A Random Act of Blogging

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while… Believe it or not I haven’t been at my computer much over the weekend (although my wife may argue that point). I’ve had some pain in my wrist and hand. Of course my first thought was carpal tunnel (spelling?). Since I’m on the computer at least 8 hours most days and ergonomics is a foreign word to me, this was a logical conclusion.

So I went to the doctor today to have things checked out. As it turns out, I don’t have carpal tunnel (again, spelling?). What my problem is, is I am getting on my “own” nerves. Basically there is a nerve running from my elbow to my pinky and I lean on it most of the day thanks to arm rests on my chair. Apparently this is aggravating the nerve and it is beginning to fight back.

So my prescription is to take some pain pills (ie Aleve) and get rid of my arm rests. Done and Done. Hopefully this does the trick. One of the alternatives is to have surgery and move the nerve that I am pinching. That doesn’t sound fun at all.

So now I sit at an armless chair, which feels weird. There’s nothing to lean on and my arms just dangle here. But I suppose I’ll get used to it. Anyway, I will attempt to post a little more now, or I will at least think about it. That’s all I can promise.

Personal, blogging blogging

Well, I am on disc 4 of my Half-Life 2 installation. The game I’ve been waiting for for a very long time has finally arrived and is in my possession.

Doh… it’s ready for disc 5… I may be back later… I may not…

Uncategorized games

… on posts older than 30 days. This is in a small effort to thwart the recent influx of comment spam I’ve been recieving. You haven’t seen much of it, because it gets captured by Wordpress and held for moderation, but I would rather not have to moderate these large numbers of comments.

So a solution that I found over at Ensight is to basically turn off comments for posts older than a certain period of time. This generally works because most comment spam is on older posts, or ones that have been around a while and are worked into Google’s search results.

So we’ll see what happens.

blogging blogging

A word of warning to those would-be hackers out there, Valve is keeping a watchful eye on who is not playing fair. In a recent post at Slashdot, Valve is said to have already disabled 20,000 Steam accounts and that number is, I’m sure, to rise.

Computing games

It all began on Tuesday, November 16th. I noticed my computer was acting a little strange, mainly in terms of being slow. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Computers, some days, are just slower than others (I know this isn’t necessarily true, but the illusion is real).

Then Wednesday evening, I was surfin around and my machine was simply crawling a long with a noticeable limp. I got frustrated and shut it down.

Thursday morning, I started it back up and was presented with a Virus warning from my AVG program. “Crap!” (We’ll keep it PG for those kids out there)

So, when I logged in, I scanned my machine, which took about 40 minutes because of my 120GB hard drive. At the end it said it had found 1 virus and “healed” it. Well that must have simply ticked off something because my machine became even more unresponsive so I rebooted again.

This time when my machine came up, AVG warned me of another virus, this one called “Backdoor.Hacdef.c” or better known as “Hacker Defender”. Yes, I had a virus on my machine defending other viruses/spyware/adware from my attempted attacks on them.

So after a bit of searching on the web, on my wife’s computer since mine wasn’t doing so well, I came across my Holy Grail, step-by-step instructions on removing this wicked, little demon.

Well, after a couple hours of killing processes, deleting registry entries, and clearing out files, I can finally claim victory over this Defender of Hackers. The only question that remains, is where did this dang thing come from? Oh well, I’m not going to waste more time trying to figure that out. I’m just going to go back to enjoying the normal speed of my machine.

Peace out.

Computing, Personal

But, I don’t have a copy yet. I have to wait until I get my other gift card from MyPoints, that I haven’t even ordered yet. I should have enough points pending to get it, I just have to wait until they clear and then I can order it. Such a bummer to have to wait, but I don’t really have a lot of extra time to be playing the game anyway. I hope to be able to grab it within the next couple of weeks. I think Valve’s authentication servers shouldn’t be too bogged down by then.

Uncategorized games

Well today was the first day back at the office since the migration. Really things went more smoothly then anticipated. There were 5 machines left over that still needed to migrate: 2 were laptops that were out of the office, 3 were machines that the Active Directory Migration Tool was unable to migrate. Basically with all 5 we simply manually added them to the new domain and then copied the users profiles over, no big deal. So, all that being said, our office is now working on our new server with SBS 2k3.

Next on the “To Do” list, move the tape drive over and get the backup software installed. Then reformat the old server and turn it into our home drive. Both fairly easy jobs. Oh and then, I need to get back to my regular job of programming. We’ve got a new release coming up soon and the cut-off is in a week.

Question of the Day. How many hats do you where at work?

I’m still counting.

Uncategorized SBS-2k3

Our network is officially running on Small Business Server 2003. Got home at 5am this morning. I was at the office for nearly 8 hours. For the most part, things went ok. The biggest snag we ran into was the Active Directory Migration Tool and the migrating of the client computers from one server to the new server.

Of course, on paper this seemed like an easy task, but what the “white papers” failed to mention was that you couldn’t migrate all the machines in one step. When we selected all of the machines to migrate only 3 of them (at the most) would actually do it. The rest would fail. Then we had to run the migration tool again and get a few more machines over, and so on. That process, alone, took the better part of 3-4 hours when it probably should have taken, at the most, 1 hour.

Anyway, needless to say, I’m a bit tired now. I might go into some more detail on Monday (count on it). But, for now, I need to finish getting my house ready for my youngest daughter’s birthday party. (This should be a breeze on 3 hours of sleep)

Uncategorized SBS-2k3

Well, today is “Migration Day”. The plan is to come in to the office sometime around 9pm tonight and get it done. I have all the materials I need, unlike last week when I discovered I had forgotten to purchase our additional CALs that we needed.

So, wish me luck.

Uncategorized SBS-2k3

Started playing with Konfabulator this morning. Looks like an interesting little program. I’m not really sure how to describe it other than a collection of “things” that sit on your desktop for you to use. Pretty vague, huh? The best I can offer is a link for you to check it out yourself.

Computing