Brian's Blog

An unmentioned part of my holiday loot was The Return of the King Extended Edition. A couple of days ago I had an extra 4 hours of time just laying around so I took the time to watch it and I wasn't disappointed overall. A few of the major goodies added in is the scene where Gandalf and Saruman have their confrontation. That scene was very well done with some obvious but needed changes from the original text to make it fit in the movie. Related to this scene in a way is the fact that one of my favorite sections of the book, The Scouring of the Shire, is not included in the film. Thus Saruman and Grima get to meet their end here vs in it's proper place in the Scouring. But, since the Scouring was supposedly never filmed I guess it just had to be.

There was another really cool bit where they added in The Mouth of Sauron who is Sauron's ambassador. This guys mouth is huge and it bugged me enough to turn on the commentary to see if they mentioned how they did it right after I finished the movie. Basically, they just digitally magnified his mouth 50%. It looks subtly wrong when you view it. I though it was well done even though my bud Bob doesn't like it. But what does he know.

Among the other goodies that I noticed as new were The Houses of Healing and a bit about Faramir and Eowyn meeting there. Plus there are a load of extended scenes. The only real disappointment I have is the exclusion of the Scouring of the Shire. Still, it's awesome. My wife and I are going to watch it again tonight.

Aside from that, today ended up being a surprise day off (unpaid unfortunately). So I've spent some time with the kids, did some more reading of Beowulf which is excellent so far, and did a little shopping for drinking supplies for tonight. My wife can't have alcohol since she is breastfeeding, so I guess I'll have to drink for the two of us. It's a hard job to take up, but I'll do my best.

This article at the Seattle Times and mentioned on Slashdot where I found it is about how technology and the fast paced world it has caused is stressing us out. Personally, I've thought similar things in the past and it's nice to see that someone is actually studying the subject beyond the hunch that I've had for years. Specifically it mentions multitasking and task-switching as not really thing humans are good at. And that doing multiple things at once actually reduces how well we could do any one of those things if we just concentrated on one thing at a time. I don't know about anyone else but this seems like an obvious thing to me. The problem is that we are pushed to multitask and it's having negative effects on us.

This makes me think of a time when I worked at IQE. Our SMS server went nutty and was causing a handful of the workstations to bog down with 100% CPU time taken by the SMS client. I was the designated SMS "expert" so it fell to me to fix. This wasn't an easy fix, and I eventually had to open a case with Microsoft to work it out which took most of the day. During this time my boss decided it would be good to check on my progress every 10 to 15 minutes, probably because his system was one of the ones affected. I noticed that every single time he interrupted me it took a good 10 minutes for me to get my mind back into the troubleshooting mode. Eventually I snapped at him and told him to leave me alone. The point being that all these interruptions, the multitasking of troubleshooting and explaining progress, increased my stress and reduced my efficiency.

One particular quote in the article from a Roman philosopher named Publilius Syrus that applies well is, "To do two things at once is to do neither." Supposedly he said this in 100 B.C. And I thought we've made progress since then!

I've often thought that we let this happen to ourselves. We let the companies we work for use technology to make us work from home, and even while on vacation. The problem is, to say no to any of this looks bad for you because you'd be the only one doing it. Even so, I don't care about how I look, I'll work form home occasionally but only during hours I'd normally work. And when on vacation my laptop stays at home and the mobile phone is off. I like to think that I'm the one with my priorities in order, not some corporation.

Anyway, the article is a good read and provides food for thought.

Well, the Christmas holiday has passed and the family has had a few days to recover. My wife is still recovering since she is the one primarily in charge of entertainment and took care of most of the other holiday preparations. As always the kids had the most fun and got the lion's share of the toys. Between my wife and I we received a good many practical gifts which getting older has caused me to appreciate more. Among the practical gifts were things like cloths for us and the kids and a food processor which we've wished we had before but never actually ran and bought. I got my wife a turn table for her records. She's practically been begging for a new one since her old one broke.

Personally I received a nice LED flashlight that doesn't take batteries and will run for about an hour on one minute of cranking the handle. Which seems like a good thing since whenever the power goes out you can never find a flashlight that actually works. Also among my loot were a few books with the highlight being Beowulf which I'm ashamed to admit I've never read but I'll rectify that soon enough. Also, I got a much needed new chair for the computer table. My old one has been fixed and rigged countless times. One of the less practical, but one of the cooler gifts I got from my mother and sister is my name hand written in oriental calligraphy on parchment that they had done and framed when they went to New York City.

Christmas day was a nice day that started out with my oldest daughter actually sleeping in instead of the expected 5AM session of jumping up and down on my back until I woke up to open presents. We had a nice fire in the fireplace all day long. A fire makes such a nice warmth compared to any other heat source. The only problem is the central thermostat is in the living room with the fireplace which causes the rest of the house to get cold since the heat never turns on. Even so, the warmth in the living room and the visual of a fire was welcome.

After gifts with the kids my family came over for a dinner that consisted of a hole chicken with home make stuffing, candied yams, salad, green beans, and apple muffins followed by my wife's incredible chocolate cookies, pumpkin pie, and ice cream. My wife sure can cook and I'll have to run on the treadmill for about 1 week nonstop to work off all that I ate but wow was it good. We ended the day drinking and eating even more at the in-laws house where they always have a large gathering of family every Christmas night. My father-in-law had his traditionally large platform of trains that is always well done.

I'd have pictures of much of the days activities in the gallery already but I've managed to leave my camera at a relatives house and probably won't get it back until the weekend.

As a side note I updated from Nanoblogger 3.0 to 3.1 for some bug fixes. I thought it would be a pain to update but I just followed the upgrade method in the docs and then used vimdiff to find my customizations in the templates and I was done. The main fixes I upgraded for was to prevent the arbitrary execution of code in blog entries and a new cache that speeds up the blog generation process.

I just thought I'd take a moment to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. Enjoy your holiday and may your loot be plentiful!

Good grief do I have cabin fever. So, here I am 2 days post surgery and just lounging about. I feel fine for the most part but I start to notice when I walk around a bit. And for some odd reason today the swelling that is so common actually happened to me two days after the fact. I'd think swelling would become evident sooner.

Anyway, I've been taking the time to read about Exchange for work a little but that isn't of terrible interest to me since it's something I have to do for work. And the Apache 2 book is getting dull. Not so much because it's written bad, but because I've learned all that I've set out to do with Apache. For the moment the remaining chapters hold little interest. Part of it could just be the chapter I'm in which is mostly just a list of all the possible Apache 2 modules and an explanation of each one. Not much to actually do but read. The next few chapters are on PHP, mod_perl, and Tomcat. At this point I know nothing about PHP, Perl and Java so what's the point of reading them? I think I'll start reading more about HTML and XHTML even though I should probably just get this dumb Exchange thing out of the way.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll be OK enough to get out a bit. Funny, when I'm at work I want to be at home and do nothing, now that I'm at home doing nothing I want to be somewhere other than home. Well, away from home for a couple of hours or so anyway.

Whelp, time for another 20 mins of the ice pack.

Well, just about everyone I associate with knows I was scheduled for Vasectomy surgery today. I know not everyone cares to hear about this but I thought I'd write my thoughts on the experience so far. I had some good references on the procedure and resources on how it's done here so I won't repeat them.

Anyway, my appointment was at 2pm today so I spent a good part of the morning doing this that would keep my mind off of it. Lets face it, no matter what anyone says, us guys are psycho in our over protective nature of the area in question. My Urologist seems to greatly understand this mental hang up we have and prescribed a dose of Valium. This understanding was the main reason I chose him. Also, I kind of gave him a short interview during the consultation visit and found out that he's very experienced in the procedure having done 100-150 of them a year for several years.

Anyway, I popped the 15MG of Valium at 1:30PM and my wife took me to face my doom. Now, I've never taken a Valium in my life, and I must say, I don't think it really did anything physical to me. By that I mean it seems to get you relaxed by affecting you mentally. As in, make the brain not feel anxiety and the body will follow. All in all I'm a pretty calm fellow and the Valium really did the trick to make me extra relaxed.

So anyway, I get called into the office and we go into the operating room. You obviously have to undress form the waist down since they haven't perfected a way to do these things through cloths yet. The nurse gets all the stuff together and leaves. So I get to hang around with my own thoughts for about 10 minutes before the Dr. came in. This time is when I really knew the Valium was working because I know would have freaked otherwise.

Well, he comes in and while chatting a bit gets right down to the business at hand. Now, the worst part is getting numbed. Unless you live somewhere that is on the cutting edge of medical technology and uses No Needle Anesthesia they will use a syringe to deliver the numbing agent. I must say that he was super quick about this part. Basically there was a little bit of pinch for the skin numbing and a dull ache for the numbing of each Vas. The only other things I felt was a slight pinch once and an extremely light tug on the one side, then nothing at all after that.

So, from the time that I was numbed to the time that I was walking out of the door to be taken home was about 15 minutes as I can recall (I was drugged after all).

So, here I am 7 hours after wards and not feeling any pain. Tylenol is more than enough to control what little there would be. And I'm following the directions from the Dr to the T.

It wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Not at all.

You know, every time I go over to my bud Chris's he points out something of a conspiracy type of nature that is somewhat disturbing. Tonight, he pointed one out that disturbed me in a major way.

What he showed me was this article in which a children's toy was discovered as saying "I hate you." between the soothing sounds it makes to lull your child to sleep.

What really upsets me is I think my oldest daughter had one of these. I can't verify though since it stopped working and was tossed in the garbage long ago but to think of my daughter being exposed to that kind of negative message makes me furious.

I made it to the final level of Thief II: The Metal Age. So far it's an enjoyable but complex level. It's kind of a pain avoiding all the Children of Karras, which are mechanical beasts that do their best to make you very dead. They can be taken out easily enough with two water arrows in the boiler on their backs but there are a slew of them and only 12 arrows to start with. So I guess I get to be a sneaky thief instead of clunking everything on the head and dragging the bodies out of sight.

While Thief II is excellent I still think the original Thief was a little bit better mostly due to the creepy environment. It's one of those games that shouldn't be played in the dark, with headphones on. My wife scared the crap out of me once by poking me in the back while I was playing. I almost fell out of the seat I jumped so hard. The only game that tops all game environments for me is System Shock 2. That one really wigged me out good. Looking Glass Studios had a way with making games high in the creepy factor. To bad they've been defunct for quite a while.

Once I'm done with Thief II I can finally give Thief: Deadly Shadows a whirl. Deadly Shadows is essentially Thief 3 in that supposedly most of the people from LGS that worked on T1 and T2 now work for Ion Storm who make TDS.

All the Thief games received incredible reviews, but for some reason they never were majorly popular. They seem to be games that most people just don't get since they actually require clear thinking, planning, and patients to play vs just grabbing the biggest gun and blowing the bejessus out of everything that moves.. As much as I'm looking forward to TDS I may just play some Warlord Battle Cry II or Warcraft III as a break. I don't want to OD on the sneaker games.

I think it's time to start a game binge. For some reason I can't explain I flip-flop between a reading and learning binge and a waste time and play games binge. So, I figure I'm so close to finishing Thief II (finally) that I may as well just finish it. It is, after all, an excellent game. Just a few of the games on my "to play someday" list are Planescape Torment, Thief: Deadly Shadows, and Warcraft III. I've also seen really good things about LOTR: The Battle for Middle Earth, so I may spend more money on a game I won't play for ages.

Speaking of LOTR, the Extended edition of Return of the King is out as of yesterday. I'll be running out and grabbing it on the 26th provided it's not in my X-mas loot.

Oh, 5 days till D-Day.

Today was an interesting day. Actually, the last two days were interesting. Well, not really that interesting but still...

Anyway, the last two days have been spent at a dentist's office working out their network woes. It started off with the server randomly rebooting itself because LSASS.EXE had some strange error given by Microsoft as nothing more than a long Hex number that no one seems to know what it really means. Anyway, every time this error would happen you'd get a box saying the system will reboot in 60 seconds. Checking the event log showed a few errors regarding Removable Storage Manager having issues with the CD-ROM drives just before each reboot so I thought it was something screwy with the IDE chain. So I just disconnected the CD drives and about an hour later it did it again.

Now this place has no Internet connectivity other than 3 PC's with dial-up. Thus, all the system are terribly out of date both patch wise and virus definition wise. They used to only use the dial up on one of the PC's that was not connected to the LAN but recently changed that and decided to transfer some stuff from the Internet only PC including E-mail to one of the PC's that had both dial up Internet and LAN connectivity. After much questioning I figured out that there problems started shortly after they did this.

Well, to not make a story longer than it needs to be, they managed to get an oddball virus called W32.korgo.AB on just one of their PC's. This virus scans the local network for other PC's to infect and is known to crash the LSASS.EXE mentioned already. So, just from the simple act of transferring some data to a PC it spread to every single PC on their network and was causing a good part of them to reboot randomly.

I've spend the past two days troubleshooting the server and cleaning up viruses. They are now looking getting DSL and a firewall so they can get the latest patches and updates.

To bad they can't consider Linux. Well, they could, but I'm the only one at work who knows anything about Linux and I don't feel comfortable enough with it to suggest that they use it. Plus due to ignorance one of the owners just against Linux and anything else open source.

I just overheard on the radio this morning on the way into work that telemarketers are going to be allowed to call cell phone numbers starting January 1st. That's really a crappy thing since most people pay for their minutes. At the very least telemarketing calls will chew up your free minutes which will end up cost you anyway.

They said that we can get on the National Do Not Call list to stop the annoyance but the deadline is Dec 15Th. I just called and registered my number, it took about 2 minutes and supposedly you'll be on the do not call list for 5 years.

I called their number (1-888-382-1222) but they have a website too at donotcall.gov.

I'm not looking forward to work tomorrow. I have to go to a client (who shall remain nameless) and attempt to help them get them directory structure security into some sane order. The problem, and the reason I'm not looking forward to going, is that their administrator is in way over her head in this subject and tends to get flustered when I get technical. I don't want to upset her in anyway, but I can't make this subject any less technical. And to water it down will defeat the purpose of the security changes. I just hope I can convince her to take my recommendations to heart, even though they'll be a pain in the ass in the short term.

On a different subject, I can't seem to get into the Christmas spirit at all. It's only a couple of weeks away and every day just seems like any other. Get up, get ready for work, go to work, fix things, come home, eat, spend time with family, stay up later than I should screwing with my computers, go to bed, repeat. Maybe it's because we haven't had time to actually decorate the house and the tree still isn't up. I'm pretty sure my scheduled surgery in the near future is having some part of it, but I can't buy that it's that much of a cause. Hopefully I'll set myself right by Christmas Day. At the least watching my kids open their presents will get my mood better.

Oh, I finally managed to get SSL compiled with Apache 2. It's been pulling my hair out and all I had to do was tell configure where the SSL includes where. Now maybe I can keep going in Sam's Apache 2 book.

Tonight I've finally finished reading The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien. I've only been reading the thing since the beginning of the First Age it seems. I must say that The Silmarillion has fleshed out the stories in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for me nicely. None of the information is really needed to enjoy and understand The Lord of the Rings but knowing the little back ground details is nice. For instance, I learned a little bit about the origins of Shelob in Chapter 8 - Of the Darkening of Valinor. And in Of Beren and Luthien is the full story of, oddly enough, Beren and Luthien that Aragorn mentioned in The Lord of the Rings while he is guiding Frodo and company to Rivendell. There are also other goodies about the origins of Sauron, the rise and fall of the Dunedain, and the main part which is the full history of the Elves. I also enjoyed the Ainulindeale which is the creation story of Arda.

The problem I have though, is I started reading this so long ago that I'm sure I've forgotten things from the beginning, so I'll have to read it again sometime. And, hopefully, having read it once, I won't have to spend as much time looking up the huge amount of names, referencing the map, and visiting The Encyclopedia of Arda so much. And instead just read and enjoy the stories.

It's definitely a re-read for me. I'd like to read The Lord of the Rings again sometime and see how much more detail I pick up. It seems every time I re-read a book by Tolkien I pick up more and more.

I'm back from hunting and none of us bagged a deer. I could only get out for one day and all I saw was one deer all day in the morning at about 9AM. If I took my Dad's advice and got an antler-less license I could have shot it and been back at camp warming by a fire before noon time. Instead I got to sit around and not see anything else but a squirrel. Even so, I think I'd rather be out in the woods on a band hunting day than have a good day at work.

Not much really happened my one day, not really any stories to tell. Unlike last time I went hunting where it was so cold all our water froze, we had to chop up the meat to cook on the fire with a hatchet, and the deer I got froze solid while hanging from the tree before we had a chance to finish cutting it up.

So, I came come then to my main system here not working, my mostly new AMD 3000+ system. Only a few short months ago I bought mostly new parts, including memory, CPU, motherboard and power supply. Every so often it would just shut off. No warning, and never when I was actually looking, but I'd leave the room and come back an hour later and the darn thing was off. fsck would run on boot showing that it wasn't cleanly shutdown. I ran memtest86 on it and found one of my memory modules was bad. So now I'm down to half my memory while I wait for an RMA from Newegg.

Anyway, I stuck a few pics of the hunting day in the gallery if you'd like to see.

Time for bed, hopefully my system will still be running in the AM.

According to this Roger Waters may reunite with Pink Floyd and tour again in 2005.

I know there have been rumor's about this for a long time that have been nothing more than just rumors but one can hope.

I saw them for their Division Bell tour without Roger Waters and they were incredible.

Today was kind of quiet. Not much going on, just messing around and starting to get ready for deer hunting on Sat with my Dad. It's one of the few times I actually spend time with him, and it's nice just sitting in the woods away from the everyday world for just a little. With a little luck maybe I'll have some extra meet to go on the table.

Sunbird has been pretty nice so far. With WebDAV setup it works fairly nice for having my calendar on my work system and my home system. It would be nice to see the ability to remember your password built in if I so choose. As it stands now I've have to type my username and password for most every change I make, even so it's still pretty darn slick considering it's still very much under development. I would also be nice to see other things like color coding of categories/events and maybe bold the days in the mini-calendar if something is scheduled. I don't think it's ready for business use yet, but it's good enough for me.

I also found a nice utility called Suntray that is nice for my work laptop which I'm forced to run Windows on. It runs Sunbird in the system tray and keeps it out of they way, allowing for reminder pop-ups but not taking up to much screen.

On a more personal note, I finally found a Dr that isn't a total quack for getting a vasectomy. Basically there's two way it can be done, the conventional way and the No Scalpel way (NSV). The first guy I saw was talking about 4cm or so of incision or 1.6 inches for the metrically challenged. Youch! Anyway, NSV only involved a puncture wound. It's amazing anyone still would be willing to get it done the old way.

I did mega research on the subject and found the most useful info at these places:

• No-Scalpel Vasectomy: An Illustrated Guide for Surgeons, Third Edition - Basically a technical manual, with plenty of illustrations.
• Vasectomy Medical - A movie of the procedure beginning to end. It also demonstrates No Needle Anesthetic. Not for the faint of heart.
• http://www.beavercleaver.net and http://www.my-vasectomy.com - The sites of two wackos who had their surgery photographed and published on the net. The nice thing is though, it's not sugar coated like some Doctors do. Once again, not for the faint of heart.

Don't worry, I'll have no such pictures on the net! Of course, these sites are for "informational purposes only" I made sure to talk to my Dr for the final word, but they were pretty close.

Time to go add the Date of Doom to Sunbird.

Last night I got DAV working with the help of Sams Teach Yourself Apache 2 . I was up till about 1 am till it was working but I'd say the problems were more related to Apache itself than the book being bad. The long and short of it is that some of the modules for Apache, in this case mod_dav and mod_dav_fs just would not load up properly. So I ended up recompiling Apache with the DAV modules compiled in statically.

So, now it's working and Sunbird connects to it and updates things as it should along with authentication to keep out the bad guys. I've tested it from work by making a change. Then checked that the change on the calendar showed up here at home. So now I have no excuses to miss anything. I even made the terrible mistake of telling my wife about this. Now I won't be able to get away with as much.

This is my first try at the Sams series of books and so far it's pretty good. The cover has on it, "When you only have time for the answers" and they mean it. Which can be a good thing. Sometimes other books go into such overkill for what I want.

Anyway, time to go shopping with the family and get ready for deer hunting.