Today I have spent a good deal of time doing research. One of the greatest resources I have found is Microsoft Blogs. There are lots of useful ones on there. Often they then link to eachother in comments and such. There are many which are created by developers, MCS and PSS people. It is amazing some hints and bug details you can find.
January 2005 Archives
Well I just wasted WAY too much time upgrading my blog and other server components. I upgraded the version of Perl (blew up) and went back. I upgrade the version of PHP, seems to be working thus far. I upgraded mySQL and had to hack it to use old authentication scheme. Last but not least I upgrade Movable Type it self. Which in reality was the easiest. This stuff shouldn't be this hard.
Going back to work last week was rough, mostly the getting up at 5:30 AM part. I also went back to working out, did so three days. Now I have today (Monday) off to help ease back in. Hopefully work out at least three days next week too.
Since we moved into this house we have had a little power problem. Apparently about 50% of the house was wired into the same 15 AMP circuit. Not too bad except one of the things was the clothes washer. After running the washer a few times and having other things on the circuit would blow. We looked at the breaker panel and decided we could add a few more. Travis's dad Norv came up and helped us on Saturday accomplish this. We added a dedicated circuit for the washing machine. Also for good measure we added one for the server/communications room. Hopefully this will resolve all of our power woes.
Friday night after watching a couple of TiVoed episodes of Huff I was antsy. I decided to walk over to 7-Eleven at about 9:30 PM. Mind you the weather had changed and was barely above freezing with a healthy wind. Most would consider this weird, but just wanted to take a walk. Went and got a slurpee and walked around for an hour. Nice to just think.
Well I have to actually go back to work tomorrow. I haven't been there since December 17th. I did some work remotely around Christmas but otherwise been cutoff. Waking up tomorrow will be tough.
Last week Microsoft released their new Anti-Spyware product. Now this is really a product made by a company by Giant that Microsoft bought. However now with Microsoft's name behind it the product will get more attention. Addmitedly it is a patch for a hole (or holes) that shouldn't have existed in the first place, but it is a step in the right direction. There have been rave reviews of it thus far so I figured I would test it. It found 0 yes ZERO things on my machine, which I guess means my machine is clean. However I find it a bit surprising. We will have to see how it goes. I will do some testing at work and may switch next summer.
Well I completed my goal yesterday. I beat KOTOR 2 while on vacation. It took about 40 hours or so. The ending was kind of blah, but overall a pretty good game. No more 40 hour games though, at least with that much talking. There has to be a happy medium between Riddick's 6 hours and this.
I was reading last night about midnight and I started hearing jets. It sounded like a jet was literaly hovering over my house. It kept going for 10-15 and I actually got curious. I went out and looked on back deck and there was at least one if not two jets circling. The funny thing is the plane was probably circling for Reagan National Airport, which is supposed to close for air traffic at midnight since it is in a city. We don't often have planes overhead and also at midnight much more noticeable since it is so quiet. Just thought it was weird.
I didn't play any KOTOR yesterday since I actually left the house. Prior to that I had logged about 20 hours on the game. I intend to go back to it today, see if I can beat it before my vacation is done.
Yesterday I went to the new Air and Space museum with Karen. We got there about 11:30 and stayed until almost 4:30. The place is huge and when you walk in you can actually see almost everything at once. It is literally a huge hangar, it feels like you are walking around in somebodies garage. It took us that long since we walked around and looked at the description plaques for each item. Seeing the concorde upclose and walking underneath it is really amazing. Then there is the SR-71A and the space shuttle Enterprise. The really cool thing is they are constantly adding more items and expanding the facility. The next phase is the restoration area, which visitors will be able to look in on. The only downside is the floor is concrete so after walking around about 5 hours, my feet and lower legs were a little sore. Great place though, highly recommended.
KOTOR 2 begins
Well I gave in and yesterday bought KOTOR 2. I figured if I am going to have lots of time to kill on vacation next week what better way. The first game took me about 45 hours to finish and I have already played this one about 7-8 hours. The best and worst thing about this game is that it is exactly the same as the first. Literally they took the engine and graphics from first game and stuck a new story in it. This is good in that the first game was amazing. It is bad in that there isn't much innovation. The few changes include some UI tweaks and the ability to break down items and construct new ones. This allows some difference in finding items, but not a whole lot. I still like the game and will play it a bunch over next week, but I just wonder if it could have been better.
Well my friend Karen was nice enough to come over on New Year's Eve and hang out for a while. Much better than being home alone on that night. We watched a couple of movies. One was Rounders which is great and I highly recommend as well, though pretty old. The other was Garden State.
Garden State was written, directed and starred Zach Braff who you might know as JD on Scrubs. This movie is about 20 something angst. There are lots of movies about teen angst but not many movies about 20 something. This movie made me laugh, get depressed and above all think. It was really good.
It also brought up an interesting point that I think about sometimes. The idea of a teenager, sometimes as young as 13, starting on mood altering drugs and then staying on them for a long time, sometimes into adulthood. This bothers me since it robs the person of emotional development in those important years. Many of these drugs remove the highs and lows and everything is just blah. If you don't have lows, you won't know when the highs are which I would think would really mess you up. I know there are real reasons for these drugs, but I would like to think they fall into two categories. One being true physical body imbalances that the drugs hopefully correct. The other being mental problems due to some influence of either past events or environment. The second one is the one I worry about. Hey I am no doctor though so I may have no idea what I am talking about.
Oh and the new title for this blog is a quote from that movie. Go see it.
Recent Comments