Shawn's weblog
LinksHomeWork Slashdot Think Geek NewEgg CategoriesWhats annoying him now (58)Diet (26) Fiction (1) Funny Stuff (38) Home Stuff (161) Movie Reviews (11) National Days (17) News (11) Politics (19) Techie Stuff (32) Traveling Man (44) Work Stuff (43) CommentsOther BlogsTeleidosopeHack a Day Make CO Libertarians DVDsWe're watchingWeeds Weeds Next 25 movies in the Queue |
|
Wed, 05 May 2010 @ 21:35 || Twitter Off || HomeTurned the twitter feed off. I'm using twitter 100% for business now and mainly just resending other's posts in an endless closed loop. Anyone finding themselves here don't want to read boring work related tweets.Shane's home from CU now and looking for a summer job. I'm slowly working on refinishing the basement. Got the floors done, the cement slabs had settled, and it needed to be releveled. Now working on the framing. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Fri, 19 Mar 2010 @ 22:00 || Snow day || HomeHad a small blizzard or above average snow storm today. I was planning on spending the day at the office, but after driving to my doctor appointment chose to work from home.Snow has stopped now, hopefully it all melts quickly. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Fri, 20 Nov 2009 @ 09:41 || Two shooting deaths || NewsIn the last few weeks there has been two sets of shootings resulting in death near my company's office. The latest one involved a bank robbery. Westminster deputy chief among 2 officers shot in gun battleAnd the one last week was a road rage shooting. Police say road rage turns deadly Starting to question my judgment on that 1 year lease extension. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Fri, 20 Nov 2009 @ 09:17 || Keep your damn dirty hands off my TV || AnnoyingHere's another reason I don't live in CA. CA targeting your big-screen TVs for elimination.So now the damn liberal save the earth types are trying to take my TV away? Damn it, I need something to watch while the world heats up and the ice caps flood the coastal regions. This would seriously dent my plans on owning a 110" HDTV by next year. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Wed, 21 Oct 2009 @ 20:32 || Trees || HomeI cut down four trees in my backyard this weekend. Two of the larger poplar trees had died sometime over the last winter. The other two smaller trees hadn't died yet, but they didn't look great.I haven't really used my chainsaw for something this big before, I mainly have used it to trim back branches that I probably should have used a hand saw or clippers. I also haven't cut a tree down since I was in highschool. Luckily the physics hasn't changed, and my memory served me well. I landed all four trees right where I wanted them. The tallest tree had to land just right, there was only one direction it could fall w/o hitting a fence, the house or my apple tree. I didn't quite trust myself, so I tied a rope off as high up as I could and had Shane, who was visiting from school, pull the tree in the direction I wanted the tree to go. I don't think the rope was necessary, as each tree behaved exactly as I wanted it to. Now I have a small pile of firewood and a larger pile of brush in my backyard. I don't have a fireplace and not sure if any of my friends have a fireplace. I was thinking of renting a wood chipper to get rid of the brush, and maybe a limb or two, or maybe a college student. The firewood will sit there for a while, unless someone who reads this wants it. link to story || 1 comment || Add a comment Sat, 26 Sep 2009 @ 21:24 || redx || TechnologyMy laptop's name is RedX. It's one of Robin's alter-egos. When I was running Fedora 10 and VMWare, all my virtual machines were based off the character Robin, e.g. Nightwing.I was running Fedora 10 for a long time on my laptop, for the most part trouble free. Connecting to a projector was always a challenge. I usually got it working, one time at a user group meeting, it stopped working after the screen saver kicked in and I couldn't get it working again. Had to switch laptops with my sales woman to start the meeting. So a few weeks back I decided to upgrade to fedora 11. I've always wanted to get an upgrade to work flawless via yum. I almost got the upgrade from fedora 9 to 10 to work via yum, but it had multiple problems, so I wiped the system clean and put a fresh copy of fedora 10 on it, which solved most of the problems. The yum upgrade seemed to work this time, but knocked out a lot of things that were previously working. The Audio, VMWare server, wireless, most of the video apps all stopped working. Also yum broke itself, so fixing all the stuff was a nightmare. Yum was complaining about missing Python packages. I installed them manually but yum wasn't happy. I fought with yum for two evenings, before giving up, backing up the files I wanted to save and doing a clean install of fedora 11. That worked, it did seem like it took longer than usual, many hours in fact, to download all the updates and additional packages I wanted. I spent two days tweaking the laptop to be exactly how I wanted it. I was getting ready to fly out to CA for a week, and this laptop is my lifeline to my company. I rebooted after adjusting the 3d driver for the graphics card... and it died. The laptop refused to boot up. At first I suspected the graphic settings, but it wasn't even loading that far into Linux. After rebooting several times I saw that it was randomly failing on different packages after loading the kernel. I was flying out the next day and hadn't gotten anything else ready yet. I grabbed my Windows 7 DVD and installed that. In a little over an hour I had a working laptop again. It seemed sluggish, but I wrote that off to running Windows instead of Linux. After downloading Firefox, Thunderbird and openoffice, I had something I could use while traveling. I wasn't happy but I could get by. While I was in CA, my laptop crash and froze up a number of times. Turns out my hard drive was failing. I had a clue, when I had fedora 11 running, for all of two days, it did warn of a hard drive failing, but didn't really give me any other details, like which one, or why it thought it was failing. I ordered a new hard drive from NewEgg, 500G for just under $100. My old hard drive was only 120G. I figured I would now have decent space for multiple virtual machines. Last week the hard drive arrived, and instead of saving anything from the Windows 7 configuration, I just swapped out the hard drives and installed fedora 11 fresh. I left the laptop running in my new home office.. um.. I mean my son's room. It's been running about a week and seems fine. I'm running VirtualBox from Sun instead of VMWare server. It seems to tax the system less. I created a Windows 7 virtual machine, I need it to watch my slingbox as they don't have a Linux viewer yet. I also play Starcraft on it when I'm bored. VMWare needed to be recompiled each time I had a new kernel, which was too often, and always seemed to happen when I was on the road. Not sure VirtualBox will load my old VM images, if not I'll probably setup VMWare server again. I'm installing minor stuff on RedX tonight while updating some GSA docs I should have done yesterday, I'm happy I'm back with a Linux laptop, and hope I get another year out of this one, it's 3 1/2 years old now. I'd like to set a company precedent of making a laptop last 4 years. The company is 10 years old next month, and I've had 3 laptops, a Sony, a dell and currently a lenovo. Of all of them, I've kept the lenovo the longest. I still have the dell, it still works, running Windows XP, but it's very temperamental. If you move it, it might take hours to get it running again. It's like Fonzie's jukebox, if I bang on it just right while pushing the power button, it might start. If I get it to boot, then getting it to load windows is the next challenge. I leave it running in my kitchen, mainly to check email in the morning and to IM employees before I head out to work. Can't really do much more with it. I'm mainly waiting for my wife to yell at me to get it off the kitchen table, she hasn't yet and it's been there about 2 years. link to story || 1 comment || Add a comment Wed, 16 Sep 2009 @ 22:14 || Sunnyvale || TravelI'm back out in Sunnyvale CA, this week. I have some documents to write this week and am stuck. I figured maybe if I wrote a blog entry it might warm me up for the more boring work.Back at my usual hotel, the Quality Inn (see past posts for my insane reason for hotel choices). They've been busy since I've been away. They have upgraded to full digital cable in each room. My room still has an older TV, but they are replacing all the TVs with 50" HDTV flat screens, even so, the older TV can see the higher cable channels, was over 200 channels to include all the sirius music channels. Since I read the book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, I can't enter a building without thinking how I would Zombie proof it. Zombie proofing a building has two major aspects; securing it from the single to small groups of zombies and securing it from large hoards. The first is pretty straight forward, get a two+ story building and take out the stairs. Zombies can't climb very high, they can't support their own weight. The second is much harder, when zombies swarm they will climb over themselves and eventually overcome any wall. So you need to make the building 'sense' proof, such that the zombies can't tell there is anyone living inside. It's hard to tell how zombies can sense the living, but blocking out all sounds, smells and sights should do the trick. The Quality Inn would be a temporary place to hide from zombies at best. First the first floor entrances are all glass, no way to easily secure them, not to mention all the windows. Secondly the stairwells are very wide and supported by solid steel girders. To remove the stairs, and there are three staircases, you would need a lot of help and cutting torches. Even if you had a dozen folks and an acetylene torch it would be a tough job cutting the stairs down. Third the hotel is not swarm proof, the windows on the second floor are too large and the rooms configured in a way that there are no interior rooms. There no place to hide more than one or two people for any extended length of time. The zombies would swarm around the building crushing each other till they formed a ramp of zombie parts to reach the second floor windows, then it would be all over for the poor souls hiding in the bathrooms. My house, if we survived the initial swarm, is pretty defensible. Other than the sliding glass doors, which I would probably brick up, assuming I had time, the stairs are easily removed, as I discovered after Sukki ripped the carpet out. link to story || 4 comments || Add a comment Sat, 29 Aug 2009 @ 08:58 || Dead computer || WorkCame into work this morning to finish up some tasks. Found my computer dead. It would boot to the starting windows screen, but when it went to switch to the higher resolution Video it went blank.I rebooted a few times, reluctant to clear all the junk off my desk to get to it, so I could open her up and see what was wrong. No luck, I had to clean my office to get to the PC. After 2 hours, and replacing 3 fans, the video card and 2 hard drives, it's back among the living. One of the two hard drives I lost had my ClearCase VOBs on them.. So now I'm copying over the backups, looks like it will be a few more hours to copy them. While I'm waiting I get to do what I really came in here for. I'm assuming the fans all died on the computer over the summer, not sure the last time I opened up my computer. The office is usually hotter than I like it, and if the computer had been running w/o any of the fans that's what killed the video card. One of the hard drives had been failing for months, and I had already moved all the files off it. The hard drive with the VOBs, I may have damaged when putting in the new video card, the computer can see the drive if you hold the sata cable in place. I'm thinking duct tape... but naw, while I'd love to brag about saving a drive with duct tape, I don't really need four hard drives, I can consolidate down to two. Will be better for the heat and power anyway. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Wed, 22 Jul 2009 @ 15:46 || Vinyl Dye || TechnologyI saw this over on Make's BlogVinyl Dye, I'm going to see if I can find any of this stuff so I can start dyeing all my old beige computer parts. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Mon, 20 Jul 2009 @ 15:06 || Birds and the Plague || HomeA local dog park has been closed due to an outbreak of the plague the prairie dogs are enjoying. This park is very close to the area Shane and I were walking each morning. We have since switched to walking around the block. Better safe than plaguey.Since we started walking around the block, we've noticed we picked up fans. A mother bird and four baby birds great us from the side of a fence a few houses down from ours. Later on they appear again and hop and fly around on the road just a few feet ahead of us. They lead us 2/3rds of the way down the last part of the block. We have been doing four laps around the block to equal our walk around Kettner lake. Each time around the birds show up at roughly the same spots and lead us around. I'm assuming they are the same birds. link to story || 1 comment || Add a comment Tue, 23 Jun 2009 @ 19:44 || Fedora 11 || TechnologySo, I log into my laptop tonight and it wants me to upgrade to Fedora 11. This is new, normally I have to download a CD of a new release... Since I'm not traveling anytime soon, I'm going to go ahead and tempt the fates and try the upgrade.link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Thu, 18 Jun 2009 @ 10:29 || Slacker || HomeI haven't been updating my blog directly in a while. Been busy and it's easier to update it via my twitter account on my cell phone.However, here's a diet update that most of the folks following me on twitter wouldn't care much about. I saw the doctor for my regular diabetes checkup. Things are looking better, I've been sticking to my diet (mostly) and it is starting to show in the blood work results. I still need to work on it, but all the indications are I'm moving in the right direction.
link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Sat, 23 May 2009 @ 07:36 || Walks || HomeShane and I have started walking each morning. Theres a small lake just west of our house, Kittner Reservoir. We get up at 6, takes us about 50 minutes.This morning I took my old gps to figure out exactly how far we are walking, was going to use my new gps, but couldn't find the odometer setting. Turns out our walk is 2.0 miles exactly. I've been doing this walk on and off for a while. Shane has started to join me as he wants to seriously consider the ROTC program at CU this year. If he joins one of the ROTC programs, they have all 4 branches available, Army, Navy, Air Force and Jar Heads, he'll have till December to meet the height/weight requirements and to pass a PT test. The PT (Physical Training) test consists of a 2 mile run and 2 minutes of situps and pushups. Hopefully after a few weeks of walking we can increase it to a jog, then start working on running. I swore I'd never run again, unless for my life, after I got out of the Army, but for Shane... maybe I can hire someone to get him in shape. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Wed, 20 May 2009 @ 21:38 || Mom || HomeMy mother was out here visiting for Shane's graduation. She went home yesterday morning, was here for a week. Had a good time, I wasn't able to take much time off work, just one day. I fixed her up with a mp3 player and a new cell phone.She took the wrong charger home with her. I'll be at her house in 10 days, I'll switch the chargers back then, hope her cell phone lasts that long. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Sun, 03 May 2009 @ 21:00 || Couch vs Chainsaw || HomeI came from from work last week to find Sukki and a couch stuck in the doorway between the house and the garage. Sukki had most of the leather stripped off and was trying to cut part of the couch off with a hand saw.I moved the couch out of the door back to the living room and had her explain what the heck was going on. She was cleaning and found some evidence of mice under the couch. When she ripped some of the material back she found a whole lot more evidence. We haven't liked this couch and we didn't really use or need it. She figured she'd throw it away, and got it jammed in the door trying to drag it out herself. Not sure why she didn't wait for me to get home or at least Shane. The couch originally came in thru the siding glass door in the back of the house, but I figured I'd break my chainsaw out and take the remains out thru the garage. The chainsaw made quick work of the couch. It also scared the hell out of Sukki, Mindy and a couple of her friends.
link to story || 4 comments || Add a comment Sat, 25 Apr 2009 @ 07:54 || Diet Update || DietAfter a few false starts, I figured I wouldn't post till I've been back on the diet a week,I started again last Saturday, my starting weight was 266. This morning I'm at 259. Lost 7 lbs in the first week. I had gained back almost 15 lbs while I was off the diet, wasn't avoiding the carbs as much as I should have, and I had zero exercise. I'm joining the rec center today, hopefully I will go at least once a week. The weather has been nice for about a week, so I have no excuses for not walking each day. My near term goal is to be at 250 lbs by May 15th. link to story || 1 comment || Add a comment Sat, 18 Apr 2009 @ 09:39 || Birthday || HomeYesterday I turned 41. Kids went all out. Got me a big ice cream cake (which I'm not supposta be eating). I did better than xmas, they spent too much on presents. Sukki knitted me a Dr. Who scarf!I went into work but closed the office around noon. We had a snow storm which was pretty bad in the morning, but turned mostly to rain in the afternoon, then back to snow most of the night. Today it's drizzling out, but I haven't seen any snow. The news claims that I70 is closed west of Golden, and that the mountains got over 30" of snow last night. They are even reporting avalanches on I70. Here in Westminster we got about a foot. I have some work to finish over the weekend, so I'll be headed to the office later today and maybe a bit tomorrow. I'm also thinking about attacking the basement project more. Last week I finished up the lighting, however, I may end up redoing a lot of it. link to story || 2 comments || Add a comment Sun, 22 Mar 2009 @ 17:08 || Spring || HomeThis weekend both days were above 70 degrees. My apple tree has started to bud. Looks like it will have a ton of blooms on it within a week. This year should be an apple producing year. Last year I didn't have any apples, but the two years before I did, so we'll see.I took the dog for a walk yesterday, walked about 3 miles, around the lake at Kensington Park. We live near two lakes, a small one, Kettner Reservoir and a large one, Stanley Lake. My goal is to work up to walking around Stanley Lake, I'm guessing thats probably 8-10 miles. The downside of it warming up, is the garage doesn't work as a refrigerator anymore. I shouldn't be drinking soda's, but I keep a few cases in the garage. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Sun, 22 Mar 2009 @ 09:06 || Back on || DietThe diet is back on. I went a week w/o major issues with the gout and have been on the anti gout meds since Thursday.So this is start of week one, starting wieght is 261 lbs. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment Sun, 15 Mar 2009 @ 10:58 || False Start || DietThe diet didn't last long, only about two days. I'm off it again. The gout came back hard Wednesday night. Thursday and Friday I stayed home trying to stay off my feet. This time the gout attacked my right foot.The pain wasn't as bad last night, but this morning it's about as bad as it was Thursday. I can get around, but it's slow and painful. I'll be getting a cane today, so I can at least get around at work. I'm surprised that it hasn't subsided yet, usually if I avoid the high protein diet for a few days it's fixed itself in a day or so. I've found that I'm grouchier and kinda mean when the pain is at it's worse, I probably need to stay off facebook when I have these flair ups. What I think is funny, is being seen as mean by others. link to story || 0 comments || Add a comment |
|
|
