Blog

Did some updating on the site today. Redid some of the navigation stuff, added plain-text HTML navigation at the bottom of the site, scanned some new photos from our most recent NYC and New Orleans mini-vacations, modified the front page to show the blog photo alongside blog entry, and set up SSL so I can make my blog entries in wireless cafes without worrying about somebody sniffing my username/password. Wouldn’t want some stranger making entries in my blog. That would be a world crisis. Just a reminder – you can get a free SSL certificate for your site or your email addresses at CACert.

I was going to do some more work on the blog’s database back end that would allow me to add more than one photo per blog entry, add an audio clip, let people subscribe to email updates (Lord only knows why anybody would), etc., but it’s just way too nice of a day outside. I washed Erika’s Jetta earlier this morning, and I think I’ll take it back out and vaccuum it as well. Maybe do a quick grocery shop and make her jambalaya before she gets home, heh heh heh.

Wireless networks that don’t work are especially frustrating. I’m stuck at Kaveh Kanes waiting for the monthly HoustonWireless meeting. For the last hour, I’ve been struggling with the wireless internet connection here, changing my settings every which way but loose, trying to get it to work. No dice. Can’t even get my wired connection to work, can’t get an IP address, can’t win for losing. Since I’ve been in here, two other guys have sat down with laptops, fiddled with ’em, and then given up in frustration. I guess I’m a slow learner.

Scratch that, I guess I’m slow to give up my money. I blew $5 on parking, $7 on a latte and pie, and I drove all the way down here. I’m reluctant to give up my investment, admit defeat, and just pack up my gear and go home. It’s looking like I don’t have a choice.

Sun had it right when they said the network is the computer: these days, I just don’t want to bother with my computer if it’s not hooked up to the wider network at large.

Tonight, HWUG is discussing the future of the group – where we are now, where we’re going, and how we’re going to get there. A lot of the group members want to concentrate on building publicly accessible wireless hotspots like this one (this one that isn’t working) at Kaveh Kanes. The more I think about that, the less I like it, and right now I can’t even begin to list all the problems with it. We don’t do a good enough job supporting and maintaining the nodes we have – why try to build more?

My idea instead would be to educate the community on wireless networking, and get the savvy computer people started on building their own wireless networks. The technology still isn’t mature enough that we can just drop-ship a box to a small business and expect things to always work. Instead, we need to prepare our infrastructure so that when the equipment IS that reliable, we’re ready, and we can build a mesh of connected, reliable nodes.

That’s my two cents, anyway. I’m not going to push the rest of the group too hard in that direction, because I didn’t really get into this to be a leader. I joined HWUG to meet cool people and do cool things with wireless. If other people want to build nodes, fine, I don’t want to stand in the way. We’ve had members that tried to redirect the group to their own fiendish purposes, and as the saying goes, I want to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.

Fall down go boom. Lost a CPU in my dual-cpu server last night after I went to bed. For the last couple of weeks, the temperature monitor on it had been reading 195 degrees F, but I thought it was a mistake, since I could put my finger on it without yelping in pain. Either I’ve got a really high tolerance for pain, or else the CPU was fried, and it looks like the latter.

It’s a bad day for networks everywhere, I guess – we’re having problems at work, too. I was singing along to Better Than Ezra, mourning the loss of a firewall, when the webcam seemed to capture me in mid-word with my mouth wide open. Got a laugh out of that one.

I finally got a digital camera. I’ve been putting it off because I couldn’t justify spending even $100 for a digital camera that can’t take better pictures than my traditional camera. (I still can’t find a camera under $500 that outshoots my Kodak.) Anyway, I got an el-cheapo $40 SiPix Blink II because it was small enough that I’d leave it in my laptop bag. The photo quality is abysmal (640×480 pixels max, no flash, no LCD) but more than good enough to enrich my blog.

Here’s a good example – for months, I’d been meaning to take a few pictures of my new Volvo C70 and post ’em up, but I kept forgetting. Here we go – live and in color, right outside the Ragin Cajun, the best Cajun place in town. After a weekend in New Orleans, Erika & I agreed that the food here is so good, we’d almost rather stay here and eat. Between this place and Bayou City Seafood on Richmond, we’re set. We shot a roll full of conventional film in New Orleans this weekend, but of course that’ll take a day or two to come back, and another day or two before I get around to scanning it. If I’d have had this little camera with me, I’d post a picture of the huge fat woman who was walking around the French Quarter topless. Or then again, maybe I wouldn’t. Can’t go alienating all my readers at once.

Hmmm, I’ve finally run out of USB ports. I’ve been a firm believer in USB – it’s a simple, easy-to-use connection standard that accommodates a lot of peripherals. Today, I ran out of USB ports. I’ve been using a USB keyboard, mouse, webcam, radio, printer, and scanner, and the straw that broke the camel’s back was a new USB storage device, one of those memory keys. MicroCenter had ’em on sale for $20, and I couldn’t pass that up.

I’ve been wanting one to store the settings for my car computer. Basically, I’ll be able to plug my USB key in to activate the car computer, so it grabs my email username & password off there. Erika will have her own, so her settings will be saved. I’m thinking things like the last played song, news channel settings, things like that. Gotta write in support for that now.

Rough week. The site’s been down for a while, and it’s a funny story. I moved the server to my office in Dallas so that it wouldn’t be down while I moved apartments this past week. Then, oh sweet irony, what happens? The office network goes down hard. Mail still isn’t getting through to my server, among other things. I would have actually been down LESS had I kept the server at the apartment.

I finally got a Tivo, and we’re loving it. Erika was crying with laughter last night while watching Taxicab Confessions 4. Tivo just makes tv-watching so much easier and more convenient.

I’m downtown at Kaveh Kanes, the coffee shop where HoustonWireless meets (tonight, as it happens), and the place is actually hopping. People are all over this place, and most aren’t doing wireless-related things. At the same time, everybody seems to wander over to the computer to check their email sooner or later, and you have to wonder how many of them are here because of the wireless in one way or another.

I’m doing a little presentation tonight on marketing materials for Node-In-A-Box, which is my big push to get small businesses to set up nodes. Steve and I were telecommuting today and we would have killed to have gone somewhere more interesting than Starbucks, but we couldn’t get wireless working right at GetWired, and we didn’t want to pay for parking at Kaveh Kanes. We gotta get more midtown businesses with nodes.

Just call me Brent Millionaire. For the last week, Erika’s been excited about this new show on Fox called Joe Millionaire. It’s a direct ripoff of The Bachelor with the interesting exception that the guy in question isn’t actually well-to-do: he’s a construction worker making $19k a year, just pretending that he’s recently inherited fifty million. Twenty women are holed up in a French castle with this guy, and he has to whittle them down to just one that he wants to keep.

As soon as the show came on last night, I thought the castle looked a little familiar. Turns out it’s the castle Becky picked for our trip to the Loire Valley! Becky and I actually stayed in that castle, walked around in the ballroom (empty at the time), took photos of the gardens, etc. It’s so hilarious to see the grounds and the rooms of the castle and say, yep, I’ve been there, and I wrote about it in my travel pages.

As we were watching the show, I ran into the closet, pulled out my travel photos, and showed them to Erika. I pointed out the staircases, the floor, everything was pretty much as we left it. I gotta ask Becky what the name of the place is, because I can’t find it in my notes.

I’m proud to announce the newest member of our family. He’s an inch and a half long, he weighs two ounces, and he’s a natural born swimmer. We haven’t named him yet, though.

Erika got us another baby turtle, which brings our aquatic family up to three. He’s a wee fella, and I can’t wait to get home and play with him. What a great way to ring in the new year!

In sadder news, Bailey (Mom’s Great Dane) is being put to sleep tomorrow. He finally lost his battle with cancer. He led a long, full life, and we all loved him dearly. I’m glad I got the chance to go up there recently and spend time with him, because he’s a big sweetheart. I’ll miss him.

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, but I just can’t find one that’s worth the upgrade. It’s more than fast enough for almost everything I do. Being a telecommuter, I’ve found that my internet connection speed makes a bigger difference than the machine speed once you get up in the P3 range.

There’s one exception: I can only play Grand Theft Auto 3 on my desktop, not my laptop, because the laptop doesn’t have a 3D video card. But I just can’t buy a new laptop solely for the purpose of playing GTA3 when I’m on the road.

Reminds me: I’m off to Dallas next week to work in the office. I’m going to drive up Monday morning, and I’m taking my web server with me. It’ll be down from early Monday morning to maybe 10am Central while I get it installed at the office. I’m putting it there for a couple of months while I move to another apartment, because I’m betting I won’t have DSL the day I move in. That would be *way* too good to be true.

Anyway, that setup will also mean that my laptop webcam will start working again, because I should be able to VPN into that web server no matter where I am. My fingers are crossed on that one.

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.

The second surprise was that somebody actually caught me via that same search, and emailed me asking if I’d share the code for my .NET blog. I’m thinking no, because that’s the reason I was searching Google yesterday: there’s got to be a decent blog solution for .NET people who run their own web servers. Still looking. I want the ability to update my blog via e-mail, basically.

The weather couldn’t be better: it’s a crisp, cool day, I have the windows open, and the turtles are sitting on their little patio basking in the heat of their lamp. Houston is a wonderful place. Steve & friends are coming down this weekend for the Rockets home opener. Life is good.

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 straightforward (dual-P3, Geforce2 Pro video card, Intel dual-port network card, US Robotics modem) and already worked with the default install CD’s for Win2k Server and .Net Web Server Edition, so I’ll see how Linux handles it.

A bit of history – over the years, I’ve tried Linux at least ten times, and I’ve never had a distro work with the devices in my systems. I don’t use esoteric gear, but it’s always been a struggle. My last effort was about six months ago, when I tried to get Red Hat 7 on my Thinkpad T21. No matter what, I couldn’t get my wireless network card or the integrated 10/100 card to work. People suggested I recompile the kernel to get those to work. Riiiight.

I got tempted this time because I was surfing through SourceForge looking at groupware tools for a work project, and realized that there was some stuff on there that could easily replace Exchange for my home use. One thought led to another, and I decided that I could make the jump and convert my web pages and mail system over to Linux fairly easily. I’d have to rewrite a few things like this database-driven blog, but since Dreamweaver MX has PHP support built in, it just might not be that bad.

I still wouldn’t switch to Linux on the desktop yet – I’ll still use VMware for that. I’d actually rather switch to Mac OS X on the desktop before I switched to Linux.

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 $40, among which I found a few really good boards. I scored a Gigabyte dual-P3 motherboard that’s perfect for my home server upgrade. The web site you’re looking at is currently hosted by an old P3-800 BX motherboard (in my home office closet, no less) and soon the Gigabyte board will take its place with a pair of P3-800’s. Not like you care, but it’s fun for me, anyway.

Polished off a couple of reviews for Epinions, a great online resource for end user reviews on just about everything on the planet. Posted my thoughts on my new Motorola T720 phone (junk) and Erika’s Jetta (awesome). In case you’ve ever wondered how Epinions’ business model works, the review writers basically get paid $.01 for every person who rates their review as helpful. I don’t do it for the money, that’s for sure, but just to give something back to the site that has helped me with quite a few purchase decisions.

And yesterday, finally, Erika and I found the perfect coffee table, as pictured here, at Bombay Company in the Houston Galleria, on sale for $200. What a no-brainer. Then we haul it home and unpack the box only to find out it’d been returned before, and it was all scratched up. Had to order another one. Worth the wait, though, because we’ve been searching for a coffee table for so long.

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 center console, which makes it look – well, a lot less ghetto. Hopefully I’ll have this project finished off tomorrow. At least, first-draft-finished. I can already see that this will be a lifelong project: I’m dreaming about putting an LCD display in the overhead console.

Drove past Mercedes-Benz of Houston Greenway this morning in my weekend ritual of self-motivation. I like walking through their used car lot and daydreaming. They’ve always got millions of dollars worth of cool toys, and this weekend was no different: a Ferrari F355 convertible, a black Hummer H2 (with a horrible orange-peel paint job) and plenty of other things I can’t afford. Maybe someday….

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 that to hold the filtering media of their choice. That way, you can choose exactly the right amount of charcoal/ammonia-remover/biomax/whatever, for your given tank size & fish/turtles. So yesterday I found myself in the checkout line at Eckerd’s with two pairs of pantyhose in my hand, explaining to the cashier that it was for my aquarium. She didn’t believe me.

And yeah, my Comets got smacked down in the first round of playoffs again for the second year in a row. I’m trying not to think about that.

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 they usually cost twice that. At that low price, though, I couldn’t refuse. Now I’m writing Winbatch software to automatically fetch my mail whenever I drive near a publicly accessible 802.11b network, like the ones in Starbucks or – well, at my house. That’s all for today, though: I didn’t sleep worth a rip last night, and I haven’t been able to get sleep all day. Going to go give it another shot.

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 finally took the plunge this week and bought the remaining pieces, and I plan to get the first draft done for my next HAL-PC column, due mid-month. You can get a sneak peek at it here, but it’s got a long way to go.

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 if the power was out at home, and it took me a few hours to realize I could check by calling my answering machine. Whew, there was power. As long as my poor turtles aren’t suffering with cold water, everything else can be fixed!