Free gifts from China.

I also got a big monitor for programming like e:jim,43029 but mine is not quite as big.

I only got a 24" model, however, this one that rotates so I can turn it up on its side allowing me to view lots of lines of code. I think this will speed up some programming tasks I have had recently. Now I just need a bigger monitor at work.






e:matthew and e:terry got something too. There go the tax refunds.

I didn't go skiing with e:terry and e:matthew today so that I could reset up the old server and go shopping for my mother's birthday with e:mike. Inside the old server I found a 250GB drive I installed but never mounted. That was really freakin convenient for backing up some important info before removing centos 4.5 and installing centos 5.

We went over to the galleria to get my mother's gift. The nail studio near Macy's was exuding a cloud of toxic gas so bad that the whole wing of the mall is like one poison gas cloud. Seriously, I was not being overly sensitive, just ask e:mike. It was unbelievably strong, we had to use another door to exit.

Random pics:
Can this be real? This coffee $50 coffee machine uses 1100 watts of electricity?


This is just way to many police for whatever the situation was with that Aldi's shopper. If he didn't have a gun then really do they ever need more than two? There were like 4 or 5 police cars on main street.


The smoke stack at UB south campus reminds me of the imagery in the movie metropolis


Does anyone remember this bar on Main Street. I think it was called Molly's or something. Did they finally get shut down for underage drinking?


These two houses on Main St near the Trimain building aways remind me of houses overlooking a river. I think it is really overlooking the railroad tracks.


I ate some more octopus at Kostas on Hertel. It is the only place in Buffalo i can find it this way. I love eating octopus. They got rid of their fresh Calamari appetizer on the menu and only have the fried kind now, lame.


Dork Chic is apparently back in this year. I will fit in well during the summer.


Damn, the apple store was so crowded. It seems like everyone and their mother are converting to Mac.


I kind of want an RV like this one but I know I have like 30 more years before that is practical.

I had a crazy day today. I didn't program much because I spent the day preparing lessons and teaching PHP at work. I kind of miss teaching a bit. Too bad there is no where I would like to teach in Buffalo and that it pays so poorly in comparison to programming.

When I got home I was exhausted for some reason. I hope I am not sick.

Seriously, today felt like 10 work days rolled into one. I didn't even have a chance to eat. I think I seriously need a vacation - and although I have vacation days - I can't even imagine a time when I could feel like "could" take time off and be able to relax with everything that needs to be done.

So, as I mentioned yesterday - I am teaching this 4 hour a day PHP class which as I said yesterday I love doing but I barely have time to get everything ready with all the work I am doing. 4 hours a day is a lot with everything else. Then 1 hour before it ended I start getting all these emails that two of our main servers were down. Would you believe that the issues were totally unrelated. Really, two servers, in different networks both became inaccessible at the same time with totally unrelated problems.

I had to cut the class short in the emergency to try and figure what the heck was going on. If there was only ssh it would have been easier, but the stupid windows server only allows two users at the same time with reote desktop and two people were still logged in so I was locked out.

The production server could not access the database server but it was weird because I was able to get to the database server from everywhere else. From inside the server I could ping other internal IPs but could not reach anything by domain name. This is when we realized it was a DNS issue and I hunted down the server team to find out after talking to several people that someone way more important than me took down one of the DNS servers around the time it went down.

To make it more complicated at the same time I get an email from e:enknot saying that our external server was down - the one that ran yroswell. I was able to get to it from my phone so I knew something was up with the networking in that case too. Turned out to be some new firewall rules that someone implemented. This all happened at he same time.

And then I get all these other requests for stuff that needed immediate attention and once again had no time to write up the presentation for tomorrow's lesson. Not that it really needs it but it is a lot to have something they can copy from and print.

I hope that tomorrow I have time to eat. It really makes me feel better.

Just because I needed some other problem. e:matthew alerted me that there is some sort of water on the floor in one of the basement rooms. I know the water is not leaking from above because the ceiling is fine ad dry and there is no water in any of the pans, on the table, windowsill, etc

But is it comming from the wall because all the flooding from the rain and melting snow last night


Or is it the water heater? Which seems to have no problem making hot water.


I guess I will know in a day if there is more water.

Someone sent me this message today and I thought I would share it with you all.

Wow I couldn't believe this. Last year Christmas 2006 I had to pick my son up in Buffalo. On the way to Lexington Ave. to pick him up I had to go to the Bathroom. I at the time was 58 years old and was really in need of a restroom. I stopped at the Wilson Farms because it was open. They would not let me use their facilities on Christmas and sent me to the BlockBuster across the street. Unfortunately BlockBuster wouldn't let me use their facilities either. Thank God for Brinks. My only regret is that I didn't buy a round of drinks for the good people there that were very welcoming on Christmas.

I think maybe it was in reference to e:news,29677 from back in 2003 but actually I have no idea.

I just found this blog randomly searching for stuff about the army. You might find it an interesting perspective.

Just like every other year I didn't vote for anyone in the primary. Not being part of one of the two big parties it is kind of a non eventful day in politics for me. I think it is weird to join a party just to vote in the primary and then drop out. It feels liek cheating to me.

Also, reminder to self - go out for Mardi Gras next year - everyone else had so much fun. Last year I went out with e:mike,38281 There is no reason to do anything else next year.

Okay, I just bought opera mobile 8.5 for my att tilt and I love it. It is such a better browser than pocket IE - which totally sucks. Well they announced a new version 9.5 to be released at the Barcelona 3G mobile convention next week. I cannot wait to use it.

It stole a lot of conventions fro mobile safari. No multi finger stuff but the stylus makes up for it. AJAX, flash, zoom, 3G HSPDA ya!

* Faster speed
* Features support fully loaded browser
* Compelling experience
* Intuitive user interface
* Tabbed browsing
* Improved text wrap
* Page overview, zooming and panning
* Landscape mode
* Save Web page for future offline access
* Call phone number from Web page
* Send link/image as SMS/MMS
* Small Screen Rendering
* Password manager
* Web address input auto-completion

According to the company, "Opera Mobile 9.5 will be available on all major platforms including Symbian, Windows Mobile and Linux, as both a standalone browser and as a SDK."