First Ski Day of 2007

December 24, 2006
Skiing, Uncategorized
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Family went skiing for the first time this year tonight at Steven’s Pass. I burst my S1/L5 disc in my back a few months ago and I just had another cortezone epidural injection yesterday. I was feeling close to 100% so I decided a little mellow night skiing with the fam would be a good test of how my recovery is going. 3 runs and my back started talking to me. I called it quits …Continue reading →

Flickr

April 6, 2006
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This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Online purchase to my door in 13 hours!

October 28, 2005
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On Weds. evening I decided we needed to replace our old printer with a new one. My daughter was frustrated with the problems we were having with the existing one and it was hindering her homework activities. So I sat down at the PC, went to hpshopping.com and purchased a Photosmart 3310 all-in-one specifying next-day delivery. I submitted my order at 7:44pm PST on 10/26. The printer was delivered to my front door at 9:30am …Continue reading →

The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies

October 17, 2005
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Via BoingBoing I find out that John Scalzi (author of some great Sci-Fi and a former classmate) has released The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies. Sounds cool.

Simon of Space is compete!

September 22, 2005
Books
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Simon of Space is complete. The last chapter has been posted. I’m shocked that the major outlets (/., BoingBoing, etc…) have not picked up on this phenomenon.  http://simonofspace.blogspot.com You can now order a printed book version: http://mfdh.ca/simon_of_space/ Read this book; it is that good.

Blogging from Flickr

July 31, 2005
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Classic Kona Look Originally uploaded by ckindel. Playing with Flickr tonight… I just discovered that Flickr lets you post blog entries from Flickr to just about any blog engine, including .Text. So this is a test to see if it really works… This is Kona, our Black Lab.

Seriously, read Simon of Space

July 16, 2005
Books
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I wrote about it before, but it warrants more attention: The online SciFi novel being presented as a blog titled Simon of Space is simply fantastic. Start reading it today at http://simonofspace.blogspot.com. Every day I look forward to a new installment, and each one is as good or better than the previous. I can’t wait to hear how this story turns out.

Mark Cuban: These are the good ole days!

July 6, 2005
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This is an example of why I’m such a fan of Mark Cuban: These are the good ole days!

Furrygoat discovers the RAID rebuild

July 5, 2005
Smart Home
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Poor Steve (Mr. Furrygoat). Like many geeks out there he bought a RAID5 system thinking it was a silver bullet providing massive reliable storage for all his precious data (precious to him, due to the time it took to back up all his DVDs, not necessarily because the content iteself is precious). A drive failed in the array. The rebuild took over a day for only 300GB of stuff; that’s in addition to the time …Continue reading →

First Darth Vader and now Simon

July 1, 2005
Books
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I Am A Cheeseburger (http://mfdh.ca/) is an immensly talented author who has been publishing some very creative things on various “Blogs”. I first discovered his Darth Vader’s Blog this spring and now am thoroughly enjoying Simon of Space, a science fiction adventure published as a blog. Really great stuff. Read it.

CATCHPA is Hip

June 9, 2005
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Comment spam has been driving me nuts. I implemented a blacklist based fliter a while back which stopped a bunch of it, but ever week 100’s of bogus comments got through because the blacklist was not updated fast enough. So as of last night I have implmented a CATCHPA solution on the comment posting form. CATCHPA stands for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”. The term “Hip” is also used “Human …Continue reading →

MCE Controller v1.1 Released – and now open source

May 12, 2005
Coding, Smart Home, Uncategorized
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I built MCE Controller as something that would be useful for my own home. I had minor aspirations of making it do more than it does, but the reality is that I don’t really have the time nor the inclination (it works beautifully for me as is). Until today I have resisted making it open source for the simple reason that I didn’t really understand what it would take to put the source out there …Continue reading →

Do you have a NAS at home?

May 4, 2005
Smart Home
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A bunch of us were sitting around arguing about why people are buying these inexpensive NAS (Network Attached Storage) boxes. Then we started arguing about who was buying them. I’ve poured over all the market research I can find and neither of these two questions are answered: Who is buying them (home users, tech enthusiasts, small business owners, corporate workgroup folk, etc…)? Why are they buying them (more storage, backup, sharing, …)? So I figure I’ll …Continue reading →

Old Man’s War

May 3, 2005
Books, Uncategorized
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I wish I could read more books. I love reading. That’s the problem. I start a book, and if it’s any good, I read it cover to cover in one sitting. Even if it takes me 2 days. Instead of fixing this by being more discliplined about putting books down, I’ve taken the stance of just avoiding starting books. That way I can have a life. This weekend, however, I  broke my rule (for the …Continue reading →

Darth Vader’s Blog

April 29, 2005
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http://darthside.blogspot.com/ Definately on my blog roll.

John Cleese Promotes Computer Backup

April 26, 2005
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From adrants.com: “While it’s about five minutes longer than it needs to be, this video, created in January to promote LiveVault disk data back up, thankfully, features John Cleese who can make anything amusing. In the video, Cleese, taking on the persona of Institute for Backup Trauma Director Dr. Harold Twain Weck (ha, ha, get it?), explains why disk back up is better than tape back up. Particularly humorous is when Cleese goes off on …Continue reading →

6mbps for less $

April 26, 2005
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I’ve been having some issues with Comcast lately. First my bill seemed high and second they kept declining pay-per-views. Of course we were trying to watch pay-per-view movies on our family movie night (Saturday) and when I would call Comcast (based on the on-screen message) they’d say “you have some billing problem, we can’t access the billing system, call back during the week”. Of course they’d authorize access anyway (without actually saying so…sneaky customer service…but …Continue reading →

The Bomb In My Garden

April 17, 2005
Books, Uncategorized
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  It is a small world and I always get a kick out of discovering connections between seemingly unrelated people and events. A few weeks ago I received a mailing from my high-school alma-mater, The Webb Schools of California, that was the typical “send us money” thing. It contained an article on Kurt Pitzer who was a year ahead of me and whom I played soccer with at Webb (he was goalie). The article talked …Continue reading →

Visual INTERCAL?

April 16, 2005
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I’ve been a programmer for 20+ years now, so you can imagine how dumb I felt today when I first read about the INTERCAL programming language. INTERCAL was invented in 1973 by Jim Lyon and Don Woods. I learned about INTERCAL today because I just hired Jim Lyon to my group and he wrote about it in his bio that we sent around announcing his joining. Interestingly enough, I don’t remember seeing it on his …Continue reading →

If you overclock don’t blame us for your crashes

April 12, 2005
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Raymond has a interesting blog post today about the number of crashes we’re seeing from the online crash analysis we do on the dump files that are submitted when you say “Send Error Report” in Windows. The net-net of it is: If you overclock your machine don’t blame software companies when the software you are running crashes.