Geeky Ramblings

I’ve always thought that Leonard Nimoy and I had a fair bit in common … and I can add another item to the list …

• He was raised Jewish, but seems to have lost religion … check
• He’s a photographer … I’m a shutter bug
• He’s a great actor … I’m … well … ok, maybe not so much in that area
• And now it appears that he supports Barack Obama for president!

Ginny pointed me to the latest “In Character” piece on NRP that highlights Mr. Spock. Pretty cool article … although I have to wait another hour to actually hear it.

I’m planning on going to the health club today after work … but before I leave, I wanted to make sure my IPOD had the latest podcasts on it.

When I plugged the IPOD into my laptop I was informed that it had a very low battery … must have been from sitting around in my back pack with the lock switch off.

Anyways, I get it synced up to the laptop … but I want to let it keep charging. So I plugged it into my desktop system here at work. Because I don’t have the iTunes software installed, the IPOD just shows up as a USB drive. But it’s assigned to drive D:. And the volume name is “DAVID’S IPO” … so it shows up as “DAVID’S IPO (D:)”.

Kind of apropos, don’t you think?

Ok, yes, I’m easily amused.

Just testing mini-posts.

09-24-06_1650.jpg

Originally uploaded by fallingrock.

This picture was taken (with my phone) at Steve’s new house (in progress) … clearly she’s planning on getting a walk-on part for a Doctor Who episode.

Well good evening all.

It’s around 11:45 at night and I just got inside after doing a micro-photosafari outside in the snow.

As I was getting ready for bed, I looked out the window and saw that it was still fairly bright (due to the light reflecting off the snow)… and the snow was fairly undisturbed … so I thought it would be a good idea to try and get some pictures.

Unforunately, the light started to fade … but I got some interesting pictures of the street and the trees near our house.

Hopefully we’ll get out tomorrow and do some more when the light is better.

… and this time I don’t mean SPAM.

I mean real, honest to goodness, junk postal mail.

I really don’t understand where some of the companies are getting their mailing lists… because I’ve been getting an increasing amount of junk mail sent to the post office box that I use for internet business.

The funny thing about it is that the people who are getting the majority of the junk mail have no direct affiliation with any of my net presences.

A few months ago I received a BankOne credit card offer addressed to: Anne Lucas, Midrange Dot Com, P.O. Box xxxxx, Hoffman Estates, IL xxxxx-xxxx. The company & address are (sort of) legitimate … but Anne, although a participant in a number of my midrange.com mailing lists, is NOT directly affiliated.

Today I received a similar piece of junk mail addressed to Leif Svalgaard from Forbes Magazine. Once again, Leif is a participant in a number of my mailing lists, but he has no official affiliation with midrange.com.

I suspect that some mailing list company is scouring the web looking for names that figure prominently in sites, looking up the whois information for the domain, and sticking the two bits of information together.

If any companies that purchase mailing lists happen across this post, I would suggest you take a long hard look at your providers to make sure they are not selling you junk.

I think Google’s GMail service is out of beta.

I just logged in to my gmail account and found I had 50 invites available to give out.

Leave a comment if you would like one … but don’t be greedy.

I just ordered a pizza online for the very first time.

Both Ginny and I had pretty rough days … and I was kind wiped out from my workout, so we decided to order a pizza from Johnny D’s KoKo Café.

We’ve ordered from them before and like their pizza … but we’ve always ordered on the phone. Today I decided to try their online ordering.

It was pretty slick … although it didn’t work in Firefox, which was annoying. I’ve been very successful at being IE free for a long time.

Tomorrow I’m back to work again … it’s been a fairly nice week off, although I didn’t get everything done that I had wanted to.

1. Run system shutdown test on server. This took me about 4 hours to do because there really isn’t a way to simulate a system shutdown without actually shutting down the system. Luckily the software behaved exactly the way it’s supposed to.
2. Work on slides for server training session.
3. Empty drawers and put paperwork in filing cabinet.
4. Clean-up basement.
5. Write program / script to scrub remaining email addresses from archives.
6. Work on prototype web app for Implementer

Of course a few unplanned items came up …

1. Major back spasm that seriously effected my mobility. I don’t know what caused it … they are usually caused by stress, but I’m on holiday right now. Maybe I’m getting stressed out about going back to work? Of course, right now, the only thing that’s giving me stress is my back pain.
2. Tivo going wonky … see previous post.
3. New hard drive & DVD-RW for my laptop arriving. This is where I learned that it’s not a good idea to leave the original laptop drive in the removable drive bay when you boot up the new drive. System gets kind of confused and screws up the new drive. Luckily it doesn’t effect the original drive, so I was able to re-image the new drive.