Here’s a nice picture of Matthew in his jumper. He really likes jumping.
Isn’t it nice for everyone to be able to see this picture online? As opposed to, you know, squinting at a tiny screen on a camera phone…
Bouncing Baby
Can You Hear Me Now?
Paige and I finally broke down and got cell phones again. Chances are we’ve already given you our new numbers. If not, let us know and we’ll probably share.
We picked up a pair of Sanyo VI-2300 phones. Paige’s is silver and mine is black (or as they say on their website – graphite). They seem to be pretty nice phones so far.
I’m really impressed with the battery life. My old cell phone weighed at least twice as much as this phone and it would hardly last all day on standby. This phone claims to last 13 days on standby. I haven’t recharged it since the day I bought it, and I’ve been talking on it quite a bit for the last few days.
Of course it has all of the other fancy features of today’s phones – color screen, ringtones, internet, e-mail, games, screensavers, etc. I tend to avoid all of that stuff. I’m sure one of these days I’ll have some free time to explore all of the options, but for now I’m just using it to make calls.
One thing it doesn’t have is a camera. I understand camera phones are convenient, but they really take terrible pictures. I just couldn’t justify paying extra for a crappy camera when we already have a nice digital camera.
The question now is – do we cancel our regular phone service? I know lots of people are doing this. Paige and I can call each other and any of our friends with Sprint phones for free and we can talk in the evening and on weekends for free. So there’s not much reason to even have a home phone anymore. Time will tell if I’m happy enough with the quality to give up the land line.
Darth Tater
Outsource Yourself
If you’re involved with computers at all, I’m sure you’ve heard of jobs being outsourced to India. Here’s an article about people who are outsourcing their own work so that they basically get paid for doing nothing:
About a year ago I hired a developer in India to do my job. I pay him $12,000 out of the $67,000 I get. He’s happy to have the work. I’m happy that I have to work only 90 minutes a day just supervising the code. My employer thinks I’m telecommuting. Now I’m considering getting a second job and doing the same thing.
Unbelievable.
You can read the full article at The Times of India.
What the?
The strangest thing is happening right now. Water is falling from the sky. Also, there’s an occasional booming sound coming from outside.
If I figure out what this is called, I’ll be sure to update the site…
Batman Begins
Ben, Geoff, and I saw Batman Begins today. This was definitely the best Batman movie so far. It was a bit long at just over 2 hours, but there was always so much going on that it never seemed tedious.
Ben and Geoff both thought it was better than Revenge of the Sith, but I’m not sure I would go that far. I’m not saying it was a bad movie, but can anything really be better than Star Wars? Besides, everyone knows that Darth Vader could beat up Batman any day…
Happy Half
Today was Matthews “half birthday” – he’s six months old today. It seems like just yesterday I was uploading the first pictures of him in the hospital. Here’s a pretty recent picture of Matthew sitting up on his changing table:
Also, he’s getting his first tooth. The tooth coming through has made him a little fussy lately, but I think we’re going to make it.
Saved Again
I said last night that I would talk about the other way that Linux helped us out on Monday.
Here it is…
This is probably a pretty common situation on business computers. We had just finished setting up our new Active Directory domain and we needed to make some configuration changes on all of our Windows 2000 and Windows XP workstations.
Normally, this is no big deal, just log on as the local Administrator and make the changes. Unfortunately, I didn’t set up all of the computers in the district (or maybe I should say thankfully). So for a lot of the computers, I didn’t know the Administrator password.
Here again it came down to possibly reloading Windows unless we could find a tool that would let us go in and reset the Administrator password. And again, a Linux tool saved the day.
A guy named Petter Nordahl-Hagen (I’m guessing he’s not from around here) came up with a handy boot disk called the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor. You can download an image for either a boot floppy or CD.
It’s a nice little script that walks you through the process of booting up Linux, mounting the hard drive, and then clearing the Administrator password. We’ve used it on about 40-50 computers so far and it’s worked on every one of them.
This is a very hand disk to carry around in the laptop case.
Saved By Linux
A while back I requested 10 copies of Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu has a pretty good deal going. Not only is it free to download and install on as many computers as you want, they’ll also ship you as many copies of their software as you want for free. My CDs arrived in the mail last week. We’ll get back to them in a minute…
Friday, a transformer blew near the high school. This knocked out one leg of the power to the building. Basically, half of the circuits in the building were down. So instead of having four dedicated circuits for running everything in the server closet, we had two. I managed to patch things together and keep everything working over the weekend with the exception of one server.
The server that controls most of the network printers on the campus wouldn’t boot back up. It tried to boot then gave a blue screen of death with INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. This is a really bad message.
On Saturday I found out that there were also some very important files on that server, so I would have to find some way to get those files back off. I spent some time the rest of the weekend researching how to fix this problem.
The best solution to this error is to reinstall windows. That means I would also have to download drivers for the RAID controller and network card since they aren’t included with Windows NT. This would’ve probably taken a few hours.
I didn’t want to dedicate that kind of time to a server that I was planning on turning off in a few days anyway so I looked around for another solution. Luckily, I had an Ubuntu LiveCD handy.
Yesterday morning I booted from the LiveCD and everthing just worked. Ubuntu automatically detected the RAID controller and the network card. Once it finished booting up, there were icons on the desktop for all three of the hard drives in the server. I was able to copy all of the files to another server and save myself a few hours of work.
Linux helped us out a second time yesterday. I’ll get to that tomorrow…
Matthew
I haven’t posted any pictures of Matthew in a while. Here’s a pretty good one that Paige took of me and Matthew a few weeks ago.
I think I was showing him how to work iTunes on that Indigo iMac – or maybe he was showing me…