The Daily Diversion Archive For January, 2003

Thursday January 2, 2003

What's cool?

The Modern, Being Home for New Year's and fireplaces.

What sucks?

Mid-week days off, hangovers and lag.

We had a lovely dinner at The Modern on New Year's Eve. I had the halibut and between our group of four, we killed 3 bottles of wine. We're not lushes, it just took a long time for our meal to progress. The lovely bottles that even were Rombauer's Zinfandel, and Shafer Firebreak and Relentless. The Rombauer is a big, jammy thing that is just the kind of wine I really dig. It's not subtle, but it's richness is truly decadent. The Shafer Firebreak is "the shit" to quote Jim, the owner of The Modern. The Shafer Relentless is truly relentless. When poured, the bubbles in the glass are a dark purple and the whole thing is rich and velvety. All three are superb wines.

The halibut was nicely done and tasted almost like steak. There were two kinds of rice, mustard greens and caviar in the dish as well. Our salad was the chevre and walnut salad and we had the cassis cheesecake for desert. One of the consistently excellent things about The Modern is its decaf coffee. I know that The Bassmaster General will probably strike me down for violating the "Thou Shalt Not Partake Of Decaf" commandment, but I've already committed hygiene, so I'm already damned. Anyway, it's the best decaf I've ever tasted and it's very consistent. Yum.

Afterwards, we made our way home while our dinner party split up. We had a few of them back to the house after a fashion and we rung in the New Year drinking nice champagne and talking about kooks like Jack Van Impe and Rexella. New Year's Day was spent just sitting around and doing nothing. It was nice.

Coming back to work today wasn't so great, but I'm here and the work's getting done.

Just a note to all of you who stop by the site: Thanks for dropping in. I was reading through the access log the other day and I notice that while I have some regular readers, I also have a bunch of people just dropping by. Well, hello to the regular readers and hello to those of you who just pop in. To get in touch with me, just click the link in the left hand pane.

Thursday January 9, 2003

Has it already been a week since the last one? I guess so.

What's cool?

Sudden windfalls, old stereo equipment and coffee.

What sucks?

Having to save sudden windfalls, broken old stereo equipment and insomnia.

I was talking to a fella here at work about old stereo equipment. I have a hall of fame for certain pieces of equipment I've known and loved over the years. Chief among them is a superb Technics tape deck that I got to use a lot back in my High School Days. It kicked ass. I'll not mention the model number as I'm searching ebay for it as we speak. I figure that 20 year old cassette decks are gonna be pretty affordable. There's also a nice portable Sony TCD-5 (or something like) that I really liked. My Harman Kardon HK330i receiver is quite nice and I really liked my old Sony TC-K690 cassette deck. The only gripe with the Sony was that the motor ran all the time by design. I usually had it on quite a lot and because of this, the motor is currently fried again. Yes, I had it repaired a few years back and it worked great for a while, but now it's back to suckin' again. Big squeaky hate.

I was and am a cassette nut. This is mostly because I'm too cheap to put CD players in my cars. Both our cars have pretty nice factory cassette stereos in them and I've been rediscovering my old CD collection via MP3s. The big problem with recording CDs and cassettes from MP3s is the sound quality. Being a lossy format, you can hear it pumping a bit and sometime the highs are kinda messy. Other than that, it's great to sit down and have a compilation tape done in a little more than the tape's running time. This is cool as compilation tape making used to take all day. Now more time can be spent finding cool stuff and planning the tape's program flow. The downside is that most of my really cool tunes are still on vinyl. This is the year I'm either going to buy the CD or knuckle down and record the album on MP3. I'm tired of not being able to listen to my punk rock stuff. I'm tired of my favorites not being available on CD--at least not currently available that is.

Friday January 10, 2003

We got our old clock back last weekend. It's a cool old thing. It's a wind-up mantle clock that chimes every hour and half-hour. It's tick-tock is a sound that doesn't seem so out of place in a house like ours. It is audible from most of the first floor and certain parts of upstairs and it was meant to be so. It's odd how much better your awareness of time is when you have something like this on the mantle.

Anyway, big thank-yous to Joe who does read this thing once in a while. I hope we can return the favor soon. Heck, I can return the favor by getting my propane cylinder and torpedo heater out of your garage.

The CD settlement site got slashdotted today. For those of you not in the know, Slashdot is a tech geek oriented website that has a very large readership. We have something to do with the CD settlement at work and it was fun to see what a huge load on our server all the traffic coming over from slashdot made. This, by the way, is what is called being slashdotted. If you have modest bandwidth and your site gets mentioned on slashdot, the referral traffic from slashdot pretty much frags your connection. All I can say is that it didn't happen here.

Friday January 17, 2003

I'm a geek. It's true. I've been doing a little house cleaning and organizing lately. My wife and I decided that our old, big stereo system was going to finally get unpacked and put in the dining room. We had a good idea to put it in an existing bookcase so we finally had a nice looking place for it. Combine these with some nice, small speakers hidden about the room and we have a stereo again, by golly. Given the acoustics of our house, it doesn't take much to hear tunes well in every room on the main floor.

My wife was the only woman I ever knew who had a better stereo system than I did. We share preferences about a lot of things in stereo stuff, so our systems melded quite well. Actually, we use her stuff on the main floor because it is nicer. We've also added a couple of pieces since we got married. We bought a 5 CD disk player a couple of years back and I bought a Technics tuner just before we moved. Add this to her HK integrated amp/preamp and you have a tidy little stereo. Her Nakamichi cassette deck is good sounding and, of course, is a Nakamichi. There's just one thing missing with this whole deal. What could it be?

Can you say "Computer?"

I knew you could.

I have found a final place for my old Toshiba Tecra laptop. It's on top of the pile of components. This particular laptop has both a line-in and a line-out jack and that corresponds nicely to the tape2 in and outs on the HK. Add this to the fact that the little Tecra has wireless ethernet on it, and you get an extremely nice MP3-streaming-from-the-basement addition to the stereo rack. That, friends, is where the computer comes in. Geeeeeek.

I got an email the other day from my buddy Illya saying that Rich Gannon and Brad Johnson, quarterbacks for the Raiders and the Titans respectively, could meet up in the Super Bowl. This is significant for Vikings fans because these guys are two ex-Vikings starting quarterbacks. Illya said that there was a possibility that they could meet up in the Super Bowl. I said that since both of these guys bear The Vikings Curse, that neither of their teams will end up in the Super Bowl.

That's a prediction.

The Vikings Curse, for those of you not in the know, comes from the fact that the Vikings were in the Super Bowl 4 times and lost all four times. Until that streak is broken, the curse will live on.

Got a new video card at home. It is a NVidia GeForce4 4200 Ti with 128Mb of RAM and a lot of other neato-frito features. I upgraded from a Riva TNT2 card. There is a big difference in these cards. The Riva was having troubles supporting a decent screen resolution on my 19" monitor so that anything above 1024x768 was blurry. Blurry like dying monitor blurry. I figured that before I sent the monitor back for repairs, I'd better try a better video card. Well, it was the old video card. The new one does 1080x1024 at 85Hz without any trouble at all. This is good. No blur. No muss. No fuss. Not only this, but it also makes the display look very nice. The resolution is better in pretty much every aspect and it makes the TV card look and behave better due to the ability to run TV in an overlay. I can't say enough good stuff about it, really.

Wednesday January 22, 2003

I'm putting my geek hat on...

So I noticed something interesting about IE6 SP1 today. I figured out that IE6's setup routine will check the signatures on all the packages inside the big install bundle when you run the setup. However, it won't check them if no internet connection is available. I wasn't aware that IE6 did this, but the way we have our lan set up at work made this blatantly obvious. Here's the details...

Our network has to IP address ranges. One for people who have internet access and one for those who don't. There are no differences between these two setups as far as the client machines. The only difference is that internet requests from the second ip address range are blocked from going out at the firewall. The clients have a DNS entry. I noticed the above behavior because I was installing the IE6 SP1 update package on a PC in the excluded IP range. It took forever.

I imagine that the installer checks to see if the local machine has DNS and if it does, then the installer checks via the internet (!) the digital signatures on each of the packages. Since the machine I was working on had all internet requests blocked, the installer's requests all timed out. Since there are about 20 signatures to check at roughly 2 minutes for each verification request to timeout, you can see what normally takes about 3 minutes on a slow machine took about 40 minutes. I was not amused.

I'd never run into this before. In the past, our network had one IP address range. Internet access was controlled by the presence of a DNS entry in the IP configuration. No DNS, no Internet. Sorta. In actuality, if one knew the exact IP address of a site you wanted to get to, you could get to it. Hardly anyone knew about this, and the only ones who did either needed to know or got in trouble. The reason we never had any problem with IE6 installing over our network from a network share was that when IE6 checked, the client either had a DNS entry, didn't have a DNS entry but the installer package knew the external IP address, or the client didn't have a network connection and we were installing it off of a CD. Now that we have the blocked range, we're going to have to think a bit before we do these types of updates.

Another thing bothers me about this: The installer isn't asking for permission to check its signatures. It is just going ahead and checking. I realize and understand that M$ wants to make sure no-one's messing with their install packages, but what about the times when there are no connections available. It doesn't seem to check then. It seems opportunistic. It seems as if there's some kind of checking-in-with-the-mother ship thing going on here. Perhaps I'm paranoid (I am), but this isn't something I really want going on without my okey-dokey.

File this under yet another reason to dislike M$

Monday January 20, 2003

Had a great dinner at Zander Cafe in Saint Paul on Saturday night. It wasn't cheap, but good food can be that way. I had the escargots again as an appetizer. They rock. The best I've ever had. For the main course I had lamb on rack with pear puree and spiced lentils. Fab-dabulous. What a lovely night.

Unfortunately, the next morning wasn't so nice. I had something of a hangover that lasted most of the morning. Yuck.

I did some updates to the site yesterday. I archived the last two months' drivel and updated the archive page. I also did a backup that I burned to CD. I'd been playing fast-and-loose with the backups and for that I'm fortunate that nothing bad happened. There's been quite a lot of changes recently to the home network and I could well have accidentally caused my other live backups to die with one slip of the finger.

No such happened.

I dejunked our incoming documents file. It was a 2 hour ordeal, but it got done and now our incoming documents file is 1/4" tall as opposed to the 16" it was before.

I also took the dog to the vet to have his shots. Yep. Boring.

Sunday January 26, 2003

So, I wonder what Sting's gonna do with all the money he made in the Super Bowl Halftime Show?

I figure it probably took a truckload of cash for him to do a good version of Message In A Bottle. Not only that, but to do a duet with Gwen My Voice Is Shot Stefani. I suspect that this will be funding his next album that, like all of his solo efforts, I won't buy.

This isn't saying I thought his performance sucked. It's also not saying that I don't like his stuff with the Police. I thought it was a pretty good rendition of Message In The Bottle. He was on. Even Gwen sounded pretty good covering it.

Who designed that awful outfit Shania Twain was wearing? She looked like a Space Hooker. Nice songs, nice voice, nice body, but come on.

So I'm updating the site from the couch, watching the Super Bowl. Just call me geek. Again.

For those of you who don't know, I have wireless ethernet here at the house. It's cool. If you're thinking of doing it, DO IT. You won't regret it. I'm sitting here completely without wires. I'm on the laptop's battery, and I'm wireless with the ethernet. Wireless is good.

I've also forgot about a very special event. No, not my anniversary, that's Valentine's Day. No, sometime about a month ago, I had my third anniversary on the Internet. Not 3 years of access, I've been on-line in some way or other since 1991. 3 years of this website. I started writing material immediately after two events happened. My Dad died and I did my last stint behind the wheel of the Minneapolis River City Trolley. This also happened to be my last commercial driver gig. I figured I learned all this history stuff for the Trolley, it'd be a waste to let it go out of my head and to waste. I started writing stuff and sometime just before Y2K, I posted it to a free internet hosting site.

The Daily came around about a month or so later. I didn't start doing daily posting until about March, but it did progress from there. The Daily started with just a few rants that I wrote on a different page. Now it's a separate part of the site with its own domain name and everything.

So happy birthday to my website. Three fun years.

Back to the game...

It looks bad for the Raiders. Gannon just got intercepted for the 3rd time. It looks as if good defense will be beating good offence this year.

Who gave Cadillac permission to Led Zeppelin's Rock and Roll?

I've never seen so many bikini-clad boobs on TV. Who needs pr0n anymore. Just watch TV.

The Office Linebacker and the guy with 3 arms commercials were funny. I really liked the Office Linebacker one. We could use one of those at work:

WUNK!

YOU NEED TO GIVE THE IT DEPARTMENT MORE THAN 3 HOURS TO GET YOU SET UP WITH MORE WORKSTATIONS!

I can see this.

WUNK!

YOU WILL NOT STREAM AUDIO ON COMPANY TIME ON COMPANY INTERNET!

This could work for me.

WUNK!

YOU WILL NOT SPILL COFFEE ON YOUR KEYBOARD!

You know, perhaps an Office Drill Sergeant would be even better.

Good call on the reversal of the touchdown play.

I'm outta here. Back to the grind on Monday.

Thursday January 23, 2003

I got new glasses last night. They're really cool, but I think I'm going to have to take them back already. I ordered the anti-reflective coating on the lenses and I don't think it's there. Even though the guy at the glasses shop said the lenses had the AR coating on them, he was looking at my lenses through glasses that already had the AR coating on. This made my lenses look like they had it. Oof dah. I protested, but I didn't want to make myself look like a jerk. I also didn't want to scratch a trip to Uptown, but since the coatings aren't exactly free, I'm going to have to go back and get them fixed.

I just want something to work right for once.

Oh yeah. I forgot. It was -10F this morning and not just one but all THREE of our vehicles started without too much fuss. I was worried about the newer cars as both of them have fairly old batteries in them and I didn't know if their batteries had enough left in them for the cold-start thing, but they did. Either these were some ballsy batteries originally or I mis-read their date codes. Who knows?

Even though I plugged in the big-ass truck, it still turned over heavily. It did start, though. Funny ol' world.

Got yer war on? You'd better soon if you don't already. It looks as though it's gonna be curtains for Saddam real soon now. I'm thinking the end of the month, but it could be as late as Valentine's Day. One thing is sure, the U.S. doesn't move as much men and equipment around as it has lately and not use it. It would be a colossal waste of money to do this without good reason. And, as several bloggers have pointed out, these mobilizations aren't just garden parties once they get where they're going. They aren't going to sit for very long at all.

Thursday January 30, 2002

What's cool?

Opera 7, snow and my neighbor.

What sucks?

Project Managers who don't plan ahead, Project Managers who think IT departments can deliver the world on 3 hours' notice, exploding kitchen sink taps and 11 hour days.

I just downloaded the final version of Opera 7. It's good. Really good. I've been using Opera 7 betas now for about 2 months. I've used Opera in the past and have liked it, but I've not liked the ad-supported part. I bought it, finally, and it's turned out to be far better than my best expectations. Go ye and buy of it.

I'll have details in a couple of days.

We're finally getting some snow. We've had almost all of the requisite parts of winter so far except snow. We now have a dusting and the place looks nice again. About damn time.

My neighbor keeps shoveling my walks for me. The last time he even did my front steps. He's retired and he's home during the day and I guess that makes it easier for him to beat me to the shovel. I'll return the favor. Bet on it. Many thanks for being cool.

The good news today was that I didn't have to move 30 PCs from one floor to another for a week. The bad news was that we had to reconfigure 100 PCs in 3 hours. Needless to say, we did not succeed in 3 hours. It was more like 6 before we hung it up for the day. They have enough for tomorrow and we can set the rest up tomorrow as well.

This melodrama was all spawned by a person who is pretty consistent about not letting us know these requirements until the last possible second. This person also gets very angry when we tell her the reason why we can't be asking "How high?" on the way up and tends to make her complaints to the boss. This tends to end up influencing performance reviews. This person doesn't do their job and then has the gall to complain about the consequences. This has and probably will cost me money in the form of not getting as good a review. I don't like this shit and I never have. I can only hope this is a just world and that this person has gotten jack shit for raises for the past 4+ years of sickening incompetence. I should stop here or I'll write something I'll really regret. This person probably doesn't read this page, but if they do, my advice is to wear it if the shoe fits.