Category: nerd

A bizarre series of power outages. 1:30pm – Cascade campus looses all power. 1:50pm – transformer on the corner of our street explodes, taking power and hurting Michelle’s ears. 3:19pm – ID10T in the server room “tests” the UPS by shutting off the power, all 40+ servers go down. The message appears to be – stop working.

Well, I didn’t catch on until 7pm. But then Scott and I drove down to historic Aurora, OR to have a few pints with another BeerAdvocate Rich before he moves to Belgium next week. Conversation was mostly beer, and all enjoyable. He’s got a blog up as well, detailing the move.

Yesterday was the Technical Staff Retreat at work. Almost all the Tech staff and managers were at a local park talking about projects and future technologies. Shortly after lunch, several managers’ phones started ringing because a Verizon Contractor had put a Backhoe blade through the fiber optic line that connected one of the campuses to the outside world. The entire campus had no voice or data connection. Little could be done, so we continued our game of croquet.

After brewing a batch with Cordle, I decided to move some stuff around on the site. I’ve completely separated the rooftop and rooftop brew sites so I could get an accurate picture of who is visiting what.

I also finally changed the /etc/hosts file so that I can type in the proper URL for my two sites and it goes there. Mac OS 10.2 finally consults the /etc/hosts file, so the change was easy. Now I don’t know why I’ve put up with it for so long. Things are so tidy now.

The poop-smiths over at MSN have shovelled another load into print about the problems with Google. Sure, Google does have some idiosyncrasies, but most can be overcome by adding a second word to refine your search. As far as I can tell, this would nearly negate the first two complaints. Besides, I’ve used MSN – you can’t tell me they’re worried too much about commercial links or skewed results.

The third complaint is somewhat confusing, because if you were looking for a book, you’d probably have found it in one of the above-mentioned commercial links. I doubt that copyright holders will be that thrilled about the ability to search the text of books. However, Microsoft, soon to enter the fiction and scholarly journal-publishing realm, will surely sell you access to these tomes.

P134s3 d0 n07 h4X0r my si73 7his w33k3nd. I kn0w i7 is w0r7h 5 p0in7s, bu7 I’d 4ppr3ci473 7h3 g3s7ur3.

otherwise, have a good time.

I broke my own requirement of finishing all the tags on my Mp3s before I upgraded to iTunes 4. Well, I had to upgrade the OS, and was going to be rebooting anyway. Plus, I’ve made significant progress. We’re talking 70% tagged maybe. Possibly.

iTunes 4 is great. Now I can easily use the tracks on my server from the living room. Better living through technology.

One of the best things you can do to not look like a lemur is to delete the font Comic Sans from your computer. The second is to go through old documentation and replace any instance of it with some respectable font. Arial is probably my favorite, partly because it looks so good in OS X and PDF. What’s your favorite/least favorite font?

From Steve Job’s Time Magazine interview:

TIME: Do you think you’ll be able to sway the tens of millions who use the unauthorized services?

Jobs: I don’t know. We’ll find out. But this is really a far better experience. Not only do the downloads not crap out half way through; and not only is it perfectly encoded instead of having the last four seconds cut off …

Although I’m very skeptical about the service overall, I like where its going. All those lemurs who encoded their music so poorly. Stupid Xing, Stupid Real Jukebox. Why I remember the days when Sound Edit 16 was the best encoder…ah…

Really though. I’ve been going through my iTunes library updating tags (still) and I’ve just been deleting shoddily encoded and cut up songs. You get what you pay for.

Is it worth the extra cost for a bluetooth enabled phone and bluetooth enabled mac? I’d say so. Check out this demo of Sony-Erricson Clicker controlling iTunes from a cell phone.

I’m taking a Database Design class this term. I’m both excited and terrified at the same time. I got a lot of my introduction to DB when I was in GIS. Now I’m hoping to learn it so I can do web development stuff with it. But I also want to learn database development to help me with my understanding of GIS as well. Then I can run my own data warehouse…. muahahaha..