Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

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.

UPDATE: This post was an April Fool’s Day joke. Settle down.
I declared victory and made a decision. After asking many people about how to best do this video capture/DVD burning thing, decided to go for what they suggested.

I’m playing around with the DVD thing again at home.
It’s just not working well. If I get the drive connected well, the software hangs. If the software is working well, the drive isn’t ready of the DVD+RW is fubarred.
I need to figure a better way out to do this.

Feet
First of all, here’s the big news: Audrey Diggs is walking! Yes, the stubborn one has made the leap to walking. Go check out the dramatic movie footage. Mrs. Diggs doesn’t have perma links, so look for the Sunday, March 30 post. Woo hoo!
Friends
On Saturday, Len and Monique threw a huge Crawfish Boil party. There was over 150 pounds of crawfish.

For those that haven’t been to a crawfish boil before, it’s a ton of fun. Once the crawfish are dumped on the table, everyone rips them apart with their bare hands.
I took a bunch of pictures and made a quick slideshow.
Food
Today was a recovery day from the party. Michele was on Day 5 of the Glendale Quilt Show and the girls needed a break. They played with the neighbor’s kids and had fun in a wading pool. We had five ripe bananas, so I decided to make Banana Bread.

Mira helped me with mashing the bananas and eggs together. Here’s the recipe.
Ali G DVD
I spent some time today trying to record episodes of the Ali G show into the computer. After several false starts, reading of manuals, and test recordings, I was finally able to get some decent work done. I ended up using the Ulead DVD Workshop program. It’s got a 30 day trial, so I can see if it works for me before I buy it. The program costs a lot, but may be worth it if I can make a DVD of our home movies.
Once I get the process down, I think it will be easy to turn video into DVDs. There’s a lot to learn about the technique, but the current tools make it simpler.