2005.11.09

site downtime

for all 5 of you.

the site will be taken down sometime this weekend for possibly an entire day. i do not know what part of the weekend, but I have some work to do on the computer. i have been having some serious issues with my computer recently that can only be described as quirky. safari blows up from time to time when it shouldn’t, the computer suffers a kernel panic when under a lot of stress when it shouldn’t, and other little quirky things that are just making me mad.

going through a few system utility checks it appears something is royally screwed up with the b-tree catalog file to the point that the apple disk utility program can’t repair it. usually this is no big deal as diskwarrior should be able to properly rebuild it, but i made a mistake when i first installed tiger; i chose the case-sensitive HFS+ file system. diskwarrior doesn’t work with this format and therefore won’t even look at the volume. i also turned to techtool pro to see if there was anything the file structure repair could do just to see it bomb out as well.

long story short, my only option right now is to reformat and re-install and re-configure everything. for me, this is about a 4-5 hour ordeal if i have a straight 4-5 hours to work on it. i need to get apache back up and running along with mysql, phpmyadmin, and all the basic stuff. however, this time i will not choose a case-sensitive file system as i need diskwarrior to work simply because i know diskwarrior would have been able to fix this problem. unfortunately, i do not have time to wait until alsoft updates it to make it compatible with case-sensitive file systems.

if you try to visit this weekend and you get a no hit on the site, wait a day or two. it’ll be back up. until then, i believe survival without icedtrip.net will not be a problem.

the weekend is almost upon us and although just a couple days ago I really didn’t have any plans, last night changed that.

first, we plan to continue our way through the “nightmare on elm street” series leading into part 5 of the series. looks like we may have more people this Friday night than have shown up in the past. about 5-6 people have been coming for the past 4, and it looks like we very well may have 10 or so this time around. looks like i may have to boil some peanuts this time like i did for the first 2. Friday will first begin at Saigon (a Vietnamese restaurant here in town), then to a friends apartment for some fun and games, later ending at my place for the movie.

second comes Saturday. although my day may consist of yard work, i will be going to a concert Saturday night. last night my cousin, trey, called me up asking if i wanted to go to the three doors down concert on Saturday because he had gotten some tickets. now, i am not a big fan of three doors down, but i do enjoy their music from time to time so i agreed to go. it will most likely be packed out since the band is originally from the coast.

and to finish the weekend off, more yard work on Sunday.

at least this beats the past couple of weekends painting, but now that the painting is done, my kitchen, breakfast area, and den look 150% better.

well, my brother is now starting to add video ipod capable home movies to his site. i for one will love this as it will easily allow me to place these on my ipod without having to do any re-encoding to get them to the right format.

a suggestion that i made to my brother as a comment deals with making home movies into video podcasts. with podcasts still steadily going uphill, this is a great way to extend this beyond the traditional podcasting arena. with built-in podcast support in itunes, it would be very easy to create a video podcast that someone produces, with nothing but home movies, to share with family members. this would allow anyone with itunes installed (both windows and mac) to subscribe to the podcast, and anyone with a video ipod would of course be able to sync the videos with ease.

no, this would not be considered a revelation to the podcasting crowd, but rather a simple idea that just makes sense. podcasting isn’t just wayne’s world for the radio, but a method to deliver home movies to family members (and whatever other types of movies you want….legal of course).

just an idea. in the meantime, check out the most recent video on my brother’s site.

http://www.joshandkristee.com/Movies/HummerWheelie.htm

BT - The American Bulldog

i had my power restored last night after it being out since Monday morning. its amazing how much we rely on electricity and air conditioning. i guess you could say that i should be used to it having lived over seas in a country where this was common and not having air conditioning for 7 years of my life. oh well, i have it back now. this also means that my site is back up too, which is a very good thing.

things have been tough for many. my company’s problems aside, people in my area have been out of power, waiting in lines at gas stations for 2 hours (if no one paniced this wouldn’t have been a problem, but too late now), fighting over bagged ice, not being able to find food in the grocery stores, etc. on top of this, we are 3 hours north of the worst of it. we were hit at a category 1 level hurricane, but looking at images and videos of the coast looks surreal. check out wlbt and watch the “skycopter” videos to see what is going on down there. i may head down there in about a week to help a friend’s family out, so i may be able to see the damage first hand.

for everyone outside of the affected areas, please try to provide as much support as you can through the different organizations and units that are providing food, water, cots, and everything else for the hundreds of thousands that are without a home right now.

i am fine as is the rest of my family that lives down here in the south, but there are thousands upon thousands that need as much help as can be provided.

in a day or two, i will put up pictures of my back yard and around my town just to show some downed trees, etc. this will show you what a category 1 does, let alone what a category 4 will do.

2005.08.23

wrx night 20050826

tonight i got a call to go out with some guys. there were 4 regular rex’s and one sti. we went out and went from one place to another, but did get some shots of the cars.

the canon elph did an ok job in the dark, but please forgive the graininess of the images. some are blurry and others are decent, but since i had to take the pictures with the flash off in order to actually get decent photos, they are not perfect. i have included in the gallery 2 shots of each photo, the original and a somewhat “enhanced” shot of the same picture. click on the thumbnails to enlarge them.

click on the image to the side to go to the gallery or click here.

smashsworld - I’m on Google Talk right now.

it looks like google will be announcing its new google talk client tomorrow, but as can be seen on the web, people are already using the service. my brother, andrew, and i have already given it a shot. looking at the above article, you will see that you can connect to the google talk service simply with a jabber client and your gmail account. applications like trillian, adium, gaim, and ichat have this pretty much built it, so it is a breeze to use. simply use the following within your particular client’s settings:

Server: talk.google.com Username: yourgmailid@gmail.com Password: yourgmailpassword

make sure you use the “@gmail.com” or it will not work. my brother and i have tried the audio and video over it with ichat and it works just fine as it does over aim. the actual google talk client will most likely be pc only, but since mac and linux users (not wanting to use wine linux users) can connect, all is happy and well in the world.

below are some other locations related to this topic.

TUAW eWeek downloadsquad

digg 1 digg 2 digg 3