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The wife and I went through a scary yet thought provoking experience earlier this evening. This email I sent to the perpetrator’s company, Chapel Sales Inc ought to explain it: To whom it does concern, I am writing this email in an effort to relay an experience I had with one of your representatives earlier this evening. Earlier this evening at around 7:30 PM EST, one of your representatives who identified himself as Clemson Cockfield knocked on the door of our residence. After explaining his purpose and showing us a list of magazine subscriptions, we decided that we were not interested. However Clemson had told us that he was trying to raise money to purchase the books he needed for his college education so we decided to provide him with a ten dollar donation in the form of a check. After asking for a glass of water, Clemson left the premises. ...

As some of you may know… Annette and I never actually got to go on a honeymoon when we got married. However one of our larger wedding presents was the promise of funding for such a venture should we ever find the time to do it. Well… okay maybe finding the time is the wrong way to put it. You see both Annette and I were “unemployed” when we got married and as such we didn’t want to take the chance that we might spend additional money that we didn’t have on something that seemed purely optional at the time. ...

Okay well maybe I wasn’t rated number one - but I was pretty darn close - let me tell you. Anyway as most of you likely already know, Annette and I got married yesterday on April 11th, 2004. I’ve written a little piece on the wedding and provided some photographs for the enjoyment of my audience. I’ve also uploaded a copy of the vows Annette and I wrote for ourselves in case anybody is interested. Click here for the pictures of the big event. Here is a sneak peek: ...

Thats right. Today is my wedding day. Annette and I decided to get married earlier this week and thanks in a large part to my family we have a nice little ceremony planned for today. This is the best thing that has ever happened to me - so hopefully this is the beginning of an upswing for me (and my site of course). Anyway we aren’t really going on a honeymoon per se due to money related issues. We were originally planning on eloping somewhere nice and getting a ceremony done with just the two of us - but do to our job situations that has been an impossibility for now. ...

A friend of mine Bruce who works at Cornell University in New York - just gave me one of their own DEC Alphastation 250 4/266 boxes to play with. This machine was originally built in 1993 and believe it or not it still manages to work after 11 years. After futzing around for a bit - I finally got the thing to boot. Hell I even managed to login into it (only after cracking the root password though). After logging in through xdm a singular thought has begun to grace my mind: ...

There is a lot of stuff that geeks care about that don’t really interest the rest of the populace. Somewhere within that laundry list of topics is one entitled, “Major Uptime”. Most people turn off their computers every night. Most geeks do not. Why? Simply put - there is some sort of odd geek pride associated with being able to operate a computer stably for a long a period of time. (Note: this especially counts for those of us who make a living administering would-be stable machines) ...

I recently became aware of a rather startling fact that most people are likely not aware of. Felines (Cats for the laymen fools among you) can get diabetes. How did I find this out you ask…. Well I came home from work about two weeks ago to find my fav cat Tommy hiding behind the couch. He wouldn’t even crawl out for this food call (which if you’ve seen the size of this cat - isn’t normal). So I reach back and pull him out only to find that he is bleeding from an area I would rather not mention. ...

Well after months of planning and years of dreaming it has finally happened… I have built the dream machine. It cost $3000+ dollars but it is finally here. Yes it is an SMP box and as you may have guessed based on the title - it uses Xeon processors. Here are the raw specs: 2x 2.6ghz Xeons 1024mb PC800 RDRAM 70 gigs harddrive capacity ATI Radeon 9700 Pro Memorex DVD+RW 2.4x Soundblaster Live 5.1+ (Audigy 2 had SMP compatibility issues) Yes the machine is truly a pleasure to use. As you may have also guessed - I built it on my own and purchased the parts from various online retailers. So the real question is of course, what OS is this monster sporting? For right now and the forseeable future its running Windows XP. I’ve spent some time attempting to work with Linux on this machine and while it does run like a dream, the drivers for the 9700 series video card are a bit immature as of now. Currently the ATI drivers do not allow me to drive both of my monitors off the same video card like I am able to in windows. So for now - this is a Windows only workstation. ...

As some of my loyal readers (whom I could probably count on a single hand) may remember - I switched my Linux box over to Gentoo a few months back. I was so enthralled over Gentoo that I decided to actually make a post on my site here about how it was literally the “second coming of christ”. Well okay maybe I am exaggerating… Anyway like grains of sand through the hourglass the saga of Gentoo continues. The win2k server my roommate and I built from spare parts nearly two years ago finally crapped out. It started throwing blue screens once every 30 minutes and would only remain stable longer than that if it was booted into safe mode. I decided to replace that box with my Gentoo Linux machine (which was sitting in the corner of my room just serving out files). ...

Well I’ve finally concluded my latest round of Linux upgrades. I originally planned on migrating my Linux box to RH Linux 8 but apparent kernel related incompatibilities prevented me from doing so. So in my desperation I decided to give good ole Gentoo Linux a shot. For those of you who don’t know - Gentoo is a highly customizable version of Linux that (1) requires you to install the system manually and (2) requires you to compile the system software and libraries from scratch. ...