Year: 2002

I got my laptop almost a year ago, and as much as I love shopping, I can’t justify getting a new one. I’ve got a Thinkpad T21 with a P3-866, a 30gb hard drive, and a great screen with 1400×1050 resolution. My boss just got a new Toshiba, which got me thinking about laptops again,…

Two surprises about my blog yesterday: First, I did a search on Google for “blog aspx” and my page came up fifth. Whoa. Wasn’t expecting that. I mean, if you search for Brent Ozar then I come up fast, and I know I get tons of hits from search engines, but that one was odd.…

Well, that didn’t take long. Mandrake 9 installed extremely quickly, detected my video card & network card, and then kept exploding after I logged in. Restarted the system twice, still couldn’t shake the segfault blues, so I’m downloading RedHat 9 now. Like Scarlett said, tomorrow is another day.

Never let it be said that I’m not open minded. I’m giving Linux yet another chance. I picked up a Gigabyte dual-CPU motherboard last weekend from Directron, and before I set it up as my new web/sql server, I figured I’d throw Mandrake 9 on there and see how she works. The hardware is pretty…

I love it when a plan comes together. My favorite Houston computer shop, Directron has Saturday clearance sales periodically, and I always go just to check out the goodies. Every time, I find something cheap and neat to play with, and yesterday’s sale was certainly no exception. They offer an assortment of open-box motherboards for…

Almost done with the car computer again. I was halfway through building my own little control panel for the driver’s side door pocket when I gave up. In Erika’s words, it would look ghetto, so I bought a $100 programmable keypad from Fry’s. It just so happens that their X-Keys Desktop model exactly fits my…

I bought my first pantyhose yesterday. I’ve been trying to figure out why nobody sells the right filter refills for my Fluval 404 aquarium filter, which has been doing a bang-up job of removing turtle poop. Yesterday, a nice Petco staffer told me why: everybody buys women’s pantyhose, cuts it up into bags, and uses…

Almost there… Got my car computer almost ready to install. I need to do the wiring inside the car, and then I’m set. I ended up scoring a D-Link DWL-520 wireless ethernet card for $40 at Microcenter, which was a heck of a bargain. Hadn’t expected to put one in for the first draft, because…

Finally getting around to building my car computer. I’ve always wanted a computer in my trunk to house my MP3 collection, check my email when I’m in range of a wireless network, check traffic maps, and so on. I’ve been futzing around with this for months, off and on, accumulating little pieces of gear. I…

Out like a light. Both Erika and I were away from Houston for a few days, and my web server decided it’d like a vacation too. All my sites went down for a couple of days, which is always fun when you’re on the road trying to check email. Joy. At first, I didn’t know…

My second article for HAL-PC Magazine just hit the stands (well, okay, mailboxes) and I’m tickled pink. Their site is always one month behind, but at least you non-Houston people can now see my first column in the June issue. The HTML version has totally screwed up paragraph breaks – every bold sentence starts a…

Always humbling when somebody points out an error in your web site code. Just got an email from the author of my favorite server monitoring tool saying that he was getting a Javascript error. I had some code left in there from my old Wickedlife.com version of the site, and kept forgetting to rip it…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

No computer upgrade is complete without a little blood loss. My desktop started locking up randomly today, and I realized I was using a power supply with a questionable history from Erika’s old computer. I had to make yet another run out for computer gear, this time blowing $50 on a new Antec power supply.…

My vacation memories: Frys. I’ve made half a dozen trips to Frys this week grabbing various little bits and pieces. My home server (which serves the web site you’re looking at) was powered by a clapped-out Celeron 400, which has been replaced with a hand-me-down 800 from my desktop. I bought a new 1.3ghz cpu…

Web site updates coming right along… Well, I took the day off to get away from the computer a while, and I realized I hadn’t published a lot of the changes I’d made over the last few days. The site is in dot-Net now, and yesterday I scanned some new photos and set up a…