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I recently upgraded to a
Blackberry 8700g.
Email, cellphone, web
access, and PDA all-in-one.
I love Canon digicams.
I had an S330, then an S230,
now an SD400. They're solidly
made, they take great pictures,
and they're ultra-portable.
I've gone back to the dark
side. I once again have an iPod.
This time it's a 60gb iPod Photo.
The Dell Latitude D620
is my current work laptop.
It's a cleanly designed
Centrino Duo machine with
amazing battery
life and a nice screen.
My home laptop is a
15" Apple MacBook Pro
dual-booting both Mac OS X
and Windows XP. Hooray for
Boot Camp!
I recently upgraded to a 20"
Dell 2001fp LCD. It has great
image quality, and convenient
USB ports on the side.
My current PC is
a P4 system based on an Intel
D915GAG motherboard in an Antec
Sonata II case. 200gb Seagate
SATA hard drive, nVidia GeForce
6600GT video card, SB Live 5.1,
and NEC DVD-RW drive.
Just like with digicams,
I like Canon inkjet printers. My
i860 is quiet, fast, and produces
first-class color prints.
Not much to say here.
If you're an aviation enthusiast
and you have a fast PC,
go buy FS2004 now.
If you get hooked on
flight sims like I did, you'll want
a good flight controller. The
CH Products Flight Sim Yoke USB
is probably the best all-around
flight controller out there.
It ain't cheap, though....
My Current Reading List
Eastward to Tartary:
Travels in the Balkans,
the Middle East, and
the Caucasus
by Robert D. Kaplan
Falling Off the Map
by Pico Iyer
Great Bridge: The Epic
Story of the Building of
the Brooklyn Bridge
by David McCullough
The Polish Way: A Thousand
Year History of the Poles and
Their Culture
by Adam Zamoyski
Best of Europe 2006
by Rick Steves
2008
October (2 entries)August (1 entry)
June (1 entry)
May (2 entries)
February (2 entries)
2007
July (1 entry)June (7 entries)
April (5 entries)
February (4 entries)
January (11 entries)
2006
December (5 entries)November (3 entries)
October (10 entries)
September (6 entries)
August (4 entries)
July (7 entries)
June (5 entries)
May (7 entries)
April (15 entries)
March (9 entries)
February (7 entries)
January (15 entries)
2005
December (4 entries)November (6 entries)
October (15 entries)
September (4 entries)
August (9 entries)
July (18 entries)
June (10 entries)
May (12 entries)
April (19 entries)
March (18 entries)
February (10 entries)
January (20 entries)
2004
December (9 entries)November (21 entries)
October (9 entries)
September (15 entries)
August (7 entries)
July (7 entries)
June (8 entries)
May (10 entries)
April (5 entries)
March (12 entries)
February (18 entries)
January (9 entries)
| 05/31/2004 16:25 |
| We just got home from a long weekend in San Francisco. Man, was that city laid out by M.C. Escher, or what? You could walk a square pattern, around a city block or two, and have it be uphill on every street. The weather was nice, the food was nice, and our free hotel was nice. How would I sum up the experience? It was nice.
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| 05/26/2004 21:36 |
| The missus and I went to a new local restaurant tonight, it's called A Bit of Europe. It is indeed a very, very small amount of Europe. The owner apparently lived in various European countries with her husband who was stationed there in the military. The idea of a restaurant with various European dishes is a good one. You could have Wiener schnitzel, spaghetti Bolognese, steak and kidney pie with chips and peas, and so on. Simple dishes that are essential parts of the cuisine in their respective regions. Well, sadly, A Bit of Europe has decided that we finicky Americans wouldn't eat any of those things if they were prepared exactly as they are in their home countries. I had Wiener schnitzel, and while edible, it bore only a faint passing resemblance to the schnitzel I've had in beer halls, B&B restaurants, and fairgrounds in Austria and Germany. It was multiple small discs of bread crumb and parsley covered veal. It came with sliced carrots covered in more parsley and dill. No self-respecting beer hall would serve sliced carrots covered in parsley and dill. Chips (french fries), potato dumplings, sauerkraut, or something of that nature is required. The best European dishes are simple--not fancy or upscale. Their menu is about 4 pages long, loaded down with things that you just don't see in European restaurants, so I can't help but think they need to edit a little bit. Like an undergraduate writing their first essay, they need to focus and weed out the crap. Decor-wise, the place is wildly schizophrenic, ranging from Mediterranean cafe, to Italian ristorante, to American coffee shop. The Budweiser/NASCAR banner hanging outside needs to be stolen and burned, pronto. All in all, it wasn't bad, it just wasn't very European. The experience wasn't helped by the fact that the owner was sitting at a table with two friends whose accents gave them away as Texans, but who kept bragging about being Scottish (how many generations ago?) and how they did things in their restaurants.
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| 05/26/2004 16:35 |
| Our new building construction is rapidly approaching completion. I had heard that the contractor wanted to have construction wrapped up by June 1, and they're going to have to hurry if that's the case. As far as my stuff, we have our networking hardware installed and partially configured. We have a big stack of Cisco switches, a Cisco PIX firewall, and a pair of Cisco Aironet wireless access points. We got our fiber optic Internet connection terminated and turned up, so we have 5mb of bandwidth ready to go. Our InterTel phone system is partially installed, and the T1 circuits for that have been turned up. The finishing touches are being put on the voice/data wiring in different parts of the building, and we're doing an expected amount of moves/adds/changes. All in all, I'm happy with the progress, and I should be able to put more hardware in place very soon.
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| 05/23/2004 18:51 |
| So all of a sudden, our WAN connectivity at work went into the crapper. It would be good for a day or two, then we'd have a few hours of high latency, packet loss, and aggravation. I spent hours on the phone with Earthlink, always ending with them insisting that nothing was wrong on their end, but that I should "check my cables and router config." That's the business ISP equivalent of "Reboot your PC and call me back." I finally called in some Cisco guys, and they confirmed that my router config was fine, but they began to believe that there was a routing loop or some other problem on Earthlink's side. Earthlink gets their circuits from Global Crossing, so we had to have a conference call to get everyone talking directly to each other. For some reason, the Earthlink tech was always reluctant to talk to both me and Global Crossing at the same time. Within minutes of talking to Global Crossing, we found out that our dual T1s didn't have load balancing set up properly. Either Earthlink never told them to set it up when we first got the circuits 2 years ago, or it had been set up, and some sort of network "maintenance" had trashed it. I'll be so happy when we're on fiber, with our WAN connectivity provided by point-to-point non-Internet T1s....
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| 05/13/2004 19:30 |
| The frustration regarding the bike rack turned out to be nothing. We were rushed to get everything loaded and on the road since the store had closed, so I didn't read the instructions on how to properly assemble and install the rack. Convinced that it didn't really fit, I was in the process of boxing it up to return, and I stumbled across the instructions. I immediately saw what I did that made the rack so difficult to install, and it was easy to correct. I tried again, and the rack fit perfectly. It's so solid that I can shake the whole car by grabbing the rack and shaking it. It's all starting to make sense. Took a first short ride, up and down the alley, and around the block a couple of times--not more than 5 minutes total. In khakis and an oxford shirt, I wasn't really dressed for cycling, but it was still good.
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| 05/13/2004 10:06 |
| Well, we pulled the trigger on our bike purchase last night. We drove up to REI after getting home from work, and bought the Cannondale Adventure 400 and the Novara Corsa. There was some confusion over whether or not we could get the Anniversary Sale discount, but the nice saleswoman at REI agreed that if one of her colleagues told us we could, and if we drove all that way expecting to get it, then they would honor that price. It was worth pursuing, since it saved us 20%, or over $200. Anyway, Sarah at REI helped us pick out helmets, gloves, pumps, tubes, racks, bags, tools, and various other paraphernalia. It was fun, but a little stressful. The bike rack we bought just barely fit on the GTI, so it was a little worrisome to make sure that our $1000 worth of bikes were secure for the drive home. Anyway, all is well, and I'm looking forward to some riding this weekend. |
| 05/09/2004 12:27 |
| I finally decided that I should do something in terms of exercise. Cycling seems like a good choice for me. I haven't owned a bike since I was in high school, which was 15 years ago. The last time I rode regularly was when I was dating a girl who was a runner, and I'd ride with her as she did her 10-20 mile training runs. I'd like to ride a 2-3 times a week, just to get and stay in shape. Also, I'm intrigued by the idea of bike touring. It would be great to take cycling holidays to (the flatter!) parts of Europe. I'm probably best off starting with the Netherlands. Heh heh... Since I don't currently own a bike, I'm in the process of shopping for a good one. We spent some time yesterday at the flagship REI store in Seattle, trying out various bikes, and talking to their bike people. They have a nice little trail outside for trying out bicycles before you buy. I rode two different ones: a Novara (REI's own brand) XR2 and a Cannondale Adventure 400. Both were good, but the Cannondale had two advantages--a better saddle, and a stem that came up higher, putting the handlebars in a better position for me. I thought I would need the absolute largest size bicycle Cannondale makes--the Jumbo--but the extra large is quite sufficient. krw is now thinking she wants a bike, too. I suggested she check out the kids' bikes first. She'll probably end up with a Novara Corsa.
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| 05/04/2004 20:01 |
| I updated the nav pane for my site today. I added new books to the reading list, and I added a mailto link in case anyone wants to send me email. Now, lest you think I'm naive and/or foolish, I used a supposedly spam-proof link. The mailto link is actually created on the fly by a little bit of javascript. That way, spammers who use spiders to crawl webpages looking for valid email addresses can't find it. I also read about how you can make a "spider trap" page that includes the email addresses of known spammers. The idea is to make the spider find that page, report all of those email addresses back to the spammers, so they all end up spamming each other. I'll work on that later.
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| 05/03/2004 18:18 |
| Today's focus for my wrath are the geniuses at Earthlink. They're normally pretty competent at providing our T1 connectivity, but someone there has really dropped the ball. They provide the SMTP server for 2 of our 5 T1 lines. It's been the same server address for almost 5 years. About 2 months ago, they emailed everyone saying that they were going to phase it out, and we'd have to switch to a different SMTP on a certain date. So I educated all of my end users on how to switch their email settings on the specified date, and I expected the transition to be smooth. Silly me. The magic date rolled around, and no one could send email. I double-checked the server settings for everyone, and then called Earthlink. "Oh, sorry," they said. "That doesn't apply to you. Just stick with your old SMTP server setting." Fine. Sloppily done, but at least we got it working quickly. This past Friday, while I was working on setting up the server room in our new building, users began complaining of mail not going out again. I figured it was just a slow response on the part of the SMTP server, and that it would clear up in a few hours. "Don't worry," I said. "It should be fine shortly." I called Earthlink, and the tech support drone on the other end of the phone said he wasn't aware of any issues with the SMTP server, but that he would have someone look into it. I felt comfortable that whatever issue there was would go away soon. Wrong! Emails still weren't going out on 2 of the 5 T1s today, so I started doing some digging. I remotely connected to one of the affected machines, and verified that email wouldn't go. It wasn't even a matter of them taking a long time, they were being rejected immediately by the SMTP server. On a hunch, I tried switching the SMTP server setting to the one they mentioned a couple of months' back. Yahtzee. Mail would go out perfectly. Time to call Earthlink. Earthlink's response? "Oh, it looks like we discontinued that server recently." Without telling me? That just plain sucks. Now I feel justified in terminating our Earthlink T1s once we've moved our main office. We'll get point-to-point T1s that don't even have Internet connectivity, and run them straight to our new office with its 5mb fiber connection. G'bye, Earthlink. It was nice knowing you... for a while.
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| 05/01/2004 11:47 |
| Okay folks, let's get something straight. A large number of the general population are morons. I know, I know, but let me explain. We live in a time when it's not acceptable to tell people they are morons, but it needs to be said. If morons know that they are morons, then they can learn to deal with their stupidity and inadequacies in a beneficial manner. So, you ask, how can I spot the morons? Here's a short (and unscientific) list of moron types:
There are a few life strategies you can embrace in order to overcome your moron tendencies. Among them:
This is just a short study of current trends in moron behavior. But at least we have brought the subject up.
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