathmandu

panasonicyouth:

mswyrr:

lunaticlightwoods:

abrahams—-daughter:

iheartchaos:

Keep scrolling. Your world will be changed forever, I promise. Teach it to your children and they’ll teach it to their children and in a few generations, we’ll have a worldwide Utopia. You’re welcome.

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OHHHHHHHHHHHMYYYYYYYGOOOOOOOD

never once crossed my mind

fuck

Dagnabbit! I’d better go make some cupcakes - just to test obviously…

So two recipes I tried this weekend: pizza dough and tiffin  Both worked very well. Josh and I made a half and half pizza with chicken, sausage and pepperoni on one side and four cheese on the other. Pretty darn scrumptious. What I liked most is how quick it is! Seriously, ten minutes making then just put stuff on it! We attempted to make stuffed crust but the mozzarella just disappeared… not quite sure how but oh wells!

The tiffin I made today is also pretty darn good. I used Dairy Milk chocolate though and I think I won’t do that next time. It has a very distinctive flavour which is a little jarring and over sweet so I might get ‘generic’ milk chocolate (or nice stuff). Word to the wise - I’ve used Tesco chocolate, the one which just says 85% or 70% in bright colours on a background, a bunch of times and it’s really good. The recipe asks for half milk and half dark which I’ve found is a pretty good rule of thumb *anyway*.

If you’ve got any good recipes you think I should try - let me know, I’d love to hear.

Willow xx

panasonicyouth:

My bus to Vegas got stopped at the Border Patrol stop on the 5 freeway if you’re heading north.

no exaggeration. Two agents came on, asked for the IDs and birthplaces of every person who was brown, and did so in spanish, and even when i spoke english back to the guy, he still spoke to me in spanish.

then they skipped all the white people and the couple traveling from China

and left

post-racial america is awesome

And I thought we had advanced as a race…

Hello again y’all. Now, many of you may know that I recently moved down to Bristol with my brother to start a new job etc. Less of you will know that my brother has decided to move back in with his mum for a time because it wasn’t going well for him and he was getting very down by the whole thing. Which makes me lonely girly…

To prevent another I-moved-here-for-a-job-and-now-I’m-really-depressed fiasco (see Rotterdam and Staines) I have decided upon a set of things I will do to be more productive and actually challenge myself *not* to eat a ton of ice cream, watch TV, talk only on IRC and general introverted lameness.

And so the completely untried or tested steps to self-improvement I will endeavour to undertake (I say endeavour because I will be a dreamer and *planner* to the end but I am easily distracted from my planned path…)

1. BE MORE ORGANISED
2. Meet new people
3. Eat new things
4. Learn new things
5. Challenge myself creatively

An explanation:
1. I can be hopelessly disorganised - this might not always be apparent because I know this fault and so try to *over* organise. I am sometimes the person who is 2.5 hours early to the airport. Seriously.

So therefore I am going to over organise my life in the hopes that the result will leave me relatively organised. To this end I am making far more use of my Google Calendar - I even have a ‘Bills’ calendar to tell me when to pay stuff, or to remind me that direct debits will be paid. Direct debits are half my bills but they’re still on my calendar. I have also started using www.clearchequebook.com which is so far pretty awesome.

I am going to set up blog reminders as well. Reminders to do coursework (see step 4) and most everything. We shall see how it goes.

2. Meet new people, simple as it sounds. I have already met a couple of people who I was supposed to be going to a show and meeting up with last Thursday but it was *pissing* it down so I kinda bailed. But next Monday (not tomorrow) I am going to be meeting up with the Bristol SF and Fantasy group which should be fun :D I have also joined the Bristol Photography Meetup Group so we shall see.

3. The problem with living by yourself is that you can get lazy food wise. There’s no challenge and more importantly no regular mealtimes. Thus, my challenge to myself is simply to cook one thing, one little thing - sweet or savoury, from a recipe book each week. Put some variety in my diet and learn more recipes.

4. Love my job though I do it means I’m only expanding my knowledge in one direction. So after the suggestion of a colleague I have decided to sign up to TWO (why two, why!?) IT classes from www.udacity.com one that will teach me some Python and how to build my own search engine apparently. And one that will build on this Python knowledge and teach me how to build a web app. So I am going to set aside time every day (with Google reminders) to do homework/lessons etc.

5. This is the big one. Lately I feel like I’ve been languishing in an uncreative vortex. I haven’t taken a creative photo since I don’t know when. I haven’t done any more web comics. I haven’t done any drawing or web design. This is unacceptable.

So. I’ve already joined the photo meet up thing which should help. My sister and I have also decided that come June (when her AS Levels are over) we are going to set ourselves a topic - a word or phrase - and take a photo within this topic. Further to that we are going to restrict ourselves each month to only being able to take it within one of Animal, Mineral or Vegetable to be specified at the time. An example in case that doesn’t make sense: the topic could be ‘water’ but the restraint could be ‘Animal’. So you can’t just take a picture of waves it has to be something Animal and to do with Water. Should be fun…

I am also going to try to revitalise my website www.salixsys.org, build a website for my mum’s tearooms-to-be like I promised. Try to do more drawings/web comics. I might set one of these as an Art Topic of the Month actually - or do something completely different.

AND THEN! I’m gonna blog about it - yay for you dear reader. If you’re there. I will try to keep other blog posts much shorter than this. Words of encouragement are greatly appreciated. And if you have a challenge you’d like me to undertake as part of the creativity section feel free to suggest it :D

Willow xx

That’s right, hoo-ha. So I had a customer call in about two weeks ago wanting what was a seemingly complex set up so that he would get text alerts from his Nagios monitoring only in off work hours (believe me, it started out way more difficult than that*)

Want to know how I did it? Well it took a while to get everything down properly so here we go.

First, the setup. The customer and his team of unfortunate on-call co-workers have what they have dubbed the ‘bat phone’. That is, one phone that gets handed to the next guy who’s on call every Monday (or whatever). After sifting through what the customer actually wanted we narrowed it down to this: text and email alerts in non-work hours for critical/recovery service alerts and down/up host alerts.

In your Nagios set up you should have a few standard config files: contacts, contactgroups and timeperiods. We will use all of these.

The way I did set this up was:

1. Create yourself an on-call contact: we used ‘batgirl’

2. Specify the name, alias,contactgroup,service/host notification periods/options (and that they’re enabled)and thecontact details.See http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/objectdefinitions.html#contact

3. For us that meant that thenotification periodswere ‘nonworkhours’ and ‘bank holidays’ and that the options were critical/recovery/down/recovered. Like so:

define contact{
	contact_name                    batgirl
	alias                                  On-call engineer
	host_notifications_enabled		1
	service_notifications_enabled	1
	service_notification_period     batgirl-oncall
	host_notification_period        batgirl-oncall
        service_notification_options    c,r
	host_notification_options       d,r
	service_notification_commands   notify-by-email,notify-by-sms
	host_notification_commands       host-notify-by-email,host-notify-by-sms
	email			batgirl@batcave.com
	pager			07777 777 777
}

Got that? OK!

4. To the contactgroups.cfg- now, I was updating a pre-existing set up so what I had to do was add thebatgirluser to the contact groups that were already defined. A contact group is the group of people who will be notified of a particular event. You can have lots of these. This customer had ones which only notified certain people if a certain machine went down because they were the only ones who knew how to fix it. Very smart. Anyway, addbatgirlto your ‘on call’ contactgroup.

5. The time periods. So this is the bit that *really* screwed me over. I used this as a guide but still had some serious issues because maybe our version of Nagios is different or because they weren’t explained well, who knows?

The plan is: create a ‘nonworkhours’ time periodtemplateand a ‘bankholidays’template.The template bit is important and wasn’t clear in the link above. I’ll give you examples of mine with comments (and a little theory)

define timeperiod{	
        name			        nonworkhours   ; Why three names? I think because the 'name' needs to be used
	timeperiod_name	nonworkhours   ; so it can be referred to as a template plus 'timeperiod_name;
        alias                         nonworkhours    ; and 'alias' are mandatory
        sunday			00:00-24:00    ; all day
	monday			00:00-09:00,17:30-24:00   ; Midnight till nine, five-thirty till midnight
	tuesday			00:00-09:00,17:30-24:00
	wednesday		        00:00-09:00,17:30-24:00
	thursday		        00:00-09:00,17:30-24:00
	friday			00:00-09:00,17:30-24:00
	saturday	        	00:00-24:00
	}

For bank holidays I had:

define timeperiod{
	name	        		bankholidays
	timeperiod_name	bankholidays
	alias          		bankholidays
	january 1	        	00:00-24:00	; New Year's Day
	monday 1 may		00:00-24:00	; First Monday in May
        monday -1 may		00:00-24:00	; Last Monday in May
	monday -1 august	00:00-24:00	; Last Monday in August
        december 25		00:00-24:00	; Christmas
	december 26		00:00-24:00	; Boxing Day
	december 31		17:00-24:00	; New Year's Eve (5pm onwards)

	}

Pretty self-explanatory. Obviously as Easter moves we can’t fit that in but this is the best we’ve got. So those are your templates.

6. The last time period definition is the easy one:

define timeperiod{
	timeperiod_name	batgirl-oncall
	alias          		On Call Officer
        use                           nonworkhours,bankholidays
 }

So now we reference this nice and uncomplex time period just once in the contact definition. She’s referenced in the contact groups and so your poor bat girl should be alerted out of hours for critical services and down servers and their recoveries.

Reload Nagios and hope to hell it works.

I hope that was even vaguely useful. If it helps at least one person a little bit before this information goes out of date I will be happy.

Willow xx

I am re-purposing this blog. Mostly because I’m not going traveling but think I should blog more. I probably won’t but there you go. Things I hope to blog about:

1. Photography - pictures what I took innit

2. Crafts - if I get round to making stuff

3. Any traveling I actually do (probably mostly Bristol stuff)

4. Techie stuff - because sometimes you Google stuff and it ain’t sodding there, but Willow has the answer

5. Other stuff that takes my fancy ^_^

Feel free to unfollow :P

Willow xx