The Many Faces of Mike McBride

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Friday, August 02, 2002

Lunchtime leisure

Spent a little time today adding a couple of products from the "Back to School" line over at the One Man IT Department store. I'm not completely sold on the image on the briefcase, but the cooler looks excellent, and it's even on sale right now! I might work on a different image for the briefcase, and a few other items, tonight when I am home and have access to the graphics software. There are some other things in the backpack/messenger bag area that need a different size or different coloration of the logo. We'll see if I can come up with anything useful on my own, or whether I have to wait for Angela to get back home. :)

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I work too hard

Picture this, it's 11:45PM, the wife is soundly sleeping, I'm well on my way, when I hear my pager. It's the work voice mail system paging me to let me know someone left me a voice mail. Someone leaving me a voice mail at 11:45PM cannot possibly be a good thing. I get up, go downstairs and call in. It's a message from Ameritech, who were supposed to test our voice T1 Wednesday night, they just now (11:45 Thursday night!) tested it and found there to be a problem, and they need me to call them back and give them the ok to dispatch a field tech to look at our cabling. I do that, I'm now wide awake, and it's after midnight. After about an hour of watching TV and playing travel Yahtzee (including the new family high score of 514!) I finally wind back down and go to bed. I'm going to be wearing out a path between my office and the coffee pot this morning.

The tech should be out before lunch. Update: The tech was out, but he's going to have to take down the whole phone system for a little while to locate the exact problem. They'll be back after 3, but hopefully before 5. The office is closing at 3 today for the company summer outing, which I wasn't going to anyway, but I had hoped to get out to the Irish Festival at some point tonight. Here's hoping this doesn't turn into an all-night project. Update #2: Phone company tech got here around 4, switched out the card on our end, drove out to the central station and switched out the card there, drove back and checked all the cable pairs, pronounced their set of problems as fixed, but also pronounced that the cable testers were still getting some other errors, being generated by our internal system. So it may not actually be fixed, we shall have to see if the intermittent problems persist next week. I made it out of the office around 8PM, which isn't too late to still catch Black 47's set at the festival, but I'm tired so I'm blowing it off. I'll catch them and the Saw Doctors tomorrow.

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Thursday, August 01, 2002

Morning news

Here's why the copyright police are dangerous, not because they want to protect copyright, but because they want to protect copyright above any other right. So you wind up with situations like this. An innocent home movie of someone's cats get's red-flagged and deleted by a hosting company because they think it might be copyrighted material. That's right, it's just deleted, no opportunity for the person to prove that he created the material, and, I assume, no official copyright complaint, he's presumed guilty of copyright theft and his stuff is taken down. If/when Hollywood gets the ability to hack PC's and P2P networks, how many of your legal files are going to be lost when they assume it's not legal and delete it? Do you think the copyright Gestapo is going to take the time to find out whether you've made your own movies, music, photos, and even writing? They'll have legal cover to simply delete everything that you make publicly accessible, all in the name of protecting copyrights. Update: Apparently the host took it down because it was "streaming media" and they don't allow any streaming, not over a copyright issue. Still, it's going to happen, your files are going to be removed and you'll have to prove they aren't violating copyright, in clear contrast to the Constitutional protection from unreasonable searches and seizures.

Eric Norlin has an interview with the technical director of Palladium. Interesting stuff, but like David Weinberger says in his pointer to the interview, "technical directors don't make marketing decisions at Microsoft." So we'll still have to wait and see whether they make the tech available to other platforms.

James Jarrett has been thinking about community and where he fits in, or where his blog fits in. I've been thinking about that too, but haven't had time to sit down and write out all of my thoughts on that one. I do feel that this blog sort of skirts the perimeter of several communities, none of which it fully penetrates. My traffic comes from a few different "communities", at least communities that I think I can define to myself, but that traffic does not include an overwhelming majority of the people in those communities. Some posts are interesting to part of my audience, while others are more interested in different topics. More on this later, but what are your thoughts about weblog communities?

Angela has discovered the ease of the Web Album Generator and has been putting up albums like a mad woman! I might have to install this sucker on the laptop so I can setup easy albums at Gnomedex.

Speaking of photos, she'll be spending the weekend at a family reunion of sorts in West Virginia, while I will be attending the Irish Festival here in town. We only have one digital camera. Looks like I'll be breaking out the film for any band pics I want to take, eh? Call me greedy, but I think we each should have our own digital cam..:)

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Wednesday, July 31, 2002

One of those days

So, there I was, settling in after the telephone debacle at work, popping open my copy of Amphetadesk in yet another attempt to get somewhat caught up on my tech news and tech blog reading, when the browser opened up with a bizarre error message about something HASH being outside the allowable array for use in template/default/index.html, (No, not that kind of hash either! *L*) where my news channels should have been listed. Oh damn, what happened? I checked all my Amphetadesk files and settings and everything seemed to be ok. No problem, let me just grab the zip file and go back to the original files, keeping a copy of mychannels.opml. Maybe I screwed something up. Open it up with the original files, and everything seems to be ok, replace the default mychannels.opml with the one I had been using and wham, there it is again. Obviously, one of the channels is causing a problem here, but which one? No hints in the log files. The only way to get it running properly again was to start from scratch and add each channel until I found which one caused the error. Eventually I did find the culprit, it actually caused the program to shutdown when I tried to add the feed. Just put in the URL, clicked "Add this channel" and blip, there went the entire program. Odd, odd behavior.

I don't know what the folks at Privacy Digest did to their feed, but my aggregator really didn't like it at all.

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The case of the mysterious tied-up telephone lines.

I only thought I was going to be researching those telephone company contracts today. I was partially right. I am dealing with both our telephone equipment vendor and the local telephone company, but not about the data T1, it's the voice T1 that's throwing fits. Monday we had a short period of time where no one could dial out, and then again today it happened, a couple of times. Every outgoing call rang busy, because it wouldn't pick up an outside line. Now since the busy signal came in after you dialed the number, I suspected the telephone company, but I know from prior experience that they are going to ask us to check the internal equipment first, so we called that company. After lecturing me about the fact that we have all our calls going through the T1 circuit with no copper backup, (Excuse me? Your company sold it to us that way, and installed it that way! I'm not a telephone systems expert, that why we hired you to handle it!) he informed me that he checked all of our internal stuff and it all seems to be working, and that he called Ameritech and got them to open up a trouble ticket on it. They'll be testing it after hours tonight.

And yes, he redeemed himself by calling Ameritech and handling that for us, because that saved me a lot of time and effort, as anyone who has ever called them for technical support can tell you!

Also, before anyone suggests that maybe all the available lines are tied up, there are 24 channels on a T1 circuit, we have 23 employees, 2 fax machines and a 4 port voice mail, for a maximum of 29 users (30 if I'm dialed into the telephone database system through a direct modem connection, which I wasn't.), the chances of 24 of those 29 all being in use at the same time are ridiculously low. There is obviously something wrong, hopefully they'll find it tonight. Either way, I'm tired of telephone companies, and the contracts are still sitting right on top of my to-do basket. *sigh*

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Reading with my coffee

Finally a day without fires to put out, maybe I can get caught up on the tech happenings around the 'net this week:

Windows 2000 SP3 is available. As Josh says in his pointer to it, there's not much info on exactly what it does, so I'll be following my normal "wait and let someone else be the guinea pig" philosophy on installing it. Of course we aren't running 2000 at work anyway so the only place I need to worry about it is on my laptop. So it's hardly vital to me.

Dwight, aka Geek has managed to get posts from the weekend up all at once while he awaits the installation of cable internet access at his new place. Like I'm not having a hard enough time keeping up, he's got to go and dump a truckload of back posts in at once! Sheesh! Seriously, I'm glad he's been able to keep "connected" to his blog while waiting for the mental giant that is the cable company. :)

Speaking of keeping connected, Jevon, who had to take all of Blogtrack with him in the process of switching servers, seems to be close to being back. His blog address now redirects to http://www.angstyblog.com/, which simply has a logo and no entries yet, but I'm guessing we'll all be changing our links in the near future. Blogtrack also has a notice that it is on the new server and should be operational again shortly. Good news!

I also got word that my friend Jen and her new baby Amelia were featured in the local newspaper (registration required unfortunately!). Amelia was the first baby born in the brand new Stork's Nest Birthing Center. How cool is it going to be to grow up and always have a newspaper article about your birth available to look at?

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to those telephone company T1 service contracts that I was researching last week. (Yeah, so exciting!)

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Tuesday, July 30, 2002

I knew this would happen

I knew someday that having the one person who works at the company that donates their internet connection to us and understood how it was setup, leave was going to cause problems. Turns out the reason we couldn't connect to the email server is that they changed the internal IP address of the mail server to a subnet that we couldn't reach, because they didn't bother to include our subnet when configuring their routers. Turns out we're running on a subnet that they thought didn't exist anymore, but it does, it's our subnet, as part of their network! So not only did they neglect to give me the new address of the email server, which we need since we don't have an internal DNS server on our network, but even when I had the new address, their network addressing and routing scheme made it impossible for me to reach it anyway!

Finally around 3PM, they called me, and a few tracert's later, we had things routed properly, including adding a temporary routing that will get it working immediately at the old server address while we update all the clients to use the new address.

At least, once I knew the problem was on their end, and opened a support ticket, I was able to go do that new employee training that needed to be done. Well, at least the part that I can do right now, some of it will have to wait until the other people leave at the end of this week, and I have a PC I can setup for her to use! My normally-extra PC is currently being used by the intern they have upstairs this summer. I think I need an intern!

Fun, fun, fun...

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More tech woes

Yesterday was almost an entire day trudging through the world of faulty DNS records, broken telephone cords, unexplained inability to dial outside, which just as suddenly started working again, a lost internet connection that kept me from updating our website database, and various other semi-emergencies. I was so busy putting out fires that when 3PM came around, and with the AC still not working, they sent us all home, I hadn't managed to do any training with the new employee that started yesterday.

So today, with all relevant fires put out, and other issues at least moved out of my hands, I looked forward to getting that training done early. Unfortunately, I was greeted this morning by an inability to connect to our ISP's mail server. Back to firefighting mode. Where did I put the hose? :)

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Monday, July 29, 2002

Reading over lunch

Getting a small chance to play catch up while I eat lunch, since Angela went home sick. (The heat in the building has reached a point of making her nauseous, maybe it's time to send everyone home!)

Phil's got a list of ways to surf blogs at random:

NextBlog! gives you a random recently updated Blogger-powered blog.

random blog gives you a random blog from the blo.gs database (not necessarily recently updated).

RandomFreshBlog is my version of the weblogs.com version of NextBlog! that Dave wants - I'm using the blo.gs changes.xml file rather than the weblogs.com version, since blo.gs's file is a superset of weblogs.com's.

Following those should be a fun way to find more blogs, if I ever find the time! :)

Blogrolling.com has new Blogroll Me! feature. (thanks to Useless Miscellany for the head's up!)

Today is Doc's 55th birthday. Hope it's a good one! I'm looking forward to hearing him at Gnomedex next month!

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So much for getting caught up.

Seems our ISP started filtering email over the weekend for "adult language". One day in and they're already blocking legitimate email to us. Heck our freakin' Webtrends reports were blocked. I hate filters, and this is why. It'll block way more legitimate email than it will catch "adult" email, and either way, it's not worth the hassle. Excuse me, I'll be busy screaming at some people the rest of the day, I think.

On top of that, the Air Conditioning isn't working either, so I'm hot in more ways than one!

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Sunday, July 28, 2002

It's a go!

Finally felt well enough today to make the trip out to the Apple Store with Angela to look into getting her eMac. We get there and take a look at the one model of eMac that they have, which was basically what she wanted with some customizations, like upgrading the RAM and installing the Airport card. Turns out that if you want any customizations done to the model, you have to order it online. They don't do any in-store customizations? Sorry, but that's lame. I could expect that from a Best Buy or CompUSA store, but from an Apple Store? They do have free classes though, so Angela and I might drop in for one of those sessions to get familiar with using it. We may not actually learn anything, but it's free so it's worth the time to try it out.

Anyway, we ordered the Mac and it should be ready to ship in 3-5 days!

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Recovering

Spent most of today in bed, again. I finally got hungry and ate something around 5 this afternoon, that seemed to go fairly well and I've spent the rest of the evening getting hungry after not really keeping anything down for almost two days. That's a good sign, right? :)

Anyway, I'm way behind on a number of things, so not much to say here. I'll try and get some things caught up again during the week and have some useful information to post then! Enjoy your Sunday!

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