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

I recently found a bunch of old LP’s (records, vinyls, 33’s, whatever you want to call them). I’ve been wanting to play them, but didn’t have a turntable. Well, tonight, the Internet/cable TV went out, so I thought it would be a great time to play them. My mother had a turntable. I went over to her house to get it. I asked where it was. She said if it wasn’t in the cabinet, it was in the “yard sale” pile. I couldn’t believe it. It was sitting in the shed in freezing temperature. I have rescued it from it’s prison. It is now playing me Rubber Soul by the Beatles.

What bothers me the most is that my mother had me save the speakers for the player for several years now. Now I find that the turntable was not wanted anymore, and was going to get rid of it. Shame on her.

I used Vista for the first time the other day at a customer’s house. I wouldn’t call it a “bad” experience, but it wasn’t a great one also. I was mostly indifferent. I did however like the Aero interface with the transparency and flowing windows (and especially the preview over the task bar windows). Well, I just happened upon something called the Beryl Project. I don’t need Vista to get that. Beryl does everything Aero does, and more. It even does “wobbly windows” (taking me a while to get used to that one though). It even has a few Mac like things, like viewing all the windows at once. What is even better about Beryl over Aero is that it works on older graphics cards. My laptop would never run Aero, but it runs Beryl just fine.

I’ve been working on New Orleans stuff this morning. I am moving points around on a map. When the points are added to the map, they show where someone walked. But the list of points is put in some random order. I have this weird thing where I try to find patterns in things. So I started thinking about the way the points were lined up. I couldn’t see a pattern. It must be “random.” But then I started thing… I don’t believe in random. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be looking for patterns. I don’t believe “random” truly exists. It just looks random because the pattern is so big. So, to come to my point: my blog is called “Random Knowledge.” This is a contradiction of myself. I therefore am considering a name change. Does any one have any suggestions? Other than “Big Stank” of course (Amber…).