What does a geek do on halloween?

Halloween is my favorite holiday! This year was a lot more fun in terms of dressing up. I decided to get dressed up to go to work on Friday. We joked that my costume is only funny in Vegas since people from anywhere else would have no idea what I am. I’m dressed as a guy who works on the Las Vegas Strip handing out porn pamphlets. You’ll notice in the picture that I’m handing out slips of paper that just say porn. I thought it best to avoid an HR issues at the office and not hand out real porn. Just didn’t seem like a good idea.

Then comes Saturday night. This is the biggie. Some friends of ours throw a halloween bash each year that gets better each and every year. This year was no exception. The place was jam packed and the costumes this year were really outstanding. A lot of people went to a lot of trouble to put together some fantastic costumes. There was no doubt that the Transformer costume that Myya made for Adam was the best. This costume would have won best costume at any part anywhere in Vegas. Great job, Myya.

My wife had come up with the idea of going dressed as Super Mario. I then suggested that we go as Mario & Luigi. The idea stuck and that’s what we did. I have to tell you, these were some of the best costumes around. They were easy to put on, comfortable to wear and pretty darn inexpensive. We each had to buy the overalls, but other than that, we were only out a little bit of cash and Chris spent a little bit of time fixing up the buttons and the hats. That’s it! And it was awesome to have pockets while at the party. Car keys, camera, wallet, etc… Next year, I’m going to make sure whatever costume idea we come up with has the same level of comfort and function.

Happy Halloween, everybody!

Well, there goes November

I was reading a poker blog the other day and found a link to NaNoWriMo.org. If you have never heard of it (I hadn’t) it’s a site dedicated to National Novel Writing Month. The point of the site is to get you motivated to write a novel in one month. They say you don’t need a plot, characters or anything like that… all you really need is a deadline. So, they ask you to write 50,000 words starting November 1st and finishing by Midnight November 30th. I love a good challenge, so I have signed up. I then showed the link to some friends who have also signed up.

They have a couple cool tools available so I figured I’d showcase them here… Here are “Word Wars” showing how many words we have all written and who’s “winning.” BTW, I should mention, there is no prize for actually writing 50,000 words other than the satisfaction of actually finishing what you set out to do… Don’t expect a trophy.

Here are our word counts
Me Jason
Sarah Jake
Jessi David

If other friends join in, I’ll add them to the challenge board.

Getting a new computer can cause serious frustration

This past Thursday my new computer arrived from Dell. I won’t even go in to the fact that it took nearly a month to arrive. That hardly factors in to the frustration level I reached while getting the new machine set up.

Here’s a basic rundown of things I ran in to:

First off, purchasing the computer itself is NOT where the spending ends… I was “forced” to purchase upgrades for at least 4 products that I had purchased online and had downloaded the original install file. At one time or another I deleted the original install so I went to the website and downloaded a new copy of the software. In nearly every case, the version that I had was way out of date and the older file was no longer available for download. So, I download the latest version, type in my registration information and find that I need to pay for the upgrade…

Oh, that’s not the only money I spent. As you may know, I have 4 monitors on my system here at home. This requires 2 video cards. In my old machine, I had 2 ATI Radeon cards. They worked great. In my new machine, I have a GEForce nVidia card. It too works great. HOWEVER, when I removed one of the Radeon cards from the old machine and placed it in the new machine, shit hit the fan! Apparently, Radeon and nVidia are mortal enemies. If one finds the other in the same machine, they start an all-out war for PC domination. I tried everything under the sun I could think of to get them to work. At one point, I wasn’t even able to boot the machine with both cards installed. So, after 90 minutes of swearing, a trip to Best Buy and $150 for a GEForce 6200 card and I was back in business. It took exactly 7 minutes to install the new card and it’s drivers.

Next it was time to try and map a drive letter on the new machine over to the linux server I have sitting under my desk. I use some software called Samba that makes this a pretty easy gig and an enormous time saver since I don’t need to write files to my local drive and then FTP them over to my server. Living without this creature comfort would be entirely unacceptable. So, you can imagine my frustration when I tried to map the drive using the following location format: \\192.168.1.124\www  - My machine sat there for 5 full minutes with the message “Trying to connect to location.” I figured it had to do with the Samba installation not letting me access the drive. I tried to call my guru Todd, but that failed. So, I chat with Matt about the issue. He says to check the smb.conf file. I check it to find that Samba is configured to allow anything from the 192.168.1. domain connect.. That’s great, but why the fuck isn’t my machine connecting to it? For some stupid reason, I clicked cancel on the connection attempt and tried again using the following format: \\192.168.1.124\www\  - This took all of 1.24 seconds to work. Crazy frustration all for the sake of a trailing slash. In the example given on the dialog box there isn’t a trailing slash. I’m almost an idiot for even trying it.

And don’t think that Microsoft Outlook went without kicking me in the nuts… Here’s a fun one to try and explain. I set up my first email account and was able to check my email with no problem. Sweet! Then, this evening I tried to reply to an email and it failed to send. Hmm, that’s odd. I double checked the settings and remembered that I needed to use a different server for outgoing mail. No problem, right? Just change the smtp server to the correct one and all should be fine, right? Not so fast… Even though I had changed the settings, the email that I had written while the settings were wrong still wouldn’t send. For some reason, it was still trying to use the old settings. After 20-30 minutes of swearing, I tried the following: Copy the text from the outbound email. Delete the outbound email. Hit reply on the original message. Paste my text in to the message. Hit send. At this point, the email sent immediatly. This makes ZERO sense to me.

I would like to throw a big ‘ol thanks out to Matt. He turned me on to a program called UltraMon. It’s a tool used for managing multiple monitors. I couldn’t do justice to explaining what it does. Just go visit their site and download the trial. As Matt says, “It only takes 10 seconds for you to realize what you have been missing all this time.” I know it’s rare, but he’s right.  :)

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Who’s jumping?

A group of us are planning a trip to Mesquite to go sky diving on November 11th. This post will serve as a place holder for the list of people who are going. If you are interested in joining, I need to collect a $25 per person NON-REFUNDABLE deposit by end of day Oct. 27th.

FYI - You need to be over 18 years of age and under 220 pounds.

SO, Who’s Jumping?

1. John Hawkins
2. Matt Piper
3. Mike Genatempo
4. Ray Lopez
5. Jason Gabriele
6. Rob Voss
7. Chris Hawkins

New MySpace project

I’ve been working on a project for the past week or so called TopSpaceHeads.com. It’s a site where you can download a bunch of free Myspace graphics, backgrounds, templates and cursors. Is it an original idea? Nope. Do I have delusions that my site will be the best site in it’s genre? Nope. Do I expect to make a profit from the site? Yep.

So, what do I plan to add to my site that will make it any different from the dozens of other sites just like mine? Well, I can’t tell you everything just yet, but, I do plan on holding some profile contests that will let people show off their nifty myspace pages and have their friends all vote for ‘em. Cash and prizes will be up for grabs. That’s going to start in the next few weeks. Other than that, I have some other stuff up my sleeve that I’m not ready to let out of the bag. But, I think it’ll draw some attention. We’ll see.

So, swing on by and pick out some nifty background image or template to pimp out your myspace profile. The code will add a nice little link back to my site. I appreciate the advertising.

Thanks, man!

Party Poker runs scared

To absolutely nobody’s surprise, over the weekend Party Poker has stopped taking wagers from players in the US. This is the knee-jerk reaction to the new law signed late last week by our fearless leader.

For a country who’s government loves to place a tax on anything and everything even more than it loves to breath, I find it absolutely amazing that they would rather put a ban on Internet gambling, which is a blanket that shouldn’t really cover poker, a game of skill, in the first place, rather than coming up with a way to place a tax on it where they could syphon off a few hundred million dollars each and every year.

Sites like Full Tilt Poker and Poker Stars are going to reap the rewards when the multiple millions of US based online poker players look to play. These sites have already stated that they have no plans to close their doors to the US market. They have no reason to.

What absolutely slays me about this whole situation is the way this new law was brought forward. It was slid in as part of a port security bill. At the press conference, Bush makes statements like:

“We’re going to protect our ports. We’re going to defend this homeland, and we’re going to win this war on terror”

But makes no mention of the internet gaming portion of the bill. How convenient.

It will be interesting to see where this goes over the next few months. I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of this.

Back to the ice

I signed up to play in the 35 and over hockey league. It has been almost 1 year exactly since I was last on the ice. Last night was my first game. I started off feeling pretty good. But, I noticed that I was taking 60 - 90 second shifts where several of the players were taking 2-3 minute shifts. I sorta screwed up the lines because I could just not hang with the 3 minute shifts. They were killing me. So, when I got tired, I changed. It’s better than being out there and coasting, right?

Well, I scored 2 goals and I didn’t take any penalties and I didn’t have any absolutely horrible plays. We won 9-3. I felt like I played my position fairly well, though, I’m not all that comfortable playing on the left wing so it was a bit of a challenge.

I think it’s going to take me 3 or 4 weeks before I’m back in to any sort of steady flow. Hopefully, I’ll survive long enough to see that happen.