You are looking at a picture of the Samsung sph-z400. Yes it is homely, but my current Motorola i530 ain’t pretty neither. Ever since my old phone came off my pocket while coming down the caged ladder in the Attic catwalk and had its screen hinge blasted apart after several collisions on its way down to the concrete I have been waiting for the new Nextel Direct Connect phones to come out. I am currently using a revived i530 that had been left for dead, but I want something better.
The phone matches some of what I want: no antenna sticking up out of the top, clamshell design, camera, works with Nextel Direct Connect. However, it is missing wifi. I really want a device I can use for accessing network data and security camera images.
This is exciting since Sprint has been killing off Nextel for a while now. They are losing much of the spectrum that the Nextel Direct Connect iDEN network runs on. Sprint wants to move all their users to the same system, but Sprint users cannot currently do Direct Connect with Nextel users. Since is used heavily by companies or extended organizations it is difficult to move a few people over at a time. Now Qualcomm’s QChat has the ability to do direct connect over CDMA and reach all Sprint/Nextel subscribers. Since Sprint has been killing off the old system, nobody has been making really good Nextel phones for a while. Hopefully that will change soon. After all, as of right now the clock on QChat runs out in January 2009.
I am looking at this from a pure administration mindset, but I am sure that if we took what we budgeted for Christmas programs this past year we could purchase a robot to it all automatically. Less hassle and stress, something not being done by every other church in town (nobody will hurry out of our service saying “Hurry, the robot show at the Baptist church starts in 20 minutes”), and we could even do a wax-drip free candle lighting service.
Just check out this video:
And for all you trying to recruit volunteers for the tech oriented parts of your ministries, just think of the geeks this will bring in. Not to mention the fun you will have making use of this investment throughout the year to come.
I have tried to explain blogs to people in the past, but most of the people who don’t understand what they are by now are going to require something a little more straight forward.
I believe this could be a part of my new tool set. This shirt lights up more bars as the 802.11b/g signals around you get stronger. This is like adding another sense. Currently available from ThinkGeek.com
This is similar to the T-Qualizer or the T-Clock, but just a little geekier.
We have these huge efficient printers located throughout the building for everyone to use. They print inexpensively even in gorgeous color. The first time I printed to the one near my office I had accidentally left it set to color and felt ashamed that I had wasted such beauty on horendous web advertisements.
In spite of all these printers located in each of the office areas we still have several dozen expensive, slow, noisy, and lousy printers on everyones personal desk as well. Why bother walking 10 feet when you can get less for more.
My problem with printers is that they soon get to the point that the more-expensive-than-gold ink gets clogged in one of the color channels and I have a dead $40 cartridge that has provided me with $2 worth of value over its pitiful life.
On Monday, Spamhaus added us to their blacklist. The cause was spam backscatter from our Barracuda. According to the report, they had 3 “we blocked your spam” replies from addresses within our system. We had to drop the blocking reports to senders, this will not be a popular option once people no longer know why ministers have not received their emails.
So, while we work on fine tuning the spamwall a bit more I thought I would share some of the poetry I found in quarantine.
Down the long course of the gray slush of things
demonstrating their talent for comedy stroke
To have been claimed by what we see of what
Nor, indeed, the bit of paint itself can know of.
To a higher level of appearance.
Beneath a pile of corpses, lying massed
Still has to be intoned, as in a lonely
A matter of getting all that right . . .
Oh, I know. The snow. The effective snow
The pain of being born into matter.
Chose to walk out of it, they’d have to pass
Dim, and die tonight? VII. Hudson and His Strait; Baffin and His Bay
Or else, like us, sunk into some long gaze
Not so much of place as of renewed hope,
And still my mind goes groping in the mud to bring
“Now it’s my turn to sing!”
Sought to contrive, intending to express
In Florida, it’s strawberry season
After reading that, my first thought was “The National Endowment for the Arts must be supporting spam artists too.” It might be a program set up to expose system administrators to poetry.
Most of the lines appear on a page entitled: “Poems for a Long Winter’s Night” with the only exception being the line about Hudson and Baffin. This page appears to be very popular with a very prodigious spammer.
It sounds like the work of Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light, but it is a new strategy for punishing minor infractions. I have been looking for something like this for a while in order to punish the “sins” I deal with the most.
Not putting something on the schedule
Leaving an outside door open
Not taking something off the schedule
Leaving an outside door unlocked
Not updating something wrong on the schedule
Propping an outside door open
Forgetting to look at the schedule and trying on using a place that has already been booked
There is other stuff, but I think I have been in a rut lately.
Do you use minor punishments for minor problems just to make sure people take notice and correct themselves? What do you do when your boss or the preacher does the infraction? What about when you do it?
In college I purchased Quickverse 4 Deluxe with a couple Bibles and commentaries (which I still have). This was a great help with my term papers and homework, I started quoting the Bible a whole lot more with cut & paste.
After graduation I purchased Version 5 Enhanced with many more books, and I used this more as I started preaching. Unfortunately version 5 does not work with XP, but so long as it was only my laptop running XP I was just fine.
So when I moved my primary desktop from 98SE to XP in 2004 I had to upgrade to version 8. The problem was that I just purchased the standard version and I couldn’t get it to recognize my large collection of older books (including the NIV). This meant that I was using my old computer for sermon writing until I could get it figured out.
After a few hours of digging I discovered how to manually add my collections into Q8 again and how to manually manage the library.xml file to adapt everything to my own preferences.
In late 2005 I reinstalled my OS from scratch to do some changes on my system and I archived my old installation. Nearly 2 years later I have reinstalled Q8 (plus the 8.0.4 update) and just went through a bit of a headache to reintegrate my previous changes. My Library is once again sanely organized and named, and all my books are there. I did forget to backup the QVProfiles folder from the “Application Data” folder in Documents & Settings, but I didn’t lose much there.
All of this because I start teaching a Bible Study tomorrow night and need quick reference again.
To set up remote desktop on port 3053 instead of 3389
Using regedit (if you don’t know what that is then don’t do this) change: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
\System
\CurrentControlSet
\Control
\TerminalServer
\WinStations
\RDP-Tcp
\PortNumber
to 3053 (or bed in Hexadecimal).
Reboot Windows to make sure the setting took properly
Open port 3053 on the Windows firewall
Set the IP address so that a future reboot would not give me a new IP.
Open 3053 on the router’s firewall and point at the IP set for the computer.
To test it I connected to my home computer and then had it connect back to the computer here using domain.com:3053 and it worked. It was dead slow, but it worked.
Just a note that even a fast internet connection gets sluggish when you are connecting both directions over RDP.
PhotoShop 7 has trouble saving over the network to a drive with more than 1TB of empty space. Since we have just moved the “My Documents” storage to a much larger drive we are now hitting this issue.
That one drive has 1.01TB of empty space. I started to duplicate a large number of files to make up for the gap and then remembered it was possible to make a big file place holder.
I tested it by incrementing the size up until I had the right size file in place. The final result was
fsutil file createnew d:\junkfiles\BigFillerFile.junk 15000000000
In a few months/weeks we will probably have that 15GB filled up with regular files and then I can delete that filler file and be just fine.
You are looking at a picture of the Samsung sph-z400. Yes it is homely, but my current Motorola i530 ain’t pretty neither. Ever since my old phone came off my pocket while coming down the caged ladder in the Attic catwalk and had its screen hinge blasted apart after several collisions on its way down to the concrete I have been waiting for the new Nextel Direct Connect phones to come out. I am currently using a revived i530 that had been left for dead, but I want something better.
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