On Thursday, I had an extra Google Voice invite to giveaway. I put the entries into Excel, created a column full of random numbers, sorted by those random number (which changed the random numbers, which is why the screenshot ordering is a bit weird) and then had Random.org give me a random number. As you can see below, Shanlee was the winner!
Category: Jake
Anybody Want A Google Voice Invite?
I already have a Google Voice account, but have an invite code for somebody else to use. Comment below by tonight at midnight Pacific Time if you’d like it. Make sure to fill out the e-mail field so I can contact you (your e-mail address won’t be published/shared). If the posted time (which uses my server’s time) doesn’t show before midnight, you won’t be eligible. If there are more than one of you that want it, I’ll put all the comment IDs for the eligible comments into a column in Excel, have it sort randomly, and then will use Random.org to pull the row number. I’ll probably do the drawing later this weekend.
One entry/comment per person/IP address. Some restrictions apply. Batteries not included.
The Web Tries To Kill MSIE6, But Some Of Us Are Stuck With It
There’s a pretty good movement about of people that want to kill Internet Explorer 6, which I have absolutely no problem with for the most part. My problem? I run an old Citrix Metaframe 1.8 client/server network running Windows 2000 (I inherited it, I didn’t design it). Some of the Web apps my company uses or potentially might use only work in MSIE (I’m looking at you Escapia and Navis). While I can install Firefox, it doesn’t work well on our under-powered twinky terminal clients. And Microsoft has no intention of releasing IE7 or higher for Windows 2000. So my co-workers are stuck with a crappy browser.
And in this economy, as much as I’d like to, we’re not going to be able to upgrade our clients into full blown useful desktops anytime soon. So while this campaign to kill IE6 is fine and all, it sucks for me as I get folks at work who keep asking me why they’re seeing this message. And I get to tell them that there’s nothing I can do about it.
(Granted, most of the site’s that are posting that IE6 No More code are sites that my co-workers shouldn’t be visiting during office hours, but that’s another problem for another time.)
I’ve Said It Once, and I’ll Say It Again…
…I do not control the entire Internet. Contrary to the popular belief of some of the folks I deal with on a daily basis (but don’t actually work for), if the Web site you’re trying to visit is down, and you haven’t tried visiting other Web sites, don’t blame me until you actually try some other Web sites. If you can’t get to any sites, then you can bug me. If I can get online, so can you. If I say the Web’s working fine, don’t sit there and waste more of my time (and my boss’ money) telling me it’s not.
</rant>
(Yes, I know I’ve made a similar rant before, but it doesn’t hurt to reiterate it.)
Big Ol’ Multi-Family Garage Sale Tomorrow
I’m working with my bro/sis-in-law to clean both of our houses of all of our old (but still in great shape) kid stuff. We have a ton of stuff that our kids all gently used, but have long since out-grown or quit playing with. Joggers, bike trailers, bikes, strollers, toys, clothes, pet supplies, and a whole ton of other stuff.
The sale’s in Elkhorn Estates here in Bend. E-mail or comment below and I’ll e-mail you the address. Sale starts at 8 on Saturday, 8/8, will last until whenever we feel like quitting.
Update after sale: Sold off quite a few things and walked off with a couple hundred bucks to pay bills with. Still have the baby stroller/trailer (it’s one of these) as the person who said they were going to come back and pay for it never did. We’d like $80 for it, if anybody’s interested (it’s in impeccable shape, has all the parts and instructions). We also have a guinea pig cage (basically new — will probably go to the Humane Society if nobody wants it), Ikea leaf canopy, a bunch of kids stuff left (lots of Playdoh stuff), and a bunch of other great shape toys that will probably go on craiglist here sometime (unless somebody here wants anything). We pretty much gave away all the clothes by the end of the sale, so there’s none of that left.
Birthday Parties Are Exhausting
My youngest daughter (who was briefly mentioned on here years ago), turned six today. With the weather being nice, we had a carnival party at our house with all sorts of games, prizes, and other goodies. It’s been in the planning stages for weeks, my wife outdid herself (as usual), and all the kids (and the parents/grandparents) had a great time. We’re all exhausted. After it was all said and done, I had to fix Jack’s server, and trying to remember command line commands when you can’t see straight isn’t the easiest thing in the world.
My wife promises this is her last big wingding for the kids. I don’t believe her for a second.
Finding The Printer With Most Operating System Plug-and-Play Compatibility
We have a homeowner at the office that’s wanting to put a printer in his Sunriver home for guest/renter use. Personally, since I don’t want to get (and won’t take) the late phone calls from guests complaining they can’t get it to work because of driver issues or what not (probably my biggest concern), I’m trying to find something compatible with as much as possible without requiring a driver disk. That pretty much eliminates any printer you can find on the shelves now, as I don’t think there’s a printer you can buy new now that doesn’t require you to install drivers either off a CD or from the manufacturer’s web site.
So I’m looking for a list of built-in printer drivers for Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X (Windows 98 would be nice, too, but not holding my breath). I’m basically trying to make it so that the folks in the homes can take a cable, plug it into their computer, their computer will recognize it, and go, making it as easy as possible for everybody involved.
I’m digging through Microsoft’s Web site, but it’s obviously a slow process. I’ve found the Windows Logo’d Products List, but I’m pretty sure that includes stuff that has been tested after the release, and encompasses far more than what’s actually included with a default Windows XP install.
Anybody have any ideas? Anybody had to look into something like this before? I know some of the older HP LaserJets will work on just about anything, but not all of them have USB ports on them, and some of them are huge. It’d just be nice if there were a list of built-in drivers somewhere for the various operating systems (and if I can find one for each OS, I’m going to compile it all into one place).
HTTP Compression in IIS 5 Sucks, But Is Fixable
This is probably going to be a foreign language to most of the folks here, but I’m throwing it out there anyway, and mostly for my bookmarks.
I’ve been experimenting with adding gzip compression to reduce browser load times across some of the sites I maintain. I’ve had it enabled on Bend Blogs dynamic pages forever, as it’s built into Gregarius (working on compression and consolidating some other content on there as well to reduce lookups). I’ve enabled it on this site, as well as my office’s site on most pages (some didn’t do too well with it for reasons I’ll look into later, so I had to do it on a per-page basis with ob_gzhandler instead of on a site-wide Apache basis like I did here).
The one thing I was having trouble was figuring out how to do it on Internet Information Server 5 (IIS5 in Windows 2000). We have an online booking server here in the office that runs IIS5 (can’t be upgraded to IIS6 easily — tried once, blew things up, not doing it again). The directions here didn’t do anything. Was glad I wasn’t the only one that had trouble. Thankfully, I was directed to FlatCompression, which enables easy ISAPI filtering to enable compression on IIS5. Considering that the online booking software our business has to use is already slow (no fault of mine), anything to help speed up downloads is always good.
So if you’re still stuck running an IIS5 server, do yourself a favor and get FlatCompression installed and test here and here to make sure it’s sending gzip/zlib/compressed content properly.
Home
Made it back from vacation. Went mostly fine, despite spending one of the days in bed and/or hugging a toilet from some bad food poisoning or something. Naturally, that was our nicest day at the beach. Just the same, good time was had by all. Now I’m just buried in playing catch up after being away from the office for a week.
Bye
I’m heading out of town for a week or so to a place where my cell phone gets no reception and I’ll have no ‘net access. I’m unplugging. Work (or anybody else) won’t be able to get a hold of me without a hassle. It’ll be me, the kids, and the Oregon Coast. And I’m going to do absolutely nothing, and enjoy every minute of it. Sis-in-law will be watching over the house while we’re gone.
Back in a week. Be good. Feel free to open random discussion in the comments.