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Jason Haslup
jason at haslup dot com

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Mon, 27 Feb 2006

Defrag and Walk
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Yeah, I should have known this, but... lately at work my WinXP computer has been annoyingly slow. Plus, everytimg I logged in I'd have to kill norton anti-virus because its update app (luall.exe) would be spinning madly, taking 100% CPU and 600+mb ram. Terrible. I finally got fed up and submitted a ticket to our IT group. First thing he did? Fire up defrag on my hard drive.

Well, duh. I should have done that right from the start. He also uninstalled and re-installed Norton, so there could have been an issue there, but after defrag got done my computer is zipping along just like it should be. Dummy.

Sidenote: I mentioned in one of my previous posts that I miss having a linux workstation. While still true, I've stopped the bleeding: I grabbed the free VMWare Player and an image that someone put together of the damn small linux distro and tried it out. It's not just pretty damn small, it's pretty damn cool...

It's really helpful to have two monitors at work... so what I do is just take over one monitor with the full-screen instance of VMWare player and leave the other monitor for any WinXP stuff. DSL didn't come with my favorite window manager (sawfish), but so far fluxbox has been pretty good, especially since i primarily am just switching between emacs windows and xterms to all our development linux boxes.

We've actually got a dedicated linux development box on the way and when that's ready I might actually switch to running an xvnc session off of that in a similar fashion. That way I can easily resume that session from anywhere, including home. But until then, I'd recommend VMWare Player in a heartbeat. I actually tried the free server edition that VMWare has and Player performs much better. But give both a try, there are benefits on each side.

And finally... if you get a chance, check our kids site and look on the right-side of the screen for the "Lela Walking" video. Yep... last night Lela decide to try walking around and was having a good ol time entertaining all of us.

Fri, 24 Feb 2006

Spam spam spam
blog

I get tons of spam. I mean *tons*. Lately I've been noticing that even gmail can't really handle all my spam... a lot of my non-spam emails are going into their spam folder. So I end up going through my spam folder looking for emails... just like I used to do when they just showed up in my inbox. So what's the point?

So I don't know what to do... I'd hate to just move to another email address because it's so handy having firstname @ lastname dot com... but I guess that's what got me into trouble in the first place all those years ago (I've had haslup.com for almost 8 years now!).

So here are my options... try out a pay-per-year spam removal service that I've heard is great and keep using firstname@lastname.com, switch to some other name@lastname.com (possibly 'jh' or even just 'j'), or dump every email @lastname.com and go with a new gmail username.

I'm tempted to try out marxmail since it's only $25/year for their most basic service... but then it's still not a fresh start and I'll probably have to go through spam folders, hopefully just not as much.

A new username at gmail would be a nice clean start, maybe just keeping that address for personal, non-website stuff... still check firstname @lastname.com every now and then for stuff. Hmmm...

Alright, enough of the boring talk... more later.

Tue, 21 Feb 2006

Pay for Gervais?
blog

So this article on CNET is pretty interesting... the Ricky Gervais podcast, which I've been listening to and I find absolutely hilarious, is moving to Audible.com and will be $1.99 per episode, or $6.95 for the season which will include "at least four" episodes.

This is the first podcast that I'm aware of that's making the switch to a paid format. I've never really checked out Audible.com's other offering so there might offer similar products, but obviously nothing I've ever found. I'm actually tempted to purchase the second season of the Gervais podcast, mainly because it's a great podcast to listen to on my drive home which is currently 30-40 minutes (but changing to 10 minutes in a month). Very interesting.

If you haven't already, check out Gervais' Guardian UK podcast which started all of this... he and his partners did 12 episodes that are freely available from the Guardian UK site or in iTunes.

Fri, 17 Feb 2006

Happy New Year
blog

Nice... Feb. 17th and I finally wish all my devoted readers a happy new year. Oops.

All is well here in sunny, non-raining Phoenix (up to 120+ days without rain). A couple days ago we closed on our Bozeman house so now we're all clear to close on our new house in Chandler, AZ on March 2nd. We're pretty excited... we're getting the floors redone and the inside painted before we move in so we've scheduled the movers for March 20th. A big thank you to my parents for letting us stay with them for so long... we really appreciate it!

I've been meaning to blog more often so we'll see how that goes... this blog post brought this post on... it's from a lisp blog I read through bloglines and I just wanted to mention it because I like it when companies get their customer service right. It must be the quality gene I get from my dad but it made me want to go out and buy Kensington products. Good for them.

I finally got around to exporting my blogroll on bloglines (my preferred feedreader). You can check out what I read here.

I think I need to switch to a new bloggin platform, something I've been resisting for a while. I'm still running the awesome perl script, bloxsom, and I either need to look at extending it or switching to a service. I think I want to add some tags instead of using categories since they're the rage these days. I'm hoping I can still do that from emacs, maybe roll some of my own elisp to help that out. During all my free time.

Speaking of free time... I started playing World of Warcraft again. It's nice to get back into it, especially since both my brother and my dad are playing. Yep... dad's playing! It's awesome... I can't wait to get into our place and get online with the three of us. I've started a new warlock on Laughing Skull and am only at level 14 but so far it's been fun.

Our girls are doing great. They're almost 14 months now and are just as exciting as ever. Not quite walking around yet but they really seem like they want to. I'm sure that will start sooner than we think (or would like!).

Hmm... what else... oh yeah, I need to start a rant on the Scientific Atlanta high definition DVR that Cox cable uses here in Phoenix. It sucks. But it's the only thing we can use right now... at first I thought it was the only thing period, but then I heard on the Diggnation podcast that the folks from Digeo have a DVR, 'Moxi', that just looks awesome. Way better than the SA device. I signed up on Digeo's site so that they could contact Cox and tell them to switch. All this proprietary stuff absolutely sucks and is actually driving me to downloading TV shows instead of watching them on the DVR, let alone live.

Ok, that's it for now... more soon.

2008 : January (2) February (2) March (5) April (1) June (1) July (2) October (1) November (3)
2007 : January (3) February (1) March (1) June (2) December (1)
2006 : February (4) March (4) April (11) May (5) July (7) August (5) September (4) October (3) November (6) December (2)
2005 : January (1) February (6) April (2) May (4) June (3) July (8) August (5) September (3) October (3) November (1) December (1)
2004 : January (9) February (5) March (6) April (3) May (2) June (1) July (6) August (10) September (1) October (4) November (3)
2003 : March (6) April (3) May (1) June (18) July (9) August (4) September (5) October (2) November (7) December (2)