My time as a student at Oregon State is coming to an end. I have 18 days of classes left, 2 midterm exams, 3 final exams, 4 German Essays to write and 32 homework assignments to turn in before I graduate. But who’s counting?
I could barely believe my eyes this morning when I saw this article on CNN.com. Strictly from a consumer’s point of view, the Daimler-Benz name has been tainted in my book ever since their acquisition of Chrysler in 1998. As an enthusiast of German sports and luxury cars, only BMWs, Porsches, and high-end Audis were on this list for me. I think Chrysler makes some of the worst, ugliest and most unreliable cars in the world and I would never consider owning a Mercedes as long as they were tied to Chrysler. But now everything is different. With Chrysler out of the picture, Daimler can hopefully return to building quality high-end automobiles without wasting their resources on a cheap American brand that, in my opinion, has been doomed from the beginning, no matter how much hype they tried to put behind their “new Hemi” and “Dodge Magnum” and other nostalgic-looking trend automobiles. The next time I consider an automobile purchase, I might indeed add Mercedes to the list of possibilities again. Assuming they aren’t still using any of that unreliable Chrysler technology in them.
As an IT support tech, my skills are constantly improving and I am learning new things. Troubleshooting Outlook was challenging and interesting two years ago, now it is easy and boring. Internet Explorer has its quirks, but once you’ve fought through them once or twice, you understand how it works and move on.
However, one thing about IT is that customers don’t change. Individual customers learn and improve and have less problems over time (at least some of them), but in general I always get stuck going back to covering the basics with users. You know, things that seem mundane and simple to me, like installing Firefox, sometimes aren’t totally obvious to people that don’t do it every day. So, while my job is interesting and exciting sometimes, there are days when I am stuck clearing browser cookies and updating drivers, because for people that don’t do these things every day, it isn’t completely obvious. This is job security for me. My brother sent me a video clip that is funny and true on so many levels:
I was recently surfing the net and came across my government’s Department of Defense website. I couldn’t help but notice the date being off by about 1900 years:
So I was thinking this must be due to some Y2K bug, that somehow escaped everyone’s attention for the last 7.5 years. Fred pointed out that it is actually something to do with the way the site was programmed and it clearly wasn’t tested with Firefox. So I tried it with Internet Explorer when I got to work (no Windows boxen at home), and sure enough, the page shows up with the correct date using IE. The weird thing is, that most of the subpages at that domain work fine in Firefox, so just the front page is broken. It’s a sad thing that even the government isn’t ensuring that their pages are compatible with other browsers. Oh well, it makes for a good laugh.
My girlfriend and I went to go see “Meet the Robinsons” today. The cool thing about it, was that we got to pay an additional $2 each to purchase a pair of 3D glasses because the film features neat 3D effects. At first I was a little skeptical, because I had envisioned those old one-green-eye and one-red-eye paper things that you put in front of your eyes to get a quasi-3-dimensional effect when looking at pictures that have been enhanced with red and green colors around the edges of objects. However, I was very pleasantly surprised to get a pair of cheap plastic glasses, that just look like sunglasses, and were very comfortable and unobtrusive and even fit over my regular prescription glasses without any discomfort. I was very amazed at the quality of the 3D effects and the whole experience blew my mind. The movie itself was pretty cute and it had its moments. I was really excited because before the movie started, there were a few previews of other 3D movies that looked really cool with the 3D glasses on. I am really looking forward to seeing a recorded U2 concert in 3 dimensions this fall. The best of all was that after the previews and before the feature presentation, they showed a Donald Duck/Chip and Dale cartoon from 1953 (one of my favorites, where Chip and Dale are trying to steal peanuts from the elephant at the zoo). The cartoon was completely done in 3 dimensions to fully take advantage of the 3D glasses!
So overall I was very impressed with how far the technology has come and I hope to see more movies in the future done with the 3D effects. One thing to note, however, is that this whole thing is playing visual tricks on your eyes and I think if the movie were longer I would start to develop a headache, similar to the type of headache you get when your monitor’s refresh rate is set too low. This is probably something that varies from person to person, but something to be careful with nonetheless. Also I would definitely not recommend using the 3D glasses as sunglasses, even though they look and feel like sunglasses, I’m pretty sure it will mess with your vision after prolonged use.
So if you get a chance, check out one of the 3D movies that are starting to be released. It is unlike anything I’ve seen before!
… but at the top of this list are MySpace, Microsoft, and Albany, OR. What do you think the world would be better off without? I’m just curious about what gets other people really riled up. Leave me a comment with your pet peeve.
I’ve decided I will start blogging about some of my favorite applications that may be not-so-well known. So today I’m going to start off with my recently discovered new favorite application: YaKuake. This little app is simply yet another terminal emulator for the KDE desktop, but the thing that is so cool about it, is that it just kind of runs in the background and it gives you an instant terminal, which drops down from the top of the screen, at the press of a button. It is completely configurable for how big you want the terminal window to be and whether you want it to disappear when it loses focus, etc. It is much more convenient than navigating through my applications menu just to find old trusty Konsole just to type in a quick command like df. In Kubuntu, just sudo apt-get install yakuake. Then find it in your K Menu under System. I just dragged it from there into my /home/jabba/.kde/Autostart folder and created a link to it there. Now from the time I log in, anytime I need a terminal I just hit F12 and I have a terminal. Awesome!!! I am not a GNOME user, but I hear you get similar awesomeness from Tilda.
Today, in one of my German classes, we watched a short film and then wrote an essay on it. I thought the movie was great and found that it had made it’s way onto youtube. There is a slight idiomatic play on words in the title, as it is called “Schwarzfahrer“, which literally means “Black Rider”, but really is referring to a fare dodger, just as “Schwarzarbeiter” (black worker) refers to someone who “works under the table” or dodges income taxes.
The film is about 10 minutes long, but the end makes it worth every second of built-up anger that one feels towards that woman.
A friend asked me to look at her computer to see if I could fix. There wasn’t anything in particular wrong with it, but it was running Windows and had enough miscellaneous little issues that, to me, warranted a rebuild of the system. Since this is something I do many times a day at work, I have the whole process of re-installing Windows down to an art and could almost do it in my sleep. However, since I was doing this for a friend and not for work, there are a few things I had to do differently. For instance, I don’t have access to nifty imaging backup software, so I was doing this the old fashioned way… Manually back up all the data, take notes of the user settings, format, install, download drivers, etc, etc…
Now, I should know better than to trust Microsoft to make a reliable solution for preserving a user’s profile upon a system rebuild, but in my laziness I decided to try out Windows XP’s built in “Files and Settings Transfer Wizard”. I had used this tool a few times at work in the past, but have since become accustomed to Norton Ghost and other solutions for dealing with this. I ran the wizard, backed up all the Documents and Settings to an archive on my Linux server and proceeded to format the machine, re-install Windows, all the drivers and third-party software, millions of Windows updates and got the system running and looking pretty smooth.
When I was satisfied that the system was running nicely, I went to the nice “Files and Settings Transfer Wizard” and told it to restore all the files and settings from the archive that it created on my server.
“Your migration store was created with a previous version of Files and Settings Transfer Wizard. Please collect your settings using the current version of the Files and Settings Transfer wizard.”
What?! It was seriously telling me that I need to go back and re-create the archive with a newer version of the software. Unfortunately this is not possible, as there is no more data to recreate the archive from. I don’t think I could have felt more anger towards Microsoft at this point.
Since I didn’t want to inform my friend that although her computer is now “fixed”, I lost all of her data, and since I have been doing Windows builds for a while now and never lost any data before, I was determined to work through this. A little bit of googling led me in the right direction: One specific Windows patch (KB896344) updated the software and for some unknown reason made it incompatible with its own data.
So I uninstalled the responsible Windows update, which by the way broke most of the other Windows components, like Internet Explorer 7 (Don’t even get me started on that one…). But after a restart, I was able to restore all of the data. Now that the data was back on the machine, I still had to fix all the things that broke by uninstalling that update. My first thought was to run Windows Update again to re-install the patch. Well this was no longer possible, since IE didn’t work at all anymore. So I had to fire up Firefox, navigate to the Microsoft Support site, download the patch, install it (which only gave a few errors and IE still didn’t work). Then I had to uninstall IE7 from Add/Remove Programs, fire up IE6, run Windows Updates (2 or 3 restarts later) and re-install IE7. 3 days later than expected and many restarts later, the machine is back up and running with no problems. My advice: Stay away from Windows!
It turns out that all the Justin Dows in the world aren’t as geeky as I am, since I am the first to snag the new address of this blog: http://justindow.com . The old domain is still there and I’ll be using it for some other things in the future, but the http://dowhaus.com/blog/ URL should redirect to here. Please let me know if there are any problems with your links or your feed readers.