Author: Cj B

Thanksgiving, San Jacinto and Joshua Tree!

Wow, what a weekend, went from the wonderful Beach, to Winter wonderland, to the desert and back to a very foggy and overcast beach! Only in LA can you do such a thing!

So, Thursday I headed down to Laguna beach to meet up with Nick and Dustin. We hung out in Laguna for a while and watched the sunset which was amazing. After that we headed over to some of Nick’s friends house for thanksgiving dinner. That was a HUGE mess, but tons of fun! Lots of people, tons of delicious food, and a great time was had by all. There was this one old guy though who kept STARING at me the WHOLE time we were there though. Very annoying! lol

Got done with that and headed home. Nick and I went through the plans for the next day and reviewed what we were packing then crashed in bed. Got up at 5am Friday morning and drove out to Palm Springs and got the second tram of the day up to the top. Got there and there was 3-4 inches of snow on the gound at the tram station which is about 8,200 feet. Started out hiking and got lost a few times because the trail was not marked at all. So we were trying to find our way up!

It was absolutely gorgeous getting up there. We reached the Peak which was about 6 miles up at around 1pm, so it took us about 4 hours to do that. Got up there and hung out in this emergency shelter cabin to eat lunch and warm up a little bit. On the peak there was around a foot of snow up there. We hung out and checked out the wonderful views and then started heading the 2 miles to our camp site. The snow seemed much deeper on this side of the mountian, we were going downhill and we were blazing the trail.

I decided after a while that it was just too much, my feet were soaking wet, my toes frozen solid so we turned around and went back. Made the 6 mile trek back in a little over 2 hours. So 12 miles and 7 hours later with a 35 pound pack we were back where we started. Spent some time in the tram station and had some hot tea and then headed to the bottom. Stopped at KFC for dinner and saw this HUGE fat guy in there eating a boat load and I was disgusted and wanted to yell at him. After that we headed out to Joshua tree to meet up with Travis and gang.

We got there and met a bunch of new people and then we crashed in bed. I was sooo tired! Saturday we got up and went climbing for the whole day. Pretty much from sunrise to sunset! It was amazing. Although I was sooooo tired and my back was killing me, so I only did 4 climbs that day. 🙁 Tons of hot guys were out climbing as well! Yum! It was a really great group and hopefully I can start doing some climbing/adventures with them some more!

Went back to the camp site that night and they had another GREAT thanksgiving dinner and then this other couple made delicious chicken tacos! We had so much fucking food around the camp site. Plus people were smoking pot and drinking tons of alc. It was very entertaining! I went to bed probably around 9ish and laid and watched the stars for a little bit. Sooo pretty.

So Sunday we got up, packed up and then headed out to breakfast with Travis, Jafey, Nick and I. Had good chat then back to LA! The drive was great, no traffic or anything but the weather at the beach SUCKED! It was overcast and nasty! I would rather have the snow! Lol

Overall it was a GREAT weekend!

Download the Google Earth file of the hike here:
2008-11-30-mt-san-jacinto

Here’s a movie:

LA Auto Show

I’ve really been sucking at this whole updating thing, eh?

So last weekend was the LA Auto show which was tons of fun! Lots of neat cars and shit to go see. I can’t wait till I get my millions to buy a new car.

Sunday was rock climbing which was a lot of fun. Started planning a trip out to Santa Cruz island.

Friday night Kris and I did something, but I can’t recall what?

Went out Wed with Travis to talk business and pick up some shit. He lent me a $700 backpack to test out this weekend! I’m excited about that!

Speaking of. This weekend I am headed to San Jacinto!

And really, that’s about all in my life right now! Boring, I know!

msmtp + Zabbix + Gmail!

My company uses Gmail for all our email accounts. We’ve found that with the limited IT budget and staffing it’s easiest for us to use google to manage all our corporate email.

I’ve been trying to get Zabbix to send emails using Gmail, of course since gmail only uses TLS it’s been a bit of a problem since Zabbix does not support this out of the box. I decided to use msmtp and a Zabbix script to handle it all.

Note: We’re using VZ servers so some commands may be different.

First thing to do was to install all the correct packages:
vzyum 103 install gnutls gnutls-devel cyrus-sasl Libidn fetchmail

After those were installed I had to download MSMTP from the sourceforge page here.

Configure, make, make install with your options. I used:
./configure --with-ssl=gnutls

Next I created an msmtp_wrapper.conf file in the Zabbix bin directory like the following:
defaults
syslog LOG_MAIL
account default
host smtp.gmail.com
port 587
tls on
auth on
user helpdesk@mydomain.net
password MYPASSWORD
auto_from on

Next I created the msmtp_wrapper file in the Zabbix bin directory :
#!/bin/bash
echo "Subject:$2+$3" | tr "+" "\n"> /tmp/message.zabbix
/usr/local/bin/msmtp -t -C /home/zabbix/bin/msmtp_wrapper.conf --tls-certcheck=off -- $1 < /tmp/message.zabbix rm /tmp/message.zabbix

Change the owner and permissions on these files as such:
chown zabbix:zabbix msmtp_wrapper*
chmod a+x 700 msmtp_wrapper*

Next create a media type in Zabbix with the script name you used.

Lastly, setup some triggers to use it!

That should be all that you need to get started.

Canyoneering!

Hmm, it’s been a while, eh?

Well not much has really been going on. I’ve been busy as per usual but nothing to interesting. Last weekend I hung out with Kris a lot and took him rock climbing. It was freezing out there! We did some other random stuff as well.

This weekend was pretty fun. Friday night Kris had a little party as his house for some of his friends. We had a good time. I cooked him dinner which was delicious! I got a little grumpy towards the end of the day which really carried over to Saturday and that sucked.

Got up fairly early on Saturday and took the car in for an oil change. Turns out it’s already time for new brakes and tires (I did put 20,000 miles on my car in the last year!) Ugh that’s gonna cost an arm and a leg!

Kris and I headed to downtown for the Prop 8 rally which was a LOT of fun, but also made me very very very angry that we have to be out here doing this shit. Who are these idiots who voted for Prop 8! I want to just beat them all to shit. And what sucks even more is that I have _GAY_ friends who voted for Prop 8. Idiots! My guess is they are into S&M in bed or something. Why would they do that to each other. The speakers there were GREAT, the Mayor of LA was there as well as Lorrie Jean from the Gay and Lesbian Center in LA! I love her! Although I thought that there was WAY to much talking and not enough rallying. It also sucked a little because all the fires around LA really knocked this story down off the front page! I read once place that there were 40,000 people downtown. I’m not sure I agree with that figure, but it was a HUGE rally!

Headed home after that and took a nap and then hung out at my apartment. I was feeling pretty down after that, sad and a little depressed. Was missing Grandpa, feeling fat, hating my apartment, pissed at the Russian, and lots of other things. Just kinda re-hashing my year! Jason invited me over, so I took a bottle of wine and we sat at the kitchen table and drank and talked about it all. I actually cried infront of him. :'( Kris also said he would call me that night but he never did.

Went home after that and went to bed. Climbing was canceled on Sunday so I slept in a little bit then headed up to Rubio canyon to meet up with this guy Trevor. We went Canyoneering which was AWESOME! Rappelling down 6 waterfalls was so cool! Got done with that in quick time and headed home.

Laid around on the couch for a while. Kris and I were supposed to watch the Sunday night line up on Fox, but he canceled at the last minute which was a bit annoying. So I ended up just watching it all alone.

This Friday I got invited to the Climbing holiday party! Very exciting, makes me feel more part of the group! I’m really looking forward to eating at the Stinking Rose as well! I’ve heard such great things about it.

I’m also really looking forward to the Thanksgiving day backpacking trip! I can’t wait for that to get here. I really do hope though that it’s not TOO cold/snowy. A little cold is fine!

Not much else going on!

SiriusXM Merger – Fewer Channels!

Saw this today on Consumerist and it echos my concerns.

I was VERY unhappy when I got into my car on Wed and found that 3 of my favorite stations were GONE. They just vanished without an explanation or anything. It’s all very annoying!

I really don’t think that they handled this in the most proper way. They merged channels, they are now censoring channels which weren’t before and I have already noticed less variety on the major stations.

I hope that this is all just a temporary thing until they can get it all figured out!

Sadly, I can’t just say “I’ll switch” because they are now the only Satellite providers! 🙁