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MP3 Player

Phew, it’s been awhile since I last updated. I’ve been meaning to, just haven’t gotten around to it. So, this may be a little long (as if that’s never happened). We’ll start with the most recent stuff first, since those are the things I remember.

Well, I just bought an mp3 player today, a Rio Cali 256MB. It’ll be nice to have something when climbing and when Colleen and I join a gym. It seems to have all the features I want, and it has expandability, etc. It’d be a lot nicer if there was someplace you could go to get a comprehensive list of mp3 players. I really didn’t want a harddrive based one (ala iPod) because of the weight and the moving parts, but I also wanted something with at least 256MB of flash RAM. Also, the Rio has a pretty good menu system, according to the few reviews I actually saw.

Speaking of joining a gym, I mentioned in the last post about it. However, we just found out we can’t join till the end of December. Grr, I guess I’ll just have to wait a few more months. It’ll be nice, though, to actually start lifting again instead of running and climbing. Something to break up the same old will be nice.

Basketball season has started. We showed the student workers how to setup, etc today. Unfortunatly, I think basketball gameday is worse than football. Thankfully we should have wireless stats monitors this year, so we don’t have to run wires all over assembly hall before each bball game. The only bad thing with the wireless stats is that they don’t have their own wireless band, so we have NO clue how they’re going to work on gameday with the headsets, etc that are also wireless. And, well, when we tried them out today they didn’t work perfectly like they had when we initially tried them earlier in the week. Joy.

I know there’s tons of other stuff, but for the life of me I can’t remember. Oh well…

Happy Halloween

Happy (belated) Halloween! Last night we went over to Nick (co-worker) and Lori’s house and had a get-together of sorts. It was a good time, and it got us out of the house. I think I had my sugar fill for the next month though. Between the cookies, the lil’ smokies with bacon smothered in brown sugar, the cupcakes, and the Halloween candy, I’m done. It was a good time though.

I don’t know why, but I felt young there. The people that were there were around mid 20’s, but for some reason I felt as if I didn’t really fit in, age-wise. Maybe it’s because all these people are married or getting married in the near future and have houses, etc. Oh well, I’m in no rush 🙂

Work has been slowing down, thankfully. Basketball season starts up on the 9th, so we’re trying to get ready for it. Nick is moving to a management/administration position in DIA, so he is leaving us DS consultants. So, now I’ll be working with Jason Minard, who is being moved over from a different dept. Also, Nick isn’t moving out of our hole in the wall office, so we’ve been deciding on what to do to make it bigger. Especially now since there’ll be him, Jason, myself, plus (at most) 4 students in the office at once. We’ve been given approval to move the rack containing the servers out of the office and to stick them into a different closet. I can’t wait for that to happen! Lots more space, AND it will actually be quiet in the office. No white background noise all the time.

Colleen and I went looking at a gym to join the other day. Most likely we’ll become members, especially since she gets about a 50% discount since she works at Cunningham Children’s Home. For $38 a month for the 2 of us, I think we can handle it. Plus, I know I’ll be over there a lot using it. Especially now that it’s starting to get cold (I greatly dislike running outside when it’s cold).

I think that’s about it. Have a great weekend…

Bored at Work

Well, I’m bored at work. I really shouldn’t be updating my website from here, but I’m about ready to fall asleep anyways. Thankfully work has been slowing down somewhat. I’d like to think that it has something to do with me being here :), but I think it has more to do with it not being the beginning of the school year.

Today I started spending some of my tech budget. Bought 4 MCSE books to start my MS certification, along with a general Windows 2003 book. The people here at DS are all about furthering my education. The way I see it, the faster I get my basic certs, the faster I can do more fun things. Also work related, we’re supposed to join a Tech Team for whatever reason. I’ve joined the exchange team. Unfortunately right now, nobody else is in the group, but hopefully it will start rolling with exchange 2003.

In other news, I purchased a pair of Klipsch KLF-30’s for the stereo. It’s nice actually having speakers that compliment the receiver. I’m currently looking for a KLF C7, preferrably in Medium Oak for my center channel. If anybody stumbles across one, I’d be much abliged if you’d pass it onto me.

Furniture!

Ok, so 11 days isn’t THAT far apart…I was really meaning to update this weekend, but so much has been going on that I haven’t gotten around to it. We’ll begin at where the last post left off. Shall we?

WOOOOHOOOO!!!! We have furniture in the living room, other than a futon! I’m so excited, that I just can’t hide it ;). A nice comfy couch and chair really add to the room. However, they now dwarf everything else in it. We still need a coffee table, or something, but for the time being we’re using the ottoman as a table of some sort. It works half way decently, but a table would be nice. The table and chairs work nicely in the kitchen area. Instead of having the phone on the ground, it’s now on the table. It also gives us someplace to put our keys, wallet, etc.

The router is nice. Especially now that I figured out why it’s been dropping my wan connection every once in awhile. Turns out the network cable wasn’t plugged all the way in. Oh well 🙂 Other than the dropping of connections, it works great. It does everything I wanted it to do. Just need to manually assign the DNS servers to each machine, otherwise they can’t authenticate to my domain controller. With 3/4 machines, I can handle that. The wireless part is still somewhat open. I’m not running WEP, but I’m also not broadcasting my SSID and I have MAC filtering on. So far I haven’t seen any problems, but then again there weren’t any wireless networks around that I could connect to here either. Just need a bridge for my xbox and all is set.

Speaking of the xbox…I finally got my 200GB drive from Dell. Western Digital, 7200 RMP, 8MB cache drive. Not bad, especially after I get my rebates back. Total cost = $22.36. Can’t go wrong with that. Just need to mail those rebates in tomorrow. So, I’ve installed the drive in my xbox, and it’s purring away with a few extra games. I just wish there was a game out (other than Kotor) that I could just get sucked into. Hopefully when GTA:3 and GTA:VC get released that will be the case. I’m also really looking forward to is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The fighting sequences look awesome.

***UPDATE TO ABOVE*** Well, it seems as if my initial reaction of it just being the network cable were wrong. Sure enough, while I was writing this entry my internet went out. Needless to say, it’s been 24 hours and I haven’t heard back from US Robotics.

***UPDATE AGAIN*** Yes, it just went out again…somewhere between me checking the link to CTHD and US Robotics. I think I need to call…

A Fun Saturday

Well, after Colleen and I sat through three quarters of the humiliation that was the Illinois vs Michigan State game, we decided to go look at furniture. We ended up buying a couch, a chair, an ottoman, a table, and two chairs. Woohoo! We’ll actually have furniture within the week! And thankfully each of the things we purchased are in, so we don’t have to wait like we did for the bed.The couch, chair, and ottoman are a set. They are a faded blue color and VERY comfortable. The table is small (30″x30”), has a weathered look, and will reside in the kitchen area. We’ll probably keep one of the chairs at that table, and then move the other one into the living room, since we don’t really have room for 3 chairs in the kitchen. We also hung the paintings today. The apt is actually starting to resemble a home.

On a similar note, if you’re buying furniture in Champaign-Urbana, do yourself a favor and go to Carter’s. Yeah, the prices seem a little bit higher, but the quality is much better and the staff is superb. Particularly, at Rhodes, I feel like I’m walking into a used car lot. The sales staff is sitting around waiting for “fresh meat” to enter the door, they smell like cheap cologne, and just TOTALLY remind me of used car dealers. This is the second time I’ve been there, and I’ve gotten that impression both times. Carter’s is just nice, and, much like my shocking experience at the Audi dealership in St. Louis, they don’t seem to mind that Colleen and I look like we can’t afford anything. They still give us the time of day. So refreshing.

In other news, I got my wireless router all hooked up. Mostly messing with it now. I’m using Nick’s old laptop with a wireless card. It’s much fun. Just need to lock it down now, so nobody starts leeching my service.

Misc and Viruses

Ok, lets get the important things out of the way first. Infamous pr0n stars is experiencing technical difficulties, so I’ll post a few goodies that should be there. Welcome Nick (aka BDR), Bud (aka Shifty), and Jason (aka SapSparky) to ips. We’re very delighted to have you aboard. Now, one of the main reasons we have these 3 newcomers aboard is because both Michael (aka lastwurm) and I have decided Halo is the new ips game of choice. Yes, it’s that good. Would I lie to you? Oh, and we have a server running. Currently it’s called ips_Halo. Its IP is 199.218.8.72 (I believe). It’s full 90% of the time, so keep it that way 🙂

In other news, the exchange migration went, well…umm, well, it’s done. Needless to say it didn’t go as smoothly as I had anticipated, but that was sort of expected since it IS exchange. It took a little (read, a LOT) of finessing, but it’s up and running. It’s one of those things that takes a lot of time to get working right, but once it’s up and running you won’t have to touch it. I suppose I can live with that.

Now, on to not so pleasant news. Yesterday when I went into work, I had a few emails from University Security waiting for me in my mailbox. Never a good thing ;). Apparantly a DIA (Department of Intercollegiate Athletics, where I work) sanctioned spam was sent out to LOTS of people. Thankfully it wasn’t being sent off one of our servers, but since it was about sports, DIA was to blame. It was infact sent by a DIA dept, but that’s just the beginning. When I checked the mail-enabled public folder that the email had in its from field, it was 7MB. This is 7MB larger than it was when Nick and I were checking it the day before at around 3PM. The email that was sent was maybe 100KB in size. Needless to say it was ugly. Apparantly security got wind of the spam because some people had complained to them about this unwanted mailing. Namely all of the students on campus. What happened, was we have an outside vendor that takes care of selling tickets online. Well, a different dept contacted this vendor to see if they could help them send out a newsletter. Needless to say the vendor didn’t contact the lady that’s in charge of ticket sales here, so the vendor just took all the email addresses they had on their ticket sales servers. Normally this would be fine. If somebody signs up for something with an email address it’s fair game. However, in order to provide the student discount to season tickets ordered online, the Office of Admissions and Records (OAR) provided the lady in charge of tickets with a dump of all the current students’ UIN number (the number on their ID card). Apparantly with that dump came with netids/email addresses. OAR explicitly forbade the lady at the ticket office from using the email addresses for and sort of emailing. For all we know, she may have signed an agreement with them. I’m sure you see the problem now…the vendor used ALL those email addresses in the newsletter without even contacting the ticket sales lady. Needless to say she’s in a shit-ton of problems right now. Then to top this already huge fiasco, this emailing was a one time only email which asked if you wanted to opt-in. However, all the links for the vast majority of the people DIDN’T EVEN WORK. This occured because some of the email addresses were sent in all caps. Apparantly the vendor’s software solution didn’t recognize the email addresses when they were in all caps. *sigh* Apparantly there’s a meeting with the CIO tomorrow along with Security. I still don’t know if I’m apart of that meeting or not. Either way it should be fun.

Halo for PC

Well, if you don’t have HALO for PC yet, go get it. It’s the most fun I’ve had in a video game, I think ever. And I’m just talking about the multiplayer aspect. I haven’t even bothered playing the single player part because it’s exactly the same as on the xbox. All I can say is stickie ‘nades and vehicles. Ahhh, a match made in heaven.

In other news, I finally got paid. I don’t know if I mentioned that before, but apparantly the secretaries upstairs don’t know where the mailroom is and instead keep the paychecks up there. So, it had been sitting up there for quite some time. Oh well, at least now I get paid again in 10 days 🙂 It all works out in the end.

Lets see…anything else? Oh, Colleen and I went to my parent’s place for the weekend. It was nice, we did lots of shopping (it’s a little better in the suburbs of detroit than in champaign-urbana). It was good to get away for a little bit. Lets see, what else…oh, I got my hands on Exchange 2003 final, so my email server won’t be beta anymore (always a good thing). Hmmm…I can’t really think of anything else right now…

All Official

Well, I’m officially an IL citizen now. Went to the DMV today and got my title change to IL and picked up my IL plates. I originally went by the DMV here in Champaign…HA! At 8:15AM this morning there were about 30 cars already in the lot. Thankfully I know about the DMV in Tuscola (about 30 mins South on 57). When I got there, there were 3 people in front of me. I actually took longer at the counter than I did waiting for my number to be called. You’d really think they’d do something to make the DMV a little bit of a better experience. Oh well, more bureaucracy. What can I expect?! 😉

Need Money

Still haven’t been paid. *sigh* Apparantly a check was cut for me on the 24th, but it still hasn’t made it to my office mailbox THROUGH CAMPUS MAIL. I could have sent it via USPS and it would’ve been here (and possibly back). Thankfully Nick (and Lori :)) have fronted me some money for the time being. That way I can go tomorrow and transfer my title to IL and get an IL license plate. I kinda need to do that soon, since my plates expire at the end of the month. Needless to say when my check didn’t come on Wednesday, I wrote an email to the lady (Rhonda) that I’ve been corresponding with about it, and then carbon copied it to my boss, the head of DS, and the two DS HR people. Thankfully I recieved a call from Rhonday promptly after the email, and my boss even expressed some interest. That was about it. Large bureaucracies make me happy, no, really. The new hire page hasn’t even indicated that my check was cut, so it makes it VERY hard to believe it’s somewhere in campus mail. I figure I’ll give them (another) work week to fix it, so come the first I will have had about enough. At that point, I’ll probably schedule a meeting with my boss and the head of DS, voice my thorough disgust and ask how THEY are going to make it right. If you can’t tell, so far my experience with DS has been less than savory. If only I had recieved other job offers…stupid economy…

On other notes, I’m almost done with KoTOR. However, since I decided to go the way of a light jedi, the end boss is about impossible. All the people I know who have beaten it have done it as the dark side, which allows you beat the final boss A LOT more easily. Speaking of the xbox, just ordered a 200GB harddrive for ~$22 today. Gotta love when dell screws up and has 2 $100 rebates on a product. Hopefully dell will uphold their end of the bargain and I’ll be able to have a place for backups (off of my main server).

Last weekend Ann came to town. I hadn’t seen her in awhile since she was in Spain for the last year. We had a good time catching up. Since Colleen worked all weekend, Ann and I went to the football game and did some other stuff. It was good to see her, and she hasn’t changed much at all. She still isn’t sure what she’s going to be doing now that she’s in the “real world.” She’s heading back to TX to stay with her parents and make a little bit of money. After that she wants to head to AZ and just start anew. Who knows with her though.

Colleen’s looking for other jobs because she can’t stand the little bit that she makes. I totally agree with her, she is definitely getting the shaft working there. She’s had an interview and she’s been keeping an eye out. I’m glad she started listening to me about applying. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen, they say no and she still has the same job? At least she has a job…

I’ve been getting back into climbing. I asked Ann to bring me back a pair of climbing shoes from Spain, since that’s where the vast majority are made. Got a nice bargain on a awesome pair of shoes: La’ Sportiva Mythos. Can’t complain when I got them for $90. Till next time…

Modding the Xbox

Wow, it’s been awhile since I updated. Lots of fun (and not so fun things) have happened these last couple of weeks. Where to begin, where to begin… Well, I’ll start with why I haven’t been updating the site. Just the pure fact that I’ve been busy both with work and playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic on the xbox. Definitely one of the best games I’ve ever played. If you own an xbox, go get it. Don’t even bother renting it, just go buy it. Now that I’m looking at ebgames, I see that it’ll be released for the PC too. I’ve got about 30 hours into the game, and I can’t put it down.

So, from the above, it’s obvious that I have my xbox up and running…with the modchip. It took a little fighting with to do it, but overall not too painfull. Just had to open the xbox up, solder a row of pin headers on, then solder one other tiny wire (the hardest part) on. The nice thing is that if I ever get xbox live, it has a switch to disable the modchip, so Microsoft doesn’t block me from using it. I just need to put a bigger harddrive in it, and get a wireless network going in my apartment that I can connect the xbox to.

Work has been crazy busy. Three weekends ago, the first homegame we had, the gameday server went down, which is what they use to print of credentials for the staff working the games. Needless to say, I got called at 6:30am. Thankfully, since I’m not a student (aka partier) anymore, it wasn’t that big of a deal. We knew the server was having problems because it had been doing funny things, but we (and hp) had diagnosed it to being the ram. We replaced the ram, and thought, “Great, we’re all set now.” Yeah, it wasn’t. After awhile we couldn’t even get it to post bios without screaming beep-codes at us. Nick and I pretty much narrowed it down to the motherboard, so we gave HP a call. The guy we had went through a few basic tests with us, and also narrowed it down to the motherboard. So, HP sent us a new one. Talk about easy to replace. All it was, was 1 thumbscrew holding it down. And sure enough, it seems to be working.

On other side notes, I have STILL yet to be paid. I was supposed to be paid on the 16th (with everybody else). However, for some unknown reason (even the the HR dept), I wasn’t. Apparantly my pay has been bumped back to the 24th now. I’m very looking forward to the paycheck, since if i don’t get it, rent’s going to be difficult to pay (I’ve already paid all the bills I need to worry about for a month).

Sorry about the laziness on my part, I’ll be sure to attempt to update the site a ‘lil more often than 2x a month 🙂