rebelpeon.com

Category: life

  • Expensive Advertising

    While some software loads, I thought I’d share my thoughts on some advertising I received in the mail today.  On the outside, it looked like a magazine offer for Urban Trends magazine.  I’ve been keeping up on some design stuff lately, so I thought I’d open it up and give it a look.  Opening up the sample magazine (~6 pages), gave me nothing but Mercury Milan ads.  Then I found the DVD. 

    Yes, it came with a DVD.  It was also plastered with Milan ads on it.  Oh great, they got me to open up there junk mail, basically because they lied to me, and now they expect me to actually consider this car?!  In addition to the magazine and DVD there was a letter, a piece of paper in the shape of sunglasses proclaiming their website, and a comment card.

    The upside, on the letter, there’s a “rebate” for a $50 american express card, but you have to test drive the car.  I don’t want to test drive the car, I have no desire (but the $50 may get me if I have extra time).  The only thing I think of when I hear Mercury is cars that are identical to Ford’s (because they are, the Milan is a Fusion), and that HORRIBLE actress they have for their SUV ads.  In no way shape or form would you find me in a Milan, unless I was renting a car.

    And wasting who knows how much money on this advertisement to make Mercury appear “hip” to the “urban crowd” is definitely not well spent money.

  • Free Virtualization

    Well, Microsoft has finally bowed to VMWare’s free Server product.  You can finally download Virtual Server R2 Enterprise Edition for free.  It’s great that VMWare has forced this upon Microsoft.  However, there are still a few key differences.  The free version of VMWare Server is actually a “beta” version, while Microsoft’s Virtual Server is the final build, and safe for production use (unless it’s running on XP). 

    This is great news for enterprise environments none-the-less, especially with the new licensing scheme for Windows 2003 products.  Basically, if you have enterprise resources, you’re incredibly stupid not to be running some sort of virtualization, be it in production or not.  You save too much money on the hardware (one machine now can host X number of virtual machines) and software end (one Windows 2003 license can be used on the host and up to four virtual machines, and the virtualizing software is free).

    I personally can’t wait until hardware based virtualization technology becomes more main-stream, that’s when the huge performance increases will come.

  • Birthday Trip

    So, for those of you that don’t read the comments, I pointed out that Erin was essentially kidnapping me for the weekend.  She basically wouldn’t tell me where we were going, or what we were doing, just that I was driving because of my far superior gas mileage. 

    Turns out we went to Cedarburg, WI, where we ended up going on a winery tour, wine tasting, dinner, and then stayed in a bed and breakfast.  It was actually quite a bit of fun.

    Unfortunately, since it was daylight savings time, we forgot to sping ahead Saturday night, and then missed the breakfast.  However, to make up for it, I got these awesome camera phone pictures while waiting for the winery tour.  I honestly can’t believe I didn’t purchase the book.  I mean, George and Laura in their under-roos?  Oh, and make sure you include Reagan too!

  • It’s Official

  • Annoyances

    Chewing with your mouth open and/or making a smacking noise while eating.  I don’t know why, but this has got to be one of the worst things evar.  What drives all of you up the wall?

  • Food of Summer

    Yesterday Erin and I had some hamburgers made on the grill.  Oh man were they tasty.  And of course, if you’re having hamburgers, you have to have fries, so I made up some sweet potato fries. 

    Unfortunately, we didn’t have any blue cheese to stuff my burgers with, but they were nice and juicy none-the-less.  It’s the egg and Worcestershire sauce that makes ‘em so good.

  • Kitchen Counters

    Here at my apartment, we have black granite counter tops.  When I get my own place about a year from now, I will not be getting black granite counter tops. 

    Now, don’t get me wrong, they look absolutely gorgeous.  Well, at least right after you’ve cleaned them extensively.  After that, they look absolutely horrible.  The black color, much like with any other thing black, shows dirty very easily.  It’s not even dirt either, if theres spot that’s not as polished, it’s very visible.

    And streaks, don’t even get me started on streaks.  You have to make sure that you towel dry them thoroughly, otherwise it’s streaks-a-plenty. 

    However, I love the granite countertops.  Just not black.

  • Daily Humor

    I was forwarded a hilarious link from Bud.  It’s a little late for St. Patty’s day, but it’s well worth the watch.  There are so many things wrong with this news clip, I don’t know where to begin.

  • V for Vendetta

    Last night Erin and I went to see “V for Vendetta” at Hollywood Blvd.  The place was packed, but it was fun nonetheless.  Nothing like getting served alcohol while at the movies to make it a little bit more fun than normal.

    Anyways, the movie was quite good.  The special effects weren’t over the top, ala “The Matrix”, but instead a good addition to the story.  And the story was also good.  Granted, it was ripped from a comic book, but it still fit the adaptation to the big screen adequately. 

    Speaking of story, talk about a great time to release the movie.  With everything that’s happening in Guantanamo Bay, and the President’s approval rating being so low, I don’t think the timing of the movie could be any better for the Wachowski brothers. 

  • Another Reason Why Project Server Blows

    The project server here at work hasn’t been connecting to our internal WSUS server, and I noticed that it was missing a few security patches.  Since WSUS wasn’t working, I decided to visit Windows Update.  HA, well that doesn’t work either.  So I open up the %systemroot%WindowsUpdate.log and find the following error.

    WARNING: WinHttp: SendRequestToServerForFileInformation failed with 0x80190191
    WARNING: WinHttp: ShouldFileBeDownloaded failed with 0x80190191
    WARNING: DownloadFileInternal failed for http://download.microsoft.com/v6/windowsupdate/redir/wuredir.cab: error 0x80190191
    * WARNING: Failed to synchronize, error = 0x80244017
    WARNING: WU client failed Searching for update with error 0x80244017
    >>— RESUMED —COMAPI: Search [ClientId = WindowsUpdate]
    – Updates found = 0
    – WARNING: Exit code = 0x00000000, Result code = 0x80244017
    ————-
    — END — COMAPI: Search [ClientId = WindowsUpdate]
    ——————-
    WARNING: Operation failed due to earlier error, hr=80244017
    FATAL: Unable to complete asynchronous search. (hr=80244017)

    Doing a quick search on the error code on Google brings me to a lot of pages about proxy settings.  However, I’m not running a proxy server anywhere, and I’m not running ICF on the project server either.  What is going on?!

    Then I see a link about project server with this error.

    I now know that project server uses a proxy server with WSS.  How stupid can that be?  Well, basically, I added our local WSUS server to the bypass list.  I also did it for *.microsoft.com, but that still doesn’t seem to be allowing me to hit Windows Update.  Oh well, at least it can update from someplace.