Why are there so many black people there on a Tuesday? I mean, I get why there are so many on Fridays, since the blacks tend to be Baptists and the Mexicans tend to be Catholics…but why on a Tuesday around lunch time?

Moreover, why did I spend 30 minutes waiting for a to go order after I’d ordered and paid for it? There’s no shortage of fish…all I ordered was fish…but my order doesn’t get done because the one ahead of me is waiting on chicken? What the fuck?

For anyone who hasn’t played with google reader recently, check it out again. The new version is a vast improvement over the old version…it functions as a proper RSS aggregator now.

I’m in the process of moving over all the feeds I care about from Bloglines at the moment.

See this vid (thanks goes to Phil at work for this one):

Any question I ever had about WoW being gay has been settled.

So I brought my Logitech MX1000 mouse into work because the MX700 that goes with my keyboard won’t hold a charge anymore, and won’t recharge because the contacts on the bottom that recharge it are corroded too much. Works great at home…I’ll get more use out of it here though.

So anyway, it works great at home, but it jumps all over the screen like crazy here…why it works it home I have no idea, but it does. So I google for a solution, and apparently the only thing to do is to call Logitech for a RMA. So I did, and they’re gonna send me out a brand new Logitech Revolution mouse since the MX1000 is discontinued. I should have it in 7-10 business days.

Pretty cool, eh? This is why I stick with logitech.

So I had a huge issue with the VPN client at work for the past 2 days and finally solved it last night.

It started when I had to install the Cisco VPN client on my work machine to connect to a client’s network to install some new software I wrote on there…should be a simple proposition, I’ve used the Cisco VPN client hundreds of times when I was at the U of A to use the UA wireless net and connect from off-campus. No big deal. So I install it, reboot, do what it tells me, and finally import the PCF file and connect. Less than 10 seconds after connecting, it BSODs with one of those IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL stop codes. So I’m thinking, “whatever…it probably is some other kernel code that’s fucking up the client” so I turn off my firewall (I’m behind a NAT anyway, I just don’t trust my system admins here after doing systems administration myself for 2+ years…I know our tricks ^^) and take down my OpenVPN connection and reboot. It boots back up, Cisco client up, BSOD. Fuck.

So I uninstall the fucking thing and use the Linux Cisco VPN client and some clever bridging on my other computer here at work.

This is where the problem comes in…I notice that my OpenVPN connection doesn’t work properly…transfers over 8K don’t work properly. They transfer about 8k and die. What the fuck? I go through a TON of network diagnostics and find at the end that the Cisco VPN fucked up my TCP/IP stack beyond repair, so I reinstalled the Cisco junk. My network works now, but I have this piece of trashware on my system now.

Fucking Cisco.

So this all started because I thought my router was broken…the next post I write will detail my issues.

So after about 4 years of consistently good service I made the decision to retire my router. It was a 666MHz Dell Optiplex L series…nice little box, but a little slow for what I need it for these days. It went from running Windows 2000 Advanced Server to Windows Server 2003 to Fedora Core 1 to Gentoo to Fedora Core 5 in it’s life, and now it’s time to upgrade. I noticed that Tor was using 80 percent of the CPU, and lately my network uses the Tor circuit…*alot*.

I replaced it with a more-or-less new Dell Optiplex GX270 with a 2.8 GHz P4 HT and popped Fedora Core 7 on it. Restored all my scripts, updated my /etc/iftab and everything was up and running within the span of one night after work. I did however lose most of my old warez collection, my experimental MySQL databases and my SVN repo (though everything in there has the latest copy on either my home or work boxes) in the move because of an fsck gone wrong.

Other than that everything went smoothly…I’m still setting up the new router’s more advanced services, but everything is going good now that there’s a faster box in the closet.

So I had to update a fairly important database recently…the problem is that when I converted it to Office 2007 format, I stuck it in a TrueCrypt container and forgot about it for a little while. Anyway, since then I’d uninstalled 2007 and went back to 2003. So when I go to update this database, I look for an Office 2007 to 2003 converter, even an ODBC driver…no luck.

So here I am installing Office 2007 again (though this time on my laptop, and only temporarily at that) just so I can recover that goddamn file and copy the data over to an OpenOffice Base file.

FUCK YOU MICROSOFT!

So my girlfriend has one of these clocks. Problem is that she doesn’t have the instructions, and can’t remember what they said since they were written in Japanese. So I tinkered with it with a little bit of help from the web and a little bit of problem solving. Here’s the basic rundown of it:

1. Hold down the reset button on the back for a few seconds to reset the clock (or take the batteries out)
2. Hold down the E-Time button to set earth time. The first thing you need to set is the offset from JST. In my case it was something like -16. This affects the Vana’diel time calculation, so it’s fairly importat
3. The rest of them function like any clock set you’ve done in your life. Just use the up/down buttons to change the value, and the “Set” button to move to the next field.
4. To set the four alarms, hold down their buttons for a few seconds. It will ask if it’s a countdown or a time timer, select that, and use the “Set” button to set the rest of the data it needs.

You don’t need to set the Vana’diel time, moon phases, almanac, or anything in that area…it’s all derived from the earth time and offset from JST that you set. I’m sure there are more features that I have no idea this clock has, and if I ever get a email back from Hori with a PDF of the instruction sheet or something I’ll update this post with better instructions.

Mostly I’m posting this because if I had found it I would have saved a few hours of work, so maybe I can help someone else out. Also, I don’t want to lose it