Category: Jake

Two Worst Days In The World

1) The day before you take some extra days off.

2) The day you return from those days.

The day before I put in overtime trying to fix a server bug. The day I get back I’ve spent most of the day fixing stuff the people have broken while I’ve been gone. Finally getting caught up a bit and will hopefully share some links I’ve collected later tonight (just finished adding a bunch of blogs to Bend Blogs).

My birthday was fine, had a nice lazy four days off, but I’ve decided that I need to quit taking days off work. As the singular decision maker and tech guy, people have become so reliant on me (for better or for worse) that sometimes even stupidly easy stuff baffles them. Stuff I have throughly documented and things that I’ve answered the questions to a ton of times are apparently stupidly complicated if I’m not here to answer them or at least bounce ideas off of.

May 25, 2008

30

I have a cousin. We both were born this day 30 years ago. He, his wife, son, and parents all came over to my parents house this weekend and we had a little party to celebrate. My aunt brought a picture of both of us from when we were about four months old, and we took another picture of both of us, 30 years later.

I had planned this elaborate blog post with both the pictures, comparing past and present, blah, blah, but I just didn’t have time to scan the old picture, nor get a copy of the new one (still waiting on my cousin’s wife to send me that). So what’s the point?

So just imagine some heartfelt mumbo-jumbo here with me talking about the past and present, what it’s like to officially be an old man, etc… . Or something. If/when I get those pictures, I’ll post them, as they’re fairly entertaining.

Anyway, today I’m 30, as is my cousin. Happy Birthday, Mike! I’m personally taking today and the next three days off. I don’t really have any plans, other than to be lazy and not be at work. Maybe I’ll catch up on my Nintendo DS games that I still haven’t finished. Or maybe I’ll find something else to do. I don’t know. We’ll just see how the weekend goes.

One perk about having a birthday is that all the various forums around the web send you automated “Happy Birthday” messages if you’re registered there. I didn’t know I was registered in many of these forums, and will probably just kill my registration at some of them.

I do know that I won’t be checking email as frequently as I usually do, so if you’re trying to get ahold of me, replies will be a bit slower than usual.

May 21, 2008

Finally

Spent the weekend (and lost far too much sleep) getting my new laptop all setup to do what I need and want it to do so I (hopefully) won’t have to be carrying two laptops around anymore (I need to find a new laptop bag for this one — any suggestions on a good, well-padded bag for a 17″ laptop?). It’s been really annoying having a nice new toy to play with, but never being able to really use it.

I still need to do a few more system-level tweaks, and clean up my Start menu a bit, but we’re mostly there. I really need to redo my applications list to include some other utilities I installed during all this and remove ones I didn’t need any more (as there were a bunch of redundant ones on there) Then maybe (after I catch up on some sleep) I get back to blogging on a more regular basis.

Happy Mother’s Day everybody!

May 11, 2008

Busy Week

Blogging will be light this week (as it has been the last several days) because of a variety of time crunches. I’m still trying to find time to get my new toy all setup so I can start using it full time (sucks having a new toy that you can’t even find time to play with). I’m also trying to redesign our church’s Web site since WordPress decided to puke on it (and I don’t have time to babysit it as much). I’m trying out Typo3 with the Web-Empowered Church extensions and there are a lot of cool things there, I’m just not familiar with Typo3 at all, so fumbling my way around it has been slow, to say the least. I’m also playing with the Central Oregon Symphony this weekend and have several rehearsals this week to get ready for that. And I have a bunch of little projects at home that I’m still playing catch-up on.

Needless to say, I won’t be making it to last-minute the local blogger meetup on Wednesday (could somebody plan these things more than 48 hours in advance folks? Fer cryin’ out loud…) as not only do I not get off work until it starts (and still have a 30-40 minute commute where I then have to go immediately to COCC), I have rehearsal that night (like I did at the last meetup). So everybody go enjoy yourself.

April 28, 2008

My New Toy

I mentioned a couple years ago the new laptop I got. It’s a great little system, and I like the size and power in it. However, it came time to get some more laptops here at the office, and instead of getting a new one for the lady at the office who’s not really going to use it much, she’s going to get the old one, and I got myself a new one (along with another co-worker, who will be taking over some of my marketing and graphics duties here so I can hopefully focus on bigger-picture and more complicated projects for the companies I work for).

Once again, I went with Sager because of my reseller arrangement with them. I loved the 1920×1200 pixel resolution of my old laptop, but didn’t necessarily like it on such a small screen (it was fine most of the time, but sometimes when I was tired it was really hard to focus on things because they were so small). Since portability isn’t as much of a concern as power, I decided to go up to a 17″ screen with the same resolution, and got myself (and my co-worker) Sager NP5793s (I guess they’re not ours, they are the company’s, but we’ll be using them exclusively).

Our configurations are slightly different (I have the higher res on mine, plus a larger hard drive), but here are the basic specs:

  • 17″ WUXGA (1920×1200) LCD.
  • Intel Core2 Duo Mobile Processor T8100 (2.1ghz with 800mhz bus and 3MB L2 cache). The thing will upgrade up to a Core 2 Extreme X9000 processor down the road, which I was looking at for future upgrades (I’ve maxed out my current laptop).
  • nVidia GeForce Go 8700M GT Video Card w/512mb of DDR3 RAM.
  • 2GBs of dual channel DDR2 667
  • 160GB 7200RPM Hard Drive
  • Windows XP Pro (will be setting up Vista Business edition, which I have a copy here, as a dual boot so I can start learning the OS, but can’t use it full time because of hardware and software issues here at the office).
  • DVD±R/RW Combo drive.
  • Intel 4965AGN 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi
  • Bluetooth 2.0 (which will help with my Blackberry — one less cable to carry around).
  • Gigabit ethernet, fingerprint scanner, media reader, 2MP video camera, serial port (yes, I still need one of these), firewire, USB 2.0, etc… .
  • I’ll also be moving my internal mini-PCI TV Tuner from my old laptop over to the new one, as it’ll work with Windows XP while the one that Sager sells now only works with Vista.

My one gripe is that I wish it had an external SATA port (not many do) so I could install Vista on an external drive and not have to take up space on my regular drive with a dual boot. And it weighs much more than my 15.4″ laptop. But beggars can’t be choosers.

It’s going to take me a while to get it all setup to my liking, getting all the various apps I use (won’t need all of them this time around) installed, and I’m tied up in other projects right now to really tackle it, but I’m looking forward to getting this thing fired up.

April 23, 2008

Damn You Spamming Robots

Since 11:30PM last night and this morning, I’ve gotten over 420 540 620 “Undelivered Mail Returned To Sender” (and the like) messages in my inbox. Apparently some automated spamming robot decided to spam a crapload of people faking the reply-to address to bounce back to me, basically using my server as their trash can. Usually these things just get sent to /dev/null, as they’ll use invalid reply-to addresses, but this time they used the one I actually use. Looking at the headers of the messages that were bounced back…

Return-Path: <jake@mydomain.com>

Received: from green.shirasaki.co.jp (green.shirasaki.co.jp [202.238.50.147])

by green.shirasaki.co.jp (Switch-3.1.6/Switch-3.1.2) with SMTP id 03MF0M61F00001658

for <[email protected]>; Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:22:47 +0900

Received: from 59.12.13.99 ([59.12.13.99])

by green.shirasaki.co.jp (SMSSMTP 4.1.0.19) with SMTP id M2008042300224602851

for <[email protected]>; Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:22:47 +0900

Message-ID: <000801c8a48c$0321b897$914eb19a@nubfw>

From: “Leivtra Cylais” <jake@mydomain.com>

To: <[email protected]>

Subject: Free Viagar Pilsl. takahashi’s discount Coupon #GYJTN.

Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:35:18 +0000

MIME-Version: 1.0

Content-Type: multipart/alternative;

boundary=”—-=_NextPart_000_0005_01C8A48C.031BAD84″

X-Priority: 3

X-MSMail-Priority: Normal

X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.3138

X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.3198

…it’s fairly obvious these didn’t come from my server (this particular one came from some ISP in Korea). I need to go through some of the other messages and start digging through the IP addresses to see if there is a few that are the bulk of it so I can report them IPs to the appropriate abuse folks.

Anybody know a bulk way to search through these in Outlook 2003?

April 22, 2008

Last Chance To Fill Out Your NCAA Bracket

The NCAA Basketball tournament starts in earnest tomorrow, so today’s the last chance to fill out your bracket and potentially win some stuff (and I’m always looking for more prizes to throw into the pot — if you have one you want to throw in, pop me a note below).

March 19, 2008

Mac People: Can You Help Me Out?

I have a co-worker who has a Mac G5 running OS X and is having a couple issues that sound hardware related (blue bar or something on her monitor), but knowing as little as I do about Macs (I’m not a complete moron, but don’t have nearly the skill set I do with PCs), and the fact that she doesn’t have a ‘net connection at her house for me to research on the fly, I don’t think I’d be able to help her. It’s a job for somebody who knows Macs FAR better than I.

Is there any local (or even non-local) Mac Gurus that read this site that could possibly take a couple e-mails or a phone call from her and help fix it (she understands there will be costs involved)? It may be a 30-second fix or a 30-minute fix, she just wants to have an idea and doesn’t want to have to drag her computer into Connecting Point to find out (as she lives in Lapine). Comment here if interested and I’ll pass off her contact info to you (or I’ll give her yours) and you can then hash it out with her.

March 18, 2008

Bend Blogs Group on LinkedIn

If you’re registered on the business networking site LinkedIn, you can add me as a contact but you can also now join the Bend Blogs group if you have a local blog that’s listed over on Bend Blogs. I approve all applicants, so if I don’t know you, make it obvious who you are.

March 10, 2008

Dang You Daylight Savings Time

Am I the only one that didn’t set my clock forward today and was an hour late to wherever they needed to be (in my case, work)?

March 9, 2008