November 28, 2001
Mix Tapes
When I was in high school, I spent way too much time making mix tapes and copying albums onto tape. (For you young folks, an album was a phonograph, a pre-cd recording medium in which music was stored in analog format on probably the world's least durable plastic medium and played back by running a diamond tip needle thru the grooves on the record at precisely 33-1/2 RPM) I finally got around to playing with the CD-RW in my new PC. I'm going to have a lot of fun :)
I wish I still had some of those tapes - I bet my music choices would be quite embarrassing!
Permalink | Comments (7)November 27, 2001
CD Review: Oh... by CombinationLock
If you've ever thought about buying a CD from a band you've never heard of, just because some joker on the Internet said you needed to own the album...now is the time to roll the dice and do it.
The first full length CombinationLock CD surpasses my expectations, and I've been a fan for a while. They don't have a record contract, this is a self funded CD. I can't believe they will stay independant for long though. Oh... delivers a powerful dose of edgy, guitar driven, melodic hard rock with "pop punk" undercurrents and lyrics that demand a close listen, lest you miss the irony in singer Glenn Hall's vocal stylings. This is a CD you will play loud in the car and you will sing along, even if you never do that sort of thing!
Just buy the damn CD. They're only asking $5 for a CD you will listen to over and over again. If you hate it send it to me and I'll donate $5 to your favorite charity :)
Permalink | Comments (0)November 26, 2001
More on my American Express issue
Both of my faithful readers will remember my problem with AMEX. They are forcing you through Doubleclick servers to pay your bill online. Now, Metafilter has picked up the issue too. I hope somebody big picks up on this since American Express hasn't bothered to give me a meaningful reply.
Permalink | Comments (0)Domain Issues fixed finally
I had to resort to changing domain registrars in order to change the name servers for odonnellweb.com - you'll notice you didn't bounce through the old site today to get here!
GKG.net did in one day whay Net Sol couldn't do in 3 weeks.
Permalink | Comments (1)November 24, 2001
Fixed comments - sort of
I know what isn't working in the comments - and I've hacked up a temporary solution - it shows 2+ for any post with more than 2 links. For some reason that I can't figure out - Greymatter is not populating the template properly with "Add a comment" text when comments =0, or with the number of comments when comments are present. So, I've used the manual overide feature in GM to display a link that keeps comments functioning - but whatever is causing the problem is not fixed.
I spent about 2-1/2 hours on this - on a Satuday night - and I'm not even a programmer, I'm in sales. Although I do wonder why quite frequently these days...
Permalink | Comments (3)Missing comments
I know the comments link is gone - all the comments are still there, however I have no idea why the link is gone. I've reinstalled all the program files for greymatter - not sure what is happening here...
Permalink | Comments (1)November 21, 2001
New CD's
recent weeks have brought several new CD's into the collection. I'm going to take a cue from Ryan and keep the reviews short. There are plenty of long winded, over dramatic music reviews on the the Web, l don't need to add to them.
Creed - Weathered: I like it. It's "less poppy" than the previous albums. It's what Pearl Jam could have been if Eddie Vetter had pulled his ass out of his head for just a little while.
Kris Kehr & The Stone Poets - Well done, rootsy, folksy, acoustic rock played with feeling.
John Hiatt - The Tiki Bar is Open: John Hiatt takes a step back to the more rockin' sound from Perfectly Good Guitar. This is a good thing. If you like Hiatt, you'll love this album. If you've never heard of John Hiatt, you'll love this album.
Lenny Kravitz - Lenny: His most "Beatlesque" effort to date. The songs have this cool "70's" vibe to them, and I mean that as a compliment.
Permalink | Comments (7)Happy Thanksgiving!
I was watching Ed tonight and Ed was upset that the townsfolk in Stuckeysville had cancelled the Thanksgiving parade due to lack of interest. The economy sucks and nobody felt like having fun was the general feeling around town. Ed pointed out that the Pilgrams didn't have a whole lot to celebrate that first year either. Life was tough, they were cold, and more than a couple of the group had already died. But they resolved to have fun, to celebrate and give thanks, even though their lives pretty much sucked at the moment.
We should all remember that, especially this year.
Permalink | Comments (0)November 19, 2001
Hitchhiker's Guide to continue...
Douglas Adams may be dead - but apparently the 6th installment of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was on his hard drive, so it is going to be published next year. Cool...
Permalink | Comments (0)I hate Microsoft!
My new PC came in today. 1.2 GHz Athalon, 256MB RAM, 30 GB Hard Drive, CD & CD-RW, 19 inch monitor, Windows ME. I though I was being smart by staying 2 OS's behind the state of the art with MS. I thought they would have the driver issues all figured out by now. Apparently I was wrong. Every time I dial the Internet Windows freezes and requires a hard reboot. I've poked around the Internet and it looks like the Winmodem in the PC is not supported by Windows ME. Something about the WDM architecture of the modem changing - it was over my head pretty quick. So I called support and waited on hold about 15 minutes - only to be told that I have to go through the reseller to get support. I think they are wrong, its a manufactuer warrenty - but the snot nosed kid in tech support wasn't listening - I thin he tuned out right about when I pointed out that it was his company that put an unsupported component in the PC. The reseller is a friend that is in the PC biz, so he got this for me real cheap and I don't want to waste his time as I am definately an unprofitable customer for him :)
BTW - I have a real modem in my older PC (350 MHz K-6) which came from the same place...I'm sure if I switched modems everything would be hunky dory - but that is not the point. I want Systemax to take responsibility for the bad component.
Any windows networking gurus out there know a fix for this?
Permalink | Comments (1)November 18, 2001
Happy Birthday to me...
Today is the 5th anniversary of my 29th birthday. I celebrated by taking my son to see Harry Potter. It's a fabulous movie - you should see it regardless of whether or not you have read the book. My wife threw a small party for me yesterday. We had about a dozen friends over. I bought 2 cases of beer and a bottle of wine for the party, and various friends brought me 1 case of beer and 5 bottles of wine, so I ended with way more alcohol than I started with. Now Michelle is bugging me to drink the beer in the fridge because its in her way. It's probably a good thing that I have taken the entire week off for Thanksgiving :) Not to mention the six bottles of wine we have to drink... Any volunteers to help? Six bottles is probably about our wine intake total for the last 3 years.
Permalink | Comments (0)November 15, 2001
Verisign aka Network Solutions sucks
After about 25 emails to Network Solutions I still haven't managed to move my domain name to the new host. They have rejected due to "illegal charactors in line 8a" although the only frigging thing in line 8A is the exact text they told me to put in line 8a. Now I'm being rejected becaue they can't verify the authenticity of the request, although the email form is clearly coming from the correct email address.
With idiots like these in charge its amazing the Internet even works.
Anybody have a suggestion?
Permalink | Comments (2)I don't get it
You are a major league baseball player, you were MVP of the National League in 1996. How the hell do you end up in hotel room doing crack??
Permalink | Comments (3)November 14, 2001
Leonids Meteor Storm should rock early Sunday morning...
The night sky could be very interesting around 5 AM Sunday morning. NASA is predicting up to 4000 meteors per hour for most of us in the US. I'm going to try to get up and take a look - if the meteor storm develops as expected it will be a very cool start to my birthday.
Permalink | Comments (3)November 12, 2001
More proof that corporate America just doesn't get it
I surfed on over to American Expressthis evening to pay my bill online. Clicking on the "Pay Bill" link yielded a 404 file not found error. The URL is below - see anything funny about it?
http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;3539453;6578810;s?https://www.americanexpress.com/en/cards/balance/BalCards?aexp_nav=sc_checkbill
AMEX is trying to force me to go through an ad to pay my damn bill! I direct all doubleclick URL's (and a bunch of other ad servers) to 127.0.0.1 so I don't have to deal with the ads, so I could not load this page via this URL. I manually edited the URL and was able to pay my bill, but that is not the point. Why would a company whose cash flow depends on us paying our monthly bills do anything that has the potential to screw up the bill paying process? What were these brain surgeons thinking? It took me about 5 minutes to find the proper form to submit a comment, and I submitted a doozy. Another thing that bugs me is that series of digits in the doubleclick URL. I see a bit of an ethical issue with user tracking on the gateway to a secure bill payment page. To be fair, I was not yet logged in when I clicked this link - but I just checked and I do have a personally identifying cookie on my hard drive from AMEX, so they did know who I was when I clicked on the link - and could be transferring that data to Doubleclick.
This is not good. I'm off to Slashdotto submit this as a story. Seems like a good one to rile up the geeks. Slashdotting AmericanExpress.com seems like a good way to teach them a lesson too :)
Permalink | Comments (1)November 11, 2001
CD Review - Cuttin' Heads by John Mellencamp
I've had the new Mellencamp CD for a couple of weeks now so I've had a chance to listen to it at least a dozen times, probably more.
This is a good album, probably Mellencamp's best in the last 10 years. You've heard the first single, Peaceful World, on the radio by now. However, the albums strongest track is one that you will never hear on the radio. The title track, Cuttin' Heads, takes on racism in America. Rapper Chuck D contributes a kickin' rap in the middle of the song that takes black men to task for overuse of the 'N' word in black culture. The chorus coming out of the rap features the 'N' word prominently. It's a powerful song that in PC America will never make it onto the radio. The rest of the CD is more typical Mellencamp, including a nice duet with Trisha Yearwood.
Permalink | Comments (4)Homeschoolers in the real world
An interesting look at homeschoolers by The Society for Human Resource Management. They ask the question, are homeschooled kids, and later, adults better employees due to to the experience? The answer is (not surprisingly) that the kids are far superior as part time employees and that adults show no negative consequences due to their years chained to a desk in their basement with no social intereaction :) The article also includes the expected response from the fountain of original thought at the National Education Association.
The final paragraph of the article:
"In the final analysis, if you're hiring, homeschoolers may be a good investment. Cutting through the stereotypes, Lines, who has studied the movement for many years, perhaps says it best. 'If I didn't know anything about someone other than their education background, I'd rather hop into a foxhole with a homeschool kid than one from public school. The homeschool kid will be a little better educated and dependable. It's just the law of averages."
Permalink | Comments (1)November 09, 2001
Great Spam!
Usually, I hate Spam. But these idiots should get some credit for audacity, if nothing else. Read on...
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All the best to you!
..."And because it's web based, it can't be cheated".
Is that just the best line ever or what?
Permalink | Comments (0)November 08, 2001
There is hope for the world
A black, conservative, Christian woman won election to the State House of Delegates in Virginia in a majority black district.
Now if a few million more black people will realize just how often they are getting screwed by the Democratic party....
Permalink | Comments (0)Google now indexing Word docs
Wow! Glenn Fleischman found the news that Google is now indexing Word Docs, Powerpoint files, and lots of other cool stuff. Just imagine all the files hanging off the web that have been "hidden" from the search engines that will now be available via Google. I wonder how many of those files were never intended for public consumption??? So much for security by obscurity...
Permalink | Comments (2)November 07, 2001
Crash, Bang, Boom
I was in a car accident on the way to work this morning. I mixed it up with a BMW and an Infinity. My car took the brunt of the damage, nobody was hurt. Actually. I'm having a hard time believing how crunched up the front end of my car is since I was going 30 MPH or so max before I had to slam on the brakes.
Oh, and there just happened to be a state trooper on the shoulder writing a ticket, so he saw the accident. That is probably going to make it rather difficult for me to overturn the "following to close" citation. A very bright sun was right in my eyes, and I think that slowed my recogniztion that the car in front of me was braking, until it was too late.
The state trooper let the guy he pulled over off with a warning so he could work the accident. So whoever you are, you owe me.
Permalink | Comments (3)November 06, 2001
I'm back
I've got the new server space at http://Digitalspace all configured and ready to go. Now if I could just get Network Solutions to transfer the domain I'll be all set. I've sent about 20 emails to NetSol as their automated system keeps finding imaginary errors in the form that they generated. All I am supossed to do is check it and reply. ARRGGHHHH
Permalink | Comments (4)November 05, 2001
Noticed on the toll road this morning...
As I sat in traffic this morning watching the cars in the Dulles Toll Road HOV lane whiz by, I noticed the following:
Percentage of cars violating the law with a single driver - 25%
Percentage of Mercedes violating the law with a single driver - 100%
Permalink | Comments (2)November 02, 2001
Smallworld.com
Last week I got a friendly email from Ryan. He had searched on Leesburg bloggers or something similar and had ended up here. After trading a few emails we have realized that not only do we live in the same neighborhood, our houses are about 200 yards apart (if that far).
This is either very cool, or a very sad comment on my neighborhood. I am looking forward to meeting Ryan in person real soon...
Permalink | Comments (0)Where is all the money???
I gave to the Red Cross in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack - I suspect both of my regular reader's did so too! So where is all the money??
Permalink | Comments (0)