Sorry, another Link Post. QA testing is going on at work, so 1) the release is getting close because Waterfall + fixed deadline = really scrunched testing timeline, 2) now everyone gets to find out what parts of the specs were just flat out wrong, or what parts need some creative re-writing to reflect bugs in integrating systems. Both of which mean every issue is a Severity 1, Priority 1, RUSH, RUSH, RUSH issue. Yet it always seems to just work out. Hmm...

Oh, and a quick shout-out & HI! to all the new visitors who are coming here because that kid jumped off the Vista Bridge & killed himself last week. Enjoy the pictures of the bridge! It's things like this that make me glad I don't have ads and so am not profiting from the 3x increase in traffic from such a tragic event.

• Hurray for Harry Potter!
• Monkeys! fun! Smuggling! not fun!
• hahahaha! "Jane Austen's Fight Club"!
• okay, weird video...but it has monkeys!
• Maybe I'm crazy, but most of these items don't seem that strange to me. (via J-Walk)
• Wow! "Vitamin Water" is not supposed to be healthy?!

Now playing: Donna Lewis – Now in a Minute – 03 I Love You Always Forever

Sorry, it's been a bit since the last post...between work picking up (insanely) and talking to a new friend , things have been busy. I've actually got a stack of pictures of Portland/Fleet Week to go through & tag & post, so hopefully those will go up at some point. Anyway, here's a link post:

• Interesting (via JWZ)
• Accurate
• Reading another web comic
• (the Lego pictures just made me smile...)
• mmmm...pancakes
• ah...computer humor...gets me every time
• fun! programming humor! (via EricGu)
• Floating TARDIS
• Ummm...okay?...
• cool: lego printer
• wow...number 1 for *serial killers* (via J-Walk Blog)
• http://www.bugbash.net/comic/21.html'>http://www.bugbash.net/comic/21.html'>Need to remember this for the next meeting I'm in
• haha
• Awesome! PowerShell + Visual Studio
• This is a bit too much driving in a week for my tastes...
• Oh dear god no. NO. Even the imagining of it is painful

Now playing: Josh Ritter – So Runs The World Away – 06 Folk Bloodbath

At the end of May I flew down to San Jose (California!) to visit my parents for Memorial Day. The first day consisted of having lunch at Alice's Restaurant (with burgers named after motorcycle brands; the Yamaha burger that I had was really good...pineapple + teriyaki sauce is surprisingly tasty on a burger!), then driving down coast through Santa Cruz to Monterey (& back). Second day was sightseeing in San Francisco (yay! finally got to ride the cable cars & see Ghirardelli Square!). The last day included trips to Beard Papa's (a nice recommendation from Ms. Snootypurse), In-N-Out Burger, and Half Moon Bay to see the beach and the house my parent's are trying to buy.

Overall, a fun trip...not terribly relaxing, but the change of scenery was nice.

And now, the photos: (full album @ Bay Area, California (2010-05))

Pacific Ocean at Pebble Beach on Monterey Bay, California

The "Lone Cyprus" on the 17-mile drive in Monterey

Union Square, San Francisco

Now playing: The New Pornographers – Together – 08 Up In the Dark

Actually got this in an email from my grandpa earlier today, and it seemed really cool!

• Fordson Snow Machine - 1929 concept

The video certainly makes it seem to work well. And I liked the emphasis on the reusability of the existing vehicle. Still, I have to wonder how strong and easy to replace/fix those drums would be. Not to mention how well it performs outside video-conditions. It didn't look like it in the video, but I also wonder about whether it gets stuck when stopped because it sinks into the snow too much...

Now playing: Vienna Teng – Waking hour – 12 Lullabye for a Stormy Night

Went down to New Orleans a month ago for a vendor conference/training session. Overall it was fairly informative, and possibly worth the money to the company (6 people from my division went...to an event with 40-something attendees...with 3 main session tracks...). The three days went kind of fast. In any case, I got to see New Orleans! Never been down to "the South" like that before (sorry, I don't really consider Florida during Spring Break to be very old-south-ish). We were at the Hotel Monteleone, which is a cool old style luxury hotel. With a unique floor plan that caused me to spent 15 minutes trying to get to the rooftop patio for the initial sign in. Found out that Bourbon Street isn't really my sort of thing. But, on the advice of a friend, I got to go out and have fun my way, by looking for better wifi, and failing that, any cell coverage. And by getting up early and walking around the French Quarter taking some pictures of course!

Looking up Royal Street towards Canal Street in the evening.

St. Louis Cathedral ("a minor basilica")

And of course, the Mississippi River, with a steamboat (the Natchez)!

Now playing: The Awkward Stage – Slimming Mirrors, Flattering Lights – 07 Only Good Days Caught on Camera

Back in April I headed down to the Bay Area again. Drove this time instead of flying. It's a looooong way down there! But, it was pretty, and now I've at least seen southern Oregon, Mount Shasta, and the Sacramento Valley. Plus driving was cheaper than flying – just two tanks of gas each way, so ~half the cost of flying. Driving down at Christmas should be an even better deal...although then I might need to head down the coast instead of taking I-5...driving through the snowstorm at the end of April was bad enough!

So, here are some pictures (full album here):

Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, California

Coast Guard ship heading out of San Francisco Bay under the Golden Gate Bridge. It actually came back an hour or so later escorting a grain freighter/tanker of some sort. And sorry, I did a bit of quick internet searching, but I couldn't find the name!

South side of the Golden Gate, looking out towards what maps say is "Baker Beach".

Now playing: Vienna Teng – Inland Territory – 07 Stray Italian Greyhound

(sorry, couldn't think of anything to draw...but I think the crayon tool in ArtRage came off pretty good :))

Should have gone to the beach this weekend & built sandcastles. That way when the tide came in & the ocean washed away my delusions, dreams & fantasies, I could at least have a clean slate to start again from...

Plus, childish sandcastles are just kinda fun...

Now playing: Thalia Zedek – Been Here and Gone – 01 Excommunications (Everybody Knows)

Finally upgraded to Forefront TMG 2010 RTM last night. And screwed up the web listener for this site. And didn’t know it. Ooops...

It should all be good now though. At least the web publishing part.

I'm still having problems getting the VPN working. L2TP seems to be working fine, but the SSTP endpoint is complaining about certificate problems and not working correctly. Plus, web proxy clients are now trying to connect to one of the RAS demand dial interfaces instead of the internal one they're supposed to. GRRRRR! (DNS looks correct, so no idea how clients even know about the DHCP assigned address...but that's what the logging is reporting...)

Also, for some reason after applying the latest round of Windows Updates, system startup has slowed to a crawl. It's now taking 15 minutes to go from POST to the login screen. Nothing is being reported as being problematic, so no clue where to even start looking. Even worse, sometimes services don't come back up, requiring manual intervention at the console to start them. They've been different on each of the handful of reboots I've done, so now I'm getting afraid to reboot...

IPv6 support is also sorely missing. It's kind of there under the covers, and bleeds through when configuring DirectAccess stuff. But without being supported & without a UI to configure rules, whatever underlying support there is is useless.

On the bright side, recreating the old rules was a breeze. And the Best Practice Analyzer is nice; it caught a couple things that I missed.

I think the best approach is probably going to be to start over and reinstall everything. Ouch. That'll have to wait a bit though...next week (+weekend) I'm down in the Bay Area again, and two weeks later I'm in New Orleans...

Now playing: Vienna Teng – Warm Strangers – 04 Shine

I finally hopped on the solid state drive (SSD) bandwagon. Got an Intel X25-M G2 160GB drive yesterday. And ended up spending all day trying to install it. Definitely should have thought about how to go from the old drive to the new drive a bit more. But, it's working now! Unfortunately, I haven't really noticed a performance boost at all...although that might be because the only things I've done with it so far are resync my offline file cache, create silly little drawings, and write blog posts. Nothing too disk intensive there, and certainly nothing that would really benefit from the improved random access times. So I'll see how this works out in the long run.

In the mean time, this is how I migrated from the old drive to the new drive:

1. Remove encrypted (EFS) files. It turns out that for some reason I had a random encrypted file sitting around, which caused the backup procedure to fail.
2. Boot into WinPE. I used a USB drive that I've got laying around for installing Windows Server 2008 R2.
3. Use imagex (from the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK)) to capture an image of the old drive's volumes.
4. Shutdown the system & install the new drive.
5. Boot using the bootable USB drive and install Windows. I did this because I needed to create the partition structure, file systems, and configure the new drive to be bootable. Windows Setup does that all for me in a lot less time than it would take me to document/chase down all that stuff and apply the changes manually.
6. Boot using the bootable USB drive again. Quick format the OS partition (or: delete everything on it).
7. Use imagex to apply the captured image.
8. Reboot. Be happy that actually worked & didn't result in weird errors from bootmgr (or even worse, "ntldr not found"! (that would have been really bad because Windows Vista, Server 2008, 7, & Server 2008 R2 don't even *have/use* ntldr anymore!).
9. (optional) Write blog post whining about how I didn't use dd, Ghost, TruImage, some other disk cloning tool, or even just did something as simple as hooking both drives up at the same time and doing a robocopy. (note that most of those would require having both drives connected at the same time, which isn't possible for me because I don't have a computer with 2 free SATA ports...yes, it's probably time I upgraded).

Now playing: Stars – In Our Bedroom After the War – 01 The Beginning After the End

So, no post last week. Oops. BUT, there are some perfectly reasonable explanations (i.e., excuses):

ReasonExcuse 1:

(no, don't even try to make sense of the perspective in the drawing above...I know I certainly didn’t while doing it...which is probably apparent...hmm...)

See, there was this Holiday thingy, and that holiday got spent hanging out with relatives, chatting, going through pictures, eating, etc. 'Etc.' there does not contain whipping out a Tablet PC and channeling my inner 4-year old to make silly sketches (posting those sketches involves a slightly older age group, say, 14 or so... (what? I didn't have the Internet when I was 4!)).

ReasonExcuse 2:

Yes, Doctor Who is BACK!!! The new season has finally started, and with just 2 episodes in the season so far, I can definitely say I'm loving it :-D. Although yesterday's episode had one little bit that bothered me...see, there's this teeth bit, and there are tubes going into the mouth, and the "overflow" tube in front of the mouth...and then at the end of the episode there's a shot of the entire monster. And for some reason I can't work out the spatial relationship between end shot & teeth shots. Just doesn't make any sense to me...and is thus bothering me. (yes, I know this is stupid...why should that bother me when this is a show episode with 300 year old queens, giant space monsters, the country of Great Britain in a space ship, flying police boxes that are bigger on the inside than on the outside...oh, and that police box happens to be another spaceship AND time machine, and to top it all off, people are running around in their pajamas saving the world!)

Excuse 3:

Umm...so I don't actually remember much else about last weekend now... So I'll just leave this as the Mystery/Fill-in-the-blank/Choose-your-own Excuse.

Now playing: nothing (wait! no! there are cars driving by on the streets outside! I can hear those! and there was just a fire truck!)