Illuminatea

This holiday weekend, I finally accomplished a task I've been meaning to do for a while: I got rid of my email. More precisely, I'm no longer hosting my email domains on my own server here in the house like I have been for the past eight years. I've finally made the switch to hosted email. With all of the free email domains out there, this may ...

I don't remember which day it was two weeks ago that I discovered that my web server was no longer accepting queries, but I do remember the distinct annoyance I felt when I got home from work, made my way through the back room to the computer rack, logged on to the management console, and saw that the server was powered off. That's nothing to the ...

In my previous post, I talked about taking a class at the local YMCA. You may have noticed that I didn't mention which class I was taking; that wasn't by accident. I didn't feel like talking about it until I knew it wasn't going to be another fad. Well, last Tuesday, sensei awarded me my 9th Kyu blue belt, so now I feel comfortable announcing ...

One of the reasons I've been a lot quieter on the blog front for the past month is Call of Duty 4 (actually, let's be honest; that's one of the ways I've chosen to spend a lot of my free time since Christmas). However, at the beginning of July, I added a new reason: I started taking a class two days a week at the local new YMCA. This class has ...

I've been knocked off my sleep schedule this week -- I had to test some sleeping medication I need for an upcoming business trip and verify that I wouldn't have any unanticipated side effects before I was in Australia and unable to do anything about it. However, in the midst of all this, I had an interesting thought, spurred a discussion with my ...

I'm getting really bloody tired of LJ's RSS feed reader deciding to re-read old posts from my blog. Apologies to the 20 or so people who still read this blog's LJ feed. I'm starting to think I need to just ask LJ to remove the devinonearth feed entirely.

Four 3-day trips in four weeks:Apr 2-4, Orlando, to present 3 hours of sessions at Exchange Connections.Apr 8-10, Denver, to be the main speaker at the Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging Roadshow.Apr 18-20, Anaheim, to be the main speaker at the Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging Roadshow.Apr 23-25, Dallas, to be the main speaker at the Exchange 2007 ...

This isn't aimed at anyone in particular whose blog I read, or who I know reads this blog, but more of a general comment prompted by the reaction of a friend who just received a huge Battlestar Galactica season 3 (the current season) spoiler on Digg: If you're talking about the current season of a TV show, or a recent book or movie, do ...

I refer you all now to the truth about switching, a nice little blog post that is refreshingly clear of hype and hyperbole. Now that we're all on the same page, on to my additional commentary. Too true. It's a lot more friendly, though, than it used to be. I credit the steady barrage of laptops with the ubiquitous Apple logo on TV and ...

It's been an awfully long time since I last posted, hasn't it? As you may have guessed by now, it is because of, yet again, another computer outage at home. In this case, my Windows domain controller hard drive died. Dead. Kaput. Spins No More. Dances With Boat Anchors. It's an old IBM Deskstar hard drive, which I'd somehow ...

Apologies to those of you reading this on RSS who may have seen two copies of the previous post. I swear, one of these days I'll figure out how not to duplicate posts when trying to edit them.

Boy howdy, that was quite an excessively long break.That'll teach me to patch my servers! You see, back in late August, I was being a good server admin and making sure all of my servers had the latest patches on them. The last server I updated was my blog server (hosting the web server plus the database that holds my Community Server install as ...

Whoa! I just now saw that folks on the LJ feed (possibly on the RSS feed) got to see the Firefly review I did all over again. Sorry about that; it wasn't intentional! (I was just fixing a couple of transcription errors that kept the hyperlink to Nick's blog from working...)

As you may have figured out by now (if you read this site in your browser instead of via RSS or LJ), there's been another small change around here. I just got done upgrading to Community Server 2.1, the latest and greatest version of the blog software I used. It includes some very nice new themes; Alaric and I made use of them until we figure ...

Somewhere in the instructions, the Department of State website, or the various other places that talk about the process, there should be a warning that your birth certificate will be sent into the processing center and returned with your passport. It's cheaper to have a mild concussion than it is to get a passport. Costs start at $97 for a US ...

I've been silent on the blogging front lately, so here's a quick update on what I've been up to this last week: Monday: I was coming down the stairs to head to my office to begin my work day, and suddenly I was at the bottom of the stairs with a concussion. Major ow. Got to go to the doctor -- work, not so much. Tuesday: Still major ow. ...

I should have known, from first thing yesterday morning, what kind of day it was going to be. Starting with sleeping through the alarm I'd set so I could get up and get a headstart to a long day, right through trying to change the roll of toilet paper and ending up by dropping the fresh roll into the toilet bowl, I had signs it was going to be a ...

I don't know whether folks reading this via RSS got it too, or whether it's just a quirk of Livejournal's RSS feed system, but for some reason when LJ finally picked up my new blog posts this afternoon (so why do they claim it scans new feeds every hour if it can't detect new material?), it picked up a bunch of the old posts as well. I'm guessing ...

Thanks to the timely comment from Scott Watermasysk, the developer of .Text (which became the blog engine for Community Server), we've got our technical glitches sorted out and everything should be working normally. How often have you had a software problem and gotten the answer from the person who wrote the software, directly on your website? ...

How wonderfully frustrating, in a minor way.Last night, I upgraded from Community Server 1.1 to 2.0, which offers tons of new features, better performance, a hugely improved administrative interface, a better skinning model -- in short, lots of crunchy goodness. Had a few minutes of panic trying to figure out why picture galleries weren't ...

We've been getting over the flu here at Casa del Ganger. For the past several weeks, I've been feeling under the weather to a greater or lesser extent, so I'd slow down and try to get extra rest, etc. After a few days I'd feel better, so I'd go back to normal life, and whammo! a couple of days later, down I'd go again. Last week and weekend, ...

Last week, we'd been making a big push to finish getting the house cleaned up (my server area and office -- two separate areas at opposite ends of the house, for those who haven't been here) before Friday evening because Treanna was supposed to have an after-school playdate with her best friend. We'd take best friend's little brother, and later ...

Thanks to net.friend larabeaton (from back in my rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan days, back when I still read Robert Jordan) I ran across this tender musical moment from Australian comedy group Tripod. This one was funny because it was a bulls-eye; even though I don't own a gaming console, I all too often find plenty of things to occupy my ...

It's all Steph's fault. No, really. She's the one who introduced me to Il Divo, a new male chorale group put together by American Idol's venom-tongued emcee Simon Cowell. These guys have some serious opera and theater cred, and I shamefully confess that I fell in love with their cover of Toni Braxton's ''Unbreak My Heart.'' Of course, Il ...

I've updated the Community Server software to version 1.1. Things should look a touch different, since 1.1 has a lot more functionality. I'll probably be updating to one of the beta versions of 2.0 here in the next couple of weeks, which will make everything look even more different. I've also added some new skins, so those of you who read my ...

I really should have done it months ago. Last weekend, I gave up pop (or soda, or soda pop, or Coke -- whatever you call it in your neck of the woods) again. This time, other than an occasional treat, I think I've given it up for good. Now that I'm trying to get on a regular exercise schedule, continuing to pour hundreds of empty calories down ...

If you've ever met me in person (or seen a full-body photograph of me), then you know that I'm more than a touch convex. The life of a sysadmin doesn't really include enough of the right type of exercise to keep a body trim and slim, and the life of a technical writer is even less physically demanding. Now, many of my peers and co-workers have the ...

The insomnia, the puffy feeling in the eyes, the last few days of sneezing and phlegm that I thought was just allergies being kicked into high gear because of the shift in temperature and weather. No, no. The chest cough and raspy throat confirm it. I'm coming down with something. Drat. I really did not want to take a sick day today.

Can you still call it a s'more when: You're using Nutella instead of chocolate squares You're using pre-sized graham cracker squares You're using a propane grill to toast the marshmellows While we may not know the ultimate answer, we Washington Gangers are firmly committed to further research in as many upcoming evenings as possible. We ...

Um, Missy dear, what exactly have you been telling the fine Exchange ladies and gentlemen about me? I'm taking an incredible ration of shit from the assorted suspects and they keep mentioning your name. And Tom, your name has gotten taken in vain more than once. And for the record, my kilt shows off what a stud I am. Disagree all you want, but a ...