Author: admin

It’s been a busy few days for me, between setting up my new desktop / gaming box and flying to Pittsburgh for the weekend to visit Laura, so I apologise for the comparitive gap in my postings.

On the new PC front, I put all of the hardware together minus 2 internal audio cables (because I didn’t have any spares, oops) on Friday night before travelling to Pittsburgh Saturday morning. Last night I put the audio cables I bought at CompUSA for $3 bucks each, and went to work building the OS and basic applications, which finished pretty quick. I tried out Battlefield 1942 at about 11 last night and WOW is it nice on that ATI All-In-Wonder 9700 Pro. Ran 1600×1200 and it performed flawlessly : ) Tonight I’ll set up some more apps and run updates, and hopefully grab the pics of the build off of my digital camera to post here soon.

The Pittsburgh trip was fun, I got into Pittsburgh at about 11:15 Saturday morning, and Laura picked me up at the airport. We went shopping, hung out, saw Old School which was pretty good, and found out that she got her internship at a pharmacy about 20 minutes from her house. Congrats! : ) The only bad thing is she has to work Saturdays 9-5 starting this week, which complicates things a bit for visits. Right now it works out with my flex-time at work so I have a day off every other week, so I can head out ther Saturday and then come home Monday. Still not as good of a solution as her getting an internship near me or me landing a job in Pittsburgh, so if you’re reading this and need some IT help, let me know! : )

Patrick Norton over on The Screen Savers last night talked about his venture into switching to Mac for a few months. It’s a pretty good representation of trying to go from PC to Mac. Check it out.

In some interesting news, a New Jersey Mitsubishi dealer offered Saddam Hussein a car, namely a brand new Mitsubishi a year for the rest of his life. He ran this offer in an ad on the local radio and got smattered with irate phonecalls. I figure why not, it’s not like we’re at war… yet.

When I came in this morning, what did I find? Oh, just a dual 2.8 gHz Xeon server in my cube : ) That has to be one of the perks of working in I.T., getting to be the first person to use that new hardware. It keeps my computer addiction cost down to a sane level.

Today is first day practice for the season opener of the 2003 ChampCar season in sunny Tampa. I know that Anita, Bruce, and the rest of the 7G gang is going to have a wonderful time while I’m here in frosty PA fighting the perpetual fire that is I.T. Brad over at SeventhGear has a preview article about the race.

I just upgraded the site to the latest and greatest version of MovableType (v 2.62) If you see any errors or things missing, let me know. So far it seems like everything upgraded AOK.

Just when you thought things might calm down, I find an article describing a MAJOR security hole in Windows XP, self-dubbed the “most secure version ever”. Yeah, secure until you use the magic relic that is the Windows 2000 installation CD.

With the 2003 ChampCar season upon us, SeventhGear is shifting around some responsibilities, and my good friend Anita Swirsky is now the Managing Editor! With the great job she’s done with the forums, the chat room, and the At-The-Track meets at SeventhGear in the past, and her wonderful enthusiasm, I’m sure she’ll do an excellent job making SeventhGear even better. Congrats Anita!

Well today I turn 24 years old… another one past 21, and one before what could be considered the last truly positive birthday milestone, 25. One more year until I can rent from a rental car company without penalty! So today for lunch the people in my group took me to Hunan Springs, pretty good. I ended up having Orange Beef, which was very good, light on the hot peppers, the way I like it : ). Then the parents took me out to dinner. I haven’t been to Chili’s in about 2 years so I figured why not. I don’t know why but I just haven’t been there in a long time. I ended up having the Monterrey Chicken, definitely a good choice! I must go there more often. All in all a pretty quiet birthday, and a quiet day of work after having 5 days off (gotta love getting stuck away from home in a snowstorm!).

I just finished reading the latest issue of LinuxJournal (the blog special that I mentioned earlier), and it had some very interesting articles. There was one main article about blogs, and the options out there for blogging systems in general, and listed some referrer sites, as well as how Google seems to promote blogs in their listings, an interesting read. Also they had a few articles about fighting spam by using Bayesian statistical methods to determine from words if the email was spam or not, and went into detail about the formulas used to make it all work. I highly recommend this issue to check it out.