Month: April 2005

I promise that someday I’ll be back to normal blogging that all the folks that read this site all love, but meanwhile, here’s an update on things after last night. I went home and tried to get some sleep, got about 90 minutes, but couldn’t sleep as my mind was still hanging out here in the office, making me a nervous wreck. At about 6 o’clock, after thrashing around in bed for at least an hour, I finally got up, showered, and drove back into the office.

After a bit of work, I got the server up and running in full (for the most part) this morning. I got everybody printing properly, got most everybody into their e-mail, and setup most folks’ preferences. I’m still having some oddball roaming profile issues, mostly from folks who log in from home (anybody want to give me a hand on these? Active Directory whiz, I am not). They can sit and simmer for a bit, however, as they’re not critical to the function of things, minus they can’t get access to e-mail and other preferences. I’m also having an issue that didn’t crop up until I had Citrix on the server: The clock periodically resets itself. Still haven’t had time to figure that one out, but am not going to worry about it right now, but if anybody has any random ideas off the top of their head, feel free to share.

I was at the office from about 7:00am until about 10:30 this morning. I then went to Selco to get an auto loan for my new ride (got a nice 4.5% interest rate), and then I went home and slept for about 90 minutes or so, spent some time with the kids, ate something, and now I back at the office, getting the accounting software all setup so that we can get paid this week (figured this would happen during a payroll week). Should be here just about another 30 minutes or so, and then I’m heading out of here and going to bed.

I’ve already said I’m not going to come to work tomorrow because not am I totally and utterly exhausted, but I think I’ve caught a bit of my daughter’s stomach bug, as I was feeling crappy all day today. Hopefully a good night’s sleep will help that a bit.

Back to regular links (and I’ve got a ton of great submissions) when life is back to normal a bit (what I wouldn’t wish to have me cloned so my clone could post the links here, or to have a guest contributor or six).

Meanwhile, there’s lots of interesting reading here (even if the date/time stamps are a bit messed up on the thing).

Right now I’m stuck at work, and will be here for quite a few more hours. It’s spring cleaning time on our servers here, so I’m going to be doing some major archiving, cleaning, pruning, upgrading, and whatever else I can get done. I might see if I can post some links later as I’m staring at progress bars, but we’ll see.

Update at 8:35: I’m screwed. Powered down and rebooted my Citrix Metaframe (running on Windows 2000) machine — which, unfortunately, powers the entire building — and the thing crashed bad during boot up. Rebooted, and now the thing won’t login. I can’t get into the system with ANY login/pass. It’s like the thing revereted back to its default settings. And, naturally, I can’t get onto the machine to get the memory dump of the crash. This is not cool at all. Thank frickin’ god I have offsite backups.

Time to yank the drives out, see what I can recover on thing. Yipee….

Update at 10:15: OK, I gave up trying to get into the Citrix machine, and my backup hardware wasn’t running stable. So what am I doing? My online booking server is over powered for the minimal amount that it does, so I’ve pulled the hard drive out of the Citrix machine and installed it into the online machine. I’m copying the data onto the hard drive of the online machine, which I’ll install Citrix Metaframe, a few applications, and hopefully be able to go home by midnight (not holding my breath, however — I just went across the street for a caffeine buy, just in case). I’ll just let the machine pull double duty until tomorrow when I’ll format the old Citrix machine, and get IIS back up and running on that machine.

I didn’t want to just reformat the Citrix machine, as reinstalling an OS and getting it all up to speed is no fun. The online machine had a stable and patched OS, and getting Citrix and Terminals Services all setup on that won’t be too hard, just tedious.

In the long run, this will be better, as the machine that was doing online bookings was way more powerful than the Citrix machine, so things should run faster.

Anybody who has any ideas on ways to speed this all up, my IM handles are here, so feel free to send a note my direction (just give me a bit to reply, as I’ll probably be beating up server).

Update at 12:30AM: Yes, I’m still here. This night couldn’t get any worse. Got Citrix installed on the 2nd server, and now my Citrix licenses won’t activate, so I’m screwed. I’m going to see if I can get a hack installed to make things work until I’ve got some sleep, but I still have to get MS Office and our bookkeeping software installed which, unfortunately, is mission critical as well. Time to dip into my Pepsi stash…

Update at 1:45AM: I give up. The folks here can login and make reservations, and that’s about it right now. They can’t print, they can’t do any bookkeeping stuff, but I got the activation crap with Citrix figured out, and I’m starting to feel sick with all the crap that still needs to be done. But I need to sleep, so I’m going to take a couple more sips of soda and drive the long highway back home. I’ll probably be back here at the crack of dawn tomorrow, but I’m finishing up a memo to the early morning staff here, in case I’m not.

OK, we haven’t got the car yet, as I need to head to the bank on Monday to get a bit of financing through. Any locals have some good recommendations? I’m probably going to go through a credit union because the rates are better, and I only need a small amount.

Anyway, my mom saw a posting at her work for a minivan for sale. She sent it my way, I called, it was a good deal, and within our price range, and we went for it.

So barring any stupid troubles at the bank, come early next week, I should be the proud owner of a 1996 Doge Caravan SE with right at 100,000 miles that I got for less than $3,000. It’s in great shape, runs great, and even has a remote starter. I’ve heard folks have had trouble with this year’s transmission, but they’ve said they never had trouble with it. But you’re always going to by a used car that could potentially have problems, so what are you going to do?

What that does mean is that I have a car to get rid of: A 1988 Honda Civic Sedan (4-door, 5-speed manual). It’s got 187,000 miles, gets 38+ miles per gallon on the highway, and the engine’s got a lot of miles left. I’ve even got a set of 4 studded tires on Honda rims so you can change thing over yourself. I also put a CD player in it as well. It’d be a great high schooler’s car or commuter car. I put a new clutch and left axle on the car last year, and just replaced the spark plugs and wires and just had the oil changed.

The problem is that it needs a new right axle (actually, it’s the CV joint, but it’s easier to just replace the whole axle). That’ll run you about $200 for parts and labor with most mechanics. It’s also got a lot of little dents as well as a bigger one underneath the right tail light (light still functions).

E-mail me an offer or comment here if you’re interested or need more specs (the car is located in Bend, Oregon, for those who are interested). I can send pictures, if you like (once I clean the thing up).

Why no links today? Because I’ve been stupidly busy, that’s why. That, and I’ve been working on a new project. It’s slow, ugly, and not totally functional yet, but I’m working on it.

Basically what I’m trying to do is create a Central Oregon blog aggregator similar to ORBlogs, but on a much smaller scale. ORBlogs, while a tremendous resource, is getting huge. Since Paul, the guy who runs ORBlogs, has told me on many occasions that his code isn’t ready for public consumption, I’ve had to take my limited programming skills (primarily PHP) and try to wing this.

I’m using lilina as my starting point for this. It uses the MagpieRSS libraries to do it’s work. It’s pretty slick, but doesn’t do exactly what I’d like it to do. I’m trying to get it to output an RSS feed, for example, and it’s caching is really weird so I’d like it to run via a cron job. And don’t like its binary flat-file storage method, but I couldn’t find a PHP script that would work well that I could actually understand (and I don’t have the programming skills to write my own). And for the life of me, I couldn’t get the other solution I found to work for the life of me.

So my to-do list for bendblogs.com (mostly so I have a reference point other than a text file on my hard drive):

• Get the rest of the sites I have stored inputted and indexing.
• Get an informational blog setup over there.
• Figure out a way to sort the sources alphabetically (maybe play with the last updated stuff here).
• Figure out a way to get an RSS feed for the site.
• Figure out a way to smooth out the caching and speed things up.
• Add a “Submit” and a “Removal” request forms, as well as FAQ, About, Contact, etc….
• Customize the CSS quite a bit more (as that’s one of the stylesheets that come with the script).
• Get a credits spot setup.
• And whatever else you guys can think up….

Things I’ve already Done:

• Changed the PHP date variables so that they’re actually readable by normal humans.
• Made it so that entry summaries don’t fill up the entire page (only am take the first 175 characters of the entries, sans HTML code, which I had to strip off as well).
• Fixed it so that systems that don’t store a title in their RSS feeds (LiveJournal, for example) will default to the first 25 characters of the entry as the title.
• Commented out a lot of code for extraneous crap I don’t need (like furl, google, and del.ico.us integration).
• Created a cheesy logo.
• Tweaked where various links were going so that things made a bit more sense.
• Removed a crapload of extraneous javascript code.

Like I said, I’m not a studly programmer by any means, so I’m just amazed the thing is up and running and tweaked (learning a lot during the process here). If anybody wants to help at all with this, they will certainly get credit in the Credits area (which will be on the front page once it’s all up and running). E-mail me (jake @ this site’s domain) if you’re interested.

But meanwhile, test it out, have fun, and let me know if you find something stupidly obvious that’s wrong. Either comment here or e-mail me.