Saturday, March 12, 2005

Geek-Out

Since I've done nothing (and I do mean nothing) other than work on computers for the last 36 hours, this entry is mainly going to be geek stuff.

I'm oncall and sick, Buddy is sick. This has got to be the most boring-ass week since we've moved into this place.. at least for me.

It was 72 degrees today and I was in the house all day. Man, that just about killed me. I've got to start getting some jobs done around here. The deck, the garage, the yard. Everything that got put on hold in November needs to start again, soon. I don't mind spending spring working, but I want to enjoy summer and fall this year.

Managed to get about 3 solid hours of sleep today after being up all night and not getting to bed until 12:30 this afternoon. Oncall is *hell*. Pages every 20-40 minutes. Just as you start to fall asleep - that semi-conscious dream-like state between awake and asleep BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP, all night long, from 10pm until 8am. There needs to be some serious process re-design here. Granted this is over 1800 jobs on 150 machines running upwards of 400 enterprise level Oracle databases, but damn... let a guy sleep!

Begin long geek ramblings:

I've been watching the desktop search competition very closely as of late, and reading every review I can get my paws on. Tonight I finally broke down and installed two of them. Google's and X1. X1 is the commercial version that Yahoo's desktop search is based on, but it allows for network drive indexing (which none of the free search tools do), among other things.

It is sorely lacking in one area: It will only handle Outlook contact/address book data. Mozilla address book is not an option. Surprisingly, neither is palm desktop; even though it has a free API, conduit, and other tools to make communicating with it nearly effortless. Were it not for this one fatal flaw, I would gladly pay the $75 for this tool. Oh, having a Trillian chat plugin similar to the one Google has would be cool as well.

It is amazing how much time you save having *everything*, even network server files, right at your fingertips. I just type what I'm looking for.. content, file name, whatever.. and it is *instantly* there. I click on the music icon, and all my music files from my entire network are all there in one list. I single-click and that song begins to play. I click the pictures icon, sort by path, navigate to the newsgroups, and it's instant porn slideshow.

Why the hell didn't somebody come out with this stuff years ago? Oh wait, they did. It was part of OS/2. Another 10-15 years and I think Windows will have almost all of the functionality of that (most beautifully crafted, useful, dynamic, customizable, *kiss* *kiss* *kiss*, now-defunct) operating system. Damn I miss it.

Anyway, if you are a PC user, try the Yahoo desktop search, chances are, you will love it. If you need network drive indexing, you'll want the X1 version. The Google one is pretty decent as well, I just don't like having rogue web servers running on my system.

I've found so many cool multi-function tools lately that I could almost get by with an appliance if it had the following: Limewire Pro, FeedDemon, Mozilla (the entire suite known as seamonkey, which btw, is no longer being updated), Trillian Pro, X1, MusicMatch Pro, and gvim (a "vi" clone text editor). Yup, that would do it.

Of course I would still need my normal heavy-duty suite of tools (which I'm not going to get into) for real work, but for day-to-day computer living, that's all I need.

The Mozilla news makes me really sad. For all the great press firefox has got, and the fact that it is more IE compatible than the Mozilla browser, it doesn't have nearly the features. Bookmarking groups of tabs and having them all open with one click is a feature I don't know that I can live without. It was one of those little things that I used in the past with Opera, but the ease of use with Mozilla made it life-altering (in a strictly web-surfing sense of the phrase).

The long awaited Dell 24" flatscreen monitor that I've been drooling over has finally arrived. Now the only questions left for me are "do I buy one or two", and "where the hell is my tax refund?".

For those of you that are already on the news aggregator bandwagon with me: if you haven't checked into podcasting yet, you owe it to yourself to do so. A podcast is really nothing more than an audio attachment to an RSS feed... simple enough, but the power comes in that when using a tool such as FeedDemon's FeedStation, you can schedule these downloads for off-hours and have them transferred to your portable audio device automagically. Even though podcasting is just starting to gain a foothold, the power of this distribution method is staggering.

News junkies such as myself stay away from mainstream media, spend most of our days reading on 100's of different sites. Then along comes a news aggregator that turns a day's worth of reading into something that can be done in less than an hour. Now much of this news is being distributed via audio and is sitting on our little MP3 players when we wake up in the morning so we no longer even have to take the hour to read, but can simply listen to the broadcasts while performing other tasks.

The analogy of the above in real life is going from 'researching in a library and compiling your own notebook of relevant information' to 'having an assembled book of news items waiting for you at your doorstep' and now to 'programming your own version of NPR.. in your sleep'. Awesome!

Friday, March 11, 2005

Another Bizarre Mishap

Another busy, crazy, hectic day at work. Oncall started today and we've got a lot of big systems (as in "each system acts like 30 systems" big) going down for patching.. it's going to be a LONG weekend and upcoming week.

The girl I see occasionally stopped by. Not much time to play with all the work stuff going on.

The power goes out for half the day.. yup, that helped me get a lot of work done. *sneer*

Watched spiderman 2 tonight, got paged... slave to the machine, I am.

My apologies for this blog being so damn boring lately. I'm full-blown sick again (different antibiotic started today), work is nuts, I'm oncall, and just generally uninspired at the moment.

Ok, one perhaps slightly amusing thing. That is, if you find amusement in other's suffering. Those who know me know that I have the freakiest little accidents occur. Like the one a few months ago where I was reaching into a 12 pack box for a beer and the cardboard got shoved under my thumbnail so far that it tore one side of the nail loose from my finger.

This month's entry into the klutz hall of fame: I start to blow my nose. All of a sudden my eye starts hurting like hell, feels completely dried out, and all I can see is blue. I run to the bathroom to try to flush it out and see what the heck is going on. It turns out that when I held the tissue up to my nose, the corner of it touched my eye, I blinked, and the (blue) tissue stuck *under my eyelid*. Of course all the blinking and rubbing only served to scratch/irritate my eye something awful, as it's been 6 hours and it's still bothering me a LOT.

Amused? I hope so, 'cause it's all I've got.

Back to work now.

Thursday, March 10, 2005

Checking in

Tired and feeling a bit under the weather (again). Had lunch with Skip today. Rode the zx-10, had some fun in the curves.

10pm, got paged to work on a problem. Starting oncall at 8am tomorrow, so I'm basically grounded for a week and will be getting no sleep.

Gotta get back to this work issue.

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

This is Not a Catchy Title

Why is it doing the exact same thing one day is so energizing, and the next is the most boring fucking thing imaginable? A lot of work has come my way in recent days and yesterday I was so happy to have something exciting to do. Today I continue where I left off and it's all I can do to stay awake. I'm in one of those caffeine-crash-like hazes and can't seem to shake myself out of it.




Called the county today, hopefully they can do something about all the crap happening in this neighborhood. The HOA certainly doesn't seem to mind that there's been a dumpster parked in someone's front yard for a few months, a house blowing apart, porta-johns all over the place and now someone living in a camping trailer on a cleared lot. We didn't have this many issues in our last house; and that was in a low-income neighborhood full of rednecks.

Talked to the vet today. They are going to be weaning yellow dog off of the diazapam. We are going to be taking her downtown to a specialist that will be doing MRIs and such and trying to come up with a more permanent pain management therapy that won't turn her into an addict. I have wondered though... if it's something that she's going to be on the rest of her life anyway, what difference does it make if she's addicted? I'm sure there's some reason, some adverse side effect, but I don't know what it is. Guess I should ask next time.

I don't know what's up with me this week, maybe it's the lower dosage nicotine patches, but I have got the munchies constantly (and that's why I started the diet at the same time!).

Is it just me, or has the web lost most of it's appeal? Maybe after 12 years of surfing (I was actually at some user group meetings when the WWW was still a concept trying to gain acceptance from the user community) I've finally gotten used to having a world of information at my fingertips and have exhausted most everything of any entertaining value.

.. or maybe it's just spring/cabin fever.

This Grand Canyon trip planning is starting to get tedious. I really expected a better turn-out for this trip than what there has been. I'm going on this trip no matter what, but the idea of traveling on bike without another biker along in case of trouble (mechanical or otherwise) leaves something to be desired. I'm sure there will be someone (at least my friend Chris) tagging along.

Having the burden of planning the entire trip including all mandatory (rest/fuel/food/motel/campground) stops as well as optional (tourist) stops, only to have someone come along later that needs to change them (doesn't have the fuel range, has a back problem and needs more frequent stops, wants to spend a day with aunt Gertrude, etc) is almost as depressing as going alone.

It seems the solution to all of this is to find a hot, non-skanky, non-bitchy biker chic (as in, she has her own bike).. and those, my friends, make the ever-elusive single bisexual college co-ed living next door in search of a couple *exactly like you* look as common as tassels at a titty bar.

Monday, March 07, 2005

Warm and Bright

73 degrees, the sun is shining, I've ridden the zx-12, I'm eating meat for the 3rd day straight, and 2 new porn DVDs are sitting here in front of me. Today is a very good day.

Watched "Seven". Saw it once before when it first came out. I have a very strong stomach but have been putting off watching this movie again for about a week now because I remember the "sloth" victim as being possibly the most grotesque, pitiful thing I've ever seen.. and yet this time seeing the movie, it didn't bother me at all. It's strange how memory distorts things over time into something very different than what it was. Perhaps it's just TV numbing us to everything though. Watching CSI and seeing 500lb water-bloated men turned inside out makes a lot of things lose their impact.

24 is an awesome show. When the heck are The Sopranos coming back?

I'm getting sleepy.