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This is the main blog for Mike McBride Online, where you can keep track of everything I'm in to in one place.
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| Saturday, February 22, 2003
Special Day It isn't quite after midnight yet, but this is a special little message for my wife's birthday on Sunday. 
This particular picture is the essence of what I feel about Angela. It's a picture taken in a beautiful place, on our honeymoon. It shows her being happy, looking classy while also being playful, and looking absolutely beautiful. That's my Angela! I hope you have the best birthday ever sweetheart! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 11:24 PM | 0 comments | 
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About last night Yes I got to spend most of my evening at work! On a Friday night, that rocks, doesn't it? Turns out that late yesterday afternoon two different machines lost network connectivity suddenly. After a few checks of routine things, I eventually made my way to the wiring closet and noticed something wrong right away. In there, we have 2 switches an Intel 510T (24 ports) and a 520T (12 ports). The last grouping of four ports on the 520T had no LED lights anymore. They were completely dead. I tried resetting the switch, I even tried power cycling the switch, but nothing would bring those 4 ports back to life. Eventually I simply re-routed those four connections through the old 3Com switch we had in there, but it's 10Mbps only, so they might notice a slow down or two whiile I figure out what happened to the 520T. I'm thinking some sort of electrical short, but I'm no electrician, and I haven't been able to connect to it using either Intel Device View or telnet. It's refusing connections now, which can't be a good sign. On Monday I guess I'll be hooking up my laptop to the console port and see if I can get a look at the error log and see what might be going on with it. I think I might even be searching for the paperwork on the purchase to see about the warranty information too. :( Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 10:14 AM | 0 comments |
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Friday, February 21, 2003
It makes my head spin.. Yesterday I spent probably two hours discussing a change that we're doing at work. In layman's terms, one of our employees is moving into a newly created position with another entity that is a "partner" of ours. He'll work for them, but still be our employee, work out of our offices and have an email address on our domain. But, it's not that simple, because his current boss wants emails addressed to him that involve our business as opposed to thier business to automatically be forwarded to someone within our business, and his new boss wants him to be "fenced off" from our business, so he's not to have network access or access to our internal email system, just the internet address and internet access. Of course you also have to factor in that they will now have two employees working in our building, with one PC. Make sense? Now consider that I have to create a new address for him, so his old address can be forwarded internally, but the new address can't go into effect until the switch over date. The other person who is working for them is on vacation until a week after this switch over date, and he needs access to her email to deal with information about an upcoming event they are having, but he doesn't actually work for them yet, she has the one laptop that belongs to them with her, so he needs to use our PC to access that stuff, yet still have it available for her when she returns, because by then, he'll be on vacation. Thus far I've accomplished that by setting up an OE profile on his current PC to get a copy of her email, leaving the email on the server so they'll all go to her when she returns. I'll then setup two different profiles on their laptop for their email, at least until they actually get a second one. I''ll create the new account for him on the switch over day and forward the old account at the same time. Of course, if she has the laptop then I don't know what he's going to use until she returns, but that's not really my problem. :) This should take care of everything they need, internet email wise. The real problems are going to come into play when he no longer has a internal mail account and decides he still wants to be updated on things that normally are just sent to the Postoffice Address list. (Keep in mind we're using Microsoft Mail internally and connect to our ISP's mail server for internet email, we don't exactly have a bunch of features and options on this aged beast..) So that was two hours out of my life, and we haven't even really started discussing the potential of buying himself a new laptop and configuring it properly, and what all he'll need on this new laptop. I imagine that conversation will be even more time out of my life. You know, it's not the technology that makes things complicated, it's the people trying to use it. :) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 11:49 AM | 0 comments |
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Thursday, February 20, 2003
And another thing.. Oh, by the way, there's some stuff in Newsmonster that has some real promise. Both the integration with a PDA, and the Distributed Reputation System, which is not currently available, sound pretty interesting. I haven't tried to integrate with the PDA, because that's going to tie up some resources and disk space that I don't have time to get into right now, but it could prove pretty interesting if you use your PDA to store webpages for offline reading. (I don't really do that much right now.) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 12:35 PM | 0 comments |
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Projects Last night's projects, while staying up to watch the Islanders shutout the Sharks 3-0, (whoo hoo!) included downloading a copy of Newsmonster and upgrading the Red Hat 7.1 Workstation to 8.0. On the Red Hat front, I still haven't found a solution to the network card problem on the server edition of Red Hat, but for now, and to at least begin the learning curve with Linux, I updated the workstation, with a network card that works, to 8.0. I'm still planning on grabbing an old network card out of something else, but this will get me started down that road while I wait for time to do that! The initial impressions of Newsmonster are mostly good. It does the job and it integrates with Mozilla nicely. The ability to archive a feeds history is nice, as is the one-click toggle for full content. On the down side, if you enable that article caching I was talking about, it can be a bit of a resource hog while it's aggregating, at least during the initial startup, and the ad-supported free version does some pretty annoying things with splash pages. It's not exactly clear how to get it uninstalled either, but then I didn't look very hard. I was due for a new version of Mozilla anyway, so I just uninstalled the whole browser and downloaded a fresh, newer version. A System Restore or GoBack type program would also probably do the trick, but, like I said, it was an excuse to upgrade to 1.2.1 or even 1.3 Beta if you're daring like that. :) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:00 AM | 0 comments |
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Wednesday, February 19, 2003
More good stuff Reading Ben Hammersley led me to the just released NewsMonster which is yet another news aggregator! I might have to give this one a try. It works with Mozilla and uses Java, so it will work in any OS, and it claims to render most major news sites, even if they don't have an RSS feed. It also caches full articles for offline reading. We might have to give that a try on the laptop to see how well it works. Picked up from Dave, is Microsoft getting into the Blog-tool business? Anyone know more about this "Community Starter Kit"? Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 1:05 PM | 0 comments |
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He's a coding fool.. OK, good night's sleep last night, mood much better, let's get to blogging! :) The coding fool I'm talking about, by the way is Josh, aka nf0. In the last few days he's written a couple of really useful scripts, eBayTools, which lets you "take a list of items, search ebay, and create an RSS feed with the results", and MtForums which "will grab the latest topics from the Movable Type forums and convert them to RSS for consumption in your favorite aggregator." Both look really useful, I may have to add them to my ever-growing to do list! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:07 AM | 0 comments |
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Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Blog day off... I did make it to work today, although the "grand efforts" of the City of Columbus snow removal teams were not exactly impressive this morning. At noon yesterday they were discussing the "total concentration of their efforts" in trying to clear the roads in the vicinity of downtown. I would hate to have seen what the roads would have looked like this morning near my workplace without that total concentration! As for the rest of my day, I'll be working. I tried catching up on some blogs this morning but, frankly, most of what I read was complete crap. I'd be much better served if I kept my proverbial mouth shut and went about my own life instead of commenting on some of the stupid things I've read today. So excuse me and my bad mood for not posting much today. :) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 10:08 AM | 0 comments |
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Monday, February 17, 2003
How was your day? Here's some pictures to show you what things around here are like today. It's probably a good thing we both had today off work for President's Day, there's no way we would have made it. Especially not when you consider the one car that could handle the snow better is in the shop! Great timing! Of course, the shop called this morning to let me know it was fixed, but I think getting out there to pick it up was out of the question today. Hopefully tomorrow! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 7:20 PM | 0 comments |
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AAArgh!!! So today, the download site is finally working, and after getting the new drivers and even getting the updated kernel (2.4.18-24) for Red Hat 8.0, the network card still doesn't work! All I get is a "device does not seem to be present" error whenever I try to start the network on eth0. The integrated ethernet works fine in Windows. So I guess I'm going to have to find another network card somewhere that'll work in Linux for me, unless I'm completely missing something. :( Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 2:13 AM | 0 comments |
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