I really gotta automate this thing … I ran the billing for December, and it’s what … December 31st … I really should automate the running of the billing … I am just going to run the billing tomorrow again for January … No payments to apply, etc … If they can automate a script to come into this here bLog and post a comment on every freakin post I’ve made in here, I should be able to automate the billing so it isn’t such a time constraint on me to have to sit down and make sure it’s right … To tell you how old the billing stuff is, it’s written in ASP … I have been writing in PHP for a couple years now … That’s one of the things I started but never got around to completing … So many others things jump up … Same goes for actually running the billing scripts … I have to make sure everything is applied before I run the scripts … and then the automating of people who have a web site one month and then don’t have one the next … Ugh! I definitely have to get some of these projects done that I started … I probably would have had more time if I weren’t deleting all these STUPID comments that this thing is spamming me with … Referral SPAM … the NEW SPAM … sucks … Oh well, off to the New Year’s gig … heck of a drive … Hopefully the new year will be less stressful for me with more time to accomplish all the things that I want to accomplish … Wishful thinking I suppose, especially in this crazy world we live in where everything is immediate … There’s no waiting anymore … Anyway … Happy New Year!
Month: December 2004
Meaningless Quiz
Flash movies
Donovan McNabb’s Blue Christmas: http://www.bangcartoon.com/bluexmas.htm
This little gray guy rants about Christmess: http://www.illwillpress.com/xmess.html
Bunnies
It’s a Wonderful Life reenacted by bunnies in 30 seconds … Dave says, “It’s a must see.”
Discount Danny
Remember the good ol’ days? Tastykakes came in waxed paper … Soda came in bottles … Concert tickets were $7.50 for General Admission … All this before there was shopping online … You used to go out to the stores during the holiday season and try to pick up the things that everyone you knew wanted … If it wasn’t there, you could talk to a shop keeper and possibly arrange for a date and/or time to return to find the product you wanted … That’s not how it is anymore … Now, the hottest selling item is bought up before it hits the shelves and it’s posted on eBay for a ridiculous profit … Friend of mine two years ago made a killing with those little tiny remote control cars … Whenever he traveled, he stopped in every place that sold them and bought them all up and sold them individually on eBay (the only place you could get them nearing the holiday) …
So my son wants this ATM Bank thingamajig that’s sold out everywhere … My wife stresses when she can’t get the boy what he wants for Christmas … so she has everyone checking every store they go to to find out of they have this item which costs a little under $25.00 … Can’t find it, can’t find it, so she starts looking online … Welp, my first solution is Amazon.Com … They’re sold out … So I said to her that it must be pretty popular to be sold out on Amazon … So a day or two goes by, and she continues to look … She’s even using the computer while I’m not around (That’s an incredible feat for her … she doesn’t use computers at all, and you’d think with all the computers around here, well, that’s a topic for another post) … So she informs me that all these sites have the thing, but most of them link to Amazon (I guess with a referring link to make their percentage) or eBay … So I’m like, let’s cut to the chase and go right to eBay …
Yup, there they are, on eBay … averaging $59.99 Buy It Now with $12-15 shipping … There was one on there for $45 but it disappeared while we were looking through the various ads and the locations of where these things were coming from … We have to be concerned on the amount of time it will take to get here … After all, 11 more days? So it looks like the bulk of the hoarders are in Washington State, but I found good ol’ Discount Danny in Massachusetts was offering a $24.99 item for a whopping $59.95 discount … So we ordered it, and are paying $71.90 to have that thing arrive at our door … In the field to add additional comments, I almost entered in: “Not such a discount, huh Danny?” … But the wife was happy I didn’t … She thought they would be vindictive and send the item late …
Remember for Halloween you used to make your own costume and stay out until like 9 or 10pm? Around my house, it’s about an hour long and is done before prime time … You can get your costume online now too … I bet Discount Danny sells them … at a discount …
RSS
Made a minute change in the headers here and wondering if that fixes the RSS feed? Some people have said that there are errors in the feed and when I upgraded playing with some of the other aspects of the way this thing runs, I ran across a forum entry about a header that was wrong and I updated it …
New Server
I just moved this site to a new server I assembled … It is an AMD Sempron 2500+ with 512M of DDR RAM (I think it’s DDR, whatever the really really fast stuff is … SDDR?) … I had been loading various things on it for a while, and I decided just to leave it as my development server … The server where I will throw all the sites I design and manage … In the process I upgraded this blog software as well … ‘Two birds’ is it? Another reason is this site is my default home page, and I was getting tired of the wait … I need things lightning fast, don’t you? This is my first AMD in a while … I used to be really big on them until I started hosting … Figured I needed to be all Intel and Microsoft … I have found that the monetary amount doesn’t reflect the production of the product … It’s a FreeBSD 5.3 Server … Command line all the way baby … Took me a while to get PHP fired up and working right … They port it different in the 5.x versions of BSD … But I’m still on Apache 1 and PHP 4 … I figure I could try to go to Apache 2 sometime later … With all the people saying it’s fine, there are plenty that say it isn’t … and when I initially brought it up, I installed Apache 2 and PHP 5 and things didn’t work immediately … So I bagged it and went back to what I was used to, enough to up the op/sys … this guy has a 160G drive in it … I have gotten the emails from Charlie and the drive has 0% used … too funny … I bought the 160 cause the game server’s HD took a dive … Instead of throwing the 160 in there, I put the 40 I was using messing with this Sempron … So the Sempron has the 160G drive and FreeBSD 5.3 and that’s where it will stay …
All this free time working with Octane has given me the opportunity to do these upgrades … plus I am making better money that I can put out for hardware and such things … Getting to be back like the old days … I even finished HL2 and have been playing Counter-Strike again … Ah, to feel like a person again … The drone of the house system was good, but way too life sucking …
Washer Repair
I can’t believe I forgot to mention this! Last Wednesday, December 1st, I repaired our washing machine. My wife put a big carpet in the washing machine about 3 months ago. One of those mats that’s bigger than a welcome mat but smaller than a remnant … I don’t know what you call them, but smaller than a throw rug … Anyway, when that thing spun to dry, you’d think terrorists were attacking my basement … So ever since then, when you went to fill the washer with water, it would just leak out the bottom … I figured it had hit the sides or something and chewed a hole in the basket … So, after a couple months of her taking the laundry to relatives, and the constant nagging that only wives know how to do, the guilt mounted and I went to work on the foul machine …
First thing that tells you I’m not a washer repairman is that I started in the back … Removing screws and plastic snaps so I could get in there and see what was what … As I pried up the back, I noticed there were wires going to the control panel, so I figured I would have to remove the cluster plugs and pull them through … As I was removing the cluster from the motor, I noticed some weird looking thing going to the panel, and it didn’t look like an easy item to remove and put back … To get a better look at it, I pryed the top of the washer off even more … The top is held on by a pressure fit … When I got the four metal springing things that held the top on free to take a better look at this thing, I realized I could just push the top up from the front of the washer and gain access into the basket … DUH!
So I get to work in there … removing the filter on top, the agitator in the middle and there are the three bolts holding the basket on … Either Governor Arnold or the old doorman from 15 North put on these bolts … One was so difficult to get off, I actually broke it … So, I pull the basket out, and I see no big gouges in the side or anything to indicate why water was escaping it … Maybe it was the holes all around it that led me to believe it didn’t hold water either … So now I am in the next chamber (where the water actually is held) and there is a rubber thing that affixes to the center and this inner basket … It’s held on with thin metal bands, kinda like the ones that hold your radiator hoses on in your car … The bottom one had separated from the outer basket … So, I removed the top band so I could get the rubber thing off and get a good look at it … Didn’t look damaged, looked okay … I figured the carpet fiasco simply pulled this rubber thing out of the metal band … So I put it back together very tight, and then assembled the rest of the washer that I had disassembled (Johhny 5) and vwahlah … The washer has been working fine ever since …
I’m not a Trucker
… but I play one on the weekends … The new truck I got puts me up high with the other tractors … A lot different than my cab over Isuzu … But one thing you car people need to realize … While a truck may be slower getting started, or slower up hills etc … You feeling you can zig zag and zip around them should be re-thought … There is something you were taught a long time ago before you took that driving test … It was called “stopping distance” … Driving a truck, I use this feature a lot … If you cut in front of me to get ahead at a light or something with a stop coming up, you have just put your life in jeopardy … One thing you need to realize … Even though I might be slow, or you feel that you need to get around me or something, if I actually can’t stop, or you cut it too close, I will crush you like paper box … Not only will this be effortless, I won’t even realize it … I will think I went over a speed bump or something in the road … and another thing … If I’m cruising down the highway at 70 or something, don’t pass me just because I’m a truck … pass me because you’re doing something greater than 70 mph … Again, if you pass me and then resume your 65 mph, I will crush you like a paper box … It’s tough enough to drive a truck, and having idiotic cars out there thinking that we’re a nuisance doesn’t make it any easier … Remember, paper box … effortless … you will die …
Cell Phones
Working with the band, I have used my cell phone a lot more … I usually always just left it off and only used it or had it with me in case of emergency or silly little calls home to ask about things like if there’s any food at home or if I should stop at WaWa or a diner … When my wife would go on trips, she would take the cell phone to have it with her in case she ran into car trouble, etc … So, for a while now, she’s been asking that she get a cell phone … So, since AT&T switched to Cingular and we have been getting all these offers in the mail, I figured it was time for me to get a new cell phone and for her to get one as well … There was a little bit of a selection of phones, but they all come in color now … I opted for a more expensive phone that has a camera and video in it with a larger display … It was like $150 with a $50 rebate … She was thinking just to use my old cell phone, but apparently that wasn’t an option … There was a cheaper flip phone that the deal was buy one get one free so she decided on that one … It was $40 … While the guy was in the back getting the phones, we realized that for $10 more she could have one with a camera, so we changed to that one … They’re both Motorola phones, so it almost looks like his & hers phones … I got a V551 and she got a V220 … In making this phone upgrade and basically “switching” to Cingular, I now have my voice mail working, and this has been a complaint in the past … So now if I’m out of reach or have the phone off, I can get messages … Also, we can talk to other Cingular customers for free, so if we talk to each other on the cell phones, it’s free … Why have a home phone? What a world, what a world …