Seriously, Momentum Missile Mayhem will kill off far too much time if you play it. But enjoy it anyway.
Mugshot Of The Month
This guy’s crimes were nasty, but he’s one hot dude.
Microsoft Product Activation Can Kiss My Pastey-White Hiney
So last night I was at the office migrating servers between hardware. Nothing really exciting about it. One of the servers I was migrating was an older Citrix Metaframe 1.8 server. That migration was going from basically like-hardware to like-hardware. The only difference between the two machines was the larger RAID array, more RAM, and slightly different processor in the new machine. They were otherwise the same model of server, but I didn’t envision major problems, should they arise.
The clone took forwever, but it got done, I booted up the server, made sure the thin terminals could connect fine, and called it a night around 11:00PM last night. This morning at the crack of dawn, got a phone call that nobody could get into Outlook, Word, or any of the other Office XP programs running on the server. The error? Product activation due to significant hardware changes. I thought to myself “OK, easy fix, will just reactivate it.” I come to the office, attempted to reactivate on the terminals, and the activation window went away — never gave me a confirmation that it was activated. When I checked the product activation on the server itself, it told me it was activated, but it was spitting out errors on the client terminals. Tried repairing Office, still gave me fits.
I was spending too much time dealing with this when I had other places to be (as I split my time between a couple offices), so I said “Screw it.” A 30 second search found an Office XP activation crack (Anti-MSOPA.exe — google it) that cracked the mso.dll file, and errors went away. We’re a fully legal user of Office XP, have plenty of licenses, but I just didn’t want to deal with the activation crap that was causing us wasted time and potentially lost money. It’s sad I had to download hacker software to do it. While I still plan on finding out what was wrong, I didn’t want to waste company productivity to do it.
The Life Of A Late-Night Sysadmin: Staring At Progress Bars
When somebody asks what I do when I’m at the office after-hours, I generally tell them “I stare a progress bars.” Generally, if I’m at the office after hours, it’s because I need to install patches, do system maintenance, copy a bunch of data, clone a hard drive, or something that requires it to be done when nobody else is using the server. And any geek who has done any of that type of stuff knows that it’s a lot of progress bars.
Right now, I’m at the office performing a server migration from old hardware to slightly-less-old hardware. I have Clonezilla running on the one server that supports it (Clonezilla is having issues with it’s RAID controller (which is why I’ve opened this thread), and I have Ghost running on another server (I prefer Clonezilla as it makes much faster clones). So here I am, staring at progress bars. An hour to go on the Ghosting machine.
Meanwhile, I can sit here. Waiting.
While I’m waiting, I tend to go through my RSS feeds, and read interesting stuff like like where to find gas that doesn’t have Ethanol, the A11 football offense, the Wired FOUND archives (I miss that section of the magazine), a well-written librarian’s response to a complaint about “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding”, and the plastic coffee on a local news show. I’ll probably also kill some time playing multiplayer minesweeper, a fun little album memory game, Totem Destroyer, and Monster’s Den. I also found it interesting all the cameras that were rolling during the L.A. earthquake last week, including Judge Judy, Big Brother, KNBC, KABC, City Hall and Judge Penny.
Back to check on those progress bars …
Sprint vs. Verizon: Thoughts?
My Blackberry contract is due up for renewal here soon, and I’m considering transferring my number elsewhere. I’ve found myself using my phone for data use quite a bit more often than I originally thought, and wanted to get a phone that I could tether to my laptop for use on the road in a pinch (for when my employer decides they need something while I’m vacation). I also would like a Windows Mobile-based phone as software availability for the Blackberry isn’t nearly as plentiful, and usually costs more money for stuff I can get for free elsewhere.
I’ve narrowed it down to a couple of phones from Verizon and Sprint (the HTC Titan tops that list), but wanted to hear everybody’s experience with Verizon and Sprint locally. While I’ve heard great things about Verizon’s support and their network, I do like Sprint’s openness with their phones. Like with Sprint, the same phone has newer software and unlocked hardware (hardware GPS works with Sprint via an official update, while it requires an unsupported hack to get it to work on Verizon’s or US Cellular’s Titan. I’d rather not hack my phone if don’t have to. But I’ve heard really lousy things about Sprint’s support (but I don’t think I’ve dealt with support often in all my years of having a phone, really — I’d rather figure it out myself.) but their network is decent.
Any thoughts from the gallery?
(And you might notice that after yesterday’s discussion, all the links now open in new windows.)
Reader Survey: Links In New Window or Not?
I made a change a few weeks ago that reader Amanda was the first to point out: I changed external links I post in blog entries from links that opened in a new window to links that opened in the same window. She was the first to notice (or at least mention it). I personally preferred opening them in a new window as I use Firefox and had it set for external links (with target=”_blank” in the link code) to open in new tabs that I could browse later. I switched it recently because more and more blogs I saw seemed to post all links to open in the same window.
Lots of folks have discussed this same question, so I now’s the time for all you lurkers to come out of the woodwork: Which do you prefer? Links opening in new window or links I post opening in the same browser window? Comment below.
(Oh, and BTW: Amanda shared Knol, which is now public, and thought it was hilarious the length of an article on making pancakes is stupidly long.)
KPOV To Go “Full Power”, KWAX to Change Frequency
Bend community low-power radio station KPOV has been awarded a full-power FCC license. Congrats to them, as they’re a great bunch of folks and it’ll be great for them to get their station out there more. When they get everything all built up, they’ll be broadcasting on 88.9 FM instead of their current 106.7.
Why does 88.9 sound familiar? As I’ve mentioned before, 88.9 is used by KWAX — a University of Oregon-based classical music station — as a local translator. Since KPOV was awarded this license, KWAX has to quit broadcasting on that frequency when KPOV goes live on the new channel. KWAX already broadcasts locally on 88.5 out of Redmond and 90.1 out of Sunriver, but neither of those translators came in as good as the 88.9 out of Bend (I’m a classical music guy, and like KWAX’s programming).
So I e-mailed the folks at KWAX, and asked them what their plan was for the Bend translator. Their response:
We have one more application to get through the FCC and will then have permission to build the identical facility we have now, but on 98.9. You should notice no difference in the quality or coverage of the translator after the frequency change. We hope to have it completed by the end of the summer, well in advance of the new station beginning operation.
Good to hear they’ll still have a good solid Bend translator, and congrats to the KPOV folks!
Worried You’re Going To Go Over Your BendBroadband Bandwidth Usage?
July is the first month that BendBroadband is capping your Internet bandwidth at 100gb/month and will be billing for overages (read up on the whole mess that ensued after the announcement here). Since I don’t think the usage-based bills have been sent out quite yet, there hasn’t been any reaction quite yet (don’t think there will be much of one since they did raise their cap). But if you’re concerned about going over, and want to make sure you don’t, a local programmer has created a monitoring PHP script that will e-mail you your usage numbers whenever the script runs. You can read up on bbbUM here.
I really have an urge to make this a public service where people can submit their user/pass, it’d be encrypted and can then email them their usage on a daily basis, but I really don’t have that kind of free time on my hands.
The Penguin Gets Its Revenge
Remember the popular time-killer Smack the Penguin? This time, the penguins fight back.
My best was 3956 (which really probably isn’t that good). How’d you do?
For All The New Features in Vista…
…there were also quite a few things that were taken out. Most of it wasn’t need anyway, but it’s still interesting to see what Microsoft deems important and not.