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October 31, 2006
Amazing Weekend
Dawnise and I were down in So. Cal. last weekend for the Beltz' annual Halloween murder mystery party on Friday night. We had a great time, and saw a bunch of friends - old and new - who we don't get to see nearly often enough.
The costumes were incredible (is anyone who knows her surprised that Dru won best costume and best role-playing, and correctly concluded that I was the sociopathic killer?) and most folks seemed to have as much fun as we did.
Plenty of photographic evidence is available.
Continue reading "Amazing Weekend"
Posted by dberger at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)
October 25, 2006
Bluetooth on Windows: Pain? Try Macintosh.
Several months ago, as an experiment, I paired my Treo with my Powerbook and played around with dial-up-networking. It took about15 minutes to get it working - most of that googling, downloading, and installing the right modem script.
Yesterday I decided to replicate the experiment on my Asus notebook, running Windows.
It took, let's just say, waayyy longer than 15 minutes.
Continue reading "Bluetooth on Windows: Pain? Try Macintosh."
Posted by dberger at 11:39 AM | Comments (0)
October 24, 2006
They're off their nut
The ferry run between Seattle and Bainbridge has had WiFi over Water for a while now - funded by grant money. We've always known they were going to convert it to a paid system "someday," and someday arrives at the end of November.
They've finally (it arrived in my inbox a couple hours ago) released pricing. And my initial reaction is "they must be mad."
Continue reading "They're off their nut"
Posted by dberger at 5:42 PM | Comments (0)
(More) Props to Cyclegear
On discovering that I had the wrong break pads last night, I dropped a note to customerservice at cyclegear.com, explaining the situation and asking if they'd be so kind as to pickup the return shipping, since the application matrix was wrong.
This morning I got a note back saying they were shipping the correct pads and a pre-paid UPS return label for the ones I can't use.
Posted by dberger at 9:57 AM | Comments (0)
October 23, 2006
Well That Was Easy (Mostly)
I took the Trophy to I-90 Motorsports for it's 36k service a couple weeks ago, and when I got it back they informed me that I needed front pads, which they didn't have in stock. (As an aside, living on the other side of the canyon from So Cal Triumph has me well and truly spoiled - finding parts for my bikes locally is a royal pain in the arse.)
Continue reading "Well That Was Easy (Mostly)"
Posted by dberger at 9:18 PM | Comments (1)
October 21, 2006
ReadyNAS NV
I've now had three different folks, two here and one at work, say glowing things about the Infrant ReadyNAS NV in response to my Reliable NAS on the Cheap post of a few days back. Three's a magic number - so I decided to do a bit of research.
The ReadyNAS seems to be everything but the kitchen sink - but what it's not is cheap.
Continue reading "ReadyNAS NV"
Posted by dberger at 2:23 PM | Comments (0)
Greylisting Rocks
I remember reading the Greylisting White-paper whilst in Grad School and immediately loving it. It's a simple, elegant, and (based on the last 12 hours) very effective anti-spam technique.
Basically, you configure an MTA (mail transport agent, the things that route email around the Internet) to send back a transient delivery failure code on the first delivery attempt from an unknown sender. A well behaved MTA will reattempt delivery after a while, whereas many spammers simply see that as a delivery failure and give up. Once a sender has behaved correctly, they're added to an automatic whitelist for a few days, so subsequent messages aren't delayed.
Continue reading "Greylisting Rocks"
Posted by dberger at 12:11 PM | Comments (0)
October 19, 2006
His Majesty's Dragon
I hadn't heard of Naomi Novik's Temeraire series until reading that Peter Jackson had secured the film rights.
I picked up a hardbound copy of the three book omnibus, and just finished the first book - His Majesties Dragon, which I very much enjoyed.
For some reason (perhaps the fact that one of his crew was named "Mr. Turner") I have a strong mental image of Jack Davenport playing Mr. Laurence.
Posted by dberger at 8:25 AM | Comments (1)
October 16, 2006
South Africa Photos
For folks who read my blog, but not Dawnises, I figured I'd mention that Dawnise has started posting pictures from her S. Africa trip.
She took (literally) thousands of pictures, so you might wanna check back occasionally to see the latest additions.
Posted by dberger at 6:33 PM | Comments (0)
I'm Carrying a Pager...
...for the first time since c. 1999, and I'm really not sure how I feel about that.
By design, we don't have an operations team as such - so the development team rotates responsibility for the live system. This is my first turn in the rotation since joining the team about 5 months ago. That's not to say that the rotation list is 5 months long - there was a grace period in there, but when I was asked this morning if I could focus on some stability work this week, taking the pager seemed to come with the territory.
Continue reading "I'm Carrying a Pager..."
Posted by dberger at 6:16 PM | Comments (0)
October 15, 2006
Reliable NAS on the Cheap?
I've been thinking about trying to move some of the data on my workstation onto a network-attached storage server of some kind. Among other things, it would simplify accessing key "stuff" from both Linux and Windows, and would mean that Dawnise's access to our photos and music doesn't live and die with my machine.
Continue reading "Reliable NAS on the Cheap?"
Posted by dberger at 9:29 AM | Comments (2)
October 14, 2006
More Compact Fluorescent Goodness
I posted a while back about installing Compact Fluorescent bulbs everywhere I could in the house - which meant all the standard non-dimmed lights. At the time, I tried using one to replace a flood light, but found they weren't up to the task.
We were at Costco today, and saw that they had these for less than their incandescent equivalents after PSE instant rebate, so we bought enough to replace all the flood lights in the house.
Continue reading "More Compact Fluorescent Goodness"
Posted by dberger at 8:43 PM | Comments (0)
October 13, 2006
New Glasses
Once I decided to punt (again) on Lasik, I started putting off getting new glasses. My prescription hasn't really changed in the last few years (which is why I'm a good candidate for Lasik), so I wasn't exactly in a rush, but one of the lenses in my current pair has gotten scratched to the point that I'm seeing the scratches, so it was clearly time.
Continue reading "New Glasses"
Posted by dberger at 2:31 PM | Comments (0)
October 8, 2006
Rated "V" for Vah-vah-vah-voom
Last night Dawnise and I did a double feature of local theater - first the Edge Improv, which performs each month on the first Saturday, and then - after a brief intermission - we caught The Atomic Bombshells burlesque show as part of this seasons "After Dark" series.
Continue reading "Rated "V" for Vah-vah-vah-voom"
Posted by dberger at 11:45 AM | Comments (1)
October 7, 2006
Norton Anti-Virus Sucks
Since purchasing Dawnise's Notebook a little over a year ago, we'd been fighting an on-and-off battle with it not reliably resuming from suspend. Google revealed nothing, Dell tech support was useless, and we had just basically decided that suspend/resume was beyond it's capacity.
On it's one year anniversary, the included Norton Anti-Virus subscription expired. I uninstalled it and replaced it with AVG's free personal anti-virus offering, and suddenly, lo-and-behold, the machine has a near-perfect track record for resuming from suspend.
Conclusion: NAV sucks.
Posted by dberger at 3:02 PM | Comments (1)
October 6, 2006
Dark Tide
Few people I've spoken to are even aware of the Boston Molasses flood. I first learned of it whilst reading a book on the Rum trade, and since then it had become something of a fascination of mine.
I was only slightly surprised when our neighbors Dave and Marcia, who hail from New England, mentioned it during dinner conversation, and was very pleased when she mentioned she had a book on the subject.
Having now read said book, I'm not sure the event was really documented well enough to support the near 300 pages, but I'm glad the author wrote it regardless. In my opinion, as an engineer, the story would have been better told from the "failure of engineering" angle, rather than from the "world war and anarchist agitation" backdrop the author chose.
If you've got a particular interest in that period of history, read on, otherwise - don't hold your breath for a movie.
Posted by dberger at 6:18 PM | Comments (0)
October 4, 2006
Random Bits o' the Morning
There was a bomb scare on my ferry ride to work this morning -- apparently a "bald guy with a goatee" made a comment that was overheard by another passenger who took it seriously and took it to a crew member. They decided that all the passengers needed to go to one end of the ferry (I was so tempted to try to get everyone to jump up and down in unison) while they investigated. Not to end it at that, we had to wait for state K-9 units to come on board and do a sweep before we could disembark.
Continue reading "Random Bits o' the Morning"
Posted by dberger at 9:34 AM | Comments (0)