Month: March 2007

I am tired of people stopping unnecessarily to let me go. When I am on my bike riding on the Fort Fraser trail, people at the Bartow Hospital and Bartow Ford stop as I come up. I have a little stop sign. They have right of way. They are in a big metal cage. I am protected by cotton (actually, I think it is a synthetic, but still… actually, I should probably where cotton). A couple of times, I have shook my head to let them know that I am not going to go, and you can see that they get mad that I didn’t take their gesture. I understand they are being kind, but they could also be some serial killer that hates bikers and wants to run them down. I know that if they are passed me and going the opposite direction of me, the chances of getting hit are very slim. One day, someone is going to let someone pass, and some idiot driver will come flying around them and run down some little girl.

People have been doing this in their vehicles a lot lately also. At least then, I am in a big steel box like them. But I still don’t need the gesture. If you have the right of way, and no stop sign, and I do… then GO!!!

I am getting closer to getting into my office. The walls are almost done and ready for paint. Once the paint is up, I can build some shelves and start moving all of my stuff into the office. That means I will have an pretty empty room here at the house. I want to keep the one counter though for playing around on. I am thinking of going back to some of my old hobbies like model car making.

Are you looking for a professionally made laptop mount? Try these out.

A friend of mine bought this (he claims his brother bought it however). It was put together by parts from Home Depot (about $10 worth of parts). I can’t believe people are actually buy these. To see some fine pictures of these, check it out on the photo gallery.

Once I get my Concealed Weapons Permit, I am thinking of getting the following:

If you don’t know, it is a Glock Model 27 (.40). I can add things like this.

Since Sprint won’t come to me, I’ll just boost their signal. I just bought this cell phone booster that you install somewhere in your home that improves signal. And guess what, it really works! I can actually make phone calls in my house on my cell phone. I of course installed the antenna on my tower at about 35 feet. I may put it higher to make it even better.

This is again in preperation for my office. When I move into the office, I am moving my “home” phone line to the office and only using the cell phone. Jessica’s should work on the booster also.

Anyway, if you’d like a system like this, let me know, and I can set it up for you!

In anticipation for my move to the new office, I need to shut down my IBM Xeon server for a short while. This server will in fact be moving to a datacenter at some point in time in the future. I however, would like to keep full control of this site and am moving it to a different server which I will keep at my office. It’s not really a new server. It is actually my old server. It is a dual 1.0GHz PIII with 1GB of RAM and a 36GB RAID1 (with an extra drive waiting for a failure). It is over 6 years old, but continues to chug along. This will be my play server. If you are reading this, then you are reading it on my new server. Congratulations!

There I was. Standing there listening to the hum of hundreds of servers. Below me was a static proof floor. Around me were racks with glowing orange and blue lights. Above me was blackness with hundreds of CAT5e, fiber, and grounding cables. There was a 1.5 megawatt generator, self resetting circuit breakers, and 6 telcos. I think a tear formed in my eye.

I was at the Atlantic.net datacenter in Orlando. We may be moving our data there. It will require the purchase of at least one server, and we have plently laying around for the rest. We got a tour, and it was quite an experience. When you use them, you get a badge where you can walk in, access your rack, and walk out uninterrupted. I told Bobby that when we hosted there, I was going to bring in a chair one day and just sit in front of the rack. When asked what I was doing, I would say, I just wanted to watch. Bobby said that I am truly a geek.

Also, to show off my geekiness, I’ve adjusted Beryl to do another neat trick. When I move from window to window on my desktop, all other windows turn darker and greyer, and the active window is bright. It helps me to focus on the task at hand.

“I’m not fond of the expression “How is (unrelated field X) going to apply in real life,” since it’s a lazy copout to learning; but I am perfectly happy knowing nothing about nature’s cruelest shape, the triangle. I rarely encounter them in real life, and when I do, I am never required to find “proof” that they exist. And if my life depended on finding the slope of something, I would not only welcome death with open arms; I would also try to get romantic with it in some way.”

– Bob “BobServo” Mackey