Archived News starting from 10-28-2003 and earlier
BlogAbout 5 years ago, I read an excellent book entitled "
Amusing Ourselves to Death." It is a discussion on how the various media we are bombarded with is affecting our lives, and some possible ramifications. Today, the free press ran a
good article on the use of media in educating children. While I spent a good deal of my childhood watching "He-Man," "Smurfs," and "Transformers," I also remember my parents forcing me to go outside and play with my friends quite frequently. I still became a computer nerd, but thanks to them I developed enough social skills to maintain relationships with my fellow human beings. I'm not saying we should all panic and run around in circles blowing up TV's, I'd be a hypocrite if I said that. Instead, I'm assigning everyone homework: buy/borrow/steal the book and read the article. If you're aware of the issue, you think differently. Don't let your imagination get swallowed up in mainstream media. Dare to be different, and express your creativity even if it doesn't make any sense at all. Here are a
few good examples.
The Surprise Visitor has been coming to my porch for almost 5 days now so
Melissa and I decided to take action. I called up my mom and asked if she would watch the cat for the next few weeks while we put up posters in case he has an owner. She agreed and now
he has a place to live. He's a surprisingly quiet and affectionate cat, and definately polydactyl. In case you didn't notice, I also installed a hood for my oven, which was long overdue.
Steve and Candy came over lastnight for the viewing of the "Nineteen Eighty Four" movie. While we were watching the movie, a
cat showed up on my porch. He had
gigantic eyes and was so friendly it couldn't have been a stray. Melissa set out a cat carrier for him, and we later saw my neighbors do the same. I don't think he was lost so much as he wanted to socialize. My cat, however, definately was
not interested in socializing and went insane trying to attack him through the window. My cat going absolutely nuts was definately entertaining.
I recently acquired a copy of the movie
Nineteen Eighty Four, an adaptation of the novel by George Orwell. I've read the book and saw the
Macintosh commercial based on the movie, but never saw the movie itself. I hope to change that this weekend. It's a story about a future society (1984 was the future when it was written) based on "Ingsoc" (
newspeak for English Socialisim). In the story, "Big Brother" spies on citizens 24/7 and runs their lives. I'm a big fan of apocolypse movies and if it's anything like the book this one should be awesome. Yes, I know I'm probably the only person on the planet who hasn't seen it yet.
Brian recently purchased a
G5 computer and immediately started running Seti@Home as a benchmark. It was very fast, and looked slick on top of it. We drooled over it for quite some time. I had switched from running Seti@Home to
United Devices cancer research client almost 2 years ago and then just stopped running distributed computing entirely. The recent demonstration had me digging around for my account and I finally
found it. I once had 10 PC's running the client to get my stats where they are, and now I'm sure I can run it on my single PC and accomplish the same amount as the 10 PC's did 2 years ago. You can watch my progress
here.
I recently read a
very good article passed on by
Stavos. I'm personally hoping for possibility #7 myself. Regardless, it will be interesting to see how things pan out.
This weekend my
girlfriend and I decided to drive out to Hell, MI just for kicks. What better way to spend sweetest day? I've been there a few times and it's nothing entertaining. Two buildings and some landmarks, that's about it. The whole point is that you're in hell, get it? At the very least it was a nice drive to enjoy the fall leaves, and we stopped off at a cider mill on the way back. We took some
obnoxious photos of the trip along with a few post-hell trip shots. As you can see from the photos, it's definately a trip worth making.
Sometime this morning, my
RT314 Router decided to stop resolving DNS requests for the first time in it's three year operation. Either the cable modem freaked it out or it's just getting old. Access to this server was unavailable during the error. Service was restored at 1:01pm after physically power cycling the router.
An unforseen problem during transfer to the new server caused both
atomicinternet.homeip.net stats and
cougarfest.com stats to stop updating from Oct 4th - Oct 9th. IIS 6 uses a log format different than IIS 5 which was the cause of the error. Fortunately it was an easy fix, and I also took the opportunity to upgrade to the latest version of
AWStats as well. I'm too lazy to update past logfiles so those days will forever be shrouded in mystery.
This server is now running on Windows Server 2003 with IIS 6 along with the latest versions of ASP, ASP.net, ActivePerl and
PHP. The system hardware has also been upgraded significantly and I took the opportunity to centralize many of the system
functions into one location. The new servername is PROTONX so I can run both simultaneously if I find a problem. If you
happen to stumble across one, please email me immediately so I can panic. Even though I'll never use many of the new
features of 2003, I'm tickled pink to be running it!
| Old System (PROTON) |
|
New System (PROTONX) |
| Oper System: | Win 2000 Adv Server |
|
Oper System: | Win Server 2003 Ent |
| Web Server: | IIS 5.1 |
|
Web Server: | IIS 6.0 |
| Processor: | Pentium II 333Mhz |
|
Processor: | Pentium III 933Mhz |
| Memory: | 224 MB |
|
Memory: | 512 MB |
| HDD: | 50 GB |
|
HDD: | 50 GB |
| Databases: | MySQL 3.1.2, ODBC 3.123 |
|
Databases: | MySQL 4.0.15, ODBC 3.525 |
| Languages: | ASP.net 1.1.2102 |
|
Languages: | ASP.net 1.1.4322 |
| Perl 5.6.1, PHP 4.3.2 |
|
| Perl 5.8.0, PHP 4.3.3 |
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