Day: 13 April 2003

Computers, do they suck up or free up time?

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From the title you may think I am pondering the usefulness of computers. Not true. I think they are great. So much so that I made a career out of working with computer networks. But, sometimes I think they can cause tons of wasted time. I think that today because I needed to spend hours yesterday and today rebuilding my computer. Last Wednesday I blew my desktop away and re-installed windows xp. tuesday night I put the machine in a new case and during the move I physically destroyed a hard drive. Out of the 4 drives that I had I lost the one with the important data on it. The good news was that I made a backup of it that morning. The bad news was I didn’t get everything. I left off some less important stuff. you don’t realize how important it is until you don’t have it. But ok, there I was with a bad drive and a backup. I was feeling dam proud of myself for making a backup. Well try importing the data back off the dvd backup I had was a pain. At first I didn’t think it would work. I kept getting major bad errors when copying. I ended up throwing the dvd in my mac and restore it from there. At this point I may just leave the “personal data” like word doc’s, pdf’s and images on the mac. I didn’t want to do that, but it is turning out to be ok. Yeah, I am just grumbling. Everything seems to have turned out ok, but it took a day and a half working on and off to get things restored. That does not count all the programs I still need to reinstall on that XP machine. I will be doing that for weeks. So this week, computers have been a drain on my time, not a savings. next week hopefully will be different.

On the flip side, I am sitting here with my handy offline blog editing tool writing this blog as my trusty powerbook is taking my photo album I had backed up and sucking it into iphoto. It places them in nice categories. I have very few complaints about the program. I was also able to hack together a non-frontpage enabled version of my website on the apache server. the photo album site of 1gig of my images will take allot longer. Also not up is what I used to call the edata site. it contained data out of an access database. apache can’t read ASP files so I need to figure out PHP & Mysql to do the same thing on apache. that will take some time also. I honestly am not sure if I will take that plunge. I would have to export a bunch of data into mysql and I don’t know it that well yet to be the sole location for that data. I am so crazed about screwing up my apache server and the content that every change I make I am backing up the directory to my windows 2000 server. I just need to get comfy with everything.

Today was another lazy day. I got up late (11:30) and just bummed around all day. worked on the website and cleaning up my desktop computer. Tons of fun stuff:) I also made a ghost image backup of the desktop OS just in case. Also got the TV watching down. Trying to catch up on things I missed this week on tivo. I also watched harry potter II last night on DVD. it was ok, but they leave so much out of the book. I totally understand they cant put everything in the movie, but it is just a let down. that is probably why I didn’t see it in the theater.

My parents probably will call and want to do the traditional sunday dinner. Not sure if I am going to opt in tonight. I had pizza for lunch and that is what they do every sunday.

I am also shopping around for a new handheld PDA. everyone who knows me knows that I go through stuff like that and cell phones relatively quickly. I do a pda about once a year. This year I went through them like every 6 months. The reason I do that is because I have not yet found the perfect device for me. If I did I would stick with it, but alas I cannot find it. also my requirements change as my needs change. what I need now is totally different than what I needed when I was traveling all the time. I am thinking of a pocket pc. the palm I have is nice, and does almost all I want it to, but it does not do everything. the problem is if I switch to a pocket pc I will probably have to give up something. Either weight, wireless ability, allot of $$$ from my wallet, or a combination of the 3. I probably will go to bestbuy tomorrow during work to take a look.

Def Leppard still rocks!

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As I have discussed before I have not written in a few days because two friends came down to visit from albany. One of my good friends from college steve and a friend of his tom came to visit. I know tom through steve, but he is really cool. They both came down to goto some def leppard concerts. We went to the thursday & friday night concerts. They actually made great time thursday and showed up early. I went up to meet them at a brew put right by the beacon theater where the concert was. I still am queasy about drinking after last week so I didn’t drink. I had some “healthy” cheese sticks and hung out and caught up with steve. The concert was awesome. we sat in the next to last row on the upper level, but I didn’t care. Tom had a floor seat since they didn’t get 3 tickets together for the first night. they played over half the songs from the hysteria album. I was very pleased. got to hear my favorite song live twice, it was nice. If anyone needs to know my favorite song is Animal by def leppard. I have others songs that I like allot but I still consider that my all time favorite!

So it turns out that tom had problems with his seat. he and another guy had the same ticket, so for the first few songs they thought that someone was running a scam. he was pissed since he went to ticket-master for the tickets. He ended up having to stand at the side of the stage the rest of the concert because they gave the other guy the seat. it was funny, but really stupid. Steve & my seats were fine.

We went back to my place afterward and just hung out till like 2-am before going to bed.

I actually got through most of friday without dealing with work. it was nice. I just had to call Keith about 1 problem with a backup. Other than that and him calling to try to mess with my head once work was non-existent.

Friday, Steve, Tom, & I went into the city at like 1:30 after eating lunch at the omega diner. To save on parking we took the rail road in and bought the unlimited ride fun pass’s for the day. We went to the trade center site since neither of them saw it before. I swore I wouldn’t go again with them, but we had nothing going on. I got a chance to goto J&R computer world, so I wasn’t complaining. then we went up to time square area and walked around for a while. We needed up spending like 2 hours in the virgin megastore just looking at the dvd’s. the guys from albany were amazed at the selection. I was pretty impressed myself. we ended up eating (and having happy hour) at planet hollywood. I was fighting a migraine all day so I didn’t drink. I ended up having to take a bextra at lunch, another at dinner, and then 2 furiset’s (aka butabital). I COULD not get a migraine during this concert. I called my dad and he said I could mix the bextra and furiset. I was worried. I didn’t eat because my head hurt too much. I am thankful to say that the drugs finally kicked in and I was fine for the concert. I also got ear plugs so that helped. I liked the first concert better, probably because of the drugs and headache, and the ear plugs drowning down the music. Steve and Tom liked the second one better. Def leppard played an extra song in the encore, and it turned out to be one they have only played once before since 1996. I never heard it so I didn’t really care. Either way I had an awesome time both nights. it was also good to see steve. I am thankful for tom putting up with our “old college stories”. he also gave me some steve hight school stories so I had a good laugh.

Steve and tom took off early today (9-am). I woke up long enough to say by, and hear them leave. I went back to bed till like noon. I was zoned out till like 3pm and then started working on my new linux box (see previous post). Not sure what is in store for tomorrow. more later!

Apache, Moveable type lives! IIS, Frontpage are on life support!!!

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Ok, after less trouble than I though (but with some problems) I am now hosting my own blog on a linux server running moveabletype and apache. My boss was awesome in giving up time to help me configure this. I had alot done by myself, but it still didn’t work right. So I called the man who knows linux. this is the same person forcing me to learn it, but I needed the swift kick in the ass to do that. Thanks, enough but kissing since I know he reads this!

The nity gritty of it all is I installed Red Hat 9.0 on an old dell desktop I have. Pumped 380+ megs of ram into it first of course. and then downloaded movabletype. that program kicks ass. I just finished importing all my old blogger.com entries into the new system. All I have to do is figure out how to properly back this thing up. I also got the offline posting app on my powerbook to work. I am writing on it right now. It is Kung-Log. I also downloaded w.bloggar to do the same thing on my XP box if I need to.

The next major step is to port my website over from IIS & frontpage to apache. that may be time consuming. I did have a copy of my site running on a win32 install of apache a few weeks ago as a test. seemed to display the current pages fine. I will just have problems with the indexing and other frontpage centric features.

As much as it was painful I actually enjoyed tinkering with red hat. I have ton’s to learn, but I learned it is not impossible to do.

Now that the technical stuff about this setup is written I can write about the past few days in the next post!