i just found out today that i have a couple more readers than i thought i had that just don’t make comments. in finding this out, i have seen an issue that i have not wanted to face, but may actually try to solve over the next month or so. i just saw my site in internet explorer again after not seeing it in ie for quite sometime. needless to say, it is hideous.

for all the mac users that look at the site, you will not have a problem with safari, firefox, or pretty much any other browser out there for the mac, but windows users (the majority) do not have the same benefit from their primary browser, ie. in order to see the site as i have intended, you will need to download and install firefox. i would recommend this anyway for security purposes, but since internet explorer doesn’t show some proper css and all png’s with alpha transparencies, you will have issues with this site as it is will shows up as very ugly.

i will try to remedy this as much as possible over the course of the next month or so, but i can’t make any promises. my main recommendation is to switch to Firefox, but it kills me to know that some people are looking at the website in a completely different form (and therefore thinking that i have no design talent whatsoever).

since i don’t have any meetings scheduled this morning, i figured i would write about the happenings of the weekend, as the previous post about the upcoming weekend didn’t exactly go to plan. here goes.

as planned i did eat Vietnamese food after work on Friday with some friends, and we did go to one of my friend’s apartments, but it was not until we reached my house for the movie that things took a turn.

earlier in the night, before going to the apartment, i had started boiling some peanuts. before jumping to conclusions, allow me to explain my thought process on this one. i had boiled peanuts several times for these movie nights and all had gone well without ever having to add more water to the pot. boiling peanuts takes about 4 hours, and since i figured the times i had boiled them while i was in the house went without incident, it would do no harm to leave for a little bit while they boiled. well, to ensure all would be well, i put a little extra water in the pot than i have done in the past, just in case.

now, upon getting to the house (with about 10 people following me) i smelt something that was ever so slightly out of place, and when i got out of the car, i heard the smoke detector in the house going off. opening the door, i saw smoke as thick as fog. immediately, smoke started pouring out into my carport and i charged inside to where the pot of peanuts was. i didn’t see any fire, but a lot of smoke was seeping out of the sides of the lid. getting the pot outside, i then opened the lid just to be engulfed with smoke.

the next 15 minutes or so had me charging into the house opening windows and turning on fans, then running outside coughing just to run back in and do it all over again. i should also say that the smoke had filled the entire house, not just the room. the smoke had gone all the way back into all of the bedrooms and closets. it took about 30 minutes to get all the smoke out of the house, but that was just the beginning. since that night, i have been trying to get rid of the smell as best i can as well as washing all the linens and clothes in the house. the smell has improved, but not as much as it needs to. it is still very noticeable. another aspect that i noticed just the other night was that once all the smoke was either gone or settled, it left behind a soot on anything with a hard top. over the next couple of days, i plan on going through the house wiping everything down, but i dread the countless blinds that have soot on them.

Other than stupidity, I think that what caused all the water to boil out faster than before was the level I left the stove at. I didn’t look closely, but I believe I may have left it on too high, and the pot simply got too hot.

well , continuing on, three doors down was a no go. my cousin wasn’t able to get the tickets, so we were left at the house watching “kingdom of heaven” (which turned out to be an excellent movie).

finishing it off, Sunday was spent washing, drying, washing, drying, cleaning, washing, drying, cleaning, etc (you get the point).

to the disappointment of my brother, there will be no downtime this weekend, which means i was able to fix my machine last night. yes, this also means i will not be forced to buy a new computer.

now, how i went about fixing the thing. last night i decided to start backing up all of my stuff in preparation for the weekend when i realized something. At the time, i was using carbon copy cloner (whose site is currently down for some reason) to do a complete backup of my boot drive when i remembered a trick that was used back in the mac os 10.3 days. The trick involved getting an os x install on a case-sensitive hfs+ filesystem. since it was not yet an option for formatting at the time, it was discovered that you could install os x on a drive, use ccc to back up the drive on another drive, reformat the original drive as a case-sensitive hfs+ filesystem using the command line, then use ccc to copy everything back over to the newly formatted drive.

the way that i figured it, i could use the same method, but in reverse. this would be my way of getting my boot drive back to regular hfs+. so i used the above method, but instead reformatted the drive to regular hfs+ so that i could give diskwarrior a shot. i had a feeling that this process may solve the problem anyway and sure enough, it worked (the whole process took about an hour and a half). i did however run diskwarrior to be on the safe side figuring it may find some issues anyway. it did, and i got everything repaired.

making sure it worked, i tested out some of the quirkiness that i had been seeing. safari no longer bombs out on the pages that it was doing so on, and everything appears to be perfectly stable again. i even used isquint to encode a folder full of shows overnight since this was the app that caused the stress that lead to the last kernel panic. this morning, no kernel panic, and isquint had completed its job. all looks well, but the last quirky thing i need to test out is a video chat with my father. i was able to do a video chat with my brother without an issue, but it would fail with my father even though my brother and father could video chat with each other. i will test that one out over the next few days. hopefully all will go well.

although i probably went into way too much detail, i know that at least my brother would be interested in knowing what i had done to solve the problem, so if for no other reason, i wrote all this for him and myself. also, you never know when a simple google search may bring someone here and help them out.

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

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.