Archived News starting from 09-20-2007 and earlier
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After providing shelter for two consecutive morlocks, my empty first floor was left without a purpose (aside from LAN parties of course). A visit to the
Leinnintigers a few months ago put the idea of a basement theatre in Lisas head, and about a week ago she made the mistake of mentioning how she'd like to have one. That very night I found
this deal on a
HC1500 projector with decent brightness/contrast and pulled the trigger. What was once a dark and musty morlock cave is now
alive with 110" of 1080i goodness (points for guessing the movie). While 48" shy of
Ron's and embarrassingly low-quality for
Duane, it fit my cheap bastard pricing requirement perfectly. Now I just need to get a proper hardware setup to replace my temporary
cat house projector stand.
Stavos has been secretly working on this
masterpiece for some time now, and he finally decided to share it with me. A better use of the original photo there is none. I already know you're going to ask if you can use it as your background so I'll go ahead and proactively approve it.
If you're stalking me you've noticed the
Gnome Cam has been in a blackout for the past 7 days. The
BT-176WC camera that has served me well for over 2 years finally decided to bite the dust and only display melted images. Anticipating a failure in the near future based on
previous issues I had a
cheap eBay knockoff camera ready to go that I finally got around to installing. As
you can see I got a great shot of me installing it, which is always a treat, but more importantly you'll notice the crappy quality. Evidently the factory that built this camera is operating in a time bubble sometime prior to 1979 as the quality is slightly less than home video cameras of that era. Rest assured I have an eBay alert set for my trusty BT-176WC in the hopes I'll find it at an affordable price. Until then enjoy the memories of disco fever and use your imagination to fill in the missing details.
With the
Morlock all growed up he decided to have a housewarming party to celebrate his move down the street and food chain. In addition to the expected beer and burgers, the party offered up such exotic things as
hookah pipes and
special brownies. To help him better fit in with the neighborhood, Lisa bought an
appropriately disturbing gnome for his housewarming gift. A much more satisfying gift than the kegerator he also received.
With 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.
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