jeffpollard.net

I might just be in love

This was a really fun weekend, but since it's late (as usual), I'm going to tell you about the highight of my weekend.

My good buddy Mike Sos is currently in the market for a new car. He's been doing lots of research and thinks he wants a wagon-style car to replace his VW New Beetle. He invited me to test drive some cars with him Saturday and I gladly accepted.

First stop: McGeorge Toyota. We looked around the lot and quickly found the Matrix models they had. For those of you not familiar with the Matrix, it's Toyota's new sport compact/sport utility car. I think it's part of a new generation of cars known as Crossover Utility Vehicles. If you want more details about it, there's an article over on CustomTacos. The model we looked at was the XRS model (the faster of the models Toyota makes. It was simply amazing. I reallly can't even begin to tell you how cool this thing was. One of the coolest features was a 9" LCD screen in the center of the dash that's not only part of the CD player and DVD player (yes, you can watch movies on the LCD screen!), but it also has a navigation system built-in, too. So, while you;re driving around, it gives you a map of where you are. This could be helpful when traveling places and you get lost. The navigation system also has a driving directions feature, allowing you to input your destination and it'll show you how to get there, using it's map. There were other features of the navigation/AV system, but we didn't take the time to play with them. The biggest thing is: this car was FAST. It was MUCH faster than I expected. Mike and I had test driven a Celica a couple years ago, but thing blew that car away, power-wise. We took it out on Chipenham Parkway and before I knew it, I had it up to 100mph. Oh, and it's a 6-speed..and I hadn't even shifted to 6th gear. Oh man. If I weren't so in love with my truck.....

Next stop: The Subaru dealership. We first test drove a WRX wagon. Folks, this is a 2.0L Turbocharged engine. But HOLY CRAP. This thing puts out 227 hp and we felt every bit of it. I really wasn't prepared for the power that this car had. Mike took off from a couple stoplights near the beginning of our test drive and I had some serious trouble keeping my head OFF of the headrest. It definitely had more power than the Matrix, but the Matrix had a cool factor (with its DVD and navigation system) that the Sabaru couldn't touch. We got back to the dealership and Mike wanted to drive an Outback wagon. It didn't have nearly the horsepower that either of two previous cars had, but it was nice and roomy. And, it had dual sunroofs. Very cool.

So, I have to say that I was really impressed with the Matrix and I only wish I wasn't so into my truck. If I could only convince Olivia to trade her car for it, though.. hehe

Bye Bye Yahoo!!

Tonight, I bid those greedy bastards over at Yahoo farewell. As you may have heard, today marks the first day that they will charge users if they want to use their email service via a POP email client. In my opinion, this is just another step in the downward spiral of Yahoo. Sure, their seach engine used to be a major centerpiece of the Internet. However, with bigger, faster, and better search engines such as Google and Teoma, Yahoo's search engine has become pretty useless. So, I will continue to give my Yahoo email address to online services I don't trust and will only check it when I am expecting mail from it. Screw them.

We bought lots of groceries tonight at Ukrops. We also picked up one of those Brita filter containers. The packaging claims that it's the "Original Pitcher", however, I always thought Molly was the original pitcher. (har dee har har)

Work continues to teach me new things about programming dynamic database-driven web pages. We've resurrected an old project that tracks job candidates for Human Resources. The first time we (Jack and I) worked on this system, I didn't know very much about asp and therefore didn't get to play with much of the asp code. Now that I've programmed a few other asp systems, I'm seeing how much work Jack put into it before. It's pretty cool. I'm really enjoying learning all of this. I just hope that I can somehow translate all of this knowledge over to SQL/mySQL at some point. I mean, who really wants to run a Windows-based web server? Not me.

Lots o' Photos

I'll continue my non-content-writing stint with some photos I've taken lately. And, if you're like me, sometimes photos are better than writing anyway.

The first gallery is photos from this past weekend's Whim Alumni gathering. It was an awesome time, as I'm sure you've read (or you were probably there!). With my busy schedule, I found it easiest to upload all my photos to Apple's iTools system and let their servers make the galleries for me. Yeh, yeh, I know: I'm getting lazy. But, I think you'll like the formating they provide. And it was SOOO much easier to post. Ok, enough blabbering: Whim Alumni Weekend Photos

The second gallery is a set of photos I took tonight at my sister Jennifer's new apartment. Since she's now in Richmond, I'm sure we'll be doing lots more cool stuff with her. Here's the gallery of photos I shot inside her apartment. It's a really nice place and she's getting a great deal on it.

Now, was that so bad? And, you gotta admit: the themes that Apple provides are pretty spiffy. There, I did it: i said "spiffy" twice in two days. Go me.

I think I may reboot my machine tomorrow. I really want to install the 10.1.4 update that came out last Thursday. I suppose going 14 days without a reboot is pretty cool.

Lots o' linkie..no talkie!

This weekend was a blast. And..to save me time and effort, you can read all about it over at Olivia's site and Brian's site.

Aparently, the Southern California gathering that my CustomTacos enthusiasts planned out was a HUGE success: 30 trucks showed up Sunday. Err, should I say, 30 Tacos showed up Sunday. What a gratifying weekend for me. My website bore fruit and I got to hang out with all of my old friends from Radford.

I meant to mention this the other day, but my webcam now creates a time lapse movie each and uploads to this server at midnight. Wait a minute. Did I mention this the other day? I forget. Anywho, check out the movie, it's pretty spiffy!

By the way, mental note: Greymatter blew up on me just now when I tried to post this entry. It corrupted an entry, thereby confusing itself. It had better not blow up again on me or I swear, I'll switch.

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday today to my Mom! She's still holding strong at 28 years old. Wait, let me verify that....yep, still 28. Here's to ya, Mom!

In other news, I've got my new webcam computer posting the time lapse movie from each day on the site now. Head over to the Webcam page and check it out!

By the way, we didn't win the $325 million last night. We did, however, win $14. My share of that? $.76

Uptime: 7 days, 2 hours, 16 minutes since my last reboot

Do you feel lucky?

I did something crazy today. Something I've never done before or ever thought I would have a part of. I joined our office's Big Game lottery pool. Basically, a bunch of us from the ITS department are purchasing a bunch of numbers for Tuesday night's lottery in hopes that we'll win THREE HUNDRED and TWENTY FIVE MILLION DOLLARS. Of course, that money would have to be split between us all, but it still comes out to WAY more money than I would ever know what to do with. Considering I've NEVER won any money from anywhere, I think our chances are, well, slim to none. Oh well, it's fun to imagine what having that much money would be like.

Since Mike recently got himself a new PocketPC with a slick little 802.11 wireless card, he's been letting me tinker around with his old Casio PocketPC. I gotta admit, this is a really cool little device. First of all, it's got a really great color screen. It has pocket versions of All of the MS apps like Internet Explorer, Word, Excel, etc. I'm pretty impressed. Now, if Mike would only bring over the USB cable so I can see if syncronizing data with it works, I'll be excited about it. Don't worry, my fellow Mac afficionados: I'm not migrating to the dark side. In fact, I started a little test late last week to see how many days I can run this PowerBook (on MacOS X) before I need to reboot. Right now, I'm at 5 days, 14 hours, 27 minutes. Not too bad for a machine that I use EVERYDAY and do all of my work on. I can't think of too many (non-unix work systems, not servers) that can run this long without needing a reboot or crashing. We'll see how long the streak lasts. :)

I thought of some other slightly less than hillarious comments to enthrall you with tonight, but I can't seem to remember them. Oh yeh (gotta say this)- if you ever get into an important meeting and you get the hiccups, JUST LEAVE. I got a bad case of the hiccups today during a meeting. I left, tried to rid myself of the seizure-esc curse, but as soon as I returned to the meeting room, they returned. Terrible. Hasn't someone come up with a cure yet? Comon', science: what gives?

Cool sites

It's not often that I explorer the Internet much past my normal websites that I visit. I mean, let's face it: we all have our normal websites that we visit all the time and it's probably not very often that we venture outside those sites. So, today I strapped on my long-distance browser shoes and headed out into the great wide open.

The first cool site that I found was a new search engine that's getting popular very quickly. It's called Teoma and it's very similar to Google in that it offers a simple, banner-free search engine. Very cool. Give it a shot. It returned more results for a couple test searches I did. Watch out, Google!

The second cool site I found today was a site on iPod Lounge that contains photos of places that people have taken their iPods. There's more than 80 photos in their gallery..pretty impressive!

And finally, here's a photo gallery that contains photos of web designer's pets. If you look closely on that page, you'll find a photo of Gizmo on there.

Wow, if I keep up putting new, cool links up often like this, I'll need a way to keep track of these things! Maybe I should give Movable Type another look.

Like sands through the hourglass...

With the horsepower my nifty new webcam computer has, I can now create time lapse movies from my webcam shots. The camera takes a grab from the camera every five minutes and adds it to the movie. At the end of the day (Midnight), it starts a new file. Here's the movie from yesterday (4/9/02):

Pretty nifty. I like how it looks like I was asleep late in the afternoon. Who knows, maybe I was! Do you think this is something I should post more often? Chime in in the comments area!

New Webcam

After an on-the-go, but restful weekend in Norhtern VA at Brian's the week started out slow. In fact, it was so slow and boring that the highlight of the day was setting up my new webcam machine. You see, my currentwebcam computer is a lowly 25mhz Macintosh Quadra 660AV. Now, this isn't THAT bad of a machine, but it's seen better days. It's been sitting under my desk taking a photo of me (or other objects in my cubicle) for the past year and a half and uploading them to this server every two minutes. It tends to crash or lock up every week or so, which means I have to reach under the desk, hit the button to turn it off, hit the button to boot it up again, and pray that it comes back up and gets back to it's duties. Lately, it's been pretty sporadic in it's reliability.

It just so happens that we have had a Power Macintosh 8500/120mhz AV tower sitting around in our storage room for a while now. I asked my boss a week or so ago if I could have it and he agreed. Pretty cool. This thing used to be a monster. It has about 180MB of RAM and a 1gig drive in it. It's equivalent (and even better) than the computer I used in my first year and a half at Radford. Amazing. I looked on Everymac.com and found that this computer originally sold for $4000-$4500. Amazing. And now, it;s been reduced to a webcam computer. I'm sure I'll accidentally kick it a few times a day on any given week.

But, the cool thing is that now that I have much more horsepower and a better video card, my webcam images are a LOT clearer. Take a look and see for yourself!

We rode over to the dirt mound tonight. It looks like they're starting to move dirt around for the model house. Pretty exciting.

Am I sick or not?

Hmmm..haven't written anything here in a few days. It's funny, (or maybe it's not) I'm still not back to 100%, health-wise. After feeling crappy last week, I felt better over the weekend, then started feeling bad again at the beginning of the week. And since then it's been sortof up and down. I take drugs, go to bed, wake up feeling better. As the day progresses, I start feeling worse and by the time it's time to go to bed again, I'm back to the state I was in 24 hours ago. So, I take more drugs and do the cycle all over again. Oh, and I've figured out that Orange Juice is really good. Especially the kind WITH pulp! In fact, I wish they'd put larger chunks of orange in the container. In fact, maybe one day they'll put WHOLE ORANGES in there. Wow.

I finally got my webcam back online. It turns out that one of our network engineers made some changes to our DNS servers, causing connections to external FTP sites, such as this website, to not work correctly. It's funny how many times I've walked back into our network room and had a siumilar conversation:

Me: Did you know that _ isn't working correctly?

Them: No. Are you sure? Nobody else has complained about this.

Me: Yep, I'm sure. Here, do this test to prove me wrong.

(enter your favorite geeky network test here)

Them: You're right. Ok, it's fixed.

I feel kinda like a watchdog sometimes. I tend to detect problems on our network before most other people complain about it. I just wish it were easier to convince them that there really is a problem. Of course, I HAVE been wrong a few times on things. Hey, nobody's perfect. :)

Now, it's off to take more drugs.

Long Weekend

Ahh, here we are at the end of a nice, long extended weekend. Olivia and I were kindof at a loss today when we realized that there wasn't a race on. Instead, we did some major cleaning of the apartment. She felt it necessary to clean UNDER the sofa, something I don't quite understand, but I helped anyway.

It was really nice Saturday, so we decided to head out to the river and run around on the rocks. We also drove out to the dirt mound (our future home) and found that they've laid down an initial layer of pavement. Amazing. They still haven't broken ground on the model unit. I think the suspense is killing us. I know it's killing me.

Last night, I pulled my K & N air filter off of the end of my aftermarket intake. As many of you know, the air filter is normally replaced every 7,000 miles. However, with a K & N filter such as the one I have, you simply remove the filter, clean it using their special cleaner and water, re-oil it (the oil attracts the dirt and holds it in place) and then re-install it. The filter is warranted to last 1 million miles. Pretty amazing. What's even more amazing is how much dirt came out of the filter when I rinsed it off after cleaning it. This is exactly the reason why I recommend people (even those of you who don't care about performance) buy this type of filter rather than the throw-away kind.

Editor's note- None of the content in today's entry is in any way false or fabricated as a result of today's date. However, if you're looking for a good laugh, check out what I did to my CustomTacos users.