My co-worker Aaron and I spoke today at the annual conference of the Iowa Distance Learning Association and the Iowa Association for Communication Technology. We gae a presentation about wireless security, why it's important, and an overview of the various technologies involved in it. Supposedly, we were a hit, but I'll wait until I see the evaluation forms to believe it. I did only see one person sleeping during our talk, but there was another one nodding off...
Ever have one of those weeks were everything you touch turns to crap? Last Friday I replaced the midplane on my iMac G5, in an attempt to end the buzzing noise that it's been driving me nuts with. No luck on that, and after Apple basically told me that they didn't have a fix, I complained to our Apple rep, who has gotten my case escalated with their customer support people. I told them I either want my machine fixed, replaced with a non-noisy one, or I want them to apply the purchase price as credit towards a PowerMac G5. The "Senior" Product Specialist who had my case thrust upon him is off today, so we'll see what he tells me tomorrow. Next, my PowerBook started suffering from a noisy hard drive or fan when it's not sitting level on a table. It's fine level, but as soon as you tilt it, it makes a bad noise. So, I called Apple on that, and they're sending me a box to send in my PowerBook for repair. They think it's the hard drive, which doesn't make me happy, as I don't want to have to reinstall all my apps if Tiger is only a few weeks away, but what can you do? So, I backed up my hard drive today, there's nothing "essential" that I only store there, but why make this harder than I have to.
Two hours after getting off the phone about my PowerBook, the power supply on my Optiplex GX270 decided to act up, it's making a horrible grinding noise now, as the bearing in the fan has given up the ghost. So, I generated an e-mail to Dell about that, hopefully one of their Subcontinental support people will have a new one over-nighted to me before this weekend.
I'd better go home soon, before I break something critical...
Though the author never interviewed me like she said she was going to, the article about blogs appeared in our local paper today. A couple of other UNI employees were interviewed though, and at least they included URLs this time (I wonder if that's because I griped about it on my blog). Unfortunately, the people interviewed in the article haven't blogged long, as "since 2004" or "for a few weeks" are the time periods listed. I've been blogging since 2000. Anyone care to place any bets on how long it takes for that link to the article to die? :)
I've decided that RHEL 4 isn't ready for production for me yet. I can't get my NetBackup client to load on it, and VMWare ESX server has some problems keeping the clock synced, which is causing all my e-mail from that system to lag waaaay behind. So, I'm setting up a RHEL 3 system on the same VMWare server, which should hopefully work just fine. I'll move back to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 after VMWare and Veritas have their newer versions out, as I really liked some of the new features and the updated packages (SpamAssassin 3 and Dovecot IMAP).
Sun almost certainly won't like this, but I've found that the Sun Blade 100 does just have a normal ATX power supply, with only the ATX connector. Mine failed yesterday, so after looking at the pin outs, I realized that it's just a normal ATX power supply, and plugged one I "borrowed" from a co-workers PC in. Sure enough, it works, and is much quieter (and cheaper) than the crappy 200W power supply that Sun put in there. I'm going to order a modular ATX supply to replace it, as you only need the ATX power lead, and there isn't much room for the extra "standard" ATX cables in that Sun Blade case.
A reporter from the Waterloo Courier contacted me today about being intervewed for a story she's doing about weblogs. I was actually in a story they did about blogs in January of 2003, but the Courier's search engine is so inept, you won't find the article. I linked to it back when it was published, but of course the paper broke the link too. The Courier is definitely not a blog-friendly web site. One thing that irked me at the time was that they didn't list the URLs of any of the sites that were used in the article, so if you were interested in reading what any of the interviewees wrote, it was difficult to track down their blogs. I'm lucky in that Seth Bokelman is a pretty unique name (there being only one other one, as far as I know) and his Google Rank is nothing compared to mine. :)
So, I'm not sure what the "angle" of the article will be yet, but I agreed to be interviewed. I'll just try to avoid using the word "incestuous" again, as my wife still teases me about that quote from the last one.
Lately, my biggest selling point for blogs is that they're an excellent resource for Google or your other search engine of choice. I've said recently to friends that Information isn't Information unless it's indexed by Google, as that's the way I feel. What good is it if it can't be indexed, searched, and shared? I'm a Google Junkie though, I bet I do at least 100 searches a day, but it's an extremely powerful tool, and the more bloggers you have feeding good information into that index, the better it becomes.
Fellow UNI IT guy Paul Huber has started a weblog. He's a Macintosh guru from the College of Humanities & Fine Arts.
The new TiVo Desktop software for Macintosh (version 1.9) will check to see if you have Lame installed (packaged here), and if so, will let you play back your AAC files from iTunes through your TiVo and any TV or stereo system you have connected to it. This isn't documented anywhere, so it looks like someone either snuck it in, or they aren't ready to support it until 2.0, but for those of us who didn't want to re-rip our entire music collections to play them back through our TiVos, it's great news.
I've added myself to the BlogMap. It'd be more accurate if it used GPS coordinates, but I guess you need something for version 2.0:
I'm getting Trackback spammed the last couple of days. It'd be nice if the spammer would get a clue, as I have the rel=nofollow plugin installed, and I'm deleting his trackbacks and banning IPs within an hour of him spamming me, so it's really not doing him any good...
