Diary of a Wolfeman

It’s kinda funny – I get annoyed when I go to read my favorite blogs and webcomics and discover that they haven’t updated…and I haven’t posted in forever. Time to remedy that a bit.

Work:
I feel I have now fully investigated every way in which you cannot resurrect a deleted email account. The short story is that if the computer has been nuked, and the server has deleted the account, the only way you are going to get that Exchange mailbox restored is to either spend money or time, take your pick. With a couple of software tools out there costing less than $1000, it will probably be cheaper to buy the software than it will be to build a virtual server and mount a backup of the database.

Luckily for me, I was able to log in to the original workstation, configure Outlook 2003 to launch in off-line mode, and then export the mailbox from the .ost. Un-luckily, I spent about ten hours of headache getting to that point by going at the problem the hard way. This comes from not having done it before and not having any training in the mysteries of Exchange 2003. Now, I know, and you can bet your sweet ass I won’t be walking that fucked-up road again. A bit of advice: if there is not a need, under NO circumstances will I ever delete a mailbox or profile for 30 days. And even then, I’ll wait another 30.

Home:
Cruising right along. Things are going pretty well for us here at Chez Wolfe, and I’m enjoying the peace. The Rat is working and being a good lad when he’s about, Pookie is dealing with her little bro well, and I still have The World’s Best Girlfriend. Now the “New and Improved” model, with wonderfully BLUE hair!

This is not some wimpy-ass Anime-style sky blue, either: this is deep, rich and vivid, and damn near glows in sunlight. This is definitely a WOW! color, and it looks great. A round of applause for Chop-Chop the Stylist for a job well done :)

I’ve got a little “New and Improved” going on around here as well. I managed to snag an appointment at an eye doctor last week, and then took Tolerant there Saturday to help me pick out my new specs. I have fairly simple requirements in specs – they should fit, and they should be lighter than what I have so they don’t hurt my nose by the end of the day. Tolerant came along to keep me from looking like an idiot.

The shop in question is Eyes! On Broadway and I’ll give them a little pimping because the doctor was not only thoroughly professional, he was even more of a perfectionist than I and extremely patient. They will be getting return business from me. The only bummer is that they don’t have their own lab on-site, so it will take about two weeks for them to build my new specs.

It’s hard for me to spend $375 on something and walk away from the store without it. Yeah, that’s a lot of scratch for something you don’t want scratched, but I got the transition tint and a frameless design that weighs about nuthin’. If I ever get tired of how much these ones weigh, I’ll have to either get contacts or surgery.

Considering how much time I had spent the other night in front of my CRT at home working on the aforementioned email problem and getting both stress and eyestrain headaches, I thought it would be a good idea to invest a little more in keeping my eyes from getting any worse by replacing the that large chunk of radiation.

So I dragged tWBGF with me down to Mecca and bought a flatscreen. A friggin’ HUGE flatscreen – 22″ wide format, DVI inputs, 5ms response time. And it’s bee-yoooo-tee-fulll, lemme tell ya. Two years ago, this would have cost about twice as much as it did, so I’m glad I waited until now to buy it.

I had also planned to build my Sweetie a new computer this year, but she worked hard to convince me that I shouldn’t spend that much money on something she doesn’t use that much – hers is old enough that nothing short of replacement will speed it up, but she doesn’t need all that much more power with her current usage habits. So, I’ll build me a mostly-all-new computer and rebuild the old parts into a new machine for her. After all, the motherboard is only a couple months old since I RMA’d the predecessor, and I haven’t stressed the rest of it out that much.

So, the new box will be AMD dual-core and faster, but otherwise basically the same. RAM and mobo will be replaced with the move to a socket AM2 proc, but I am staying with 2GB of memory. The DVD drive is being replaced due to it being elephantine: it won’t forget the last DVD you used until you reboot. I’m replacing the video card as well, since the move to the new display has made DarkStar One a little finicky. Just too much monitor for the card, it seems :)

I read a review from a G.I.in Iraq who claims Newegg shipped his gear to him there in 7 days, so I should have mine by the end of the week. Looks like next Sunday will be spent worshiping technology :)

For those of you who have been pining away like me for a new space shooter since we got tired of playing Tachyon: The Fringe and gave up on X3: The Reunion, there is some small bit of hope: Ascaron Entertainment’s DarkStar One.

Basically, the game is a T:TF retread. Your character is given his murdered father’s ship, the experimental DarkStar One after he graduates from flight training. He is of course then tasked to go find his father’s killer. Along the way, he flies from system to system, meets new, interesting people, and kills them.

Yeah, the plotline’s a bit hashed, and I think an almost direct copy of X3, but what the hell. It’s not like we really give a rat’s ass about the plot, we’re here to shoot down other ships.

And, boy, do they give you plenty to choose from.

The hook for the game is the ship itself, which has a new twist up its tailpipe: the ship can be upgraded by collecting Coupons…err, Artifacts that have been left behind by some ancient race.

In asteroids. That are being actively mined for ore. And people just left these things lying around without taking them to any of the hundreds of research stations planted throughout the galaxy…

Yeah, not a lot of thought here.

Keep reading… Read the rest of this entry »

NOT!!

So I get assigned a work order to set up a new laptop at a client’s. I show up, fire it up, and …shit. It’s running Vista.

So, I spent a full day back-and-forth with tech support from their developers upgrading the applications to the latest version and tweaking, poking, prodding and generally swearing at this laptop to come to the foregone conclusion:

Nuke it back to XP. It just ain’t gonna happen.

Da Wolfie:“So, why did you guys order a Vista laptop?”
Clueless Client: “We just wanted the latest and greatest!”
DW: “Did you think for a second that the 4 absolutely-must-work-applications you guys use might not work with Vista yet?”
CC: “Well, Vista is backwards-compatible, right?”
DW: “Not so much, no.”
CC: “You’re kidding me.”
DW: “Nope.”
CC: “…”
DW: “Vista was built from the ground up to be different than XP, in a supposed effort to give us more functionality and security. What this means is that hardly any existing software will run on it, and any new versions will have to be re-built from the ground up to work with Vista.”
CC: “That sucks!”
DW: “It gets worse.”
CC: “!!”
DW: “Do you really think that your software developers are going to put in all those hours to re-write their applications from the ground up and then offer it as a free upgrade?”
CC: “Oh shit.”
DW: “That’s right. You’re going to have to buy NEW copies of everything you use. All at once. For the whole office, because you know that shit won’t be backwards-compatible either.”
CC: “But…but…WHY?!?”
DW: “Billy-boy thought his money was getting lonely?”

————————

At another end of the “being the guinea pig” spectrum, I have installed the full production version of Vista on my spare hard drive so that I can use it as a target for the latest version of the “migrate all yer shit to Vista” software packages available. While I was at it, I figured I would install some games.

Well, try to , anyway.

Not having so much luck there. Ok. They installed fine, it was just when I tried to run them that they crashed.

Color me unimpressed.
————————

So, again I say that the only thing you can run on Vista is a web browser and office 2007.

Just for the halibut. Might give me better info than the traffic logs.

Create your own visitor map!

Well, tomorrow I go in to retake the SBS exam. Hopefully this one will go better.

So far today I have taken two 40-question test exams and passed them, and have gone through the entire sample question package so I could write down the answers to the hardest questions. I’ve found that the act of writing something down on paper sets it in my mind, so I did this about 6 times each for the 10 hardest questions. Two of these are of the “arrange the steps in proper order” type, and this should help.

I also plan on forcing myself to take…it…slow… I normally blaze through tests pretty quickly – I read and comprehend things faster than most, I suppose. A useful talent in many situations, but it sometimes gets the better of me. So, read the question. Read it again. Read all the answers. Read the last two sentences of the question again, THEN choose the answer.

Wish me luck.

Okay boys and girls, this weekend marks the official release of Windows Vista into the common market. You’ve seen the ads on tv and in the paper, and you know there are several versions to choose from – but what should you get?

Well, nothing for now. SP1 is scheduled for a mid-2007 release, so you should just wait for that. But when the time comes, hopefully this little primer will help you decide which version to buy.

They have whittled it down from 7 versions to 4 for your average Joe or Joe Small Business, add a 5th if you’re Enterprise-class. (Ignore this if you have less than 100 pc’s to worry about.)

Oh, wait – if you live in a piss-poor 3rd World “emerging market”, they have Vista Starter Edition. Not available anywhere you can find two coins to rub together.

Common pricing available so far: (Rounded up to nearest dollar, not including sale pricing. Prices pulled from Amazon and NewEgg.)

As you can see, the cheapest way to buy it is to go with an OEM copy. This version is supposed to be for System Builders (I.E., computer boutiques that build custom rigs.) According to the license, the store selling it has to sell you hardware too. Since many computers out today don’t have the oomph to turn on all of the pretty in Vista, buying additional RAM will certainly count as “hardware” and you’re covered.

So, now we know what it will cost, but which one do we choose? Here’s the breakdown of features from Redmond itself:

Vista Comparison

What that all means is that nobody will ever buy Vista Basic. It doesn’t do anything, Full stop. No backup, no media creation, no Jack. It doesn’t even have the new games, fer chrissakes. When you can get Home Premium for $20 more, spend the extra money. Premium has all the pretty and the functionality any slightly-more-savvy-than-Grandma user will want.

If you need to connect to a domain, you will have to go with Business at least. Home Premium does not have that function. The same goes for Remote Desktop. The Business Edition doesn’t have the Media Center stuff though, so if you find yourself needing any business-type functions in your home computer, skip Business and go straight to Ultimate.

So, when would the home user without business needs go Ultimate? Hi-Def movie making and built-in backup and restore. Those are the two functions Ultimate has over Home Premium. Honestly, I’m pretty sure that 3rd-party software houses will have solutions for those two points, so it boils down to what software you prefer.

For business users, only the Marketing or Graphic Design departments will need Ultimate’s media-creation features; the rest can live happily on Business. The BitLocker trick is a pretty salient point though, which means that most companies buying laptops will want them equipped with Ultimate for the extra security. Again, there will be software available to mimic that function, but sometimes it’s nice for us in the IT field to have it built-in.

There you have it kids – time to start stuffing the piggy banks.

So the Ratboy, after breaking his third phone, called me up the other night from CellCo’s store at the Mall.

“Hey Dad – tell this sales clerk that you agree to extend our phone contract for 2 years, and they will give me a deal on a new phone!”

“Is it going to be cooler than mine?”

“Well yeah, you just have that plain little flippy. I gotta have something cooler than that!”

“So let me get this straight: you want me to assume an extra two years of legal contract so that you can have cooler gadgetry than me?”

“Uhm…yeah.”

“I think not. We’ll go down there this weekend and get me a cool new phone, and you can have my plain little flippy, which will tide you over until you can afford to buy a cooler phone.”

“Man, you suck.”

“Or I could just keep my phone, not sign a contract, and you can wait until your next payday…”

“Okay! You win.”

Woohoo! Write that down in the calendar! Rod, tell the man what he has won:

Well, I looked online first, and CellCo is hawking the Samsung T609 for free after instant rebate (why do they say that shit? If it’s free, say “free” and be done with it.) The phone includes a 1.3 megapixel cam, bluetooth and speakerphone. (It has MP3 playing power too, but who gives a rat’s ass. I already have one.) Cool, huh? Well, apparently not very, as Samsung has already discontinued that model and CellCo doesn’t carry it in the store anymore.

So, what else is there? A close facsimile: the MotoRAZR V3. No 1.3MP cam, but it has everything else, and I got it for only $30. (The V3t has the better camera, for $70 more. Not enough in the piggy bank for that.) Not a bad deal on a pretty good phone. Extending the contract was a no-brainer: CellCo has the best pricing for calling plans I have found, so it isn’t like they had to twist my arm. (So why am I obscuring their name? TANSTAAFL.)

Immediate trip-ups: Moto inverts the functions of the # and * keys while entering text, so I will be changing typing modes instead of hitting a space until I get used to it. The phone is too slim to be held to the ear with your shoulder – as B found out when he got his and dropped it in a bucket. Unlike my Sammy, the RAZR takes decent 1-inch pictures. (The Sammy took almost-viewable regular-sized ones.)

Yeah, basically picking nits here. I liked the Sammy, but now I can get a bluetooth headset, which will come in darn handy.

On a side note, I was tripping through CellCo’s website looking for a new ringtone, and I came across one from Oingo Boingo that I never thought I would see: “I love little girls”. For those of you who may not know, this song came out of Boingo’s full-on sarcastic social commentary phase and is sung from the perspective of a pedophile.

Yeah – not really the song you would think to pick as a ringtone. Unless, of course, you happen to have a phone with cutomize-able rings, and a buddy that married a gal ten years younger than him… Muahahahaha!

Of course, the EMC was sonly 18 when we got hitched, so pot-and-kettle wot?

Linky

Bold the ones you’ve read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put an asterisk beside the ones you loved.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien *
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov (Hmm…I keep meaning to…)
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein *
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson *
7. Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury *
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison *
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison *(Go out and get Stalking The Nightmare. Now. Really.)
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson (Gods-awful bit of crap I tried to read on a bus trip.)
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling (I am what, one of ten who haven’t?)
27. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams *
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick (Boring)
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke *
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven (No, but did read the one about the trees.)
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien (I had an old, old copy, but no idea what came of it. I don’t know anyone who has managed to finish it.)
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson (I am the Deliverator!)
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

Tolerant reminded me the other day just how out of touch with my local surroundings I can get. When I wasn’t looking, the City of Portland made a deal with a California company called MetroFi to “unwire” Portland – free municipal Wireless Internet Access.

Of course, now that I am looking for it, the news is all over the place. Funny how I didn’t notice it.

In any case, the great Wire-cutting Ceremony will be taking place at 11:30am Tuesday Dec 5th in Pioneer Courthouse Square.

Of course, the initial roll-out will just be downtown and limited additional areas, but the plan is to eventually cover the whole city. Looking at MetroFi’s site map, you can see they have quite a bit of infrastructure in the works. I’m not sure if the map is current, but I have seen a number of the white cone-shaped antennas mounted on traffic signals in the area, including around Lloyd Center.

As with anything “free” on the Internet, patrons of the wifi service will be subjected to ad banners while they surf. Hopefully, they won’t be too obtrusive. Others have speculated that this will be the end of the Personal Telco Project, but I don’t see that as being the case. The PTP is a partnership promoting truly free wireless, and is not a commercial organization.

So, those of you in the area of the first rollout, rejoice! And let me know how it all works out.

So, what did we wake up to today? A firewall that had been locked up due to the manufacturer doing maintenance on the license validation servers last night.

After about 5 reboots, we finally got the stupid thing to link up and authorize again – but only the wireless was working.

Yeah, I said that too.

So, after much begging and pleading to get some support on a Saturday, it turns out the stupid thing had a corrupted firmware that needed to be (you guessed it) nuked and paved.

Not really a problem, except I wasn’t able to log in to download the firmware until about 8:00pm. In the meantime, Greyduck was forced to do some modifying to his gaming computer so Kyla could make a raid.

Thankfully, the nuke process only takes about 15 minutes on our little home unit. I’d hate to have to do the same with the offic firewall.

Let’s just hope it stays fixed, eh?