..I guess. I figured now that we are almost done with September, I’d make my fourth post of the year. Nothing really to report. I wake up, go to work, get annoyed, go home to watch TV, sleep. Occasionally there are drinking sessions which leads to fun, but life is fairly routine. But just to recap:

- Free conferences are great.
- The Space is being shutdown. Parazoid.net is now hosted virtually in Atlanta.
- I want to get back into PHP and doing development work. I have to thank having to do perl work at Marist for getting the programming bug back into me. I have a couple of small ideas of things to do once I get some updates/upgrades done.
- I’m starting to get back into the Internet again. For some reason, every time Summer comes around I stop paying attention to the Internet and stop reading email and news and completely ignore my feed reader until it is so large that it crashes my machine (+45k unread messages isn’t enough). But I am cleaning up and getting back into things, so hopefully I’ll start posting random stuff again, especially fun tips and tricks that I see. So many things to share. I am playing with WordPress and plan on switching soon. Does anyone have any suggestions on good plugins and/or themes?
- I live in Red Hook. Moved up in June with Dave and Sara.
- Have I said free conferences are great? Free food and an excuse to not be at work and not use up vacation day, wow!

Alright, I’m out of random points, and this session is almost over. I do feel bad not pointing to a cool tool or something, so go to xkcd and read through the entire archive. I’ve probably plugged it before, but my god is it good.

There’s a battle of the bands at Marist tomorrow to raise money for the Wenchi Water Project. Read below for the facebook description of the event, or read the Marist Public Affairs release about the event. And facebook users, go to the event page to get more information.

Clean drinking water is becoming an increasingly scarce commodity in Ghana. The supply of drinking water for the rural population is insufficient both in quantitative and qualitative terms. In fact, the treatment and distribution of water occurs in less than 50% of the country. The lack of water in villages and towns makes it difficult to maintain good health and may cause diseases such as dysentery, cholera, diarrhea and guinea worm. Women and children are being forced to travel long distances in order to obtain drinkable water.
Wenchi Water Project Company Ltd. was established in 1984 for drilling water wells in villages in Africa. They are currently in collaboration with the Catholic Diocese of Sunyani in efforts to raise funds for the drilling of clean water in Ghana. This project will aim to build three mechanized boreholes in three targeted communities: Abesim, Chiraa and Dumasua.

Each borehole costs $14,024 and will impact a group of about 7,900 people, mostly school children of small-scale farmers. The project will be conducted in close relation with the District Water and Sanitation team, a government water authority. The Catholic Diocese of Sunyani has asked Marist College to raise $10,000 for project and hopes to raise the remaining $4,000 to build one borehole for one community.

On April 29th, 2007 the Marist College Council of Business Leadership and SGA Student Programming Council will be hosting a benefit consisting of a Battle of the Bands. This event will be open for students and the community in hopes to raise money for the Wenchi Water Project.
Join the Marist community while we enjoy music, food and prizes as we come together to WATER THE WORLD…one well at a time.

The following bands will be performing at the event:
1) Radfax
2) Pass the Broccoli Grandpa
3) Frank Viele and the Manhattan Project
4) The Comeback Tour
5) This Condition
6) Cove Road

The event runs 11:00am - 5:00pm, and there will be plenty of raffles going on throughout the day. And I hear Frank Viele and the Manhattan Project kicks ass.

I was tagged back in May by vgdave, so I guess it’s time to actually follow the rules.

“Once you are tagged you MUST write a blog about your 6 weird habits/things as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose the next six people to be tagged and list their names.”

I’m far from normal, but it’s hard to list why. Here goes:
1. I hate disorganization, but am a very unorganized person.
2. I usually have a good supply of moist towelettes in my coat and/or desk drawer. Occasionally gum and toothpicks as well.
3. I do not have TV, but watch far more than I should.
4. I don’t like people, but I can’t be alone for too long.
5. I’m a packrat when it comes to data. I download files for the hell of it.
6. I finally got out of school and soon I’ll try to get back in again.

Since I can’t think of anyone that actually reads this, I’m tagging MHVLUG people. So I tag Sean, Bruce, Derek, GNU Joe, Mike, and Patrick.

Excuse me being late in hearing this news, but I’m glad to see Fox is actually promoting Drive. Anyone who is a fan of Tim Minear or Nathan Fillion might want to check it out.

Fox starts the series off April 15th and 16th (somehow it’s a 2-night, 3-hour premiere). There are a couple of promos on YouTube to check out here.

I don’t know how I manage to forget this every year, but it’s SysAdmin Day.

If you’re a customer/user, show your SysAdmin some respect. If you are a SA, go do something vengeful or whatever it is you do.
http://www.sysadminday.com/

After several days of sitting, no stick spray is quite sticky and incredibly hard to clean.

So last week I managed to destroy Soze (work laptop). This is pretty normal for me, its summer and the work laptop was the last piece of sanity I had left in the world. I followed the normal course of action and had a desktop student place a service call with IBM (or Lenovo, or whoever the hell else wants to handle support for thinkpads). This usually is followed with a box being provided a couple of days later and a little over a week’s turn around time. Fine, I can live with that….or so I thought.

It has now being a week and a half, and the most acknowledgment of the problem we can get out of IBM is “We tagged your call so people would look at getting to it soon.” WTF! How hard is it to send a frelling box?

And of course, my snobbishness (this is a blog, I’m allowed to create words) regarding screen resolutions has kicked in. With Soze, I’ve gotten used to 1400×1050 res. With my t30 and a t43 loaner, the best I can do is 1024×768. This is just not acceptable any more.

So yeah, I guess it got bumped up to July 21. From what I’ve read, it should be an alright movie. I try to force myself not to have expectations, so I also make reviews quasi-neutral.

In other news….I was playing with unixODBC and OpenOffice.org’s Base and discovered that a few people were commenting and having issues with the captcha system. So spam blocking is now off and I’ll just have to moderate more often.

I have been advocating punishing users here for years. Now’s my chance.

(10:25:25) BatGirl: So you are in charge of Notes this afternoon.
(10:25:32) Self: ok
(10:26:00) Self: users will be punished for their insolence
(10:26:06) BatGirl:
(10:26:35) BatGirl: You can tell them: “No Notes For You”
(10:26:48) BatGirl: You can be like the Soup guy on Seinfeld

When you research something on Encyclopia Britannica’s website, you expect them to say “No, we’re not going to give you this information unless you pay for it.” Turns out that when you pull up an article on their site, they will give you about a paragraph’s worth of information and then ask for you to login. Understandable, not angry at all. I’ve registered for a trial anyay, so no biggie. But I made a mistake and printed an article before loginning in. Somehow the printer knew the rest of the article….