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| Wednesday February 28, 2007 | Posted at 8:32 pm | |
| Barely see 15 inches of snow all year and then... | ||
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All hell breaks loose!! I can't recall the official snow total from last weekend, but it was somewhere around 10 inches, maybe more or maybe less. Now, we're bracing for the big dump... School is already canceled for tomorrow, they know it will be crap, the kids are all stoked up! I hope they have to make it up, haha... Because, if school is already canceled for tomorrow and this storm isn't supposed to leave the area until late Friday morning, school being canceled on Friday seems very possible. It would be a good time to close down the school for a 4-day weekend, seems every other person in town is sick with the flu. Thankfully none here, although that crud I experienced last month sure had some flu like symptoms. Last I heard, we're expecting anywhere from 12 to 21 inches of snow, maybe it was 10 to 20, I have heard differing reports. Suffice it to say, it should be a significant dumping. By the time Saturday rolls around, the yearly snowfall total will go from downright miserable to a little bit above downright miserable. If we could have had that kind of snow back in January, it would have been worth registering the sleds and paying BP's exorbitant beer fees for cleaning carburetors and making sure there were in good shape:) I might have also put a little more effort into fixing my snowplow and getting the old Ford fired up to deal with it. You never know!! This is Wisconsin!! It could be 50 and raining by the time I get up in the morning. But if the snow does come, it is supposed to be that "heart attack" snow, the real wet and heavy stuff. I imagine power flickers will be common, if that is the case, I welcome them to see how the new UPS handles it. It has helped on a couple power glitches and during one test I ran the cable modem and wireless router for nearly an hour before I stopped the test. I was still able to use my laptop and surf the net, sweet! Still hopelessly behind in some e-mails... If yer awaiting a reply, I will get to it, sooner than later, I hope. Last day of February, cool... |
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| Sunday February 25, 2007 | Posted at 1:27 pm | |
| Dog Dayz of Winter! | ||
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Jeff wrote about not having much to say last week... Must be catching... Just not much to say these days. I wonder what the deal is. I have updated NASCAR-Fans.com more than I have posted here. Just not much to BS about I guess. Today we're in the midst of a late winter storm. Down south of us they are supposed to be getting much more snow than we will. I think I heard up to 18 inches down there. The amounts up here vary greatly depending on who you listen to. We have already gotten about 3 inches or so, hard to tell because it is blowing like hell out there, and we could get anywhere from 3 to 10 more inches. I gotta give a shout out to a newly found second cousin once removed!! Hey Brittany!! She found me through one of these genealogy sites and said her great-great-grandparents were the same as my great-grandparents. We've exchanged quite a few e-mails over the last couple days. She has provided me with the info on her branch of the family tree and I sent her my report on the family tree. So what started at 30 people and is now at 187 will hopefully get over 200 in the next couple of weeks. Work has been really friggin busy! We did hire a new guy, but he will need quite a bit of attention to bring him up to speed. It's funny... People think "oh websites, they ain't all that tough to do...". But, when you see the scale of our sites and the complexity of the business rules you have to account for and all the back end work, it is insane! I can remember when I came from the Hospital to my current job, I was awestruck by it all. AND I WAS AN EXPERIENCED WEB DEVELOPER!! haha... Entry level peeps, when they see our shizzy, they can get wigged out if ya toss them to the wolves too quick. Did some programming work for the Great Northern Beer Festival yesterday. Nothing that you would notice when you go there... Gave them a nice back end for adding breweries to a database. Now the brewery list display dynamically. This will allow them to manage who is coming and confirmed. Supposedly, real soon, details will be released about where the beer fest will be happening. I have talked to Bill a few times and he has kept me up to date on some details. All I can say is it will be a MUCH better location than the last couple of years. Not that there was anything wrong with Trees For Tomorrow, but this new place is ideal!! Right now I am installing Windows 2000 on an ancient Dell Optiplex GX1 for Porn Star... Man, this machine is a turd!! Heavier than my monster XPS!! I am going to see if I can get a wifi card installed and configured... He'll be setting up this machine in his shop, which is about 75 feet from the house. Rather than run CAT5 through the pipe between the house and the shop, we'll try a wifi solution first. Hope it works... We're trying to figure out what we are going to do for a summer vacation this year... Still paying off that new central air and furnace, so funds are kind of limited... Think we'll stick close to home. We talked about going up into the UP and checking out the Porcupine Mountains for a couple days, then head to Pictured Rocks for a couple days, and then head to Sault Ste. Marie for a couple days. Each destination is only separated by about 130 miles or so. No long days of driving, plus, gas isn't cheap anyway... No camping for us, my back is just too messed up for that. We're going to look for cabins in each place. Might be difficult in Sault Ste. Marie, but a hotel will work too. We want to go spend a day checking out the locks up there and then venture into Canadia for a little while. |
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| Sunday February 18, 2007 | Posted at 9:43 pm | |
| This Racing Junkie Has Gotten His Fix! | ||
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Speed weeks are finally over in Daytona. A few weeks back it was the Rolex 24 hour race and then into all the NASCAR action of the last 10 days... Whew... It is all over and my favorite driver managed to walk away with two huge victories! Kevin Harvick won the Busch 300 mile race on Saturday and then won the Nextel Cup 500 mile race on Sunday. It was 6 years ago to the day that racing, and the fans of racing, lost Dale Earnhardt Sr. It was only fitting that his former team win the biggest race of the year. The total race purse is $18 million!! Insane amounts of money... Anyway, I won't bother running up all my space here about NASCAR, after all, that is what I have NASCAR-Fans.com for, haha. I've been blogging more over there lately than here, but that is where most of my attention has been lately. Work has been pretty busy lately... I got called Friday night, about 10 minutes after getting home that there was this "super big problem, gotta fix it right now..." Well, our VPN has been in the crapper and I wasn't going to be able to logon from home to fix it, so I drove into work... It only took a few minutes to locate the code that was causing the problem. It had actually been broken for about 26 hours by the time I fixed it. Turns out some shit code was pushed live... 5 minute fix and a little over an hour of driving. Great... But, while fixing that problem I found another and fixed that too... I wasn't a happy camper and didn't mind telling my coworkers that I wasn't a happy camper either. They'll hear all about my unhappiness on Monday morning. The one shining moment in all this crap was that the VPN is now fixed... Yeah, they rebooted it about an hour after I got home... Nice... |
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| Sunday February 11, 2007 | Posted at 11:18 am | |
| Wow... Walmart Sucks! | ||
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I never would have thought the day would come! Maybe as Allen Stern says in his title, "Walmart in bed with Microsoft? Walmart says NO to Firefox, Mac, Apple", Walmart is kowtowing to the almighty Micro$hat!! It is unconscionable to think that any company making more than even $10,000 per year in online sales would shun close to 20% in sales. 20% is probably a pretty close number... I know that Firefox has been hovering around 10-15% in recent months, but I am not sure about Mac and Apple numbers. Consider too, most who would use a video download service are probably more tech savvy peeps and are probably running Firefox anyway because they know it is the superior browser. |
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| Saturday February 10, 2007 | Posted at 11:56 am | |
| Still sick!! But getting better!! | ||
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So far my ribs are intact!! haha! Go back to the December 2005 archive and look for the "I am so wasted" post for a refresher... The first two days of being sick, I slept at least 40 out of 48 hours. Then I had what felt like a couple good days. Watched the Pooper Bowl with a couple of friends and drank some beers, even headed to work on Monday. I think that going to work did me in and the coughing started. During the next two days I didn't sleep at all. Sure, maybe a 5 minute blackout between coughing jags, but really no sleep. I called in sick on Tuesday and went to the doc for drugs. After last year, I am not waiting long anymore! Got some liquid gold cough syrup, Albuterol inhaler, and some Claritin D. Claritan D dried me up pretty good, cough syrup only worked if I took 3x the dose and really didn't help me sleep anyway. The inhaler gimmick has pretty much fried my voice. I only really emit a series of crackles and pops while talking. This kids will be happy because I can't talk, let alone yell at them. Would be a good time for a Huml Raw show, huh?? hehe. So today is really the first day I am sitting down to the computer to get caught up on 20,231 emails, get some writing done over at NASCAR-Fans.com, and do some research for work. A bunch of stuff has happened in the world and at home since last week, I will make some comments and then call it quits.. Anna Nicole Smith - Big effen deal... Does it really need to occupy every friggin news channel for days and days? Hell no I say... She was just a gold diggin trailer court queen. When you lead the party hardy lifestyle, expect to crash and burn. The one sad deal in this whole thing... Her five month old daughter! ANS herself probably did not know who the real daddy was!! Super Bowl - Yeah, whatever... I like football and sports in general, but these days the way professional athletes behave, I could give a rip. Was cool to see the first African American head coach get a super bowl title. I think the better game would have been New Orleans and New England. Da Bears didn't have much of a chance unless they could have somehow opened up a killer running game to keep Peyton off the field. Grossman wasn't going to win that game, they should have put Griesse in. A few friends came to the house for the game and we slammed some beers... Pretty much the only reason to comment on the game was that the beer was good and some of the commercials were funny. My personal fav was the rock, paper, scissors commercial from Bud. Prince as a halftime show was kind of cool, but I never got all boned up for his music. Anyone who changes their name to a symbol is pretty much a moron in my book. The Great Northern Beer Festival - Some breweries are starting to commit to coming! The location is close to being nailed down! On a sad note... My friend Bill, who is pretty much the main cat in getting this event together, with the help of some really great friends, lost his father on January 29th. Bill is a really good guy and I am sure he got that way from his parents. Bill sent me an article and the obituary that was written about his dad, it was really cool reading about how his dad was a radio personality back in the 40's and 50's in Wausau and was the voice of the Merrill Rangers baseball team. He was also a founding member of the West Side keg Club (now I know where Bill's passion for beer comes from!!). Godspeed, Chuck! Promotion - I was offered, and accepted, a promotion at work. New title, a bit more pay (haven't seen it yet), and more responsibilities, read headaches... No corner office with a view, however I do get to retain my corner cube with zero view. Our senior dude took another job and has moved away. We're trying to organize our department a little better and offer a clear career ladder through the department. We had always been pretty much "developers". Even though I was a developer, I mostly did sys admin work and occasionally programmed. I actually did whatever it was they asked of me... I guess I still will do whatever is asked of me, but now we have better defined roles and responsibilities within our group. Plus, I now get the chance to lead and take more responsibility over the advancement of our junior programmers. I am also going to get a say in hiring new staff, which makes me very happy! I've already made a number of suggestions that were well received by management and are currently in the works. I've been around the block a few times, even with my current company... I know change takes a long time and often times, the more things change, the more they stay the same. But for now I will remain optimistic and stand my ground for what I feel we need to move forward. Sammi's Birthday! - I did come out and post about it on the day of her birthday, I would have to be on my death bed not too. I was damn close to that death bed, but not quite into it. Michelle and Sammi headed to Wausau for the day to do some shopping on her birthday. Sammi has also been doing a lot of babysitting and raking in some good cash, so she had to spend that in typical teenage fashion, before it burned a hole in her pocket. Sammi really likes those Mom and Daughter outings. Sammi got a couple DVD's and CD's for her birthday from us. She got some money and nice cards from some family members. They baked a cake for her when they got home from Wausau and we did the signing and stuff after dinner and ate some cake. The next day, Jake, that useless hunk of crap we call a dog, helped himself to a rather large chunk of the birthday cake during the super bowl the following day! Heard stuff crash and bang upstairs and ran up to find the cake pan top on the floor and the cake pan itself on the counter, albeit missing 90% of the icing and 40% of the actual cake. Some days, I really hate that dog!! Training - I am heading to a training class next month in the Twin Cities... The class will be on VMWare, server virtualization, super cool technology! I've been working on getting our main website running on Linux and Coldfusion and have had some huge success in recent weeks. We're looking to better leverage our existing hardware and take one physical server and virtualize it into any number of virtualized web servers. We'll dump that crappy OS Winblows and switch to Linux (CentOS) and save the licensing costs on Windows. We just bought a new database cluster, so we can take the two old database servers, which have 12 gigs of ram each and are hyper threaded Pentium IV's, and carve them up into 4, 5, or 6 web servers. They would make killer web servers, but are losing their edge as high availability database servers. I was supposed to attend this class in Madison and was really looking forward to hooking up with Jeff and Jenny over at Buzzcat.net. But, typical delays in the corporate world, and losing track of time, means I won't be in Madison for a week and won't be able to hook up with them at Tyranena Brewery. Comments - I have been toying with the idea of putting comments back on the site... 100% moderated of course. Basketball - Michael has been doing pretty good with his basketball stuff! He's played in a few games, scored some points and is having fun. The one sport I hate the most is basketball and it has been hard, at times, to share his enthusiasm for the game, but I keep it positive. The timing of his games is generally after school and I am at work so I don't get to see them. He has a tournament one of these weekends in Crandon, I will go cheer him on. I think I am gonna wind it up here... This is getting long! Nobody reads this crap anyway!! |
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| Saturday February 03, 2007 | Posted at 3:12 pm | |
| Happy Birthday Sammi!! | ||
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15 years old today... Two years ago I wrote that "Next week she'll be driving"... Well, certainly within this next year she will be... Hope she can get used to a stick shift! She's probably got big hopes of driving Mom's Durango... Well, reality says, she'll be driving a 1992 Toyota Paseo which, by the time she gets into it, will be nearing 200k miles! Haha. Happy Birthday Sammi!! We all love you very much!! |
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| Friday February 02, 2007 | Posted at 7:58 am | |
| Sniffle...Sniffle...Cough...Sneeze...Fart..... | ||
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That has pretty much been my mantra the last couple days... Got progressively worse yesterday and I came home early... Today, woke up just long enough to bundle up and run the kids up to school with temps hovering around -7. I sent an e-mail to work and now I am heading back to bed, but first I wanna find a couple more pounds of blankies to toss on me. See you on the other side... This stuff better be gone by Super Bowl Sunday! |
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Keep a tight one... (Thanks Jimmy)
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 March 11, 2010 :: 1:33 PM |