Cameron's Thoughts

I know this is Michigan, but what gives?? Monday night, I got out of work at midnight, drove home, no coat, was a bit chilly, but not to bad. Wake up and there is a crapload of snow coming down Tuesday morning. Now, it's Wednesday evening, and the temp is 78 degrees outside. It goes from 60's one day, to 30's the next, then almost up to 80's the day after. I'm surprised there weren't any tornados.

Seems like everything is back to normal now. The weather and news is back on the side of the page since the server is now able to access that info again. This is good news as it means I don't need to move to a new server. Well, at least for now.

Seems that there was been a number of issues with this website recently. I think the main issue is that the server this page is hosted on has been under a DOS attack for the past week or so. This has been causing pages not to load and to timeout. It has also hindered my abilty to update the site. At the same time, the server seems to be having some trouble fetching information from other sites. This could be caused by some blocks the server admin has been putting in place to try and control the attack. So, this has caused the weather and news functions to no longer work. Now, I also seem to be having a bit of trouble with the Cost of War item on this page. Looks like these features will not be working for a bit. Hopefully all will be well soon. If not, looks like there will be another server move in the future. I really hope not though.

Hasn't been much going on recently. Took Hailey to the doctor today for a checkup. She was 30 inches tall making her in the 97 percentile for height for her age. I have no idea where that comes from. She has also now reached the 20 pound mark too. Everything was perfect during the checkup and she actually didn't need to get any shots this time.
In other Hailey news, she is going to start walking soon. Yesterday and maybe the day before, she was letting go and taking a step or two before falling over.
Well, going to meet Nickcole for lunch at noon, so that's all for this post.

Yea, it's been a while since I posted. I got the DirecTV with Tivo installed on Monday. As you can see, I have been a bit busy with it, and it is cutting into my computer time. The only reason I am posting right now is because it is slow as hell at work. It was kind of cool actually because earlier we were so slow they let over half of the tech support staff on break to go outside and play some football and Frisbee. Very strange to just let everyone stop working and go outside. We were all worried that when we came back to work, there would be a huge amount of calls on hold, but there were none. I actually didn't have a call for about five minutes once I came back.
Anyhow, back to the subject. The installers were pretty late on Monday. They said they would be there between 9 and 11. 12:30, almost 1 they finally show. I was supposed to get this installed first thing since the installation didn't take place on Friday like it was supposed to. Plus they told me the installation was going to be real quick. I was already assuming it would take about an hour, but after they said that, I thought it would be even quicker. Two and a half hours was what they meant by quick.
But, it's all in, I have DirecTV in the bedroom, and the DirecTV in the living room with the Tivo receiver. I will have to give a more detailed opinion later since during the time of writing this we got a bit busier at work, and now it's about time for me to go home.

Which OS are You?

The satellite system is sitting in my living room. Still in the box. And I can't open the box, so it is driving me nuts. Only the installer can open it, otherwise my warranty is void or something. Something came up yesterday, so the installer rescheduled. I'm not all that happy. I guess they are not coming back until Monday. And yesterday at work was a LONG day. Not only was I excited about coming home to my new TV setup, but I was hardly on the phone. I was only taking call 45% of the night. The rest of the time I was just sitting there. Not usually a bad thing, but yesterday it only made things go by even longer than necessary.

I have went and ordered a DirectTV/Tivo combo unit. It is being delivered today, and the installer is even going to come out and install it the same day. It's a 35 hour unit. The Tivo's with the DirecTV reciever built in are probably the nicest one's you can get. If you add a regular Tivo to a digital cable box, or to a satellite system, the receivers get the digital video that is already compressed and converts it to analog to go to the TV. But then it goes into the Tivo and is converted back into digital and is recompressed. Then it goes right back out as an analog signal to the TV. The degrades the signal. Plus, a digital cable box can only output a single channel at a time, so there is no way for the Tivo to record anything while you are watching TV.
The DirecTV/Tivo combo unit receives the digital signal from the satellite and stores it as is on the hard drive. So all recorded shows are the exact same quality as any other show your would watch. Plus, the unit has two satellite inputs, so that means that youcan watch one show while another is recording, record two different shows at the same time, and even record two shows while watching a previously recorded show.
All I can say is I am pretty excited about getting this installed. Plus, Nickcole and I decided that we will get HBO again. Right now we have no movie channels. I love Curb Your Enthusiasm and can't wait to watch it on a regular basis.
I also have to say that so far I am pretty impressed with the service I have recieved. I ordered this on Monday, and on Tuesday the unit was already on the UPS truck, and on Wednesday the installer was setting up an appointment to install on Thursday afternoon, only hours after UPS drops the dish off.
If anyone is in the market for a Tivo, you can get one for free right now at Rapid Satellite . That's where I got mine. You get the free Tivo, dish, installation. You also get a free gift after like three months. Mostly some crappy stuff, but there is a DVD player, so I am going to get that. I had to pay a little though, since I also got a second receiver for another TV and I got the multi satellite dish. That is required to get local channels in some area's (like mine in the upcoming months). It is also required for Spanish programming and HDTV. There are a few smaller niche channels that also require that satellite. Probably a good idea to get since newer stuff will be put on the newer satellites that only that dish can pick up.
But, it's a pretty good deal either way. Have to go to work now, hope the day goes by quick since I can't wait to get home.

It is now time for Bill Gates to step down from the throne that the computer era of the '90's gave to him. That is the throne of being richest person in the world. He can blame Bush for the reason why he is no longer richest (Bush can be blamed for a lot of things actually). Gate's currently has a wealth of $47 billion. But, Ingvar Kamprad has a wealth of 400 billion crowns, a Swedish currency. That equals $53 billion. Apparently due to the American dollar losing value, Gate's riches are no longer as big as they once were.
Swede overtakes Gates as world's richest

On Wednesday, Hailey went and got her first haircut. It wasn't a full haircut or anything, but she did get her bangs chopped so she can now see without having her hair in a pigtail. Here are some pics from that.

Google has announced a new service called GMail. I have to wonder if this is some strange April Fools joke, or if this is a serious service they are offering. I remember reading not too long ago that Google had registered some domain names such as googlemail.com. I think I saw that at Slashdot. But that lead some people to believe that Google had some kind of mail service up their sleeve. But, if what they are offering is true, it could eliminate Hotmail and Yahoo as mail providers. It would also make me question how Google is able to provide this with only text ads.
The main thing that is shocking, is that GMail is a 1GB e-mail account. 1GB of storage space. They estimate it will store about 500,000 pages of messages. The idea is, instead of trying to constantly delete messages to stay within the smaller limitations of other services, you save all your e-mail and never even need to organize it. Then use Google's search technology to find messages that have info that you need.
So far, this is still in limited beta testing, you can't sign up for an account yet. But once this gets up and going, Google is going to shake up yet another web industry. First, they showed up that searching could actually produce results that we wanted without all the junk and deadlinks, and now they will show us a new understanding of webmail.