The start of something good

On Saturday, Chris, Blake and I walked from our house to the Galleria mall, walked around the mall and then back home. It probably worked out to being about a 3.5 mile walk. It felt great. Other than the exercise, walking to the mall had an excellent side effect - we sent no money at the mall. Nobody wanted to buy anything because I instituted a “You buy it, you carry it” rule. Not so much as a DVD was purchased because nobody wanted to lug it back home. I think I’m going to turn all of our mall trips in to walking trips, too!

I will admit that I was probably the closest to buying something before leaving the mall. We stopped by the Cingular store and I got to check out their new BlackJack phone. I’m at the point in my contract with Cingular that I could get the phone as part of my extension, but it’ll still cost $199 (after a $100 rebate) out of pocket, which I’m not overly concerned with. I’m more concerned with the monthly “data plan” that I’ll have to pay for which is $39.99 a month. So, for now, I’ve left the phone with Cingular. If I can justify the extra monthly cost, I may go back and get it. I’m not holding my breath, though.

Chris and I followed up our Saturday walk with a 40 minute walk on Sunday evening. It was just as the sun was going down and the weather was great. A little bit of a breeze and the temperature was just about perfect. I’m hoping that we can get out and walk 3 - 4 times a week. We both really enjoyed it and while the weather is like this, we certainly shouldn’t pass up the opportunity. It won’t be long before it’s 100+ making walking a little less enjoyable.

Well that was dumb!

I’ve only recently (within 6 months) become an iPod user. Before that, I’ve had about 5 or 6 different MP3 players. I used to use software called cdex to rip CDs to my computer to play on my MP3 player. The problem was, I never had a standardized naming convention. So, some of the tracks had track numbers, some had band names, some had just the title and a whole mess of them were never sorted in to sub-directories… this made finding stuff a bit of a bitch.

With the new iPod came iTunes. It has it’s own nice little MP3 ripping software built in that lets you rip the CD and import it to your iTunes library all in one fell swoop. Love it. So, the other day I was at my desk and started ripping some new CDs that I had recently purchased. I noticed that they were going in to a new iTunes music directory. When I looked, I noticed that it was set up EXACTLY as I wanted it. Every track was ripped and set up in a perfect directory structure:

\Artist\CD Title\01 song title.mp3

I was so giddy! A thought ran through my head… “You should delete all your current MP3s and re-rip them all so they all are perfectly named and organized.” What a great idea, I told myself. I quickly went over to the MP3 directory that currently existed and hit delete. Windows even tried to save me from myself by asking me, “Are you sure you want to delete 2245 files?” - “Of course I do”, I answered out loud as I hit confirmed and watched 4+ years worth of MP3s hit the bit-bucket.

It was about 2 minutes later when I realized what exactly I had just done. I threw up in my mouth a little bit.

The picture above is what “Phase 1″ of my CD ripping will consist of. Gotta go now, it’s time to switch CDs again.

TV reinstall hell!

I month or two back I picked up a second Tivo to use in the bedroom. It’s one of the Series 2, dual tuner types that let you record 2 shows at once. They way this is done is you use a splitter on the cable coming out of the wall and plug one directly in to Tivo and the second goes in to your cable box as normal… The feed going directly in to the Tivo will pick up the low channels (in my case, 2 - 99) and the other will pick up all the channels, or 1 - 999.

When I installed it myself something wasn’t working quite right. It wasn’t completely screwed, so I didn’t get around to fixing it right away… Then, the unthinkable happened. On the Tivo downstairs I had 3 programs set up to record via the Season Pass that all came on at the exact same time. I didn’t realize that there were 3 shows I actually cared about on TV at all, let alone on the same day and time… Sadly, I didn’t realize this until Tuesday when I tried to watch Heroes and nearly blew a gasket when I found out it didn’t record. Thankfully, NBC.com is kind enough to let you watch the entire show of Heroes directly from their site, so the crisis was averted.

After figuring out where the problem was, I made a quick adjustment and moved the High Stakes Poker season pass to the TV upstairs. No sweat, all’s right in the world. NOT!

The following Monday when I climbed in to bed around 11:00 and loaded up Tivo to watch some poker before sleep, I was upset once again when my show DID record, but the channel was completely black.

After messing with every cable configuration and every TV and Tivo setting, I finally gave up and figured it was time to call in the heavy hitters. I call Cox and ask them to come out and check on the issue. The guy that came out did a couple things:

1. Replaced a coax cable that was bad
2. Replaced the cable box that was faulty
3. Re-wired everything so that I was taking advantage of the TV’s HD capabilities.

While I’m thrilled with #1 and #2, #3 here has completely hosed me! The way the wiring is set up, I can only use Tivo to record shows on any of the low channels. Plus, I know have to jump through a couple hoops to get back and forth between sets of channels. While this would be fine if it was just me watching the TV, but I’d have to draw a map for the wife just so she could watch TV. This configuration was NOT going to work!

After putting it off for another week, it was finally time to do something about it. So, I spent about 90 minutes today messing around with the wiring trying to come up with a combination that would leave me with everything I wanted. Unfortunately, that just wasn’t going to happen. So, after getting really really frustrated, I was going to put the wiring back to almost the exact same way that the guy from Cox had installed it, but I was going to need one additional cable. When I left for Best Buy, everything seemed to be working except for this one final piece. Oh, how sadly mistaken I was…

When I get back from Best Buy I install the new cable, move the TV stand (which is quite heavy, btw) back in place and sit down to make a little how-to page for the TV. I now have 3 input sources going to the TV:

#1 AV1, This is the DVD player - working perfectly
#2 Cable3, This is for Tivo and all channels 0-99 (using the newly installed cable) - working perfectly
#3 Component, This uses 5 cables and should allow me to watch channels 1 - 999 - NO SOUND and I can only get channels 100 and above.

OK, I could live with the channels 100 and above thing, but no sound? This fucking worked before I left! What the fuck happened?!?!?!!

I tried 2 separate sets of cables for this, but no dice. Nothing worked. No sound is how it’s been left…

I was able to move my season pass for Heroes to this TV which should work no problem since cable3 is working and has sound, but still, I’m overly frustrated and may need to borrow the help of a fellow geek (cough cough Todd cough cough) to try and solve this one.

Clearing out the brain clutter

Man, I sure do love to start project! Finishing project, not so much…

Over the past year or so, I’ve launched several websites that all had potential for making money. Most of them still have the potential. What they were lacking was somebody with enough focus and drive to actually see them through to completion and then put some time in to actually advertising them properly.

What’s worse is that after I start the project, it sits in the back of my brain nagging at me for some attention. You can ignore and even forget about them for days or even weeks at a time, but they are always there… relentless little bastards that they are.

Last week, every time I sat down at my desk to work on a project, those tiny voices would all start chiming in at the same time… “Hey, work on me. No, work on me. Hey, I’ll make you lot’s of money so work on me.” It was so bad that I couldn’t work an anything because I wanted to work on everything. So, I did what I think any sane person would do… I sold all my project sites to a buddy of mine. Now those tiny voices can call out to him every time he sits down at the computer. Sorry, bro.

So, what am I going to do with all my newly found free time? I don’t know, but I tell you what I won’t be doing… starting any more projects! I have a website I’m building for a guy I know and another that I need to build for my uncle. Those two projects should now receive the attention they deserve.

Royale with cheese


I’ve been playing a LOT of online poker lately. And, tonight I had some really crazy things happen. Getting knocked out of a tourney after flopping a set, that’s always fun. Q/Q losing to J/J, no sweat. But then, there was this gem… Lately, A/J has been kicking my ass. I can flop top two pair and find a way to lose with it. So, playing A/J lately has been a slippery slope. I’ve been playing it EXTRA cautious. So, here’s how this one went down. I’m in first position and have A/J of diamonds. Flop comes with 3 diamonds giving me the nuts. It’s checked to me so I go ahead and check. The turn comes and gives me the absolute mother of all hands… Sadly, it also means I make basically zero cash from the hand.

Work, Poker & general catching up

Wow, December already! I know we all say it every year around this time, but where the hell does the time go? I mean seriously! I remember the first couple of days of 110 degree weather like it was a week ago.

Last week I took over a new position at work. I’ve actually changed companies, but haven’t left the building… The main company I work for has about 15 sub-companies. I moved from one sub to another. The position I took basically takes me back full circle to a position I was in about 18 months ago. I’m the technical director for a new group that is going to be handling a lot of web development for our own company(ies) and for several 3rd parties. The pace of the new position is a bit quicker than where I was 2 weeks ago, so it’s going to take some getting used to in order to get back in the swing of things. I’m very excited about the new position and I foresee a lot of good things coming out of it.

Poker has been back on an upswing for me lately. The day after Thanksgiving we played in the Sahara tourney and it was absolutely huge. I made the final table and then talked all 10 players in to chopping the pot. Normally this isn’t something I’d do, but, I had an “average” size stack (60,000 chips) and the blinds were going to be 10,000 / 20,000. So it was going to be a crap-shoot to see who won. If we gave 10% to the dealers and then chopped 10 ways, we each took home $705. The only way to make more than $705 was to finish 3rd or better.

Chris had surgery on Thursday to remove a cyst from her hand. She has the entire month of December off from work, so it made sense to schedule the surgery for this month. The surgery went well and she’s back home resting up. The company Christmas party is tomorrow night so hopefully she’ll feel well enough to hand out for a few hours. She is supposed to be sitting and keeping her hand elevated with an ice pack. That’s going to be tough to do at the party. She does have a nice big bottle of pain killers, so maybe that’ll help.

I had requested Thursday and Friday off from work and scheduled some errands for Friday back when I was still with my previous company. Then, after switching companies, there are 4000 things going on and taking two days off seems a bit crazy. Just good timing is all. I have a good team that can handle things while I’m out so I’m not too worried!

Hey, here’s an interesting one… I found out last week that a couple we know and at one time were very good friends with, got married this summer. Both Chris and I are very happy for them and wish them all the best in the world. The crazy part is, we didn’t learn about their marriage from either of them, but through a mutual acquaintance. Obviously, there is no requirement for them to invite us to the wedding or to send a wedding announcement or anything like that, but, you would think that after being close friends with somebody for a few years that you might, oh, I dunno, MENTION it. If the 40 cents for a stamp is too much, last I heard, email is free.

Well, anyway, Congratulations you two. We would have sent a gift, had we known.

The views expressed in the previous paragraph are mine and mine alone. My lovely wife didn’t seem phased when I mentioned it to her. I hope she doesn’t read my blog.

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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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.

Seriously! How long does it take?

I decided that it’s time to order myself a new computer, give Paxton my existing computer, reformat the kids’ existing computer and set it up for Blake. So, I went online last night and ordered me up a new system from Dell. Let me first list for you all the options I have tossed in. While reading the list, try and come up with an estimate for how long it takes to build such a machine and, assuming Sept 25th was the order date, try and come up with a ship date. Don’t say it outloud, we don’t want to ruin the game for everyone…

Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E6400 (2.13GHz,1066FSB) with 2MB cache
2GB DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz
No Keyboard Requested
Video ready option w/o monitor
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 LE
Serial ATA 2 RAID 0 With Dual 320GB Hard Drives
No Floppy Drive Requested
Microsoft Windows XP Professional,Service Pack 2, English
Dell Application Back-up CD, Factory Install
Dell Media Experience 3.1 Basic
Complimentary courses: Look for EU icon
Windows Media Player 10
Dell Direct Download
Icon Consolidation Application
Internet Search and Portal
Image Restore
Dell Support
Dell Owners Manual installed on your system,click on icon after system set-up to access
No Mouse Requested
No modem requested for Dell Dimension
Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0
48X Combo and 16X DVD+/-RW
Sonic Cineplayer
Roxio Creator Basic/MyDVD Basic
Sound Blaster Audigy MB Audio
No Speaker Requested
Norton Internet Security 2006 15 Month
NETZERO ISP
AOL for Broadband
Broadband Icon for Inspiron
Microsoft Office 2003 Basic Edition,Dimension,DHS
1 Year Limited Warranty
No Warranty, Year 2 and 3
Warranty Support,Initial Year
Dell Hardware Warranty PlusOnsite Service, Initial Year
Type 3- Third Party At Home Service, 24×7 Technical Support, Initial Year
Serial and PS-2 PCI Adapter
Windows Vista Capable

Well, if you guessed October 24th as the ship date, give yourself a pat on the back.

Holy crap!! What on Earth could take so F’n long? Seriously, I would expect Dell to have all of these parts on-hand so it’s not like they have to order anything special. Everything I ordered was part of their online selection process. It’s not like I ordered some rare type of motherboard that is hand built by some sweatshop in Russia.

Ahh well, the wait begins. :-|

More proof that people suck

For most people, seeing panhandlers on the side of the road is nothing new. You pull up to the stop light and there is some dude walking between the car with a “Please Help Out of Work Vet.” Most of the panhandlers that I’ve seen look like they are passing time between being drunk or wacked out on the drug of the day. I rarely roll down my window and toss change their way. Mainly because I feel that any money I give them is only going to go towards a bottle of booze or go into their veins. If I felt that they were going to use the money to buy food or to do something in the way of getting their life back in order, I’d feel much more compelled to throw a few bucks their way. When I see a panhandler outside a fast food joint that I’m driving through, I have been known to purchase an extra burger and fries, have it bagged separately and deliver the meal to the person rather than giving them the cash. This way I know that they are going to use the donation as it was intended. Keep that in mind… “As Intended.” I’ll get back to this in a few minutes.

I feel bad for all the people who had to experience Hurricane Katrina. Many lost their lives or lost friends or family. Many lost their homes and/or businesses. It was horrible even watching the chaos of it all safely from my living room. And, as always, it wasn’t long before all the benefits start rolling around. Benefit concerts, auctions, telethons, etc… Whatever the process is, tons of money goes to FEMA and then they distribute aide to victims of the Hurricane. The intention being to get these people back on their feet. I don’t think I have ever sent money in to a telethon myself and I don’t think I’ve ever won an auction for this type of charitable organization. When I read articles like this one I found on CNN.com, I don’t think I ever will. As it turns out, about $1 billion dollars worth of the aide money was spent on hookers and blow. OK, not hookers & blow exactly, but $600 at a strip club, $400 on “adult erotica products” etc, etc… Here’s a nice little snippet from the article:

Among other problems found with the registrations, according to the GAO study:

# People signed up for assistance using Social Security numbers that didn’t exist or belonged to other people.

# Aid applications contained bogus addresses for damaged property, or gave addresses for damaged property where the applicants did not live when the hurricanes struck. In one case, FEMA paid nearly $2,360 to a man whose allegedly damaged property was in a cemetery.

# Payments were made to people who listed post office boxes as their damaged residences.

# People submitted duplicate registrations, which FEMA did not detect.

# More than 1,000 registrations used the names and Social Security numbers of prison inmates. According to the GAO, in one instance, FEMA paid $20,000 to a Louisiana prisoner who listed a post office box as his damaged property.

So, I’ll end this the way I started it… people suck.

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