jeffpollard.net

Oh Ess Ten Point One

This weekend started bright and early Saturday morning at a little before 8am. What could possibly drag ME out of bed on a Saturday morning? That's easy: a (free) major update to the best-looking, most powerful new operating system in the world. Mac OS X version 10.1 was released earlier in the week and upgrade CDs were supposed to be available at local Apple resellers. I arrived at Capitol Mac a few minutes before they opened. There were already 10 or so other people waiting by the front door. The doors opened and everyone rushed in. I got my copy and rushed back home so that we could leave for Northern VA for the weekend. So, Olivia drove..and I installed the 10.1 update..yes, in the car! It installed beautfully and, so far, is just simply awesome. It's exponentially faster than previous releases of the system and finally includes DVD video playback and data CD burning from the desktop. I can't think of any other word for it except "awesome." I'll have to continue playing with it over the next few days, but I have a strong feeling that I'll start using this as my "everyday" system starting now.

For those of you non-geeks that skipped the above paragraph because it contained high (and possibly toxic) levels of technical terms, Olivia and I went up to visit Brian in Northern VA for the weekend. Everything seemed pretty normal up there, except for the mass number of American flags and "UNited We Stand" banners hanging from every overpass in the DC-metro area. It was pretty cool to see the patriotism being shown up there. Many of the tall buildings in the Tyson's Corner area had huge American flags hanging from them, too.

Overall, it was a very relaxing weekend away from home. I didn't watch CNN or MSNBC all weekend, which was a nice change. Unfortunately, not much had changed. It looks like the Taliban is now almost taunting the US, saying in an Afghanistan public radio message that the US "doesn't have the courage" to come over there and fight them. I wonder if they'll say the same when a stealth bomber flies right up their ass. By the way, while we were in NoVA, Brian pointed me in the direction of a pretty interedting website: IHateOsama.com. Some pretty funny images and games over there. Check it out.

Back to ground zero

Today was absolutely the slowest, most boring day ever. On top of it being boring, I didn't east lunch, which left me with no energy and no motivation to do anything. I HATE days like this. I feel like a big blob just sitting my desk chair staring at my screen. Nothing seems interesting and time goes at a snail's pace. But, I have something to look forward to: Tomorrow (Friday), our department has but one desktop technician. Me. Normally, we have 2 Mac technicians and 2 PC technicians. But tomorrow, it's just me. Bring it on.

Tonight, one of my freelance web clients emailed me to tell me that somehow in the process of his web host moving his site, the entire site reverted back to a previous version. Previous to me doing any work for him. So, I quickly hopped on Google and tried to pulled up a cached-version to try to save what I could. No luck. The cached version that Google had was the old version. I have no idea how this could have happened, but it's very frusterating. I just put in about 5 hours of work into maintaining this guy's site..and now all is lost. What about backups? I didn't keep any backups of his site here for two reasons: 1.) his server is PAINFULLY slow. It's painful to even upload one page, let alone downloading an entire site. 2.) Why keep a backup of a server that should be backed up itself?? I know that both of my OLM.net web servers get backed up EVERY DAY. There's no reason why any reputable web host shouldn't do the same. Very frusterating.

Oh yeh..I've been meaning to say this for a few days now, but keep forgetting: For the first time in more than a year (and probably much longer than that): I purchsed an audion CD from a music store. But, don't worry, I haven't gone mad. It was The Crystal Method's new one: Tweekend. It rocks. I would have just downloaded it using my new cyber best friend, Limewire, but I wanted to support these guys. Awesome CD.

Smash Mouff

Today. Ya know what? Forget today. Let's talk about tonight. Another boring night at home, right? No way. Eric Hurd (a buddy from Radford days) called me this afternoon and offeredme tickets to see Smash Mouth play in concert tonight. Seeing as I really dig Smash Mouth and their totally original musical style, I agreed to take them off his hands. Eric even picked them up and hand-delivered them to my apartment. Was this my lucky day or what? I must say a HUGE public thank you to Eric for calling me and offering us the tickets.

Olivia and I got to Innsbrook (a very cool techno-business park area in the suburbs of Richmond) just before Smash Mouth hit the stage. And just as they were taking the stage, I glanced over at a lighted sign that read: "Q94 presents: Smash Mouth..with BT" BT? BT?! BT!!!??? ARRRGHHH!!! For those of you scratching your head right now, BT is Brian Transeau, one of my absolute favorite techno-trance-dance artists. At this point, I almost flipped my right leg up and kicked my own ass. Smash Mouth absolutely rocked the..uhh..grass and trees and stuff. No, but they were really great. They played their single set to be released next week and also played a few songs off of their yet-to-be-released album (due in November). Very cool stuff. It was so neat to finally hear (and see) them in concert after listening to their CDs. Most of all, it was cool to hear the lead singer's voice..it actually sounds exactly the way it sounds on their CDs. I took a couple of photos, but you can't really see much, except a big blob:

I came away from the concert with a smile on my face..which was very quickly replaced with a frown when I remembered that I missed BT. I think I'm more upset about missing BT than I am happy about seeing Smash Mouth. Why is BT so cool? Well, besides making some really awesome techno music, he makes and does a lot of mixing on his computer platform of choice: a Mac. In fact, he was a rather large spokesman when the Titanium PowerBooks came out. In this promo movie, he claims "Dude, I'm have to have one of these!" Now that's what I'm talkin' about. He makes awesome music..and he does it on a Mac.

After the concert, Olivia and I went and filled her tank..for $1.19 a gallon. Now, to make this even more interesting, I found a humorous sign hanging on the gas pumps:

Now, don't be scared. I'm ok. I did have my cell phone on while I was pumping gas, but I somehow came away unscathed. Next time, I'll be sure I turn off my phone before I pump gas. I now know exactly how dangerous that can be. :)

It's on. 10.13.01

Well, I tried to get this entry in before midnight...again. And I didn't make it..again. I missed it by 2 minutes. I do that alot now. If you look at my entries lately, most are just shy of getting in under midnight. Some of you may wonder why this makes a difference. If the entry is posted after midnight, then it will show as being from the next day..so, I end up with a day that doesn't have an entry and the next day with two entries. Bummer.

Today was another slow-ish day. The one exciting event was that Apple has announced MacOS X.1 (that's 10.1 for you non-Mac-people) Why is this amazing? It's amazing because 10.1 contains all of the features that 10.0 should have had, such as built-in cd burning, DVD viewing, and BLAZING fast speed. If it's half as good as what I've seen in demos, hopefully this will allow me to finally take the plunge.

I purchased the hosting package for CustomTacos.com today, too. I figured I'd better get this show on the road if it's gonna be ready to roll by late October, as I've now promised all of my faithful newsletter subscribers. The next few weeks are gonna be interesting.

The meeting with the c-notch guy went extremely well. I didn't realize it, but he's a member of a very large (and in-charge) club called "Subculture". This is the club founded by Lance Martz(editor of MiniTruckin' magazine) and a boat-load of other high-profile characters in the mini-truck scene. Aparently, this club is very elite (31337 for all you l33t hax0rs) and only allows the best of the best into their organization. Needless to say, this guy's truck was quite remarkable. It's a 97' Ford F150 rolling 20's on bags. He popped his tonneau cover to reveal a MONSTER nitrogen tank to power the suspension system and one of the most beautiful rear susp[ension systems I've ever seen. The whole thing was nice and smooth with no rough edges, weld snot, or other nastiness. He showed me photos from the buildup of his truck. Very cool. So..I made an appointment with him. The truck will be dropped of at his place on October 13th and he'll probably have it for a week or so. Pretty exciting. I was so inspired seeing the buildup of his truck and the airbag setup that he has that I almost told him to just go ahead and bag the damned thing. But, I have NO MONEY for that right now. I'll just be happy to have an extra 6 inches or so of travel.

Another tragedy

Long time, no type, eh?

It was a busy weekend. So busy, in fact, that I didn't have time to update my site. Bet you didn't even notice! Ok..maybe you did. So, we have lots to catch up on.

Tragedy struck again Saturday night. No, not of the calibur of New York or D.C., but of the Ultra/Wide SCSI type. I was rebooting my Blue & White server to burn some (haha) backup CDs and that was the last time my boot hard drive read data. Upon reboot, it went into a infinite spin up, 'click!', spin down cycle. I worked for about an hour trying to revive it, but alas, it's injuries were aparently to severe for a recovery. Format it? Yeh right. It wouldn't even format. I'm guessing the drive head decided it would just park itself right on the platter, then spin. Yay! Physical damage! It's a good thing that that was only my boot hard drive..all of our personal data such as photos, web design stuff, mp3s, etc. are kept on the other drive. So, I went on Amazon.com and picked up a 20gig 7200RPM Maxtor drive for $99. It's only IDE, but at 7200 RPM, it should suffice. Anybosy want an ultra/wide SCSI card? I know somebody who has one not in use anymore. Bummer.

Sunday, I went down to Kevin's house in Dinwiddie with Patrick. Kevin and Patrick are the teo guys who helped me lower my truck a few months ago. I went down to show them both how to control their web-based inventory control system for their shopping cart system. We had a good time talking about cars and stuff. The ride back home was much less eventful than the last time I made that trip. This time, I didn't ruin any tires! Amazing!

I'm meeting Shawn Barnard about c-notching my truck tomorrow. I'll take a look at some work he's done and then decide if I trust him enough to chop up my frame for me. Pretty exciting. I'm tired of my axle bottoming out on my frame.

I constructed the CustomTacos.com Cafe Press merchandise store tonight. It was pretty easy. I made my images a little larger (and higher quality), uploaded them, and boom! Now YOU can pick up your very own CustomTacos.com logo'ed t-shirt, coffee mug, baseball cap, or mousepad! And all at reasonable prices! I've got LOTS of ducks to get in a row before the site is supposed to be up and running by around Halloween. It'll be interesting to see if I can actually do it.

Inspiring message from Commander Bush

I just finished watching President Bush's speech to America regarding the "new war" on terrorism. I have to say, I was pretty moved. I also have to admit that I was very skeptical of George W. being president, but I was thoroughly impressed with his emotion and vigor tonight. He seemed more sincere and more full of emotion than I ever remember Clinton being. Very cool. Or not. Think about what Bush just said. To the nations of the world: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." To the Taliban: "They will hand over the terrorists or they will share in their fate." "These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion." Personally, I can't wait to see the expression on the Talibans' faces when they hear those words. They're not gonna like it too well, I have a feeling.

Ok. Happier stuff. Or maybe something kinda weird. I stumbled upon a really interesting movie today of some Army people testing a new Tank-destroying missile. Check it out!

I also found a really neat cgi script that takes virtually any website and makes it nasty. What do I mean? Well, check out these "nasty-fied" websites: this site, cnn.com, peer2all.com, www.apple.com. If you're curious to see what other sites look like, just copy the URL below and add in the website of your choice after "?URL=":

I guess that's all for now. It's absolutely pouring outside. The power went out a few minutes ago. It's funny how something like the power going out makes be nervous now. Funny, it didn't 11 days ago.

Slowness

Everything seemed very slow today. Not a whole lot happening, except 150 fighter jets heading to the middle east. Jeez, I hope we're not gonna do something stupid.

With all of the slowness, I had time to finish coding the new front page for the Intranet. It's a huge tablewith lots of embedded tables and even an iframe thrown in there..The Hand of Kami Sama would be proud of me. (Don't ask if you don't know)

The reason for doing this was so that I could pull in a Perl-generated page into an ASP page. So, I made a floating frame in the middle of the page and told it to load the perl-generated page. Pretty groovie. Never done that before.

I want to do something diffferent on the web..something different than I already do. It's so interesting to look at the Greymatter user sites to see how people do their weblogs. I find myself often inspired and saying to myself, "Wow, that looks really cool..I should do something like that!" I'm the kind of kid that never left his room arranged a certain way. Nope, I was always moving it around.

Freaky Word Trick N' Stuff

Hi everybody! Remember I said that I would have something more interesting today? Well, here we go:

In my random surfing through that ole' Inner-net thang over the past day or two, I found a very disturbing computer "trick". And I'm going to share it with you. So, open up your word processor program of choice (this will be Microsoft Word for many of us). In ALL CAPITALS, type NYC. Now, highlight it and make it larger..like 72-point font. With NYC still highlighted, change the font to "Webdings" from your font menu. Eh? Pretty neat. Now, make sure the text is still highlighted and change the font to Wingdings. Yeh. Pretty disturbing. Please understand that I in no way endorse any message that you may have seen here..this was simply a freaky font "trick" that was passed on to me. Very freaky.

I called a local guy that does custom vehicle work today to get a price quote for c-notching my truck. I had previously talked to a shop up in the valley about doing this for me, and he quoted me at $600. Pretty expensive. The guy I talked to today quoted me at $300. Not too bad, except that I've never seen any of the work that he does. So, I may meet with him and take a look at his work and decide based on that. If he does good quality work, then why pay double for the same work? The guy seemed really nice, so we'll see what happens.

For those of you wondering what the heck a "c-notch" is, here's a quick explanation: When you lower a truck, you're actually just "pushing" the suspension up into the body of the truck..and eventually, it can't go any higher. When it (the suspension) can't go any higher, usually this is because of the frame. So, to solve the problem of the suspension bottoming out on the frame (and allowing the truck to go even lower), the frame of a truck is often notched up higher so that the rear exle can continue to travel higher, thus allowing the truck to go lower. Below is a graphical view:

And life goes on..

It was nice to see most things get back to some form of normalcy again today.

A slow-ish day at work today. I came home and took a nice 3-hour nap, which I needed badly.

Not really much else exciting today..sorry!

Two thumbs up for QuikStore

Olivia and I decided not to go up and visit Brian this weekend in Northern VA (DC). I don't think either of us really thought it was a good time to be up there. In addition, it looks like the highways were really busy with people traveling to see loved ones this weekend.

So, we spent the weekend here..relaxing and unwinding from a tense week. It also gave us a chance to do a few things we've been wanting to get done like hanging a couple of small shelves in our newly-designed duck bathroom.

It also gave me a chance to make some MAJOR headway with the resurrectionauto.com web project. I was given the OK from the guy who runs the business to purchase the shopping cart system for his used classic auto parts e-commerce website. (that's a mouthful!) It was one of the more pricey systems ($280!), but it has an AMAZING administration back-end that allows him to enter, edit, and delete his inventory...all with absolutely (except for some paragraph tags) NO HTML knowledge! So, if you're looking at setting up an online store, I HIGHLY reccommend taking a look at QuikStore. I've been able to look at the programming for the system (all done in Perl) and (heavily) tweak it to do exactly what they want to do. I can't wait until their store finally goes live. I'll post a link on here when it does.

Other than that, a slow, lazy weekend. For the good of the insanity of Americans, I hope life gets back to normal this week. I haven't really made many comments on the events that took place last week. And most of that is because I'm not quite sure what to say. The other part of it is that the news media has said pretty much anything about this that could be said. So, here goes: I'm fairly paranoid right now. I can't imagine how much more paranoid I'd be if I lived in one of the cities that got hit last week. I'm fearful of the future. I'm afraid that if we go and begin attacking Afghanistan that we may, too, wake a "sleeping giant" and get into a war that we didn't expect. A war that may ultimately come back on U.S. soil and kill many more innocent civilians. But what do you do? Not do anything and let whoever organized this get away with it? Nah. Revenge is in order..but at what cost of additional Americans? Anybody else apprehensive about starting a "war on terrorism"?

Here, have a can of patriotism!

Before I make any comments tonight, I'd just like to make it known that my heart goes out to all of those people (and their families) who were injured or lost their lives in this week's tradgedy. Now, on with my comments.

Over the past few days, people in our company have been sending around a TON of global email messages with forwards from all of their friends containing stories and suggested memorial rtuals. These included (but are not limited to):

- "On Thursday, wear only red, white, and blue and show your patriotism!"

- "Tonight, light a canld eout in your front yard and we'll light up the sky with American pride!"

- "Wear a blue ribbon to show your support!"

- "Wear a red ribbon to show your support!"

- "Wear a yellow ribbon to show your support!"

- "Display an american flag outside your home for the next 30 days!"

- "Display an American flag outside your home for the next week!"

- "Light a candle and put it in a window in your house tonight!"

- "Also, in memory of the victims, travel with your headlights on today and

tomorrow."

Do you see what I mean? Why do so many people feel the need to come up with so many different rituals in a time like this? I understand that people feel the need to express their emotions, but this means of it seems kinda dumb. "Hey, let's all stand on one foot with our right hands in our shirt pockets and a red, white, and blue candy cane in each nostril on Friday!" And the crazy thing is how many people will be doing these things.

Now, as I said at the beginning of this post, I feel just as terrible about everything that has happened, but I feel like the country needs to continue with their normal everyday activities and try to let life go on. Yes, it is normal to mourn and feel sad (and even angry), but this country has basically been at a stand-still for the last 3 days..and don't look to return to normal until Monday..maybe.

I guess my point to all of this is that expressing your emotions has to come from deep within yourself..not from "canned patriotism" that have been circulating around our office the past couple of days. Feel free to comment below. I'm totally prepared to be flamed. :)

The Day That Should've Never Been

I woke up this morning just like any other morning. Actually, if the truth be known, I woke up a little late. I ignored my alarm as I've done frequently. I took a shower, ate a bowl of Smacks and headed off to work..a little late. As I walked up to our building, I noticed that almost everyone was gathered in the atrium. I decided to investigate, rather than go straight to my desk.

The events that happened after that were..different. More different than I've ever seen. Unless you've been hiding under a rock (which I felt like doing at some times today), I'm sure I don't have to re-tell what the TV networks have been re-telling all day.

And those events became today. They became everything that was seen, heard, talked about, and thought about.

I'm just thankful that none of my friends or family were vicitimized in today's terorist attacks.

By the way, Brian has some great photos over on his site that he gathered throughout the day today.

I think I'm going to get up when my alarm goes off tomorrow.

What a bum I am.

I'm a complete bum. I didn't really do anything this weekend.

Really, the highlight of the weekend was watching a bunch of cars (and trucks) drive in circles. All major NASCAR series races were in town this weekend: the Craftsman Trucks ran Thursday night, the Busch cars ran Friday night, and then the Winston Cup guys raced Saturday night. It was neat watching the races and knowing that it was all happening not more than 10 minutes from here. Pretty cool. I can't wait until next month when we go to Charlotte.

I worked on a website design for my friends that run a custom vehicle club called Diversified Ridez. I had been somewhat un-inspired until late, late Saturday night. I had a neat idea, I sat down and drew it up in Photoshop and I'm pretty happy with it. We'll see how happy they are with it. To satisfy your curiousity, I've posted the new design I came up with. Check it out!

And finally, here's a plug for my buddy Randy from Missourri who's decided to put his truck up for sale. It's a 2000 black extended cab Taco that looks strikingly similar to mine, except that it's notched, bagged, and sweet all-around. So, if you know somebody who's looking for a killer ride, send em his way! (maybe I can somehow convince him to trade me frames before he sells it..hehe.)

YA YA YA. I forgot. Phhht.

I missed it, didn't I. Yep, definitely forgot. I went to bed last night and totally forgot to update my site. My sincerest apologies to my faithful daily readers who had to find fascinating content elsewhere today. If that ever happens again, make sure you head on over to www.peer2all.com and check out Brian's new design for his site. It's a refreshing and clean new look. Nice work, Brian!

And, if you weren't paying attention in that last paragraph, I just changed the subject. I'm quite good at that. :)

Over the past couple of days, Olivia and I have been gathering new towels, rugs, shower curtains, and many other non-essential bath items for our new-themed guest bathroom. It's been really fun buying cool stuff for the newly designed room, but expensive. Make sure you click on the thumbnail at right to see the completed bathroom. Pretty bright, huh?

I've been noing a boatload of work lately keeping up with the ever-flowing content for the the agency's intranet. I still enjoy doing it, but if it keeps up at this pace, it's gonna wear me out...fast.

I've also been looking for a free(or relatively-cheap) web shopping cart system for one of the web projects I'm working on. I've already explored all 84 Perl-based shopping cart systems offered on The CGI Resource Index with little luck. You see, the twist with this project is that I'm working with a client that has absolutely no HTML (or other programming) knowledge, so inventory editing and updates need to be available to him in a simple, web-based format. I found a system that has a great web-based administration side, but the shopping cart system itself costs $200 and the web administration plug-in is another $80. Pretty expensive. I found another system that offers a decent web administration interface, but the programmer who wrote the software will not let you download the system to run on your own server; you have to run it on their server..and pay $49.99 a month with a $99 setup fee. Total crap. I ever called the guy and pleaded with him. No dice. So, I'm stuck. If you've ever seen anything that might work, I'd love to hear about it!

Oh, and by the way, I'm (sortof) famous again! The guys over at SporTruck.com finally decided to post my photos from Show-N-Shine's Event II from last month.

And lookie! There's a new survey over there

Tweaking the backend..of the news database

If I told you all that I tweaked a back end today, would you all worry about me? Probably. With that said, today, I tweaked the back end of our Intranet news database a little more. With the changes that I made today, I (or whoever will be inputting the news in the future) am now able to input news items and not have them appear until the date that I specify. So, for example, I already have the news articles that will run for the rest of this week. I input all of the articles today, but put dates on them in the future. Hopefully, at 12:01 tomorrow, my Wednesday news articles will magically appear on the site. Amazing. A system like this would have been sooooo useful back in my Whim days.

I stayed late downtown tonight for the monthly XMUG meeting. A rep from Asante' was there talking about Cable/DSL routers and wireless home networks. It was neat, but I really didn't learn too much.

On the way home, I finally got a chance to test my new headlights. They don't seem half as bright as my previous headlights. When I turn them on in the parking lot, it almost looks like they're pointed up too high. When I drive down the road, it seems like more of the light from the headlights is hitting road signs and not the road, where I need it the most to make sure there's no debris in the road. So, I'm thinking I might put my old bulbs back in..they didn't look quite as cool (from an onlooker's perspective), but they sure worked better for me.

I've down-sized the first Tacoma movie I made this weekend to 9MB. So, if you're on a fast connection, check it out! It's about a minute and a half long and I had to sacrifice lots of quality to get it small enough for the web. Because of it's size, it may not stay up forever, so if you want to keep it, make sure you download it after you watch it. Enjoy! I'd love to hear what you think of it, so leave some feedback!

Smoke em' if you got em..but don't forget to film it!

Olivia and I experimented with a new equation this weekend. You see, neither of us are really that great at math, but somehow I think we found the right answer this time. To explain the equation, I've created a graphic interpretation:

We had a great time working on this, err, masterpeice yesterday. The grand plan is for this bathroom to be adopt a "rubber ducky" theme. I think it's gonna be pretty cool when we get all of the new stuff in there.

I borrowed the one of the Agency's DV camcorders this weekend and have been having a blast with it. Mike and I went out Friday evening and shot some footage of me driving my truck around. Mike told me a story a while back about some friends of his taking video footage of their cars and editing it into a sort of promotional movie for their cars. I thought that was a pretty cool idea, and I've been wanting to give it a shot for a while. So we did.

After the Friday shoot, I brought the tape back and made a short (45 second) mini-music video out of the footage. Saturday afternoon, Paul and I went out and took some more footage of the truck. My intentions were to take a Matrix-esc 360-degree panorama..but that didn't come out very well. However, we did get some other cool shots of me doing burnouts. I decided that I hadn't heard what my new tires sounded like and that I might as well get it on film if I'm going to smoke em' a little. I've started work on a second video, but haven't gotten as far with it. Perhaps ater I do a little more with them, I'll make them into QuickTime movies and post them all for you to enjoy.

I'm actually writing this in the car on the way to Bridgewater to visit my parents. Jennifer and James are leaving in a few days to move back to Vermont for their new hospital assignment. We'll miss having them here in Virginia. :(