Month: May 2008

So on June 7, 2008, I’ll be entering my first radio-control pylon race. I encountered a cool video on Air Sports Net that shows the National Championship races.

Now, the model I’ll be racing is called a “sport quickee” — category Q500 — that runs approximately half the speed of these Q40 championship racers you see in the video speeding along at over 200MPH. Yet it’s still a race, and there’s pretty intense competition for a fun-fly. My model is a Lanier Predator 2 with a Thunder tiger .40 in the nose. A part of me wants to get a second kit just in case my first has a run-in with terra firma… but my budget and time availability probably won’t allow it.

For the past decade, my wife and I lived in the same house. It was a small but serviceable townhome-style twin home on just a little less than a tenth of an acre of land. We had a couple of small garden plots, a back yard just large enough to entertain a small party, and although I did not have a green thumb, with the help of my wife I was able to keep the lawn tidy.

I have learned a new definition of pain. I had trouble sleeping last night because I was so sore from aerating an acre of land.

A large parcel of land is good, I suppose, if you really value a lot of yard work. I don’t.

Why did our house get picked to be the local Animal Shelter? Seriously, did one of our friends play a trick on us and put a “Drop Unwanted Pets Here” sign outside?

In the past year, we have had:

-> Two cats show up at our house. Not kittens, but people-friendly cats. Luckily, we found a home for them with one of my friends from work. He was real happy with me when one of the cats delivered three weeks later 😉

-> Two more kittens showed up later. We fed them one night, then they never showed up again…

-> A baby pit bull. We found him a home with one of the wifey’s friends

-> And tonight…THREE kittens show up at the door. People-friendly, because while they were skittish around us, they allowed us to pet them.

I admit we live in a wooded area where now that the trees have greened up I can’t see any of my neighbors (and can only see a small glimpse in the winter). But how does that translate into becoming the local SPCA?

We’ll have to see if anyone wants them. Our cat peed on the wife unit the last time she tried to introduce another cat into the equation, so that precludes us keeping it. I know, my wife should suck it up, but hey, I can’t make her cowgirl up 😉

My $.02 Weed

Tonight we shoot a scene where 2 people arrive at a party with food.

I have rewritten the scene for you people. It now says”

“We’ve brought Pies!” “Pies?” “I like Pie”. “That ends that argument”!

HEE HEE.

RIP Stu Wagstaff. You loved flying, and I really liked flying with you. If there is such a thing as a spirit, may yours enjoy flying in ways you never could before.

The time: 11:00 PM The place: a data center in Salt Lake County The event: an air-conditioning outage.

Enter our protagonist. Let’s call him Bubba. Bubba hand-scans past the door of the data center floor to try to bring down some machines (and bring up some others), and is blasted with a wave of oven-like heat from the thousands of computers acting like little space-heaters in a confined space.

Bubba enters the cage containing our computers. Most of them have already shut down due to the overwhelming heat. Some few, mostly older units or computers nearer to the floor, are struggling along. Bubba sees a new, junior system administrator attempting to bring up some important production machines that had crashed.

Bubba notices three large, brand-new window air conditioners sitting on the floor. The raised-floor tiles are pulled up. These AC units are plugged in. Their fronts face the inlets of this junior admin’s machines.

The rear, hot side, faces the disk arrays to which these machines are attached.

Now, for those in the audience who think that opening your refrigerator on a hot summer day will help to cool off your house, here’s a quick science lesson. The rules of conservation of energy are simple: matter can neither be created nor destroyed. You can’t get more out of a system than you put into it; the best you can hope for is to break even.

By leaving your refrigerator open to try to cool off your house — unless it’s a refrigerator from the turn of the 20th century that runs on actual ice blocked from a river and stored for months under some straw — you’re actually making your house hotter. Yeah, really! That little space in front of the fridge is the only thing getting cooler; those hot coils in the back are blasting lots more heat than cold, resulting in an overall warming of your house.

Air-conditioners are, basically, refrigerators. But they make your house cooler by pumping the heat outdoors.

In effect, what Mr. Jr. Admin was doing was adding three enormous space heaters to the inside of a stewing oven, and pointing the hottest part of their blast cone right at the disks supporting the environment he was trying to bring up.

I don’t know what else to say, although some clever hand-gestures and sophomoric noises come to mind.

So our company sprung and purchased IT a copy of VMWare Infrastructure Foundation so we can get on the virtualization bandwagon. The VI Server software fairly rocks. Setting it up is a breeze, networking is all virtualized, and setting up virtual servers is a piece of cake.

The idea is to set up a new accounting timesheet server and Exchange test server on the VMWare boxes. The accounting timesheet server will be easy. However, Exchange might be a bear. So I look up the requirements: There must be a Windows 2003 SP1 domain contoller somewhere for Exchange to muck up with it’s schema changes and such.

We have such a server, but it’s in out Dayton, OH office. Everything else is a Windows 2000 DC. Not good to have your Exchange server talking to a remote DC over a DSL link, so the plan is to install a DC here at the local office. Normally that would involve new hardware and software, and you gotta justify it and order it and have it shipped and install it in the rack and hook it up and install the software.

That’s why VMWare rocks. I download the 2008 install iso from Microsoft, create a new virtual machine, configure it to be a 2008 server, virtually attach the CD-Drive to the iso, configure the vm to boot to the iso, and away we go. No hardware, no justifications, just make sure you have a license!

I set up a Server 2008 core vm in a matter of minutes. It’s sweet.

So I wanted to make my new Server 2008 a domain controller. TO do that, you have to run some preparation scripts against your existing Active Directory domain to prepare it to have a Windows 2008 server join. There were some snafus there due to some experimentation with MS Services for Unix and AD4Unix back in the day (note: do NOT extend your AD schema unless you absolutely have to and know what you’re doing), but they were fairly easy to work out.

Another note: I decided to go with Windows Server 2008 core, which is MS’ way of being all Unixsy by neglecting a GUI and making all configuration done via command prompt (although some programs still pop up a dialog box when looking at the help…huh?). So I had to find a reference on the command-line commands to do things like set up the networking, change computer name, join a domain, etc. Luckily, they have this nice thing called the internet with a fancy search interface called Google which finds me anything I could possibly want, provided I know how to ask (and please just ain’t the answer sometimes 😉

So Google enlightened me how to make my spiffy virtual Windows Server 2008 Core machine a domain contoller (hint: DCPromo and an answer file stripped down from an unattend.txt file).

Now to be a domain controller in an Active Directory environment, you must also be a DNS Server. Again, Google was the way and the truth and the light by finding me the OCSetup command, which adds “roles” to a Server 2008 installation. Wanna be a DNS server? BAM! Wanna be a DHCP server? WHAM!

Now here’s where the fun begins. I figured I could continue my command-prompt configuration education, but sometimes life is short and you just wanna use a damn GUI. Microsoft has traditionally offered AdminPaks for the client OS to manage MS server OSes. Google showed me that Microsoft thought RSAT would be a better name (Remote System Administration Tools). Of course, MS also though that it would be awesome to only have the remote admin tools for Server 2008 run on Vista w/SP1.

Luckily, I have me a Vista machine I’m testing out right here to my left. Alas, after downloading the RSATPak, it tells me this update is not for my machine. A lil’ bit or research (log files this time, not Google) tells me my machine doesn’t have SP1 installed.

Since Vista’s SP1 came out ages and eons ago, I wonder why my machine didn’t install it.

The first place to check is our WSUS 3.0 SP1 machine. I look, and it has downloaded Vista’s SP1 (and is even impatiently waiting for me to approve the EULA for XP SP3.) So it’s not the WSUS machine’s fault.

Back to my machine to look at the WindowsUpdate.log file. I find that it seems the updates, and it likes the updates, but some regulation is denying it from downloading the updates.

I swear to GodAllahYahwehBuddahHughHeffner! The error is: Update X us “PerUpdate” regulated and can NOT be downloaded.

So Google came up with some answers to this one, but I though that the first step would be to download Vista SP1 (tardily) and install it, to see if it would help.

Cause then with Vista SP1, I can install the RSAT. So I can be lazy and configure the DNS of my new virtual 2008 core server via a GUI So I can make sure it’s ready to interface with my new Exchange 2007 test server. And I still need to go back and make sure Vista SP1 fixes my Automatic Download problems on Vista…

And this doesn’t take into account the loads of other stuff I need to be doing. The joy of being IT at a small company is that I get to learn all kinds of new things and play with lots of new toys.

The bad thing about being IT at a small company is that I have to learn all kinds of new things across many different technologies. Alongside my computer and network IT duties, I am also Lord and Master of a vintage 1990’s era Nortel Modular ICS system, the alarm system for the building, the card access system, a third-party accounting system based on VB apps written around a COBOL database, and a fleet of new Crackberries used by people who reside at remote offices (and I don’t even have a Crackberry!).

Luckily I have my idiot savant relationship with anything IT, so I can figure it out. I don’t know why I get it, I just get it. KMart sucks…

My $.02 Weed

So today, for the first time, I heard the term “muffin top”. I am turning into an old man, I guess. From Urban Dictionary:

muffin top 1013 up, 179 down

Muffin-Top is a word used to describe the strange and bizarre waist scrunching effect that results when females wear tight fitting, low-rise/hip-hugger pants along with small-sized, navel exposing, mid-riff tops.

Though, the effect is more extreme with heavier females, all females, with the exception of anorexic models, can fall victim to the muffin-top disaster. The reason for this, is that the design of low-rise/hip-hugger pants, originally popular during the late 60’s and early-to-mid 70’s, defies the natural shape and contours of the average females’ body; forcing the skin and fat around her waist, back and upper buttocks to spill out over her pants and through her tiny crop-top, causing a muffin-top effect.

Originally, the idea behind low-rise pants and mid-riff tops, which made their first reappearance during the mid-to-late 90’s, was to produce clothing that would make a woman’s torso appear longer, and possibly thinner, than it actually was. Normally, men’s pants are designed with lower waists, because of their naturally longer torsos, narrower hips and smaller pelvises. In order to recreate this “longer, thinner torso” appearance for women, clothing manufacturers adopted shorter-waist, men’s trousers, modified the design for the female market, resulting in the catastrophe that the word, “muffin-top” currently describes. The muffin-top’s legacy, if anything, describes the disaster that can result when the fashion industry goes terribly wrong. The existence of muffin-tops is currently quite common, which is a testament to the fact that women will buy and wear anything, regardless of how vulgar and ridiculous it looks, as long as it is popular.

Wow, look at that muffin top! tags whale-tail low-rise low-rider hip-hugger chucha by Mr. Cheesy Cheeseville Jul 15, 2006 email it

This term was used to describe a late-night guard at our disaster-recovery site. I instantly recognized what he was describing when my co-worker said of the guard, “She likes to wear really skanky clothes with lots of leather, and it kind of grossed me out because she had a big muffin top below her halter.”

Never heard the slang term before, knew what it meant the moment I heard it. Now that is a useful phrase!

is Iron Man really as far into fiction as we think it is? http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20080515/video/vwl-reuters-quickcut-flying-man-d7f4ae7.html Boy, that looks like an awful lot of fun!

Came across a post on RationalResponders about How To Irritate An Atheist. Here are some of my favorites, that actually work really well on me if you’d like to drive me nuts:

15) Say that seperation of church and state isn’t in the Constitution; insist that the Constitution is based on the Ten Commandments.

37) Explain that the lack of proof doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

38) …and give him a blank look when he says that all people tried for a crime would go to jail.

39) Blame absolutely everything wrong in society on evolution.

44) Accuse him of being an agnostic, since he isn’t 100% positive that God does not exist.

59) No matter what he quotes from the Bible, say that it’s out of context.

60) …and when he points out that the quotes are in correct context, tell him you need to be a Christian to understand the true meaning of the Bible.

61) Tell him you must study the Bible for many years to reject Christianity.

62) …and when he points out that you reject Islam despite never having studied the Qu’ran, say that you have faith, and faith is all you need.

82) Smile smugly and tell him that there are no atheists in foxholes.

89) Equivocate scientific faith with religious faith, and conclude that, metaphysically, you are both in the same boat.

105) When he takes the time and trouble to explain where your analogy or interpretation is at fault, begin your response with a sigh, so he’ll know how patient you’re being.

120) Claim that Einstein was a Christian.

121) Claim that Darwin recanted evolution on his deathbed.

123) Vehemently claim that the theory of evolution is incompatible with theism, then turn around and blame the theory for promoting atheism.

125) Tell him it’s his responsibility to prove that God doesn’t exist.

129) Ask what he believes in, if not God.

130) …then tell him that nonbelief is also a worldview, therefore there is no such thing as an atheist and Christianity is true.

148) Tell him that Hitler was an atheist. (–MattNote: Hitler was Catholic–)

156) Argue the most insignificant point you can think of; when he doesn’t address your pettiness, claim victory.

157) Constantly attempt to equate atheism with theism.

172) For Muslims only: Say that it’s perfectly reasonable for anyone to convert to your religion, but no one has a valid reason to leave Islam; it is the [most] perfect religion. (–MattNote: this applies equally to a religion of which I used to be a member…)

185) Insist that Thomas Jefferson was a Christian.

226) Tell him he has to believe before he can understand the evidence.

244) Grossly misunderstand the word “theory.”

269) When the subject of homosexuality comes up, say “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”

275) Reply to every statement he makes, “That’s only your opinion.”

279) Point to something in nature that’s really cool, and call it proof of God’s existence.

284) Take advantage of a horrible national tragedy, caused in large part by religious fanaticism, by pushing your own religious fanaticism as the only thing that will save us all.

285) …and announce that the tragedy only happened because of those who ignore your religious fanaticism.

281) When ending your conversation with the atheist, promise to read whatever book the atheist may have mentioned, knowing darned well that you yourself never made it through Leviticus. (–MattNote: Yep, did this with a Christian friend, we exchanged Behe’s “Darwin’s Black Box” for Sagan’s “Demon-Haunted World”. I asked him if he’d read the book he loaned me yet, and he hadn’t. Several months later, we exchanged books again… and he hadn’t read the Carl Sagan book at all, yet I’d read Behe’s work and highlighted a bunch of passages. Dunno if I want to repeat that mistake.–)

All-told, a great post that I thoroughly enjoyed reading.