Archived News starting from 05-01-2005 and earlier
BlogYesterday,
Ron was driving my
Cougar around during Missy and I's visit to the great white north. Sitting in the passenger seat, my fuel pump noise seemed even louder so I decided it was time to change it. I now have a great deal more respect for
Duane who was the original installer of the pump. The fuel pump is
located where 4 fuel lines and 6 wires intersect in a 4"x6" area under the car. Just manuvering tools around is difficult. 1.5 hours and several curse words later it's finally changed and sounds much more healthy.
My old house is
once again for sale, following the request for an early rental termination by my renters. Should the house sell, their rent is terminated. Until then, I'm getting paid to sell a house. With prime selling season coming up I can't be too upset about this turn of events. I also can't say I'm surprised, as the
math freaks who stalk me already created a formula to predict this outcome. They factored in
Redford Grill, the
big move, the
false sale and the
dead guy and got a 67% probability of this happening. It seems impressive now, but they also calculated a 13% probability of
Nukie coming back and doing a dance on the roof, burning it to the ground. While highly unlikely, it would have opened up alot more marketing opportunities.
BUY MY HOUSE!
Two updates ago I got my very first
comment spam. Since I wrote my own blog program I was surprised how easily they picked up on which form to submit on the page. It was exciting for a whole two days and then instantly annoying. Whoever writes these comment spambots must have them cranking away as fast as the machines bandwidth/processor allows. There are all kinds of methods of stopping these things, but most lean toward blocking IP's or requiring a login. Both options were not something I wanted to do, so instead I decided to just block spam comments. I figure these spambots all want you to click on a link, so from now on if a comment contains "<", ">", or "http" you'll get an alert message requesting removal of these key characters. Try it out, it's fun! Only time will tell if my technique is effective.
Excelcier alerted me to the outage at 11:13am today, which was just before lunch so I decided to stop by the house and find out what happened. As you can see from the photo, BrightHouse was already working on it. I decided to yell obscenities and make idle threats anyways since it was such a nice day. They didn't seem to mind. I'm not sure when the problem will be resolved, but when you read this you'll know. All hosted sites are unavailable, but the
GnomeCam and
BlackNova continue to update.
Outage Time: 11:13am - 1:23pm.
Tonight I installed
Service Pack 1 on this server and so far no conflicts/blowups. It is basically the Windows 2003 version of WinXP SP2, with a few extra server-specific enhancements. One of these enhancements is the
Security Configuration Wizard which gives you a step-by-step tutorial on how to create (and apply) a security policy. Of course I blindly ran it and locked down everything I don't use, and after 15 minutes of poking around I can't find anything that doesn't work. Now the magic of SP1 is on this server, and you can once again rest peacefully until the next major upgrade. Consequently, if you find something broken,
yell at me.
Keith and I went for our second mountain biking excursion of the year today and decided to hit
Potawatomi bike trail which is normally reserved for mid to end of the year. Thirty minutes into the trail we remembered why we save it for later in the year. There are at least 3 hills that are impossible to climb unless you are Lance Armstrong, and most of the other hills are almost as difficult. The 50 degree grade alone is tough, but you also get roots and rocks to manuver around while you struggle to get up them. The plus side is the downhills, which have 1-4 foot dropoffs at regular intervals making for some good jumps. It took almost 3 hours to get through it, but only 1.5 hours of that was actual biking. The other half of the time we were laying on the ground recovering. Next time I'll have a video camera on my helmet so I can sell the bloopers on ebay.
My
Media Center PC Experiment ended in a flop. The highest bid was $400 which was $150 less than what I paid to build it. If you've always wanted one, but were afraid to ask, I can part with it for the at-cost price of $550. If not, expect to see it up on e-bay again with more pizzaz and less initial bidding price. I'm confident there's untapped potential here.
Link to Details
The "Current Server Status" window on the right tracks various parameters on this server. One of them is free disk space and it has shrunk below the 8% warning level a few times in the past month. Each time I was able to delete a few things and bring it back. This time I have a big chunk I plan to get rid of, but I think these are signs it's time for a bigger drive. I've been watching for a sub-$50 100GB+ IDE HDD's but haven't seen any without using 5 rebates. If you have one laying around you can part with (yes, I'm sure everyone does) shoot me an email.
Lomar and Angela came over for a round of
Star Wars Monopoly lastnight. Don't let the box or photos fool you, it's completely different than normal Monopoly. Different enough that was I confused and disoriented allowing
Lomar to win the game. Had it been classic Monopoly I would have emerged as the clear dominator. On a side note, make sure you listen to the
latest plasmateam song, it's metarelaxiawesome.
Almost a month ago,
Duane wrote an
article that moved me in the appreciation of a good friend who I've taken for granted way. When I first started working with Duane we quickly realized we shared the same twisted sense of humor and appreciation for computers and motor sports. At the time I was just getting into my car and had a
pretty sad web site. His
Impreza had just been run off the road by an SUV and he was driving his
89 Firebird with side pipes. Both of these cars fascinated me because they were so different than what I had ever been exposed to. At the time, Subaru was a rare brand and most 89 firebirds had long ago lost their side pipes. I found this attraction to oddball vehicles refreshing and thoroughly enjoyed the animated "moving car" icon on the dash of his Subaru to indicate he was indeed driving.
Duane had been working on web sites longer than anyone else I had met and consequently launched me out of the stone age in terms of web design. Some of his initial work involved the
Amiga community which was at the time a thriving computer platform for multimedia. He quickly became a
well-known and respected name in the late 90's for the platform, and to this day gets correspondences from people needing help with this now unfortunately neglected platform. This passion for his work motivated me, and when he discovered table-less designs using strict XHTML and CSS I jumped on board without hesitation. He made easy examples to follow and helped get me up and running. It fueled the separation of logic and presentation that first attracted me to
ASP.net, a product of the evil empire that is designed from the ground up to completely separate the two.
His passion is contagious, especially with the Macintosh platform. He single handedly supports the growing Macintosh community at work, and has convinced those around him it is the platform of choice for front-end web development. Judging by the results I'm forced to agree it is the best system for the job (I had traumatic experiences supporting early MacOS machines). Plus they have great places to hide slim jims while they dry to a brittle stick.
Our preference in cars and computers are in heavy contrast, but we clearly share the same passion. With someone of such strong convictions, disagreements are inevitable, but in a world where many people are content to live their lives in the status quo Duane trusts his instincts and experiences to make his own path. This self-confidence is something I envy, as I sometimes attach myself to the popular method rather than the right method. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a sprinkler to jump through.
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