Category: Weblog

The rain came to Cincinnati today. It’s not too cold and a bit refreshing.
The new RAM for the laptop arrived yesterday and the extra 512 MB does make a difference. I need to try Shadowbane to give it a real test.
We had Passover Seder yesterday night and it went smoothly. While I’m not a very religious person, it did help me remember to keep some perspective on what’s going on in the world today. People have suffered under tyranny for hundreds and thousands of years at a time. It clear that you cannot break the hope in people for a better life even under the most terrible circumstances.
I thought while I’m vacation, I’d be blogging more, but I’m just not in that groove today. Later

I’ve been playing with Trepia a bit. The Trepia software is used as an imprompto instant messaging system based on people near your real physical location.
The Trepia software works with wifi to send out a signal that other Trepia users can pick up. If two Trepia users are near each other, a message will pop up telling them that someone is close by. They can then exchange IMs back and forth. I think it will be fun to try this at a larger geek gathering where there are several wifi users willing to play around.
There’s only a Windows client at this time. I asked where the Mac & linux clients were and the CEO told me they were coming in the future once the Windows version takes off.
Cool stuff if you ask me.

It’s the evening here in Cincinatti and hopefully I can catch up on a few things.
NCAA/DVDs
Thanks to Kansas I ended up winning the fraternity NCAA Tourney pool. The prize for winning was a DVD from each of the others in the pool. Here are my choices:
For the kids:
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
For Martin who told me to choose Kansas:
The Killers (w/ Lee Marvin)
For Michele
Royal Tenebaums
The Transporter
Big Fat Greek Wedding
The Firm
For me:
Stripes
The Waterboy
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Apocalypse Now Redux
Blazing Saddles
Amazing Grandmother Tricks
When we arrived here, Michele’s grandmother was sleeping. She’s 88 and had traveled from Philly the day before. Michele’s dad, Steve, had flown out before and travelled with her back to Cincy. For her, this was very tiring. So on Saturday, around 4 PM, she went to sleep. We arrived to the house after 4 PM on Sunday.
About 5 PM, the girls woke up Bubba (grandmom). She had slept for 25 straight hours. A full day.
IMHO, this is a remarkable achievement. No matter how hard I try, the most I’ve ever been able to sleep is a little over 12 hours. I wonder how long she trained to be able to sleep 24 hours?
This morning she woke up around 9AM and had some tea and breakfast. She headed back to bed around 11AM, but was up and dressed again by 3PM. After dinner at 6:30PM she went back to bed. Around 10 PM she talked to Michele for about an hour. Now she’s in bed again.
Amazing!
Weblogs
I met Grif at SXSW. We are both GenX geeks with kids and careers that attempt to remain cool in the face of approaching our 40s. He is coller than me. He is starting a counter meme.

Alan is happy to have a Tivo. Chalk one more up for the converted.
Yoshi has finally got his weblog groove on. Go visit him and ask him why the site must be black.
After a three month hiatus, Trikster posted. Fargin slacker…
Lastly Mrs. Diggs details the pre-trip birthday party. Unfortunately, that evening I had a gut-wrenching experience. The next morning, Michele was the one feeling ill. I blame the Mrs. Diggs personally!
Gaming
I got Shadowbane working on the laptop. It’s slow, but I was able to level yesterday. Woot. I’m hoping that the 512MB RAM arriving on Wednesday will help.
Music
The Flaming Lips rock. Go listen to their music, immediately!
It’s 1AM here now. I’m sleepy. G’night.

I’m in Cincy. The laptop is running well, even with Shadowbane. 🙂
Now I head out to get a bottle of scotch with my father-in-law. Life is tough.

After work today, I went to my parents house. The kids were on their last day of official spring break and they spent it with their grandparents.
When I arrived, I found that my Dad was having problems getting connected to the internet. I assumed that it was a simple thing. I sat down and started to poke around. The computer reacted slow and I had trouble bringing up windows. My dad pointed to the DSL modem at the flashing lights and said, “When it does that, nothing works.” The flashing lights are the activity lights.
I called up the network interface and saw no packet coming down and tons going out. It looked like 2 megs a second blasting out. What the hell, I thought. I called up the task manager, and after a long wait, it opened. I looked at the processes and was suprised to see ‘sqlserver.exe’ running at 90+ percent CPU usage.
SQL on my fathers computer? How can this be?
I aked him why he had SQL on his computer. He told me it was for some sales software he had for his company. It couldn’t be what I thought it was.
I ended the sqlserver process. The lights stopped flashing. The computer became responsive. I could connect to the net.
Could my father really have the Sapphire/Slammer worm? Looks like it.
I downloaded the Microsoft Slammer Patch Utility, and sure enough his system was wide open to the worm. I ran the utility and rebooted again. Everything seemed fixed.
One of these days, a virus or worm is going to hit the net that does some real damage and individuals will really get hurt. Consider that two and a half months after the Sapphire worm hit the net, packets are still travelling around in significant quanities that it found my father computer.
OS and software manufacturers are going to have to step up to the plate here. Windows Update didn’t patch his computer. Norton anti-virus didn’t protect his computer. All software is going to need updating of problems built-in.

I have returned home from Las Vegas. I was hoping I’d have the energy for a nice entry, but I’m running on empty. I only have enough for a quick one.
Phone rings
Every cell phone out there has a vibrate or silent mode. Every one.
Why don’t people use the silent mode? While I agree that some of the phone rings are neat, most of them are simply annoying.
I was in a number of meetings this week and in the middle of almost every one, a phone would go off with some song. Switch your damn phone into silent mode or turn it off during meetings!
OK, I need to go get some rest.

Lack of posts lately, I’m in Las Vegas for the NAB convention. Not a lot of time to blog here.
A few quick tips if you come to NAB.
1) Bring lip balm
2) Never allow yourself to be pulled into a meeting in a room on the floor
3) Drink a glass of water for every glass of booze
4) Flash your business card and continue walking into the parties, don’t wait for them to check your name
5) If you like cookies, take the whole tray to the table
Time for breakfast. More when I have time.

After a week of meetings and work I finally have a day to rest before launching off again. Next week, I’ll be in Las Vegas for the NAB convention. I’ve been going since 1990, only missing two years, so this will be my 11th trip to NAB. Nevertheless, I am still a bit excited. The changes in technology and inside Disney promise to make for interesting times ahead.
At the office, I was in a meeting with Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems. He said a lot of interesting stuff. He’s definitely not afraid to think differently. He did make an good point. He said that companies shouldn’t use open source software directly. He means you shouldn’t download source and compile it yourself. Let others handle it for you. Why have a linux kernel expert on staff when you can pay for the expertise instead? The advantage to the company is that the price charged for software with equivalent open source software can never get too high. If Sun was to charge too much for StarOffice, a company could easily switch to OpenOffice. You get the benefit of price control without the headache of software management. It’s a very valid point for larger businesses.
Gaming
I’ve been playing Shadowbane and even got into the beta for Planetside. I don’t have time to go into the details, but I will later.
Weblogs
I’ve been a little out of the loop this week. Between no time at work for surfing and all the tech troubles at home, my blogrolling page is scrolling by unmonitored. I’ll catch up, but I think I’d rather spend time with my daughters than reading weblogs for a bit.
Later.

I should have known better than to mess with Apple on April Fool’s.
Tech troubles continue. Michele told me on my way home from work that her computer was not working. When I got home and took a look, she mentioned that earlier in the day, there was a strong ‘hot electrical’ smell coming from the computer.
I feared the worse, but pulled off the heatsink anyway…

That’s a burned up CPU. The brains of the computer to you non-geek types. An AMD 1700+ XP processor to be exact.
All the computers in the house use AMD chips so I pulled the chip from the kids computer and put it in Michele’s so she could check her email.
A new CPU is on the way from Newegg, so we are down to only 4 computers in the house until it arrives.
I’ll never mock Steve Jobs again.

I’m sure that in some sort of karmic revenge for my joke about the Mac, I spent a bunch of time working on tech issues at home.
Michele’s CD-ROM had been acting up and she had complained that her CD burner wasn’t fast enough (8x). I ordered a pair of matching black Lite-On drives. They arrived yesterday and I began the install after the kids went to bed.
As expected, after booting with the new drives installed, the BIOS hung during POST and didn’t recognize the drives. First, I reflashed the BIOS. No luck. then I swapped out the IDE cable with a new one. (How nerdly am I for having spare IDE cables lying around?) That got them working. The DVD playback software and Nero burning software installed smoothly. Getting a copy of Nero included with the drives was a great deal.
I copied a mix CD at 48x speed to test things out. Three minutes to burn a CD. Nice. As I type, Zoolander is playing on her computer.
On the girls computer, the mouse stopped moving left and right. I popped it open and found a small ecosystem of dust bunnies inside. I cleaned it out and it still didn’t work well. The girls took the mousepad into the bathroom and washed it with soap in an attmept to help.
I opened the mouse and had to realign the IR sensor to get things working well.
Most importantly, last night Shadowbane broke.
Shadowbane downloaded a patch and afterwards the program would crash when I tried to enter the world. After some research, I had to rollback Nvidia drivers from 43.45 to 41.09. Finally, the precious had returned to me.
I powerleveled from 6 to 11 last night. If not for all the tech issues, I could have been level 15 easy…
Time for work. Have a good day.