a.k.a. Little L

Today was pretty busy from the get-go. My compadre was off today, so I was flying solo. I had to setup (and tear down) the sound system for a couple of events (thankfully, I was able to call on the Facilities guys to help with the speakers).

The sound system is a weak area for me, so it always makes me nervous. But the more I do this, the better. Although, today, there was no fry bread. (the photo, above, is from when I was running sound for our powwow)

I’ve been dealing with some login weirdness all day, too. (Seemingly) Random drives dropping off of people’s machines. Hmmm…

But, now, as the day comes towards the end, I have some time to look at a couple of our servers that we’re using for an internal project.

We had a little blip in our power today, and it knocked one of the two servers down. I was able to bring it back up, but it took more time than I thought it should have. Also, everytime I fiddle with either of these machines, I think “I need to do a better job of managing their power usage and also remote admin stuff.”

I can ssh into one of them, the other machine, I can only use VNC into it.

In the process of checking out ways to manage power, I’ve found a couple of good resources. One is ServerFault.com. Lots of tech sites have become cluttered messes. ServerFault is clean, with a nice signal-to-noise ratio. Lessee what happens…

I had a dream last night.

I was at the Canadian border and the border guard came to my window. It was a cold night. I could see his breath as he approached.

I rolled down my window and he bent down and asked "Is that your music?"

What? What did he mean? I was expecting him to ask me about any produce or contraband.

But now, with the window down, I could hear the music. It was familiar. I heard loud guitar riffs, zipping along, drums hammering. Was that... Scatterbrain?

At that time, I woke up and realized that I had fallen asleep with my iPod shuffle playing.

We recently added an AppleTV to our home entertainment setup. I love it. It solves multiple problems we have encountered with our “home media experience.”

Our CD collection used to be right next to our CD player. It was easy to browse and select something to play. Our collection now has almost 2000 CDs and they’re now in a room at the other end of the house.

It’s really cramped the music listening. As a result, we don’t listen to our music as much. We listen to the radio (which, in my opinion is not always desirable)

Another thing, we have thousands of photos. But we only have a few dozen printed out and on display.

The AppleTV has made it easy to browse our collection of music, photographs, and movies. And it’s done it without adding (a) stacks of discs to our living room, or (b) lots of big electronic boxes to our living room decor. (not that I’d mind, but I’m not the only one who lives here.)

As much as I dislike most traditional radio stations, I love the medium. So, I’m turning to internet-based stations. On my desktop computer, which is in the office, at the back of the house, I can use iTunes to browse and listen to tons of great stations.

I know that there are others in my house that are turned off by the list of hundreds of stations. So I created a playlist of about a dozen internet radio stations in iTunes. I was a bit irked when it didn’t appear in my list of playlists on the AppleTV.

But, just now, I went to the radio section of AppleTV and at the top of the list of genres, is my playlist! It made me laugh! I love it!

Baseball season is starting up and I was searching for the location of our practice field. It happened to be near our house. Since I was "in the neighborhood," I decided to scroll over to see what our house looked like.

Based on the arrangement of the table on hte back porch, this photo was taken two summers ago.

That also means that those light patches you see in our front yard mark where The Boy & I stood when playing catch.

This captures the summer before the year he actually joined a "real" baseball team. We would stand on either side of the driveway and toss the ball back and forth.

As this was a new activity for us, and accuracy was still an issue, I stood just on one side of the driveway. (I'm the upper light spot). The Boy stood across the driveway (his is the smaller light-spot, near the red car).

Nowdays, I'm under the tree, and The Boy either pitches from the same spot, or does diving catches a little south of the driveway. (towards the bottom of the picture).

As I’ve mentioned before, our network at NAYA is busy. Dealing with network issues is one of our biggest headaches.

The students are doing their quarterly standards-testing. And once again, network traffic looks like it might be an issue.

This article, UNIX network performance analysis, came over Twitter as I was scarfing some gumbo between troubleshooting sessions.

Some good, basic tips for analyzing your network.

I also found a podcast, The Root Cause, which talks about system admin issues. I’m loading it up on my iPod shuffle. I’ll let you know how it goes.

We’re talking about solid state hard drives at work and I remembered this video.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

I like the style of the video, as well as the content. A good example of using new media channels to advertise. This commercial was never put on TV (to my knowledge) and was only released “to the ‘Nets.”

It works on many levels. The demographic for this product will have all the easy-sharing tools at hand; YouTube, blogs, email, Hi-speed connection.

It’s an impressive demonstration of the technology.

Crafty Samsung. Very crafty!

This week has been very busy on our network. With a staff of approximately 100, plus around 80 students, and about 100 other networked devices, our network is busy.

In fact, we’re exploring ways to increase bandwidth, which is amazing, because this current setup was supposed to be enough to handle the organization for another year.

Since I started, about 4 months ago, spam has not been much of a problem. But the past few weeks, we have been getting more and more.

As soon as we get some spam, we track down the IP and add it to our firewall. We do some research to see where it’s coming from.

Last week, most of our spam was from Russia. This week, we’ve been receiving spam from Mexico, Brazil and Japan.

Most are innocuous “male performance” enhancements, but we have had a handful of messages with Trojan Horse attachments.

They appear as a fake message from DHL. The subject line indicates a problem with delivery of a package. This is apparently the Bredolab virus.

This snippet comes from a Symantec security blog by Daren Lewis, “It comes from the Cutwail (aka. Pandex) botnet, which is one of the largest mass mailing botnets in existence, with over one million ‘zombie’ machines under its control.”

Spammers are scum.

rentzsch.tumblr.com: Twitterrific+MarsEdit Script: Blog a Tweet

Studied network naming best practices…oriented new employees… in the process of reviewing our Electronic Communications policy (26 pages!)… start presentation for staff meeting on said policy… salvaged memory and hard drives from dead laptops… worked on an internal web server… installed new work request forms… setup A/V for several meetings…sent email to wrong person…got a new hat!…it was a good week!

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : A not-so-brief chat with Randall Stephenson of AT&T.

Fake Steve Jobs rips Randall Stephenson a new one over the new plan that AT&T is going to start charging more money. FSJ uses a Beatles analogy to demonstrate why AT&T should be building out their network, instead of complaining. Love it!

I’m pretty sure that execs at this level never speak to each this way, but it’s very satisfying to imagine this is true.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbW_vEjVOBI&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0xe1600f&color2=0xfebd01]

The title of this post is the chorus from one of my favorite Visqueen songs. 

It’s a simple, catchy song. I love the bass, I love Rachel’s voice, the tune, the song rocks!

Another catchy ditty is “Sailor”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATK1jWj9XPA&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0xe1600f&color2=0xfebd01]

An example of my favorite style—loud and melodic.

Visqueen has released a new album today, “Message to Garcia” (Amazon link).

When I saw them in April, I did not know who they were. But it was such a great show! Lots of energy and great tunes.

I’m sorry I didn’t know they’ve been around since 2000.

These videos were shot at Seattle’s Crocodile Café. The sound isn’t great, but it’s enough. The videos show the energy and fun. I mean, when’s the last time you saw someone slide their pick up the strings? Probably a Boston cover band. But, here, it’s great!

[Update] I have a couple of cel pix that I took. You can see them on my Flickr site.

Topic - Here’s a list of ipod docks that I found over at Amazon. - The only requirements were that they have an AM/FM radio. They’re listed below, sorted by price. - It’s a mixed bag. Some are portable, some require that you be plugged in. Be sure to check the “iPod compatibility” some won’t charge the newer iPods (like the newest 4G nano, or iPhone, or iPod Touch (2G).

Click on the item’s name to go to Amazon. Be sure to click on the “Explore Similar Items” link on the page.

If you have any questions, lemme know!

• iLive Portable Boombox

• Memorex Mi3005BLK

* iLive IBCD2817

* iLuv i552

* Imation Boombox

* Sony ICFC1iPMK2

* Sony ZSS4IP

* Macally Flat-Panel Stereo System with AM/FM, Alarm Clock, and iPod Dock

On Top of Portland
Originally uploaded by a.k.a. Little L

Yesterday, Mooj & I rode in the Providence Bridge Pedal. It was fun.

This was our third time. We missed last year, but the year before was a cluster. I think that the event suffered from its own success. It was so crowded that we were caught in a couple of big traffic jams. For example, a couple of years ago, it took us about half-an-hour to cross the starting line. We crossed a bridge and hit another jam, where we crawled along for about 45 minutes. It was very frustrating for a little one.

But this year it was very smooth. When I see the large crowds and the combination of riders of various skills and good/bad manners, I’m amazed at how well it works. But this year was the smoothest ever. It was fun!

In our previous two attempts, we did not get to the Fremont bridge before it had to open back up to traffic. This year we were determined to make it.

As we were waiting to start, the organizers announced the availability of a shortcut. We missed the Ross Island and the Hawthorn. Lots of cool pix from the Portland Bridge Pedal photos on Flickr.

My sister-in-law shares her experience on her blog. We met at the beginning of the ride, but were separated shortly after the start.

I just uploaded a bunch of photos to Flickr. Over the past 6 months, I’ve been moving from iView to iPhoto, transferring tags, and updating sets, etc.

I’ve taken quite a few self-portraits of my son and me. They’re arm-length and now, after eight+ years, becoming a quite a collection.

If you look in the widget over at the side of this page, you’ll see my Flickr stream, but it doesn’t give you a feel for the chunk of pix that I’ve just tossed up.

I still need to fix the titles and add some comments. Another project!

I Know You Stole This Bike
Originally uploaded by tinctoris

Whilst browsing Tinctoris' flickrstream, I found this photo. Great stuff! As one who has had a bicycle stolen. I love it!

One of my favorite programs is Cocoatech’s Path Finder.

Over the years, I’ve supported many users on Windows and Macintosh. Something I’ve noticed is that Mac users are more likely to fiddle with their file systems. That is, they spend more time organizing their files.

In general, I think that Mac people tend to be more spatial and/or visual, The Mac’s Finder (which is the program that you use to look through folders and launch programs) is more… uhmm…. trying not to start a flame war… better…. uhmmm… equipped with tools that aid in file management than Windows. With labels and breadcrumbs and various other little things that help a user know where they are. (I think this might become another post)

And Windows users throw everything into My Document, or more maddeningly, on the Desktop.

Anyways… what I’m trying to say, is that if you use the Finder a lot, you should definitely try Path Finder. It’s like a Finder on steroids.

Normally, it’s $40 – which, IMHO, is a great deal for something that you use every time you’re using your computer – and right now, it’s on sale. If you’re a student or teacher, you can get it for $24 (through Aug. 20). Or it’s $33 when you enter “TWEET33” when checking out through Path Finder’s integrated purchase system.

It has a 30 day trial, so give it a shot. You might thank me.

Math is a weak area for me. It irritates me that sometimes I have to write stuff down to work it out.

For example, when I look at a design or a spreadsheets, I can look at it and it’s obvious to me what the issue is. And I can resolve it in my head.

This post is from the Launchbar forum. Someone was utilizing the calculator and not getting the results that they expected.

One of the developers responded with a super-informative answer. As the developer, I know he’s already worked this problem out, but it’s an example of the difference between doing math and knowing math.

I feel that if I really knew math I could look at these numbers and tell the difference between an answer that is in Radians or Degrees or the difference between a common (base 10) or natural logarithm. Duh!

The Boy & I in The Gorge
Originally uploaded by a.k.a. Little L

via my simple Nokie and T-Mobile

We took a drive out to Stevenson, Washington, looking for "The House of Loudness." We found the "Thunder Shack." It was beautiful out there. We will definitely be heading out again. We saw some neat places that we want to check out. This also gave me a chance to test some of my new techno-weaving I've been doing with my phone-Flickr-WordPress-Twitter

Image006.jpeg
Originally uploaded by a.k.a. Little L

T-Mobile

Shoulda gone to Metric when they were in town.Shoulda gone to Metric when they were in town.

Swing, Swing, Swing
Originally uploaded by a.k.a. Little L

One of my favorite baseball pix so far.

I’m currently lusting after a MacBook Air for my mobile life.

For the past 5-6 years, a laptop has been my main system. But I was recently blessed with an iMac, which has become my “main” machine.

Mostly, I use my iBook for browsing the ‘Net, and writing. My iBook is a 600MHz G3 with a 802.11b airport card.

But I must say, when listening to 128K radio streams or music from our music library (a TiBook that’s now our media server), it works great!

[UPDATE] As I re-read this few days later, I realize that I said that I’ve been using a laptop for the past 5-6 years, but I just remembered that before my TiBook, I was using a PowerBook 3400. As a freelancer, it was a great machine. And being mobile was efficient and freeing! I purchased my 3400 (200Mhz 603e) in ‘98 or ‘99. 10 years ago! Yikes!

Sometimes, while browsing with my iBook, I’ll open up iTunes and listen to a radio station. I usually listen to my local classical station, KPBS.

When I tuned in, I wasn’t really interested in what was playing. I hopped over to the listings under Ambient, and I found “Birdsong Radio.”

I thought “clever name” and I clicked on the link. I was expecting some ambient chill, but it really is birdsongs!

I can totally see putting this on when I don’t know what I want to listen to. I love the ‘Net!

Once upon a time, I wanted to create a great web presence. It would includes posts and photos and videos and links and more!

But I always got tied up in the CMS (Content Management System). My first was Frontier. Later, I was going to make my own, using XML-RPC, then I used Radio (from Userland, which was really an updated version of Frontier) There was a big mess with Radio upgrades, and so I thought I’d build my own.

Well, that hasn’t happened.

So I’m here at Wordpress (thanx WP!) and now the photos are going to Flickr. I’ll be working on integrating them all.

Which is really what I want to do. Create and fiddle with code.

Here’s my first Flickr photo.

I’m grabbing this link from the Guardian.

The Mac at 25 - interview with Andy Hertzfeld

I’ve been a big fan of Andy for the longest time, not including the past 25 years of Mac usage.

If you’re a Mac fan, you should check out Andy’s site, folkore.org, which is a wonderful collection of anecdotes on the development of the Mac.

Great news! Apple will now allow you to choose the songs you want to update to iTunes Plus!

There’s more info at Ars Technica – Per-Song iTunes Plus Upgrades Now Available.

At 30¢ a song, I think it’s a good deal. In the past, I’ve upgraded my songs whenever possible, Once a month I’d check to see if I had any songs that were eligible, and if they were, I’d upgrade. A few cents here, a buck there. Nothing too much.

After the announcement at the latest Macworld, I went to upgrade my songs. It turned out that it was going to cost me $50! I can afford $10, but $50’s a bit much for me, right now. I did not realize that I had so many iTunes purchases. (that’s X songs, FYI)

There are some songs in there where I’d really like to have them at 256K, but there are some where it’d be nice, but not so important.

I think I see some iTunes browsing in my future…

(Thanx to Daring Fireball)