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Sunday,
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Monday, June
5, 2000
We have returned from our trip to Chicago and the
Winston Drag event.
It was a very enjoyable and successful trip.
Gary Scelzi won his Top Fuel race and we were part of the crowd to
witness John Force's breaking the all-time Winston Drag racing win
record. Bob Glidden held the former record of 85 national
event victories.
The weekend started out with a heart
stopper. Gary Scelzi had a major scary crash as he completed
his first qualifying run on Friday evening. Just as Scelzi
crosses the finish line one of his rear tire came apart, destroying
the rear wing and Scelzi's Winston sponsored top fueler began to
come apart. His car was destroyed and the stadium was silent
for a few seconds (seemed like forever) when the announcer boomed
that Scelzi had climbed from his car, which was now laying on it
side under his own power. Scelzi returned to the pit area shortly
thereafter and was signing autographs to the fans' delight, not to
mention those of us who work for Winston.
Gary had another scary moment in his semi-final
run on Sunday. From the time he hit the gas on his run the
back end of his car was on fire. He stayed in the throttle
through the quarter-mile to claim victory and advance to his
finals. He said he could feel the flames behind him all the
way. The fire was quickly extinguished at the "top
end."
Prior to heading out to Joliet, I was able to
combine some business meetings with our trip and stay a couple of
nights in the city, where we enjoyed dinner with friends at two of
Chicago's finest restaurants, Morton's
of Chicago and Lawry's. To say the least, I had my fill
of "red meat" on this trip. We always enjoy our
trips to Chicago and this one was no different, although it may be
a little tough to live there. After I got past the traffic,
I think the winters would be the next burden, although I may have
these two reversed!
We stayed at the Marriott on Michigan Avenue and I
had an opportunity to continue my workout regim while Suzy took
the much needed opportunity to sleep in. I needed to
exercise after all of the food I consumed!
As you can imagine, my mailbox was bulging
at the seams when I returned. Here are a few items I saved
before doing some heavy deleting, etc.
- Yahoo is beta testing a new
media player that will handle MP3s, audio CDs, and video
clips. It also boats an internal browser to help you find
music, videos, and news within the Yahoo network.
- Not to be outdone, RealPlayer (the net media player I
am currently using) is pushing
their version eight into beta testing.
- It doesn't appear the release of Windows 2000 has
done much to slow down the proliferation of the Linux
operating system. I guess this means I better get back
to working on Linux in my environment. I think I may
have forgotten everything I learned over the winter and will
need to start over. Ugh. I have Windows 2000 but
have not installed it on any machines yet. I tried a
beta copy, but ran into major video driver problems and I have
never gone back. I am currently using a mix of Win NT
and and Win 98 on my systems.
- If you're into Information Technology and looking for
a job, then you may be in luck. This story says there
may be as many as 80,000 IT job openings by the end of the
year and that employers like CISCO
are using some unusual tactics to get would be employees
to recognize the networking giant. The son of a friend
of mine at work has just been hired by Cisco and they offered
some very intriguing benefits to start, like stock options at
a very attractive price, moving allowances and some four weeks
of paid vacation to start. His brother is now interested
in seeking employment there as well.
- I personally dance back and forth with search
engines. I will try one for a while and then for some
reason start using another. I am currently using
freefind to index my site, but am not impressed with this
portal for web searches. C|Net's
Ultimate guide to Search Engines we may have all been
looking for. Wonder if it'll bring some organization to
the search debates? There are some within my family unit who
will not be surprised that Pokemon and Brittany Spears are
some of the more popular search terms.
- I wonder what was behind Valvoline's decision to
leave Mark Martin and Jack Roush beginning with the 2001
Winston Cup season? Valvoline had been their sponsor for
some 12 years and the company says it will continue to be a
major sponsor in Winston Cup in 2001. To me this could
mean a couple of things. Either they were forced away financially
or have found a new star to hitch their wagon to.
I hope Marcia Bilbrey [marcia@dutchgirl.net]
doesn't mind if I pass this story along:
Three beggars are begging on the
mall in downtown SanJose.
The first one wrote "beg"
on his broken steel cup and he received ten bucks after one day.
The second one wrote "beg.com"
on his cup and after one day he received hundreds of thousand
dollars. Someone
even wanted to take him to NASDAQ.
The third one wrote "ebeg"
on his cup. Both IBM and HP sent vice-presidents to talk to him
about a strategic alliance and offered him free hardware and
professional consulting, while Larry Ellison claimed on CNBC
that ebeg uses 95% Oracle technology, and i2 announced
begTradeMatrix, a b2b industry portal to offer supply chain
integration with the beggar.
Cisco just announced that virtually
all ebeg traffic runs over their equipment.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Tuesday, June
6, 2000
My sister sent this page along. It's advice
to kids from kids. Maybe we should stop long enough to
take in some of this common sense that sometimes goes over our
heads.
Bob Thompson mentioned a site in his notes last
week a site
that would give you a valuation of the domain name of your
site. I was naturally curious, so I checked out what they
say Wakeolda might be worth. Of course, I realize valuing is
one thing and selling is quite another.
Anyway, here's what www.shoutloud.com
fired back:
| The domain name for which the valuation
was requested is: WAKEOLDA.COM
Our valuation range is: $ 10,000 - 75,000
This valuation is based upon the following
information:
Domain extension is: .COM
Desirability factor for domain extension is: 100%
Domain length (excluding extension) is:
Desirability factor for domain length is: 46%
Domain includes hyphen: NO
Hyphen weighting: 100%
Domain name is: WAKEOLDA
Word count weighting is: 100%
Plain language weighting is: 50%
Target market SIZE/Branding potential weighting is:
87.5%
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[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Wednesday, June
7, 2000
In case you missed the article, someone found a
condom in a McDonald's hamburger a few weeks ago. Here is David
Letterman's top ten McDonald's excuses for the condom in the Big
Mac:
>
10. We were test marketing the new "McRibbed."
9. Condom, Condiment.....What's the damned
difference.
8. It still tastes better than the Arch Deluxe.
7. It was either there, or in the vanilla shake.
6. Turns out the rumors about Grimace and Mayor
McCheese are true.
5. We're experimenting with a new, even happier
meal.
4. Employees too embarrassed to ask "Would
you like a condom with that?"
3. So what? A regular Big Mac is 60% latex anyway.
2. Drive-thru speaker broken: "Coke with lots
of ice" sounds like "Prophylactic device."
And the number one McDonald's Excuse for the
Condom in the Big Mac:
1. When you're serving billions and billions, you
can't be too careful.
[Sunday] [Monday] [Tuesday] [Wednesday] [Thursday]
[Friday] [Saturday]
Saturday, June
10, 2000
Time Warner arrived on Thursday to install a
RoadRunner cable modem. They made a promise the installer
would be here between 12 Noon and 2 PM and he promptly arrived at
1 PM. I didn't expect him to show up during lunch, but I was
here anyway.
The installer walked in the door and after
announcing he was here to install my cable modem said, "show
me to your computer." I took him downstairs to the
computer room and fortunately didn't have to make any excuses for
the number of machines in this room since I was getting only one
computer connected to their network. I also pointed out this
may be an easy installation since I had a cable TV connection in
this room that I had run when we built the room.
It was then off to cable embarkation point where
he looked around a bit and noticed some kind of filter on the
outside of the house to which he made a mental note that he would
have to change that. Naturally I asked why and he volunteered
he needed to change it to a 1 gig filter of some kind. From
there I am lost.
He went to his truck a picked up the new filter,
the cable modem, test equipment and Road Runner installation
pack. He promptly handed me the installation package since I
was going to be doing a self install.
At this point I made mention again that I had made
this latest cable connection to the computer room and it may be
split in the ceiling. He said something to the effect of
"that won't work" and went after more coax. He had
decided to make a new home run from the cable entry point to the
where the cable modem was going to be installed. Our
basement has a drop ceiling which was no problem, but I then
mentioned I was picky and wanted the cable inside the sheetrock
wall. I volunteered that I had an old work box around here
somewhere that we could put in the wall, but he whipped back,
"no problem, I've got one in the truck" and proceeded to
make a very clean installation.
I did learn one thing watching his cable running
tactics. In the past when I have wanted to run a piece of
cable back to this room I have moved each ceiling tile one by
one. He ended up moving only about three ceiling
tiles. Seems his experience taught him this trick. He
took the fiberglass shaft off an old bicycle flag and tapes his
cable to end of the fiberglass shaft and then pushes it
through. Very simple and very effective. He even used
this flexible shaft inside the sheetrock wall. Worked like a
charm and I was impressed and made a mental note to scam the pole
the next time the kids' bike flag gets tattered.
The installer then made the cable connection to
the modem, waited a few seconds for it to find a signal and announced
he was done. He was here less than a hour.
I am going to assume it's important for the cable
connection to the modem to be a home run and not split in any way
since after I told him of the split he didn't hesitate to make a
new run. The cable is split at the entry point only for the
cable modem and he used one of those faceplates that the cable
just sticks through, not one with a female connector on each side.
After he left I took a look at the installation
package and noticed it also contained a special edition of
Internet Explorer, however, I wanted to do some exploring of my
own.
Before installing RoadRunner's package I thought I
would try to change my network settings on this machine away from
my internal network to a dchp session since I was only going to be
getting a dynamic IP address from Time Warner. The system
rebooted and I was on the internet without installing their
package of of yet. I am sure I will have to install it at
some point to access their mail services, etc., but I wanted to
see if I could get connectivity without any propriety software
installation.
This was about all o the time I had for the cable
modem, because Thursday was Andrew's birthday and we had to get
ready for the celebration, which is another story within itself!
The kids get to choose where they want to have
their birthday dinners. For his eighth birthday Andrew chose
Chuck E Cheese's. I didn't even know we had one in
Winston-Salem. I had heard of the joint and didn't much
think I was going to like this loud and obnoxious
experience. But it was his birthday and we get to do
whatever he wanted for his day.
We arrived at about 6 PM and the place was already
mostly filled with kids whooping and hollering and playing the
games. We got our pizza order in and gave the kids some
tokens to go play the games. I chose to add a salad to my
order, so I attacked the salad bar.
I had finished my salad, had gone back for some
additional salad and gone out into the game area to see how the
kids were doing with the games when something told me to glance at
my watch. It was now 7 PM and our pizza had not yet
arrived. I thought it shouldn't have taken more than about
30 minutes on a very busy night for a couple of simple pizzas to
arrive, so I went to try to find out what was going on with the
food. I didn't have much luck, so I made my way to the
kitchen door, where I discovered our pizzas had been made, but
were sitting there and had gotten cold. This would not work and I
insisted they be made over.
After just a few minutes one of the waiters tried
to deliver one of the pizzas. There was no way a new pizza
could have been made in this amount of time, so I refused delivery
and was off to find someone in charge. I was starting to get
ticked off, mostly because they had now tried to trick me. I
also thought our wait had been excessive, but I really didn't like
the fact they were trying to trick me.
I found a manger who herself was quite
flustered. I had to stand in line to bark at her and she
didn't know which way to turn. I explained my situation and
that her help had tried to deliver a pizza that should have been
thrown out. Her answer was that they would make the pizzas
again.
I waited about another 10 minutes and then
reappeared at the kitchen, mostly wanting to watch what was going
on and make sure they didn't try the old cold pizza trick again.
When the manager walked by I started barking again
which led to her giving me a coupon for a future visit for a large
pizza, four drinks and 40 tokens. I stuck this in my pocket
and continued to wait at the kitchen. It was not past 7:30
PM and still no pizza. I tracked her down again and told her
this would not work and further demanded my money back. We were
going somewhere else to eat. She didn't put up a fight to
give me my money back, knowing she was wrong. In fact, she
said our pizzas were now lost. "I made them myself and
now they are lost" was her response as they were nowhere to
be found. I think she was lying through her teeth.
So we gathered up the kids and headed out.
Andrew still wanted pizza for his birthday, so we walked a couple
doors down the sidewalk to a gourmet pizza joint and had a great
pizza meal. They kids were happy to finally be getting
pizza, albeit a couple of hours later, and I was happy to be
getting some decent pizza in a setting where you could hear the
person next to you speaking.
It was then back home to open some presents...a
cache filled with Playstation and Gameboy additions. He did
get this cool baseball pitching machine. It's battery
operated (ugh) and slings plastic baseballs at the batter.
So far, his batting skills aren't that great, but he's enjoying
the challenge. He's also donning a new bike helmet.
I told someone at the office yesterday that we
have the greatest kids. Never once during this ordeal on
Thursday did they complain and further, although he was quite
excited about his birthday, Andrew did not bug us once during the
day about opening his presents. I don't think I could have
shown the same patience.
With the cable modem installed, I thought it
might be once again time to think about Linux.
Although I am rusty on the Linux operating system,
and never knew that much about it anyway, I thought I would give
it a try.
I ultimately want to connect the cable modem to my
Linux box and install a proxy server and firewall. To do
this I know I will need to install two network cards.
However, my first step was to boot Linux with just
one NIC to determine if I could get connectivity to world using a
dchp session in my Linux system. That was no problem and
netscape surfed the world at ease.
However, when I installed the second NIC there was
a conflict of some kind. I assigned a manual IP address of
192.168.2.1 to the second NIC as eth1, but when the system booted
eth0 failed and the system never recognized eth1. More than
likely some of my problem may be that both NICs are identical and
I am not really sure which is physically eth0 and which is
eth1. I am sure it's just some configuration stuff I have
done and with the help of some of my fellow webbers I get this
system going in no time.
In fact I posted some of this same message to the
email list of my fellow daynoters
and I am receiving suggestions even as I type this message.
Later this afternoon Andrew's birthday
celebration will continue. This time it's the bowling party
with his friends (and more presents). For some reason he
likes to go bowling for his birthday celebrations. We'll
head off to the lanes about 2 PM and in the meantime I don't think
I will have much time to mess with Linux.
Here is some of the latest Spam.
This is as offer to get your site listed near the top of the
search engines for a fee. I don't think so.
I saw your listing on the
internet.
I work for a company that
specializes in getting clients web sites listed as close to the
top of the major search engines as possible.
Our fee is only $29.95 per
month to submit your site at least
twice a month to over 350 search engines and directories.
To get started and put your
web site in the fast lane, call our toll free number below.
Naturally i omitted the name and telephone number.
I received this virus alert from my sister. As I
read this warning, yes it does seems this virus is taking over the world, the
USA in particular.
There is a new virus
going around called WORK. If you receive any sort of WORK, whether
via e-mail, Internet, or simply handed to you by a colleague, do
not open it. Those who have opened WORK have found that their
social life is deleted and their brain ceases to function
properly.
If you do encounter WORK
via e-mail or are faced with any WORK at all, purge the virus by
sending an e-mail to your boss with the words 'This is too much
for me, I'm going out for a soda. This better not be here when I
get back.'
Your brain should
automatically delete the WORK. If you receive WORK in paper
document form, simply lift the document and drag the WORK to your
trash can.
Send this message to all
your friends in your address book. If you do not have anyone in
your address book, then the WORK virus has already corrupted your
life!
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