Archived News starting from 03-29-2003 and earlier
BlogRecently, our team at work moved to a new building. Consequently, I got a
new desk next to the window. I like it.
After reading a recent
post from a fellow Cougar owner, I decided I'm going to give AutoX a shot. The
Detroit SCCA is holding an event April 13th and I plan to participate. I also plan on getting my butt kicked, but there's a possibility I might not place last. I love watching rally, and have been to the track where my
friend races a few times so I figure it's time to try it out for myself.
I've been trying to get my criminology take-home exam done and I just can't concentrate on it. Perhaps it's my procrastination, or perhaps just my lack of interest in anything remotely related to schoolwork. In any case, I can't get myself to do it. Instead, I stare blankly at the screen and get more and more tired. I've only got one class left after the two I'm currently taking, so now that I'm close to the finish line I guess I just can't make that final sprint. Time to read something and go to bed.
Browsing through my weblogs while on break at my ASP.net class, I compared
this months stats (not even halfway through it yet) to the
same month (March) of last year. Currently, this server has served up 4.15 GB to 2857 unique visitors. By the end of this month I'm sure the numbers will have doubled to 8.3 GB and 5714 visitors (you can check my numbers March 31st). A year ago it was only 495.87 MB and 569 uniqe visitors. This means the server has infected the Internet with 1676% more bandwidth and claimed 100% more victims than a year ago this month. Everything myself and my associates are coding is either interesting, or search engine friendly. The whole purpose of this server was for me to play around with web technologies. Now that it's evolved into hosting useful applications I can't experiment as much, but fortunately I've learned enough to avoid catastrophic experiments anyways. I plan to continue to provide a web playground for those like myself who are interested in all flavors of web technologies, as well as the resources that have developed on the server. Future projects include my weblog application (ASP.net of course, to get some real-world experience from all this training) and the resurrection of an old PS/2 I own into a fully fledged forum hoster running PHP and MySQL server on top of Linux OS. Of course, I'll also continue to rant. Afterall, the most important application on this server is my soapbox.
This whole week I'm in training on ASP.net. The place I work at doesn't use ASP.net, but it's still an interesting web framework and I decided to play around with it. Initial impressions are that Microsoft took Front Page, Visual InterDev, and Visual Studio and threw them together to make Visual Studio.NET. Webpages are now programmed like visual basic applications. Each button/textbox/web control has code behind it (if desired) and each page has an associated visual basic file. Everything is compiled and ground up into the necessary HTML at runtime. While it's obviously designed for mickey mouse programmers, it definately has an advantage in terms of productivity. Unlike the typical front-page bloat, all code is compiled into a DLL for quick access. The actual HTML is still heavy, but the functionality and built-in functions make most of it unnecessary. The downside is the high server traffic to make it all work. I'm planning on making my weblog program with it so I'll update again once I have some real experience using it. Head to
www.asp.net and download the web matrix to play around with it yourself.
I've had these for awhile, but figured it was about time to share them with the world. I'm still working on my
helping hands monkey, but I've been tempted by the following: The
trunk monkey and the
bathroom monkey. I'm hoping the helping hands monkeys come pre-trained for both. If not, they'll be a whole lot of monkeys at my house!
While working on updates to various hosted sites, I decided it was time to allow uploads (actually it was time awhile ago, but I'm lazy). The result:
AtomicInternet Upload Box. As of now it only allows uploads of graphic files under 2MB, but I will probably expand it in the future. For now I'll see how fast I get hacked.
I was at work today and heard a song called "
United States of Whatever" and I can't stop listening to it. I think it's the improvisation of it that hooked me. There's also a video, but I'm too lazy to link it.
Enjoy!
A
fellow Cougar owner had a piston blow from his newly installed turbo. The kit has been tested well on various Cougars but this one apparently didn't like it. They still aren't sure what caused the problem, but I believe he was running more than my 8psi boost. However if I do wind up with the same fate, I'll just do what he's doing and get a 3.0L to replace it.
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