If you’re somebody like me who has ever had to manage a pile of computers, servers, etc…, you’ll appreciate these. And be sure to read the comments, as there are a pile of good ones in the comments as well.
Month: December 2005
Here Come The Year-End Wrap Ups
This time of year, you’ll see a pile of different news organizations and web sites that will do year-end wrap ups and summarys of the “x” of the year 2005. The first one I’m posting is this very entertaining 101 Dumbest Business Moments of 2005. Thanks BBSpot for the link.
Horrible Video Game Covers
The site’s not in English, but the pictures say a thousand words.
“It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”
That would be George W. Bush, referring to our Constitution, which is a pretty important piece of paper that his administration feels like burning. Thanks to Will for the link.
Trading Sex for An Xbox360?
It’s probably a fake ad, there was a woman on a Craigslist posting (that’s since been removed) that was apparently looking to do just about anything to get an Xbox360. And while she didn’t mind selling herself to get a video game system, she apparently had some standards: “I’m looking for the PREMIUM system, not the ****ty watered down one.”
Minus 16°F
It’s frickin’ cold. Simone’s feeling it, and we’re feeling it. Co-workers here at the office live in the same area as Simone (a couple a bit further south) and said that this morning at 6:00 it read -16°F on their thermometer this morning (yes, that’s minus sixteen — that’s -27°C for the rest of the world). We had about eight below when I got to the office this morning.
The company I work for manages 175 vacation homes in Sunriver, and while we inspect our homes weekly, we were concerned about the sudden cold snap and the affect it could have on furnaces, water lines, pipes, etc… in our homes, especially our older ones. We wanted to make sure that if there were problems, we took care of them before the onslaught of tourists hit next week. So we basically sent all our staff today out to check the heat in all our homes and make checks on every faucet, hot tub, and source of heat in the home to make sure things aren’t frozen up — especially in some of our older homes. It’s just now 12:45, and we’ve already discovered five frozen up homes, and the day’s not even half-way done yet (and we’re maybe a third of the way through our homes). Not only that, but some of the main water lines and meters for this homes are buried under snow. We just got a report from a field staff member trying to get to the water meter and he can’t as the local snow plow geniuses buried the thing in a now six-foot-tall berm of snow. Everything’s repairable, and I’m just glad we’re discovering this now and not next week, that’s for sure.
It’s going to be a long few days, like Simone said, this winter is certainly shaping up to be a lot like 1992 (though we had much more snow by this time that year, if I remember correctly).
A 1700 Year Old G-String
Apparently gladiators were sex symbols.
Anybody Actually Using Clearwire?
I got a fancy marketing piece in the mail yesterday for Clearwire, who is now offering Wireless internet access in Central Oregon. Their coverage of the area isn’t too bad, and better than BendBroadband’s. Clearwire, according to my sources, has a big ol’ antenna on top of Awbrey Butte so, in theory, anybody with line-of-sight on Awbrey Butte’s towers should be able to get internet access (that being said, their system thinks my house is out of their coverage area, despite the fact that I can see Awbrey Butte, but I am awfully close to Pilot Butte). From the bit of research I’ve done, it looks like there are some issues with the service:
- It’s not nearly as mobile as they’d like you to believe. The directional wireless modem they require you to use is pretty decent size so while it’s technically movable, it’s something you need a power outlet to actually be able to use. One nice thing about BendBroadband’s coverage is that they do allow you to use your own wireless equipment in your laptop so you can actually truly be mobile.
- They’ve been known to block VoIP services, and they can get away with it thanks to a very broad TOS Agreement. There have also been reports of TCP/IP ports used by BitTorrent and other file sharing applications and Web and FTP server getting blocked (BendBroadband, last I checked, also blocks Web/FTP servers on their home accounts — at least they used to).
- The prices aren’t clear on their Web site, so I have no idea how much it actually costs, though many reviews’ prices seem a bit expensive.
Sadly, for those folks who can’t get DSL or Cable, this might be an option for them (like my boss, who can only get DirecWay where they live. With a strong enough antenna they could probably get a signal, though I have no idea if it would work with Clearwire or not.
So has anybody actually used their service?
Women Turned On By Monkey Sex
The study, conducted by Meredith Chivers of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health and J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern University, was published in the October issue of Biological Psychology. The researchers found that while straight men are only aroused by females of the human variety, straight women are equally aroused by all human sexual activity, including lesbian, heterosexual and homosexual male sex, and at least somewhat aroused by nonhuman sex.
Input Needed On Community Portal Software Packages
For those who know me, you know I’m working on a couple community sites to compliment the Bend Blogs site. I’m finally getting to the point where I really want to attack this and get a better presence for all the domains I own, and get a good community site setup, and am starting to look at software to pull this off.
If you have a developer mind at all, or know of any good software packages to pull of what I’d like to do, read on. I know I’m taking a risk making this public, but I may have found somebody to help pay for this project (as I know I’m going to need a bit of help), so it’s a risk I’m willing to take. Read On….