Archived News starting from 05-12-2005 and earlier
BlogI was sent a link at work today about the 2003 movie called
Malibu's Most Wanted. Not surprisingly, I had never heard of it, and now that it's over 2 years old I can talk about it and maintain my elitist non-conforming reputation since it's borderline commercially expired. The main characters name is B-Rad and that's all I know. According to the few people who have seen it that's all I need to know. I still plan to watch it just to see if the creative minds that came up with B-Rad have any other talents to share with the world. After all, I've been Brad for 27 years now and never came up with B-Rad on my own. It took a movie like this to open my eyes.
My
Cougar has
EBC Green Stuff brake pads as recommended by the SCCA instructor I had run my car last year. I quickly learned they run much hotter than normal brake pads. Unfortunately I learned this after I installed them and consequently, my rotors warp every 5,000 - 10,000 miles. Once the warping starts, I have to get them turned pretty quick or the steering wheel starts to shake out of my hand when I stop. It's only $20 to get them turned, but taking them on and off becomes time consuming so I decided to get some "serious" rotors. Enter the
Power Slot Cryo-Treated Rotors. They are "warp resistant" and are designed for full ceramic pads. I
installed them and they definitely
look sweet. Hopefully I can keep my car off jack stands for another 50,000 miles this time.
At the request of Stavos, the
GnomeCam has been adjusted to compensate for the growth of the japanese maple in my front yard. You have
Missy to thank for the fantastic view.
Stavos told me about
this game and I hate him for it. I just can't stop playing it. It's not even that good of a game. It's the same command and conquer 3rd person type game as Dune 2000, Starcraft, and every other game where you build an army to attack the other guy with. There's only so many variations you can make on the concept, and this one is reusing about 90% of the games that came before it. Still, it's now 2:30am and I'm just now getting the will power to pull myself away from the computer. My only explanation is that they inject subliminal messages during the explosions to keep me playing.
I have an
MSDN Universal subscription through work, which allows me use of every Microsoft product on up to 10 computers at work and home. Unfortunately, due to some paranoia at said place of employment, I'm unable to obtain my login for the subscription and get the latest
Visual Studio 2005 Beta. Enter
Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Beta 2. While a mouthful, it's a totally FREE (and stripped down) version of Visual Studio 2005 Beta. Both use the new
Microsoft.NET 2.0 framework which has oodles (yes, oodles) of new features that make working in the old version seem tedious. A user navigation control I spent over an hour building is now of course a standard item in this new release. Eventually, you will just type what you want into a text box and Visual Studio will return a compiled application. No need for designing or coding. Probably the next release. At any rate, to quote ABC speak, "Now, more than ever" you should download this
latest beta.
Yesterday,
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.
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