Month: October 2004

Happy Halloween everyone! My sister and her friend have been dressed up as Mario and Luigi all day, however my sister’s friend is taller and dressed up as Mario. I am going to dress up as a penguin! Me and Jess may go to a Halloween party tonight, but she never told me about it. Anyway, gonna go hang out with Randy and debug a Cisco pix and router.

I am posting on my new Zaurus SL-6000. Sharp is discontinuing it in the US, so I had to get it now so I wouldn’t have to ship it from Japan. You should get one too, it has a 400MHz processor, 64MB of RAM, SD and CF, and built in WiFi! And best of all it runs Linux. Only problem is that it won’t sync with Linux, at least not yet. I am attempting to work on a Zaurus SyncML client. However, I really don’t have any C programming skills, but that doesn’t mean I can’t learn.

I am also working on some Windows projects in the Bunny Rabbit Corner. One is a program that removes all of IE’s temp files (as it leaves many after you hit “Delete files…” and a log viewer for TapeWare

Want to run Linux, but want to test it first? Don’t want to have to make a bootable CD and reboot? Then you need to try the Portable Virtual Privacy Machine. This is neat, because you can run Linux from within Windows. You can stick it on a flash drive and take it anywhere with you, and your data stays on the flash drive. You can also scare friends by running it on their computer, and say you installed Linux instead :)

I went out to Haines City yesterday to install a printer for someone as they could not get it working. It kept giving them an error message. I get there, and the first thing I see is a yellow exclamation on the printer in the Device Manager. This means that they plugged in the USB printer BEFORE they installed the software. I don’t care what the instructions say (which HP’s instructs always say plug in the printer first), you always put the software in first. However, this would not have helped anyway. I tried installing the printer several ways, but it would not go, came back with file errors. It seemed like the CD-ROM drive was bad… so I took the CD out, just to make sure there wasn’t any horrible scratches on it. As it turns out, there was a huge figerprint smudge (like food or something) on the CD. I cleaned the CD, tried again… went right through. So the moral of the story… make sure your CD’s are clean.

Well, I have really pissed off the RoadRunner techs now :). Its been over a week now with a bad connection. Normally, there will be one tech working out there, now I have two… and a third one showed up briefly. This was all about 20 minutes after I placed a call to RR Tech Support very aggrivated. But I have customers complaining, so it has to be fixed.

BAAA! RoadRunner is ticking me off! For the past week or so, it has been up and down like crazy. I am paying massive amounts of money for business class, and yet it still does this. I have been a pain to the RR Tech people because I have been calling everyday for a week now complaining.

In other news, I am building a computer for someone, and first I open the case, and its missing a bay cover for the 5.25 and the 3.5. They assumed I would put in a floppy and a CD-ROM… however, I am building a computer without that, just the hard drive. Their site pictures the case with all of them, but they don’t ship all of them, so I called and they are sending more.

Second, I tried putting in the processor fan. Its a standard Intel fan, nice fan, however, their plastic holder for the fan sucks. You have to lift these levers over and back the other way for it to hold tight. I did that, and the plastic broke… so now it won’t hold. So I called Intel, and they are shipping me out a whole fan. They can’t just do the plastic piece. However, I commend them on their excellent support/warranty service.

Anyway, its off to dance class to do more fox trotting, and maybe something new. Then come home and watch Gilmore Girls with my girlfriend. She wants to have its babies as she would say.

I have transitioned from Mozilla to Firefox. Its much simpler. And everything seems to flow together nicely, you should try it out. I have to switch my family over, they all use Mozilla, and I think they would be happier with Firefox.

Firefox – Rediscover the web

Well, not too much has been going on here. I was without electric for a week during this last storm, which was bad for my servers. However, I did have a generator to power them, but it doesn’t do much good if the Internet connection isn’t working. Anyway, next year, I hope to be more prepared.

I recently bought a used 75 foot radio tower. It is pictured below. We had a heck of a time getting it down. We undid one of the guidewires, and hooked it to my truck and backed up a little… well, all was good for a few seconds, until it pulled my truck along with it… down she went. There wasn’t too much damage though… except to the ham radio antenna at the top, but I am not sure what I am doing about that. However, I would like to get my license for it.

Now I just need to put it up somewhere. I am going to put it behind my house, but I need to place the guidewires.

I am going to be redoing my office to make it more work friendly in here. I bring home too many computers to work on, and the one desk I have for that has been outgrown. I am going to be repainting my whole office, and putting cabinets on two walls with plenty of storage, and three or four spots for computers where all the wires I would need would come up. I am also painting the walls with a gritty paint, should be a neat look. I don’t know what color scheme yet… any ideas?

I’ve been doing some yardwork, but for a while there, I only got so far as you can see in the second picture below.

But all is well now, with a new wheelbarrow. I will post some pictures later for the finished yard… hopefully, some of the grass will have come back.