Update at 4:15 (after working on this for several hours now): I found out the problem, so I don’t need help anymore. Long story short, there was a function that was failing, throwing a false return back and causing the rest of the code to not be executed completly. I basically had to go through the code line-by-line to figure that out, but it works. Original request is after the jump.
Category: Jake
There Just Needs To Be An Extra 12 Hours In A Day
Or I just need to quit sleeping…
I have at least a dozen people who all want me to do computer work for them, and unfortunately I don’t have enough free time to do it. I totally wish I could help you all right now, but I have a day job that obviously has to come first. All of you, I’ll get to you eventually, I promise.
Priority #1 for me right now is to get everybody from my previous mailing list software into FeedBurner (there’s a new sign up form on the right of the page). Unfortunately, they don’t have an import function, so I’m forced to manually renter them one-by-one. I’m about two-thirds done. Update: All done — all folks on the list should’ve received a message to confirm they wanted to sign up. You can also use the sign up on the right side of the page.
Priority #2 will come tomorrow night when I take over the Web hosting for Jack Bog. We’re going to move his popular blog to a dedicated server tomorrow, and I want to make sure it goes perfect (and I’ve been planning and setting up for this for a while so it’s also occupied a bunch of my time). Update on 8/18: After the transfer last night, we had some odd ball Perl issues with MT. After a late night, we got them all resolved, and Jack’s site is flying nice and smooth now.
Priority #3 will be to take care of my in-laws computer, which keeps randomly freezing up. It’s not heat related as I let CPU-Burn in run for about eight hours with no issues at all, so I still have some work to do on that. Update: Think I may have this resolved after uninstalling a bunch of unneeded software. But I need to stress it to make sure.
And then Simone, Cheryl, a couple coworkers and a few other folks all need their computers upgraded, fixed, or what not. Just need to find the time to do it all, and actually see my kids (which are far more important than anything on the above list).
And these are all just free-time priorities, not actual work-day priorities, which are a whole other issue entirely.
I just need to quit sleeping … but we’ll try that some other time, so good night.
Anybody Need A Computer?
Long story short, I built a computer for somebody who I thought was a friend of mine who was trading work for me who then decided to leave town without paying me for said computer or finish his work. So I have a basically brand new, pretty darn fast (smokes my home PC), computer with 17″ LCD Monitor sitting here that I can’t afford to keep as I need the money, and just want to get rid of for my cost of the parts: $675 (I’d usually sell it for $800+ with all the time/labor I spent on it to build it).
Quick specs on the thing:
-Antec LifeStyle SONATA II Piano Case with 450 watt ATX Power Supply
-ViewSonic 17″ Black LCD (with built-in speakers)
-ASUS P5NSLI motherboard with built-in sound, network, etc… – upgradeable to dual (SLI) video cards and Core 2 Duo/Extreme processors and up to 4GB of RAM.
-160GB 7200RPM HD
-1 GB Dual Channel DDR2 RAM
-Intel Pentium D 915 Presler 2.8GHz (Dual Core)
-Radeon X550 256MB PCI Express Video Card
-10-in-1 Built-In Media Reader
-Lite-On Dual-Layer DVD/CD Burner
-Windows XP Pro (if you can provide a CD Key, as I used this guy’s CD Key to install it and that would be piracy and that would be bad) or Windows Vista Business Edition (as I have a copy of that).
Understand that I’m not Dell, and I don’t have their buying power, so I can’t provide 24-hour tech support, and it’ll probably be chaper to buy from a gigantic vendor. But I have built dozens of PCs over the years, and rarely have to work on them ever again. All the parts in the system carry at least a one-year warranty. It’s been fully patched and anti-virus software has been installed, useless crap uninstalled, as has some basic (free) office software from openoffice.org.
It’s seriously a great little desktop computer, and it’s pretty darn quiet, too. If I had the extra money, I’d just replace my home PC with it — so unless somebody’s willing to just give me $675 so I can keep this thing, I have to sell it.
Would prefer to deal with somebody locally, as I don’t really want to ship this thing. Questions, let me know.
Update on 7/29: The computer’s been sold. Thanks everybody for your interest!
Major BendBlogs.com Cleanup
MySpace’s dead RSS feeds caused me to remove the MySpace blogs from the front page on BendBlogs.com. A few small sites picked up the news of the dead RSS feeds, and MySpace must have gotten wind of it and fixed the feeds. So I’ve spent the last few hours going through all the old deprecated blogs I had in there, all the old MySpace blogs that were sitting in there, and everything else that I had in there, deleted or deprecated ones that haven’t been updated in a long time, have gone dead, or folks who have moved, and put back up everything else. There are now 200 fees listed there, and they’re not total crap. Enjoy.
Update the next day: Fixed “Enjoy” to actually go to bendblogs.com and not enjoy.com. I should know better than to blog late at night.
Yes, I Am Here
I am back from the coast. We had a terrific time, the place we stayed at was terrific (and I’m not going to share with you where until I can make sure I get it reserved for next year), weather was great (first time I’ve been to the coast and seen the sun for three straight days), and it was really hard coming back and seeing that I had 950 unread messages between all the e-mail accounts I have to check (not counting the well over 1200 unread RSS feed items that are also in my RSS reader). I finally made my way through most of it and can finally think straight again.
And the best part about the trip? There was no cell phone reception at the place I was staying (was a few miles south of Newport, off the beaten path). So I could honestly completely ignore my cell phone, keep the computer in the bag, and relax. I need more weekends like that.
Hiatus
Assuming the world doesn’t come to an end at the office today (already had to replace a network card in a firewall as well as a fan in a server), I’m planning on going on a much-needed vacation tomorrow to Newport for a few days. I really need this break to clear my head again as work, personal projects and life in general have pretty much sucked all the life out of me lately. I haven’t been able to spend the time to really do the things I enjoy, and it’s been a stressful, chaotic, even on occassion depressing last couple months.
I have no idea if I’ll have ‘net access at the place I’ll be staying, but I’ll be bringing my laptop anyway. Will I be bloggin? I might, as that’s one of the things that relieves stress for me. Anybody who has read this site for more than a year or so has probably noticed that my post-count-per-day has gone done quite a bit in the last year or so, which is sad because I enjoy sharing my finds and commentary with everybody out there. Now if I could just find a way to make blogging my full-time job …
I’ll be back in town Sunday (will have some folks staying at my house while I’m gone), and hopefully the new van will survive (we have a warranty, but I’d rather not have to use it). Meanwhile, check out some other local blogs (which will now be easier to read thanks to yesterday’s clean up).
How To Sell Me A Car
As I mentioned last week, I was looking to find a local car dealer so I could get myself a new rig. I would’ve preferred to have dealt locally, but the local dealers just didn’t have much at a price I could afford. And the ones that did have something of interest knew they had a monopoly on the area and could charge more money.
So I started looking elsewhere around the state, following some advice from the commenters in that previous entry, as well as some folks who privately e-mailed me. The problem was that I didn’t have time to sit on the phones with these folks, and had to rely on what was online and had to communicate via e-mail. So here’s some advice to car dealers who want to deal with folks like me…
It’s Time For My Own Personal Hell
As I’ve mentioned many, many, many, many times before, I pretty much hate the 4th of July. I’m all for celebrating our independence, but since I live where I can see the annual Burning Of The Butte (aka our local fireworks show) from my living room, our neighborhood becomes a war zone for the week before, the day of, and the week after the Fourth. Since fireworks went on sale last week, it’s been non-stop booming and banging with flaming projectiles flying through the sky (most of which are illegal in Oregon). I even saw one guy down the street who had set fire to a stump in his front yard and was lighting fireworks with it.
As I type this (and it’s 11:40 right now), I can still hear bottle rockets flying over my house. And today’s only the third of the month — it’s only going to get worse tomorrow.
Now just so folks who don’t live here understand, I live in a desert. A dry, hot, mostly moisture-free, high altitude, mountainous desert. We get snow in the winter, but our actual annual precipitation is very low. Which means we have a lot of dry wood and trees that will cause fires to burn of control quite rapidly. We’ve already had one fire destroyed this week because of illegal fireworks, and I worry that mine might be next because of some drunken moron down the street who decided it’d be a great idea to shoot projectiles out of their mouth, right at my house (yes, that has happened, and no, unfortunately Darwin didn’t win that battle). I’m thinking I might just keep my sprinklers on all night.
So enjoy the Fourth safely, everybody (I’ll be at work, so you’ll undoubtedly hear from me on the holiday). And if anybody has to deal with me on Thursday, I apologize in advance as I’ll be tired as hell.
Any Recommendations On Local Car Dealers?
I’ve about had it with my Dodge Grand Caravan. It was a good deal at the time, but it’s just been one thing after another that needs to be fixed, and it’s time to trade it in. I want to get a different minivan, preferably a foreign one (Toyota or Honda), as Consumer Reports just rates them so much better. I certainly can’t afford a new car so I’m going to be shopping the used market, but would prefer to buy from a dealer so I could possibly get a warranty of some sort and flexible financing.
Obviously the RNR people all seem to hate Auto Warehouse, but has anybody had anything good or bad to say about any local dealers?
Heading To P-Town
Don’t know if I’ll have time to blog at all the next few days. I’m heading to Portland for a much-needed mini-vacation. The grandparents are coming over and watching the kids, and the wife and I are heading to Portland to watch people bang on things. Yes, we’re going to see Stomp, who my wife and I saw in Eugene when we lived there when we first got married. I couldn’t afford the tickets then nor could I know, but after having as much fun as I did last time, I wasn’t going to miss this. That, and I really needed to get out of town for a bit, even if it is just overnight (we’re staying with some old college friends up there).
Everybody be good while I’m gone. I’ll be bringing the laptop and might check in — or I might not (I just know if I don’t bring it, the office will call me and I’ll need to remote in to the servers and won’t be able to). Cell phone calls will be sent to voicemail, regardless.
On a totally random note, I’m glad to hear that The Source “loves” me (read the comments) and will hopefully quit putting my name in quotes, which I griped about before. Thanks Dave for getting on ’em about it.