The time I should wait to play with David after he eats, but I can never wait that long. From last night (click for larger version):
Here’s a closeup of that last one:
He was ready to get back to playing!
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David vs. the IRS
We waited much longer to file our taxes this year because the good ol’ State of Illinois took nearly forever to get a social security number provisioned to David. They must have a room full of monkeys banging out SSNs until they find an unused one… (psst…. Illinois… if you used an INFINITE number of monkeys, like the theorem states, it might go faster. Or a computer. You pick.)
The day we received David’s Social Security Card in the mail, I filed our taxes with him proudly listed as a dependent. The IRS rejected it. I surmised that either A) the room full of monkeys messed up or B) the glorious State of Illinois didn’t have their act together in time to get David’s brand new (or recycled) SSN transmitted to the Feds. So we got a reduced tax return and waited for an official rejection letter.
Got that letter today, called in and got it straightened out. Yeah, a pretty uneventful end to the story. Sorry.
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VMWare Server
Made a big OOPS tonight, something that could/should have been avoided by a slightly better UI/usability design on the part of VMWare Server.
As I mentioned a couple days ago, I have started running my web server (the 0ne hosting this blog among other things) in a virtual machine, using VMWare Server. I happily got everything installed and up and running, but then noticed what appeared to be a bug in the version of Apache I was using that caused some hiccups with mod_proxy. I looked it up and it appeared that the next point release of Apache took care of the problem – but I’m running Debian stable and it wasn’t available.
I read up on running mixed stable/testing packages in Debian, and thought I was ready to go. My plan was to take a VMWare Snapshot before the upgrade and if something messed up I could quickly roll it back.
Well, something went wrong and apache wouldn’t start after upgrading it to Testing. Getting annoyed, I decided to rollback to the snapshot and deal with it another night. Here’s where the OOPS comes in….
I click Snapshot…Take Snapshot instead of Revert to Snapshot (they’re right next to each other on the menu). CRAP, my safe snapshot was now being overwritten without any prompting and I was effectively hosed. A nice little confirmation prompt would have been great to have, VMWare. Thanks.
This reminded me of the great UI design I ran into once when dealing with an HP server’s RAID controller. At one point you’re prompted to confirm a delete action. Every time we hit clicked to confirm the action (we did it 2-3 times), nothing would happen but the prompt disappearing. Upon further inspection, HP had swapped the OK and Cancel buttons so you wouldn’t easily and accidentally destroy your data.
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Month 4 Photos
Finally, right about 8 hours after I initially wanted to upload them!
More available, as usual, in gallery.
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Web server
The hard drive on my webserver took a dive this afternoon, so I’m in the process of getting things moved around and back online.
To alleviate these sorts of problems in the future I have installed a new webserver in a virtual machine running on one of my windows servers – meaning it’s running on 2 year old hardware instead of 6 year old, decrepit hardware. And the virtual disk is sitting on a RAID array so it’ll be further insulated from hard drive failure.
This all started as I was going to upload David’s 4 Month photos, btw. So those are still en-route.
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Does this happen to you?
I’ve noticed this more and more lately. I’ll be watching tv or listening to the radio (at home, in the car, it doesn’t matter) and I’ll hear two notes that sound exactly like my Instant Messenger notification sound on my computers. It catches my attention like you wouldn’t believe, and if I’m anywhere remotely close to my computers I’ll start searching for a blinking IM window. Heck, even when I’m not near a computer it causes me to start looking around for a spit second.
Anyone else have this problem?
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New PDA
Ana’s new PDA arrived today, the Asus A626, and it’s pretty darn cool. Now I want one, but I have to keep telling myself that I’m near a computer for the vast majority of my day so there’s just no need…damn!
Ana discovered that along with her new job at Memorial, she was spending a lot of time out of her office but still needed quick access to her email and calendar. So it was pretty clear that she could use a pda or smartphone. Luckily, whenever she’s offsite, she’s at one of the other hospital buildings will full wireless access. That combined with our unwillingness to pay for these expensive cellular data plans made the choice for a standone pda very simple. The connection speeds sure beat cellular too.
So I got it all setup tonight and it’s happily syncing with her Exchange account at work.
As the former owner of a few PalmOS devices, I never got to play around with Windows-based PDAs. I really liked what I saw.
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Spring Geyser
Or just a faulty sump line.
Those have have followed this blog for years may recall that we had a tremendous time getting our sump pump line installed/buried/whatever by the terrible company that built the house – Construx. They’ve been out of business for a couple years now, thank goodness, but their handiwork strikes agian.
The “buried” line (in quotes because it ended up being 3″ at most underground) has pulled apart again at a joint and we have a nice little geyser spray up whenver the pump kicks on. It’s pretty neat, really. Unfortunately it isn’t neat enough to put benches around and charge people to see, so I’ll need to dig up the joint and repair it soon.
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Hey TruGreen ChemLawn…
Dear TruGreen ChemLawn (nice name, btw – “hey kids go roll in the grass that the ChemLawn people took care of!”)
Two years ago you offered to get rid of the grubs in our lawn – it was a nice gesture. Well, we paid you… so it wasn’t that nice. Even less nice is that the grubs seemed to thrive on whatever you sprayed on them – so thanks for that too. We ended up using Scott’s GrubEx to really get rid of them.
Anyway, back to why I’m writing this. You keep calling us. We keep telling you to leave us alone and never call again, but you insist. You also canvas our front door with your propaganda and offers for further service. WE DO NOT WANT ANY MORE OF YOUR “HELP”, THANKS. NOW LEAVE US ALONE.
To top things off, I’m sitting here working today and I look out of my window onto my porch and what do I see?
That’s right, in addition to the litter you placed on my door Monday you also deemed it neccessary to leave your papers on my porch. Stop littering on my property!
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Few Days
Since it has been a while since I’ve posted a photo…
The Johnson Blog 