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Christmas Pictures

We started a new tradition this year - annual family pictures. Here's some we had taken last weekend. Enjoy!

Posted in General at Dec 13 2003, 01:27:32 PM MST 1 Comment

Beautiful Snow in Denver

Last night we got around 5 inches of snow at our house. Beautiful stuff, I love it. Too bad I'm not on the slopes - Breckenridge got 9 inches. Here's some clips from the local news:

Posted in General at Dec 09 2003, 08:26:02 AM MST 2 Comments

After talking with Apple's Tech Support for an hour today, the verdict is in: my PowerBook's hard drive is hosed. They're sending out a dispatch from Airborne Express, should be here on Tuesday. I package it up and send it back, should take around 5 business days to fix. I like Dell's Support better, they send someone to your house to fix the problem the next day. Since this is my primary development machine at my current client, it should make for an interesting week.

This site was down for most of the night last night - this time due to a core dump from the JVM. At least I'm more attentive to this site than the folks at javablogs, which has been down all weekend. I think it's time to quit hosting so many demos on this site. Currently there are 5, and they can't be helping my memory issues. I'll leave Roller and the Wiki on this site, and moving the others to my home server. I wonder if I can use the balancer in Tomcat 5.0.16 to redirect traffic to my demo server. My upload speed is only 200K, but that's probably enough for these small and simple demo apps (i.e. struts-resume, displaytag editable table, struts-menu, strutscx and my quick-n-dirty training app. I don't know if this will help, 54,000 hits/day (3000 visits) probably doesn't help much (I wonder how many of those are real people).

My PowerBook dying sucks, but hopefully it will get me off the computer at night, and I can enjoy more time with my family. Yesterday, I spent most of the day working for an old client, but I did get everything done I hoped to, so that's a nice feeling. Julie, Abbie and I went to Kiddie Kandids to get Holiday Pictures taken - 5 hours later (3 hour wait), we had them in our hands and it was well worth the wait. I'll scan one and post it soon. Today, we're getting/assembling our tree, and I'll snap a pic for Russ. This year, Christmas will be spent at the cabin, but a tree (and lights) is still essential in my book.

Posted in General at Dec 07 2003, 02:15:14 PM MST 4 Comments

The day before it hits

Abbie has been sick for about a week now. It started out as a runny nose, and watering eyes - nothing too bad. She's had a smile on her face and been laughing the whole time. This can be a real treat after she's sneezed, the boogers are streaming on to her chin - but she still wants to give you a kiss. Kisses at this age means she opens her mouth real wide and plasters her face against yours. As gross as it sounds, I think it's cute. Anyway, on Sunday she started to get quite cranky and began to earn her nickname we've always wanted to give her but never could - Crabby Abbie. On Monday, we noticed she was running a fever and took her into the doctor. It was a typically doctor's visit, nothing we can do, get lots of rest/fluids, etc. That night, after her afternoon nap, she was back to her happy ol' self again and it was hard to believe she still had a fever. Yesterday it was the same thing, smiling happy kid with a fever (100-101). Then last night, I started to feel it. You know that feeling in the back of your nose when you know you're getting a cold. It sucks, you know it's coming - and you're pretty much helpless to get rid of it. You pound down the Orange Juice, throw down some Vitamin C - and hope for the best. But I know it's coming... it's just a matter of time. Getting 5 hours of sleep last night will surely escalate the process...

Posted in General at Dec 03 2003, 07:08:31 AM MST 5 Comments

What's up with Google Ads?!

At first, I thought that Google's AdSense was kind of annoying. Then I realized, from Russ, that you can actually pay for your hosting costs with it. So I tried to sign up (this was about a month ago now). I was denied with a vague reason like my site was too personal or something. "Oh well" I thought, "at least I tried." But now I'm seeing these suckers on almost everyone's blogs. "Sheot" I say to myself, "those bastards are making money and I'm still stuck paying $50+/month for this site!!"

So on one hand, I'm jealous of all your Google Ad Bastards, but on the other hand, I'm proud to be Ad Free!

No wait. I take that back. I'm just jealous. Money talks...

Posted in General at Dec 02 2003, 05:16:28 PM MST 2 Comments

House Project: Garage has started

The Garage crew showed up last week and began working on Saturday. Today they poured concrete - this builder isn't wasting any time! They expect to have our garage done by Christmas. Click on the image to zoom in.

Posted in General at Dec 01 2003, 01:56:24 PM MST

Memory and Disk Space is Cheap

Memory and Disk Space sure is cheap these days. I got 1 GB of RAM for $150 last week, and I bought a 160 GB Hard Drive today for $80. Gotta love that!

Posted in General at Nov 29 2003, 11:38:43 AM MST Add a Comment

Happy Thanksgiving Y'all

Happy Thankgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! This year I'm thankful for continued employment, a thriving Java community and an awesome family. Abbie and Julie are the most incredible women I've ever met. My parents, sister, and in-laws deserve a "Thank You" as well - you all rock. Here's a smile from Abbie to brighten your Turkey Day.

Abbie on a bench

Posted in General at Nov 27 2003, 05:10:38 AM MST

Unix Utils for Windows

If you develop on Windows, and you use Microsoft's "cmd" to run Ant or compile your classes - you really should install Cygwin - it's much easier and provides the same functionality as cmd. Even better, Dan sent me an e-mail (can't find it now) about UnxUtils - Native Win32 ports of some GNU Utilities. You can even download an executable to install it. I dig it - symlinks that actually work on Windows.

Posted in General at Nov 26 2003, 07:02:20 AM MST 3 Comments

Fedora like OS X?

Is Fedora like OS X? It almost seems like it - everything "just works." Well, at least after my 2nd format-and-install it does. Last Wednesday, I tried to upgrade from Red Hat 9 to Fedora Core 1. It didn't go very smoothly and the upgrade wasn't possible (installer said not enough disk space - I know there's enough). I ended up doing a format and clean, and got most things working but my USB Printer. I spent hours trying to get the damn thing working on Friday night (until 3 a.m.). I spent more time compiling things and trying to get it to work on Saturday (insert picture of me banging my head against the wall). Finally, I gave up on Saturday night and reverted back to Red Hat 9 (it worked before). Formatted and installed. Then I spent all day Sunday trying to get DNS/DHCP and HPOJ (Printing) working. It worked before - what the hell?!

And then on Monday morning, I found the simple-ass solution that was staring me in the face the whole fucking time: Turn off the printer and turn it back on. I found it on a mailing list or something. So, since I knew the solution, and I still hadn't gotten DNS/DHCP/Samba working on RH 9, I decided to upgrade to Fedora (again) last night. Again, same error - on a new 30 GB hard drive - not enough space to upgrade. So I formatted and installed. Lo and behold, I power cycled the printer and everything worked! I installed Dynamic DNS (I did have to run rndc-confgen) and configured Samba to recognize my printer. Viola - in under 20 minutes after I installed Fedora - everything worked. I spent 15 hours trying to fix something that eventually took 1 hour to fix. While setting this stuff up, and everything "just working" - I thought "Fedora is just like OS X - everything just works." Now if I could only get a Ximian Desktop for Fedora.

Notes to self: You're a Linux rookie. Don't mess with the default config. Don't bang your head against the wall for more than an hour. Don't try to upgrade Red Hat 9 to Fedora.

Posted in General at Nov 25 2003, 02:19:39 PM MST 2 Comments

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