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I decided my glasses were boring after seeing a pair Andrea was walking around with:

Spiffy, but don’t clear up my vision quite as well. Just another Monday morning in the office…

Friday night Aoody + Suzi set up a karaoke night, which sounded like a good idea at the time We had a really good time, and definately needed to unwind a little after what had been more than a little challenging of a week. With Aoody being my driver, meant I didn’t go until he did, though the last few stragglers of us were in no real hurry, finally quitting around 3a.m. That’s when I remembered Aoody’s car doesn’t exactly have a working heater and so needs the windows down a little to stop it freezing up the windshield. 3a.m at 10F in a car with no heat and open windows. I felt sorry for Sadie + Erin stuck in the back more than anything! I guess their revenge was calling me at 10a.m the following morning and singing loudly into my hear, but it did precede a nice brunch at Alba’s and then meeting up later for dinner at Jeff + Angel’s. My Sunday was then filled with three NFL games and two DVD’s. It was a good weekend.

But, at least one good thing came out of work last week. Our helpdesk system sometimes kicks up some good ones, and this was a peach:

Problem Detail:
We had a staff meeting today in the SPED dept. Part of the meeting was celebrating the birthdays of some of our staff with brownies and ice cream. One of the staff is in Tununak, and participated via SKYPE. Well he wants his birthday treat. We saved him some. Here is the problem, how can I send this to him via email, or fax. Is there a digital way to send objects through internet servers????? He wants to have his cake and eat it too.

Action Taken:
After exhaustive research on the interwebs and discussion within the department, it has been suggested the only way is to bring a new cake to TAI (preferably double-chocolate with a nice frosting too) so we can explore all available options and, provided we don't get thirsty in the meantime, try to come up with a usable solution that doesn't involve dilithium crystals.

I got a piece of cake out of it Her ticket was submitted half in jest after her earlier “where’s the any key?” question which got a half-decent response I guess, but has now decided to hold back on future abuse of the helpdesk otherwise when she has a genuine problem, she might not get a sensible answer…

No apologies for how long this page may end up taking to load with half a dozen videos! I’ve only got a 64k upload connection so I bet it took longer for me to upload them than for you to download them

We’d been pretty lazy today, so headed out with Rocky for a walk along the river in the afternoon. Seems like it’s always very quiet going for a walk along the river as there’s no kids round there, whereas walking through the village they’re everywhere! We headed over to the south bank of the river by the airport where Kat hadn’t been before and was pretty cool:

Looking back across the river, the runway is right on the bank and the in the distance, you can just about see the school building. It’s very visible when you’re actually there since it’s the biggest building in the village and happens to be painted bright blue! This is the opposite end of the runway from where the terminal building and the other photos and video were taken:

But, onto some videos! First up, with the ice forming in layers, on the banks it often breaks away so you can pick it up and throw. No particular reason why though!

After timing it right for an airplane taking off a few days ago, we then had one coming in to land right over us:

The cold effects people in weird ways. Not much else to say on this one really:

Figured I should get in on the act next. I dunno, might have just been something in the air, or Rocky’s natural behaviour finally rubbing off onto us!

We then got treated to another takeoff right over our heads. There weren’t any passengers in the plane and the pilot obviously saw us waving (though probably thought it was a couple of kids!), as they don’t usually bank and turn like this, honest!

After taking a rest by sitting around on the ice, Rocky realised that he was basically surrounded by chew toys. Not sure why he thinks chunks of ice are the best things in the world, but he does!

We had fun, and it wasn’t all that cold either so was nice to mess around for a bit. Coming back into the village past the airport, a little ice hole had been formed by people coming and chipping ice. Is a bit of weird spot, and only about 3 feet across, but this is basically what you do when chipping ice to got into the water tank – break off chips of ice from the frozen lakes:

Most of the locals head to a lake north of the village just off the trail up to Bethel, but guess someone hasn’t been wanting to head that far. Also around the area, along with numerous fox trails, were what looks to be hare tracks:

Made me of think of Jessy, though don’t think she’d be quite as happy in this kinda weather! Too many foxes and people out hunting too – often see spent shotgun cartidges along the river and through the tundra.

We didn’t make it to the basketball matches, but the girls team won again. Not sure about the junior teams who been at an invitational just outside of Bethel – some of Kat’s kids had gone, so sure we’ll find out all about it on Monday as it’s the first time most of them well have been away with a sports team since they were just 4th/5th graders!

Bugger, just realised after that last post was published it’s Friday 13th! Tempting fate to move domain, web + e-mail server today? Hope not

I’d go along with that – probably more reliable than the BBC weather forecast!

It’s not often I trackback to other blogs as I’m not a fan of posts that simply link elsewhere and you don’t actually end up with any story or breaking news. But, I’ve followed Jeremy’s blog over at Linux Questions for a while now, and his latest article was just beautiful!

Like many, even those that aren’t necessarily big Linux advocates, I’m bored with statistics and reports trying to prove Windows servers are more cost-effective, econimcal, stable, secure and easier to manage than Linux servers. It’s quite simply untrue. The quote in question claimed “Windows 2003 Server, in fact, led the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux with nearly 20 percent more annual uptime“, which is like pulling a rabbit out of my man-sized ass. You’re needing to run into some *serious* problems to have a margin of uptime that different.

One sentence I just loved from Jeremy’s article was:

“When you get a bunch of Linux boxes setup by MCSE’s it’s no wonder why things came out like they did”

which is quite true. Even though many reports aren’t backed by Microsoft, they do seem to be being conducted primarily by Windows-based/trained engineers (if that’s even the correct description of these people). I doubt many of these reports that look at things from a test-bed environment have to actually run them in the real world.

But, the final sentence was wonderful, poking fun at the Yankee Group whom were behind the report:

“The completely hilarious thing about this is that the Yankee Group has absolutely no business even talking about uptime when they can’t keep their own web server up for more than 20 days. It incidentally runs Windows 2000.”

Check out Jeremy’s full post here – http://jeremy.linuxquestions.org/blog/_archives/2006/6/7/2013415.html

Found this pretty funny. I guess the site owners didn’t find too clever, but then I’d like to know what CMS they’re using that didn’t provide even basic authentication checks and would allow something like Googlebot run through and remove all the content simply by following a hyperlink to a page editing screen

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I’m a fan of the Bastard Operator from Hell stories, but have come across Confessions of a Network Manager which looks very cool! Has only been going for a couple of weeks or so (though the feedburner archives seem messed up back to September for some posts), but is some guy that just causes problems and makes life hell for others. Can definately associate with some of the things he talks about and worth a read!

Bill Gates did not seem impressed at all, but here’s a nice video clip explaining the history of Ctrl-Alt-Deland how it came about

Found this via livelocker, a pretty cool new media aggregation site which is worth checking out.

I’ve been listening to a few podcasts recently to learn some Japanese, but thanks to Lorraine, we can now learn a little Chinese too: