One other thing. The Powerbook only has USB ports for external keyboard/mouse input. If you are a big geek like me you have several monitors, a few keyboards and a KVM on your desktop. The KVM is of course PS/2 based, because until now you have used only PCs. Well! Microcenter, and many other retailers I am sure, will sell you a PS/2 keyboard + mouse to USB adapter for $15. Mine is made by QVS and it works perfectly.

I’m typing this from my new 12″ Powerbook.

What have I done?

Update:
What I have done is bought a defective computer. I’ll be returning it today assuming Microcenter doesn’t try to charge me a restocking fee, in which case I’ll be ending up in jail most likely.

I noticed when I got it home that there seemed to be some weirdness on the front right edge of the case. It’s seperated by the tiniest bit. I figured it was just shoddy craftmenship, which I don’t really expect from Apple, but whatever. All was well and good till I picked it up to carry it across the room. As soon as I picked it up the screen went grey and a white box popped up saying I needed to reboot. I did this a few more times to verify and then I Googled.

Seems that I have either a bad hard drive or a bad hard drive cable. That, on top of the case oddness makes me think someone before me has had this laptop and maybe dropped it on it’s head. I’m not happy.

Further Update:
I took it back, got another, it did the same thing. I killed the dog, shot the roommate, blew up the house and then called Apple support. Britney told me I was a weak girly man and to push the Airport card in further. I did and all is well. *Woops*

Oh, I forgot to mention the dreams. Whenever I am sick I have constant, repetative, stupid dreams whenever I try to sleep. It’s always some task I am trying to complete that either goes on forever or that I keep failing at. This time they are all tower related.

Last night and the night before I was trying to make this piece of a huge black tower that is all convoluted. The tower was made of pieces of randomly welded together steel and somehow represented TCP/IP. (Don’t ask). The problem was that I was responsible for this one hunk of the tower right in the middle and I had to build my piece in such a way that I could move it into place without disturbing any of the other pieces.

Tonight, in the few hours of sleep I actually got I was just climbing an endless staircase in a tower. Just climbing and climbing and climbing. Sometimes I would slip and then I got to start over.

So, it’s 6:40am I have to be up for work in about 1:20. I can’t sleep cause I am freezing and sweating at the same time. Man this sucks.

I have been sicker (more sick?) than I have been in years for the past two days. Fevers, delerium, headaches, body aches, ache aches. Doctor says it’s a virus and I just have to wait it out, which surprisingly, made me happy. The last time I went to the doctor for this kind of sick they were still in the “throw antibiotics at it!” frame of mind and that always bothered me. People knew for years that antibiotics did nothing for viruses and that the constant use of them was just making stronger bugs but you could pretty much be guaranteed that if you went to the doctor with a sniffle you were gonna get a bottle of nasty pink stuff.

So, score one for the medical trade which finally woke up a bit and also score a few dozen for the bastard virus that has me feeling like death.

All this is well and good except for one thing. I started a new job on Monday and now I have been away from it, sick, for two days. Not the best first impression I am sure. On Wednesday I could barely move, everything hurt so much but I was sure I would be able to get back on Thursday. Wednesday night came with a 103 degree fever and going from teeth chattering cold to cast in the pits of hell hot. Today the fever was mostly gone (except for a few minutes ago when I checked, it was back slightly) but I still have this terrible, dry, wracking cough and every muscle in my body hurts. Oh, and my eyes are bleeding for some reason.

On a happy note, the first few notes of a song that I had stuck in my head for 4 days but couldn’t figure out suddenly resolved themselves while listening to Groove Salad. It was Fragile State, if you’d like to know. That’s a relief. I thought I was going to lose my mind hearing the same two notes over and over again in my sleep.

That’s all for now. I’ll be back in work tomorrow no matter what, even if I have to have someone carry the individual pieces of my broken body in one at a time.

P.S. I was just kidding about the eyes.

Back alive from Vegas with the Fazed crew. Woot!

Viva Las Vegas!

I saw this on someone’s website and LOLed, so I figured it was worth stealing.

A Girl’s Prayer:

Lord,
Before I lay me down to sleep,
I pray for a man, who’s not a creep,
One who’s handsome, smart and strong,
One who’s willy is thick and long.
One who thinks before he speaks,
When he promises to call, he won’t wait weeks.
I pray that he is gainfully employed,
And when I spend his cash, won’t be annoyed.
Pulls out my chair and opens my door,
Massages my back and begs to do more.
Oh! send me a man who’ll make love to my mind,
Knows just what to say, when I ask “How big’s my behind?”
One who’ll make love till my body’s a twitchin,
In the hall, the loo, the garden and kitchen!
I pray that this man will love me to no end,
And never attempt to shag my best friend.
And as I kneel and pray by my bed,
I look at the creep you sent me instead.
Amen.

A Boy’s Prayer:

Lord,
I pray for a nympho with huge boobs,
Who owns a beer store.
Amen

So what’s new?

I accepted an offer for a new job last week. I’ll be working for a consulting company and my client will be a medical research company. I’ll still be doing mostly Java programming, but it sounds like there might be the opportunity to do some other neat stuff too. I’ll give more details once I start and get settled in.

My sister Civvy and her boyfriend got engaged to be married in April. It was a surprise to me, and a surprise to everyone from what I hear. Very cool though. They’ll be getting married in Las Vegas so I’ll be making a second trip to Vegas soon.

With that mentioned, I’m going to Vegas for a weekend of insanity with the Fazed crew next week. I’ll be there from the 5th through the 8th, so if you will too, drop me a line!

I brewed my first all-grain batch of beer a few weeks ago and I’ll be kegging the first half of it this weekend. For you non-homebrewers out there (why?!), all-grain is when you start with nothing but malted barley and you end up with beer. It’s a much more complicated process than what I have been doing till now, which is extract brewing. The upside is that you get much better beer, and you can control every aspect of the resulting product. This is of course practice for when I open my own brewery 🙂

The beer that I brewed is to be a clone of Alaskan Amber. Kelly’s parents went on a cruise to Alaska last year and her Dad had some of this beer. He thought it was really great and looked into having some shipped back home. Unfortunatly the cost to get a case or so shipping to New Jersey is very prohibitive so I thought I would try to make some. I’ve never actually had it so I figure I’ll work on the recipe till the beer tastes real good to me and then ship some to NJ for sampling.

I’m sorta working on a new photography type project, but haven’t really gotten it off the ground yet. I want to do some high speed photography of exploding fruits and the like. I know it’s been done before, but it hasn’t been done by ME before! The only place I have to do these experiements is in the basement and it wouldn’t really be safe, or legal to fire either of my guns down there so I am building a powerful CO2 powered air rifle. It’ll still be dangerous, but it will be legal and that’s important!

In the near future I’m going to try to take one or two welding classes, as that’s something I want to learn how to do. I’d like to start building a more permanent home brewery this spring and summer, and it’s either wood or weld. I’d also like to be able to add fittings to my kettles and the such without paying outrageous prices to have the welding done.

That’s it for now!

Rover! Go fetch. Fetch! Wait, no. No! NO! OH GOD NO THE BURNING!

I’ve just finished configuring Nagios for the network at my office. Until now we’ve used a hodgepodge of monitoring stuff that never really did the job all that well. Nagios took me about 2 days to configure properly, and it was by no means easy or intuitive but now that it’s all done and I know how the system works some I have nothing but praises for it.

Nagios will monitor just about any kind of server or service you can throw at it, and it will notify you when there are problems. That’s just touching the surface, but for those things it does a great job. It will also do uptime reporting, escalations, dependencies and all kinds of stuff I havn’t even looked at. All this and it’s free. Yay Open Source!

If you want to run a robust monitoring solution for your network and don’t want to spend billions of dollars on something like HP OpenView, you could do worse than install Nagios.