This may be old news to some folks in larger cities or those who visit bigger airports frequently, but I saw an iPod vending machine in the Indianapolis airport over the weekend. I’m not kidding, you can swipe your credit card in the machine and get your very own iPod nano or shuffle. I think it’s a great idea for the last minute gift, but imagine the disappointment when someone buys one of these for their flight only to realize that it not only needs to be charged but it also contains no music. Next up, kiosks to purchase songs to fill up your mp3 players.

I’ve spent some time today reading the blog of Anousheh Ansari, the first female space tourist. She is currently inside the International Space Station and has been writing frequent entries to her blog from space! I was amazed when first hearing of this. I’m aware of the fact that wordpress can be configured to add entries sent to a particular email address. Although they do not have Internet access on the ISS yet (that I’m aware of), emails are sent and received three times daily. Regardless of how it’s done, her blog entries paint a vivid picture of what it must be like to spend some time in space. Be sure to browse the blog archvies for September to read all of the entries.

A couple of days ago, I replaced the brake light switch in the Jetta AGAIN! I can’t believe after making four revisions to this part, VW still messed something up and had to produce a fifth version. Over the weekend, I noticed the brake lights were stuck on and I immediately knew the problem. I took out the switch I put in a year ago and tried to reset it. When I reinstalled it the lights were still stuck on, so I took the switch out again and left it out. Probably not the best idea, but we only drove the car a few times without the switch, and thus without the brake lights working at all.

I did a little research on the net and stumbled upon the exact same forum that provided the instructions the first time I needed them. The most recent posts on the subject were mentioning a version E of the part. I looked at my disconnected part and saw that I had version D, which was the latest version available when I bought it. I can’t believe that they had to make any change to this part, and what’s worse is they won’t refund any of my money. I’m just glad I’ve done the repair myself and not had to pay for labor. It’s a good thing the car isn’t an automatic, otherwise I couldn’t have got the car out of park with the bad part installed.

In other VW news, the Rabbit is back…

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but I now have remote desktop setup on my computers at home so I can connect to them from work or any other place that has a connection to the Internet. Brilliant! I got the idea from my buddy Nate who I was hanging out with this past weekend. We were at the airport and he was connecting into his PC when this idea hit me. I thought, “why don’t I have that setup?” So that’s what I did yesterday.

The tricky part was trying to figure out which computer to connect to, since I do have two of them. I decided to connect into my PC where I do most of my work, the newer machine. This was done easily since I already have a domain name that points to that machine. At the same time though I wanted to be able to connect to my web server, so I could restart Apache if needed or edit my configuration. It was at that point that I realized all I needed to do was setup remote desktop on that machine as well. Once I connect in to my newer machine I can then remote desktop to the web server and have full control there.

It’s kind of slow, but I’m not sure how I ever lived without this!

I have a new enemy and its name is Cymphonix. I guess that we’ve had one of their Network Composer devices installed here at work for a week or two now. At first it didn’t cause too many problems for me, but I was told by other employees that their streaming music was no longer working. Luckily the streams that I use via my Sirius subscription are still working to this day (knock on wood).

I soon realized that I was no longer able to download mp3 files, which isn’t that big of a deal since I obviously have other ways of listening to music. Something strange started happening yesterday though. I was not able to get to oarsa.org:

Blocked Content Analysis: Gambling

I then browsed over here to edpaffjr.com:

Blocked Content Analysis: Alcohol and Tobacco

What the hell? It’s obvious to me that they either have a monkey doing their website categorization or they are using some sort of real-time filtering. Perhaps the device can read what’s on a page and then decide to block it or not. Obviously O.A.R.’s song “That Was A Crazy Game Of Poker” could lead to the gambling categorization, and that’s what first led me to this theory.

Regardless, I’m sure this product aims at increasing productivity. I’m not sure if the result is going to be reached though, especially after I just spent the last half hour of my lunch trying to research how the filtering is done. I haven’t quite figured it out yet, but hopefully I’ll be able to view these obviously “safe for work” sites in the future.

With Kim in Iowa overnight last night, I took advantage of the situation by eating Chipotle for dinner and then working at my computers for the rest of the night. I finally finished my project of moving my web server from Phil’s old machine, to Ringo (my old machine). I immediately noticed a slight improvement in overall performance. Upon further investigation, I noticed significant improvement involving my upcoming redesigned site. Now that this design is not horribly slow, I can continue on and hopefully release it in the future.

What does this mean for you? Absolutely nothing…well hopefully. I don’t think I missed anything when moving everything from one computer to the other, but there is a slight chance that I did. If you notice anything strange, please let me know about it. In the meantime, enjoy the slightly faster website!

Johnson County Park and Recreation District has done it again! They’ve taken forever to enter the results for last night’s volleyball matches, and they still are not up. You have to start questioning what exactly we are paying for.

Despite missing two of our regular players, Kim and Christie, and playing with only five players, including the one substitute we could find, we managed to win all three games last night! I believe that I’ve mentioned the game time limit before, and I’m sure I was complaining before, but it actually went in our favor twice last night. Two of our games were ended by the time limit when we were only up by one point. Overall, I still think that this was quite a victory, and we have a great chance to take back the top spot when we play the league leaders this coming week.

After the game, the good luck continued. I was finally able to format the C: drive on the old machine, so that I could get a fresh copy of Windows XP installed. I am now in the process of making sure all of the critical updates have been installed, and from there I hope to get the server up and running very quickly. Once that’s done, assuming all of my tests pass, I’ll have to get busy redesigning edpaffjr.com.

I really don’t have too much to write about today. Last night I sat at my computers and tried to get various things done. I still haven’t got windows XP setup on the old machine like I’ve been wanting to. Currently the machine is sitting on the floor, with the case open, and various parts missing. I’m not having much luck with it. Perhaps I’ll have more time tonight after volleyball.

Kim is still down in San Antonio with work. I’m still not sure why I didn’t tag on to the beginning or end of this trip like I’ve done a couple times before. Just look at the hotel they are staying at, and you’ll probably be asking the same thing. Adding further insult is the fact that I’ve never really been to Texas before. I have had a layover or two there, but I don’t count those. I think we decided that it was just going to cost too much, especially since I wanted to spend time in Austin as well as San Antonio. I guess we’ll just have to arrange for a different trip down south.

After work on Friday Kim and I headed to dinner at Brio. The food was wonderful and mostly free since we had some gift cards to use. From there we headed back to the apartment and put together the new office desk that I bought from a guy on craigslist for $30. It is big enough for both sets of monitors, keyboards and mice. I’ll have to take some pictures of the new setup, it looks really nice.

Kim left early on Saturday morning for San Antonio, the location of Great American’s annual conference. After sleeping in for a few more hours, I put together a new filter for the turtle tank. I hope that the tank will require much less maintenance than before. From there I sat at the computers and made some progress in getting them all working as I want them to. I’m to the point where I am ready to install Windows XP on Ringo, the old dell machine. From there it should be easy to get the webserver setup and hopefully run some tests on it. Soon enough it was time for the guys’ weekend to start. Todd, Mike, and I first went up to Harling’s to watch the one and only Mama Ray. From there we headed to Kelly’s for a few rounds and some pizza. Finally we ended up at the Levee to listen to Groove Agency once again. It was a nice night out.

Sunday I had lunch at The Mixx, a rather new restaurant next to Chipotle. The food was good, but it’s a little pricey. From there I picked up a few things at the grocery and headed home to make some Skyline dip. Mike and I walked over to Todd’s a couple of hours before the big game, to start tasting some of the leftover bourbon from the New Year’s tasting. The party was a nice way to round out the weekend, even though the Steelers won. :)

So we bit the bullet and bought a new computer last night. I believe the computer I use at home on a (somewhat) daily basis was bought before I started this blog. I tried searching through the pages of the blog for any reference to this purchase, but I came up empty. That means that this machine (aka Ringo) was bought sometime in 2001, if not earlier, making it over four years old and in need of a replacement.

Ringo is a dell and has treated me very well (bring on the poet line…), so this time I again turned to dell to deliver a quality product. I started searching for the perfect machine before Christmas and finally found it sometime last week. I forced myself to wait a week to see what the next weekly special would be. This week the price went up just a tad on my dream machine and the deals were not much different, so we wasted no time and ordered it.

Okay, it isn’t the best thing ever, but it is a huge upgrade when looking at what I have now. Ringo is somewhere in the range of 1.3 GHz with 256 MB RAM, and a huge conventional CRT monitor that takes up the entire desk. It has two hard drives in it, an 80 GB and a 40 GB (the original), which are almost full, mostly with my recorded shows.

This new machine is 2.8 GHz with 512 MB RAM and a huge 180 GB hard drive. I think my favorite part is the 17 inch flat panel monitor! Oh yeah, I will also have a CD/DVD burner to play with, so hopefully my mom can teach me how she makes all of her DVDs. I can’t wait until it gets delivered!

This means that I will once again be transforming Ringo into my web and ftp server. The machine I borrowed from Phil (aka Skinnyboy) cannot handle the update to edpaffjr.com that I’ve been working on. I haven’t tested the new site out on Ringo yet, but I’m hoping that after I wipe the main drive clean it will perform much better. We’ll see. That leaves Skinnyboy open to serve some other purpose which has yet to be determined.

With all of this news I’m happy to announce the first ever Name Ed’s Computer competition. Just leave a comment to this post and the winner will receive a special, yet to be determined, gift. If you need a little help getting started, let me explain the other computers’ names. Ringo was an old nickname of yours truly while in high school. Skinnyboy was changed from Fatboy, the name Phil had originally given it. Best of luck!