Woodstock, my dual (200MHz) Pentium Pro server died a couple weeks ago. The power supply failed. The power supply was manufactured in August of 1997. The CPU cooling fans and front case fan failed at various points over the last two years and I merely unplugged them. I have cannibalized the Adaptec 2940 Ultra Wide SCSI Adapter, 2.1Gb IBM UW SCSI hard disk and 4x SCSI CD Burner. They are now up and running in another box. I have a few pieces of proprietary RAM in the form of EDO ECC 60ns DIMMs if anyone needs them: 32MB, 64MB, 128MB... It is hard to believe the 128MB knock off Viking chip rang me up ~$200.00. I thought I got a really good deal on this machine, but the proprietary RAM, voltage regulator, and 2nd processor really added up. Oh well, I think I got plenty use out of it over the years...
Is there somewhere I can donate old computer pieces? I remember a computer store that had a huge bin of old pieces somewhere around here.
Yesterday, Doug and I went down to Mad River Mtn. near Bellefontaine Ohio. Mad River Mtn. had a solid base (46"-52") of snow from the recent winter storm and some help from nightly snow making. I was excited to use the set of skis I received for Christmas. Doug and I found the slopes very easy. Doug went to Lake Placid (where the Olympic team practices) last week. He noted that the green hills (i.e. the easiest) at Lake Placid were more difficult than the double black (i.e. most difficult) at Mad River Mtn. Mad River Mtn is a good place to learn to ski but its downhill challenges are easily overcome. None-the-less we had a good time. We even ventured over to the fun park which included ski jumps, grinds, and obstacles. Doug and I tried out the ski jumps. He did pretty good and I took a solid crash.
According to Patrick Cronin of the Hampton Union (in Hampton, New Hampshire), Bryan Lafond just wanted to go to his school dance. The seventh grade student of Hampton Academy Junior High School thought it might be fun to go dressed as Santa Claus.
Bad move.
When he arrived at the dance, Fred Muscara, the interim principal, stopped him at the door. Dressing as Santa is, apparently, politically incorrect. Why? Let's let Muscara explain that for himself:
"It was a holiday party," the principal told Cronin. "It was not a Christmas party. There is a separation of church and state. We have a lot of students that go to Hampton Academy Junior High that have different religions. We have to be sensitive to that."
First of all, the notion of a separation of church and state merely prevents the state from adopting an official religion. Dressing up as Santa at a holiday party doesn't exactly qualify.
And furthermore, if Muscara is concerned that Santa is inextricably connected to Christmas, then one might well ask exactly which holidays are being celebrated at the "holiday dance"? Presumably Christmas, Chanukkah, and, I suppose, Kwanzaa. So what's the problem?
But even more to the point: Santa is part of the secular celebration of Christmas -- not the Christian religious day. Recall that there were no elves in Bethlehem.
What we have here is yet another example of a hysterical secularist leaping at any hint of religion -- even when the offense isn't remotely religious.
I finally got around to putting the photos from Rob and Heather's halloween party on-line. It was a great party and the photos show the Reckley graveyard, Rob chasing kids with his chainsaw, and the witch piñata. The best costume goes to Doug dressed up as Rob and second goes to Justin dressed up as Rob's boat. (Justin yearns to be a Ski Nautique owner.)
Last week I traveled to Texas City to attend a training session. I was in Detriot awaiting my flight to Houston and I ran into Malavika. It turned out that she was on the same flight to Houston. (She was my first supervisor at Marathon Oil, and left to work for i2 3 years ago.) She is still at i2 and was surprised to hear that I was still working for MAP. On the flight I thought back recalling the exodus: Jeremy, Josh, Steve Z, Malavika, Dan... It was enjoyable thinking about corporate IT and my co-worker friends pre-SOX and pre-outsourcing.
Comment spam is a problem. I have been using MT-Blacklist to try to eliminate it. However, it is a time consuming game of one-upmanship. I read Dan's "Spam Begone" approach and decided to give it a try.
I disabled MT-Blacklist and setup SCode. The first approach (MT-Blacklist) consisted of ultilizing a blacklist of known strings to identify comment spammers and zap their spam. To maintain an effective blacklist required constant updates, which I hadn't bothered to automate. In addition to being time consuming to maintain, false-positive string matches would eliminate useful comments. Therefore, strings need to be specific enough to eliminate comment spam while avoiding vagueness which would result in false positives. What a conundrum!
The new approach displays a security code and requires the end user to manually reproduce it before they can save their comment. This should stop spambots in their tracks (for awhile), by proving the end user is a person rather than a computer program (specifically, a bot which emulates a person). The only comment spam I will need to worry about is items that are manually typied in. That is until the next round in this comment spam arms race.
I just uploaded the photos that Kate took when we removed the ski course. These were taken with her camera phone, so the quality leaves something to be desired. We skied until almost dark, despite the fact that it was November.
Chris and Gary are barefooting this weekend (December 4th and 5th) in Michigan dressed up for the holidays. The local newspaper is going to write an article and publish photos of this endeavor.
You are or soon will be eligible for a free yearly credit report from Annual Credit Report.com. This website appears to aggregate data from the big three crediting reporting agencies: experian, EQUIFAX, and TransUnion. This is a nice service to check up on your credit and verify you are not a victim of identify theft. Currently, identify theft is the fastest growing crime in America.
It is about time that a person can have free access to the data tracked about their credit, spending, and payment history. This is important data that determines interest rates available to you as well as the prices for most types of insurance. Hopefully, free access will eventually be increased to more than one report per year. However, kudos are appropriate for this step in the right direction.