Blog

I love my turtles. Nothing much to say, but I was chatting with my mom and set the webcam up to shoot the turtles’ patio, so I figured I’d throw in one of the resulting shots. This is Fred sunning himself after a nice breakfast of shrimp. These guys, I tell ya, they’re so spoiled. Nobody feeds me shrimp for breakfast. Come to think of it, a gordita de cameron from Ruchi’s sounds extremely good right about now. It’s raining cats and dogs, though, and I think it’s probably too early to drag Erika out of bed. I’ll probably do bagels instead.

Sometimes, Microsoft just rocks. I’ve got a home server running Windows 2000 and I’m using IntelliMirror. I have a laptop and a desktop, and whichever one I log in on, I have the same settings, favorites, documents, everything. My stuff is always backed up on three machines. At times like last night, that is priceless – I needed to reinstall my desktop, and the whole thing was done in less than four hours. All of my settings, documents, favorites, everything all immediately showed up as soon as I logged in the first time on the newly installed desktop. Talk about a timesaver. Go, Bill! I might even forgive ya for Windows ME.

My little boys are growing. Frank & Fred, my two turtles, are coming up on a year old this month, and they’re still growing like weeds. I just got done cleaning their aquarium and decided to raise the water level again.

Red-eared sliders live mostly underwater, so it’s important to keep the water clean. Even with a filter, I have to change the water every five days. Every couple/few months, I’ve been putting more water in it and adjusting their basking patio up so that they get more water to swim in. I’ve got a 20-gallon long aquarium, and as of today, it’s about 2/3 full and they can still easily stand on their hind legs and breathe at the surface. Time to start planning the pond I want to build them.

If you can’t beat ‘em, spam ‘em. My employer was going to send out unsolicited HTML spam without an opt-out, and thank goodness I found out and put a stop to it hours before they started cranking out the emails. Whew. Dodged a bullet on that one. I’d always swore I would never work for a company that sent out illegal spam like that – it ranks right up there with boiler room brokerages.

As a result, I did a frantic search for web-based, net-friendly bulk email management tools and couldn’t find a decently priced one. So being a geek, I decided to build one myself, and that’s why I’m up past midnight. I’m probably only 40% through it, but the framework is in place. My newest invention (muhahaha), www.MailPath.net, should be up and running within a few days. More on that as we go live.

Coding, coding, coding… I did a bunch of work on my class reunion site so that people could upload their own photos and some other stuff, and that took a lot out of me. Then I decided to write my own forum software as my first serious project with ASP.NET & Visual Basic. I started programming ASP (Active Server Pages) with VBscript a few years back, and I’m amazed at how much I knew in ASP that I have to relearn in ASP.NET. I’m glad I forced myself to do it, because it’s the only way I’d have learned.

Anyway, now that I’ve spent probably 30 hours on it, got it coded and online, I’m totally getting a case of feature-envy. There’s so many things you can add to online forums – everything from email notification, cute icons, HTML filtering – that it’s hard to know where to stop. I’m really tempted to just go grab something like PopForums and be done with it. We’ll see.

Anyway, now it’s time to go see my Houston Comets beat up on the Sacramento Monarchs. If you’ve got ESPN2, you can watch the game, and you’ll see me behind the Comets bench, about three or four rows up. I’ll have a blue shirt on.

My high school 10th reunion is coming up, and our site is starting to heat up. It’s so much fun chatting with everybody and seeing how they turned out. I grew up in a small town, with maybe 110 people in my graduating class, and I can honestly say I miss most of them. I would want my kids to grow up with that same sense of family. (On the other hand, everybody probably feels like this just before their reunion!)

How about that Avril Lavigne, eh? I picked up her CD on a whim, after I couldn’t get the first single “Complicated” out of my head. Judging by the twang of her voice on the single, I figured the rest of the songs would be a cross between country and pop. You know how it is – lately every country singer is trying desperately to make the jump over to MTV, and I figured it’d be a halfway disappointing CD. Wow, what a surprise – there’s a lot of pretty catchy songs. I might even forgive her for having a Flash intro on her web site. The fact that she looks like a skater version of Alyson Hannigan doesn’t hurt either.

OK, now that was bizarre. I was goofing around with my new combo cell phone/pda, setting it up, and somehow I goofed up the settings on my web cam. For the past 12 hours or so, it’s been capturing images from my TV card. People pulling up my webcam were seeing Fox26 here in Houston. That’s actually pretty darned cool – I guess I could set this thing up to take screen shots of CNN or something if I want some privacy. Neato.

Anyway, that’s not even why I called you here today, ladies and gentlemen. Back to the phone – I got a used Kyocera 6035 for $75, which sure beats the $400 I didn’t really want to spend on a new Handspring Treo. I travel a lot, and I wanted the ability to send & receive emails from anywhere without hassling with laptops or cell phone “keyboards”. This is a Palm PDA, so it has handwriting recognition, and I gotta say it’s cool so far. It browses the web, too, but since it’s only connected at 14.4, that’s nothing to get excited about. I’ll do a full review soon in my Buying Time section.

I am so tired. I drove home last night from Dallas, and after cleaning the turtles, eating dinner, and reading my first HAL-PC article in print, it was almost 10. Now, I’ve been up since 3am, and I’m ready to crash.

I was hoping to get my forums online by this morning, but I ran into a few snags. Ernie (our network admin) gave me spare parts to build a workstation here, since I bought my own laptop (instead of using the company-provided one). After hours of troubleshooting, it turns out that the motherboard and memory are both probably bad. The motherboard wouldn’t take my favorite video card anyway – my ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon with TV tuner, so I can have CNN in a window while I work – so back it goes. I pretty much pledge allegiance to Intel motherboards, because the quality is unbelievable. This was my first non-Intel board in a couple of years, and it reminded me of why I prefer the Real Thing.

Off to sleep. I’ll be back online in a few hours, and try to finish up the forums while Erika is absorbed in World Cup matches.