FreeNode

Cal-tastrophe

2010-04-01T13:43:00.001-04:00

I believe that you should have ONE and only one calendar. I’m not so strict with email accounts but when it comes to the Calendar, Contact and Task list trio, you better have just one or your asking for trouble.

In a utopian world, we would all use the same wonderful program but unfortunately there is lot of wonderful programs and none of them do everything. My solution involves all of the following:

Zimbra – Work Email/PIM solution: Good: Free, Bad: Web Based UI.
Outlook – Good: User Interface, Bad: Not available on-line.
BlackBerry – Good: “On-My-Hip” kind of availability, Bad: Itty-Bitty Keyboard and screen.
Achieve Planner – Good: Best Task/Project list system in the world, Bad: Mediocre calendar, contacts and no email support.
Google - Good: Hey, its done by Google so too much to list here, Bad: Doesn’t work with corporate provided Zimbra.

My solution is to use sync technology to build the utopian system. I want all the good things above without any of the bad things. My flaw is that the existence of synchronization technology means I can never achieve a utopian system. Concepts of Utopia and Synchronization are mutually exclusive.

Believe it or not, all of these are “Connected” for me:

Zimbra is connected to Blackberry and Outlook via software my company has implemented. I have software that syncs Outlook with Google. Achieve Planner natively links with Outlook. Basically, I have setup a system that has more poking and prodding going on than a bad soap opera.

With that analogy in mind, I had the equivalent of an STD introduced in my system. All future calendar entries got deleted and that wipe began to cascade throughout the rest of the applications. My knee jerk solution was to call Outlook the slut that she is and send her off to therapy. In therapy she has dumped all my contacts and tasks and is now refusing to talk to anyone.

Unfortunately, Outlook was the social glue that had everyone getting along. Now that she is gone, we can’t, in the words of the Blues Brothers, “get the band back together.”

At first, this was a “Bummer” moment. Now that I am realizing what all is broken and lost, this is looking like a pretty good time to panic.

I will recover. It will take time. Meanwhile, I am going to talk to all my software about safe sex.

The Power of Paper

2010-03-30T00:38:00.001-04:00

ps i love you
Originally uploaded by Nasser ☮

This flickr, interesting photo shows the true power of paper. Once written, it is there.

Therapy Dog

2010-02-12T12:58:00.001-05:00

There were enough peculiarities with yesterday's trip home to warrant a short retelling of the adventure. This journey began with a plan to return home from Salt Lake City which I completed in a safe and reasonable amount of time. The story begins with the Service Dog in the security line.

I had seen several Service Dogs before. Most are Seeing-Eye Dogs which, as I write this, just noticed the redundancy in their title. There is a gentleman at our church that has a Seizure Dog. This amazing critter can know when his master is going to have a seizure before the seizure happens. I assume that this fortune telling canine first alerts everyone with a bark of what is about to happen so preparations can take place and the seizure can be had in a safe fashion.

No, the little terrier at the airport wasn't a Seeing-Eye dog. He was too short and didn't have the correct type of harness. I became amused when his little official vest labeled him as a Therapy Dog. I had never heard of a Therapy Dog. The only thing I could picture was this terrier jumping up into the man's lap and saying, “Bob, I sensed your anxiety level is rising, quick, pet me!” My next thought was that we are all at an airport having to remove random accessories and dissect our carry on luggage so it can be x-rayed in a flattened manner, the East Coast has a snow storm induced shut down going on and we could all use a Therapy Dog. Why don't I see more of them? Maybe all dogs are Therapy Dogs but this one just had is uniform on.

I do however think all Flight Attendants should be issued two things. A Therapy Dog and an iPod. The purpose of the Therapy Dog is obvious. They are forced to deal with more dumb bunnies in a single day than a Summer School teacher does in the month of July. Now the issuing of the iPod is for me. I need them to know how one of these things works. We all know to turn them off when the announcement says so. And I can't explain how the timing lines up but all too often here is what happens.
The crackly voice on the speaker says, “In prep arg shun for ake off, plea ring or ay tables an eat backs up to a ull … locked pos ish un and turn off any and held devices like cell phones you ay be oozing.” We know this means, bring your seat up to an uncomfortable position, raise your tray table so it won't cut you in half in case we stop quickly and turn off your iPod. Immediatly my thumb goes to hold the play/pause button which must be held down for 3 seconds to turn it off. In less than one and a half seconds later, a snippy flight attendant is standing over me asking, “Sir, do you know where the off switch is for your iPod?”

Now, this infuriates me and when I'm traveling without my Therapy Dog, I'm tempted to say things that has a 100% chance of getting me kicked off the flight with a 50/50 chance of getting to talk with some TSA agents about my behavior. Most of what comes to mind starts out with, “Do you know where the off switch is for your attitude?” or “Bend over and let me show you where I am going to stow it!” This, according to my therapist, is lashing out and in pleasant society, rude. In airport world, probably illegal and makes me a candidate for a body cavity search. So I suppress it. I do like flying home.

However, being somewhat of a Black Belt in passive-aggressive behavior, I put my mind to work and came up with a slightly safer comeback that I may try next time. Next time I will say:

Why, no, I don't know where the off switch is. I do have the instruction manual in my carry-on bag in the overhead. Why don't I unbuckle, stand up and dig through my bag to find it. Once found, I'm sure I can educate myself to the off buttons location and we can solve the 'On-ness' problem that my iPod is having and reduce the imminent danger to this flight.

Because I wasn't prepared, I wordlessly let the remaining 1.5 seconds pass until it powered off and she moved on to harass a preteen with a viscous Nintendo DS. I don't expect them to know how each and ever device works but the iPod is the most popular device to be used prior to and during a flight. It has been out for a decade. And yes, it takes 3 seconds to power it down. Know it. Embrace it. Forgive it.

Now above the magical ten thousand feet mark I look over and find myself, for the second time this year, sitting next to giant-arm-guy in the window seat. We are in coach. I am in the center seat and he is completely filling up his allotted space and is grasping his arms together to keep me from sharing is body warmth for the next 3 hours.

For in-flight entertainment and work, I gave up using my laptop a long time ago. I had lost my Platinum Status and the resulting first class upgrades. Also, with little to no improvements in battery life, it just wasn't worth it. Pleasure is found in paperback books or small writing journals and work is restricted to what I can do on my BlackBerry. I even sometimes risk trying to read 8 ½” x 11” papers but to me, that is pushing it.

Now Giant-Arm-Guy which I will acronym down to an appropriate moniker of GAG, who was reading “the paper” when I sat down is now digging in his laptop case and pulling stuff out. To my astonishment, he has pulled out his laptop to use during the flight. My first thought was how nice it is to not be troubled by concepts taught in physics. I guess it keeps adventure in your life. What I wanted to say was, “What the @#$@ are you doing?” Because I knew I was trapped next to GAG for the next three hours I rather jokingly said, “Wow, I'm amazed you are even attempting that. I gave up trying to use my computer on flights a long time ago.” GAG looked ridiculous. His laptop looked like a giant square oyster shell that was being held shut by the reclined seat in front of him. At that angle, he couldn't see the screen to read it. His arms, still clutching each other couldn't shrink to actually type on the keyboard. His excuse he used to give up was lame. “Yea, I thought my seat wasn't yet reclined and I could make more room to use it.”

I wonder if I could find him a “Physics Dog” or something like that.

10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr

2010-02-03T20:50:00.001-05:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr

View more presentations from John Allspaw.

Workshop

2010-01-10T12:52:00.001-05:00

Workshop
Originally uploaded by chamilto0516

I cleaned up my workshop after two years of not being able to walk in here. It is now one of my favorite rooms in the house. I feel like I can fix anything in there. I can't but I feel that way.

Picasa and Twitter

2009-12-07T00:34:00.001-05:00

Picasa

Somehow I got to tinkering with Picasa and Picasaweb the other day and began to appreciate some of what the two programs were about and how they were supposed to work together. I am currently downloading the latest version of Picasaweb so we will see if my experience changes the next time I use it. The driver or trigger for this adventure was related to the fact that I have a bunch of pictures taken on my Blackberry Curve 8900 which doesn’t really connect to my MacBook. OK, it can now connect to the MacBook but I would have to upgrade to Snow Leopard which I haven’t done yet. Anyway, I needed to get them off the phone and onto the Mac for use and storage.

Twitter

I really haven’t yet understood Twitter. Maybe I don’t have the right followers yet or people following me but how much meaning can be put in the teacup text box. I understand blog posts that are usually thought about for some time, created, edited and then published with pictures and links but not necessarily Tweets. I understand Wiki pages which evolve over time too. One might think they would be used mostly to spread URL’s but this technology has to be assisted with things like TinyURL and bit.ly to get that job done.

I do however think programs like TweetDeck are pretty cool and are poised to evolve into the next major client side app. The winner will be the one that can keep up and will be ready to manage Tweet like things from 30 different web sites from thousands of friends and be able to handle the intersections of friends and Tweets correctly. My money is on Google for doing this as they know how to handle this magnitude of data for us.

Cavalia

2009-12-05T09:25:00.001-05:00

I have seen two Cirque Du Soleil shows and now Cavalia. Cavalia is a Cirque show but not marketed as such which is a fair representation of what to expect.

Denise had left me a note that the "Field trips with Sue" site had posted half price tickets for Dec 1-5. So I called up and gave them the code and purchased the cheapest tickets I could afford which were on the back wall with an obstructed view. This meant we could see most of the left of the stage or most of the right of the stage but was going to have to put up a column in our way. We had arrived early and sat down with a member of Cavalia operations came to stand in front of us. We named her the "Upgrade Fairy". She asked if we wanted better seats and we thought about this for a tenth of a second and said yes. We guessed we were only going to get rid of this column but we were wrong. She led us down to the center of the theater 11 rows up from the stage. We couldn't have really asked for better seats. The price difference was around $500 dollars and was just gifted to us. I tipped her all the cash in my pocket which was about $2 and felt bad about that. The poor girl couldn't even go to the concession stand and by even half a bottle of Dasani water for that.

The show was amazing and had all the artistic elements you expect from a Cirque production. The live music was beautiful and moving and as always, I wanted the CD. The 2 legged performs loved the horses they worked with and loved entertaining. You could tell this from their moves and expressions.

Early on in the show they had about a dozen horses ride on to the stage and do a loop around and ride off at full speed. It created an adrenaline rush in me that paralleled my once visit to the start/finish line at Talladega and my appreciation for the horse rose tremendously. If you were a horse lover then that would have stopped your heart for a second and if you were not a horse lover, you would be now.

These were the most beautiful horses I have ever seen. Not a mark on them and every hair was in place. The show showed us some 40-50 of these animals throughout the show which was also mixed with human performances more Cirque-ish and a few funny elements.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself and will say I won't ever forget that show or look at a horse the same way again.

Wave Hello

2009-11-28T19:55:00.001-05:00

I just got my Google Wave invite/account and this thing looks like it has real potential. More on this later.

Foreboding

2009-11-23T13:34:00.001-05:00

Foreboding
Originally uploaded by chamilto0516

This was the scene this morning that I got some disappointing news. I was amazed at how surprised I was at the news. Couldn't the vultures have talked or whispered something to me like they do in the cartoons?

Current Favorites

2009-09-30T19:51:00.001-04:00

I am currently on one of my favorite services. It is Safari Books Online and at the lowest subscription of $9/month, will pay for itself based on the number of books that I need to use (briefly) and don’t purchase.

I have also started to fall in love with Evernote. It is a client & web based application for storing random notes for later retrieval from any machine. It is free for the basic service which is pretty capable. I haven’t come close yet to needing to pay for it but I do see that on the horizon. It has a BlackBerry app that rounds out this gem. I am using this as a superior replacement to the now defunct Google Notebook that I still have access to but they have halted development & sign-up on.

Given my current cube is in the sound collection zone. My wife found a white (pink or brown) noise generator called Simply Noise that is a lifesaver and production booster.

I have also climbed to the summit of the learning curve of Achieve Planner from Effexis which has to be the best task planning and management system around. It hooks seamlessly into Outlook too.

I have also begin to dig back into Spring and the SpringSource tools. I’ll post more on my J2EE to Spring conversion in the coming weeks.

I am a fan of Facebook but the Zynga games are growing old on me. They really don’t seem to be games but just activities that require clicking. They loose their luster from time to time. I don’t know, I enjoyed the BBS game Trade Wars and that wasn’t much different. How about someone implement some real social network games that allow strategy to play a part.

I also set up an account on Twitter to 1) reserve my Twitter name and 2) to see if I understand its usefulness. So far, I’m 1 for 2. I still don’t get it. If someone doesn’t want to spend more than 15 seconds on something they are going to write, I know I don’t want to read it. It seems like RSS morphed and got loose much like Godzilla did in those old monster-kill-town movies.

Pingbox

2009-09-30T12:29:00.001-04:00

I just put the Yahoo! Pingbox on my page here. I don’t think it is working well yet.

Facebook Personality Test

2009-08-12T23:38:00.002-04:00

I took the quiz "What's Your Myers-Briggs Personality Type?" and got the result: ENFP (Extraversion, iNtuition, Feeling, Perception)!

I am warmly enthusiastic and imaginative. I see life as full of possibilities. I make connections between events and information very quickly, and confidently proceed based on the patterns I see. I want a lot of affirmation from others, and readily give appreciation and support. I are spontaneous and flexible, and often rely on my ability to improvise and verbal fluency. Famous people with my same ENFP personality include: Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Andy Kaufman, Bill Cosby, Robin Williams, Sandra Bullock, and Robert Downey Jr.

Connecting it all up…

2009-08-07T15:08:00.001-04:00

I finally hooked up my Microsoft Office 2007 to my Microsoft Office Live Workspace. This is pretty neat and lets me open and save to my online folders as well as share thing in Outlook like contacts and tasks. My other laptop can’t seem to login to Office Live. I’ll troubleshoot that one later.

Catching up on some industry research…

2009-08-06T18:36:00.001-04:00

I thought this article on the Death of Microsoft Word was very well thought out and actually mirrored some analysis that I did a couple of years ago. I think the industry will get this stuff right but they need the right technology go mainstream.

I am thinking of buying Google stock because they have a good chance of not only being the only company around in the next 50 years but also being the engine behind our government. I use them for email, calendar, phone call routing and voice mail, storing my documents, taking notes, collecting and sorting news and other information, finding my way, publishing my web site and blog and organizing my pictures. I hope they take that “Don’t be evil” thing serious!

When I start to think about how all the applications are linking things together I feel the need to map it out so I can understand it but then I realize how hard that is becoming. I have multiple email addresses and phone numbers associated with me. I also have more calendars than I need. I need just one, any more or less is worse than having just one. Google is coming to the rescue on this but I think I need to double check all this stuff and the permissions of who can see what.

On top of all of this, if an application (web or desktop) isn’t linked, there is usually a plug-in for that so they can get in on the über diagram. Convenience is the payout but the cost is not yet fully understood.

My road was taken away and Facebook had the answer…

2009-07-22T02:23:00.001-04:00

I had posted as my Facebook status asking why someone took away the road I live off of. I got some great responses.

Bryn: I know! It was probably a missed communication. Your road will probably be returned before the end of the week with an apology note. ;)

John: You apparently are in the "have" category. Now someone else who was in the "have not" category has your road. I'm sure you can thank the new administration for that.

Darrin: That's what happens when you don't pay your road bill. They repossessed it.

Me: I better get that apology note and they better put it back because I don't want to tell people I live off of a dirt road.

Joe: Maybe your road has been taken hostage and you should be receiving a package in the mail with photos of your road bounded with duck tape and a ransom note. I hope your road cooperates.

Chris: Just be thankful your house doesn't have wheels on it. I've seen mobile homes being pulled down the road with furniture and clothes still in them (doublewides)

John: See?!?!? Yet another example of the "redistribution of wealth" at work already! Furnished doublewides and roads for everyone!

Brian: Which is why I question yard sales. If someone else owns your old yard, how can you get to your house?

Me: I told my kids that they rolled our road up and took it away to be cleaned. When it comes back, they will get to see how good a job they did.

Mark: At least your half of the dirt is still there. They've completely removed the road, bed, dirt, gravel and everything at my end. They're even making me use your half of the dirt now!!!

This has been my favorite thread yet! Aside from the great collective humor, I loved how this brought people I knew at different times in my life together. Bryn, Darrin, Joe and Chris from High School and John and Brian from previous jobs and Mark, a neighbor and fellow Scouter. This is social networking software at its finest.

I have apparently angered the Gods of Travel

2009-07-06T03:48:00.000-04:00

With the abundance of automation, this idea of getting from one place to another, an activity we have named “travel,” is now a fairly smooth process. However, when you find yourself having to speak to an actual human, you know things have gone wrong. The fact that I was having to speak to someone who looked like a Phyllis at the Delta service counter in Atlanta on my way to Hawaii a couple of days ago at 7:48am wasn't a good omen for the rest of the trip.

I'm not sure what qualified Phillis to be a representative of the First Class/Club Membership Customer Service counter. The only outstanding quality she had was the inability to speak loud enough for anyone to hear her. She was also immune to my subtle social hints that I used to indicate we were having a communication problem. For example, I asked her to repeat everything twice and once conspicuously asked my wife in a voice that I wished Phyllis to use if she could hear her either. The reason I was having to speak to Phyllis at 7:48am was that our reservation had remained just a reservation and never turned into a ticket. I was told only that I was 'pending'. Neither Phyllis nor the person Phyllis telephoned could tell me why I was pending and suggested that the computer system that held me pending was pretty vague on the whole thing itself. They finally pushed me out of pending and into a ticket state. Aside from the effect that we all weren't sitting together anymore, I was thrilled.

To correct our seating situation we asked Phyllis, the nice lady at the Sky Club room, the gate agent and the flight attendant to help correct problem. None seemed to have any ability to do anything. Apparently the only people who could do something was the couple that we explained were going to have to sit in front of my children while their parents were on the other side of the plane. They gladly switched seats.

Prior to boarding, the gate agent said she could check our car seats all the way to Hawaii. This sounded to good to believe so we asked again and she confirmed that they would be plane side when we landed. They weren't but at least it gave us about 10 hours of that now hollow feeling of “convenience.” We filled out the lost baggage claim form and then stated that our next problem was legally leaving the airport area in our rental car without car seats. The baggage person went behind a door and brought us out two car seats as loaners. She did this too easily. I could only stare at them and think about some poor couple at a baggage counter in Oakland trying to describe how their two car seats never arrived either.

Our luck had not changed when we arrived at Hertz to rent our vehicle. They had no four door Jeeps to rent. Only the smaller two door Cherokees. This meant that I could either take all my luggage to the hotel or my children but not both. I worked with the Jeep for 15 minutes and couldn't get it all in. I asked Hertz for help and they said they could rent me a mini-van for an additional fee. I tried to stuff everything in the Jeep once more and capitulated to get the mini-van which they then told me they had none to offer. They also weren't able to satisfactorily explain how the mini-van was in a class above the Convertible/Jeep “Fun” class which my reservation was for. They then suggested I try the convertible. I gave them a blank stare for a while on that but didn't have any more options so I went out and on the second attempt with that vehicle was able to stuff everything (and everybody) into a Mustang Convertible. I next headed straight for Snorkel Bob's water sports rental equipment emporium but due to the amount of extra time we spent looking for lost car seats and actual cars to go with our car seats, they were closed.

After this, I wanted something to good to balance it all out. No, I needed something set this day right. My big status is at the Marriott and I needed something extra special from them. We checked in and I asked for a better room. We were assured we had been placed in their very best standard room. I was tired and this word play didn't sink in right away. I asked if there was a concierge lounge and was told their wasn't. I asked for a complimentary breakfast and was told no. After this, I just had to see my room. The room was great. The single king sized bed looked as if at least 3 of us could sleep in it each night. As it turned out the wicker sofa was a pull out couch with a mattress as thick as your average slice of texas toast. I decided to only punish one child and make them sleep on it so I called housekeeping for a role-away bed and was drawn into an argument on whether I really needed one or not.

In resolution to this day, I just went to bed with the knowledge that I was going to wake up in Hawaii which wasn't to bad an end to this very long day.

Comfort Zone

2009-06-20T16:08:00.001-04:00

I’m wondering what the border of your comfort zone is made of. When I think of "comfort zone", I see a bullseye on the ground in a large empty warehouse and I'm standing in the center. The walls are invisible which tells me they are only figments of my imagination.

Bill vs. the LifeFitness Elliptical Machine: Epilogue

2009-04-22T11:41:00.001-04:00

This morning 3 of us in work out clothes get in on the 5th floor to head down to the hotel gym. I'm worried about getting stuck with THAT machine again but I'm the last out of the elevator. I easily pass the older gentleman with the limp but the other one is walking with an eagerness that worries me. I think he knows the situation. I take a short cut through an area where they are setting up tables for a corporate breakfast. This takes 20 paces off the trip but he must have sped up. We meet back up but I'm still behind him. Now I am really worried.

I enter the Marriott Tomb of Horrors behind him and there are two Elliptical machines unused. The dreaded BEAST from yesterday and the one next to it. I curse under my breath. Right before I break my cool and dive for the working one while screaming "Mine!", he picks the Beast and I quickly throw my iPod, towel and bottled water on the working one. The tension alone already has me at my target heart rate.

I smirk to myself while I watch him with my peripheral vision. He is starting, stopping and pushing buttons trying to figure out what he has done wrong to be treated this way.

Bill vs. the LifeFitness Elliptical Machine

2009-04-21T10:30:00.001-04:00

I awoke in my hotel room at 5:31am. I am not a morning person. If there was a Dungeons & Dragons Morning Person (MP) role-playing stat, mine would be a 3 assuming they still range from 3 to 18. To work-out in the morning, I must remove all mental excuses. I had laid out my workout clothes, sneakers, iPod and room key to dissolve the, “I don't know where my stuff is” excuse.

I crept down to the Tomb of Horrors which is the name I have given to the Marriott's gym. Previous times this place has been void of life which is pleasant and makes these quest almost tolerable. This morning, there was no less than 25 denizens confidently engaged in battling their own cardio demons. Skipping coffee has given my MP a -1. This crowd gives me another -1 modifier. It is looking less hopeful that I am going to come away unscathed.

The only foe I can battle is the LifeFitness Elliptical machine. With a touch screen, multimedia computer attached, their intelligence can be rated as 'high'. However, there was only one free. This is the one to fear. My anxiety level shot up. It is not that this one hasn't been picked, but that it has and everyone knows it doesn't work correctly. There will be some quirk about it. I mount it and begin the fight.

My only weapon is my Black 30GB iPod. Once state of the art but thanks to weekly innovations by Apple, has moved through 'Classic' and on to 'Retro.' I have a killer Workout playlist so I give myself a +1 modifier.

The Elliptical takes round 1 as it is stuck on the highest resistance level. I'm pushing with all my might. The Hulk would have problems with this machine. After several minutes, it finally sees my heart rate and adjust down to a level that those of us who are not Olympic gold medalist find possible.

In round 2, I place my hands on the stationary hand holds in the center. In one swift move, the left oscillating grip finds its way under my shirt sleeve and on the back stroke, pulls me head first into the touch screen causing the machine to raise back up to level 87. I look around praying this went unnoticed but as everyone is looking purposefully away, I have my doubts. Sadly, I have experienced this attack from one of these machines before and should have been prepared.

I learn that as long as it knows my heart rate, it keeps to a normal human level of resistance. I go for my towel and immediately feel it all slowing. I quickly put my hands back on the handles. I don't need a towel that bad. I'm thirsty too but I can't figure out how to get my lips down to my water bottle without looking like I'm trying to French kiss this thing on inappropriate places. Apparently, this vile machine thinks if your heart rate suddenly goes to 0, you just need to push through the pain to come back alive again.

I think of ending my half hour workout a little early but as I still have 21 minutes left, I decide to hold out a while longer.

As I get close to the end, my hands are numb from gripping the handle and ensuring my heart rate is accurately conveyed to my enemy to keep it subdued. We take our battle into the cool down mode. All other machines here begin to ignore heart rate and automatically adjust to a lower level. Not this one. Unless I want to admit defeat, I have to keep my hands in place for a while longer.
It's last jab was displaying my workout stats but only for a sub-second duration before shutting off. I was not defeated. I completed my workout and that is what matters.

For our next fight, I am going to use my mystical powers of Complaint and have management take it away to be fixed.

Keyboard Based Integration/Accessing a Simple POP Account

2009-03-25T23:33:00.001-04:00

I am at a new client and am trying to get all the right contacts into the right systems for efficient communication. The client has given me a laptop so for each contact, I have to:

Add each contact into the clients IM system
Add each contact into my Lotus Notes system so it will be added to my phones contacts
Add each contact into Skype for easier communication

Needing to do about 20 contacts, this took more time than what I thought. There is no good way automate this either.

I also got to play “guess the mail settings” with AT&T as I tried to setup Windows Live Email client to work with something other than MSN. AT&T instructions were terrible and both Thunderbird and Windows Live didn’t really give me very good feedback as to what the problem was each time. Patience applied to trial & error was able to prevail here. I got it all working with my Thawte certificate too!

Toronto

2008-12-10T10:09:00.000-05:00

Toronto is an interesting city. 49% of the people here aren't from here. It is not uncommon to stand about anywhere and hear English, French, Russian and Mandarin being spoken. The restaurant choices follow this phenomenon as well.

The subway, as is true in all cities, surpass my home Atlanta's MARTA in every aspect except cleanliness. I rarely enter a station when a train wasn't there or arriving. I have never waited longer than 90 seconds for a train.

I measure walking distances in clicks where a click is when you find a coffee shop next to a pharmacy. There are about 2 clicks to any given city block. Those things are everywhere.

Trial-by-Fire

2008-05-13T15:23:00.002-04:00

I remember being on a proof-of-concept for a friendly (low stress, plenty of time to complete, under the radar) company and opportunity four or five years ago. During this POC, I had RedHat Linux on my secondary laptop (for fun and education) and had gotten it working running some management and monitoring software we were selling. I remember needing this component and hooked it up to involve in this POC. I was 3-4 days into this when I realized that this Linux based component was critical to the success and there was not enough time to replace it even if I needed to. I guess this was the first time I ever felt like a true Linux User of sorts. My pay was dependent on Linux. As you would guess, both the OS and our software stood up just fine. That was for me, the trial by fire. Since then, I have done many projects solely on Linux and usually, given two VMWare images, its is a 50/50 chance I'll choose Linux over Windows or visa versa.

Now, I find myself in this same position with my laptop. I am currently dependent on my "play" MacBook as my primary laptop as I don't have a Windows based laptop anywhere near its capabilities (not antiquated) to flop over to. I guess you can say this is its trial by fire and so far, it is doing a great job.

Eben Moglen

2008-03-17T12:03:00.001-04:00

Here is a great speech by Eben Moglen at the MySQL Conference on some of these Web 2.0 services and privacy.

My Yard Sale Rule

2008-02-27T00:39:00.002-05:00

Only go to yard sales in which the yards have houses attached that are more expensive than yours. If you are going to buy junk somebody doesn't want, make sure it is better junk than what you have.

Pirates all over the place

2008-02-19T17:37:00.002-05:00

I have just started to dig into reading my Pirates of the Spanish Main RPG rulebook. I have no time to actually play this game but I wanted to see how a game like this would be created. So far, it is based on the Savage Worlds generic RPG system which I haven't seen before so this should be interesting.

Speaking of pirates. My son downloaded Disney's Pirates of the Caribean: Online to my parents computer. Although, there is a free (low priority & limited stuff) edition, I don't think he is ready to play such games all by himself as this is a MMORPG and other players can freely chat with him and that will not do without a parent present. Needless to say, we have frequent talks about on-line as this problem gets to be worse and more worrisome. He and my grandparents were oblivious to the nature and of the game and I tried my best to explain it. I believe the only interaction he had with another human was when someone got on his ship as he was sailing to Cuba. I'm sure if this passenger (captive?) new the true age of his Captain, then he would have found more reliable transportation. I wonder if he was meaning to go to Cuba at all.

When I initially saw the screen, I thought it was a game I saw in Best Buy the other day called Pirates of the Burning Seas. I would love to see a comparison of these two and also a little history on how the world ended up with two Pirate MMORPGs coming out at the same time.

As I was searching for the Burning Seas website, I cam across this computerized version of the Pirates of the Spanish Main CSG game that looked interesting but the website seemed problematic and I couldn't really get more information from it to continue my investigation.

Ubuntu 7.10

2008-02-19T17:30:00.004-05:00

I just set up an Ubuntu 7.10 VMWare image. I found this article called 10 Things To Do Just After Installing Ubuntu 7.10 extremely helpful. I might try to regulate personal browsing and projects to this virtual machine so I can keep work stuff separate but I only give that a 5% chance of happening.

One thing I think is pretty neat on Ubuntu 7.10 is the application Tomboy Notes. It is like a little personal Wiki and looks to be pretty handy.

Linux Downs and Ups

2008-01-26T01:50:00.000-05:00

I went to install an application into a CentOS 5 VMWare system

Problem Mouse Pointer - More of an annoyance, the mosue cursor was giving halting like it was in and invisible box and you had to move the mouse around to get to the edges of the screen. This was a known bug but I guess I took the long way around to fixing this. In the end, for CentOS5, I had to use 7.0 vmmouse driver and make sure I had "CorePointer" in the server section.


Section "InputDevice"
  Identifier "Mouse0"
  Driver     "vmmouse"
  Option     "protocol" "Auto"
  Option     "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
  Option     "Buttons" "2"
  Option     "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
  Option     "Name" "Vmware Pointing Device"
EndSection

Oracle XE: Installation of Oracle XE went well but you have to remember to run the configure option of the service. Go to /etc/init.d and find the oracle-xe control script and run ith with the configure parameter. Then you will be able to use the menus that it installed.

My application needed me to create some table spaces. You can not do this from the menu but you can from the SQL command window. I have to learn more about Oracle DB (I'm a MS-SQL person).

Disk Space: This was the coolest part. Like I may have said, all this is in a VMWare Workstation image. I am only using this thing for demostration and proof-of-concept tasks so I set this thing to have a 12GB disk. Even being diligient with my temporary and install files, this app I was using checked my remaining space and refused to install because I was going to run out of space. I thought I shot myself in the foot with this 12GB limit. But VMWare lets you attatch more than one drive/file to a virtual machine. I quickly created an 8GB device and rebooted. Linux saw it as /dev/sdb and I was able to use the volume manager to create an /opt and /tmp partition and I was good to go. Extremely simple and a life saver.

GDM and being locked out: It was at some point after that the oddest thing happened. My non-root account got locked out with a message from GDM about my disk being full because it couldn't write to $HOME/.Xauthority. The drive was not full and it let root in just fine. Many web pages (and a few white papers on GDM) later and I determined this was a permission problem. Solution was to make my home folder rwx (and tell GDM that it was OK) and then go delete all those hidden folders and directories that GDM/X created the first time I logged in so it would create them again. This was a time killer but I learned something.

Java Web Start: The application I was installing uses Java Web Start so I had to get the latest JDK and link this Firefox 1.5 version to the plug-in file but that went smoothly.

Microsoft Fonts: One thing I always do when I setup a Linux workstation/demo machine is to go through the procedure to get the Microsoft fonts on there. It makes a difference.

Pidgin: GAIM is now called Pidgin. I guess I haven't kept up but this cost me an extra 15 minutes of my life.

So far so good.

Sun Java CAPS

2008-01-23T23:02:00.000-05:00

Sun's (I guess really SeeBeyond's) marketing department should be hanged, drawn and quartered (and may have been but the damage was already done). Their Java CAPS suite's first problem is with the horrible names they have pinned on them. Quickly, tell me what eView, eInsight, eVision, eXchange, eXpressway, eWay and eGate do? OK, just pick one and tell me how you would use such a product. Would you think these products do different things? Now try reading a datasheet or whitepaper about them and keep it all straight (not possible). Their best names are eTL and eBPM and those kinda suck too!

I feel sorry for their sales people and trainers.

All Sun has to do to shoot themselves in the foot is use 4 or more products in front of the customer and then try to explain what they did. They'll loose the prospect even with a whiteboard unless they have some really good Amazing Kreskin quality word association tricks to attach meaningful thoughts to those oatmeal names.

Dungeons & Dragons

2008-01-22T10:13:00.000-05:00

Dungeons and Dragons: Like a computer game but instead of a control and a screen you had reading, preparation, writing, art, planning, math, friendship, statistics, imagination, human interaction, acting, cartography and the only practice teenagers put towards something called risk and consequences. If parents only knew what was to come next, they wouldn't have complained so much about how much time we guys spent together. Dollar/Hour, it was the cheapest form of entertainment there was and probably will ever be.

I guess I stopped playing when the Magic the Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh began to gain in popularity. I do like Pirates of the Spanish Main from WizKids. The ships are excellent and the rules seem to meet a minimum level to reduce arguments that I heard that Magic the Gathering duels were infamous for. There is a role playing game companion to this pirate trading card game that I now have and will review at some point in the future (I haven't read it yet). Anyway, I have a collection but little time and no knowledge of others that share my interest and live nearby to play against.

Google Tricks and Search Tips

2008-01-09T18:03:00.000-05:00

Here are some pretty good Google Tricks and Search Tips.

Being Busy

2008-01-06T23:08:00.000-05:00

I cam across the following quote from Brainy Quotes:

Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.

Thomas A. Edison

I think we all should keep this in the back of our heads when we go to do.

Great Lego Pic

2007-12-23T21:22:00.000-05:00

This is a great Lego picture. Notice the shadow of the two bricks. This is how a kid sees legos. Kids don't need all the fancy pieces to detail a brick out into a model replica. When you need a navy, you just make one.

Dilbert (rather Wally) explains one of my problems

2007-12-18T13:52:00.000-05:00

This Dilbert Strip explains why I get so little done during the day.

Wally: It was theoretically impossible to work this week. Everything I needed to do required me to do something esle first, until it all looped back on itself like a Möbius Strip.

PHB: Maybe you could make a to-do list.

Wally: As if I had a pencil.

Ten Video Games Kids Should Avoid

2007-12-18T08:12:00.000-05:00

Article on Fox News that I found interesting: Family Group Lists Ten Video Games Kids Should Avoid

Assassin's Creed
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Conan
The Darkness
Clive Barker's Jericho
Kane & Lynch: Dead Men
Manhunt 2
Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles
John Woo Presents Stranglehold
Timeshift

I was playing Act of War which I thought made a great book and video game but my 6yo son at the time was watching. I wasn't thinking anything about it because it is mostly just tanks and helicopters and such. There are people but it is not a first person shooter. After a session or two, he wanted to go back and played that game where you killed people. Thus ended any future sessions and led to a sooner deinstallation.

They pick up on this stuff. Yes, they will eventually get their hands on these games but I would rather when they had the mentality of a 21 year old than a 12 year old. Parents need to know what the ratings mean and enforce them. It takes a village to raise a village of children into a village of good men to lead us.

How about a nice Tycoon game, maybe when they are troubled in school they will actually start a business and make profit or something dastardly like that.

Christmas Physics

2007-12-06T21:19:00.000-05:00

Our Christmas tree fell over while being decorated. My wife called and asked me to come help her pick the tree back up. It is the biggest one we have ever had. On the way, the root cause of problem came to me. See, my stand was to small for the diameter of the base of the tree so I had to use the chainsaw to make the bottom of the tree a smaller diameter. These stands are designed for a maximum size tree and I made a tree too large fit into a smaller stand thereby creating the child crushing hazard. The solution was to get a bigger stand. It also helps that the stand holds 3 gallons of water.

My Law of Instances

2007-12-03T16:39:00.000-05:00

As my favorite professor, Dr. Bob Harbort, once said, "If you automate garbage, you just get fast garbage." This has helped me immensely in my field of Application/Information Integration. He taught me a whole bunch of other stuff to but that was pretty profound. The only thing that I can come close to that is thus:

Hamilton's Law of Instances: For some applications (portals, search, knowledge bases, calendars, ERP etc.) the best number of instances for any organization is one. Having less than or more than one is worse than having just one.

Obviously some companies are so big that the number of small governments (which will be much greater than one) inside the company will be constantly pulling the ideal number of instances away from one but this can be manageable but is still not ideal.

I hope to one day have the chance to prove this out with real math, statistics, data, research and what-not but for now, it will have to live as a cute little quip that I have in my back pocket for when I want to seem smart.

Phil Steinmeyer and PopTop

2007-12-03T13:28:00.000-05:00

I found Phil Steinmeyer's blog the other day and dropped him a note to thank him for the work he did at PopTop in creating the best simulation games in the world. There is a fine line between simulation accuracy and enjoyment and PopTop always managed to find it and walk it gracefully. At no time since the release of Railroad Tycoon 2 has my laptop every been without a game from PopTop on it. My fascination with simulations started with Lemonade Stand on the Apple ][ and has peaked with the products of PopTop Software and I have been left with disappointment at everything since then (with the one exception of the Titanic of the simulation industry, Civilization).

As I have often visited the Programming & Design forum on Yahoo Answers! and see many high schoolers (or college students with poor spelling and grammar...it is so hard to tell) ask how to develop a game for the web, PC and other strange devices (TI-84 calculator topping the list of odd ones). One such question pulled back a memory of when I sent a game idea to 20 companies during the height of the the Atari 2600 (I was about 10 then) until the photocopied scribbles on notebook returned with very polite "no thank you" in a way of wording that only corporations know how to use. My thoughts turned to how easy it was to design a game when you were 10 but how hard I hear game design and production really turned out to be.

Speaking as a guy with a couple of Computer Science degrees who uses PowerPoint more than a compiler, I applaud his accomplishments, imagination and hard work.

Studyhall

2007-11-26T14:08:00.000-05:00

In addition to work related products, I am currently studying up on the following:

JSF: Well this is mostly work related but Java Server Faces seems like a good entry into getting deeper into Java technology.
Wordpress: Blogger is great but we have WordPress 2 inside the firewall so I want to see how to best use that software.
Web Design: A am currently labeled the webmaster for our Cub Scout Pack so I need to figure out how to do that effectively.
XQuery: Actually this is a total work thing but it has been on my list a while to learn.

What are you studying?

No Special Purpose

2007-11-21T23:23:00.000-05:00

My wife found my blog and pointed out that I probably had no readers because I had no special purpose for my blog. It had no theme and I no reason to be writing. All this is true, I couldn't argue with her. So I have decided to try blogging a blog with a theme, three actually. One is within my companies firewall and is related to my job and is on presentation and technology useful for pre-sales engineers. The other two are here on blogger:

FreeScouting-this is about my son's and I journey into Scouting. He is now a Cub Scout and I am a Leader.
FreeHarp-My journey in learning to play the harmonica.

Mind the Gap

2007-11-20T23:38:00.000-05:00

Now the reason between this long gap between posts is that a good portion of my time has been consumed by work and Cub Scouts. At work, I have been assigned to a new territory and two new sales reps. In Cub Scouts, I have been running the popcorn fund raiser and it is the first time I have done anything like that. I am settling within the new job and the popcorn sale is coming to an end.

Yahoo! Answers Blogger Badge

2007-08-22T17:29:00.000-04:00

I made my first template change to my blogger page. I added my Yahoo! Answers badge to the nav bar on the right side. Scroll down to see it. Pretty Cool.

Help my Yahoo!

2007-08-10T15:58:00.000-04:00

OK, I official need mental help. I have become addicted to Yahoo! Answers and realized this was a problem when I looked up and realized I had answered a question in Fashion and Accessories. I have made it to level 2 which lets me thumbs up/down answers before they go to rating which is neat. I'm immediately, running back to my home categories of Networking and Programming. Man! this is addictive.

Yahoo! Answers

2007-08-08T12:21:00.000-04:00

I am currently fascinated with Yahoo! Answers. Many who ask would benefit a favorite article on mine written by ESR called How To Ask Questions The Smart Way. There are many legitimate questions asked but it has it shares of trolls.

I am compelled to get to level 2. I don't know why.

As we share text...

2007-08-03T16:01:00.000-04:00

As we communicate more with Blogs, Wiki's, email, web pages, we all must get better at doing so with our language of choice. I cam across George Orwell: 12 Writing Tips on the del.icio.us home page and thought it practical to share.

I bet George didn't have to make 2 corporate wiki updates, blog his daily status report and answer 25 emails a day.

Remove Celluar Before Entering Dwelling

2007-08-02T12:46:00.000-04:00

At our new house, my wife and I have very poor cell phone signal inside the house. My Cingular phone usually at 1-2 bars and most calls are fine but I have a high chance of noise or dropping. My wife has a T-Mobile Razr and she has no signal. So we bought this this wireless extender product called Wi-Ex. It is very hard to say that it works because I can not admit to a "good" installation.

First I have to find a place in the attic or on the roof where we can get signal. A friend of mine found with all phones (he has T-Mobile too) that we can get signal in the attic. Then you have to put the base station near where you want to use the phone. I know where I want it, I just can not get it there. The 30ft RG6/Coax cable that comes with it is just too short for any practical use. I can use the existing coax lines in my house that run from the attic to the basement but then I worry about signal getting lost from the antenna to the repeater because the cable is so long. So far we have gotten a weak signal out of the repeater (unless you are right next to it) for a variety of reasons:

Signal still to weak in attic
Signal lost in long coax
Poor placement of repeater (repeater too close to antenna or walls in the way)
Repeater may work but antenna needs to be beefed up (unidirectional = additional $60)

Troubleshooting this thing is not easy but I really need it working. To make matters worse, Wi-Ex web page kinda sucks. I wish they had a forum or their store working so I could order accessories that might help.

SnagIt and Camtasia Studio

2007-07-30T13:09:00.000-04:00

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then SnagIt is a must for every SE out there. My fairly efficient method of getting screens shots has been dwarfed by Snagit's methods. I'm still in trial of this inexpensive utility but if you have our products handy then you could answer "How do I..." questions a lot faster with SnagIt. As soon as you build a presentation or work on an RFI/RFP, you will get your money back ten fold with this utility.

TechSmith also sells Camtasia Studio. This is a recording product that the WebEx people can only dream of. I first started looking for something like this when I became frustrated making WebEx recordings (did you know WebEx recorder and player do not support USB headset). Camtasia Studio surpasses WebEx by allowing you to record your session, edit it and put audio in later. It will also render your presentation in a variety of formats. I'm dying to see if I can put a useful demo on the iPod with this tool (which is a supported output format).

If we all used these two tools like we do Winzip or Outlook, we could cut back on some redundancy.

"Yes, I edited (and recorded) a wiki page with a table last week, let me send you that snipit"

"I'm getting an error message with PowerPoint, can you look at this screen shot?"

"No, I did configure it correctly, here is a recording of what I did"

"How did I update that certificate six months ago in our ESB product?...Oh yea, here is the recording."

It has potential right?

Free

2007-06-30T01:39:00.001-04:00

This presentation by Lawrence Lessig is excellent and should be viewed and studied by people interested in copyright and creating and giving presentations.

Leo Kottke - Vaseline Machine Gun

2007-06-03T18:40:00.000-04:00

Without the video, I would guess that there were at least two other players with him. I mean if this was first musician ever with the first instrument every made, no one would have thought we needed to invent any more.

An RFP in Wiki Format; Google Notebook

2007-06-03T09:21:00.000-04:00

I am working right now an a Request for Proposal. I despise these things. What the Wikipedia page doesn't tell you is how these get created and answered. Often they are thrown together by 15 or so people with about 15 different purposes. Duplication and confliction abound. The one I am working on now was written by one of the Big Four audit and consulting groups. These are the worst because I have been on both sides. The answered ones have has many words as a couple of Stephen King novels but the similarities end there. A smart company would set up their questions in a Wiki and give all vendors access to it. That way answers could be added when they are ready and questions could change to reflect what the customer really wanted. Security could be on the entry and hidden between vendors. I'm sure there is a Wiki engine out there that could be modified to do this.

I also looked into Google Notebook. A colleague asked me if it was a Wiki. I would have to fail Google notes as a wiki. I tested it and ran it through the wiki principles and it seemed to fail on most of the tests. It reminded me a little of Microsoft OneNote (which I have abandoned) than any of the wiki's I have used.

In summary Google Notes is more of a single user tool than a collaboration tool. Wikis are about collaboration and trying to make editing, organization and free form information management possible and not just saving web clips. It is something I will keep my eye on as features are added. I think if you combine Google Mail, Calendar, Notebook, Pages, and Documents you have a nice little shareable office suite that doesn't cost you $300-600 and has enough features for the common man.

USB Hubs

2007-06-01T14:25:00.000-04:00

I have the absolute worst luck with USB hubs. Every hub I get meets one of the following fates:

Loose the AC adapter
Loose it outright
Plug on hub where AC adapter plugs in comes apart from the main board
Gets power from the AC but not from the computer causing weird problems where some devices work and others do not
Stops working for no apparent reason

I will admit that 10% of the time it has been that the USB system on the laptop has been flakey.

Now I have to go purchase another one.

Dot-Matrix

2007-05-22T09:30:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I went to get a vehicle emission inspected. They ran the tests and then printed out the report on an Okidata dot-matrix 9-pin printer. It was not a new one either. It was probably 10 years old. I was amazed. Then I priced them at an office supply store and I think they are more expensive than when I bought mine 15 years ago.

Frisbee Games

2007-04-24T09:13:00.000-04:00

I may start up a new Scouting Blog but until then, this is my only outlet for this story.

For our last Tiger Cub den meeting, I had decided to play Frisbee Golf. For about $4 for the stakes at Home Depot and some donated frisbees from Up the Creek Fish Camp we had what we needed. Instead of "holes" 1 through 9. We did Totem through Boy Scout. They boys decorated each of the stakes and we went and placed them. After we set up our course, we played a round. Borrowing a line from WKRP, as God as my witness, I thought Tiger Cubs new how to throw frisbees. There is no need to keep score when all you are trying to do is make it to the end of the game.

After the game, we pulled the stakes and put them away for safety reasons. I gathered the parents to plan summer activities while my assistant Den Leader took the kids into the field with the frisbees. When they returned, most of the frisbees were broken and all were scratched up so bad that you couldn't make the logo out. Apparently, my son invinted Frisbee Sledding. This is where you take the frisbee to the top of the bank, sit on it and slide all the way down.

I asked my Assistant Den Leader how this went and he reported, "all other things we did this year paled in comparison to Frisbee Sledding."

Linked-In

2007-03-28T10:41:00.000-04:00

I finally gave in and setup my Linked In account and started to build out my electronic network. Most of the people I chose to link already had accounts so I am not the leading edge person here. My reservations to joining in the first place was about security. But much of the information I added was already on other sites. It does scare me how much the LinkedIn people know. The free version is nice but if you need the advance features, those prices seem very high.

Terminal Server References? Anyone?

2007-03-21T21:44:00.000-04:00

As I am looking to build or buy a new home, I started planning a home computing system for the house from scratch. What I have in my head is some beefy server and cheap workstations (graphical diskless thin-clients) throughout the house. I have read some up on the Linux Terminal Server Project and envisioned an amazing system possibly involving intercom (VoIP), home chat, controlled web access (I have kids), Myth TV, word processing, presentation and central fax & print. The software seems to be there for the right price. The hardware is another story. I have not been able to put together this architecture cheaper than just buying and networking full fledged systems for each room. Isn't there supposed to be a cost savings with this architecture? Am I after a 2001 dream that everyone else knows has already failed? I am tired of spyware and viruses and updating multiple systems with various patches. Is it going to cost more for less?

Move into an apartment and use a Mac

2007-03-16T19:46:00.000-04:00

It has been a while since my last post. I have moved into an apartment. I haven't lived in an apartment for a long time. I forgot how noisy they are.

Anyway, I am breaking in a new MacBook that I won at a company function. I really haven't used a Mac since college and that was so long ago that really doesn't count.

I guess my only advice to a Windows user that switches to a Mac would be this; don't fight it. Stop overthinking how to do things. Everytime I have hit a "how do I do this" wall, I realized that if I had stopped and just tried the first, most obvious way to do something, it would have been right. Everything has been simplier. The only real problems I had in the networking department was actually on the Windows firewall side of things.

On a different subject, I am suprised to see the Intel section on Slashdot. I wonder where Slashdot is going with this.

SOHO Terminal Clients and Wi-Fi phones

2007-02-04T00:19:00.000-05:00

Current technical interest in these last 48 hours is about having Linux Terminal Clients in the new house (whenever I get one). I am thinking one server and eventually clients in the study, office, kids area and basement. I'm not sure yet what functionality I would want but that list is simmering in my head. My current problem is the cost. Early looks at pricing has the clients (even if I built them myself) to be more expensive than run of the mill cheap computers. I guess they are cheap for companies but still pricey for SOHO.

An article on Wi-Fi phones has me thinking about their use. If we dump Vonage when we move (likely) then Wi-Fi phones for home office use my be the ticket. I will start to keep my eyes on this technology.

del.icio.us good, myspace bad

2007-02-03T22:23:00.000-05:00

I have discovered del.icio.us. I did not understand del.icio.us at first. I thought it was functionality that was already in your browser. After I noticed that many of my browsers bookmark lists were very long, unmanageable and different. del.icio.us is a single place for all your bookmarks and is further sorted by a tagging system. The best part is that it is sharable. You can also see who else had linked to something you have linked to. The Firefox plug-ins make it part of the browser again.

How is MySpace.com so popular? The standard interface seems like a collection of crappy web applications built by different people who were made at each other and were not on speaking terms. To make matters worse, they have to have the most annoying in-page ads on the planet. Now, the strangest thing is that with an interface that bad, you would think it would be impossible to make it worse but everyone has managed to do it.

Creative Webcam

2007-01-15T15:03:00.000-05:00

Well, I have my Creative Web Cam setup and working with Yahoo and possibly Webex but I haven't tested the Webex thing yet. I'm not sure what really to do with this thing outside of Webex presentations and such. I have been able to watch myself use the computer and that is not much different than a still image. Everything I do looks alike from the perspective of the screen.

I did set it on top of my cube and pointed it so I could see someone approaching my cubicle and that was kinda helpful. It was boring to watch and I felt like I was spying a little so I took it down.

I am more aware of me and what I am doing while the webcam is on and running. I guess Jennifer Ringley could tell you when that goes away.

NPR and some Books

2007-01-03T16:25:00.000-05:00

I loved this story on NPR called, "Time to get organized? Not so fast." I should get that book when I am not backed up on my reading. My current list is:

The World is Flat
Guns, Germs and Steel
Eragon
Systems Thinking (don't ask)
And some work books like Demonstrating to Win and Enterprise Integration Patterns

Too much training

2006-12-14T15:42:00.000-05:00

Three weeks of corporate training is my limit. I didn't mean to do three in a row but next weeks important class was canceled and I found the same class this week in a better location. Anyway, my brain is toast.

Dumb Questions

2006-12-11T14:37:00.000-05:00

The principle that"there are no dumb questions" is a polite contract between student and teacher and not necessarily between student and other student.

OneNote

2006-12-07T22:19:00.000-05:00

OK, I feel like a traitor. I am trying out Microsoft OneNote 2007. I see it as a competitor to Wiki technology and that I am going against all the Wiki preaching I was doing at my former company. I need a better way to store information. The big con is that this info will sit on my hard drive and not help anyone and get stale. My current company doesn't have a SharePoint server so collaboration is out. The second big con is that the auto-linking is not there but then I haven't figured it out in the Confluence wiki we have at work either. I think that is necessary. A former co-worker was a big OneNote person so I may ping him for some help.

The pro here is the following:

Integration with Outlook
Handles media (pictures, web clips, audio recordings, etc.) better than the Wiki's I have seen
Goes with you
OneNote Windows Mobile Client

Anyway, my Apache server has crashed on the home Linux box taking my favorite Wikka Wikki with it and I'm just not loving the former companies choice called MoinMoin (even though I love the Python language).

Food pyramid has changed

2006-11-21T08:59:00.000-05:00

It seems more and more people are getting on Yahoo 360. Is this the equivalent of MySpace (which I have tested but do not like)?

Anyway, I have started a new job. I have actually been on the job for about 2 1/2 weeks now. So I am doing the new job thing. Getting to know the systems, culture, products, people, procedures and such. It is amazing how a bunch of different little things do add up to a big thing. No details on that right now but maybe I will do a comparison between my old and new employer one day.

Last night in our Cub Scout meeting we covered the food pyramid which has changed since we learned it many years ago. It was a pretty good meeting. I am now up to 6 Cub Scouts but I think I will only have 5 that will attend regularly. I think my 6th (and his Dad who is supposed to be my Assistant Den Leader) is going to drop out pretty soon.

Travel Restrictions

2006-11-14T21:39:00.000-05:00

I am returning from a one day trip to Washington. I am traveling with a new company and was heeding to company and manager travel restrictions. The new company is a bit more strict and loss of liberty was felt.

So I flew Airtran and got to sit next to singing Hispanic woman. On top of that we got to sit on the plane an extra hour waiting for people and bags to load. The company prefers Avis and not Hertz so I had to go to a rental car counter. I hate rental car counters and think they are needless. And for what? To get something called a Chevy Cobalt. Yea, its kinda like a car. I didn't really fit in it and the mirrors are way to small. At around 8000 rpms, I will begin to creep forward toward the car rental exit.

So at a $200 hotel limit in DC, I couldn't stay anywhere near our office. I ended up at a Marriott Town Place Suites about 10 miles away that seemed more like a Fairfield but with a kitchenette. I think I was in the room 6 hours.

The meeting went fine so it was back to IAD for an earlier plane.

At IAD, I learned the AirTran ByePass system won't let you select an earlier flight so it was back to a counter. So I got really aggravated when TSA would not let me use my Delta Crown Room Card and AirTran ticket to use the fast airport security line. So I got to wait in both the quick and slow line. And then I got to find out my after shave cream was 3.3 oz and so it had to go in the trash. It was sort of expensive. TSA's options the propose is for you to go back to the start of your travel day and try again. They propose you can go get in line to check-in again and then go through security again. Sounds like fun? Nah, just toss it.

Many thanks to Google Maps. I printed out directions between all points and it was right on the money.

Left one, starting another

2006-10-16T22:00:00.000-04:00

So I have left one job and will start another at the end of the month. Someday, I will type up why but not now. It has been a while since I have posted so I thought I would put this big move in here. More later.

Two technologies

2006-10-05T17:13:00.000-04:00

Here are two technologies that software sales engineers should not do without.

VmWare: I have been using VmWare for a year or so but have just now started to explore some interesting things like snapshots and its advanced networking. Snapshots are unbelievable and extremely useful. Take a snapshot and install or re-configure something. If it goes bad, just revert to the snapshot.

Webex: Besides the on-line meeting capabilities, the record, playback and powerpoint embedding functions are underused.

I have also learned in a Demo training this week that I am not the Powerpoint expert I thought I was. I will follow-up on that later

Learning

2006-09-13T08:48:00.000-04:00

As we get older and more mature, why does it seem like learning new things is harder and not easier? My theory is that it is infact easier to learn something new but we are much more aware of the passage of time and become frustrated at the seemingly slower process.

Bad Travel Day

2006-09-11T16:02:00.000-04:00

Well, last night I ended up getting to bed about 12:30am and had to get up around 4:15am to make an 8:00am flight. I was flying Airtran to save the company a few dollars even after the freenode: Airtran Left my Butt in Vegas episode. So I get to the terminal and they direct me to a kiosk. I swipe my card to give the machine my name and it asks me if I want to upgrade for $35 dollars. I push yes and it gives me a message that says I need to talk to a human to check in to this flight. The alleged human says I need to try again. I do and the thing wants to now charge negative seventy dollars to my card. It then told me to find another human (or the same human, it wasn't specific). The second human, checked me in but told me that the upgrade that was sold to me failed because it had no business class seats to really give me. So I was checked in to coach with no seat now and no receipt of the upgrade debit or credit. I was told the gate agent human would straigen this out. So now I got in line to check my bag and talk to human #3 who gave me a seat and a receipt showing the proper debits and credits. This was not as smooth as that as every question required her to go away for a few minutes at a time. I don't see how the kiosk is supposed to save me or anyone time.

I borded, flew to my destination and rushed to my trade show. Now my only problem was that my trade show was scheduled for next week and I didn't want to go to the current trade show being held at the hotel. I sat down to go over a few critical Outlook Calender entries.

Come to find out, there were many emails talking about Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday (without week or dates). There were a few that actually mentioned the proper dates which were obviously not read carefully by myself. There were even a few to others travelling with me discussing an imagined conflict that I was going to have attending the trade show and my non-trade show work, my actual travel agenda showing the improper dates I booked reservations on and a request to share a car (which nobody took me up on ... now I know why). There were no emails from my travelling companions telling me I was going the wrong week.

So a few embarassing phone calls to people inside my company and a few very long phone calls to reservation hotlines, the mistake may be contained to 3 figures and a day lost and piece of my sanity (which I think is evidence that I can not loose).

New return flight is delayed but I expect no further problems.

Cub Scout Recruiting Ideas

2006-09-06T10:23:00.000-04:00

I thought this was page was a good idea: Cub Scout Recruiting Ideas - Longs Peak Council Online. Too many boys could benefit from scouting but do not because they never had the opportunity.

Informative Desktop Wallpaper

2006-08-29T14:25:00.000-04:00

Why does it seem like there is a short supply of informative desktop wallpaper? Yes, a pretty picture is nice but what about a more subdued artsy design like many found on KDE-Look but with informative text and diagrams that are relevant to your job. I can think of a few examples:

phonetic alphabets
guitar chords
harmonica layouts
measuring conversions
parts of an engine
binary chart
network topologies

I think these would really be popular.

Anti-Wiki

2006-08-25T16:07:00.000-04:00

I am trying to setup an internal general-use Wiki for my entire company. We currently have twenty five (25) wikis on our MoinMoin Wiki server but they are all department aligned. I am getting some resistance to using a generic company wide name along with some quetions about our purpose. In the process, the "Wiki Administrator" actually comes back with this rebuttal:

As to the larger issue, a single generically named wiki is not what people want. Also, it's not practical. Who owns the home page? Where do I find things? Who controls the placement of information? Who sets the naming standard? Who cleans out stale information? The usability of such deteriorates rapidly. Information simply gets lost. This isn't Wikipedia. By the way, the desire for multiple Wikis exists well below the department level. We have received several requests from several departments for multiple wikis, each targeted at a small subset of their activity. I call em Boutique Wikis :-)

I couldn't help but rebute every singe line:

single generically named wiki is not what people want

Uhmmm…I thought WE were people and have been asking about it. If I am just a person then if there were some other individuals then we would be a group of people that could be called just 'people' for short. Oh, and we ARE asking for a generically named wiki.

Also, it's not practical.

I looked it up on Wikipedia and got the feeling it is practical.

Who owns the home page?

Everyone

Where do I find things?

All Wiki's come with the built in automatic pages named: RecentChanges, TitleIndex, WordIndex, FindPage, WantedPages, OrphanedPages, AbandonedPages, RandomPage, PageSize, PageHits. Will they not help in finding things?

Who controls the placement of information?

Everyone can help control and maintain it. It is worth a try. Name one other system at our company that has limited bottlenecking control and is perfect. Try something different. This might work.

Who sets the naming standard?

The naming standard is already mostly done with the concept of WikiWords. The remaining work is trivial because page renames and link changes are simple. The system will report on which pages refer to PageOne and FirstPage and tells you where to fix them. I do it now but not because I have special privileges, I just understand Wikis.

Who cleans out stale information?

If anyone can then anyone could. If I could get rid of crappy unused portlets on our intranet portal and create new and better ones that I would but there is no facility to do that. There is no facility to tell me which ones are old and no privileges to let me. AbandonPages and WantedPages are the answer to that. Ironically our non-Wiki like current content management system is the king of stale information

The usability of such deteriorates rapidly.

The original Wiki on Software Patterns was started on May 1, 1995. I went there and I am not really seeing the deterioration.

Information simply gets lost.

Then search for it, find it and put it back where it belongs. Please see the "Where do I find things" response above on how this is possible.

This isn't Wikipedia.

No, you are right, they understand Wikis and how to use and host them. But we use portal software and we are not Yahoo, we use search but we are not google (ok, bad example, we don't really use search that well) but you get my drift.

the desire for multiple Wikis exists well below the department level.

Only because NO ONE is in charge of knowledge management for it to come from the upper levels and based on the horrendous point that follows, the lower levels do not understand wiki's either.

We have received several requests from several departments for multiple wikis, each targeted at a small subset of their activity. I call em Boutique Wikis :-)

It was at this point, I passed out

Am I off base here? Are corporate wiki's a flop or is this really about something else like lack of control?

Grandfather of Blues

2006-08-24T07:25:00.000-04:00

I was reading in another post that W.C. Handy is considered the grandfather of blues. This immediatly reminded me of the hit song by Lonestar called "Walking in Memphis" were W.C. Handy is mentioned. Wikipedia.org had an excellent entry about Handy.

This article called the Essential Blues Harmonica Listening by David Barrett also struck my fancy today.

I had to point someone to download putty today.

An actual Web Log entry

2006-08-23T15:24:00.000-04:00

I had to look up something on Java Web Start today for work. Also, a colleage asked about download speeds and I thought this article on T1 would be helpful and pointed him to DSLReports broadband speed test.

A digg article sent me to read this article on public hotspot security.

This must be "get Bill to help me day"as in another friend has asked me to help re-build his RedHat kernel so he can get a WiFi driver working. So I found these instructions with google.

Note: I wish this used a wiki-like syntax instead of the GUI/HTML syntax. Is that an option?

Blog with Teeth

2006-08-22T11:24:00.000-04:00

The Lessig blog pointed me to this blog software add-on that lets you take your blog entry and make it a letter to your congressman.

Excellent Idea. I remember a standalone product from the makers of Act for DOS (A popular PIM at the time) that was called Write Your Congressman. It was basically a light version of Act! but came with the database pre-poplulated with all goverment officials name and address. I guess it didn't sell well.

What's Related

2006-08-17T09:14:00.000-04:00

Has anyone any knowledge of a What's Related feature that may have been implemented early (or even current) versions of Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Some searching has reported that it would show you a list of web sites that people who have looked at the same web site have also looked at. It seems now for a browser to do this, it would have to report what web sites you are hitting to a central place and that would either be taboo in today's anti-spyware or similiar to Googles pagerank thus acceptable.

Internet Explorer's help file has a What's Related entry but it points you to the ability to hit search engines from the address bar.

MozillaZine has this to say: “What’s Related” was a browsing feature first introduced in Netscape Communicator 4.06, allowing users to retrieve a listing of websites similar to the one currently being viewed. This preference actually dates back from that browser—it never did anything in Mozilla, despite having checkbox in the browser preferences.

Mozilla’s implementation of “What’s Related” is dependent upon the appropriate sidebar being open. It’s not implemented at all in Firefox, Minimo, or Camino. See: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.related.enabled

Hand Techniques For Amplified Harmonica

2006-08-13T11:22:00.000-04:00

Great hand techniques for amplified harmonica.

Blogs and Spam

2006-08-01T09:40:00.000-04:00

I am currently the champion of a MoinMoin based Wiki at work. I have really enjoyed studying and trying out Wikis and Blogs (this blog is part of my experiement). My challenge now is to try to convince a community of peers to use it. This is not going to be easy.

Why can't a spam filter (I am talking about the google mail spam filter) recognize that I only read and send english (ok, probably bad english) emails and that the daily kanji emails I receive MUST be spam?

Unified Theory of Nothing Much: Lost and gone forever?

2006-08-01T01:08:00.000-04:00

A better blogger than I pontificates on some of my favorite shows in a post titled:
Unified Theory of Nothing Much: Lost and gone forever?

Junior's Juke Joint

2006-07-31T23:51:00.000-04:00

This cracked me up. Junior's Juke Joint describes his organization as:

This is a non-profit organization. In fact, it's a money losing, hole in the wall, one man, one vehicle organization.

The Northeast can always surprise me

2006-07-26T21:09:00.000-04:00

It has been a while since I posted so you might think I have an abundance of witty stories. I either do not, or do not remember them for very long after they happen. But I did see a "Dad" get kicked off a Delta flight yesterday and someone rear end an ambulance today.

In the "Dad" incident, we had already boarded the plane that was leaving an hour later than promised when the pilot said the window heater was out and we couldn't use the plane. I guess you can't fly with cold windows. I don't know why. We disembark and went to the next gate to get on another identical plane (the one difference being the working window heater). As we got on, this Dad makes a stuffy, rude comment (we were all cranky) and the flight attendant jokingly said we could change his ticket to another flight. He got mad and told her to get out of his way and that he was going to his seat (although he wasn't as nice as it reads here). She countered with taking his ticket and throwing his ass off the flight. His family flew home without him.

Apparently in Rhode Island you do not have to get out of an ambulance's way. It may also be permitted to ram them outright. Some sort of car fire was about 4 miles ahead of us. I saw the ambulance coming in my rear view mirror. I tried to get over but no one was letting me. The ambulance was only moving slightly faster than I but when he was a few hundred feet ahead of me a tailgating car bumps into him. No damage was done but the ambulance driver gets out (yes, the light and sirens are still on) and goes back to make arm gestures and yell at the idiot offender. He then stomps back and takes off again to save the original life in peril.

The Northeast can always surprise me.

Symantec Readies Anti-Phishing Software

2006-06-26T15:52:00.000-04:00

"Symantec said today it will release in September a beta version of a security software product that hardens a computer's defenses against e-commerce and banking fraud....Norton Confidential scans Web sites visited by a user for fraudulent or suspicious activity. The software compares a Web site against lists of fraudulent ones"

My comments: Good idea and about time but I dislike these kind of press releases. I know it is just putting stakes in the ground and gives the software developers an idea of if they are going to sell it when it is finished. I can see them now, "Gee, this announcement only got 34 diggs and half the comments were poor, I guess we can stop developing now." However, for the sake of the surfing non-web-savy people in my family, hurry up and finish, I worry about them.

read more | digg story

Linksys working out OK

2006-06-23T09:57:00.000-04:00

The new Linksys router is working out fine now. About once every other week or so, I have to restart it. I can live with that. I don't want to but I can.

Anyway, things so busy and hectic now that I really don't have time to write about it. I will update at a later time.

Cheap vs. Expensive Wireless Routers

2006-05-31T21:50:00.000-04:00

I have determined that the difference between SOHO wireless routers (under $150) like the ones I have been fiddling with and the expense ones that companies purchase (>$600) is the ability to actually use them to debug problems. The D-Link router I mentioned ealier did not pan out. Where my expensive equipment was fine (company supplied Thinkpads) the home equipment was having lots of weird problems. The cheap products do not come with any debugging capabilities. You can not debug poor connection problems. I'm assuming the expensive ones like the Cisco Aironet 1240AG Series then you can actually use SNMP to get detailed information from them. The cheap ones barely keep up with DHCP lease times.

Anyway, I am running the house on a Linksys WRTG54X2 that seems to be performing well. I will keep the blog up to date on my results.

TSA and my bag

2006-05-19T16:58:00.000-04:00

After 10 years of travelling, my luggage and I finally arrived at our destination on different days. I think I know what happened but I can't prove it. Last Sunday night, I was instucted to take my checked bag down to the extra special x-ray machine and let them scan it and put it on the luggage belt that goes to my plane. It wasn't until my bag and I were without each other in NY that I remembered that it didn't happen as it should. My bag bypassed the machine (which was not running) and went through a door (I suspect it led to a closet) and not on the "belt".

As I stood there in the Delta Vestibule of Hate, Scorn and Dissapointment (a.k.a. Special Baggage Services), I got just livid at TSA. Did they tell me the machine was down? Did they give me a warning that my bag might not make it? Did they take my phone number or email address so they could call/sms me later? Did they notify Delta about the issue? Did anyone in the "value" chain actually care about me? Nope! Not at all.

My situation was the cause of randomness in the system and people who have refused to deal with it or care about it. I highly doubt anyone was much safer because all those bags were batched up a forced to wait to be scanned befor being sent on their way.

So, I went shopping for clothes at 2:00am Monday morning. I don't know what women do but men can find socks, underwear and cheap golf shirts at Walgreens for under 10 bucks (total). Everyone accepted my jeans so this wasn't catastrophic.

Atlanta Bread Company

2006-05-11T10:00:00.000-04:00

When you work from home in which you are trying to sell, you run into the problem where a realtor wants to show your home without you in the home office. I have found refuge at the local Atlanta Bread Company. Breakfast, lunch, coffee and sodas are available but the WiFi is free! Now I know where to head when I am out of town and am looking for an office away from the office.

Now this is better

2006-05-04T16:11:00.000-04:00

I now have a D-Link DI-524 Wireless (and wired) Router. The setup was a pain in the but because it did not want to play well with my Motorola Surfboard cable modem. Adelphia assured me that everything was correct but I could not get this thing to get an IP address. I think it was because I had changed it's hostname or initial IP address from the start. It took a hard reset (which didn't wipe away the config) to get it to work. But then I was up and running.

The main difference between it and it's Linksys counterpart is that Linksys has the ability to give preferred bandwidth to different services, ports or hosts and this does not. But I prefer the D-Link because it's configuration of things like port forwarding, port triggering, firewall and parental controls are MUCH better.

The best part was that when I called tech support, he spun up and we talked like real tech people. He didn't play down to me at all. Adelphia, tier 2 support is like that as well.

Linksys Customer Support

2006-05-03T14:59:00.000-04:00

I am frustrated with Linksys technical support today but that is only because I had to call it. My WRT54G - Wireless-G Broadband Router has decided to drop the internet about every 10 minutes or so. I did all the smart stuff I know how to do to fix it like upgrading the firmware, hard resets and stuff like that before I called.

Call #1: Being fairly knowledgable with computers and networking, I used to be able to give the technician enough clues to bring his level of instruction up to what I am capable of.(which is similiar to handshaking a 38.4kbps instead of 2400baud) For example, instead of having him say, "Open up Internet Explorer, click in the address bar, type in 192 dot 168 dot 1 dot 1 and press enter. Enter your password in the password field. Click on the status tab. Tell me what you have for the WLAN IP address." I want him to say, "let's go lookup the WLAN IP number given to your router by your ISP". 5-10 years ago, you could bring the tech up to that level in only a minute or so. The conversation used to go like this:

Tech: Open up Internet Explorer
Me: OK, I have logged into the router and am at the setup screen
Tech: OK, (adjusting) I need the current MTU and the WLAN IP number. Is your problem only when running VPN? Could be an IPSec setting.

This is not the case these days. There is no way to spin these people up. I think this is because they really do not know anything about networking or these products. I think they just follow (or are told to follow) the decision-tree software that is in front of them. Well, that is part of the problem. Even after being on the line with them, for 30 minutes they will still spell out 'ipconfig /all' instead of saying, "run ipconfig with slash all option." It is aggrivating!

Well, at the end of call #1 which went ok, he gave me a case number and told me that if I had another problem to set the MTU down to 1200 and if that didn't work to call back and they would get a new unit on the way to me.

Call #2: I gave the case number and told them to send me a new unit because we did everything we could think of and it didn't work. So went through the entire troubleshooting thing again so he could give me an order number for a new unit. Fortunatly, my connection died within a few minutes after restart and he said to call back in 5 minutes and get an order number.

Trying not to be a complete idiot, I think I picked up on the problem. I think they get demerits if they just hand out a new unit. So, if I worked there and that was the case, I would do everything I can to get them to call back and get another tech rep to actually hand out the new unit. This would make it look like I never have to hand out new units and can fix any problem. Another side effect (which has crossed my mind) is that the person gets fed up with the "call back" stories and goes and buys a competitor product. Sounds bad but from a support view, they didn't have to hand out a new unit did they!

Call #3 (2nd Call re-deux): I gave the case number (again) and told them to send me a new unit (again) because we did everything we could think of (again) and it didn't work (again). So went through the entire troubleshooting thing (again) so he could give me an order number for a new unit. But this time, the @#$! internet connection stayed up for 10-12 minutes and only went down 5 minutes after I got off the phone. Being not a complete idiot (at least at the moment) I explained my dilemea and possible infinit loop of support (in which I was in the 3rd iteration). Where I call, they run through their decision-tree and get it down to a reboot the router step and then I am fixed.
Tech: Sorry, we can not send you a new unit because your now working!
Me: (nice but aggrivated tone)But I am only working for the next 5-15 minutes which is longer than you will be on the phone but is way short of the quarterly reboot I would love to have.
Tech: Call back if it goes down again.
Me: It will!
Tech: And we will get you a new unit.
Me: Really, you haven't yet!

Call #4: Yes, I am a complete idiot because I still have a broken router and am on call #4. After 30+ minutes on hold, I get someone sounding a little closer to home and explained my situation. They finally agreed and told me to call back and go to menu options 3, 3 and 6 to get the new unit ordered. They approved the replacement. I thanked her , hung up the phone and realized that this defer trick has probably happened again. Doh!

Airports and Automobiles

2006-04-24T20:58:00.000-04:00

I really can't stand the San Francisco Airport. Maybe it is because I fly Delta out there from Atlanta and that puts me in a bad mood to begin with. A typical "fly-in" to SFO goes like this. We land and I am usually in the back of the plane in a middle seat. This sets the mood. The short walk to baggage claim is not too bad. Today, the luggage carousel lied to me. My flight number was posted above the second carousel but all the bags were coming out of the first one. And it took a while for it to come out of the ground. Once you get your bag, you have to walk to the middle of the parking deck even though you have not parked a car there. From the middle of the parking deck you then walk to a different set of elevators where you can go to level 5 and catch the Airtrain. Once you get on that level, the have put 2 sets of 5 steps there. I can only think that this is to annoy the 90% of the people with rolling luggage. Your options here are to pick up your bag for these 10 steps or take the handicap ramp which is set at only 2 degrees but has to be about a 1/4 mile to get around the 10 steps. Now a short escalator ride later and you have just missed the Airtrain. I always see it pulling out to the point that I think it waits for me before it decides to leave. Now you wait. The next train comes and now you have to get on the longest airport run public transportation ride in the world. It eventually will drop you off in the lobby of the car rental center. Where you have to take an elevator back down 5 stories to get to Hertz. All the time, you are dreading the return flight because this unnecessary nonsense has to be repeated in reverse order when you go to leave.

Hertz has done it again. The have given me a complimentary upgrade to a convertible Ford Mustang. The novice renter will be excited. I have had this stunt pulled on me a few times and I just groaned. First, they only have this car available when the weather is cloudy and rainy so you really can't enjoy it. Second, it is not the GT/5.4/COBRA version of this car. It is the basic one with the smallest engine. Third, it is really, really small on the inside. Fourth, visibility is so poor that I when I do a head check, all I can see is my headrest which may or may not be in front of a car I'm about to merge in to. This particular type of Ford Mustang is basically a Ford Focus but without the visibility. I doubt there is anything they can put in my profile to say thanks but no thanks to an "upgrade" to a Mustang. Everynow and then they give me an SUV but the Mustang happens to me the most often.

Why I suck at blogging

2006-04-18T23:34:00.000-04:00

I know no one really is reading my blogs...but at least I know why. Here are the problems with my blog:

I am not really using it as blogs were originally intended to use. I read somewhere that they were first used to easily post what websites you surfed to that day and what you thought about them. I surf the word wide web but not very "widely." So this can't be a successful blog from an original intention perspective. I guess I could do more searching and traditional blogging but that requires more time and I can't keep up with everything I have to do now.
Other successful blogs have a theme and an expert in that area that is enriching that field. That field can be about grid computing or love or industrial poetry, but they work because they have a topic that they are good at working with. I have no such cohesion so this isn't a successful blog. I work with way too many technologies to specialize in just one enough to pull this off.
More specifically from #2 above, it's not funny. Funny takes extra skills to write.
Finally, I'm too cautious about opening up in a blog so there isn't the personal raw insight that you pretend you can get from reality TV or an internet pen pal of the desired sex. I mean, this entry can be around forever and traced back to me so there is danger shouting to the world my political views, hangups, phobias and intimate desires. So this blog isn't going to make anyones top 10 list for this reason easier. I don't think there is a reward for opening up. I don't think I will feel free. So why risk it?

Scams

2006-04-16T10:53:00.000-04:00

OK, I just read in a magazine that they think about 1500 people fell for the those Nigerian inheritance email scams last year and got taken for an average of 5000 dollars. This goes back to what they say about a fool and his money. However, I sometimes feel that if I didn't have a couple of computer science degrees and specialty in web technology that some of those phisher emails would snag even me. What does the novice do? You know, no CompSci degree and just bought their first computer and hooked it up to the 'net? I'm very afraid for all of you!

Multi-player Blues

2006-04-11T22:04:00.000-04:00

My current computer game I am playing right now is Railroad Tycoon 3 by PopTop Software. I bought it when it first came out and played it a little but didn't not think it was better than the Railroad Tycoon 2 so I put it up (I also didn't have the hardware to run it while on the road but now I do.) I have gotten it back out again and am working through the scenarios when I thought I would try the multi-player mode. Something in multi-player is powered by GameSpy. I know this because there is a big GameSpy logo in the bottom right hand corner of the game setup/chat screen. I do not know if GameSpy just powers the hookup technology or the whole multi-player library. I have not yet been able to complete a game or get one to last longer than about 12 minutes due to one of the following reasons:

Game crashes on startup
Game crashes during play
Player is so new, that he spent all his money on track and forgot to buy trains so he has no income and can not play much less win
Player is used playing the computer and bales at his or her first mistake leaving you back in a solo game (which is not the point given #1 and #2 I am suffering with to play another human and this is the most likely reason)
Other player's game crashes on startup
Other player's game crashes
Other players just go away for no apparent reason

It all seems a little buggy. Either GameSpy must be overloaded or it has trouble handling the 7 individuals that want to still play this old game (which you can now buy in Walmart for $9.99). The in-game player hookup is actually slower than the game.

It is really hard to determine when someone leaves whether there is an error or they can only win one way and when an opponent blocks that route, then they bail. I think a lot of people figure out a trick to win and they are one trick ponies.

The other things that are annoying me is that apparently, no one can type more than 10-14 characters when they chat and there is no use of punctuation marks at all.

Anyway, while I was typing this up, I finally got a real cool dude to start and finish a 20 year game. I actually won this one so I may not be that bad. He lost track of the goal and did some cool stuff but forgot to do what was required to win.

MySpace

2006-03-29T10:42:00.000-05:00

I am one of the early adopters of any and all web technology things and rarely does anything become big and noteworthy on the web that I haven't at least heard of much less have an account on already. MySpace.com came at me from out of nowhere. I got in on Hotmail early so my username was just my college unix account name (no funky numbers or underscores or anything like that). I can claim to be on ebay (selling too), My Yahoo!, Yahoo! groups, and Google rather early too. I was floored when I read that MySpace was number 2 most hit web site. Next thing I know, Time and Newsweek has it on the frontpage and I had yet to logon.

Blades Confiscated

2006-03-07T11:23:00.000-05:00

I went through security in Atlanta and had a pocket knife in my coat pocket. They also had to search my luggage and found a corkscrew with a knife in it. Once those two items were thrown away (I guess I really don't know what happened to them but they didn't come with me), they let me on through without another look. My question is how many blades is one allowed to have taken from them before they get to have a serious meeting with the white shirted ones? Two was not enough!

Fun with 'Install Everything'

2006-03-01T10:06:00.000-05:00

I have finally started using my GNU/Linux system again. I briefly used it once prior to now as a file and print server on a large project while at Deloitte Consulting. Since I rolled-off the project it mostly has been sitting in the basement pretending to be an extra network attached hard drive which is probably not much of a glamorous life for even this class of machine.

Recently, I decided to put dotProject on it and update it the OS at the same time. I installed RedHat Fedora Core 4 and for the first time, clicked Install Everything. Install took a while and I didn't know what I was going to get. When It was done, all the prerequisite software for dotProject was there. After an hour of fiddling with Apache and MySQL security, I had dotProject up and running. There are some things like Gantt charts that do not work yet but I will get to those. One thing that didn't work was email. I have been afraid of Sendmail so I neglect to do anything with it. The important thing was that dotProject was working!

I am also looking at putting a Wiki up at work and now that I had a working installation of the magic trio (Apache, PHP and MySQL), Installing Wikka was a piece of cake (after more fiddling with MySQL security again). Once you have LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP/Python/Perl), you have the keys to the world of easy free computing. It is like if you have fuel, oxygen and heat then no matter where you go next, you are going to create fire.

But now, I was on a roll. Since I really was using this Linux box now as a server and less a workstation (X is kinda slow on it) I started to think about the UI of this box. An old Linux Journal article pointed me to webmin. It installed easy and now I was really cooking. With webmin, I was able to use/configure/modify cron jobs, imap, fetchmail, MySQL (no more mucking about with security for me), Samba, Sendmail, Squid and the system time.

I even felt so good about all this that I updated my Linux Counter info and installed the auto-update script. I am sure now that this box useful that it will start to go down on a regular basis.

I will keep the blog updated on my Wiki studies.

First Mac experience in years

2006-02-27T09:29:00.001-05:00

I used a Mac notebook the other day to create a slidshow for the local elementary school's Father & Daughter dance. Teachers would take pictures on their digitial camereas and then run the back to me for importing. I had 330+ pictures in all and played them in slideshow mode while the DJ put music too it. It went over wonderful and I was impressed how easy it was to import, edit (Red Eye Reduction, Cropping) and make the slideshow.

The Mac has the best user interface but I still think they could go with a two button mouse.

Pictures of Me

2006-02-23T10:25:00.000-05:00

We are preparing our house for sale and at the same time looking to buy a new house. My wife read in the “How to sell your house” books that you are supposed to take family photos down. However, I noticed that the decorated model homes that you visit have put up family photos. They are simply the picture frames with the default pictures left in them. I can only conclude that to sell a house, you should not have pictures of me in them.

Cute Website that generates your pirate name

2006-02-21T10:15:00.000-05:00

My pirate name is:

Captain Tom Vane

Even though there's no legal rank on a pirate ship, everyone recognizes you're the one in charge. You tend to blend into the background occaisionally, but that's okay, because it's much easier to sneak up on people and disembowel them that way. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from fidius.org.

Airtran Left my Butt in Vegas

2006-01-23T10:16:00.000-05:00

Airtran must have a better on-time record than any other airline. I say this because I know for a fact that leave early enough to make any scheduled arrival time. They not only want you on the plane 10 minutes early, they want you strapped down in your seat and pushing back 10 minutes prior to departure. Here is what happened to me in Vegas:

I left the company dinner at the Venitian to walk back to Ceasars to get my luggage with over two hours to spare. I Left Ceasers in plenty of time to catch my flight. A buddy of mine is with me and we drop him off at Delta at terminal 1 and the cabby takes me to airtran at terminal 2. My first mistake is that I assume cab drivers have to go to the airport alot and that they read the signs and know where each airline is located. I go in and don't see Airtran on to the right and walk left and don't find them there either. He had dropped me off at the wrong terminal. So that had cost me 10 minutes or so. I go out and see the shuttle bus stop that takes me to terminal 1. We ask the uniformed guy and he says that it comes every 10-15 minutes. I am about to go hire a taxi when it shows up 20+ minutes since I have been waiting. I tell the guy I am running late. He "helps me by" dropping me off and tells me to go in the door and turn left to find Airtran. I do. He too has mislead me. I finally stop and ask someone and they tell me to go back where I came from. I run and find them past the doors I came in (I should have turned right) which probably cost me another 10 minutes. I have almost 30 minutes to spare and the Airtran rep refuses to check me in. She calls her manager and they say "No, we are already boarding" and she lies and tells me security line is too long (I know she doesn't know how long it is). They refuse to issue me a boarding pass. I have travelled for about 10 years now and this is the first flight I have ever missed. Airtran doesn't mess around with this leaving stuff. I may need to go back to the legacy carriers where I am almost assured of a 15-45 minute departure delay.

Personal Icon Picking

2005-10-10T09:02:00.000-04:00

It is very difficult to pick one image or icon that defines you. I might have to go with an actual picture of my face.

IM Icon

2005-10-07T15:43:00.000-04:00

I see the Instant Message Icon becoming important. I must go find a new one.