Weddings...

So, today, my wife hits me up with the "weekend agenda". Lots of times we wait until Saturday morning to do this, but we've got quite a few things to make happen.... Julie's birthday celebration, various shopping, and arrangements for child care for my sister-in-law's upcoming wedding reception.

Anyway, the groom, Paul, asked me to be in the wedding party this past weekend. I'm happy to do it. His friend can't make it up from home, and I know it can be difficult to find the right person on a compressed schedule. I'm sure he was being pressured to go ahead and ask... In fact, my wife told me he'd be asking, but he wanted to wait for the right time to ask.

Paul's a good guy. He's sentimental. Oh, and he helped me assemble my kids swingset! Heh, seriously, I'm glad to have him as part of our family.

So, I gotta get over to G-Wood Men's Wearhouse and hook my self up with a fitting, drop a deposit, and hope that the clothes arrive in time. I'm sure everything will be great.

Oh, and a colleague of mine at the office is getting married. I mentioned getting fitted, and she said how difficult weddings can be. I sympathize. However, I sincerely hope that her event turns out as wonderful as it can be. She's dealing with lots of the same issues that my sis-in-law is dealing with. Basically people stressing over the details of the event, when the person getting married is probably more focused on the marriage and their lives together.

Oh well. I think we're going to have to take the day before the wedding off to get our house in order, lots of relatives will be in town for "the event". I think I'll see if I can work a 4-day, 10-hour week.

AOL Open Mail Access

So, I have an AIM account, which is a free, unlimited storage mail option. But, I hate ads, and I want some additional functionality, so I use FastMail. Fine.

FastMail allows me to get mail from all my other accounts, by acting as a mail client using the POP protocol.

I thought it was working, but I'm getting failure messages about 2 of 5 times. I get those failures as messages in my mail box, which is pretty annoying. For some reason, I was using port 995, rather than 110. Probably trying to be secure, even though the FastMail POP Links don't have an option for SSL.

So, I visit the About Open Mail Access page, to try and see if I should be using a certain port. As it turns out they have this to say:

"About Open Mail Access

You can now send and receive your AOL/AIM e-mail using any e-mail program, as long as it supports the IMAP protocol. You get all the great features AOL/AIM e-mail has to offer and the flexibility to read and send e-mail via a third-party e-mail client.

Note: IMAP and POP3 are the major standards for reading e-mail. IMAP allows you to read your e-mail directly from the remote e-mail server and the e-mail will remain accessible on the e-mail server even if you use a different computer to access it later. POP3 requires you to download your e-mail to your computer before you can read it and the e-mail is deleted from the e-mail server as soon as it is downloaded, so the only copy of your e-mail is on the one computer used to read it. Due to security issues, e-mail programs that only use the POP3 protocol are unable to connect to the AOL/AIM Mail servers."

Fabulous. I'm going to change to port 110, and see if the message goes away. I'm really getting tired of deleting the failure messages. If not, then I'm going to get upset that FastMail doesn't support IMAP retrieval.

I guess I shouldn't be too upset. It isn't as if I receive mail at that address anyway.

I miss my router...

So, I sold my wireless N router, thinking... oh, I'll just make a better "server box" that does that, and stores files, and serves up my printer(s) and all that such.

I made a SmoothWall box, and that was great, but I hated giving up a running machine. I tried ClarkConnect, but I still hated giving up a "big" box for it, and using "slow" hardware.

In the meanwhile, I just hooked up "raw" to my DSL, which uses a PPPoE connection. Fine, I run "pppoe-setup" in a terminal, and everything is gravy... until I reboot, and have to bring up the interface again by running "/sbin/ifup ppp0" as root.

I'm really starting to think that D-Link Wireless N / Gigabit router and the Gigabit storage box aren't such a bad idea.

Commit... failure

I seriously need to just promise myself to write one entry per day, no matter how small or insignificant....

There, done.. a fresh install of Fedora 8 Live x86_64 using a USB stick... and gnome-blog.

Today, we took Scott outside to play on the swingset. Took a few pictures, but they won't be up for while, because we just don't get around to posting/organizing that often.

Also signed Holly up for the "Everything" plan from Sprint. She's porting from the T-Mobile prepaid we used as a backup when she lost her (my) unlocked GSM Motorola RAZR. A bit excessive on the cost, but maybe she can use the extra features... at least she won't have to worry about running out of minutes. Thanks to my buddy Brandon for the hookup.

Still pondering dropping AT&T Completely, but DSL is awfully cheap, and I'm not ready to commit our home phone to Comcast, or drop it entirely. We finally got our vouchers for discounts on the digital converter boxes. So, now I need to decide which one to buy. OTA digital/HD TV is working pretty good for us on the upstairs HD 30-inch TV, but it's kind of crappy downstairs. Need to get the media center going...

Oh, and the Internet... pppoe-setup on Fedora is quite lame. I might have to build a router, seeing as I sold my Wireless N one, for lack of gigabit switching. Smoothwall has always worked well, but I hate dedicating a whole box to that. I'll probably go with the D-Link Extreme N one. I'm not sure I really want to do ClarkConnect either. If I'm going to go that far, I might as well just run full-out linux on a box for a server. Configuring Fedora doesn't really sound like much fun though... I've got a Celeron 700 with two 10/100 cards and a wireless-b card that works... sigh...

My son went potty...

This morning, my wife called me at work. I thought it might be something with my kids, but this message was definitely more positive than I could have ever hoped.

My two-year-old son, Scott, used the potty. Number 1! Yeah!

Last night, he just kept wanting to play around with it, and we were trying to go to bed. Before going to the sitter today, he used it. Then stuck his head in and said, "yuck". My wife called me after dropping them off and noted that he tried again at the sitter's house

Woot, pull-ups are official now! We got the first set from Holly's aunt and uncle. We were really just kind of using them out of convenience. Scott is now Two, and we've had these two packages of pull-ups since Christmas. We'll have to finish off the packages, and maybe get another, or just move straight to big-boy underwear.

So, now... the real question. what kind of cartoon do I need to get for my two-year-old son's underwear. Spider-Man? Cars? I think I remember wearing "The Incredible Hulk" underoos... maybe I should ask my parents... a poll on my blog might be cool, if only to reveal that nobody actually reads it yet.

Fedora 9... delayed... Preview

Okay, so the release of Fedora got pushed back... probably doesn't matter to anyone, since lots of people who care are running rawhide anyway. Everyone else is probably still running Ubuntu. Heh.

Anyway, I'm still psyched, because the tools in the distro let you make a live USB stick. The details are in the wiki, but since I can't remember the command line tools, and don't have the Windows tools at my disposal (they really need a graphic utility for this on Fedora) I just do a google search for Max Spevack's old article I am Fedora, and so can you!.

USB persistence for the live images is awesome, but I only use a couple of 1 GB sticks, so it isn't that important to me. I still burn and print CD/DVD media anyway.

So, I torrented the x86_64 and i686 live images, and I guess I'll do a wipe and install. For some reason, the upgrade doesn't appeal to me at the moment. Probably something to do with F-spot not starting. and the fact that I never got that Prerlease feature working...

writers block

I think I may have discovered why I don't write as often as I like (besides the fact that blogging at work isn't appropriate for me). I think that a blog post needs to be some major production... as if there needs to be a picture and a long description.

I think random, short posts about what is going on, or what happened each day is probably better. I'll blame Kacie. She inspired me, but man, her posts about her family are pretty hard-core... in a good way, totally.

So, today, I talked to my mom on the phone. I had to confirm her zipcode, because I can never remember. I sent out some framed pictures (from christmas) and a couple of DVDs full of digital pictures (completely unsorted, dupilcates, some she won't care about, etc.)

I guess that means that I need to get on the ball and start organizing my photos. I plan on using F-Spot. But, in a panic, I thought I lost the DVDs that I had already made, so I started to try to at least eliminate duplicates to get the files down to one DVD. GQView worked awesome for that. Then I found the DVD's and shipped it off. Unfortunately, I used a Flat-Rate USPS box, so I probably spent an extra $5.00 sending it. Oh well.

There we go... one post done... tagged up, and ready to roll out.

Media Center Madness - Part Infinity

So, I got rid of my fast Socket P4 chips for cash, or donated them to family members. My two 3.0 chips are gone. My 2.8 GHz chip is gone. My 2.53 GHz chip is with my sister-in-law, leaving me with a 2.0 GHz, 1.5 GHz, and a 2.30 GHz Celeron. What am I going to do now?

I also sold the motherboard I used with an AMD Athlon 3000+ to a friend Meatloaf, who's media center motherboard died. I took the two 1 GB sticks of RAM in there and donated them to my mom-in-law, who's computer is "slow". (Athlon XP 1800+ @ 1.53 GHz w/1 GB RAM and Windows XP, and a ton of startup programs. *Then* I deleted some extra cruft from her startup programs. Hope that helps!) I really don't know what I'm going to do with the 3000+, but if I find a motherboard, I think I'll upgrade her computer with that.

I got an ATI X300SE PCI express video card with passive cooling and DVI/VGA/composite ports. Traded my old PCI FX 5200 for it to Fodeesha. He also had a 8400GS PCIe card with DVI/HDMI/S-Video ports. I plan on using that for something HTPC-related, for sure. I snagged that for a stick of RAM.

I did snag an AMD BE-2300 chip, from my friend, ScootZilla, because his motherboard died, and I have a few sticks of DDR 2. Natrually, I'm thinking about building a 780G-based media center PC with that. A NewEgg search for "AM2 HDMI" lead me to this full-size ECS A780GM-A Motherboard. I might take a chance with it.

I also picked up a couple of Vista MCE remotes at Fry's, after returning a remote that didn't really meet my needs. Thinking I really got violated by buying locally, I was pleased the SIIG CE-000022-S1 Vista Infrared MCE Remote for $12.00 more on NewEgg. Hopefully, I'll get a box set up to test this thing out soon. It should compliment the Media Center Keyboards that I have as well.

If I go with that full-size motherboard, then I'll need to choose an appropriate case. I'm still pretty torn about that. I have a hard time justifying $200 on something, but you certainly can't have a beige tower sitting next to the TV. Cutting mATX out of the equation should at least narrow the choices down... maybe I can get a case tall enough to accommodate my Scythe Ninja tower and run it totally passive, which would rock.

Blogging... for serious, mate.

Wow, having a blog is hard work, for serious. My wife started a blog, and asked me about it. Then my friend Nuno IMs me, asks how my family is doing and then wondered if I had any pictures. My mom has been asking for more pictures of the kids, and I'm not doing my job well enough on that. Then my wife really needs a way to get the pictures she's taking for her weight loss organized and online.

So... I think it's time to make a formal commitment to my blog, and get my digital pictures up and organized. I'm going to stick with LIveJournal, and probably pay to get rid of ads. I'm also going to start using my enhanced Flickr account, that I get for being an AT&T Yahoo! DSL subscriber.

I burned a couple of DVDs to send to my mom, since her Internet situation is spotty, and she should be able to grab those pictures and be inspired and use them in her poetry. We also have some framed pictures to send her as well. Soon, we're going to have to go out and visit too.

Here's to a more regular schedule of updates, and installing more tools on my phone and computer to get content posted. Don't worry, I'll still post up sexy pictures of my computer hardware adventures, as well as those wonderful kids too. It won't all be little posts about my blog, and what I decided to do about it. I was telling Kacie Weldy the other day... "I just have a blog so that I can use it to test out blogging tools, I don't really use it."