blog.circusgeek

a personal blog with nerdy bits thrown in

Category: Technology

  • Anniversary, and dinner at a friends

    Ciao VitoLast night Kelly and I went out to celebrate our 4th wedding anniversary. Our anniversary was technically Thursday, but we went out for dinner after work yesterday instead. Kelly picked me up from work after a work happy hour (last one in the current office, I move to a new location in a couple weeks), stopped at home, and then walked down Alberta Street to the restaurant Ciao Vito. We arrived a bit early for our reservation so we went next door to Mash Tun for a beer and a visit with their friendly staff. Dinner was delicious, I had the Sugo of Pork dish, which was very good (and very filling) and Kelly had some kind of fried cheese thing (can’t find on the online menu) and a caprese salad for her dinner. Everything was wonderful, and the staff were friendly and welcoming. It was a very nice and low-key dinner experience, I recommend the restaurant. After dinner we went back to the Mash Tun for another couple pints before walking home.

    After getting home Kelly wanted to watch Serenity (I love her!), though sadly I was exhausted and fell asleep on the couch with the cat about halfway through, waking up at 2 or 3 in the morning and shuffling upstairs to plop in bed.

    Tonight we went out to dinner at a friends place in Hillsboro. Had a great time out… chatted, ate fajitas, drank beer, and got to see Battlefield Bad Company in action. The game looks like fun, too bad it’s not out for the PC. Grrr.

    In related gaming news, I’ve rediscovered OpenArena recently. It’s free and works on Mac, Linux and PC, check it out and get your frag on! 🙂

  • Since the trip…

    Since the last post, I had a nice end of my two week vacation. A couple relaxing days that allowed me to get back into our timezone. During that time I also discovered that Belmont Station carries the Bruges beer that Kelly and I had much of on our trip, Brugse Zot, so I picked up a couple bottles of that. Hooray!

    Last Wednesday Kelly and I had M & B over for dinner, to thank them for watching over our house and our cat, and I figured that would be as good a time as any to tap my keg of Guinness. The countdown begins. Tapping it proved to be more complicated than I’d thought. The first problem was that I hadn’t tightened the stout faucet all the way, and when I first went to lock the tap on, beer sprayed everywhere. Damn! Once I’d fixed that, the tap wouldn’t lock down easily (making me wonder for a bit whether I’d picked up the wrong tap). Finally realized that it just needed a bit more ‘elbow grease’ than other taps, and finally got the delicious black stuff flowing Yum!

    Kelly and I went out to my hometown on Friday after work for a belated birthday dinner for Kelly. We went to this newly opened Chinese place, the food was mediocre, but it was still a nice dinner. Afterwards we drove to my folks place for dessert (ice cream cake, yum!) and I got to spend time playing with my rapidly growing nephew, Bart. After getting home I had a couple pints of Guinness (naturally) while getting distracted by this Comcast site Fancast, where you can watch full episodes of TV shows… I ended up watching some of the original Battlestar Galactica. I hadn’t seen it in many, many years.

    Last night we went out with Mr. & Mrs. Ghost Dog to the Goose Hollow Inn for delicious sandwiches and beers, before coming back to our house for a bit. Had a great time, and it’d been quite some time since we’d seen the GDs.

    Today, finally, the unseasonably cold and rainy weather broke, and Kelly and I were able to spend a few hours outside doing yardwork. Soon, we’ll be grilling some chicken kabobs on the barbecue. Hooray!

    Between all this, was a crazy first week back to work. Loads to do in the next few weeks for the next software release. Gonna be nuts.

    Oh, also, discovered a new web comic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Enjoy.

    Edited to add one more thing: My friend and coworker Aaron recently blogged about this news site The Big Picture, where I found this photo/article about an uncontacted tribe in Brazil. Really found the photos amazing, imagine not being in contact with the ‘modern’ world and having a helicopter buzzing around your tribe’s camp. What must have been going through their minds.

  • If Facebook were real

    Caught this little gem from Digg just now and had to repost it here, because well, it’s hilarious. And sadly true.

    This video represents the downside of being too connected. Sometimes it can be good (yielding some favorable contact with long-lost friends), sometimes it can be awkward and slightly uncomfortable (being contacted and ‘friended’ by people who you might rather not bother with), and sometimes it can be outright weird. I’m sure anybody who’s ventured into the MySpace or Facebook worlds have had all three happen at one time or another. I’m beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t just work towards removing my profiles, and going back ‘off the grid’ and return to relative obscurity. 🙂

  • Backups

    Yesterday I picked up a 500 GB external hard drive, and connected it to my Airport Extreme so both Kelly and I can take advantage of the OS X‘s automated, versioned backup goodness that is Time Machine. I got my MacBook Pro all backed up yesterday, and Kelly’s is working at it now. It’s pretty nice, specifically because with very little attention, Kelly and my Mac’s will be fully backed up… and, the drive shows up and can be used by my Windows and Linux machines to use for backups too. Nice.

  • 4 gigabyte Horse Brass

    Last Friday I ordered some RAM for both Kelly and my laptops (through my work’s IT department, saving about $40 from what I’d have paid otherwise). After ordering I was told it would be 3 to 5 business days. I arrived to work this morning and had the RAM already. Woohoo! So I borrowed the tiny screwdriver required and upgraded my MacBook Pro from 2 GB to 4GB (the maximum), and later tonight upgraded Kelly’s MacBook too. So now we’re both maxed out on what we can do to these machines, and it was massively cheaper than adding such an upgrade through Apple (each 4 GB kit I just bought came to just under $100, the same upgrade when ordering the laptop at Apple’s site is a whopping $700!)

    Before going home I met Snooks at Horse Brass for some beers, joined later by Kelly. Mmmmm… delicious Beamish on nitro.

  • If you’re going to San Francisco…

    just say no.. be sure to wear… oh hell with that. 🙂 I found out today that my manager at SuperSweetCo really wanted me to go to a web designer conference, An Event Apart, held in San Francisco. The event is in 3 days. So at the end of the day, with the help of a coworker, we got everything all booked up. I fly out of Portland this Wednesday afternoon, arriving in SF at about 7:30, with 4 other fellow designers from the company. The conference is held both Thursday and Friday at The Palace Hotel, where I’ll be staying. I arranged to fly out on Friday afternoon (perhaps missing the very end of the conference) so I could have the weekend at home. Should be a fun, and at least very interesting and informative, time. I’m sure I’ll be writing about it while I’m there, providing the hotel room has some damned signal.

  • CircusTroubles

    Not sure what the heck I did, but sometime over the weekend, I managed to do something bad to circusgeek. This meant that anyone trying to reach the blog for the past couple days has either not been able to reach it at all, or it’s been insanely slow.

    Over the weekend, I did a number of things to the server, from trying to tweak the config files, to upgrading software (including upgrading my blog software, which, in case you haven’t noticed, includes some new sidebar items, like a tag cloud view of categories, a list of recent comments, and an inline login form). All of the blog upgrades I did yesterday. Most of the meatier server changes I did on Saturday. Of course, I was at home, connected directly to the server, so it wasn’t until last night while chatting with Snooks that I discovered that things weren’t working properly.

    I spent the past couple hours prodding at things, trying to figure out what was causing the slow connections to the server, only to finally try a reboot of the server. Magically, everything seems to be working normally again. I’m still not sure what was going on, the system wasn’t displaying any unusual behavior, but regardless, everything seems to be fine now (crosses fingers).

  • I broked the internets!

    Haven’t written in a few days. I intended to, but I couldn’t. I broked the internets! 🙂

    It all started Saturday, which was truely a day to myself. I didn’t leave the house except for some grocery shopping (translated: I bought beer and some meat to grill). I spent most of the day tinkering around my home office, backing up data, updating software, and researching some new computer equipment to buy. Fun stuff, yeah? Yeah, well it was for me. And, it was nice to spend a day doing practically nothing. Not seeing anybody, not going anywhere, just hanging out by myself. Well, me and the cat I guess.

    The research was for a new WiFi access point. I have been running on a dinosaur, the original Apple Airport (known as the Graphite model) since around the year of our lord 2000 AD. It was old, slow, and though it worked, I’ve recently been using the wireless a lot more (what with the new laptop) and it’s shocking how long it takes to transfer a large file over that old, slow WiFi connection. I also wanted to move to a WiFi router, something new that could take the place of my old WiFi access point and my old ethernet switch. One power plug instead of two, one or two less cables snaking along the wall, etc. This, after loads of research, lead me to the newly released Apple Airport Extreme (1 gigabit ethernet version).

    While out grocery shopping Saturday I tried to visit the nearest Mac store and buy one, but they’d closed. Oh well. I spent the night surfing the net and watching season 3 of Black Books, a very funny / snarky English comedy series.

    Sunday however, I was able to purchase my new toy. So I got home with it in the afternoon and set in getting it all hooked up. One thing I knew was going to happen in all of this was that my current setup was going to break a lot… my old setup was such that my broadband modem fed into my Linux server, which then fed to my ethernet switch, which then fed into my old WiFi access point. Long story short, a LOT of configuration was done on my Linux server to get all this working… and I had to undo it all, and do a lot of new stuff, to get everything back up and running.

    I had however underestimated how much of a pain some of it would be. Getting my network up and running and getting my computers online was really easy. That part only took 10 minutes. What was more troublesome was getting my Linux server happy again, and then discovering some things that meant some larger changes to my setup (new nameservers, routing for my domain name, port forwarding, blah blah blah). What that all means is that Circusgeek was offline for a couple few days until everything got sorted out. Which, as far as I can tell, happened today sometime. Now I’m finally able to post to my blog again. Hence, the long-winded post. 🙂

    Now that it’s all running, things are faster and I’m happier overall. More than anything, I’m just glad to have everything running again. What a pain in the ass!

  • Nerds, Beers & Pubs

    After a long and hectic work week (including some big news for SuperSweetCo), I had a day to myself.

    Actually, it kind of started last night with my friend Miranda coming by to hang out, stopping me from working until the wee hours. She and Brian are in the process of buying a house just a few blocks away (hooray!) and she didn’t want to go home and pack (again) so she came by for a bit. Later last night I tried to watch some of the backlog of shows we’ve recorded on our PVR but I fell asleep around 11pm or so. I was pooped.

    This weekend was Kelly’s ‘school weekend’ (classes on Friday night and all day Saturday) which generally means I sleep in late on Saturdays. Today however I woke up around 8:30am to the sounds of hammering, sawing, pounding, and yelling by the construction workers building a new house across the street. Fortunately I’d gotten a fair amount of sleep and wasn’t too cranky at being so rudely awakened on a Saturday morning. I got out of bed and made coffee before proceeding to do a bunch of little things around the house, like paying bills online, hanging some blinds in the master bath, cleaning the kitchen, etc.

    Macforce Summer Blast 07Around 2:00pm I got out of the house to run some errands before Kelly got home. Prior to leaving town for our little vacation last week, I’d seen a flier for a nerdy computer expo in town held by a local Apple specialist shop MacForce, with a grand prize drawing for an iPhone, so I figured I’d go down there. Wasn’t very exciting, but it was free, and they were serving free BBQ. Since I’d arrived later in the day I had already missed the drawings for some software I’d have liked, but oh well, I had better things to go do…

    Belmont StationAfter leaving the Mac expo thing, I went to one of Portland’s two “Beer Heaven’s”, Belmont Station, to pick up some beers for the weekend. I was a bit disappointed that they didn’t have a few things I was looking for (like Adnam’s SSB) but still picked up a Black Sheep Ale and some Abbot Ale. Such a great store, and I was glad to see it was pretty busy. Was able to snap one shot w/o a bunch of people in it.

    County Cork, Portland ORI got home around 4pm and finished cleaning the kitchen before Kelly got home from her class. A bit after Kelly got home we decided to go check out an Irish pub that we’d been meaning to go to for a couple years now, the County Cork. Not a bad little spot, though when you first walk in it doesn’t seem too impressive, the bar area is rather plain, but the rest of the main room is nice enough. There’s also a little patio area out back, all enclosed with tables and umbrellas. Kelly got a Lagunitas Censored on cask (which was really really good) and I got a Murphy’s stout (it’d been a long time since I’d had that on tap anywhere). Overall a pretty decent spot, though we opted to move on.

    Kelly and I both had a hankering for the Welsh Rarebit at Moon & Sixpence, so we headed on up there for some food. Had a nice time hanging out there, and the food hit the spot. After that we decided to get home, Kelly was tired from her day at class and wanted to relax in front of the television.

    Oh, also, this post goes out to Aaron. You asked for it. 🙂

  • Tech supporter, and Independance Day

    Happy "intellectually-challenged people burn shit up and kill people" day. Ugh.

    I played tech support / web nerd for some friends earlier this week. On Monday I helped my friend Jenn get an old laptop onto her home WiFi connection so she could stream music to her basement. She paid me plenty with beer and some BBQ’d meat though, so it was far from a chore. On Tuesday I met Snooks at Kennedy School and helped him sort out his troubles with his new hosting service (mis-configured DNS entries for the domain name) and helped him get WordPress (the blog software I use) installed and set up. I then did some basic training on how things work, how to tweak the themes, etc. I also had too much beer, since the following day (4th of July) off, so by the end I’m sure I wasn’t much help.

    On Wednesday Kelly and I slept in a bit, and then I got up and took care of some computer tasks and sipped on coffee for a bit. Later we ran to the local grocery store and then went to a nearby friends BBQ. Had a good time, though I was pretty tired from the heat. It was about 90 degrees here, and I tend to get tired and cranky when it’s warmer than 75. Had a good time though, there was a sprinkler running, which I stood in frequently to keep cool, and later we were treated to many many large and very illegal fireworks from nearby houses. Some were quite impressive (those that start with the telltale thump, and then a very loud bang as bits of magnesium, carbon, phosphorus, and other elements spread out in large colorful bursts. While on one hand I enjoy them, the other hand recognizes why these large fireworks (and even smaller cousins, bottlerockets) are illegal here… so much can go wrong, especially when it’s been so hot and dry. I at one point ran home and watered the lawn for a while to be extra careful, just in case a random bit of burning material landed in my dry lawn. Anyway, I ate too much delicious food, and then came home to watch a bit of TV before going to bed to start the work day. Well, because of the holiday, the morons were out lighting firecrackers until well past 1am (I think I finally fell asleep somewhere around 2am). Urgh. Stupid 4th of July. 🙂