AtomicInternet Archived News

Archived News starting from 08-09-2004 and earlier

Melissa and I decided there simply wasn't enough monkeys throwing poo in the immediate area, so we decided to go to the Toledo Zoo to up our poo-flinging chances. The poo-flinging was never observed, but fortunately there were enough other animals to keep us entertained.

Today I had two seperate power outages. One at 10:43AM - 12:01PM, and another 7:59pm - 10:02pm. Both were more than long enough to exhaust the UPS battery on my server, so the website was unavailable for a few hours. While some signs point to a suicidal squirrel that took a dive into a transformer, I'm inclined to believe that once again the Woodward Dream Cruise had something to do with the power interruption. We're getting close to the anniversary of the "Great Power Outage of 2003" which we all know was caused by the very same cruise. Todays outage was just a warmup for what the cruise ultimately has in store for us. Don't say I didn't warn you.

After returning from vacation to a green pool for the second time in a month, I decided it was time to disassemble my pool. The constant rainy weather (a new Michigan record set for May) and low temperatures kept me out of my beloved $200 pool most of the time and I wasn't getting enough use to justify running it anymore. Unfortunately, teardown was at least ten times more difficult than setup. Getting all the water out of the pool involved picking up the sides (covered with mud and moss) and channeling the water toward the pump intake. After that it was a futile attempt at hosing it down in the same mud I was trying to rinse off. With the pool eventually put away, the tarp came up and I was greeted with various roots and grubs that refused to let go under high pressure water. Total time required: 24 hrs to drain, 10 hours to tear down. On the plus side, now that the pool is down the weather will be hot and humid for the remainder of the summer.

Every year I help organize Cougarfest, an event I started 5 years ago for new model Mercury Cougars. This year the lead organizers were very committed and I can confidently say it was the best yet. The first day was a meet and greet, followed by a track day involving autocross and drag competitions. Saturday was the main show with lots of modifications being done in the hotel parking lot. As always the best part was seeing the usual crowd and catching up with everyone. Since we owned the entire hotel, every room was open with various types of alcohol for consumption and people went from party to party. I tried my best to keep up but my low tolerance always means I pass out early. Myself and everyone who went are already looking forward to next year.
Photos from the event.

The server suffered a power outage on Friday (July 24th) at 6:55pm. The power outage lasted over 45 minutes and the server shutdown until "the fiance" revived it. Good thing too, because Cougarfest is going on and the live web cam doesn't work well without a server.

I'm sure you've always wanted to know, so here they are:

Coat	Size: 44 XL	Over Arm: 48	Under Arm: 38
Trousers	Waist: 34	Outseam: 44.5
Shirt	Neck: 16.5	Sleeve: 37
Shoes	Size 13 D

After using a "debug mode" of my mobile phone that tracks things such as "Active Pilots," "Neighbor Sets", and "Recieve FER%" I decided to research the protocol my phone carrier uses, CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access). I was fascinated how I can get 300k connections wirelessly through my mobile phone in contrast to my old lowly 56k wired modem I had for so long before broadband connections were widely available. I also wanted to understand what the magical debug screen terms meant. I found this article which gives a good high-level overview of how the protocol works. It starts with the original system used in north america and progresses through cdmaOne to the current CDMA2000 standard. Fascinating reading for anyone interested in cellular networks.

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