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Weekend time

Took the family to see Bruce Almighty it had it moments and was a good break from the action movies I have seen in the last few weeks.

Made some back end upgrades to the journal with a few hacks to make it easier to add entries. Planning on spending the weekend just working around the house and vegging out. Got gaming tomorrow night at Del’s. The other want to do an all night of gaming so that should be interesting.

Got around to shaving the bed room door down so it opens and closes with out sticking and making a ton of noise when ever anyone enters or leaves the room. I also had to move the strike plate up so the door would latch. I have had to make a lot adjustments on this house on stuff the previous owner did. I think he used about 2K lbs of nails to make his repairs and additions to the house.

Well back to building stuff.

Car gets money thrown at it

What a long week it’s been. My car has been on the shop 3 times since Monday. Last week I took it in to have a recall taken care of and the timing belt replaces. When they got under the hood they informed me the head gasket was leaking so I had that replaced as well to a grand total with tax $1,460.00.

So I am driving back from Woodbury and the check engine light comes on. Now me being the techno geek that I am I find out the blink codes and determine that the computer is saying I had a miss fire on one of the cylinders. SO I take it back to the dealer and say this shouldn’t be happening since I just had the plugs and cables replaced at the beginning of the month. Now my service center philosophy is be nice to them and they will be nice to you and give you fast and friendly service. So Steve the mechanic who did the timing belt/head gasket work took the car into the garage as I waited (just to let you know if you actually wait for the car they work on it right away). So in about 10 min he drives it back out and tells me he has fixed the problem. The connector that plugs into the coil pack from the computer was cracked and he replaced it no charge. So I jump in the car fire it off and the check engine light comes back on and the engines missing and bucking. So back inside have Steve come back out take the car back and fix it again. This time he has the shop foreman take it for a test drive and then give it back to me. I jump in and away I go back to work with no problems. I get back in the car at the end of the day fire up the engine and guess what…check engine light’s back on and the engine is miss firing and bucking. I nurse the car back to the service center and drop the keys back on the counter. The next morning I wander back to the service center to find out Steve had to replace part of the wire harness that goes to the coil pack from the computer. It seems he accidentally pinched a wire when he was replacing the head gasket. So no charge to me and I still have about 82 days left on the warranty.

The weather is starting to get to me. It’s not the rain that’s bothering me. It’s the gray skies and cool temps that are making me feel lousy. So till next time…..

BIG Geek Alert

Well last night I proved my geekiness to my family and wife. After a lot of hemming and hawing I decided to go see the Matrix: Reload a day before general release. Delmar and I went and hit the theater at 9 to get tickets for a 10 or 10:20 showing. Was it worth it? I use the line I use from my Top Gun days…”when’s he get back in the plane?” The Action scenes were great but there was way to much talk….it was like being in a philosophy 101 class. There were a few scenes that we both thought could have been left on the cutting room floor and added to the directors cut release. But it was fun to be able to say I saw it the day before it was really released. Of course now I have only had about 4 hours sleep and I have no coke at work so it’s going to be a tea kind of day.

A busy weekend and Monday, spent the better part of the weekend with the folks. They came down on Friday night so my mom could go with Avery and Carolyn to the Degas exhibit at the Philadelphia Art Museum. My dad and I hung out and talked computers. Sunday I installed a new kitchen faucet for Carolyn’s mothers day gift. We took the folks out for dinner at the Chesterfield Inn and had a great meal.

Monday spent most of the day trying to get the Antivirus program working on a users machine. It was infected with the klez virus and waked the software. I couldn’t even uninstall it. I did find out how to remove it manually. I also found about 10 other people who weren’t connected to the antivirus server so they weren’t getting the latest definitions. So I had to uninstall it and reinstall it, but if I had upgraded them from win 95 to win 98 I had to uninstall manually and remove a ton of stuff from the registry. So that’s what I have been working on this morning.

Last night though we went to see Avery play in her first band recital and sing in her first chorus presentation. It was packed. I want to send out a quick thank you to my aunt who went to the school early and saved us seats in the second row. She got there about and hour before the performance and still people beat her for the front row. It pays to live right in front of the school I guess. Avery did a great job playing and singing. I am very proud of her for sticking with playing the clarinet and practicing and having fun with it. I her grandparents were very impressed and happy to be down to hear her play and sing.

1 day till Matrix: Reload……

Wep Wep Wep

Been a busy past 2 days this week. I got the AP working at work finally. I even got WEP working on it. I had to upgrade the firmware and software in the AP unit before it would stop locking up when I tried to pass data through it. It got so bad that it even locked up when trying to hand out an address. I had to use a Linksys WAP11 because I couldn’t find a wireless PCI card with a Prisim2 chip anywhere so I couldn’t build one out of a spare Linux box.

The next big hurdle was to get the VPN clients to work right on the clients and be able to talk to the corporate network. This way only company devices can use the wireless network to get to the corporate network. I used the Checkpoint SecureClient VPN client. It wasn’t too bad to set up just a little learning curve to go through.

The weekend wasn’t to bad saw X-Men 2 on Friday with Del. The movie kicked a**. Then spent Saturday hanging with Avery and Carolyn. We got a little work done around the house for my parent visit this weekend. Headed to Jac’s for breakfast on Sunday and talked computers for a few hours. Then went gaming at Del’s. We are playing first addition modules with third addition characters. I found a good character generation program that Del and I are now using.

So back to the world of wireless today, have to look into the cost of some wireless repeaters so I can blanket the office with signal.

Manor House 1

For the last few nights I have been watching the show Manor House on PBS. This show took a family and 11 other people and set them up in a Manor house. The rub of it all was that they had to dress and act as though they were in Edwardian Times. The family lived “upstairs” as the masters of the house and the 11 other people were their servants.

This was defenently an interesting experiment. They had to live this way for 3 months. The young people who were picked to be the servants just didn’t understand how things worked back in Edwardian times. The last episode was last night and you could tell that everyone learned something about himself or herself. The family will be the worst off. The mother came right out a said she enjoyed having everything done for her.

My favorite person in the whole show was the French chief Monsieur Dubiard. This guy rocked. He came to the project to cook as they did in Edwardian times. He knew the meaning of hard work. I was impressed with him.

Monsieur Dubiard if you ever come to the east coast of America please look me up because I want to shack your hand. The boar’s head you cooked looked excellent.

Check out the site for the show. There is a section on how the people are doing after they left the manor house. If you get the chance to see this show I would recommend it.

Sunday is not a day of rest today

Wow a busy day. I got up today and got working on the new office. Yesterday I pulled new electrical wires from the basement to the atitic for 4 new circits upstaris. Today I knoked the wholes into the walls for the new outlets. I droped new wireing down the walls before it got to hot in the attic.

I still have to drop the network/telcom wireing down the wall. Then I can start haning dry wall. I hope to have that done by Saturday night. I can then get it all taped and mudded befor mothers day.

Was looking on the web for new chairs for the office andthe dream chair is the Aeron. Now if I can find 2 for free.

A few thoughts

Yesterday the DSL line went down again in our Woodbury office. It really didn’t go down per say it was just very slow on the D/L side of things. So I called the provider who in turned called their supplier. This all happened around 8am. I finally got a call back from the ISP around 11am. The tech said it was tested and there wasn’t a problem I laughed and said I think there is and asked if there provider had just tested.
He said yea and they rebuilt the circuit. Now wouldn’t you think that was something more then just testing?
The DSL provider for our ISP is NAS. This is the same provider that gave us the IDSL line here in Lawrenceville when I started. It was down more then it was up. Now the same sort of problems is happening in Woodbury as well.

Since I installed webalizer the other day I have been keeping an eye on the logs for this site a little more. Its interesting about a dozen different web crawlers/search engines a day are hitting this site. Just thought it was interesting. The same thing is happening over at rocknroll.com as well.

Yesterday when I went home for lunch the guy that my next-door neighbor hires to mow the lawn was there. I went in and Carolyn asked if I looked at the front yard. I went out and the guy had only mowed right up to the center of the lawn and stopped I was tempted to just go out give him $.50 to finish the lawn. I had to go home last night dig the lawnmower out of the shed and do my half of the front yard. Now when I do the lawn I also do the neighbors if her guy hasn’t been there yet because I am a nice guy.

More later if any thing cool happens today.

Anyone got a Radio station they want to give me?

Ever have an itch that is only there once in a while. I have just such an itch..to own a radio station. When I got out of high school I got a job as a part time DJ for WVIN-FM/AM. This led to a full time job doing nights. Well after an owner change I lost my job and ever since then I have wanted to won my own station. Well that itch came back today. I found a small station in West Virginia for a whopping $150,000. It’s not as good a price for the one near my hometown that went for $62,000. If I only had the money and wanted to live out in the hills of West Virginia I would jump on it.