Brian's Blog

Well, I can't believe I missed it. Just three days ago it was Pi Day and I was asleep at the wheel. I'm not a math geek and I've never even made the connection of 3/14 being Pi Day until I saw this posted on boing boing. Apparently they had pointed it out on 3/14 but I missed it. Still, I don't need much of an excuse to have a celebration and to eat yummy pies so I think I'll add this day to my calendar.

I wonder if I can push to have this be an official paid holiday at work?

After many months of having the ingredients sitting in a box I've finally got off my lazy arse and decided to brew some beer. It's been a good long time. To bad it takes 3-4 week (minimum) to get drinkable beer because I'm kind of in the mood for one now!

Anyway, the recipe for this time around is called 3 Spice Lemon Weiz and it a wheat beer. Something I've never made before and I don't think I've ever had wheat beer at all. Hopefully I'll like it. The description sure sounds good though:

If you're looking to brew something a little out of the ordinary, this sharp and zesty wheat beer will be right up your alley. The blend of brown spices and fruity esters abound in every complex and contemplative sip of 3 Spice Lemon Wheat.

In addition to the canned Malt/Hops mix that you get with the recipe it also calls for lemon juice, coriander seed, nutmeg, and cinnamon. The wort smelled pretty good before I put it in the keg. So, in two weeks or so if I'm lucky I'll be bottling it up and getting onto the next recipe in the queue, Defibrillator Doppelbock.

It turns out that the photo album that I had the pictures I took of some of the things I've made from leather was sitting on the very top of the pile! Having found them so easy I decided to scan them in right away. This brings my photo record of what I've made as up to date as it can get. I know I've made a few other things but never took pictures of them. For instance, I know my Mother-in-law has a checkbook cover of a different design than the ones I've pictured and my father-in-law has a belt my wife and I made together for him.

The pics are in my gallery in the Miscellaneous section at the bottom for those who care.

No, not that kind of leather!

It's been quite a few years since I've plied the craft and I have to say I missed it. Way back when I was a Boy Scout (yeah, I know I'm even geekier than you thought!) I was introduced to leather carving while working on the various requisite merit badges for Eagle Scout. After that I didn't work leather for something on the order of 10 years but then returned to the hobby in my late 20s. Not long after that Tandy Leather disappeared from the face of the earth. Tandy Leather, by the way, is a local company that sells leather, supplies, and a multitude of tools to work leather into useful things. When they went out of business I stopped working with leather because of the inconvenience of buying leather on line and the fact that you don't know what quality you are going to get in a skin. Well, I was quite happy when my wife pointed out that Tandy Leather has opened up again and has a store about 5 minutes from my house! It turns out that another company bought up the previous version of Tandy Leather Company, changed the name to Tandy Leather Factory, and decided to open stores up in all the cities where they originally were.

In about 1997 or so I made my wife a nice carved purse which she has used hard and it's showing wear. It's been repaired multiple times and, even though she loves it, she has decided to retired it for fear of ruining it entirely. So, she put me to the task of making her a new purse. I just finished the new one this weekend and have a picture of it here in this post. The only thing I don't like about the way it turned out is the highlighting came out sort of swirly rather than the smooth even color it should have been. I'm not sure why it turned out this way as I did a dry run of the finishing process on another piece of leather to make sure something crazy wouldn't happen on the real article. Depending on ones point of view it makes it look somewhat antiqued which is a kind of nice look. Either way, I don't think it turned out hideous. What do you think?

Since I can actually get back into this hobby again I've made a gallery to show off pictures of things I make. Thus far it only has pics of my wife's old purse and her new one. Go here if you'd like a closer look at what I've done so far. Somewhere or another I think I have printed pictures of other things I've done. If I can manage to find them and if time permits I may scan them in and put them up also.

Well, I took my 70-292:Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment for an MCSA Certified on Windows 2000 exam today (Microsoft gets paid by the word obviously for their exam titles). I'm happy to say I've passed and am one step closer to obtaining the 3l33t h4x0r m4d skillz that only Microsoft can teach (not). So, only one more test left to become a fully upgraded minion of the Empire! Hey, it pays the bills right?

Oh, on a side note, it's a happy day. Captain Copyright is dead.

My friend Bob pointed out that I had never made an update regarding the results of my test. That's because I never actually took it. Unfortunately a emergency project game up at work and I had to reschedule. So, now I'm taking the test tomorrow morning at 9am. I'll do my best to actually follow up for the few who actually read my blog on a regular bases.

So, for a second time, wish me luck.

Well, I've finally schedule my 70-292 exam for upgrade my certification for work. I'm taking it on Jan 29th. Wish me luck! If I pass this then only one more to be officially current.

Christmas this year wasn't as much fun as it normally is. Don't get me wrong, it could be much much worse, but my daughter woke up at about 2:30am Christmas morning and left me a nice present of vomit to clean up. She was sick all day Christmas day and much of the next day causing me to stay home and take care of her rather than engaging in holiday festivities. She obviously didn't get sick on purpose and I was much more worried about her getting better than I was about partying but still it wasn't fun for either of us. At the very lease I had some forced one on one time with her which I think I always fall short in doing anyway. So we played some games and talked while keeping warm in front of the fire.

On a positive note though it was a somewhat Geeky Christmas for me having gotten a couple of tech toys worth mentioning. I got the cool binary wrist watch pictured in this post. It looks like I now have reason to get faster in my mental binary to decimal conversions! My wife also got me a new printer which I sorely needed. My HP 722C was a champ and still works but it is really showing its age. Printing out pictures was a laughable exercise. So the new one is a nice Canon PIXMA iP6700D. Which I went through a minor hell getting to work with Linux as it isn't even listed on Linuxprinting.org. I was going to send it back but it would have cost almost as much as another printer once you added the restocking fee, shipping, and the price difference of the HP K550 I was going to replace it with. After much Googling it turns out that a driver for the iP6600D for Linux is available on the Japanese Canon site, and ONLY on the Japanese site. And, as another stroke of luck, it works for the iP6700D also. I'm sure I'm missing some functionality somewhere or another but I haven't seen it. Either way, it's a major step up and a better printer from what I can tell than the HP one was. Given a little bit of time I'm sure it will be supported directly.

The highlight though of the tech fun is the Commodore 64 30 in 1 game stick! Talk about some fun retro gaming! I've already blown more time than I should with my old favorite, Jumpman Jr. Not to mention Karate Champion, Winter Games, and Pitstop 1 and 2.

More important though than all the geek goodness though is that finally everyone is feeling well and we are having a nice day together.

For years I've been referring to Thanksgiving as "Happy Kill and Indian Day" but today I stumbled on someone who's much more over the top than I am. Here is what he said (sorry, don't remember the name):

Happy White Man's Manifest Destiny Used To Attempt Justifying Religious Persecution And False Divine Mandates, In The Process Of Raping, Enslaving and Murdering The Indigenous People of North America Along With Other Sordid Acts And Turkey Devouring Day to everyone!

The sad thing is there is a significant measure of truth in his statement. This is one of those things from American history that I am not proud of in the slightest. The sad thing is we actually celebrate it!

Now, I know Thanksgiving is about giving thanks to God for our harvest, but we need to all remember that if the American Indians didn't help the first settlers they would have stood a good chance of dieing of starvation in their first winter. And our way of thanking the American Indians for their selfless act of generosity was to kill them, destroy much of their culture, and take their land.

Anyway, after that fun dose of reality I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday!

It seems my wife is putting in a subtle bid for becoming a say home mom. Normally the end of the day is ultra-crazy with us both getting home around 6pm and still having to do things like make dinner, spend time with kids, etc etc. By the time all that is done and they are all in bed it's close to 8:30 to 9pm and my wife and I are both tired. Only after this do I get a chance to sit and read and try to cram this MCSE stuff into my head.

Today I walked up to the door, my oldest daughter opened the door for me, both kids and the wife had a hug and kiss for me, a fire was already burning in the fireplace, and dinner was moments away from being done. On top of that both kids have been well behaved for a change (so far).

One day Cindy will be able to stay home I hope and make every day similar to this. The nice thing is Cindy actually wants to stay home and be a house wife. Sometimes it's nice having a wife with old fashioned ideals.

Well, the PFX concert was last night and I have to say I am totally impressed. These guys had it down nearly 100%. I think their keyboardist was having a bit of an off day with his solo in the beginning but after that it was very tight. They started out pretty darn good and got better as they played through the evening. I mean significantly better. Such that by the end the only reason I knew it wasn't the real Pink Floyd was because the guys on stage looked nothing like actual members of Floyd. Of course, the light show was great too. They played a perfect Arnold Layne and dedicated it to Sid who recently passed way which was a nice touch. I'd recommend any Floyd fan to go see PFX and would be happy to see them again next time they come to town.

RCN game by this weekend and hooked up the new cable modem. To save us all a bunch of grief I simply had them set up the modem on my work laptop to test because it's Windows and decided to do the rest of the stuff myself. No offense to the RCN guys, but from the little I talked to them it was clear they didn't know much about that "Linux thing". I can't blame them though as I'm sure they run into if very rarely.

With my laptop connected directly to the cable modem I was blown away to see I was getting actually above the 10Mbits that I has signed up for! I don't know how long that will last, but maybe they won't notice. Or read my blog. So then I connected the new service up to my IPcop box and ran another speed test getting only about 2.5 MBits. WTF! After much poking around I noticed I had my traffic shaping set with a max speed of 3Mbits causing it to throttle back. I figured I'd turn it off and all would be golden but with traffic shaping off I only got 8Mbit. Much better, but not what I was expecting. I went crazy and mostly gave up on it but then I realized today that my WAN side had a 10BaseT NIC in it! Well, DUH. THAT'S what my problem was! Some switching of NICs and a bit of configuration later I was running full speed.

So, I guess the speed problem I had with SECTV wasn't actually their fault but rather mine. I wonder what speed I'd get back on the old service with the traffic shaping off? Still, I'm not going back. They had to many other things that pissed me off. So far RCN has been sufficient. Their tech support isn't Speakeasy but they aren't as brain dead as SECTV. I had to buy a static IP to make sure all inbound ports weren't blocked and RCN assures me they don't filter any spam unless you ask them to leaving it up to me.

Keep the power of control in the users hands...Just the way I like it.

I checked in today on the status of my Speakeasy order. I found that they have already shipped out my installation kit which is nice, however, I also saw that there was a note from Covad that if I didn't switch to Verizon for my phone service from RCN that they couldn't provide me service.

For anyone who doesn't know Verizon sells phone lines to other services like Covad and RCN. Now Covad provides DSL links for the ISP Speakeasy. Other than the system being stupidly complex this entire thing normally didn't effect me other than to delay service setup due to the extra steps. That is until now. For some stupid reason Covad can't provide DSL to my residence simply because my phone service is with RCN an not Verizon. Never mind that RCN is selling Verizon lines already. I'd have to change to get DSL with is utterly ludicrous. Now, if I was close enough and was essentially guaranteed a solid connection I may go for it. But as it stands now I am at 14070 feet and the max is 15000 feet. Meaning that if I go through all the stupid hoops and change my phone company I still may not get a serviceable DSL line.

Now, to be fair, Speakeasy has nothing to do with this. They are an awesome ISP with an incredible reputation. And they are known the be very geek friendly. They are simply at the mercy of Verizon and Covad. Due to the circumstances they waved the order cancellation fee when I asked them to as there was no way I could have known this would happen. So they get bonuses for customer service and keeping a potential future customer happy. I have every desire to use them and I told them that. It just makes no sense to go through the pain. If things change and they can provide guaranteed solid service here then I'll change to them in a heartbeat.

Until then though, it's time for Plan B. I'll be calling RCN to get service setup with them. There should be no problems there as I already have RCN Phone. I'm thinking the 10M/800k service sounds nice. I guess I better put the sales rep through the ringer though to make sure they aren't brain dead too. Or at least not as brain dead as SECTV/Prolog.

Well, I'm finally fed up with my idiotic ISP. I've had multiple issues usually stemming from them (SECTV/Penteledata) not being geek friendly in the slightest. I loose E-mail due to spam filters that they won't let me adjust. They bitch about me using to much bandwidth from time to time. One month I went on a Linux distribution download binge, aka using my bandwidth that I give them money to use, and they sent me a stern letter. And now I've just gotten another one so enough is enough. I've placed a call with Speakeasy, who it seems finally has a chance of being able to give me service. I'm on the hairy edge for ADSL service so the only thing I can do is get it installed and see if it works. I have a month to decide if I want to keep it before the one year contract kicks in.

I've been wanting to get on Speakeasy for ages. I've heard nothing but raving reviews on their service and they are absolutely geek friendly. Geek friendly being things like no blocked ports and it being OK to run your own web/mail server if you wish.

The only down side is that I will be taking a step down in my bandwidth. Currently I top out at a theoretical 7 Megabits per second. But, I must admit, that I've been falling far short of that. The most recent speed test coming up somewhere around 1.5MB to 2.2MB down. So, now that I think about it it's not that much of a step down as long as I can get the DSL line at about 1.5MB.

We'll see I guess. If Speakeasy can't provide sufficient speed I'll have to fall back onto Plan B which is to switch to RCN. RCN recently (finally!) ran fiber in my area so they can (again, finally!) offer Two-Way cable. I checked their Internet Usage Policy on their website and it doesn't look nearly as limiting as SECTV/Penteledata but I highly doubt RCN will be nearly as geek friendly as Speakeasy.

A couple of days ago my wife pointed out that The Pink Floyd Experience is going to be playing locally! I've heard great things about this cover band. Supposedly they are very good and true to the Floyd style so I called Bob and "talked" him into going. He agreed readily which is good because going to see a show by yourself is just weird. Besides, I kind of owe him one. During the most recent, and probably last, Pink Floyd Tour (The Pulse Tour) I went and never asked him to go. I didn't know he was a Floyd fan. So I've been waiting for them to come around and play again. I'm not expecting them to ever play again because, well, they are getting up their in age, David Gilmore is doing solo work, and they have gone on the record as saying it is very unlikely they will ever play again as a group. So this is the closest thing I can do to redeem myself in the eyes of Bob. Besides, from what I can tell from the PFX website I won't be able to tell I'm not at a real Floyd concert anyway. I hope they are as good as they appear to be. They kind of have to be though as Floyd fans are pretty darn picky. Or, at least, I know I am.

Check out the PFX website. They have a photo gallery, promo video, and some sound clips.