If it Ain't Broke, Fix it Anyway!

2012-01-21T15:52:00.001-05:00

GO RANGERS!

2011-12-07T10:19:00.001-05:00

DR testing @IBM in Sterling forest.

2011-10-15T13:53:00.001-04:00

We are on the Old Croton Aqueduct at the bottom of the trail to the Lenoir Preserve celebrating Aquefest

2011-08-27T08:56:00.001-04:00

Getting some last minute supplies. The A&P is a madhouse. Should have got up earlier

2011-08-24T15:39:00.001-04:00

Rode our bikes up to Lyndhurst Greenhouse. Very scenic http://ping.fm/M8VDW

2011-08-19T12:53:00.001-04:00

Sent from my Verizon Wireless Phone

2011-08-19T12:49:00.001-04:00

Just got Dana'S new bike. Specalized Arial

2011-08-13T13:39:00.001-04:00

Dana and her favorite plant, Scarlet Beebalm

2011-08-06T15:06:00.001-04:00

Looking for a new bike for Dana.

2011-08-02T22:37:00.001-04:00

My wife just put the finishing touches on her photography web portfolio. Check it out http://ping.fm/VUOzP

2011-07-29T12:58:00.001-04:00

I just got a root canal and they didn't even give me any drugs. That's the part I was looking forward to

2011-07-21T19:19:00.001-04:00

Watering the Butterfly and Hummingbird Gardden at the Lenoir Nature Preserve

2011-07-19T10:45:00.001-04:00

Seesmic on blackberry did not attach the photo. Take two

2011-07-19T09:29:00.001-04:00

At the Lenoir preserve this morning. The haze captured the sunlight

2011-07-16T07:41:00.001-04:00

Perfect day at Jones Beach

2010-12-02T14:30:00.001-05:00

I'm in New York for the Microsoft Management Summit near Rockerfeller Center

2010-09-10T09:57:00.001-04:00

Last day of SQL training in NYC

2010-09-08T09:18:00.001-04:00

Going to SQL Reporting training in NYC

2010-08-20T21:59:00.001-04:00

TGIF! Went in the pool for a bit. Now relaxing with drinking iced coffee.

2010-08-10T15:02:00.001-04:00

Eggplants growing in the garden finally

2010-07-31T09:10:00.001-04:00

Waiting to get new tires at Costco

2010-07-31T09:09:00.005-04:00

Waiting to get new tires at Costco

2010-07-31T09:09:00.003-04:00

Waiting to get new tires at Costco

2010-07-31T09:09:00.001-04:00

Glad I got to Costco early to get new tires. People are already waiting

2010-06-29T21:32:00.001-04:00

Growing zucchini

2010-06-29T21:27:00.001-04:00

Tomatoes and zucchini are going to be ready to eat soon. =)

2010-06-26T20:21:00.001-04:00

Harvested the first stringbeans of the season. Yum.

Creditors may bring America to the brink of Revolution

2009-11-18T12:06:00.000-05:00

Enconomist will tell you that the economy goes through cycles of ups and downs and right now we are on a downward spiral. In my opinion, this recession was brought on by greed and such a drastic recession could have been avoided. In order to line their pockets, the creditors and mortgage lenders knowingly issued credit to indivudials that would have normally not gotten the line of credit. Now hard woking people are being crushed under a mountain of debt unable to make payments and losing their homes. Then when people file for personal bankrupcy and banks foreclose on homes, the creditors that initially issued that credit are losing money casuing the creditors to shut down. Normally this is type of cause and effect economics is played out daily with no intervention. But this time, the government decided to step in a save the creditors that gambled and lost using more of American money to bail them out of trouble. Top execuitves of those firms are still getting their multi-million dollar bonuses.
Now, the creditors are increasing their rates to generate more income using the recession as an excuse for the rate hike. Does it make sense to raise rates on people who are already having trouble paying their bills?

Banks encourage you give them your money for a tiny percent of interest in return, but they turn around give us back our money in the form of credit charging 20 times the interest! We are fighting a losing battle that the banks and creditors are reaping rewards on the breaking backs of Americans. Today, in a economy based on debt, the creditors and banks join the focus of our fustration and contempt.

One of the reasons that the USA was formed was because of the people were tired of the government increasing taxes and fees making difficult to live. If you keep pushing people to the edge they will push back. One of my favoraite lines in the move Fight Club, describes this sentiment:

"[T]he people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not... fuck with us."

Everyone is not a victim here. American culture is somewhat to blame as well. We belive in the American dream and that involves new cars, big homes, and comfortable living. This culture in conjunction with seeming unending credit has allowed Americans to live beyond their means. Instead of reducing our expenses, we open a new line of credit to pay for the things we already can not afford, digging us deeper into the hole. Americans need to take responsiblity and change their thinking to understand the reality of what they can and can not afford in order to stop this downward sprial. However, this does not get all of those companies that sold us the noose and gave us enough rope to hang ourselves off the hook. --

Computers, Gaming, Gadgets, and Geekness
------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.everythingtech.net

System Center Operations Manager Maintenance Mode Scheduler

2009-09-22T12:22:00.001-04:00

I can't believe that this feature is not built into SCOM 2007. It is a common enough occurrence that a server is rebooted weekly for whatever reason. It would be great to schedule SCOM maintenance mode during the same time so the reboots do not send out alerts. Secondly, if the server does not come up after a reboot, you would be alerted when it came out of maintenance mode. Well, it turns out the work around to this is to create a powershell script and use scheduled task to run it. Here is a cool utility that provides a GUI to do that.

http://www.scom2k7.com/scom-remote-maintenance-mode-scheduler-20/

--
Computers, Gaming, Gadgets, and Geekness
------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.everythingtech.net

Twitter, Facebook, Xbox Live Down - What's next

2009-08-07T09:00:00.001-04:00

The recent outages that Twitter, Facebook and now Xbox Live have experienced are apparently from a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. This type of attack is difficult to defend against since it is inherent in the way that computers communicate. Actually it is quite amazing that the TCP/IP protocol has worked well for over 30 years. Can you think of any technology that has lasted that long before being obsolete? I have not researched if IPv6 will provide some sort of protection for a massive flood of data that can cause these types of global outages. The fact is that everyone on the web is susceptible to an organized DoS attack and while there might be some remediation actions that can be used to restore service, the protocol will need to be redesigned to react differently to this type of attack.

Operations Manager 2007 Report Errors

2009-07-10T14:58:00.001-04:00

I was getting the error Cannot initialize report. The item ... could not be found when trying to run performance reports that show up as a task on the right side of the Operations Manager Console. After troubleshooting with Microsoft, we found that it was a permissions issue. We needed to make the account that is the action account, sdk_config, Data Writer, and Data Reader account a local admin on the RMS and the Data Warehouse server. Also if you have created a SCOM Admins group, also make this a local admin on both servers. Then restart the Operation Manager services on the RMS and watch for error/warnings in the Operation Manager event log.

--
Computers, Gaming, Gadgets, and Geekness
------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.everythingtech.net

Windows 7 Release Date pushed up.

2009-07-06T13:27:00.003-04:00

Microsoft's newest OS Windows 7 is going to be released on Oct 22, 2009, but there are rumors that it will be out sooner. You can reserve your copy now.

SCOM 2007 Post SP1 Hotfixes

2009-06-29T09:05:00.001-04:00

I just set up System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1 for my organization and I know that this a Microsoft product and it will have fixes even after a service pack. The Kevin Holman blog (http://blogs.technet.com/kevinholman/archive/2009/01/27/which-hotfixes-should-i-apply.aspx) on the Microsoft TechNet is updated frequently and has links and description of the SCOM 2007 post sp1 hotfixes as well as SCOM 2007 R2 hotfixes. I have experienced some inaccurate data displayed in SCOM and I am hoping one of these hotfixes will fix that.

World of Warcraft Account Hacked

2009-06-26T14:44:00.001-04:00

My wife's World of Warcraft account was hacked a few days ago. The hacker change the password and email address so you could not login to the account. They took everything from all her toons and transferred 2 level 80 characters to another server. She contacted Blizzard and they were able unlock her account and she is waiting for a GM specialist to try to recover the characters and stolen items. What is bothering me is that this was a brute forced attack. My wife's account was known to no one including me. As a bit of a Grey-hat hacker this sort of stuff is interesting to me. My guess is that they used the Armory to find a target; that's what I would do. My wife had good gear and special items. Somehow they we able to find the userid or email and brute force a password from either the WoW client or the WoW account web page. Since hacking the web has been around for a while there are more safeguards around the WoW web site. The client does not disable your account if you attempt to many unsuccessful logons, so my guess is that they used a program that brute forced the password from the client. The hard part was getting the userID. I will have to investigate a little further to find out how they did it.

Agent proxying needs to be enabled for a health service to submit discovery data about other computers

2009-06-24T12:07:00.001-04:00

In Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1 you may get the error message:

Agent proxying needs to be enabled for a health service to submit discovery data about other computers

This looks like it is coming from the Root management server, but the details give you a GUID to the actual server with the error. It looks like this:

Details:Health service ( FED0B867-F9AE-ACAF-4CCF-311DD92789C9 ) should not generate data about this managed object ( 66A10C3E-EF01-28E2-6F41-E15C782B906D ).

In order to get the actual name of the monitored device you need to use PowerShell. Don't use the PowerShell that you find in Programs -> WindowsPowerShell 1.0 since this does not have the SCOM snap-in included. Go to Programs -> System Center Operations Manager 2007 -> Command shell then execute the following command. Replace the GUID with the one that your alert specifies.

Get-MonitoringObject -id:'FED0B867-F9AE-ACAF-4CCF-311DD92789C9' | ft DisplayName

Then to enable Proxying:

Access the Administration Node and locate the agent under Agent Managed. Right click the node you found after you execute the above command. Select Properties. Click the Security tab. Check Allow this agent to act as proxy…

US Postal Service increase rates on Flat Rate Shipping

2009-06-23T12:10:00.001-04:00

I sold a few items on Ebay to try to get some extra cash and I used to use the US postal service flat rate shipping boxes to ship domestically in the U.S. The price used to be a reasonable $4.95 for a 11" X 8.5" X 5.5" or 11-7/8" x 3-3/8" x 13-5/8" medium size box. They have recently increased the shipping price to $9.85 for the same box. This upsets the "Ebay economics" since the minimum you can expect to pay of an item on Ebay is about $10. If you sell and item that is moderately expensive then you can make up the difference in shipping. For instance 10% of $100 is $10 dollars. So if your item is less than $100 then a significant amount of your sale goes into shipping. This could be the begining of a shift from online purchases to brick and mortar purchases. Once what was more convenient to purchase online my be more cost effective now at the retail store since shipping is going to force online retailers to charge more for shipping or product or both. Keep a look out for rising shipping costs and how it will affect the online retail market.

The Most Baffling IT Terms Explained

2009-06-22T10:33:00.001-04:00

HP came out with an explanation of what they consider the most baffling IT terms. Here are the top terms:

VoIP (Voice over IP): A T-Mobile survey found that one in ten respondents thought VoIP can improve visibility for the visually impaired! It actually stands for Voice over Internet Protocol, and literally refers to the ability to transmit the voice over the Internet.

Petaflop: This is a word you'll probably see in conjunction with discussions of supercomputing. A petaflop can be expressed as a thousand trillion floating point operations per second; it is a measure of performance for the fastest computers in the world.

ASP: This one is particularly tricky because it's an acronym with two meanings. An Active Server Page is an HTML page that includes one or more scripts (small embedded programs) that are processed on a Microsoft® Web server before the page is sent to the user. An Application Service Provider is a business that provides computer-based services to customers over a network.

Kernel: This is the central component of most computer operating systems, responsible for managing the system's resources and the communication between hardware and software components.

Megahertz (MHz): This is unit of measurement used when determining a computer's processing speed. It literally means one million cycles per second. Accordingly, Gigahertz (GHz) and Terahertz (THz) equal one billion and one trillion cycles respectively.

Deduplication: This is a method of reducing storage needs by eliminating redundant data from a device. Deduplication is also sometimes known as "intelligent compression" or "single-instance storage".

Robust: This is probably one of the most commonly used, yet least understood, terms in IT marketing materials. A "robust" product can be one that doesn't break or fail easily; for example, an operating system in which any individual application can fail without disturbing the operating system or other applications can be said to be robust. Robust is also sometimes used to mean a product or solutions designed with a full range of capabilities.

Source: http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enewsletter/cache/602541-0-0-225-121.html?jumpid=em_di_497654_US_US_4_013_hpe_us_779444_across-bg&dimid=1131245382&dicid=&mrm=1-4BVUP

Exchange Store won't mount

2009-04-21T12:12:00.004-04:00

We had an issue with the Exchange 2003 server this morning. The information store and the public folder would not mount. We checked the database integrity and ran a repair using the eseutil.exe utility, but it still would not mount. We called Microsoft and it turns out that the log files was at the end of the sequence and a new file could not be created. Log files start at e001.log and go sequentially up. When the log files reaches effffe.log the next log can not be created since it has reached the sequence limit. Delete the log file (or move them to be safe), start the information store and mount the store and a new log file starting at e001.log will be created. This will happen if the server has been up for a long time or there are a lot of transactions according to Microsoft.

SmartUPS and Windows Reinstall

2009-04-11T21:43:00.007-04:00

I have been putting it off but I finally replaced the dying APC SmartUPS 620 for my server. I got a %25 discount for upgrading to the newer model and they also included a return shipping label to return the old unit. These UPS' are pretty heavy. I also got to map the serial cable pinout to connect the UPS to the server.
I have also been meaning to re-install Windows XP on my Dell laptop, but I did not have the media. Luckily Dell will ship you the installation media provided you are the original owner. So I've got Windows XP Media Center 2005 installed and I have to re-install all the applications again. That is the part I forgot how bad it sucks.

Meeting with Quest Software

2009-04-10T10:27:00.002-04:00

We had a meeting with our new Quest software account managers and I didn't realize how much stuff they are involved in. They are Microsoft centric, but they make tools to integrate other applications and operating systems into the Microsoft universe. The conversation was mostly on identity management, like single sign on, password synchronization, and automated application logon. They also make a ton of Management Packs for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, which I will be rolling out very soon. They also have some handy free Windows directory tools available for download on their site. I have to give them a little more credit.

Blackberry Store

2009-04-04T16:37:00.002-04:00

My co-worker told me that in the latest version of the Blackberry software has the Blackberry App store, like the Iphone has. Obviously you won't get the same apps, but at least there is some competition in the market. I have not seen the update on my Blackberry yet. I will have to do more research.

Conficker / Downadup Hoax

2009-04-01T13:32:00.002-04:00

The Conficker / Downadup worm was supposed to hit April 1, 2009 but so far it looks like a hoax. Many IT folks that has to rapidly patch servers due to paranoid managers did all that work for nothing. Hackers are sneaky, however, and they may have gotten a laugh today but may strike later when everyone lets their guard down when they let out a sigh of relief. Friday's are good days to cause havoc. Look out for this weekend!

Systems Center Operations Manager 2007

2009-03-27T17:09:00.003-04:00

Finally we will be installing and using Microsoft Systems Center Operation Manager 2007 to monitor the servers in our environment. Systems Operations Manager (SCOM) is an agent based monitoring program with hooks into many Microsoft products such as SQL server, IIS, and Active Directory, for reporting up time and performance. This will be welcome change from finding out a server has been down all weekend and you need to fix it Monday morning with everyone breathing down your neck.

Bakups are important

2009-03-24T19:17:00.003-04:00

People do not realize the importance of a good backup before it is too late. It's sort of like insurance; you don't know why you have it until you need it. With so many options out there, such as USB External Hard Drive, tape drives, DVD, and even online backups, i am shocked how often backups are neglected. Computers can be replaced. Your pictures, invoices, and 40 page research paper can not.

SEO Magic

2009-03-24T08:10:00.003-04:00

I have been really interested in Search engine optimization (SEO). It is an interesting topic and profoundly effects the flow of the internet. Before the internet you used the Yellow Pages to find what you were looking for. Now you use Google or Yahoo or any other search engine. If you are able to sway or control the results in these search engines you control the internet. Your website that contain the secrets of the internet will forever remain buried in with Anglefire web pages and websites with frames. However, if you are good at the game of cat and mouse they call SEO, then your site has a shot at being seen or maybe even utilized. I'm sure it is not as simple as this and there are others out there that have figure this out already. But, I am ready to learn the magic behind SEO. See you at the top of Google ;)

Downadup Stikes Again

2009-03-23T17:52:00.003-04:00

I had to remove the downadup virus from a Windows 2003 server today. The server had Symantec anti-virus on it, but it could not remove it for some reason. I needed to boot into safe mode and run the Downadup virus removal tool from Symantec. The network department was also seeing alot of the traffic generated from the worm, but hopefully I got rid of it for good.

Installing Microsoft Sharepoint 3.0 SP1

2009-03-23T10:44:00.002-04:00

I installed Microsoft Sharepoint 3.0 SP1 on a virtual machine to test out the functionality and how we can use it in the department for document management. As it turns out Sharepoint is built into Windows 2003 R2.

Too busy to update?

2008-06-13T18:30:00.001-04:00

Ping.fm is a service that lets you update social sites and blogs like twitter, blogger, pounce, myspace, and plurk from one interface. I'm using it right now. It's in beta so there might be some bugs.

Sports Translation

2007-12-29T14:11:00.000-05:00

I just helped a very talented young boy, that goes by the name Yankeeboy98, set up his blog on blogger. The site Yankees Kid Talk translates the baseball sports page speak of negotiations and contracts to terms young sports fans can understand. Obvoiusly Yankeeboy98 is a big New York Yankees fan and the site's content is primarily Yankees related. However, I think this a great start for sites like this and perhaps it can expand to include more sports new. Maybe Yankeeboy98 will be a sports writer when he grows up.

Brick and mortar beats the Net this time

2007-11-20T15:32:00.001-05:00

In an attempt to beat the Christmas rush, we decided to do our Christmas shopping before Black Friday. There were a few "must have" gifts that we needed to get namely the Nintendo Wii and the Hot Wheels 4-Lane Raceway. In an age where you can find anything on the internet, we scoured our favorite sites and they we all sold out. We found a few on some unknown sites and decided not to risk it. You can't be to careful these days. I doubtfully called the local Toy R' Us and they were somehow stocked with both toys. While the net is convenient, there is a sense of satisfaction when you have the item you want at home immediately.

Blogged with Flock

Flock Me!

2007-10-19T13:27:00.001-04:00

There are more browsers than just Firefox and Internet Explorer. Flock is a browser that combines many of the sites and services that you use the web for, such as Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, and Digg, so that are all in one place. This post was posted right out of the Flock browser without having to go to the Blogger site. Kindda Neat!

Blogged with Flock

Business is Booming

2007-08-26T10:58:00.000-04:00

Well, not really. In an attempt to increase my income I have started a computer repair and consulting business (http://acsissolutions.com) on the side. It's been slow going but I have been getting more word of mouth referrals. I have really not advertised my services and I think I will increase that effort and see if I can get more referrals. The goal is to get enough business to consider doing it full time. We'll see how it goes.

Higher Education

2007-01-14T22:29:00.000-05:00

I am 2 courses away from my MBA in Technology Management from the University of Phoenix Online. I have that feeling when you see the finish line in race. It is a good feeling of accomplishment. You might have been thinking of getting a degree on line, but all the ads and scandals about online schools make it seem like a scam. I was skeptical at first but a co-worker was enrolled in the program so I was able to see for myself what they had to offer. They have an extensive MBA program with specific concentrations such as technology management. It has taken me about 2 years, but it would have only taken about a year if I hadn’t taken some breaks. In case you’re wondering how it works here is a brief explanation. The courses are 6 weeks in length (5 weeks for undergraduate courses) spanning year round. You can have class through the summer and holidays (the school does close for a week or two during Christmas). Course work and participation is run through a forum like site. Grading is based on papers, group work, and class participation. Class participation consists of discussing topics that the instructor of the course determines. I have had a few final exams which were multiple choice based on course material. The course materials can be purchased in printed form or can be downloaded in pdf format. One aspect of the program that I found interesting and helpful is the Adobe Flash based simulations. These workshops simulate situations that are found in organizations where you usually role play as the manager in the organization and the decisions you make effect the organization positively or negatively. Most traditional MBA programs require that you intern at a participating organization to learn how the concepts you learn in the course apply in real world situations. The University of Phoenix does not have this requirement but they do require that you are employed so you can apply the concepts at your own organization. There are quite a number of military people that are enrolled, some of which are in the Middle East. An online program like this is sometimes the only option working people have with busy schedules. But the online craze has caught on to more and more local Universities. If you are thinking about enrolling in an online program, check out your local Universities first to see if they have an online or “distance learning” option. If you do go with University of Phoenix, it is a reputable school and a well known for its online program so you won’t get a strange look at a job interview. As for what I will do with the MBA, I’m not sure yet. My goal is to run my own business, we will see what will come of it. Next up, PhD?

TinkerToilet?

2007-01-06T22:06:00.000-05:00

Today is my son’s 7^th birthday. Happy Birthday Frank Jr.! Today my server also crashed. As a good systems administrator should, I had a back up of the server so I went through the standard process of restoring the data. But it is Microsoft Windows and it just never goes that smoothly. The hard drive died and I had install a base operating system on to the new drive before I could restore the data. After that I restored all the data overwriting all files and registry entries. That should have been it, but it did not boot after a restart. I tried a few things like safe mode but finally I had to repair from a Windows install disk. To my surprise it worked and all the setting were intact. I had to remount the drives and set up some shares but that was it.

I installed a new 250GB SATA drive in my wife’s computer but that also gave me trouble until I realized that I was plugging the drive into the RAID ports instead or the SATA ports.

My brother-in-law’s laptop was not connecting to the network so I help him out with that and top it off, the flusher handle on the toilet broke. So I fashioned a temporary handle from my son’s TinkerToys. We call it our “TinkerToilet” now.

I am now at ease with everything ~~working~~ functioning again.

Pre-packaged food is no diet

2007-01-03T11:56:00.000-05:00

Quite a number of people are starting their New Years resolution to lose weight. I’m sure the number of health club memberships skyrocket this time of year. For the past 3 months or so using the NutriSystem diet and along with twice a week exercise program I have lost about 15 pounds. But you know the saying, “No pain. No gain”, and I have experienced some pain. The pre-packaged meals, which do not require refrigeration and contain things like mozzarella type cheese, are portioned and labeled for each meal of the day. This setup is geared for the busy or undisciplined person to grab a days worth of meals with little or no preparation. The plan has you eating frequent small low calorie portions throughout the day which boosts your metabolism and doesn’t leave you hungry. In theory these are very good eating habits and can be followed without pre-packaged meals. However, the food is less than appetizing and while there are a variety of choices, you will soon find that you gravitate toward the few that you can tolerate. In addition to the pr-packaged meals you need to supplement your diet with veggies and proteins like low-fat yogurt. The plan even has “snacks” and desserts for your cravings, which compared to the rest of the food is a welcomed relief.

If you don’t want to have to think about what to eat or don’t have time to prepare your meals ahead of time and you can stomach them, then these pre-packaged meals are the way to help you shed some weight. The real key is to get more regular exercise and to eat small partitions all day to keep your metabolism up and hunger down. You cannot spend the rest of your life living off of pre-packaged meals so you may be better off learning to eat right and get into healthier habits that will keep you on the thin side.

How to make a New Year's resolution and stick to it

2006-12-29T22:21:00.000-05:00

The new year is upon us and that means the parties are all over and it's time to get back to business. The new year makes us feel as if we've got a clean slate to do the things we have been meaning to do the past year.
If you have written down your New Year's resolutions and stuck them to the refrigerator your not off to a bad start. The first thing on you list should be to get the book"Getting things done" by David Allen. David Allen is well known as a "productivity guru" and gives seminars on organization and effectively completing projects. This book shows methods of productivity for both home and office.
One of the methods in the book is to write down your goal in a notebook or pad of paper then write specific tasks or milestones that will get you to the goal. So if one of your resolutions is to "lose 20 pounds", write down the tasks that will get you to that goal such as "Exercise 20 min a day". You can get as detailed as you need so the task can be completed without making you make you feel overwhelmed. The next tip from Allen's book is if a task takes only a few minutes to complete, just finish it and get it done with. If it is paperwork make sure that you file it away if it needs to be filed. If it not important or does not need to be kept, throw it out. You do not need to clutter you desk with completed work.
What is great about the methods in this book are that you can start using them right away. By the end of the book you will have a system to deal with and organize your life, which will help to keep you focused and actually stick to those resolutions throughout the rest of the year. Happy New Year!

A haiku a day keeps the ninja at bay

2006-12-28T15:25:00.000-05:00

My buddy at work always has a store of surprises. Especially since we are mortal enemies; me being a ninja and he a pirate. Check his new collaboration www.daily-haiku.com which will soon allow others to participate in the fun of a thought provoking haiku on a daily basis. By the way, you should duck at random times. You’ll thank me later!

Sopping Wet and Satisfied

2006-12-24T00:08:00.000-05:00

It seemed like a simple enough task; Install a water filter. However, hidden in this medial task lie a worldly truth; things are not always a simple as they seem. I glanced through the directions, putting aside my male ego, so I would have an idea of what I was doing. I'm not exactly experienced in plumbing, but I know enough to think I can fix stuff on my own. I got out every wrench, vice grip, and pliers I had to make sure I had everything to make this job smooth and painless. Under the sink I discovered a fairly common plumbing configuration. Copper piping leading from the cold water out-flow to the faucet. I seems the previous owners had a ice maker/refrigerator water dispenser since there was this piercing saddle valve which made installation of the water filter a little more difficult. The instructions stated to place the adapter provided in between the cold water supply line and the faucet. The problem is that copper piping is not that flexible and I was not able to bend the the pipe easily. (Don't forget about the saddle valve in my way). I connected the parts back on to the water line and turned on the water to test for leaks. Needless to say I was sopping wet in no time. While messing around to try to get a better seal I bent the pipe to much and it sprung a leak. Now I've done it! I have to replace the pipe. luckily I knew from experience and watching "This Old House" that they use flexible piping in the 21st century. Off to Home Depot I go. I ended up having to go twice since I was lazy and didn't bring the broken pieces with me to make sure I bought the right parts. A nice elderly gentleman in the plumbing section helped me find the flexible faucet connector that would let me finish this little project. The water filter is now installed and working bring me and my family clean and good tasting water which left me with a satisfied feeling. I will, however be more careful when judging the difficulty of a project. Next project: Install a garbage disposal. Don't worry, I'm calling a plumber!

First Post EVAR

2006-12-23T00:46:00.000-05:00

O.K. I've been on the internet a long while and this is the first real post on a blog or forum of any sort. Kinda weird, huh. My online habits have been of an internet scavenger. I search around looking for what I want and when I find it, I'm out. I sign up for forums and message boards to read through the content but I rarely post anything. My decision to start this blog is to add to the collective knowledge base that has become the internet we know today. I have leeched my share of information and I figure it's time to put some of my insights and experiences out there in hopes that someone that is looking for that information will find it useful. My only concern is that I hope I will not be adding to the endless chatter and noise that has filled the net like spam. My next post will be of more use.
/End of useless banter.