Month: April 2009

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Ixodes scapularis

I found a dog tick on myself yesterday. I actually felt it walking on my scalp. Good thing I had cut my hair. Then like a half hour ago I was scratching something on my right shoulder and when I looked at my hand I saw these little legs sticking out — what appeared to be a flea — but when I looked more closely I realized it was a very small tick. I don’t know if it was a deer tick or just a small dog tick, but it pissed me off anyway. We went upstairs to inspect Anthony (who was asleep) and I went over his head with a flashlight for about 5 minutes. We didn’t find anything but we’ll probably keep checking him for days.

The Great Outdoors indeed.

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Why is my title in smallcaps now?

WordPress is doing something weird now. Yesterday the head of the site was not in all caps, and today it is.

Hmm.

Ok, I figured it out. I guess I must have installed some new font on this computer – “Trajan Pro” – and the header was showing in that font. I deleted it from the stylesheet and now it defaults to Lucida Sans Unicode, which is what I wanted.

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VMWare is pretty cool.

Over the past few months I’ve gotten to love VMWare. We had purchased a SAN around May 2008 for one project, and all the SAN vendors kept asking us if we did anything with virtualization. The first few times we kind of furrowed our brows and said no, but eventually I started wondering if this was something I should be looking into.

Continue reading “VMWare is pretty cool.”

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Today was a nice day.

Today was the first really nice day of the year. We spent almost all of it out of the house. It was nice.

I need to get my oil changed.

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“My daddy is a great big giant!”

I can’t help but feel people will be underwhelmed when they finally meet me after this kind of a build up. I’m flattered though.

The fan in the bedroom burst into flames tonight and Anthony was terrified, so he got to spend the rest of the night downstairs while we watched TV.

I should be sleeping. I finished StarCraft Zerg mission 6 tonight. Now that I got the hang of the ctrl-groups it was pretty easy, I had an armada of 24 mutalisks, 12 guardians, and 12 hydralisks. I picked up StarCraft a couple of days after my WoW sub ran out and I haven’t missed WoW at all. I know 3.1 is out now but until I see some massive nerfs for DKs it’s not worth even considering going back, though as sick as it sounds, I do feel bad for my rogue. If you’ve never played an MMO you wouldn’t understand.

On another note, I guess this WordPress thing has worked out pretty well so far.

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"My daddy is a great big giant!"

I can’t help but feel people will be underwhelmed when they finally meet me after this kind of a build up. I’m flattered though.

The fan in the bedroom burst into flames tonight and Anthony was terrified, so he got to spend the rest of the night downstairs while we watched TV.

I should be sleeping. I finished StarCraft Zerg mission 6 tonight. Now that I got the hang of the ctrl-groups it was pretty easy, I had an armada of 24 mutalisks, 12 guardians, and 12 hydralisks. I picked up StarCraft a couple of days after my WoW sub ran out and I haven’t missed WoW at all. I know 3.1 is out now but until I see some massive nerfs for DKs it’s not worth even considering going back, though as sick as it sounds, I do feel bad for my rogue. If you’ve never played an MMO you wouldn’t understand.

On another note, I guess this WordPress thing has worked out pretty well so far.

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I used to love my BlackBerry Pearl

I got my phone in April 2007 from LetsTalk.com. I got a good deal — a BlackBerry Pearl and 2 Motorola RAZR V3rs for… free. No rebates or anything, totally free. LetsTalk screwed up the account creation but I got that straightened out with Cingular.

The BlackBerry served me pretty well until around September 2008 when the trackball got so gunked up I couldn’t use it. I keep my phone in my pants pocket and not in some protective case, so I guess the lint and finger grease got to be too much. I dealt with it like this for a couple of weeks until I decided to try cleaning the ball. It’s pretty easy to remove the clip and take the whole apparatus out, and it was indeed very gunky in there. I went at it with a can of air (computer dusting stuff), a Q-tip and some rubbing alcohol. I got all the gunk off, put it all back together and it was pretty good for about a week or two. Then it was back to its old self – spinning the trackball didn’t do anything and I couldn’t navigate menus or use almost any of the features of the phone. Plus – this is the best part – the plastic clip that kept the trackball apparatus in place had apparently lost tension or something and would pop off, and by the end of 2008 the trackball had fallen out completely and is now lost to the ages.

Fortunately at some point before the complete failure of the trackball, when it still functioned intermittently, I had gone into the configuration and set the left-side convenience key to go to my inbox and the right-side button to go to the web browser. These two apps are navigable using the keypad, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. So my phone still has email and basic browser support, but if a dialog box pops up that doesn’t have hotkeys for “OK” or “Cancel” I have no choice but to hit the “go back/cancel” button, so e.g. I can’t accept many SSL certs.

This whole experience has soured me on the BlackBerry. I’m not buying a phone with a trackball again, and I’d like to buy something with no moving parts if possible. I had high hopes for the BlackBerry Storm – I love the BlackBerry OS – but the week the Storm was released I went to a Verizon store to play with it and I found it horrendous. The reviews that came out about the Storm since then have said pretty much the same thing – the phone is a dud.

After reviewing the options it looks like my two best choices for internet phones are the iPhone and the Nokia e71. A guy at work has the e71 and loves it, but even he has conceded that the iPhone has a superior browser. I’m not a fan of touch keyboards but the iPhone still seems like the most advanced phone available today, even almost a year after the 3G iPhone’s launch.

My contract is already up but I don’t know what I’m going to do. There’s supposed to be an AT&T-subsidized version of the e71, the e71x, coming out pretty soon that’s rumored to cost around $100, but it’s been “real soon now” apparently for several months. I’m leaning toward the iPhone but I hate to spend $200 out of pocket when until now I’ve never paid for a phone.

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Converting FLAC to MP3

I downloaded a couple of albums in FLAC format the other day and wanted to convert them to MP3.  I found a couple of ways to do this, with the most trivial seeming to be FLAC -> WAV and then WAV->MP3, since there are plenty of tools to do WAV -> MP3.  But, being lazy, I didn’t want to have to re-enter the ID3 info for each of the tracks.  After a couple of minutes of searching I found foobar2000 which has a nifty convert function. The included MP3 presets, however, were not to my liking. Namely they were both Joint Stereo. I know there’s some debate in audiophile circles about Joint Stereo and lots of people claim it’s fine, but I don’t like it, and if it’s a matter of a couple of extra kB in a file to ensure I don’t hear weird warbling then that’s a small price to pay. To setup my own preset I had to get an executable copy of LAME. CDex comes with LAME but it’s in a .dll which doesn’t work. Fortunately I found lame.exe on this Audacity download site and I was able to specify the command-line options to lame.exe to encode the tracks exactly how I wanted. So now, after having lost the discs (which I purchased) years ago, I again have Electric Ladyland and The Wall. Yay!