So I’ve been watching a bit of “Americas Got Talent” the last week or two.. and tonight, I stumbled across some of the videos on YouTube for “Britain’s Got Talent” from earlier this month.
This one I ended up in tears afterwards.
This one I ended up with “goosepimples” and tears with as well.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to consider what “America” thinks is Talent.
I think I’m moving to the Britain.
Around 1pm today, I took off with my bike and drove up to Enterprise to go for a ride. When I got out of the car in Enterprise around 2pm or so, the wind was blowing quite a bit. I was a tad worried. Little did I realize that it was a tail wind riding out of Enterprise on the way to Beryl. I thought it was coming from the North West. Either way the ride up to Beryl was quite a nice one. The roads were well maintained, zero potholes, and flat.. very flat.
Here is the ride that I took. After I turned around up at the top by the railroad I realized why it was so fun. The tail wind. Now, coming back I was going straight into a head wind. Painful. It took forever to get back to the Beryl Junction, where I took my rest at the Elementary School. After 10-15 minutes of rest and a cliffshot, I realized that there were 11 more miles to go.. and it would be a painful 11.
Anyway, it was slow going. Finally my quad’s freezed up around mile 5 and I couldn’t pedal without searing pain. Then the same for my calves. ugh. I ended up walking a little bit, until it was soo painful I couldn’t. I just sat on my bike on the side of the road for a few minutes until the swelling went down. Walked a little more, and then some guy stopped and offered me a ride for the final 5 miles or so.
So yeah, fun ride. Half of it was, anyway. I did about 42 miles or so myself. It felt like I also bonked (lack of nutrition). Also got a nice burn on my right bicep. Good stuff.
Since I have written many-a-time about the lack of the available Over-The-Air (OTA) HD channels in St. George, I thought it might please those few readers of mine that there is now another channel broadcasting in HiDef. ABC channel 4 came online just a few short weeks ago. It’s not ‘true-HD’, but they’re upconverting the signal, however, it’ll do.. for now.
I’ve been bugging Cody @ Skyview Technologies who has the ‘in’ with those that bring HD to the area about the subject quite a bit. He mentioned only recently that Fox13 should be getting here shortly. In fact, it’s already being broadcast from West Mountain (a really big mountain West of Ivins/St. George that has a ton of antennas on it) into St. George. I tried to pick it up for the season finale of “24″, but failed to get signal. So it should be a sure fire thing that it’ll be installed before Prison Break returns to Fox this fall. Good thing too.
For those of you that haven’t experienced the blissful heaven that is what we call HD, you are truly missing out. Go buy yourself a HiDef TV and if you already have one, get an antenna so you can get these OTA channels for free. Speaking of free, that’s one of my big drawbacks to the Dish/DirecTV packages. I can not get the local HD channels alone. I have to get a $29.99/month package to have the ability to get the HD channel package. Oh and then I have to get the HD receiver which is more. But oh yeah, I’m into this DVR thing, so I like to record stuff while I’m away for later viewing pleasure. More $. Ugh. So, I’m living with my appointment HD-TV for now. Rumor has it, I can build me a MythTV box to pull the HD OTA streams, but that may be a project for another day.
More posts later…
Just got this on ‘Software Update’.
This update renews the .Mac certificate required by iChat for encrypting text, audio and video conferences.
Great. Thanks Apple. …but Software Update says..’Restart will be required’. WHY??!
I can uninstall/reinstall iChat without restarting, yet a certificate renewal needs a restart?
So this little story just barely happened… figure I’ll write it up while it’s fresh on the old mind.
Being the security concious freak that I am, I typically lock all of my doors and windows. Not sure what other peoples thoughts are on this subject around Washington, UT, but mine is a little bit paranoid. Since all that I own earthly wise is contained in my house.
This evening I was proceeding to fire up the ‘ol BBQ in an attempt to cook some recently purchased steaks. After scrubbing the grill (yeah, I dont do it after every use, I’m a slacker), I proceeded to heat it up. Here is where hte problem started.
I have this sliding glass door that opens up to the rear of my house. Unbeknownst to me the dowell that is usually leaning up fell down when I slid the door shut on exit from the home (Yes, I usually shut doors when I enter or leave my home). Problem. I can’t re-open the door. So here I am stuck outside with a BBQ that’s heating up. (steaks inside, along with phone and keys). I’m wearning nothing I should be wearing in public. So I run around to the side of my house.. turn the knob for the door to my garage and no go. I thought I had remembered to open it (sister was coming by during the day to pick up a bed) earlier, but it might have been locked. But no go. Same thing with the front door. “Crap!” I thought. Jenny has a set of keys but I don’t have her cell number memorized.
After going back to the rear of the house, trying to lift hte glass up and in.. to no avail. I try the side door thinking I could break it open. Realizing that my hand was probably greasy from the handling of the grill and such, I used my pant leg to help turn the handle and surprise surprise it worked.
Anyway. Moral of the story. Make and hide a set of keys somewhere so I can get back into my house should I be in the same circumstance and my door is really locked like it should be.
Time for steaks.
So yeah. I help manage and operate the servers for a company called Instaproofs. They have a couple of servers and seem to be growing quite a bit. So we ended up ordering a dual woodcrest processor (5150’s) in a 1U supermicro case from Genstor.
The server arrived after some delays because of shortages of processors (probably thanks to Apple’s hording them for the MacPro). All seemed well upon installation, compilation and building of the new FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE OS/kernel. Running the amd64 (no more i386 for me!) line to take advantage of the 64-bit-ness of the woodcrest chips. Dual Cores, Dual Procs = 4 processors.. add in hyperthreading fun and it shows up as 8!
Unfortunately, when I tried copying files onto the server via SSH my SSH process on the sending server kept erroring out at random times. Same thing from another server. Ugh. The next day running memtest showed some errors. After getting a new set of 4×512MB dimms installed, I kept seeing the same problems with SSH copying as well as memtest.
So, I’m shipping the server back to Genstor so they can determine where the problem lies.. CPU or Motherboard. Hopefully they’ll be able to fix it quick and get it back to me.
So, the box is fast.. when it works right. I hope that we’ll be able to use it again soon without all the errors.. It sure is nice. 4 drives in a 1U, with that much CPU power.. wow. Probably can take up to 32GB of ram too.. oh, and did I mention it has dual power supplies? all in 1U.. go supermicro.
I need to send my laptop back again. It’s sad.
Appears the optical drive likes to scratch media upon insertion. I found this out the hard way in borrowing Jenny’s Seinfeld Season 5 DVDs. Ends up I scratched two of them. I wondered why they both stopped working about 3/4 of the way through the disk.
So I have the box from Apple. Well, it took two tries. The first one never got to my office. The second, is sitting in my office waiting for me to send my laptop back. I know..I know.. I can do it anytime I want, but to be without the laptop for another two-three days is kinda hard. Sick I know.
I also had them put a note on the ticket to take a gander at the audio-line-in. I couldnt get my headset to work. I know I had it working in the past.. so something’s gone wrong there.
My Applecare expires in 2007. I believe I’m getting my money’s worth out of it. Good thing I got it.
Got this email sent to our ticketing system. I have no idea who could’ve written it.
You are receiving this mail because
yahoo@yahoo.com
is sending feedback about the site administrated by you at http://www.infowest.com.
The message sent was:We dont want virus all junks bussesses please not more send e-mail to us it no all the times . Thanks
I was going to write up a big entry about how my laptop is dead. But I’d get frustrated.. so my laptop is dead. It wont boot anymore. It’s gotten worse over the past few days. I got all the stuff I need to, I think, off of it. Shipped it today to Texas. It should be back on Monday, I hope.
Sad days.
I typically frequent FedEx Kinkos when I need to ship something via FedEx. Usually, I’m shipping something related to work.
I frequent the place at least 2-4 times a month I’d suppose. Usually, I get the same guy, Tyson, that helps me. He’s pretty good and knows the system. I’m not sure if he remembers me when I go in or not, since I’m sure he helps a lot of people. This time, though, I had a new guy helping me. He’s been employed since 2004 I think, so he should know everything. And he did. It just took forever.
I first filled out the form by pen (why not let me type in the address information for you and save time?). Then the guy asked me if I wanted this express. I said “yes, that’s why I filled out the express form.” He then said well it’ll get there by March Xth, is that ok? I do the math in my head and say “yes.”.. since I did check the 3 business day shipping option, it should be apparant that I wanted it there in 3 business days or less..which is what he quoted me. I dont know.. it just seemed like all the dumb questions he asked.. and since I’m a frequent flyer with FedEx Kinkos for shipping things I get annoyed.
He then spent 5 minutes looking for a tape measure to measure the box. Why not leave one there by the desk and let the customers do it for you to save time?
Then he found a highliter and underlined the tracking number and the link to “fedex.com” where I could track the package and told me such. I mean, I’m no novice to this. I could have easily found the tracking number on the receipt (and the copy of the triplicate that was mine).. and I surely know that fedex.com is the place to find this. No sense in underlining it. And they do it everytime I go in. I just want to be like “3 day please. Yes, friday is ok.. it’s 3×4x2 and I dont need you to underline. Here’s my card” and be on my way. Is that too much to ask?
I guess I could get a FedEx Account for work and ship them myself.. but then I’d have to stock everything there and I wouldnt have something to blog about today.
