Really? The press secratary has a Twiiter address? Does anyone else see this as weird?
Why would the white house need a twiter account?
The way I see it, it’s just another way for cyber-threats to make it into sensitive areas. Didn’t the removal of the President’s cell phone teach this administration anything? Why would the peson in charge of the White House’s voice to the world need a Twitter? Has he forgot how to call a press conference?
Well, it’s been a very long time since I started to play PWI. I look back and I’m amazaed at how long. No game that I’ve ever played has held my intrest for so long – not even Halo which I love! But all good things come to an end. And PWI ended for me today – officially.
PWI actually began to bore me about two months ago. It’s just taken me this long to realize that there’s nothing left for me to do. In fact, all that I’ve done for those two months is dailies and help others in my faction. As much as the latter has made me happy, I’m simply not enjoying the game any more.
So on earlier this week I pulled Guild Wars off the shelf, installed it and began playing. I know it’s an old game, but I never really got very far with it when I first purchased it. Now I have all the expansions and a new character. A new character that I have progressed further than I ever did with my previous characters. And I’ve only been playing for about 3 or 4 evenings. I’m looking forward to playing through all the expansions.
In fact I’m hoping that I can get through all the expansions just in time for Guild Wars 2 to launch.
This weekend I felt like adopting a new policy – once a server is installed and running, never, ever update it. I felt like this because this weekend was my “Rack Maintenance” weekend. I needed to accomplish three things:
This first two went fine – actually the last one did too, in so much as all the updates were applied. But when the time came to turn the servers back on, I hit a snag. One server – the one controlling our internal Instant Messaging Service, Microsoft Live Communicator 2005, came up, but the refused to start the Communicator Service.
I began searching for the cause of the problem. According to the event logs, my “Evaluation Period” for Communicator had expired. WHAT?! I never installed the evaluation version on this machine. At this point, I was tired, a bit frustrated and decided to call it day, planning to call Microsoft about it on Monday. I even posted an email to the entire company stating just that.
Well, as it turned out, I needed to come into the office on Sunday to clean up some things. While I waited on a copy process, I did a bit more Google searching and found that one of the security patches that I had just applied to the server in some cases broke the Communicator service in a manner similiar to my server’s issue. Some further reading and a few web pages later and I had found a hot fix.
I immediatly felt like “Silly Microsoft!” I even laughed out loud. Then in the very next moment, I said “Really?!” The brief comical moment turned to frustration. How could something that should have been a good thing actually caused a problem – breaking a highly used function of my network. (That’s kind of funny in itself. A few years ago, I would not have thought that IM would be so widely used in an office environment.) I seriusly wondered why I had patched the machine in the first place.
The simple truth is, any kind of patch can cause a similiar problem, but I’ve never really had it happen to me – until Saturday. I guess I could have taken more precautions – spending time reading and following every KB article for every patch applied. But then I’d never get anything done because all I’d be doing is reading the KB articles. I guess I handled it about as well as it could be. In the end the service started and all is well.
So I left the office laughing with the thought that I would call Bill and tell him about our “new policy”.
My friend Bill McGregor brought his Mac Mini in this morning so I could tinker with it. In fact, I’m using it right now to post this entry!
So far, for a “limited resource” computer by PC standards, it seems to be doing fine. Fairly snappy, even with several applications up and running.
I’m really a bit curious about the thing “under the hood” and being able to manipulate it in the same manner as I would a PC. I would like to be able to image the hard drive, reload it, add applications, make it do things like rip DVDs, utilize FTP, browse newsgroups, edit video and audio, figure out its quirks and learn the “Apple Way”.
I feel like I’ve been handed a my first windows machine all over again. Yeah, I can make it do things like browse the web, listen to music, read e-mails, etc. But ANY computer can do that. I want to take it to the next level – I want to be able to “hack” on the thing and see if I can make it do things out of the ordinary.
At any rate, I know that all of these things should be possible, but I want to make them happen and learn how to control the system, not work inside the “Apple Box” so to speak.
Will report back later.
Ok, I’ve added Google AdSense to this site. I’ve done it for one reason – I might make a little extra money. MAYBE.
I know this site doesn’t get visited a great deal, but maybe I can get a few pennies every month that I can squirrel away.
I hope this doesn’t offend the readers…
I discovered today that the footer of my previous theme contained a link to an online drug web site. While not particularly harmful, I was unable to change it because the footer was created by a piece of encoded php code. I couldn’t understand it, didn’t want to take the time to bother with it and simply was pissed off that someone would embed something like that in a theme.
So to the creater of “The Ultimate Blogger” WordPress theme: SHAME ON YOU! Bad form for including it in the first place, but REALLY bad form form for not enabling the user of the theme to modify it.
At any rate, I found a more “minimilistic” theme that I like. So we’ll move on from here.
Well, I’ve found a new theme and I’ve decided to start posting again.
So, what have I been doing? Well, I’ve been very busy as NEI for one thing. Beginning in the last quarter of 2009, I started on a broad path of projects. These projects include upgrading our File Server, upgrading Exchange to 2007 SP1, a Server Consolidation plan involving VMware’s ESXi platform, deploying Office 2007 and purchasing AutoCAD Civil 3D 2010.
I’m currently in the tail-end of the Exchange 2007 deployment and only partially complete with the Server Consolidation plan. Our rack is nearly full and this weekend I’m adding a 3rd UPS to it to handle the load. My hope is to remove three physical servers from production before summer hits. Before the end of the year I want to either have or have an approved plan to install a SAN so that our ESXi boxes can become fault tolerant and I’ll be able to employ snapshots and replication for backups.
On the personal side, I’m still playing Perfect World, but am starting to grow bored with it. I’m trying to learn more about photography and better utilize my Nikon to take good pictures. I’m hoping to add some photos in a gallery here before too long.
I watched Avatar on Sunday night – it was awesome, despite it being a giant political statement. James Cameron has done wonderful things with the way that movie was created – especially int he way CGI played such a large role. I remember watching Final Fantasy when it came out and could instantly tell it was done in CGI. This movie, while you can still tell, has come a VERY long way in the ability to make a full CGI movie possible.
Well, anyway, I’m off to check on my Exchange box. I’ll report back when I have more time.
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