|
|
|
| Tuesday October 30, 2007 | Posted at 5:39 pm | |
| Surfin... | ||
|
I love YouTube... Someone sends you a cool little YouTube link and you can literally spend hours watching videos and other crap... While on there today I came across an oldie, but a goodie, from Static-X. Some will enjoy, some will be repulsed, whatever the case, any reaction is worth it. Hopefully this video stays on YouTube for a while. Oh crap, then I found the new one from Serj, good stuff! This dude rocks! Oh double crap, then I found this one from Serj's band, System of a Down, great stuff! I made a ring tone for my cell phone from a snippet of this tune! If anyone wants it, lemme know. |
||
| Sunday October 28, 2007 | Posted at 11:25 am | |
| I think I am still trashed... | ||
|
Wow! Forgive any sphelling errors, me head is still in a solid fog from last night. Went to a friends (I force him, and another co-worker, to be my friend, but that is a whole other blog post!) house for dinner, conversation, cocktails, and board games... That makes me sound old! Michelle and I were the old farts, as our friends are under 30. The food was awesome! A huge baked ham with pineapple, potatoes, corn, rolls... Cheesecake... Apple pie, which I don't think we even cut, haha, that cheesecake was the bomb! They also had a good spinach dip and a fruit type dip that you dunked slices of pineapple and strawberries into. I brought beer, shocker there, huh? Anchor Steam, Autumnal Fire, and Riverwest. I am forever grateful of my unselfish wife, the patron saint of designated drivers!!! The last couple of weeks have been busy with working. The virtualization stuff is coming along pretty good. We now have three Vi3 servers up and running and it looks like we may be getting a few more. I am also working on upgrading our web server software, Coldfusion, from 6.1 to 8. We have seen some insane performance boosts between 6.1 and 8, on the order of 50% plus increases under heavy loads. On the hometown front... All the funerals are over and school is back in session and life is slowly trying to return to normal. This past week a few of the families had "thank you" ads in the local paper. When I was reading those messages it really sunk in how much the community comes together to help out during a crisis. We gave money, I felt it was a pretty decent amount actually, but when you consider the scale of it all, that amount seems like nothing... Sam was waitressing at a church sponsored fish fry and she setup a coffee can asking for donations. They also took the can to church that next Sunday and got a bunch more money. Kind of cool, because they attend a church in a town about 30 miles away, and people there were eager to help too. BP and I went out grouse hunting last weekend! Haven't done that in quite a few years! The only grouse we saw were while we were driving, haha, typical. I wiped out my Windows XP install on the laptop and installed Ubuntu 7.10. So far the battery life is awesome! You can hear the fans wind down when the machine goes idle. A huge improvement over the last time I tried it. I am awaiting some memory I purchased to get Mike's computer going, Ubuntu is already installed and ready to go. I am going to use an older machine to run XUbuntu on. XUbuntu uses Xfce instead of Gnome and is a nice clean X-windows that will run on older, or lesser, hardware. Sticking with geek speak... Alltel is upgrading towers up here and we're finally able to get EVDO in most areas. Except, at home!! I see flashes of "EV" on the Treo (phone) here and there around town, I hope the towers up on the hill, east of town, get upgraded soon. I can usually get 100k throughput, but getting over 500k with EVDO would be much nicer! We got a letter in the mail from Charter Communications, who supplies us with TV and Internet, stating that they are going all digital. The fine print at the very bottom of the page says, more or less, if you have a TV and it doesn't have a digital box, your TV will stop working. They charge you something like $5 or $6 a month for a box... We all have small TVs in our bedrooms and I have one in my office. DAMN! We already have two digital boxes on the primary TV's in the house. We'll probably use our bedroom TV for watching movies on DVD. No more Discovery or TLC watching from bed. I took off from work on Friday, Michelle and I went to Rhinelander. She had her three year checkup, blood draw, and chest xray... Afterwards, we went shopping and out for lunch. I got some smaller clothes, haha, it was nice not having to look for the über fat rack! Instead, I just browsed the fat rack. Also bought some shoes and some hiking type boots for the coming winter season. While looking at the boots, I noticed that they were "eco" boots... Recycled products and other environmentally friendly components were used in the manufacture of the boots. I thought that was kind of cool! We weighed in on Friday since Michelle was going to get weighed at the doctors office... I am down 57.5 pounds now, weight loss is coming more slowly now, but it is still coming, so we're still sticking with the plan. Well, there are exceptions, like last night, haha. This is getting pretty damn long winded. I think I will stop for now. |
||
| Sunday October 07, 2007 | Posted at 3:19 pm | |
| BFD!!! | ||
|
Bad Friggin Deal!!! By now, many of you may have heard of the tragic happenings in my little town of Crandon. First, we're all safe, and the situation is now over! I was really happy to finally hear from the wifey, 10 hours after she was called to duty with the sheriff's department, that she was ok. Sadly, the same cannot be said for friends and the children of friends. October 7th, 2007 will certainly be a sad day etched into the hearts of many in this small town. This whole day has been a surreal blur and what ifs... "What if it were my kid?" "What if it were my wife?" "What if it were my buddy's kid?" It's bad enough that we know people that have died and that we know grieving parents, but god damn, it sure makes me wanna go squeeze my kids that much more. We had two news helicopters over the town at once. Shit, we go months without any helicopter doing a fly-by. Now we'll be inundated with effen national news people wanting this angle and that angle to this story. If I happen to encounter one, I will promptly tell them to f*&k off!!! I think, today, my children got a much better appreciation for their strict old man who forever has a thumb on them and is very involved in their lives. For if we weren't, this could have very easily been them. I am kind of in shock, I guess... I think I am going to need some more beer, as yet another news helicopter comes in to fly 500 feet over the town for the next half hour. I hope Michelle gets off work on time tonight, I can't wait to give her a big old hug. |
||
| Saturday October 06, 2007 | Posted at 8:15 am | |
| Whizzay up mah people, I am in tha hizouse! | ||
|
Jeff, over at Jeff-Archer-Black.net (another fine site hosted on the BadgerTech Network), dropped me an email yesterday gittin a status cuz he hasn't heard from me in a while. I guess quite a few people could, and some have, make that claim. Hehe... What can I say? Been busy! Put in some long hours at work last week and that transfered into some long hours of research at home too. Been doing some stuff with the side biz and working on crunching numbers and various scenarios for ways to expand upon the web hosting business. Really have been thinking long and hard about running a couple of my own servers rather than a leased server. Over the past couple of years I have been straying away from the Coldfusion programming language and going with PHP. However, in the last couple of weeks, I have really been able to witness, first hand, the huge improvements in speed of CF 8 versus CF 6.1. Yeah, hopping right over CF7 there. Plus, this past week, down in Chicago at Adobe MAX, they announce CF9. We're probably a solid year to a year in a half away from that, but it shows that Adobe is not abandoning the language anytime soon, which had been one of my primary concerns about the language, ever since the buyout of Macromedia. Not to mention, CF8 really runs so nice on a virtual server. During benchmark testing that I was running, I easily saw the 30-40% gain they claimed in the white papers. So, maybe, in the future, BadgerTech just might be offering CF hosting. If only I can figure out a way to come up with a ton of extra cash for servers and licenses and then market that to the masses and get the ever elusive ROI. Diet news: Wow! Going real well! I am down 51 pounds now and Michelle and Sam are at 17 and 15.5, respectively. I won't see the Doc again until Oct. 29th, so I am still on 75 mcg thyroid meds. Last weekend, Michelle and I dropped off the kids with Grandpa and Grandma on Saturday so we could go celebrate our 16th wedding anniversary. We met up with them in Green Bay, since they live about a twenty minutes to a half hour south of there. Once the kids were in the hands of the grands, we took off for Door County. Why Door County? Easy, close to the grands and there was a pretty cool AND cheap resort that I wanted to check out in Little Sturgeon Bay. Door County is absolutely filled with weekend terrorists out looking for artsy fartsy crap and wine. Well, Michelle and I aren't your typical artsy fartsy types and neither of us appreciates wine. We had time to kill after dropping off the kids before we could check in. We stopped at Applebee's and got a bunch o' appetizers and I had a Numbskull beer. Yeah, even though I have sworn off the beer during this diet, I do make exceptions, haha. Then we hit a boozer to get some adult beverages for later, wink-wink... We drove all the way up to Sister Bay on HWY 57 and then back down to Sturgeon Bay on HWY 42. I'll be honest with you, Door County ain't my bag, baby... As a matter of fact, the small streets, shitloads of traffic, and terrorists were really beginning to PISS ME OFF!! I couldn't wait to get to the resort, check in, and dive into those adult beverages. The resort was really nice, off the beaten path, and far enough away from all the little "clicky" harbors to be extremely, extremely well valued for what you get!! We paid $110 for the night and we basically got a one bedroom condo/apartment complete with full kitchen, dining room table, sleeper sofa, chair, two fireplaces, one of which was a three-sided fireplace between the two person hot tub and the king-sized bed. As if all that wasn't enough, they even had a huge bathroom and a little vanity area and a private deck with table and four chairs. Not to mention, a wall of windows that overlooked the marina and lake. I have crappy cell phone pictures I will put somewhere, someday, maybe I will make another Flickr set. They have a little restaurant/bar in the lowest level. Talk about reasonable priced meal! Not bad at all! We each had the tenderloin steak meal that came with soup, salad, and potato under $15, each. The next morning they had a breakfast buffet that included an omelette bar. It was great! So was the bloody mary!! Again, that was very reasonable when you consider all that was offered. I think each meal basically costs us about $30 or so. The name of the place is the Wavepointe Marina & Resort. We stayed in the Corner Atlantis Suite. Check their prices... $110 is the summer rate. We did tour the largest suite before we left. We thought maybe we'd go back this summer with the kids for three days during the week. One suggestion, bring drinking water. That was the only thing that was kinda scary. It is kinda of cloudy and tastes over-conditioned. I have never found a hotel or resort where the water wasn't over chlorinated or treated and this place is no different. I did drink some, and so far, no bad side effects. This is getting long... Crap, maybe I should post more often!! |
||
Keep a tight one... (Thanks Jimmy)
Copyright © 1997 - 2010
The Huml Family Organizational Unit
 March 9, 2010 :: 3:31 PM |