rebelpeon.com

Photography Shops

The first day of the photography class the instructor mentioned that the best places to get your camera and supplies (if you already didn’t have one) was at B&H Photo or Adorama, both of which are internet shops located in New York. At the time, I didn’t much think about it because I had used the same logic when I purchased my camera: cheapest reputible dealer (watch out for NY camera shops, you have to be very careful).

However, the second week, one of the students in the film class mentioned that he had a hard time finding the tryex (know idea on the spelling) film. Our teacher then stated how there used to be so many Mom & Pop photography stores, but that they’d all disappeared.

Huh, I wonder why? Maybe it’s because people are told to not use them by their photography teachers. I mean, come on, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You either support the local shops or you don’t and they go out of business. Is basic economics really that complicated?

Oh, by-the-way, the Central Camera store on Wabash in Chicago is only bested in chaos by Portillo’s during lunch or dinner rush.

Links 4/26

Original XBox Harder to Find
1 TV Hour = 1 Bag of Chips

The study followed 550 children aged 11 to 13 over a period of 20 months. For each hour they spent watching television, their food intake was found at the end of the period to have increased by 167 calories a day. (A packet of crisps contains around 180 calories, while a can of Coke has 140).
Monad is now the Windows PowerShell
Color Wheel Version 2.0.1
LightSnake—Images can be found on their site also.
16GB Credit Card—I have one of PQI’s really small USB flash drives. It works great and is incredibly tiny. I can’t wait for this to hit.

Under Construction Page

Well, if you attempted to visit my page yesterday (probably even some into today), you were hit with an Under Construction page. Basically, I did this so that I could put something up that explains what’s going on, and that it was that the server died, again.

At least I know it’s definitely not the logs filling it up. However, I still have no clue what’s going on. In trying to troubleshoot, I found that the CDROM drive on the server was bad though. Thankfully I have another, which was pretty much identical.

I’ve also got a functioning monitor and keyboard hooked up to the machine right now, so hopefully I’ll be able to log onto it and see what’s going on.

Here’s hoping.

Oh yeah, and those with @rebelpeon.com email addresses, I had setup forwarding to another of your accounts, so you should’ve all gotten email during the downtime. I’ve since switched it back to be delivered to rebelpeon.com correctly. If it happens again, I’ll just keep switching them around so that there is no email downtime (or at the least very small amounts).

Update 4/25 10:33 PM
More downtime again. I’ve finally reinstalled ESX to see what happens, but I still have no idea what’s going on. I ran some memory tests, and that doesn’t seem to be the culprit either. If the reinstall doesn’t fix it, the next thing I’m thinking is that it could be power related, so a new surge protector may be in order.

For those using email, it’s still forwarding to another address. I’ve just setup the website so I can easily tell if it goes down again or not.

Gallery RSS

For those of you that never actually visit the site, and use some sort of syndication, there’s a new RSS feed on the site for my gallery. The only downside to it is that I’ll probably be adding pictures in large clumps, so the 10 images it gets will be woefully inadequate.

Links 4/21

There needs to be a stupid tax edition.

GPS vs Your Own Eyes

Despite warning signs on both sides of the road, and nothing but water straight ahead, local villagers have found themselves pulling an average of two cars a day out of the river for the past week. “When you ask what happened, they say, ‘My sat-nav told me it was this way,’” one resident told The Times.
Door-to-Door Free Breast Exam—Seriously, who would think this is real?!

Downtime(s)

I’m sure some of you have noticed the downtime I’ve been having here. I’m not sure what exactly is going on yet. Basically my ESX host becomes unresponsive at around 1:30 AM and kills all the virtual machines with it. I’m planning on playing with it some tonight, so there will probably be more downtime to come.

Thanks for your patience while I deal with this matter.

Update 4/21/2006 6:11 PM
Ugh, more downtime as it happened again, but the good news is that I think I may have found the problem. I’m not 100% positive, but I’m pretty sure. I feel pretty stupid about this one too. Basically, some of the log files had grown a wee bit large, and it looks like I was running out of disk space. I guess I should setup a cron job to take care of that, eh?

Pharmaceuticals

And my Dad thought that I wasn’t living in the real world because I was in IT; welcome to the world of pharmaceuticals.

Last night, Erin and I went to a dinner about Spiriva. This was both of our first adventures into this sort of setting.

Erin made it downtown a little bit early for the drinks & appetizers part of the evening (6:30 PM), so we started out at Petterino’s. I love that place. Ed is by far the best bartender, ever, but I could be biased, because he knows who I am. Anyways, after a Goose Island there, we headed over to Nick’s Fish Market. Yup, that is where the Spiriva Dinner was hosted.

Anyways, we walk in to Nick’s and they have the whole main dining room downstairs booked for the drug dinner. They have us sign in and specify if we’re physicians or just in the healthcare profession. I was tempted to check physician, but then they’d probably try to hunt me down to push their drug on me later. The representative at the table made some small talk with us and then we headed into the dining room. The main dining room encompased around 12 tables with 14-16 people per table. We sat down and immediately a waiter was over asking if we wanted wine or anything else to drink. We both had a glass of wine and waited for Erin’s friend from PT school.

Appetizers were served, the assorted platter, three to a table. However, there were only 5 people at our table, so we gourged on the yummy bites. Overall, the tables were about 75% full. Not a bad turn out, but quite a few short of what the apparently expected. We were asked what we would like for our main course at this time, Chilean Sea Bass or Filet Mignon.

By this time, I think I was on my second glass of wine, and one of the representatives grabbed the mic and introduced the presenter Dr. Nicholas J Gross from Loyola. He started into his speach and informed us that he was being paid by the pharmaceutical companies behind Spiriva to give the talk. During this time the second course was served: Manhattan Clam Chowder.

Dr. Gross (man, that’s an awesome name) gave his speech about COPD and how, basically, Spiriva is a miracle drug. All in all, his presentation lasted about 15-20 minutes. Needless to say, I didn’t know what he was talking about a fair amount of the time, but I had Erin there to translate for me. Not like it mattered though, it was purely marketing propaganda. Nowhere were we told what the drug physically does in the body, or how it increases the FEV1 of patients, just that it does. I was tempted to ask questions along those lines, but the food was too good. Anyways, nearing the end of his presentation course three was delivered: Ceasar Salad.

I think I was on my third or fourth glass of wine by now. It’s hard to tell because the waiters didn’t actually let you finish a glass before refilling. Talk about service. Our fourth course came out, and I had picked the Chilean Sea Bass, while Erin had the Filet Mignon. Talk about delicious.

Things started to wind down and Erin’s friend left, but we stuck it out for course #5: banana chocolate cheescake and coffee. By this time we were both more than stuffed, but it was so good we couldn’t say no.

It was around 9:00 PM so we headed home after we had both finished our entire piece of cheesecake. We stopped back by my office to grab my bag and then proceeded to walk home to try and burn off some of the food. Man was it good though.

Afterwards I told Erin, that whenever she gets an invite to one of these dinners again, we definitely need to go. Granted, I was just along for the food, but she actually wanted to go for the information. However, she was a little disappointed with the information in the end. It was quite funny to see the different types of people there though. The people that they were actually pitching the drug to were easy to spot. They were the nicely dressed doctors. Then there was everyone else, which mainly consisted of nurses, some of which were still wearing their scrubs.

It was definitely a learning experience, and you figure that if only one doctor prescribes this drug to his patients, the whole evening is probably paid for. I’m just hoping there’s some sort of mailing list that I can get on for other upcoming events.

Chicago Protesters, An Open Letter

Dear Chicago Protesters,

If you wish for people to rally behind your cause, we really need to know what your cause is. Parading around with plackards that say nothing does not help this cause. When I have to sit and watch you dance around in a circle for more than 10 seconds, chanting the same things as every other protest group, I’m not going to feel sympathetic. Your cause is even further hindered when you completely block the sidewalk which prevents me from ingesting delicious food.

Do us all a favor and

Don’t take up the whole sidewalk
Make it easy for us to figure out what you’re complaining about

Thankyou,
Your rebelpeon.com friends

Links 4/20

Post down-time links.

Credit Card Sized Biodiesel Reactor—Wow, that would make homebrewing crazy easier. Wonder how much it will cost though?

The device – about the size of a credit card – pumps vegetable oil and alcohol through tiny parallel channels, each smaller than a human hair, to convert the oil into biodiesel almost instantly.
Virtual Server Front-end—With the amount of Virtual Servers we run at work, this would help a lot.

Eww

The tea made at Argo Tea on Randolph (between State and Dearborn) has just been described to me as having a taste that lingers in the back of your mouth akin to chewing on a cigarette.

Yum!