My little niece went to the store with her mom, who let her pick out her own tree this year. She chose the exact one she wanted, then picked out exactly the ornaments she wanted to hang on the tree. With the help of her mom, who is big enough to reach the top of the tree, she placed all the ornaments exactly where she wanted them. No haphazard operation, as she was very precise in where each item should go and how it should be hung.

In case you were wondering, she really likes pink.

She has assured me that the box hanging on the tree contains no spiders (or as she says "phiders"). She keeps those (little plastic ones left over from Halloween) in a completely different box. Just ask, she'll show you.

Happy Thanksgiving to everybody and I hope you have things to be thankful for. It's been a rough year for lots of folks in more ways than I can count and I hope things get better soon if you're having a bad time.

You find something that makes you think life might not be the horrific collection of terrible things strung together by disheartening and soul crushing let-downs that it appears to be.

This kid is good. He has that "something" in music that makes you stop and listen. I can only describe it as "passion". You hear it when people play that truly, deep down, LOVE to play. The kind of people that you know might not ever be famous or make a dime off of their talent, but they'll keep playing anyway, because they just love it. (at least that's what it sounds like to me) Enjoy this one, even if you don't follow Daft Punk, and check out some of his other stuff on Youtube. The cover of "I Gotta Feeling" by the Black Eyed Peas is pretty freaking awesome. Especially if you watch him through the whole process of building up the loops for the first couple of minutes of the video, that's a lotta work.

Cinnamon. Nutmeg.

These two things are now officially off limits within arms reach of me. Bring me anything with either of them in any detectable amounts and I'll be civilized enough to give you the one warning. Then I'll physically do very bad things to you and possibly everybody around you. Then I'll really let you know how I feel about it.

Seriously.

Last straw came this afternoon while eating a chocolate frosted cupcake that friends packed up for me from the party last night. It was in a ziplock bag with two pieces of pumpkin bread something or another muffin looking things. I noticed the small of the cinnamon/nutmeg duo as I opened the bag to retrieve said cupcake, but didn't really pay it any mind.

Until I bit into the cupcake.

It reeked of cinnamon and nutmeg which had oozed into it from the pumpkin bread things. Nasty.

I like pumpkin flavored stuff. Pies, bread, muffins, etc. I also like sweet potatoes as well as the usual sweet potato pie and so forth. Baked sweet potatoes rock in an amazing way if you've never had one. Until somebody decides that these things just aren't "festive" or "gourmet" enough for people to enjoy unless they reek of bottles worth of cinnamon and nutmeg, that is. It's nasty. It's vile and foul tasting. Stop it.

Why can't you just let pumpkins and sweet potatoes taste, well, like pumpkin and sweet potatoes?

It goes to the whole human predilection to think we can improve on everything for some unknown reason. "Oh, if the recipe says it'll taste great like this, well, I can add something and make it better! I know! Spices! Those always make it better."

No, no it doesn't make it better. Just like Hollywood doesn't do a movie "better" the second or third time around. Car chases don't make for better cinema, it doesn't help things to airbrush the guns out of their hands or put in gratuitous scenes filled with now available CGI crap just because you can. These things, they just make it noisier. More spices don't make it better, just noisier in a culinary sense. Learn to project an image or a taste with a simple, clean presentation. As for the extra just-because-we-can garbage, Quit it. Stop it now. Sometimes, things really don't need to be your vision of "better". They are pretty darned good as they are.

Or at the very least, if you're one of those visionaries, keep it away from me. Or there will be an incident.

I've been in NOVA (Northern Virginia) all week, just a couple miles outside Dulles Airport working at the cable office up here. Customer has some strange-ish needs in the design and engineering areas, which I have been taking care of. The thing is they really want somebody from our company in their office full time, and we aren't going to be able to bring that person in until first of the year, so I'm here. I'll be making the drive up pretty much every week, staying a few days, then driving back Friday or Saturday for the duration. So far they're pretty happy having me around, and lots of little things are being done that normally took far longer since I'm right in the office, just a desk or two away. I get along with them and fit in with the office environment, so it's a good fit.

Works for them, works for my company. I get to be just outside DC for the foreseeable future. Somehow that seems to be working out less for one third of that equation than the others. Unfortunately, I seem to be uniquely good at dealing with difficult jobs and customers with unusual requirements, so here I am. Yay for being good at stuff?

We were having a family dinner thing at Mom and Dad's tonight, when my niece turned toward her mother/my sister and gave her the "one eyebrow raised" look (think "The Rock", but smaller and blonde, usually wearing something pink). It completely came out of the blue, and was absolutely untaught, as nobody in my immediate family, nor my BIL can do even do the eyebrow thing besides me. On top of that, she nails you with the eyebrow raise so perfectly, so absolutely and with conviction you would swear she's been giving people that look for far more years than she has been around. Seriously, she's so good at it, you find yourself starting to question the validity of whatever you just said to her that earned you the look.

She can raise either eyebrow at will, and alternate between them for dramatic effect as she needs to. She gains teh awesomeness each and every day.

I was securing some algae to the side of the tank in the office for the snails to supplement what naturally grows in the tank, and the little clown fish took a good nip at my hand. Luckily, he's (I have no idea if it's a he or a she, they pretty much look the same as far as I know) still small and they don't have sharp teeth, so it was just a quick pinch on the soft part of the skin just between my first and second knuckle. Enough to make me pull my hand out of the water quickly, though.

He's always been the type to nip and nibble at you when you're messing around in the tank, but lately it's been more of a tiny frenzy, and quite aggressive. Of course, I probably would be the same way if a giant appendage suddenly appeared in my house and pasted a giant sheet of seaweed to the wall, but it was still a bit of a surprise. I had to go to the break room and grab a small paper plate to hold between the clown and my hand while I finished messing around with the suction cup thing holding the algae. The fish just started attacking the plate, then when it was gone went after the algae sheet.

Clowns and their cousins the damsels are very territorial and protective of their little piece of ocean reef, so maybe that's the explanation. (scuba divers get nipped at by the little fish far more often than the big ones) Or maybe he's just pissed off for some reason.

Just got a set of pics from my sister of my Niece at the local Renn Fair. My niece got to ride an elephant (an actual, live one), talk to a lady with a pet dragon on her shoulders and then had a conversation with the Queen, where she was presented with a ring as a gift from Her Majesty. Quite a full day for such a small person.

An audience with the Queen

Elephant ride

Lady with a dragon

Rides

More conversations with Royalty

She's now done something I've never done, ride an elephant. Two and a half and she's one up one me. Harumph.

Finally got all my new PC parts together in one spot and began the assembly process. This is probably the brazillionth PC I've put together (for better or worse, work home and family), so I was pretty much none too excited about the process. I spent an abnormal amount of time researching parts, even for me, since this is my first new home desktop for me in several years. The concept of replacing my trusty desktop is not trivial, so I wanted to get pieces I could live with. A lot of time was spent on the Newegg and Tiger Direct sites to say the least.

A couple of pieces I am really thrilled with are the case and power supply. I like a no-frills case and PSU, and ones that are easy to work on, uncluttered and rugged. This is a lot to ask unless you have a large budget to work with, which I don't.

First the PSU - I looked at a bunch of brands on the web, but there were so many with multiple DOA reviews, even though the majority were good. Some had set motherboards on fire, some had exploded, but most had a significant number of people that simply got a dead unit. I really hate to RMA stuff because it;s a hassle and it wastes time. Finally Newegg had one that popped up in a search without a single DOA review.

OCZ Fatal1ty 550 Watt

It's named after a gamer guy (I'm not a gamer, so I have no clue who he is, but he's more famouser than me so who am I to argue) and has a red LED in the fan, but I will overlook that. It's a gorgeous black finish with a monstrous fan that is pretty much the size of the bottom of the supply case. It's massive, seriously. The thing is absolutely silent, too, which is nice since the old desktop I currently have is louder than most small planes. It's also a modular supply, meaning that all but the motherboard power cables detach from the supply with plugs, so you only fill the case with the cables you need. Nice. The cables are also wrapped in a nice black braid covering which looks nice and keeps things from flopping around in the case. It has provisions for 6 SATA devices, 4 regular 4-pin Molex connectors, 6 and 8 pin MB connectors and two graphics card power connectors if you run SLI video cards. All that and the cables come in a handy nylon bag with a zipper, so that any cables not being used can be stored nice and neat.

The case - I'm not fashion plate, but I like a nice simple, well designed case. Again I spent a ridiculous amount of time researching and reading reviews. Lots of DOA and damaged cases inside undamaged boxes along with cut fingers and easily bent frames. Finally, one came to the top of the pile:

Gigabyte Triton 180

This case is unbelievable. Honestly. For the price you get a solidly built, well designed, BIG, pretty case with a lot of really nice features. The front panel is aluminum, not plastic. Even the drive knockouts are aluminum. The case comes with two 120mm fans (one front one rear), room for umpteen drives and a wide open interior that has more than enough room to work and deal with drives and components without being cramped. The case is about as tool-less as any I've seen with nice, snug and actually functional drive rails. DVD and HDD slipped into place and didn't move. Nice. The HDD rails have rubber rings around the mounting pins to help deal with vibrations. The fans are even rubber mounted for vibration control (and they are silent as well). Cables are plenty long, and the system fans are "Y"'d together so you only need one MB connector for the two, and the cables are zip-tied to the case for you, so you don't have to. All this and not a single cut finger after assembly. Very nice.

The motherboard os a Gigabyte (always have had good luck with Gigabyte stuff) Gigabyte GA-MA785GPM-US2H

Seems to be a good board with the features I wanted. Since I'm not a gamer. I can use a milder board, but it's gotta be able to run AutoCad and related software, and this one seems to be enough to do that. I paired it up with the Athlon X2 that came as part of the builder kit deal from Newegg. We'll see if it does what it promises.

The only disappointment so far has been the hard drive. Seagate Barracuda 7200.12. It appears to be DOA, emitting a soft "meep meep meep" then silence on boot up. Guess I get to RMA it after all. Feh.

The case rocks, and I would completely recommend it to anybody looking for a large-ish case. The power supply will wait for a while, but it appears to be right on the money for the 10 minutes or so I have run it (voltages all look correct at least).

Talked with Dad Friday night. He went back to the "rehab" program at the YMCA. He was a bit nervous, obviously, and was waiting to see if he was truly "back to normal" after the hospital business.

He said that his lap count on the walking track was up by half a mile for a total of 1.5 miles, and he upped his exercise bike time by 5 minutes, and felt great the whole time.

He's like a Timex, he's definitely taken his lickings, but come back ticking every time.

Almost enough to make me optimistic or something.

Yeah, boyz! Some Google Maps tech knowledge done got dropped on one o' Mix's hot tracks from da way back, yo!

Peep it, ya know.

My Posse's on Broadway with Goggle Map goodness.

Yeah, another one of those weeks.

Started out really last Friday when my Dad went back into the hospital for some work. What prompted this was that he (after his last heart catheterization a month or so ago) was in a "rehab" program the hospital puts on at the local YMCA. The program involves the usual walking on the track, riding exercise bikes, group exercise time, etc. etc. etc. These activities are all monitored by nurses, several of which my Dad knows from the various doctors he sees on a regular basis. Records are kept of each person and the amount of laps they walk, time on the bikes, and so forth and as they are all heart patients of one type or another, blood pressure and other vitals are watched as well. My Dad had been improving steadily each session over a few weeks, when suddenly he hit some kind of wall and lost ground quickly. Having felt that particular feeling before, he know he needed to see his cardiologist for a diagnosis, and the appointment was quickly arranged. A stress test later and he was scheduled (Friday) for a heart cath to see just what was going on.

Due to the blood thinners he's on, and the nature of the catheterization process (they snake little wires up through your femoral artery directly into the arteries around the heart and poke around to find any blockages) they ended up postponing the work until Monday due to his blood being just a slight bit thinner than they want for proper healing once the pull the tubes out of your leg artery. This is what they did a month or two ago and "fixed" three spots that were blocking up, resulting a major improvement in his overall health.

He went in Monday morning, my Mom and sister were at the hospital for the morning shift, I was going to go over about lunch and relieve my sister. It's a pretty routine procedure nowadays, and there isn't much sense in all of us sitting there all day watching TV in a waiting room. Unfortunately, life does go on even if you want it to stop for a day.

About 8:00 I got a text saying that he was going in and that he should be out in about an hour or so. Then I got a call about 8:30 saying that I needed to get there ASAP. That's never good. Ever.

From what Mom and sis were told, the blockage was about 90% in one of the stents they had placed in an artery during the episode about a month ago. It's something that happens - blood clots at the edge of the stent where it contacts the artery wall, then more clots stick to them, and eventually you have a problem. The cardiologist said that it was severe enough that the balloon procedure to open it back up might be life threatening, and that he might not make it through that. Adding to that he said that the heart motion was severely diminished, and that we could opt to not do the balloon thing, but he might only have 2-6 months after that, or we could try the balloon and he may get a few more years due to the damage to the heart muscle.

It's about a 45 minute drive to the hospital from my office. Try making that drive in the rain, with morning Charlotte traffic after hearing that news. Worst drive ever. I managed to make it about 2/3 there, when I got another text from my sister saying that he was out of surgery and the doctors were practically dancing around the waiting room. It apparently went that well. Believe me, from Dad's descriptions, this cardiologist is not the dancing type, so it must have gone really well to say the least.

That made the remaining drive much easier.

From reports I got later, the doctors were very severe doom and gloom when they asked if we wanted to do the balloon thing. That became dancing, rainbows and puppies very quickly. The doctors made mention several times about my Dad being so active and in otherwise good health, and that was why things had turned out so well.

Dad laid around for a day (you have to for the healing on the leg arteries, they literally strap you to the bed for some of it), then after some red tape nonsense, got moved to the next floor down for a day to make sure tings were going well. As soon as he got downstairs he started walking the halls. From his calculations done by counting ceiling tiles and multiplying for distance, he walked about a mile Tuesday night in the hallways. Next morning he made laps for another mile. The cardiologist came to see him to ask how things were going and after a report of his walking laps, he was sent home.

He's doing well and hasn't really stopped except to sleep at night. He's chasing my niece around all over the place and doing his normal routine without any troubles. He's looking forward to going back to rehab to see if he's back to 100% or if there's some catching up to do on his laps there.

Obviously I'm happy about the way it all turned out even as stressful as it was during the whole thing. What really amazes me is that Dad hasn't once complained or gotten angry or tried to give up a single time during any of this stuff. Amazes me. I've watched people hit with less than half the problems he's had just wither up and die, stop doing anything, turn into frail old people right in front of my eyes. I just hope that when it's my turn I can do it half as well. Not that I'm not fighting it. I'm not fighting as hard as I could be right now due to lots of things, but I'm getting back into that mode. If it's coming to get me (and I know it is, I've seen my genetics and theyr'e not pretty on this front) it's gonna have to take me the hard way, and that's all I got to say about that.

I like this guy. I like him more and more every time he speaks.

I went to the wedding of one of my cousins last night. I wore a suit, which I despise, but that's not why we're here.

The wedding was a nice affair, well done by a local place that has all the stuff that you apparently need for a wedding: Tent, large house for the wedding party to get ready in, gazebo type structure for the ceremony, reception hall, chairs, tables, linens and a carriage and horse to ride you the 100 feet from the house to the gazebo. All for a small (phe)nominal fee, of course.

My cousin married a good guy, with two good kids and I think they'll be very happy. But that's not why we're here.

At the beginning of the ceremony, they played part of a tape (yes, we used tape back in those days children) that my cousin (now around 32 years old) had made of an "interview" with my Grandma way back when my cousin was in school. Probably early high school, but not sure. Grandma talked about how people shared things when she was growing up. If the neighbors needed things, you helped them out. If you needed things the neighbors helped you out. Whether it was vegetables from the garden, milk from the cow, eggs from the chickens, or physical help collecting the milk, eggs, and vegetables, somebody was able to give a hand.

I remember growing up in that spirit and collective "all for one and one for all" environment. People were self sufficient and made their own way in the world, but if you stumbled there was sure to be somebody there that would offer a hand to get you back on your feet. They weren't going to give you a free ride in life, but then you would never have expected one (or accepted it for that matter). It wasn't all fresh milk and rose petals. Life was tough at times, and not every neighbor got along with every other neighbor. I remember squabbles and differences of opinion that escalated well beyond polite front porch conversations. But it still held true that if you fell, somebody was going to give you a hand back up. And you knew you would do the same for them.

It was a mild shock to hear her voice again after all these years (she passed away quite a few years ago) and, sitting there in my dress-up-clothes about to watch my now-grown cousin ride up to a gazebo in a white carriage wearing an over the top gown walk up to said gazebo to be married to a guy in a dark suit, I suddenly found myself going back in time to remember where I learned how to be a civilized human being. Sitting on a front porch in the heat of summer, snapping green beans fresh from the garden, listening and watching people much older and wiser than me.

And that, helping your neighbors whether locally or globally, and being civilized, is indeed why we're here.

To echo my cousin at the end of the tape: I love you Grandma and wish you were here.

Just for the record...

1) The leg issue has been taken care of. A couple weeks away from the simvistatin and the pain disappeared completely. Called the doctor and explained the situation, and that I had stopped taking the statin like everybody says to when you get those symptoms and he called me in a new pill to try. Been taking it for close to two weeks and so far so good. It's another statin, but a different mixture or something (pravastatin, for those taking notes) that hopefully will not create pain down the road.

2) Went for my first bike ride since February today. February was busy at work and freezing cold, March and April were consumed by finishing my machine for work and customer buyoff at the plant, then three weeks in Brazil. Then we began the "Summer of Suck" as I changed jobs, spent time in hotels, generally lost track of life due to family stuff and now we're here. Egads it's scary how out of shape you get and how quickly you get there. At least I work at a place where I can take time at lunch to ride. Maybe I can get back in shape as quick as I fell out of shape?

3) Work is work. Customers aren't making it easy, but I'm doing my thing. I'm good at work. I like work. It's actually the closest thing to a hobby I have it seems. That may be sad, but it is what it is. If I could just work on getting a life, maybe that would be good.

4) My little niece is amazing. She's two and a half now, and talking like a talking machine set on overdrive. She makes up songs, stories and explains the holes in a board my Dad is working on by telling me about the big monster that was biting the wood and making the holes. She only takes one shot at figuring out most anything she wants to find out and once she learns it, it's there for good. I also think she's nuclear powered. Never slows down, never gets tired. Major fun little person.

5) Finally changed the battery in my Polar cycle computer slash heart rate monitor watch. It's an awesome piece of tech/gadgetry and keeps me honest on my bicycle adventures. It started flaking out with my heart rate going from zero (ZOMG! I'm a zombie!) to 250, then back to 20, then hanging around 200 for a bit, lather rinse repeat. The battery was nearly impossible to find (special ordered from a watch repair guy near work), and all the people that use the Polar stuff are scared to death to change the battery for fear of breaking the watch unit. It's not a cheap gadget, and water proof watches are always a big pain to crack open and work on. Turned out to be a bunch of hooplah over not much. Four screws, open the case, pop out battery, replace expensive battery, close case, done. The o-ring never even moved. The unit now reads dead-solid from all the sensors without missing a beat. Nice.

6) Finally pulled the trigger on a some new desktop components for home. My current desktop runs fine, but it;s about 5 years old, which for me is painful. I have the ex-work laptop, but I like to have a desktop for all my personal stuff. Just seems more permanent somehow. I have everything except case and power supply, and a DVD drive. Waiting on Tiger or Newegg to have a good setup on sale. Oh, and Newegg totally rocks. I got the Motherboard, 4 gigs of ram (already have foru gigs sitting around that I got for a steal months ago for a total of eight), a 500 gig HD, reasonably good video card, and dual core CPU for under $250 with free shipping. And it'll be here tomorrow, which is two days total shipping time. Awesome.

6.5) Still deciding on XP64 Pro or Win7-64. Definitely 64 bit to use all eight gigs of ram, if only just because I can. I would go Linux, but I still have to run AutoCad on it, and Autodesk steadfastly remains in the Micro$oft camp. They refuse to make a Linux version of Acad, period. And yes, I am aware of the Linux Cad packages (for free even), but they are not AutoCad, and yes there is a difference, I don't care how "compatible" they are. It's just not the same, I'm sorry. Believe me I desperately would like to tell ADesk where to stick the $4500 they want for the basic Cad package (try pricing any of the specialty packages like Electrical or Mechanical for some sticker shock), and AcadLT doesn't allow Lisp programming, which I have to have for work, so that's right out, but even at a cool grand a seat it's not cheap either. I hear good stuff from friends about Win7, but Vista still has me a bit gun-shy. (I use XP64 Pro at work and really like it, dead stable and runs everything so far except iTunes, and that's just a quick easy hack to make it work) Who knows, maybe I'll give W7 a shot anyway.

I finally seem to be breaking out of whatever funk I was in for the past few months. I'm actually not actively hating life every day, so I hope things will continue to improve. I can;t nail it down to any one thing that started the blues fest, too much was hitting me all at once, but I think the meds had something to do with it and the stress just piled on.

This summer has officially sucked. I absolutely can't really say much for it, except that it sucked.

I'm sure there were some good points in there and maybe one day I'll figure out what a couple of them were, but I'm not really putting a lot into it. Just not worth the effort.

About three or four weeks ago, I seemed to snap out of whatever batch of suckitude was keeping me chained to the couch and I actually started to feel like getting outside again and doing something. I walked past one of the bikes in the hallway and thought to myself, hmmm, I probably should ride one of those again at some point. This came as a shock to me for a couple of reasons:

1) I suddenly realized that I had, for some time, not wanted to ride. I enjoy the bikes and even though I'm no Armstrong, I at least get some pleasure out of my little rides around my area.

And

B) I also suddenly realized that I had not been interested in ANYTHING for quite some time. The events of the summer had just simply drained me beyond my realization.

That's a bit scary on a lot of levels. I know a few folks that read these things deal with real, clinical depression on a regular basis. I feel like I just got a small, tiny, sliver of a peek into your worlds for just a bit. Just enough to gain some understanding of how sneaky a thing the condition can be. My hat goes off to you all for dealing with that on a regular basis, don't know if I could do as well as you do with it.

This led to my most recent doctor visit in which things (for a change) came up pretty rosy in the lab work department. This helped to snap me out of my funk a bit more, and thanks to inertia, I sort of kept the mental ball rolling as it were.

One fly in the proverbial ointment, though. My leg was hurting. Felt like I had pulled my hamstring nicely, although I couldn't for the life of me figure out how. I guessed that it must be my spine out of alignment messing with the sciatic nerve (again), and that usually clears up after a few days of resting the lower back muscles and letting things pop back into place. I limped around for another week before deciding that wasn't it. For one thing, my back didn't feel like it was full of broken glass like it normally does, and second it was going on way too long. After another week of no improvement, I had pretty much figured it wasn't my back, and was on my way to figuring out what else it could be. Lack of any real physical activity ruled out muscle pulls, and having had plenty of those I knew how to make them better. Nothing was working to help the pain, and pretty much any leg motion was feeling like my leg was on fire from my hip to my mid-calf. Not conducive to bicycle related activities, especially, and it was starting to hamper my ability to grocery shop and do normal routine things.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I went to the drag races in Rockingham with my sister and her boyfriend on Friday night. The leg seemed to be fine (fine meaning not painful enough to make me want to lay down on the ground), even with all the walking, and after waking up, Saturday morning was no problem. I assumed I was finally over whatever issues were occurring and went about my usual routine. Saturday afternoon brought some pretty horrendous pain, no matter what I did, what position I was in or what I tried. I pretty much ended up not sleeping the rest of the weekend, plus not eating anything until I had a can of beans Sunday night (forced myself to eat those) and popped more Tylenol than is healthy. Thankfully Sunday night was better and I actually slept a few hours.

Some time during all the Saturday nonsense, I remembered one of the side effects of the cholesterol medicine I take is muscle pains. Both my parents had them when they started taking the statins, and had to move to something else to get rid of the pain. Some people have a mild reaction and a few aches, and some more severe pains. I stopped taking the statin Saturday night. After a few days the pain was receding quite nicely. Now a week later I am back to walking normally for the most part and there's only a slight ache in my hip when I stand for a long time. I'm thinking I found the culprit, and will confirm that with the doctor sometime this week and see about switching medicine to something a bit less painful.

Don't really know where all this is leading, but I feel like I'm still coming out of whatever fog had me stumbling around blind for the past few months. It makes me more than a bit angry that I pretty much blew my summer on a couch doing as little as possible, but I can't really do anything about that now. My leg is almost healed up (or at least doesn't feel like it's on fire any more) so the bike thing can happen again. That's a start, any way.

For posterity sake:

Got Japanese-ish food from Mt. Fuji Express (little Japanese fast-food type place just down the road from the office) for dinner last night. Opened the fortune cookie, and after learning the Chinese word for potato (I wonder of that's Cantonese or Mandarin?), flipped over to read the following in simple, tiny, plain font:

Don't Panic.

Best fortune cookie EVAR.

Now to grab my towel.

The newest (visible) inhabitant of my little office reef, a Chocolate Clownfish. A variety of the normal ornage clown, it's a dark brown color with an orange chin and white stripes. As it swims up near the lights, you can see orange bleed through the brown for an interesting color effect, but he;s mostly brown and white.

Very friendly fish, and he takes note when you walk into the office and watches you during the day. These guys can actually be trained a bit to interact with the humans on the outside of the tank. Makes you wonder who's watching who some days.

Just for inventory I also put in a coral banded shrimp and two peppermint shrimp to join the hermit crab and the emerald crab already in the water.

Next step: Corals!


Coral banded shrimp:
http://www.liveaquaria.com/product/prod_display.cfm?c=497+2857+698&pcatid=698

Peppermint shrimp:
http://www.liveaquaria.com/product/prod_display.cfm?c=497+2857+701&pcatid=701

I was in the office today (yes, I realize it's a holiday, but some things are best done without an audience if for no other reason than me avoiding having to hide the bodies of people trying to "help" me) working on the venerable old telephone machine that runs the phone system in our office.

Seems the hard drive in the old beast gave up sometime between Friday evening and Saturday morning, effectively silencing our phones until repairs can be made. I stopped by Best Buy this morning to pick up an IDE drive to go in the machine, and was soundly greeted with dull looks from the staff when I asked for a plain IDE, not a SATA drive. I was repeatedly referred to the website, to which I repeatedly responded that I wanted one today, not in a few days. Besides if I'm ordering from the web, it would be from somebody else entirely.

Happily I scrounged up an old Western Digital 15 Gig (yes, you read that correctly and I did not leave off a zero, that's fifteen gigabytes of whopping storage, 14.something after formatting) and was able to at least get the old thing band-aided back into life. Of course we have to reconfigure all the trunk lines and extensions and voice mail wave files, but that's just some time tomorrow morning.

The system, for those playing at home, consists of two AltiGen Triton boards allowing for 4 incoming POTS trunk lines and 16 outgoing extensions from the PC itself. It's been a totally reliable and bullet proof system now for about 8 years, and I would recommend Altigen to anybody looking for a DIY PBX style system. Of course they went VoIP a while back, but I think you can still get analog POTS stuff from them as well.

The real beauty of this system is the fact that it has run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for 99.9% of the 8 years it has been in service. On an original Athlon 800 MHz (yes, again that's megahertz, and that's the card edge socket A CPU thanks, no pansy-ass ZIF socket for this PC) with a mindcrushing 256 megs of RAM zipping along at 100 MHz. It's an awesome thing to be in the presence of such power. All of this on Windows 2000 Pro. Without any real hiccups. For 8 years.

Oh, and when the pipes burst in the old office it was sitting in about two inches of water overnight. Without stopping. The bottom couple of inches of motherboard as well as the two Triton phone boards were submerged for several hours. After we let them dry in the sun, they started up like nothing had ever happened.

All in all losing the hard drive isn't as bad as it could have been. Those Triton boards? 16 bit ISA card sockets. No PCI versions at the time we bought them. Tried finding a motherboard with an ISA slot or two anywhere lately for a backup? It's not easy. I haven't really looked, but I can figure it's going to be a fun day on Google for that item. The other option is to find the new phone boards and drivers from Altigen to move to PCI. Can't wait to get the price on those jewels, those ISA boards were not cheap back in the day. Plan B is to check out building an Asterisk setup. Really nice PBX type systems that can be built with off-the shelf parts and open source software. Linux and Asterisk and some phone cards, oh my. Main thing is we've got to get a back up machine ready. My experience is that once something fails on a PC this old, something else is not far behind and if that something is motherboard related, we are in a bad way. I'd rather be ready in advance instead of trying to slam something together by the seat of my pants, even if I am a fully certified Pants Seat Flyer. It's another "hide the bodies of the people trying to 'help' me thing". It's getting harder and harder to hide those things.

First it was California outlawing my car (although I like the rebel mystique that gives me - "You know, I can't actually drive my car into California, we'll have to stop at the border unless you want to be an outlaw *rakish grin*.)

Brazil fingerprinted me and now Australia has it in for me. On the other hand though, I have managed to move from states to large South American countries to a whole country/island continent in the past year, so I got that going for me, which is nice. Heaven help me if I ever end up in Antarctica for some reason, who knows what will happen.

I got an email from United offering vacation packages to various places. One of these places was Australia, which is a place I have always wanted to go. Naturally I was interested. I checked out the link and saw the package in question was a 12 night stay, including hotels and rental car. The basic thing was 3 nights in Sydney to see the sights, you pick up a rental car and drive toward Melbourne for a few days with lodging arranged along the way (or you could get vouchers to pick your own places to stay along the way if you wanted), then hang out in Melbourne for a few days before winging your way home.

Awesome package, and one I have previously tried to devise for myself, possibly involving a motorcycle rental instead of car. Kickass is what that would be! Anyway, I perused the prices, and was shocked to see $850 American. Wow that's not bad, even if airfare was extra (it was extremely discounted airfare so it was a pretty good deal regardless). Then I saw the "single supplement" which I have seen on many Aussie vacation packages. Usually a couple hundred bucks extra assessed to your wretched, horrid, miserable soul for the unspeakable crime of being a single person. This one was $850 bucks! Unreal! If you happen to be single, pretty much you get to pay for a second person regardless of your travel pal being your imaginary friend. That's pretty nuts, Australia.

Why do you hate me, mate?