Because you can observe a lot just by watching.
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.
That is why I like this video entitled: Blogs in Plain English (with pictures too).
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.
A West Virginia Blogger has posted about cleaning your print cartridge with WD-40. Found via Lifehacker where there are many more cleaning suggestions in the comments.
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.
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?
Some technical infractions:
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.
I keep looking for this information on the blog here and forgetting that it is actually in the forum here: VPN’s.
So, without further ado, I will post it here as well (note: I am not using the port mentioned here).
Notes: You can change the listening port for remote desktop
Then connect on that port
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.
Have you considered what it costs to leave machines on all the time?
I told one of the staff members at the church that they should go ahead and power down their machine at night. I also told them to turn off the streaming radio station when they are away from their desk. I am always concerned about unnecessary use of power for both cost and environmental reasons.
In a recent study found via eco geek and Gizmodo I read that each year $1.72 Billion is wasted on computers being left on all night. I’m not sure about the findings, but I know we waste a lot of money on our computers. With the bad electricity to our building we are more likely to have a computer destroyed by power surges and brownouts than turning them off 5 times per week.
Consider that the average office work hours are around 48 hours per week (rounded off to make math easier). That is 2 full days.
If you leave your computer and monitor on all the time then they are running for 7 days each week (168 hours).
Running a computer for 48 hours a week vs. 168 hours is like running it for 105 days vs. 365 (a difference of 260 days).
To make this easier to remember, look at your calendar and mark the 105th day: April 15.
Just image how happy your computer would be if it only had to work until tax day each year rather than the entire year.
Make your computer happy. Turn it off.
Does anyone out there have official like rules about turning computers off?
Adobe Reader 8.1 is out and that means it is time for me to update it on the network. This is one of those programs that we store on the network to make installation easier on new computers or those that had been neglected at an older version. The problem is that Adobe Reader doesn’t have a direct link. It goes through a downloader in IE, and GetPlus in Firefox.
I had always used FireFox for getting the install file, but I figured that was no longer an option. Fortunately I still has Safari installed on my computer so I used it to access Adobe and download the file directly from here: http://ardownload.adobe.com/. . ./AdbeRdr810_en_US.exe.
At home I am in the process of rebuilding my machine. It is a perverse hobby for a geek to decide on occasion that the OS installation needs to be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch but I have a new faster hard drive and it deserves a clean install. I’m not about to stick Safari on this machine, I won’t even let Quicktime or iTunes on it, so I grabbed a Firefox User Agent Switcher and visited Adobe pretending to be on an Opera browser (something else I’m not planning to install).
I’ll remember this option for Adobe 8.2