Archived News starting from 09-13-2007 and earlier
BlogWith my
first efficient power supply up and saving the world, another
cheap deal suckered me into saving the world yet again. This time the energy savings was only 12 watts for my
home server, bringing the total for both computers from 300 watts to 264 watts. I've decided to hold at two so I can avoid having my power supply fetish cross over into a mental treatment required situation. It also goes without saying that if you need a power supply in a pinch, I've now got plenty of spares.
Forced to make another Mountain Dew purchase after seeing EternalOne drinking a bottle at work again, I headed to the vending machine and discovered I was fresh out of single dollar bills. Fortunately the machine next to the pop machine makes change for $5 bills. For my $5 bill, 5 gold colored coins with John Adams on the front tumbled into the change tray. Fearful of a government conspiracy to rid the world of the
Sacagawea dollar I had finally grown to accept, I ran to EternalOne in a panic and showed him my discovery. Unimpressed, he returned to his bottle of Mountain Dew and I consulted the
giver of knowledge. Turns out Sacagawea wasn't as popular as the US Mint had hoped in replacing short-life $1 bills with longer-life coins. The success of the
state quarters prompted a similar attempt with a
presidential $1 coin program. Even though it feels a bit
Canadian, I've grown to like dollar coins and was glad to also learn Sacagawea will still make up 1/4 of all dollar coin production for the life of the presidential coin program. And although it's more fun to actually say it, I thought I'd type Sacagawea one last time to make it a nice round total of 4 times for this post.
About 2 months ago I was searching for database help on the "GROUP BY" function and every search engine I tried kept returning a "page unavailable" error. Not thinking straight, I cleared my cookies/cache, tried every browser I had, and eventually gave up and went home. The next day everything worked again and I wrote it off as an oddity. Well today I was again searching for group by help and the magic word combination I used the first time was entered again. Try this on any search engine with any browser. I'm curious if any are NOT affected. Enter this (without the quotes): "select group by count"
About 3 years ago, my sunroof in my Cougar broke along with a vast majority of fellow owners. I quickly learned it's one of the top failure parts for the car, but not being a critical part, I eventually forgot all about it. Recently some fellow owners, including
Excelcier, found replacements in local junkyards. I became increasingly aware of my previously forgotten broken sunroof, especially when surrounded by people who enjoy taunting me by leaving their sunroof open while parked. EternalOne took pity on me, and donated his sunroof after deciding he no longer wanted it. An
attempted replacement with Jrak left me with detailed knowledge of sunroof assembly, but the donor part was also broken and the sky remained an extra-vehicular activity. Fast forward to today when I finally broke down and bought a replacement part. Fighting mosquitos, I managed to get it installed in 45 minutes flat, 5 of which was spent conversing with the ex-
Morlock who quickly moved on after learning I was engaged in actual work.
After learning Lisa's parents live close to a
disc golf course we decided to
try it out while visiting. The first two holes were unmarked, and it looked like we'd be making our own tee-off spots, but the third hole was marked with a clear sign including yardage and par. Disc golf signs being as popular as they are, the first two must have been stolen. Fortunately the rest were also well marked and we had a good 9-hole round. I'm always amazed at how easy it is to find a disc golf course wherever you are in the country.
At work today our emails for orders, returns, and all sorts of other important things stopped sending. Fearing the worst, I checked all our configuration files and they all seemed in order. Still email wasn't going through, so remembering you can telnet to an SMTP server I quickly ran "telnet smtp 25" from our server and was greeted with a prompt. I followed instructions in
this link and discovered first hand how SMTP really is a simple mail transfer protocol. Trivial for some, unexciting for most, but something noteworthy for me. My lack of an email confirmed the server had a stuck queue but an hour later I got my very first telnet email and celebrated with a Mountain Dew.
After seeing a
deal on a
500w EarthWatts power supply, the hippie in me decided to make the purchase and save the world. Curious as to how much less power an
80Plus certified power supply would draw, I checked the UPS reading for this server and noted 174 watts. I then swapped out my standard boring power supply with the new exciting hippie supply (it's actually colored green) and was shocked to see it required 24 fewer watts to run the exact same equipment. That's a savings of 210.24 kWh per year at 6¢/kWh which means my $40 upgrade will save me $12.61 a year with a full ROI in 3.1 years. Definitely not a wise investment, but satisfies your inner hippie as long as you don't toss the old supply in a landfill.
Two people at my work have been redesigning
Fathead.com for almost a month now, with the rest of us jumping in for the last two weeks at 12 hours a day. Taking a step back and realizing all the bugs are fixed, it finally hit me what a great looking site it really is. Don't believe me? Click on a product image, any image. Most of you will choose the swimsuit models (Entertainment -> SI Swimsuit). Notice the "zoom" slider on the left. Move it up and down. Tripping out yet? If that's not enough, compare with what it
used to look like and you'll get an appreciation of how drastic the change is. Now that it's finally live, I plan to sleep all weekend. You may post your criticism below while I slumber.
Coming back from lunch today, EternalOne and I noticed a fire truck at the front of our office building. After we got back to our desks everyone was talking about the car that
burst into flames. We missed the actual burning, but I managed to get some aftermath photos, and was emailed the time lapse phtos of it happening. The guy who owned the car said he just had it worked on so our theory is someone got oil on the engine and shorted a connection (apparently it started burning very slowly). After they towed it away (spilling gas/oil/antifreeze behind it) we took a look at the parking spot and saw it actually melted the asphalt.
Wondering what else would be fun to do on a 90° day, I decided to help my sister
move from Grand Rapids to Chicago. After we filled a 15-foot truck and drove 4 hours to her new apartment, we discovered a garage door leading to a 500ft hallway we had to move everything down. Luckily someone had already stolen and left
shopping carts to help new tenants. Now I can finally say I've moved various pieces of furniture with a shopping cart.
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