Blog

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!

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 new paragraph in the printed version. I guess I’d rather have the HTML version screwy than the printed version!

I’ve had a great time corresponding via e-mail with everyone who’s sent in questions about laptop purchases. I’ll need to take some time to add follow-up info to this site with some additional info, like where to find refurbished laptops.

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 out. Ahhh, much better.

An old college friend of mine, TJ, is coming into town tonight to visit his folks for the weekend. We’ll probably head out and see Men In Black II. If you haven’t seen About A Boy yet, you should – it’s one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a while. Yeah, I know, it looks like a chick flick, but believe me, it’s got something for everyone. Hugh Grant plays exactly the kind of guy we all think he actually is in real life. The Bourne Identity was great too.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When testing it, I inadvertently stuck my finger in the running CPU fan, and chopped off a hunk of skin. Good fan. Moves quick. Thumbs up from me. Anyway, it’s been running for nearly an hour now, so that’s a Good Thing.

I put off going out until the end of the Indy 500, and man am I glad. That was easily the best finish I’ve ever seen, with Helio rolling to the finish with barely enough fuel to make the victory lap. My dad took me to Indy several times, and it’s the only racing event I love to watch.

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 for my desktop, but it turns out my motherboard won’t take higher than a 1ghz. More trips to Frys, and now I’ve got a P3-933 in my desktop, and more fans for my home server. (It uses SCSI drives, and it’s been getting way too hot.)

I can’t say enough good things about the folks in the CPU department at Frys. I asked for the quietest CPU cooler they had, and the woman knew exactly where to find it. These people are always on top of things.

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 page about my turtles, Frank and Fred.

More upcoming changes are in the works: the blog really isn’t up to speed yet, and I’ve gotta finish the discussion areas and my column archives. I’ll also have a login setup so that you can get emails whenever I publish a new blog.

On a personal level, I’ve got a horrible headache today. Dunno what’s going on there, but it’s been persisting for the last couple of days. Probably a brain tumor. These might be my last words. Egads.

Well, it’s coming along. Let’s see how this works.

And of course, it won’t save multilines.

Here we go! I’m in the process of converting the site from plain old ASP to dot-Net. I figured while I was at it, I’d give the site a bunch of new functionality. Here, for example, is my new database-driven blog.

The changes are being driven by two things: I was dying to play with the new Dreamweaver MX, and my site’s probably going to start getting more hits now that I’ve got a column in HAL-PC magazine. I wanted to have a discussion area for the columns, so that people could ask questions and contribute ideas for upcoming columns. Anyway, here we go!