Category: Jake

Finally Up And Running

OK, so it was more than just the day of being offline, but after getting all my data and information transferred to my new toy, I’m finally up and running and good to go. I still need to install a couple more applications, but for the most part, all my data, applications, documents, etc… are all moved over on to this thing so I can clean up my old laptop and give it back to the company.

This thing is far faster than my previous one, that’s for sure. Loading up documents in Photoshop is a ton faster than it was before (and I can actually work in other programs while working in Photoshop). I’m still not quite use to the high resolution on this small of a screen (1920×1200 on a 15.4″ wide-screen makes for small icons), but it is really nice having that much real estate in my various desktop publishing and development programs. And being able to have a few programs open at once and be able to see all those windows is very nice.

Now I’ve gotta catch up on all the email I missed the last 24 hours, finish up installing the few things I just realized I’m still missing (Homesite, a few typefaces, Quickbooks, Metapad, and Pagemaker, for some of my older designs that Indesign just can’t open properly).

January 26, 2006

Don’t Expect To Hear From Me For The Rest Of The Day

My new toy (three business days after ordering) is here so I’ll be playing with that.

On a related note, I mentioned before that I can give people deals on those laptops, and I found out that I can do drop shipping anywhere if need be. Just let me know if you’re interested!

January 24, 2006

I Wish I Was In The Sixth Grade

Back when I was in the sixth grade over at Cascade Junior High School (back when it was still called a “Junior High”), I had a teacher who was a raving Seattle Seahawks fan. Every time they won a game, the class would get cookies. The problem was that this was 1989 and they only won seven games, so we didn’t get cookies as often as, say, a 49ers fan. This year, we would’ve gotten cookies 15 times (and counting). I know this same teacher still works in the school district, now teaching elementary school at Westside Village, and I hope her kids are getting cookies, too.

While I actually like both of the teams in this year’s Super Bowl (which is a first), I’m rooting geographically and hope the Seahawks win it all. Go Hawks!

January 24, 2006

Server Move Notes For Myself

This is just mostly just random notes for myself, after yesterday’s server move, so when/if I have to do this again, I don’t miss these things.

  • Make sure that php.ini is edited to have “register_globals” turned on, otherwise it totally screws up Sunray’s site.
  • Make sure your root password for your old server doesn’t have a “+” sign in it as it totally screws up cPanel’s account transfer functions.
  • Make sure you get rid of the zerobyte “/etc/eximmailtrap” file, as it conflicts with e-mail form scripts.
  • Don’t rebuild Apache with SNMP support (at least not via cPanel) as it won’t build in curl.
  • You need to manually setup hard-coded DNS subdomains, as cPanel’s transfer functions always seem to miss them unless they were created with cPanel.
  • Fix Sunray’s internal server so it only allows logins from the new IP address.
  • Symlink pico to nano (ln -s /usr/bin/nano /usr/bin/pico) so you don’t keep typing “pico” and wondering why it’s not working (yes, I’m not one of the cool kids, and I don’t use vi, emacs, or whatever else all you punks use).
  • Added on 1/21: Make sure CRON jobs on old server are turned off so this doesn’t happen.
  • More to come, I’m sure…

Feel free to contribute below if you can think of any gotchas that you’ve run into before.

January 19, 2006

My New Toy

Ken isn’t the only spoiled little b***h — I’m getting a new toy, too (even though Ken has far more toys than any of us).

My toy? Actually, not my new toy as the company is paying for it, but I’m getting a new laptop — a Sager NP5320V model. I’ve had good luck with Sager’s systems, and am typing this on an older one that I’ve been using for a few years.

Why a Sager? It’s a poorly-kept secret in the laptop industry that the bulk majority of laptops sold out there under a variety of names are made by just a handful of companies and rebranded slightly (kind of like kitchen appliances). Clevo makes all the laptops for Hypersonic, Voodoo, Sager, Alienware (at least they used to), and Mtech (among others). The one thing that’s nice about buying it from Sager is they usually have the newer technology from Clevo, and their prices are always far cheaper (and since I have a reseller account with them, they’re even cheaper than the public price).

So here’s some basic specs on the laptop I’m getting for about $150 less than their publicly available price:

  • 15.4″ WUXGA Active Matrix LCD Display Display
  • Intel® Pentium® M Processor 760 / 2MB L2 Cache, 2.0GHz, 533MHz FSB
  • 1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz
  • ATI Mobility Radeon X700 PCI-Express 16X Graphics with 256MB DDR Video Memory
  • 80.0GB (SATA 7200rpm) SATA 150 Hard Drive
  • 8X Dual Layer DVD Burner ± R/RW
  • Windows XP Pro
  • Built in wireless, gigabit ethernet, media reader, video camera, firewire, USB 2.0, etc…

It’s on order and should be here soon, and then I get to start installing all my toys and then I get to get down to real work of making this site into a rockin’ site.

Update: By the way, if anybody wants something from Sager, let me know and I’ll sell it to you at my cost.

January 19, 2006

Anybody Have A Hookup On A Good Bend Home Rental?

My sister and brother-in-law are apparently getting booted out of the place they’re renting in the Providence subdivisions in Northeast Bend. The owner of the home has decided that he’s going to sell it, and he’s probably going to be asking far too much for them to be able to afford to buy it from them. He’s given them 30 days to get out of there, which means they have to move somewhere else.

Looking on RentBend (will be looking at the Bulletin later tonight), there’s just not a lot out there for median income folks who are renting but need a three-bedroom (or larger, as they have three kids) with a pet-allowed (they have a cat) home. Their credit is recovered after a bankruptcy many years ago, but Bend’s home prices and the interest rates are certainly not supportive of folks who make normal wages (unless you were lucky enough to get in before the boom like my wife and I did). You can’t buy a home for less than $220,000 here, unless it’s on wheels.

Anybody have some leads on a private homeowner who is looking for some renters, and might be open to a rent-to-own arrangement? Contact me at utterlyboring [-at-] gmail [-dot-] com.

January 9, 2006

What Firefox Extensions Are You Using?

I finally got around to upgrading my Firefox setup to version 1.5. Why did I do this? Because I tried just doing the quick-and-dirty upgrade to the 1.0 version of the Web Developer Extension and it totally hosed my 1.0.7 install (I need to read directions, I know).

But I figured this was a good a chance as any to just bulldoze my profile and start from scratch with 1.5 (which is the recommended course according to many forum threads I’ve seen over here, versus trying to upgrade on top of the old version).

It was also a chance for me to download and install all new versions of all my extensions, and thought I’d post what I’ve installed here for everybody else to peruse (and so I don’t have to look them all up again), and I encourage folks to comment here and let me know what they’re running so I can see if there’s any other cool little extensions I might be missing (and for anybody who cares, I use the Smoke theme, after using the Noia Lite theme in 1.0.7).

Also of note, I probably will install Greasemonkey at some point as there are a pile of great scripts for it, but I’m going to hold off for now.

So what is everybody else using?

January 8, 2006

Stuck In Utter Chaos Mode

Warning: this will be one of those entries that will totally fit the “Utterly Boring” title of this site. I apologize in advance.

This day has been utter chaos. Minus the few minutes of peace and quiet when I grabbed a bite to eat with Simone earlier today, this day has been a mess.

We’re doing a bunch of year-end closing stuff with all our accounting stuff, and we had some problems with running the year end reports and the payroll that is supposed to be run this week for the first pay period of the year. It was giving our accountant upstairs some really ugly errors. So I hit the company’s knowledge base, the solution is to rebuild the appropriate payroll database tables. So I do that on the payroll tables, thinking it’s a payroll problem. Try it again, still giving the same error. Go back, and just rebuild everything. Notice I’m getting an error in one of the general ledger tables. So I open up the raw table, don’t notice anything weird, but for the life of me can not get in and run payroll, getting the same error.

I spend a good chunk of the day trying to rebuild these things so we wouldn’t have to reinput the last couple days worth of transactions. So I finally bucked up and called the company, paying for the privilege to talk to them, and got the answer that I didn’t want to hear: “You need to recover from backup.” And of course, the last two days worth of backups had the same corrupt table, so I had to recover from the last known good, which was done on Monday night. I told him that I didn’t want to pay for the call as he couldn’t help me, he said that was far and didn’t count it towards our support agreement and he said that was fair

So reimported the whole mess, reclosed off the year so we could run payroll, and finally got things working again. What a frickin’ mess — it’s just totally consumed my whole day and kept me from writing the proposal to my boss to redo this site (more on that some other time).

Anywho, normal blogging to resume when I catch my breath after that mess. It was my daughter’s sixth birthday yesterday, that’s my excuse for not getting online yesterday (I played hooky, and stayed home, took her out to lunch, and had a grand old time).

January 4, 2006

Obligatory Post-Christmas Post

I’m stupidly busy at the office today dealing with getting all our homes ready for the onslaught of folks we have coming in this afternoon. Meanwhile, here’s a list of some of the things I received for Christmas (and you’re welcome to post what you got in the comments below). I’m putting this in an extended entry for those who really don’t give a rip what the family and I got or how I spent my weekend.

(more…)

December 26, 2005

Merry Christmas!

Tomorrow is the one day during the year where our office is closed, so I actually get a paid day off (I usually work on Sundays). That being said, I’ll be back at the office on Monday, the 26th, as it’s one of out busiest days of the year with a crapload of check-ins.

Have a happy and safe holiday, everybody, and be sure to post all the goodies you got (or you gave your kids. I’ll post one of those obligitory posts at some point, but always like to hear what everybody else got/gave. And I already know about Jon’s birthday cat, so let’s just not discuss that as it seems to be a touchy subject in the household (just joking Jon/Wife — I love ya both and hope you have a safe holiday).

December 24, 2005