We had a very nice Thanksgiving at my Mother's, and have just returned home. I mentioned at dinner that I must be growing up or getting old or something, because I now like cranberries. I have always hated them, and now I love them. Weird? We had a thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat, and then the next day after Patty and Mom did a bit o' shopping we had another dinner just like the first, and still had enough leftovers for two strapping six-footers to snack on all night. My brother and I put away quite a bit of food over the short visit, but I think now there is enough room in Mom's fridge for normal food, and not just leftover storage!

We relaxed and I watched TV and talked with my family, got some reading done while people were away shopping and whatever. Finished 'The Cabinet of Curiosities'. I think I'll concentrate on 'Hacking Exposed' for a while now.

My father and his mother were visiting his brother in Florida, and I hear that they had a great time. We had to leave earlier than planned Saturday due to some nasty weather coming north. Once we got home, I called and my brother mentioned that after we left they had blue skies and the threatening storm missed them completely. Ahhh! That is because it was chasing us north, always keeping us within a few minutes of its leading edge. We stopped once for gas, and it started raining and took 20 min of driving to put it behind us again. Then I decided to take 66 instead of 340, which may have been a better route, but plunged us right through the storm. Of course as we got within half an hour of home, no rain. Very weird weather today!

I have just uploaded new pictures, and updated the older pictures on the pictures link, to the left. New outdoors and indoor pictures where applicable, including the new yard front and back, and the new bench downstairs, and the new purple room upstairs. New as in about a year, but not represented online. I also updated my computer pictures and descriptions, including the stuff in storage. I'm still not sure what to do with all the parts. Maybe I'll begin tinkering again if I get in the mood, but for now they stay safely in the closet.
posted by MikeM at 10:55 PM    

 
I am attempting to enable a new commenting service to allow readers to comment on my posts. Seems easy to use, but I may edit it a bit over the next few weeks until I'm happy with it.
posted by MikeM at 1:47 PM    

 
Skimmed through the "Pole Shift" book, not much there worth reading. Started "The Cabinet of Curiosities" by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, which promises to be a good book. I'm also reading 'Hacking Exposed', but technical material needs fiction to break it up, so I usually read two books in the same time period, alternating as needed.

No snow, just rain and 35 here, but we will still wait until tomorrow for the drive. Harrisonburg is supposed to get snow today, and I don't want to drive into a snowy situation. Mom has a full Turkeyday dinner with all the trimmings in the preparation stage, so great fun should be had by all!

Making good progress through Half-Life - I forgot how much fun it was! Since I have completed the game once a long time ago, I know just enough to have an edge, and finish sections faster than the first time - as I know where to go and what to do, for the most part. The sound and graphics improvements are nice, but overall the gameplay is what made this game the Game of the Year in several publications.
posted by MikeM at 7:56 AM    

 
Even after I cancelled my Yahoo account in September, I was still being charged $5 per month to my visa. Since I had erased my visa information on yahoo, I was kinda wondering just how they were doing this... I emailed tech support a few days ago and today got word that it was the virtual address that I was paying $5 per month for - that used to direct my geocities account to another geocities account with my name in it. Convenient at the time, not needed now. They cancelled it and refunded $10 to my visa. Nice touch that. Hopefully this will close the yahoo chapter.

Supposed to rain and snow tonight, which means the morning will bring a nightmare of ice and traffic. We were supposed to drive down to Roanoke tomorrow evening, but with this weather, Thursday morning seems more sane.

Started reading 'Hacking Exposed, 3rd ed' yesterday - in the same vein as 'Counter Hack', but different authors and different information and stories.

I'm also trying to learn spanish - via cassette on the drive to/from work. 8 30-min lessons on 4 cassettes. So far so good.
posted by MikeM at 4:21 PM    

 
It's been a while since I posted, so here's a quick capsule:

Thursday at work we were visited by a tech from the backup company I have ranted about before (CA BrightStorEB), and we came up with 14 'issues' that he entered work items for, two of which were critical and to be immediately shuttled high in the tech support chain. No calls yet, by the way.

Friday we had a partial meltdown of the same backup system - I got it going again, and this time changed some defaults to try and make it more stable. We'll see.

Saturday we went xmas shopping and cataloging - bought a lot of stuff for ourselves, and scratched the top of the xmas list.

Sunday we went xmas shopping and did a bit better - got about half the list done. Or at least nearly done.

Today I swapped out all of the tapes in the library, the changes I made Friday apparently worked, as we had a stable backup over the weekend. I also changed half the jobs to do the backups in TAR format instead of brightstor format. Just so we can (hopefully) get the data back if brightstor decides to stop reading the tapes again. I say half because I alternate days and have two jobs for each server, so over the space of two days, I get two complete backups on two separate sets of tapes. The second set will now be in TAR format.

Over the weekend, I finished Counter Hack and began where I left off with a book I was reading over a year ago - I found my old metal bookmark, by the way. 'The Pole Shift' is basically a bunch of pseudo-science mixed with prophecy and psychic revelations that apparently all agree that in the year 2000 or 2001 the earth will rotate 180 degrees about its axis when the crust slips around the core, causing massive earthquakes, ice ages, volcanic destruction, and other mayhem. This is supposed to be a warning to take action to stop the depletion of the ozone layer and stop polluting the ocean because this is somehow responsible for the Pole Shift. I find myself skipping through entire sections, so I estimate the entire 400pp book will be done sometime tomorrow. Not impressed.
posted by MikeM at 2:30 PM    

 
I've been replaying Half-Life for the past few days, and it is fantastic. I figured that the new video and sound cards would change things, especially when combined with the new 5.1 surround sound speakers! Everything is fantastic, the sound is awesome, and the graphics are far smoother than before. I am learning to save every few minutes, and to rest my hands often to avoid wrist pain. The joystick is not the best choice for this game, so I am using the keyboard - which I am not used too.
posted by MikeM at 9:35 AM    

 
Morning, all. Turns out that my family won't be visiting us this Thanksgiving after all. Health problems and the discomfort of a 4 hour drive/ride conspire to prevent it. Ah well. Perhaps we will go down to them! Assuming, of course, that my mother is willing to house Patty & I and our two dogs for 3-4 days...

"The Demon in the Freezer" is worse than scary, it is horrifying, and it is NOT FICTION. They detail some extremely scary facts about the Anthrax attacks last year, and what the investigation revealed. None of this ever hit the press, and for good reason, it would have caused quite a panic.

Turns out that the anthrax used was a very strong strain, nearly pure, and had been treated with other agents including nano-silica to cause it to act as a gas, becoming airborne very easily, and traveling a long way on air currents. This was weapons-grade stuff, and was likely produced in a state-sponsored lab, not a kitchen somewhere. It may have been packaged into the envelopes in a home environment, but even that is unknown, as there was no DNA evidence on the envelopes, stamps, or tape - no dust, hairs, etc at all, meaning that the envelopes were put together in a clean room or dust-hood.
posted by MikeM at 8:09 AM    

 
Started reading another Richard Preston book, this one a non-fiction work called "The Demon in the Freezer" (isbn 0375508562), about bioterrorism in the recent past and very possible future. He writes about the Anthrax attacks and possible Smallpox and other attacks. Scary stuff. Why do I subject myself to scary books, sad books, and books designed to make me paranoid? I dunno. I must enjoy it. Next on my to-read list is "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire", or "The Cabinet of Curiosities" by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. (Yes, Douglas Preston is the brother of Richard Preston, above.)
posted by MikeM at 7:22 PM    

 
Yesterday was a pretty ordinary day - work was good, making progress on the backup issue.

Today was also good - resolved the backup issues and in the process of rolling it out to the (so far) un-backed-up machines. The solution involves three methods - level 0 ufsdump to tape from init 1 (no network, most things shut down), level 0 ufsdump to a remote server from normal login status, to get a benchmark, and the last is a monthly or weekly level 1 ufsdump to a remote server - which gets things that changed since the last level 0. Only this last one will be scheduled, and because the machines are very static, we shouldn't need to do another lvl 0 for a long time.

On the home front, my grandmother, mother, brother, and nephew are coming up to visit us over the Thanksgiving holidays! We are happy beyond words, as we haven't seen the Southern Kin for many moons. They get to experience shopping in the DC Metro area the day after Thanksgiving.

posted by MikeM at 5:38 PM    

 
Finished 'The Mole People' and began once more on 'Counter Hack'. I also found this site that debunks 'The Mole People' - interesting reading as well. It seems that the author of this site has visited many of the sites described in the book, and has detailed information on the subway system and tunnels - and many of the places described in the book simply do not exist, even some of the ones Toth claimed to have visited. This leads one to believe that either she made up large portions of the book or simply changed descriptions of locations in order to hide and protect those living there.
posted by MikeM at 2:29 PM    

 
Today is a holiday, but I will be at work - hopefully everything will go smoothly today, as I hope to resolve a thorny problem I have been experiencing with the backup system.
posted by MikeM at 8:10 AM    

 
Sunday was a lazy day - slept late and took 2 naps, vacuumed 80% of the house between naps, dumped nearly an entire Mt Dew off the balcony onto the carpet below, then had to race the dogs to clean it up before they could. Caffeine-hyped dogs zooming around is not nearly as much fun as you might think. We watched 'The Scorpion King', which was excellent, and then took an additional hour or so to watch all the add-on bonus material. Well worth renting or buying!
posted by MikeM at 8:08 AM    

 
Friday I wasn't feeling so good, but Saturday I felt better. Good enough, in fact to drive into downtown Baltimore in an attempt to visit the Aquarium. Talk about a shock. In DC, nearly everything is free as far as public attractions go. Metro is convenient and inexpensive, and the place is generally visitor-friendly. Not so Baltimore. No metro service to/from relevant places. Traffic at noon on Saturday was horrendous. The lights aren't even vaguely synchronized to help traffic flow. Some red lights NEVER CHANGED, and people were just blowing through them once they got tired of waiting. Now these were not blinking red, they were solid red. Parking was difficult to find, difficult to enter, and $11 for just under 3 hrs.

Then once we got to the Aquarium, there was a line outside that was easily over 75' long. And a big sign saying tickets now selling for 1:45 pm. A quick glance at my watch showed me that it was 12:30pm. Add this to the long line that was barely moving, and we would be lucky to get inside before 2:30, and the place closes at 5pm. We bailed out of the line. Did I mention that the ticket price was $17.50 per adult? I had printed off coupons from the web site for $2.00 off each ticket, and we gave these tickets to another couple in the line, far in front of the line, where they were least likely to bail out. We ended up walking along the Inner Harbor, shopping a little, then we ate at the Capitol Brewery and went home.
posted by MikeM at 8:04 AM    

 
There is a new virus out that masquerades as several official-looking emails or files. It pretends to be from WinZip, Yahoo, Microsoft, and several other places - please be very very careful whenever opening any attachment in an email, or even when clicking on links in emails. Just clicking on a link can either run a virus or send you to an infected website where your browser will run the virus automatically. You can also get infected simply by opening an email in Outlook or using the Preview Pane to see the email contents without opening it.

W32/Oror.b@MM is detailed at http://vil.mcafee.com/dispVirus.asp?virus_k=99786
W32/Oror.e@MM is detailed at http://vil.mcafee.com/dispVirus.asp?virus_k=99787
posted by MikeM at 10:41 AM    

 
Well, yesterday I exported all of my bookmarks from Mozilla and imported them into Explorer, rearranged them the way I was used to using them in Mozilla and changed back to Explorer for my primary browser. I have been using Mozilla almost exclusively for quite a while, since the release of 1.0, actually. I like the look and feel of Mozilla better, I enjoy the tabbed browsing feature, and there are several other items that make Mozilla an easier browser to use than Explorer. Why then, have I switched back to Explorer? Compatability. Several times every day I have to open a site in Explorer simply to use the site, as there are Java/Javascript or other tools in the website that Mozilla either mangles or ignores, resulting in me staring at a mostly empty screen where there should be a complex set of pull down menus, or some other content.

I cannot work like that - I want my browser to be able to read and display correctly ALL website content. MSIE meets this requirement far better than Mozilla, unfortunately.

Now, if only I could find some way to change the font size in the links toolbar... :)
posted by MikeM at 10:35 AM    

 
Seems that the big quake in Alaska caused more than a few hundred quakes in Yellowstone. The echoes are causing quakes all over the place!
posted by MikeM at 3:06 PM    

 
NERD MODE ON : Is there a way to easily get your SHELL, LANG, and PS1 environment variables to be the same on all machines you telnet into? Bash is not always in the same place, RH8 does interesting and amusing things with your LANG variable, and everyone seems to have different prompts. I would love to find a quick and easy way to make these three items standard whereever I log in. Then I would like the same whenever I SU to root. :) Pipe dreams are nice, I suppose.
posted by MikeM at 2:55 PM    

 
I completed the 'No One Lives Forever 2' demo - it was too short - I am very impressed with the AI intelligence, and in the full game it is supposedly even better! The guards got suspicious when I turned off a light in an empty room. They tried to flank me and enter from different doors, walking all the way around the building, and the guy at the front waited until the guy at the back was ready. Nasty tactics! I think this might mean that I need to get the full game, because the environments and missions in the demo were so immersive and well done!
posted by MikeM at 8:40 AM    

 
Well, every vote counts, too bad more people don't think like I do. :) Local Election Results show that I did only fair. Out of 24 votes, 15 went as I had hoped. Of the 6 'Questions' on the ballot, 4 went my way. The important thing is that it looks like the ICC won enough supporters to get something done this time around. Only 2 or 3 of the anti-ICC people won, which is good. :)
posted by MikeM at 8:28 AM    

 
The earthquake in Alaska apparently only caused minor damage to property, but also did some damage to the pipeline, which the powers that be are repairing ASAP. This report also mentions that the quake caused hundreds of related shocks in the Yellowstone area. This could be interesting, as the Yellowstone area is known to be a supervolcano.

Also of interest are two small quakes in Kansas. Could these be related to the New Madrid fault system? They are some distance from New Madrid, but since Alaska caused quakes in Yellowstone, it is feasible that Kansas could be the precursor of something larger at new Madrid.
posted by MikeM at 11:11 AM    

 
Review of 'No One Lives Forever 2' : WOW! While it is familiar to those who played the previous game, the graphics are far better, the weapons are improved, the AI is superior, and the gameplay itself is FAR better than the prior incarnation. You have more options now, you can use more items than before, and there are many ways to achieve the mission objectives, not just one linear method. Some of the new devices are hilarious - like the Angry Kitty - a robotic kitten that chases the enemy and explodes when it gets near them! The AI is smart enough to hear your footsteps if you are not quiet, and notices things like blood splashes and footprints. They actually track footprints in snow, and you can hear them working through what happened in a logical fashion if you are hidden nearby. The Demo is well worth the download, and I may even have to purchase the game!
posted by MikeM at 10:39 AM    

 
Vote! I did my civic duty this morning, voting a mainly Democratic ticket except for those cases where the other candidate was in favor of the ICC and the Democratic candidate was not. Hopefully we will get a good bunch of people that will do what it takes to get the Inter-County Connector designed and constructed, as well as the Purple Line of the Metro system. While these projects will not directly impact my trip to work each day, I am willing to absorb the tax increases required to make these projects a reality. Getting more people to their destinations faster will definitely reduce the aggression in this area, perhaps saving lives and reducing crime overall.
posted by MikeM at 10:34 AM    

 
Review of Unreal Tournament 2003 : Same game, different maps. I could find no real difference in play from the original Unreal Tournament and this new 2003 release. New weapons, new maps, a few new players, perhaps better AI, but overall - the play is the same as the old game. The graphics are FAR superior, but due to that the game will run slower than the old one on the same hardware. All in all, not worth the money. Wait for the bargain bin. Please note that I am biased, as I have not played UT in over two years. :) I just got bored with it, and this new version has done nothing to make me want to play it again.
posted by MikeM at 2:04 PM    

 
Preliminary reports of a 7.9 earthquake in central alaska... Wow - these things are popping up all over recently. Usually we get only a handful of 7.0+ quakes a year, now we have several in the span of a week or so. This coming week could be very interesting indeed! There was also an X-class solar flare recently, which some people claim contributes to earthquakes.
posted by MikeM at 7:37 PM    

 
I just put the cover on the pool - wow. That takes a lot out of you, no wonder the professionals charge $150 - $250 for it. If I had to do it for someone else, $200 might not be enough! Carried all the pool toys, floats, recliners, lawn chairs, and pool tools to the garage and put them into storage until spring. I think that's everything, maybe I can relax a bit now.

Patty just reminded me that the waffles I put into the toaster over an hour ago have popped and cooled off... That is what comes of 'just a quick check of email' while they are toasting. :)

I have the demos for 'Unreal Tournament 2003' and 'No One Lives Forever 2', and hope to be able to install them and get in some playtest time this weekend.

I also need to do the research on all of the candidates for the elections Tuesday. I will be voting a straight ICC line, voting for any of the candidates who are pro-ICC, regardless of party affilation. (ICC is the Inter-County Connector, for those who are wondering.)

posted by MikeM at 12:28 PM    

 
Sumatra, Indonesia getting hammered with quakes now - 7.5 and a 6.2 so far.
posted by MikeM at 12:21 PM    

 
Well, more earthquakes in Italy today - could these be precursor quakes?
The new moon on November 4 comes only about 19 hrs before perigee (closest approach of the moon to the earth). I'll bet that sometime during Nov 7-9 there is a 7.0 or larger quake somewhere. Seems to be that 3-5 days after the perigee/new moon is when the big ones hit. We'll see...
posted by MikeM at 12:36 PM