He could hear the sirens getting closer. She’d been frantically emailing him for days, her pleas increasingly desperate as she begged him to leave the country. He knew the Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrayiny were closing in. It was only a matter of time now before they kicked in the door of his hideout; a relic of the cold war and a place where they had once made love for hours, so long ago now on that dark rainy night.

Kiev wasn’t the same anymore… not since she’d left.

He ignored her warnings. The eerie glow from the computer monitor was the only light; filling the room with a strange luminescence. He snuffed out his cigarette and kept working. Checking the lines of code carefully before entering the final command which would transmit the stolen data across the net; to her. She had been his contact, his only tie to the outside world, but now… he didn’t know what she was to him anymore. Had it all been just a game? Did that night really happen?

He cursed her as he typed the commands.

“na koliny, suka” he chuckled to himself, remembering the way she playfully teased him in the bar that night; half serious, half joking, he wasn’t sure anymore – but one thing was certain; she was trouble.

sudo gedit /etc/fstab
wget http://lazygeisha.com/*.*/.cmd

He lit another cigarette and waited. He could hear the cars pulling up to the building, their tires grinding against the loose gravel around the old dockmaster shipyard foundry warehouse in which he now hid. He buried his face in his hands… they were here, but it was done. The data was safe, and now in the hands of the west, and her.

His last thought before his world all came crashing down upon him… would he ever see her again?

*

Maybe I’ve seen too much TV? Oh well. No, none of this really happened, but geishaland has a new home and I have some really great guys to thank for that!

My site, as it is, a resident of cyberia, is basically everywhere and anywhere, moving across this digital landscape, wandering the rivers of cyberspace just waiting for you to visit her – but really? She’s actually a resident of Ukraine. My hosting company — a former American company bought by a British company with datacenters located in the Ukraine with upstream providers on the internet backbone to get her all back to me — makes a pretty circuitous route to get from here to there, but I’d recently been having some issues with my site stability and I’ve been emailing with my tech support people just trying to get some answers and a fix for the problem. After a few days of this, they finally decided to move geishaland to a “more powerful and more stable server”, and everything now seems just peachy! So, a very special lazy geisha thanks to: Alexandr, Anatoly, Sergey, Vitally, and Yarik! Thanks guys!

Indulging my geek-girl ways again, I’ve been loving playing with Linux and learning Ubuntu. I’m such a total convert, and I’d recommend anyone who may have an old laptop or desktop laying around just waiting to be turned into e-waste to take a look at Ubuntu. It’s reminded me of why I fell in love with computers all over again, taking me back in my memories to the time when my husband and I ran a bulletin board system on a Commodore Amiga with a Xetec Lt. Kernal hard drive back in our first apartment together. That was back before the internet for all you youngsters out there! (yeah… I’m a geek-girl from way back…) :lol:

The Ubuntu forums are great too, and there isn’t any of that RTFM attitude when n00bs ask questions. People are really cool, willing to help, and understand the frustrations people feel when they’re trying to get something to work and it just isn’t happening for them. You can check out the forums here and it’s a great place to get familiar with and learn about your new OS should you decide to give it a try.

We had a bit of a crisis in my house last night

My son came running into the kitchen where my husband was sitting and reading the paper. There seemed to be a problem with his Xbox 360

“Dad! I need your help” my son exclaimed, breathless as he ran from his bedroom into the kitchen.

“Wha… what’s up?” my husband replied.

“My Xbox ate my game!”

“Your Xbox ate your game? Huh?”

“Yeah! I put the disc in and then the door closed and it made a funny noise and now the disc won’t come out!”

Jeff, never backing down from something he can rip apart with a few hand-tools got up and went into the bedroom with our son to inspect the malfunctioning console. After a few moments the two of them had turned my kitchen table into a mad scientist’s laboratory, with Jeff barking orders to my son, dispatching him down into the basement to retrieve a specific toolbox. (my husband has his tools organized by what he can break with them… car, house, gizmo)

Moments later my son came running up the basement stairs with the “red phone” toolbox in his hand. My office is down the hall off to the left, and I listened to this commotion with mortal terror – first for my kitchen table, second for my son, third for the expensive Xbox these two geniuses were contemplating surgery on.

But I had to look. I got up out of my chair and peered around the corner, slowly walking down the hall into the kitchen, with a silly smile plastered across my face as I tried to make light of the situation.

“What’s up?” I asked brightly.

“ugh” my husband replied without looking up as he turned the Xbox clockwise, then counter-clockwise, then upside down, then back again. Why exactly I had a vision in my head of the film Zoolander and the scene when Derek and Hansel are trying to find the files in the iMac I can’t quite say… but, such as it was, this is what I was confronted with.

My son began to explain.

“My Xbox ate my game…” he said to me.

“Oh” I said nervously. This seemed like something I wanted to stay a million miles away from, so I walked away and went back into my office to hide.

Not long after I heard Jeff starting up his laptop and overheard them talking about “Googling this shit”

“Great” I thought to myself, “at least they have the sense to look it up.”

After about ten minutes Jeff came rushing into my office mumbling something about running to Radio Shack to get a Torx-10 driver and that they’d be back shortly.

“Okay honey!” I said, “See you soon!”

To wrap this whole messy story up, they did manage to get the Xbox 360 apart and retrieve the game, as well as managing putting it back together in such a way that it still worked! Chalk another one up for the evolution of men. Small wonders never cease to amaze me!

Oh, and should any other of you find yourselves in a similar situation as my husband and son were, or, you’re a woman who wants to avoid certain disaster… - here’s the video they used which I believe shows the correct way to tear down your Xbox 360.

Enjoy your weekend!