The ScooterBlog

Ugh! Another week long break between posts! I need to get back to making this part of my daily requiem of things to do, because thoughts do hit my head and I don’t have a good place to put them, except here in this blog, for everyone to see.

So without further adieu, here’s why the break … Danielle’s dad went back into the hospital again. From the first time he was in, which ended up being for an entire week for a heart ablasion, he ended up getting an infection that went into both his only kidney and his blood stream, so after a week at home resting, he spent another week back in the hospital fighting that (with some drama to boot). But the good news is, he is back home and resting again, and hopefully after this week will be back working and back to 100% health again.

More coming up later, I’m going to edit and add to this post.

Yeah, been another lull in the blog posting days, but it’s ok, cause there’s some good stuff coming off of Digg today that I wanted to pass along:

• Apparently the same dude who programmed PGP nearly 15 years ago is writing the same program with an emphasis on VOIP phone calls over the Internet called ZFone. The link to this is here.
• For those of you selling your hard drive on eBay … this tool is probably a good idea, overwriting a hard drive with 8 random sequences and 27 programmed sequences. Eraser is here.
• The smart little suckers at Microsoft went back to old arcade machine style tactics and covered their BIOS chip with epoxy to prevent them from being accessed. Yeah, they’ll still mod this eventually, but here shows why it’s gonna take some work to do it.
• If you’re travelling … and happen to be at a Mariott Hotel … free Pay-Per-View! Trust me, there’s some hacking involved in this fix.
• There’s reviews ad nauseum out there now for Windows Media Player 11’s beta with its music store. The verdict? Good but not great.
• Here’s a very nice guide on how to take your XP installation, virtualize it, not lose a thing but then get a clean XP installation for yourself. Check it out here.

… well, that’s Mother’s Day week for the rest of you, so get something nice for your mom! Me, I have an extra week … I explain in the resolutions.

• Danielle’s dad … still in the hospital, his test on his heart’s electrical function has been delayed twice while he sits in a hospital room! NOT HAPPY! Actually, we’re al frustrated. Aside from the things that of course make it annoying, it’s messed up all this weekend’s plans and pushed them back one week. Just as long as he gets the test done and gets home though, that’s all that matters, that’s it.
• I’ve decided on the Linux route, not the Linux router. Actually since I made that post, my router has been especially stable, halfway through completing a 50 GIG torrent without crashing. But, I’d like to play with Linux and make a nice formidable machine that can prove to be usable. I’m going to use Ubuntu Dapper Drake Beta 2 … I’m sure I will have questions.

Can’t think of anything else right now. Will write more later.

Just a quick heads up to the masses who read this blog … keep Danielle’s dad in your prayers. He went into the hospital last night with chest pains due to a racing pulse rate. He’s stable now, but he is going to be in until Monday for additional tests. Hopefully he is going to be ok, but he needs the prayers much more then I or most of us do right now!

Just a quick update here on Monday. He’s still in, but all of his tests came back normal, and he had a heart cathedarization today, which was also normal. They think there may be issues with the electrical function of his heart, so he’ll have a few more tests tomorrow, but he’s doing very very well for a multi-day hospital stay. It’s good to see!

So while this technically serves as a purpose for me to test posting via e-mail, I should mention that I had a blast at the Corporate Challenge for Karlsberger this evening!

In three games, I bowled a 150, 105, then 129. Very good scores for me considering it is only the second time in my life that I broke 150, and prolly had 8 or 9 strikes over the course of the night. Danielle had a blast, got to meet a ton of my co-workers, and absolutely loved all of them.

Quite a few people had very nice things to say about my being there, which needless to say felt great. It’s one of those moments where you go from just being at a new job, to really feeling like you’re a part of the new job and a part of where you work. Good stuff.

[i]E-Mail posting didn’t work .. back to the drawing board![/i]

Anyone in town, I’ll be at the good ‘ol GJ from 12 to 2 helping out for the Halo 4v4 Pro event tomorrow. Stop in, say hello, help us keep track of all the loonies, cause all of us are gonna need it.

Oh yes, speaking of the ‘ol Game Junkie, check out the latest newsletter. Very well written stuff by both Chelsea and The Professor that will make you think.

Oh yeah, I have no Sunday plans … anyone game?

So here I thought I was a lucky son of a gun to move and go from a 50-minute, 50-mile commute to a 15-minute, 10-mile commute (and still be well in the suburbs).

Well, that’s all fine and dandy until bridges start to crumble and SR-315 slows to a crawl.

Guess I am gonna learn Columbus one way or another!

I’m torn and I need the advice of people smarter then I do figure this one out.

I have an old Microsoft Router, MN-700 I believe … bought it from Joe Morgan about two years ago, and it’s served me well, likely can continue to do so as a wireless access point. But, I’m now using the heck out of it for torrents and more heavy-access type applications, and it’s not holding up terribly well, crashes 1-2 times a week.

So, my new thought process is to do one of two things:

Option 1: Buy a new hardware router

Option 2: Build a Linux distribution and let it do the hard work.

I would love thoughts from everyone as to the best thing to do, it’s greatly appreciated! The computer I would use for the Linux setup would be a P4 1.7 GHZ, 1 GB RAM, 20 GB boot drive and a pair of 80 gig drives, striped NTFS in Windows now. I wouldn’t mind striping them in Linux either.

Stephen, Bradley Hale, and myself were all fortunate enough to attend the WWE RAW live show at Nationwide Arena on Monday Night, and had a great time! The seats that we had in the club section were off the charts good, and only cost $20 each (plus TicketMaster’s “you take it right up the rear end” fees), and there were some good matches and good moments too. Some awful matches, but that’s the WWE these days, some good, and some just silly.

• The Sunday Night Heat match featuring “The Untouchables” as a tag team group was flat out ridiculous, although they did show some pretty good wrestling moves, and they are a tag team on RAW, something you barely ever see anymore.
• Shawn Michaels being set up by the Spirit Squad to face the wrath of Kane, taking the shirt they deftly gave him, swift kicking Rob Conway, and putting the shirt on him … then helping John Cena win his title match at the end of the show. Laura would have enjoyed watching all of that (and hopefully I’ll have some basic footage up soon!)
• The fun banter between myself (Cena fan) and Bradley (Triple H fan)
• Danielle cooking one awesome meal, and me actually baking extremely good BBQ chicken. Stephen can back me up on that, I hope he comments so that it will actually be believed!

A lot of fun, I’m so glad that the guys made the trip up. I’m sure I’ll read up on Stephen’s Smackdown experience in Cincinnati yesterday on his blog today. I sure did pay the price last night though from all of the time awake … I was dead to the world! But all better today and back on top of things.

(Links for much of the above coming soon)

Just discovered quite the interesting program completely written in Flash …. it’s called Goowy, and it’s a full fledged desktop with RSS reading support, Instant Messaging with all four of the major clients, and even file storage and e-mail. I don’t know if it’s the end all but if you’re in a bind and need something quick, say, at a public computer, this may be a half decent way to go.