Not in the closet yet

Gizmo is sitting over on the table glaring at me. He looks pissed. I'm not quite sure why, but he's looked pissed all night long. Sometimes I wonder what's going through his brain.

I didn't get to lock myself in a far-away place today. The biggest reason was because the server on which I'm going to be doing my work was still not configured properly with directory permissions, etc. Even more amazing than that, I kept uploading files and when I'd view them in my browser, they HADN'T CHANGED! I opened the file on the server just to make sure I had, indeed, uploaded the changed version. Sure enough, it was changed. But when I reloaded my browser, it was still the old version. It turns out that there's some weird IIS bug (or maybe M$ thinks it's a feature) that causes .asp files to remain cached on the server. Jack figured it out and hacked the registry on the server so that it would NOT cache the files. It's so amazing to me that it takes a registry hack to change settings in IIS. Just another reason why Apache rocks.

I have to confess. I've paid money for two shareware programs in the last two weeks. Those of you who know me know that I'm not normally the first one to fork over lots of cash for software. It's not because I don't think the 'ware is worth it, it's usually been the case that I just didn't have that kind of money to spend on a single software package. I mean, comon': $500 for Photoshop? Give me a break, Adobe. However, I did find two worthy causes in the last two weeks. The first is a little program called "Watson" and the second is called "XMonitor". Watson is an Internet search engine tool that allows you to track packages, check movie times/listings/reviews, look up phone numbers and zip codes, view television listings, track eBay auctions, exchange currency rates, check flight times, search for recipies based on type/region of food you desire, browse Yahoo categories,and get up-to-the-minute stock quotes. You know, it's funny. I was ready MacWorld's review of Watson tonight and their "Cons" of Watson was: "Limited Search tools" Give me a break! I absolutely love this software and was really happy to pay the programmers for their product.

The second software app I purchased recently is called XMonitor and itallows you to monitor CPU load, RAM usage, Disk Usage, NetworkTraffic..all in a cool-looking customizable window. Pretty nifty. I like to watch the CPU load rise and fall as I'm busy working on things. They allowed payments via Pay Pal, which made it a no-brainer for me. And, even cooler than that, they let YOU decide how much you're going to pay for the software..$1 or $100. Pretty cool.

Hopefully I can get to work on my extranet project tomorrow. By the way, the road crew is back out in action again tonight. They've been digging out there for hours and it looks like they're going be out there for the rest of the night. Man, I think I need to bring my webcam home and set it up on my deck!