This is funny
Make sure the coffee is safely on the desk and no food is in your mouth before watching this. It brought tears to my eyes from laughing so hard.
Make sure the coffee is safely on the desk and no food is in your mouth before watching this. It brought tears to my eyes from laughing so hard.
We used to run SMS 2.0 when I first started here. It was ok but basically a pig for what it did for us so I ditched it a few years ago. Well the one thing SMS did allow you to do was software inventory. Recently we came up with a situation where we wanted to get a firm count on how many licenses we were using and I had no easy way to do it so I started searching for a free way to do it, not expecting to find much. Well I was pleasantly surprised to find a freeware product called Lansweeper Pro.
It is in a word, awesome. The only catch is if you don’t have some technical expertise, setting it up could be a bit rough. It isn’t case of running setup and clicking NEXT a few times. It is an ASP application where you have to set up the SQL back end for it. Luckily if you have some basic windows admin experience and can follow directions, setting it up shouldn’t be too bad. I followed the 20 or so pages of steps and got my installation up and running with only a few hiccups along the way.
Once it is installed, getting it populated with information about your clients is easy. There is no software to be installed on the clients, simply an executable to be run that can be included in the logon script. Once it is run the software becomes populated with pretty much anything you wanted to know about the machines on your network. The reporting is extensive and allows tasks like tracking license usage become a no-brainer. It is GREAT software.
Yea non-techies will find the above rant boring, sorry. In local news, John McCain won the Florida primary and Hilary stomped Obama in the Democratic primary even though it means nothing. It is so stupid. Evidently Florida and Michigan decided to move up their primaries to earlier dates so they would become more significant players in the process. Well for some reason the democratic party didn’t like this and decided that they would not recognize the results from these two states to penalize them. It is asinine, I mean wtf?
I still am up in the air between Obama and Hilary. Obama is a powerful speaker whom instills confidence just listening to him, a polar opposite to our sitting president. I like the fact that he hasn’t been in the “system” that long, hoping he has not yet been corrupted by it yet like so many others. I think it is awesome that a black man has a shot at becoming president. On the negative side I think Republicans WANT him to win because they think he is beatable because of his limited time in congress. I am sure they also are counting on the underlying racism that still exists in America to be helpful as well.
With Hilary, she just isn’t that likable and comes off poorly with her public image. She is very polarizing for some reason and the people that don’t like her, REALLY don’t like her, namely Republicans. I think they are much more scared of Hilary as capable of winning the election. To me, the upside of Hilary is it is almost like getting Bill back in the white house. Although Hilary will have the title, you know Bill will be involved. I liked Clinton as president, I could care less if he got a bj. Hilary has views on the war and health care that I like and the federal budget under Bill actually was operating at a surplus, all great things.
It’s obvious to me that the Republicans are shoe horning McCain as their candidate. I have always liked John McCain but there are two things that bother me. First when he ran against Bush, Bush smeared McCain all over the place. After the fact McCain stepped right in line and kissed Bush’s ass. Second, I hate McCain’s stance on Iraq, he wants to stay there. That fact alone makes me dismiss him as a candidate. Being in Iraq is killing us literally and figuratively. Plus the guy is older than dirt, I don’t think he would live through his term.
I read this letter in the paper today.
Editor, Daily News:
This letter is for the education of local drivers who are unaware of Florida State Statute 316.126(1) (E31), as I was the other night at 10:15.
My wife and I were returning from Naples on U.S. 41 in moderate traffic. We noticed two police cars with flashing lights parked back-to-back on the side of the road near Rattlesnake Hammock Road. The police officers were in their cars; there were no other vehicles or people near them.
I was unable to move into the adjoining left lane because of a vehicle beside me, so I passed the two police cars by continuing in the same lane.
Wrong! I had just violated the statute cited above for passing an emergency vehicle with lights flashing without vacating the lane next to it. I was unaware of that statute so was guilty as charged. This resulted in a citation and $120.50 fine.
The entrapment procedure of the Collier County Sheriff’s Office is shameful, at best. There was no other purpose for these police officers to be parked by the side of the road. They were able to arrest three of us within five minutes. I have no idea how many others were ensnared that night.
I guess this is a good source of income for Collier County, as they feel the pinch of lower property taxes.
I now understand why local drivers tend to clog the left lanes. But I still haven’t figured out why they rarely use turn signals.
I think this is pretty shitty. To have cops sitting in the middle median with the lights flashing for no other reason than to nab people unaware of an obscure law is rather ridiculous. I would certainly hope there were more pressing needs for the sheriff’s department to attend to.
Looking for Wii buddies – my wii email address is [email protected]
My Wii number if you want to talk Wii to Wii is 7087215877291611. Have Wii, want to mingle.
So on the way home from work on Friday I stopped at Sam’s Club to get some bulk items we were running low on. My first stop was in the video game aisle where I picked up Super Mario Galaxy which is supposedly one of the best games out there for the Wii. So after picking up my items I head to the checkout to pay for the stuff. It’s a bit annoying, when you buy video games you pay for them at the checkout but then have to go wait in line at the customer service desk to pick them up so that is what I did, waited 5 minutes, got the game and headed for the door. Sam’s has this incredibly annoying policy of having a person at the door check your receipt to make sure you aren’t stealing stuff. It’s ridiculous, something my Dad would never endure, of course he would never set foot into a Sam’s Club to begin with. So anyway I hand the door guy my receipt and he counts my items. I am impatiently waiting for him to hand me back the receipt when he stops and counts again. He says “You have 14 items, the receipt says 13, you have to go over there…” pointing back to the customer service desk I just had left. I immediately got very angry and protested as I saw a line 5 deep at the customer service desk. “I just came from there, why do I need to go stand back in line for a mistake by your clerk” The guy said that was the only spot where they can fix it. I stared at him in disbelief for a moment and then angrily went over to the desk with a scowl on my face. Monday morning QB style, I should have taken the 40 pound bag of softener salt I wasn’t charged for and dropped it on the floor and walked out. Damn that would have been perfect.
So after waiting another 5 minutes or so I get to talk to the same clerk that I did to pick up the video game. I immediately start griping to her, saying how it was crazy to make customers go back into another line and wait when Sam’s clerks f’s something up. She apologized and agreed with me. She ran the 5 dollar transaction for the salt and I went back to Mr Door checkout man. I flash him the receipt and say “Here!” Nope the delays are not over. Now he has to take the information on both receipts and transcribe it to an error log he has sitting on a stool by the door. There were maybe a half dozen other entries already on it. I was incredibly annoyed. I love all the “stuff” Sam’s has at decent prices. I HATE dealing with the store. You almost feel like you just slept with a whore when you walk out of that place.
So my mood was plenty miserable after that cluster f. Luckily I had a traffic jam to pile on to the bad feelings. Traffic was gridlocked all the way up to the interstate. It took me at least 45 minutes to travel the 14 miles to my house. When I opened the garage door and saw Ali wasn’t back yet from ballet I was even more annoyed. Evidently she got caught up in the same traffic nightmare on her way back.
Late Friday night after we watched our Friday night tivo-fest I popped in Super Mario Galaxy to give it a try. Immediately I was almost embarrassed by how juvenile the game is. The dialogue that pops up in the chat bubbles with mushroom people, talking stars and other silly looking characters is at a 6 year old’s reading level. However it doesn’t change the fact that the game is a buffet for your senses. Playing the game requires using the nunchuk. You control direction with the nunchuk in the left hand and do things like jump and shoot star bullets with the right hand. It seems a bit awkward at first, especially because there is no conventional camera angles you are in space so conventional physics don’t always apply. The bottom line is it is fun. They do a nice job of incorporating the free flowing ability of the controllers into the game. I have discovered 3 or 4 galaxies so far and entered the zone where Mario gets to transform into a bee. It’s two player mode is kind of different. It’s really like one and a half player mode. If a second player wants to join in they get the ability to take over the star shooting part of the challenge which could be helpful as things get real hectic. It’s great fun, even if it is geared for kids with only one digit in their age.
On Saturday I was very busy. I had a string of technical successes that made me feel good. I replaced the brush motor on my one ailing Roomba to bring it back to life. Ripping the Roomba apart into various little pieces and putting it back together and having it still work made me feel good, much like the rush I got during my pc/printer repair tech days. Then I swapped out my old Directv receiver and card with a used one I bought off ebay. At first I thought it could be as simple as moving my existing card over to the new receiver. That didn’t work and I had to get customer service involved. After about 15 minutes on the phone I was up and running, so much for a $90 charge to have a tech come out and do the same thing. The final tech success was getting the HDTV antenna in place for optimal reception, allowing me to get clear HDTV on several stations. I spent some time watching the Winter X-Games in HDTV. Wow, the detail is pretty amazing, it looked great. It makes me anxious to upgrade my 6 year old Sony projection to a more modern, 16:9 big screen.
The weather this weekend was cooler. I mowed and weed whacked the property on Saturday and hardly broke a sweat. As I was riding around on the mower I took a moment to think it was sort of wild that I was out mowing grass at the end of January, only in Florida…
Sunday was a decent day. Ali had to do some stuff related to her race for a good chunk of the morning. I played housemaid for much of the morning as I stripped the bed, washed the sheets, swept the floors, folded laundry and emptied the dishwasher. Sometimes I get annoyed that I wind up having to do these sort of chores, sometimes I don’t mind. I didn’t mind too much on Sunday.
I had Ali buzz my hair down on Sunday afternoon. I look like I am right out of the Marine Corp once again. Late Sunday afternoon we went back to the track to run again. We ran an extra lap, making the total distance a little more than 2 1/4 miles. I felt pretty good during the run and more importantly don’t feel too bad today. Ali actually signed us up to run the largest 5k in the area in mid-February. It should be fun. It feels good to get out there running with Ali again.
I helped make dinner Sunday night. “Making dinner” basically meant working the microwave and stirring a pot of mac n cheese so the noodles didn’t stick. It was hardly cooking but Ali appreciated the effort anyway. Sunday night Ali and I played some Wii tennis. Ali later took the Wii fitness test and checked in at 51 years old in Wii age. It was a big improvement from her initial test that calculated her Wii age at 68. I later took the test and flashed a disappointing 40. Two of the challenges were boxing which sucks. I don’t know what it is but boxing is the one game where my controller movements don’t seem to translate to the screen accurately.
Just bombard my house with these political bullshit messages on the phone. It is out of control, every day we get at least two of them. Politicians are f’ing stupid if they think calling people’s homes with automated messages is going to do anything but piss them off. Idiots.
I’ll be damned, that simple change fixed my upgrade issue going from Vista Business to Vista Ultimate. Basically all I had to do was “turn off” 3 Windows services. The fix as I found posted here, goes like this:
Go to Control Panel >Programs and Features.
On the right side click on “Turn Windows features on or off.” Turn off
these three things:
Microsoft.NET Framework 3.0
Remote Differential Compression
Windows DFS Replication Service
That’s it. I am so glad I stumbled across this information, else I would have easily spent countless hours trying to fix the issue. So now that I have Ultimate running here is my quick report on the changes I noticed.
The Media Center aspect of Ultimate is cool. It recognized my ATI HDTV card without issue. I flipped through the couple hdtv stations I received over the air. I need to mess with the antenna position to maximize what I receive. Ultimate also comes with something called DreamScenes. DreamScenes allows you have an animated background on your desktop as opposed to a static image. Pretty much any .avi or .wmv can be used. I pulled down a few and tried them out. It is a real cool effect. My only hesitation is the extra cpu load from it. There area bunch of additional media related items included with Ultimate as well as some additional games, including a Texas Hold Em game. I really didn’t have time to dig into much more but I’ll pass along other gems as I come across them.
This weekend I have a decent mental list going on. I’ll be keeping busy. Rambo comes out today. I heard it is surprisingly good, much like Rocky Balboa was. I will definitely want to see that one in the theater. I got a used brush motor for the Roomba yesterday, I want to try to get that installed this weekend so my floor sweeping trio is once again back at full strength.
Shortly before Christmas I decided I would take advantage of the “Anytime Upgrade” in Vista to upgrade the copy of Vista Business I was running to Vista Ultimate. I envisioned that all I had to do was pay for the upgrade, download a few files to unlock the added features and boom, you’re done. Well I quickly found out that wasn’t the case.
Yes you download a key that unlocks the software and also store it in your “digital locker” with Microsoft. However to perform the upgrade you need an Anytime Upgrade DVD which I did not have. Microsoft will send you one for free but it takes 7-10 business days. So although I was disappointed that I didn’t score instant gratification, I eagerly awaited my upgrade dvd to arrive. I waited and waited and waited. Well two weeks had passed and I did not receive the dvd yet. I contacted MSFT and asked where the hell my dvd was. They didn’t know what happened but said they would send out another one right away. Once again I wait and wait and wait. The 10 day window passes and I still have not received the damn dvd. I contact them again, this time even more irate. Again they ship another dvd out, this time via next day air. On Tuesday I came home to not one but TWO dvd’s waiting at my door. Evidently the second one that was sent via regular mail finally found it’s way to me on the same day as the overnight one. The first disc MSFT sent still is MIA.
So anyway last night I finally get to attempt the upgrade, a full month after I paid for it. I already had Vista running, I figured upgrading to Ultimate would be a no brainer. Well after 4 hours and four failed upgrade attempts I knew better. The first time through it got to the very end of the upgrade and did it’s final restart. Just before the big payoff the dreaded blue screen of death pops up and the computer reboots and automatically rolls back the upgrade, putting me back at square one. Once it got done it told me that there was a problem with my audio driver and I needed to update it. This made no sense to me since I was already running Vista with this audio driver for the last 6 months or so, but whatever. I track down the latest and greatest drivers for my audio chip, install it and give the upgrade another shot.
Again I get through to the end of the upgrade when instead of a blue screen I am presented with a simple error box that says “Windows could not configure one or more system components. To install
windows, restart computer and then restart the installation” WTF does that mean? So you click ok and once again you are rolled back to the prior version of Vista whether you like it or not. So then I thought that maybe it didn’t like my HDTV card so I pulled it and ran the upgrade again. Once again I get to the very end and am greeted by the exact same message. It wouldn’t be nearly as frustrating if the process didn’t take so damn long, literally it takes at least an hour each time I went through the process, maybe a little more. Before bed I fired off another upgrade attempt and again this morning I came out to the exact same f’in message.
So as I was eating my breakfast this morning I was looking up the error and came across an interesting post describing the same situation as I was seeing. They said that the fix for the problem is to turn off 3 Windows services before running the upgrade. It makes little sense to me that the customer would need to do this to successfully upgrade their Vista version but what the hell, it’s worth a shot. So before I left for work I made the changes and fired off another upgrade. Hopefully when I get home tonight my system will be up and running Vista Ultimate. If the fix works I will post more details here. Only MSFT could make upgrading Vista to Vista so difficult.
I also got my used Directv receiver I bought on ebay yesterday. The next time my existing receiver flakes out I am going to pull it and slap this one to see if it makes a difference.
I am finally trying to sell our old Sony laptop on ebay. Since I have the 3 Lenovo laptops sitting around there is no reason I need to keep the Sony in my computing stable. I have some other things I need to get up on ebay as well.
This morning I was sitting in the parking lot of one of our branches waiting for someone to show up to let me in. I was just hanging out, listening to the Stern Show on satellite radio when I noticed an older woman that was outside her Cadillac looking at it. She was looking at the wheels and then she managed to get the hood open and was looking some more. Of course I had to offer my assistance. I asked her what was wrong. She said she saw smoke coming from the right side. As I approached the front of the car it smelled like burned rubber, much like what I experienced when the rear brakes were seized on the party van. I touched the wheel on that side and it was burning hot. I touched the other side and it was much cooler. I told the woman it looked like her disc brake was locked up. She asked me if there were any garages near by (she was from Canada). I mentioned a couple. She asked about the Cadillac dealer in town. I said that was a good idea so I whipped out my Treo and found the number for them on it via the web. She called the dealership and they said they would send out a truck to tow her in. She thanked me for the help and that was that. No big deal.
Spook is the oldest of the two cats, she is probably 14 or 15 years old at this point. For the last decade or so she has been pretty much a loner. She doesn’t interact much with the other cat or us either. She spends most of her time up in the office hanging out on the cat shelf we have mounted there. The only time I had contact with the cat is when she would come under my computer desk and lay on my feet. She loves to lay on feet for some reason. Well recently she has changed.
All of a sudden the cat wants attention. She will even seek it from Nicki. Nicki can be laying there and the cat will come over and start rubbing her ahead against the dog. Spook has become interested in sitting on laps and even being petted by something other than feet. It’s very weird. Ali and I have no idea what brought about the change in personality. We speculated that maybe the all wet cat food diet is doing her good. She has lost a lot of the pudge she was carrying around since we made the switch.
This clip of Bill Clinton falling asleep during some MLK ceremony is quite funny. He had to be drop dead tired he just could not stay awake.
It was pretty shocking that Heath Ledger died. It sounded like he had a pretty hidden substance abuse problem. The family said it was accidental but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was trying to check himself out. It always is amazing to us “common people” how celebrities have as many issues as they do. I guess fame and money can’t buy happiness after all. Well at least he got done filming the new Batman flick before he passed on. It will be weird watching the movie now.
I was talking on the phone with Ali when the internet at home went out. Since we use Vonage it killed the phone call as well. Ali called me on her cell phone and started bitching about Vonage again. Since I did all that work tweaking it out it has been fine. Well going down one time in 3 months apparently is too much for Ali to handle as she went on a gripe fest about it. I got angry about her being angry about it. If it was up to Ali she would go back to Embarq. She seems to forget the months and months of dropped calls and calls that sounded like we were talking through an electrical storm. Plus we paid nearly double what we are now. It’s Ali’s way to focus on minor things and blow them way out of proportion.