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  • Busy at Work

    Depending if you came to the site in the last 24hrs or not, you may have noticed an RSS feed. And now, you may notice that it’s gone. 🙂 Currently I’m updating the website by just editing the straight blog.htm file. Therefore, to create an RSS feed, I’d have to, in essence, keep up 2 sites, since I’d be manually editing both the htm, and xml. Fat chance that’s gonna happen. It’s cool in theory, but I think I’d rather just have people visit the site currently. Maybe in later versions of the website, I can incorporate something that will automatically do it. With that said, if anybody knows of anything that would significantly make my life easier with creating the xml for an RSS feed, please let me know (spruit@(remove)rebelpeon.com). I was playing around with various RSS feeds, and they are pretty nice. Well, if you’re totally lazy and don’t want to visit websites. Then again, I’m sure some people (like those people that tell me to setup an RSS feed) visit a lot more websites daily than I do. It does make it A LOT faster to parse through data, since it’s all in one spot. The RSS aggregator that I was using the other night was BlogExpress. It seems pretty nice. But as I mentioned before, I personally don’t see myself using it. I browse the web to 1) get news, and 2) to waste time. Using RSS feeds totally negate 50% of my web usage. That can’t be good.

    In other news, I have been thinking about redesigning the website again. It’s working for now, but it just feels “eh” to me. However, I’m in no hurry, since I’ve got something up currently. I kinda want to do something more “hip,” but my artistic ability is lacking. Not necissarily the vision, just actually putting it into a usuable form. I’m sure the lack of html knowledge I have doesn’t help either, but Dreamweaver seems to be able to help me there too much. 🙂

    Let’s see, I think I’m on a roll here, might as well keep going. At work, we had talked about deploying Windows XP to the student athlete labs. We had talked about this for months how a good time to do it, was over the winter break, since we’d have a month to get everything working. Needless to say, it never got worked on before the winter break. So, Monday, Nick, Jason, and I had a meeting and the labs were brought up. Since we had 2 weeks left, we kinda laughed at the probability of getting a new image going. However, I am happy to report after a day and a half of work, the new image is ready to be pushed out. What helps, is that with all the new user machines, we are deploying the vast majority of applications via group policy objects (GPO’s). This means, that we just have to add a computer or user to a specific group, and the software automatically installs when the machine boots up. Previously all applications were either included in the ghost image, or were installed by hand. When building a new machine for a user, it was typically a full day event. However, now, the time has been drastically reduced to (at max) 2 hours. Now, of course, it’s not just as easy as I said, because a lot of work has gone into making the applications able to be deployed via this way, but since all the backend work had been previously done, it took almost no time to actually do the labs. This included totally redoing the group policy for labs (locking down the machines, restricting access, etc). It’s amazing how much technology changes in 4 years. From everything that I’ve heard from the guys that worked at DIA before me, the labs group policy has never been totally redone since the original one was made in 99/00. It’s crazy how much hack ‘n slash was put into it for each additional deployment that occured after the original was made. It should’ve been redone each time because of improvements made by Microsoft to various options in GPO’s. However, that didn’t happen. Needless to say, this has been one of the fastest (if not the fastest) lab build and deployment. Hopefully from now on, it will always be so easy.

    Food dryers are cool. I got one for Christmas from a relative, and Colleen and I used it last weekend. I love dried apples and bananas, so I’ve wanted one for awhile. We bought 4 different kinds of apples to try: Fugi, Granny Smith, Golden Delicious, and Pink Lady. Needless to say, the best dried ones, were the same as the best undried ones. The bananas didn’t come out too well though. They didn’t get fully dried (had some soft parts in the middle) and so they didn’t last. Also, since the drier manual didn’t say to soak them in an ascorbic acid bath (like it said to do with the apples), they came out almost completely black. How appetizing. Also, with the manual, whoever made it and thought that only took 6-10 hours to dry the fruit really needs to have his head checked. Needless to say, I started it at 2PM Sunday, and figured it’d be done by the time I went to bed, ~11. HA! I went to bed at 12:30 because the stupid things weren’t done, and then I woke up every 2 hours after that to remove the peices that were done and keep an eye on it. So at 8AM, before I was leaving for work, everything was finally done (well, except for the bananas, as I mentioned earlier). Grr. Oh well, gotta learn somehow. Plus cutting the fruit the same thickness really helps. Unfortunatly the bottom rack will always finish before the rest, so you still have to check it frequently. Plus, I like to have apple and banana chips, where they are leathery. Colleen on the other hand likes to have them still kinda moist, like the dried apples you can get in the store. I’m not really a fan of those, though, because they feel so disgusting. I like mine a lot more dried. Just more variation…wee…

    Wow, this was an exceedingly long post. Yes, that’s how bored I am tonight. Well, I gotta go run over to Cunningham Children’s Home to drop off a form Colleen forgot to bring with her to work…

  • Frozen Pipes

    So, after looking at the time stamp above, you may be asking yourself if I’m still on vacation? Well, no, I’m not. I’m just not at work right now because maintenance is at our apartment fixing our frozen pipes. Needless to say, last night it got pretty chilly, and our pipes didn’t seem to take the weather too well. Thankfully they didn’t burst, but apparantly, where the pipes run is in the little room that can only be accessed outside (not part of our apt). Well, to no one’s surprise (well, at least not my own), this area isn’t heated, and therefore will be the same temperature as it is outside (it just blocks the wind effectively). And who would’ve thunk the pipes would’ve froze?! Apparantly they have insulated the crap out of these pipes, but the maintenance guy is sure that they must have missed someplace, since when we called the emergency number we were informed that this happens about every year. Now, you’d think that since this happens (almost) yearly, they’d let us know. At least have us run the water at night or something. Dammit, there I go making sense again.

    There was something else I was gonna post on here, but for the life of me, I can’t remember. Well, off to find something to do while the hot water heater refills itself so I can take a shower.

  • It’s Alive

    Yay! I got the xbox working yesterday. It actually wasn’t that bad, I was just quite pissed about it on Wednesday when it happened. So, I’m going to make a great drawing representation for you, in paint! So, there’s the round area, that brings the trace down to a lower level, and the trace itself that’s supposed to connect to it. Needless to say, as you can see from the drawing, here, that the trace wasn’t connecting to it. Now, you’re supposed to solder a wire onto the round area, but since mine got so messed up, I ended up messing up the trace. So all I had to do was use the wire I needed to solder on to also connect the trace to the round area. Needless to say, after I made the hypothesis that that would fix it, it took about 5 mins to actually fix it. It’s a relief, that’s for sure.

    In other news, having Thursday as a holiday, and not Friday, is just asking for nothing not be accomplished on Friday. Needless to say, that is exactly what happened yesterday. However, we DID get the laptops that have been on order from HP for the last 2 months. I’m sure the people that actually ordered them will be happy.

    And one more thing, I just bought the Damien Rice – O album last night, and WOW. Talk about a great album. You should take a listen. No, really!

  • Happy New Year

    HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

    Well, I think I borked my xbox yesterday. Joy. It was just going to be a simple day copying stuff. However, Aaron Binford, a student worker at DIA, got a 250GB harddrive. However, we couldn’t simply get his bios to reflash enabling his xbox to see over 137GB. Well, we since mine has a 200GB drive in it, we decided to swap out my chip, and see if it works, etc. Well, needless to say, we finally got his working, but after I got mine all back together, it didn’t boot. So, I took it back apart and worked on it for quite awhile. Right now, it’s completely in pieces. With none of the modchip pieces hooked up, it STILL doesn’t work. So, I haven’t touched it since yesterday. I hope I can get it fixed. If not, at least I’ll know exactly how to get it working right the next time. I may try to return it to ebgames, since I did get the “no questions asked” warranty. I just feel kinda sleezy for doing that.

  • Operation DDR Part 2

    Well, I must report that the dancepad works. It’s not quite as good as at the arcade, because it has a tendency to move under you when you “dance,” but other than that it works well. Phew, you also definitely get a workout just for screwing around on it. It gets your heart pounding, and the sweat was starting to roll. All in all, not bad, for what amounted to $7 out of my pocket. I just wish you could add your own music and it would auto-detect the beats so you could dance to it. Maybe in the next version…

  • Operation DDR

    I don’t really feel like updating this, but I figure I should, since I’m not doing much of anything else. Just a heads up, project dancepad for DDR was a success. And now on to other things…

    Christmas in “Quin-tuckey,” aka Quincy (Colleen’s home), was a good time. We left on Wednesday since the University was nice enough to give us the full day off (we were originally only supposed to have a half day). Since no one was going to be intown, we also took the cat. Nothing like listening to a cat for a few hours in the car. Always a good time. Anyways, we went to midnight mass with Colleen’s mom (Colleen fell asleep, tsk tsk tsk) and then celebrated Christmas at her mom’s house on the 25th. Later that afternoon we went over to her dad’s and had Christmas too. Nothing like meeting more strange family members ;). We went and saw “Cheaper by the Dozen” with her dad that night. It was a decent movie, but according to Colleen, “Nothing like the book.” Colleen and her brother Mick had pictures taken the next day (yesterday) and then we came home.

    Later that evening, we went to see “LotR:Return of the King.” Wow, go see it. Talk about a great movie. It’s amazing though, how after watching/owning both the extended versions of the first 2, you start to pick up on where they’ve cut stuff out. Like when the eagles /hawks first appear. One of the characters sounds as if they know where the heck they came from. However, as an audience member, we have no clue. I know they’ll be something added about that in the extended version. Also, when Gandalf and the crew meet up with Pippen and Merry on the flood plains, if you hadn’t seen the extended version you wouldn’t know that they found the food and weed to smoke. Such a great movie though. I can’t wait till the extended version of the third one comes out. I can only anticipate 4 hours of goodness.

    Oh yeah, and on the stick of movies, I really am beginning to hate all the commercials they put before hand. Thankfully, I noticed that the previews actually start at the advertised starting time of the movie. So, in order to avoid most of them, just get into the theater at the correct time. Oh, and don’t even get me started on those lovely MPAA commercials with the stage hands, etc about piracy. Maybe if they’d pay the actors/actresses less than 75% of the movie’s spenditures, maybe there wouldn’t be such a problem. Hell, if I were a movie producer, I’d go back to High School economics and learn that Net Profit = Total Gross – Spenditures. If I were to pay the actors/actresses 50% less, that’s more $$ in my pocket. Woh, now, there I go making sense again…

  • Get Your Fix

    Well, apparantly I’m not updating my blog according to some people *ahem* Nick *ahem*. I guess it’s not ok for me to update, but not for others. Sorry about the crappy uptime of the site. My recommendation to all of you, never buy anything from U.S. Robotics, not matter how good the deal may be. You won’t get all of your rebates (if any apply) AND you’ll get some pos equipment. I swear, if I don’t have to manually restart this router from them every day, it’s a good day. Now, on to the real news…

    I went home last weekend (19th through the 21st) to celebrate xmas with the fam, since I’m going home with Colleen over xmas. It was a good time. I took Friday off and headed up Thursday afternoon. Friday I finished up my holiday shopping, Saturday some relatives came over, and then Sunday I worked on my car a bit. Man, I wish I had a garage to tinker on the car in. Being out in a parking lot with slush and wind takes all the fun right out of everything. I finally got my cd player/radio working correctly in my car. For the last 6 months or so it kept flicking on and off while I’m driving down the road. Talk about annoying, you’re listening to a song, and all the sudden it turns off. However, sometimes the radio didn’t turn all the way off, it just flicked off, then came right back on. VERY annoying. Needless to say, I had done everything but play with the cd player (it’s a 10-disc player), and nothing seemed to have fixed it.

    To preface this next part, I suppose you should know about my special 10-disc player and truck. Well, most people either have a car with a 10-disc (can stick it in the trunk), or have an extended cab or someplace to put it. Well, needless to say, in my stock, bare-bones, no-frills truck, there was (at the time) one place to put it…behind the seat. Talk about a pain in the rear. Everytime I wanted to change cd’s, I’d have to scoot the seat up, then tilt the seat forward, change the cd’s, then tilt and scoot the seat back. Yeah, that just wasn’t gonna do. Of course, engineering Aaron got hard at work fixing this problem. So, since my car has nothing but the basics (well, it had A/C, but then again, it didn’t have a radio, nor speakers when I got it), there was only 1 airbag (driver side) because the passenger airbag was optional. Nothing like putting a price on passenger safety ;). Well, that instead of sealing up that area where the airbag would be, they just didn’t put anything in it. Well, after screwing around a little bit, I found that you could actually pull the part of the dashboard off where the airbag would be. No screws were holding it in or anything. Talk about the ultimate place to stick a stash. Well, needless to say the compartment wasn’t deep enough for the 10-disc to fit. However, the only thing behind the compartment was the duct for the passenger side heater. Not like I have that many passengers anyways! So one weekend while I lived down in TN, I started hacking away at the duct and let me tell you fiberglass is one of THE WORST things to work with with simple tools (no injection molding or anything). Talk about itchy. I swear I had that crap on me for weeks. Anyways, I slowly whittled my way into the duct, and well, the 10-disc fits in there like a glove! You actually can’t just pull it straight out. You have to lift one side, and pull on just that one side to get it free, then the otherside (it is then attached to the frame, so it’s not gonna go flying out). Well, by giving it such a tight fit, the cables are the ones that are sacrificed. There’s sort of a support ridge running through the inside of the duct, and it is just above where the cable connect. Needless to say the cables do about a 90 degree turn RIGHT away.

    Well, since this was the only part of the puzzle I had left on the radio mystery, I decided to rip it out, redo the cables, then stick her back in. Now, the real bitch of this problem was that when the car was just sitting, I could listen to the radio just fine without it turning on and off. That means, I’d have to rip it apart, and put it all back together to test the stupid thing. So, I unplugged the wires, replugged them back in, readjusted the angle that the wire was being fed to (made the wires go behind the cdplayer instead of on the side), reseated it, and then refastended it. Well, let me tell you how much better the 5.5 hour drive is with music, as opposed to without (damn thing didn’t work the whole way up to Detroit). Also, I was stuck in a traffic jam on 94 (they had closed the interstate because of an accident or something) for a good 30-45 minutes. I would’ve gone insane if I would’ve been forced to sit there in silence the whole time.

    Well, NICK, I hope that helps your rebelpeon.com fix 😉

  • Xbox Games

    So, instead of renting movies from blockbuster, family video, or any other local establishment, I’ve started renting them from gamefly. It works pretty well. They have an INSANELY larger collection and they seem to have most of the games in stock. The basis of it is similar to netflix, where you set up a queue for the games you want, they send them to you in the mail, and then you send them back. You can only have 2 games at a time, and you just send the games back whenever you want. The games are shipped USPS one day, or something like that, so turn around is fast. It’s still not as fast as going someplace in town, but I can handle it. Amazingly enough, most of their games are available too without having to wait. That was one of the reasons I never got into netflix (I had heard they were horrible about having stuff in stock). So far, pretty much every game I’ve wanted (be it, it’s only been 4) have been in. It works really well when 2 of the guys in the office also signed up for it. We should be flying through games now. And all for $22 a month. I figure, as long as I rent more than 4 games a month, it’s a better deal than going to blockbuster.

  • Random Jedi Sighting

    OH MY GOD!!! I just saw a Jedi at the Steak and Shake on Prospect!!! What are the odds?!

  • Xbox “Problems”

    Happy Turkey Day! I hope ya’ll are having a good Thanksgiving with your families, etc. I’m at home (Champaign) playing with my new toys I got yesterday. Since Colleen is working tonight (double pay, so she’s excited), I decided against going home.

    So yesterday I got both the wireless xbox adapter and my pronto remote. Since I didn’t have the laptop, Colleen took it to work, I decided to screw around with the xbox first. The pronto really needs to be setup with a program on the PC, so that’s the need for the laptop. And I wasn’t about to run up and down the stairs whenever I wanted to test something (eventhough that’s how things turned out in the end).

    So, before I really started messing around with the adapter (I had already tried it and set it up just to be sure it worked), I wanted to try and put in a ATA100 IDE cable in the xbox instead of the ATA33 one it had. As I’m sure you can all sense, bad things were to ensue…So I open it up, and for whatever unholy reason, I decided to touch and giggle one of the solder points of the mod chip. This of course was the one that made the original mod difficult. Well, I put it all together and the xbox frags (on, off, on, off, on, flashing red and green) so I can’t use it. At about this point was the starting of the madness. This happened right after Colleen left, so around 7:30-8ish. So I open it back up and take a better look at it. Sure enough, when I had stripped the wire the first time, I had cut a little too deep and there was probably one strand of the wire that was still making contact. However, if I moved the wire the correct way, it would make contact and all was good. So, being the genius that I am, try to tape it in one of these correct orientations. Needless to say, once the tape was down, it didn’t work. So, in the process of removing the tape, I totally ripped the wire right off the solder point. ARG. Now, I have to drive back to work in order to get my solder/flux and soldering iron.

    Before I begin with the rest of this, I should preface it a little…
    The wire used is either 22 or 24 gauge (think as small as possible)
    Let’s just say the original soldering of it didn’t go too smoothly and the trace is actually exposed (the wire in the trace is sticking up and the hole it was originally supposed to go in is, well, gone)
    So, I’m already starting with barely anything, but I don’t have any wire sitting around to bypass this point (the d0 point) and either go straight to the chip the trace goes to or connect to the alternate d0 point on the back of the xbox motherboard. So, I sit down with it, and with my surprise, after only a few seconds of solder (not including tinning the soldering iron tip, since it’s brand new) I’m able to boot the xbox without it fragging. The mod chip is enabled, and I can easily get into the xbox. However, when the mod chip is disabled, it still frags (ARRRRG!!!). After searching the forums over at xbox-scene.com for awhile, I come to the conclusion that it’s still the d0 point. However, when I simply push on the solder job with a metal object it boots, so I’m really confused. What I didn’t notice (because the TV wasn’t on this whole time, just the receiver) was that when I pushed on it, it boots into the mod chip still, even with it disabled. This is when I started getting REALLY confused. However, since I’ve only played with the d0 point, it had to be that. Well, after a little more solder-play, I finally got it to boot both when the mod chip is on and off. Needless to say, I put electrical tape over the connection. The good news is when I stripped the wire this time, my knife was so dull, it barely got through the plastic, so the same problem shouldn’t occur again.

    Oh, and you think the night’s over now, don’t you?! HA! Now that I got the xbox working properly (around 10ish), I wanted to actually start playing with it like I had originally planned. Well, xbox xlink works. I didn’t actually join any games, though, because there were so few people on it. Also, because they were all playing games I didn’t have (minus Halo, but all the games were filled). However, now that the xbox was connected, I wanted to get working what I had originally purchased and modded it to do, stream mp3’s off my server upstairs to my receiver and speakers. With Xbox Media Player (xbmp), you can “easily” stream music, movies, pictures, etc, off of typical windows shares (samba, or smb, shares), by simply connecting to them. There’s a howto in the xbmp guide. Well, needless to say, it wasn’t simple for my setup (of course). The machine that has all the mp3’s is a Windows 2003 server. I didn’t have a problem, when I shared out the files from my XP machine. Knowing darn well, the config file for xbmp was correct, I installed Ethereal, packet sniffing software, on my server to see what was going on. It kept saying that access was denied whenever the xbox tried to connect to the share (and it was hitting the correct share). Well, I decided to visit the xbmp forums. Sure enough, I’m not the only one having problems with xbmp connecting to Windows 2003 shares. After much scouring the forums, I found that because of win2k3’s advanced security features, by default it only accepts encrypted passwords. Of course, xbmp sends the passwords in plaintext instead of encrypted. So I have to disable it. Well, there’s a registry entry to disable it (I won’t give it here for reasons told later…), so of course I go and disable it. Since it’s a registry entry, it takes a restart to apply. So, reluctantly, I restart my server. When it boots back up, I head down stairs, get into xbmp, look at the network share, and HOLY COW!!! it works. I start streaming audio, it works great, so I start navigating through the various directories, when all the sudden I get the blank screen, no more directories (what happens when it can’t connect to a share). So, I head back upstairs and look at the registry entry. WHAT THE HELL?!?!!? I reverted back to the previous setting. I try it again, but again it reverts itself. Odd…something must be overwriting the setting after awhile. The only thing I can think of that doesn’t apply immediately until everything’s loaded is a group policy setting (GPO). Needless to say, in order to actually do this correctly, you need to modify in both the Domain Controller Security Policy and Domain Security Policy, the “Microsoft Network Server: Digitally Sign Communication (always) policy to be disabled. This entry can be found in Local Policies, Security Options. I tried manually changing the setting on my servers local policy, but I quickly found out that the GPO overrode the setting. This brings us up to 1:30am, doh!

    Well, needless to say, I FINALLY got the xbox working like I want. I’m currently sitting on the floor with the laptop, getting ready to play with the pronto while listening to mp3’s from the xbox. I’m just glad that it works now. I’ll probably submit this to the xbmp website to incorporate in their guide from now on, because there was no nice and easy place to go to find this info…

    Oh, and again, have a happy turkey day 🙂