WARNING: Excessive packet loss

Top of the hill

2007-04-11T11:45:00.000-05:00

Monday April 16, 2007 I will be 40 years old.

It is all downhill from here. Good, I'm tired.

One more turkey day...

2006-11-25T04:59:00.000-06:00

One more turkey day has come and gone. Mary and I have both been sick over the last week so we decided to play it cool and just stay home. We still had turkey with all the fixens (when I finally rolled out of bed.) Mary took care of the sweet potatos and cranberry sauce, while I was in charge of the turkey, mashers, and StoveTop stuffing.

I had forgotten to get a can of pumpkin, so the pie had to wait until today. I have been watching a lot of old episodes of Good Eats on my Zune, so I decided to skip the pumpkin and make Alton's sweet potato pie. It was great. I think it would have been even better if we had followed his recipe closer. We used light brown sugar instead of dark because Wal-mart was out of everything! We also skipped the pecans and maple surup on top. Next time I will be sure to get the dark stuff and will likely use walnuts as I am not really fond of pecans.

On an unrelated note, I finally signed up for a Google Adwords account and setup a technical blog over at LockerGnome. I called it Minimum Verbosity. Please take a look and let me know what you think!

Buster comes home...

2006-10-20T21:48:00.000-05:00

It's official, we have a new dog; Buster Keyton Jorgensen

I am sure Mary will have more and better pictures up soon.

One more time...

2006-10-06T16:43:00.000-05:00

Ok, I am going to try one more time to explain why I was interested in the cause of death numbers I posted a while back.

Here is the train of thought that caused me to post them (remember you are dealing with computer geek here) as far as I can remember.

Woah, lady get out of my way so I can turn onto Providence and drive home.
(This actually happened, she was standing in the middle of the turn lane waving at someone WITH HER BACK TO ME!)
Oh, she has a sign, it says that almost x,xxx Americans have been killed in Iraq.
(No, I don’t remember what the number actually was.)
Ouch, that many dead, that is just under a thousand a year.
Wait a minute, didn't the news say that thousands and thousands of people died last year on Americas highways?
I wonder how many people Americans die each year and what's killing them.
(What's likely to get me? See #2 on the list, and remind me to get off my ass next time you see me.)

Bam, that was it.

When said I was looking for context, the above is what I thinking. What I should have said (hindsight is 20/20) is that I was looking for a sense of scale.

Personally I think we should see more protesters. We need the war protesters to remind us what is going on over there and what it is costing us, but we also need people protesting against alcohol and tobacco.

Can you imagine someone trying to bring tobacco to market today? They would be laughed at (and I am pretty sure we have laws against selling against anything addictive.) I think it is pretty stupid tobacco gets a green-light just because it is already on the market.

And yes, it MUCH more complicated than that, but damn it, this is an personal blog, not a peer reviewed scientific journal. Please compare it to the [sarcasam] important and socially significant content [/sarcasm] of other personal blogs, not to an episode 60 minutes.

So... If you take anything away from my list, let it be that I am anti-alcohol and anti-tobacco, and that after looking at the numbers, I think everyone else should be too.

PS. I am turning on comment moderation, but I only plan to edit out F-bombs and the like. F*** is fine, but let's at least try. My daughter is still a minor. Looks like I can't do anything about the existing one though. If you know how to edit existing comments, please let me know.

Getting old...

2006-10-06T07:43:00.000-05:00

Ok, I must be getting old. I have been up by 6am all week. Of course that also means that I have been in bed by midnight (and usually 9pm) every night.

While I am really enjoying having extra time in the morning, it still feels really strange to be up.

American Deaths in 2005

2006-09-11T14:28:00.000-05:00

Finally found some numbers to put the "Americans Killed In Iraq" banners I see people holding on the street corners in context.

American 'cause of death' stats for 2005

(Sorry, I miss-read. All the numbers are for a 1 year period, the are NOT all from 2005.)

435,000 Tobacco
365,000 Poor Diet and Physical Inactivity
85,000 Alcohol Related
75,000 Microbial Agents
55,000 Toxic Agents
32,000 Adverse Reactions To Prescription Drugs
30,622 Suicide
29,000 Incidents Involving Firearms
26,347 Motor Vehicle Crashes
20,308 Homicide
20,000 Sexual Behaviors
17,000 Illicit Use of Drugs
7,600 Anti-Inflammatory Drugs
846 Killed in Iraq
0 Marijuana

The numbers are not 1 to 1, death to cause. For example 16,653 of the motor vehicle deaths were alcohol related, and are counted in both 'Motor Vehicle Crashes' and 'Alcohol Related'.

Sources: Iraq numbers, the rest.

Vista RC1

2006-09-05T15:35:00.000-05:00

I am on day 3 with Vista RC1 on my home computer and my primary laptop at work. So far the only thing that does not work is 802.1x which fails to authenticate.

I was really surprised when 'glass' worked out of the box on my Dell D620. It has an integrated Intel chip and glass had not worked in any previous build. It not only works in RC1, it pretty dang fast.

Dinner at Jazz...

2006-08-31T14:52:00.000-05:00

Mary and I went out to dinner Tuesday with some friends...

Joe, Sara, Mary, Erik, Julie

Carla, Tony and IAN...

2006-08-24T21:42:00.000-05:00

Just found this image from our last trip to Utah. Great shot!

jorgie.org

2006-08-23T21:46:00.000-05:00

Finally got jorgie.org up and running again. It just points here, but that's a start. It is still registered at Melbourne IT, but MS put it back in my name and I started the domain transfer process to my now registrar DreamHost. Wish me luck!

Day two with the MBP

2006-08-17T18:45:00.000-05:00

I got XP installed and patched on my MacBook Pro today. It took all day because I was doing real work on my Dell. :)

I think I will go ahead and put Vista pre-Rc1 on it when it drops.

So far it is pretty impressive, but I think the keyboard on my Dell D600 kicks its butt (so does the one on my old iBook). It is too bad they paid more attention to "look" and not attention to "feel" on the keyboard.

VM hell...

2006-08-15T14:44:00.000-05:00

I am creating virtual machines for testing some patch-application scripts and it is a pain. I have 6 so far and 2 to go: Win2KSP0, Win2KSP1, Win2KSP2, Win2KSP3, Win2KSP4, XPSP0, XPSP1, XPSP2

Dell LATITUDE D620

2006-08-14T19:14:00.000-05:00

About two weeks ago I got a new Dell laptop at work. I upgraded from a D800 to a D620 and damn it is fast.

Right now I am building some virtual machines to do some automated patch-application testing this this thing run XP in a VM (VS2004) faster then my D800 ran then native. Amazing!

The only problems I have seen are a stubborn docking bar (I have to push harder then I think I should to dock) and a problem hibernating. I am working through the docking problem and the hibernation problem was fixed by an XP hotfix (needed on systems with > 1GB of RAM).

Nothing but Noodles...

2006-08-14T11:10:00.000-05:00

Oops, I guess it is actually Ninth Street Noodles now.

Brand and I went last Friday and Bobbi and I are going today. I mentioned to them that I would come in more often if they had half-orders and they told me I was welcome to order of the children's menu. SWEET.

First post...

2006-08-13T16:26:00.000-05:00

First post in months AND first post from Windows Live Writer. Fairly interesting. We will have to see if it it is enough to get me to post more often.

Unbelievable!

2006-06-25T23:41:00.000-05:00

After seeing the response on /. to the announcement that Warren Buffet is donating 85% of his net wealth (to the tune of about 37 Billion) to charity, I have followed Jim's lead and given up on /. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/25/1917238&from=rss

Here is what I posted. (Typos and all since /. still does not allow editing or have spell check.)

"After watching Slashdot go the way of Usenet and become all trash and no real discussion, the childish, uninformed, and downright selfish comments posted in response to Mr. Buffet's amazing announcement has finally made me realize that it is not worth the time anymore.

If folks knew anything about Mr. Buffet, (or even RTFA) they would know he is a straightforward person with an amazingly successful hands-on approach to investment management. This is a guy who has gone his own way over the years because he has refused to invest in things that others proclaimed to be easy money simply because he did not understand them. He has never put his money (or that of his investors) into anything that he did not research and understand.

I know exactly nothing about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but the simple fact that Mr. Buffet has give then ANY money, let alone a large portion of his net worth, tells me that they doing something right.

Here's hoping I can find a place where people actually have frank discussions about topics they know and care about, and actually take the time to RTFA, because /. is certainly not that place.

So long, and thanks for all the fish! - D.A.

Jorgie"

2 Betas in one blow...

2006-05-24T18:37:00.000-05:00

Now I am really asking for trouble. I am posting from Word 2007-b2 on Vista-b2.

Outlook was useable from the get-go, but I am still really stumbling around in Word. Things are MUCH different.

I guess I will have to install it at home and do some more poking around!

Windows Defender need defending...

2006-05-16T23:25:00.000-05:00

Here is a strange one... Installing Microsoft PowerShell prevents Windows Defender from getting updates and produces the cryptic message "No signature was present in the subject".

If it wasn't for Google I would never have thought to uninstall PowerShell.

What a difference a week makes...

2006-05-04T22:45:00.000-05:00

It was back to XP for me today. I just could not take a few of the nagging issues I have been having with Vista on my Dell D800.

One of the problems seems to be related to the Nvidia GeForce Go 4400 video or more specifically the beta video driver. I could not un-dock without disabling my secondary monitor or the system would lock HARD and require me to physically turn it off and reboot. Even if I did disable the secondary monitor, the next time I rebooted it would go back to 'mirror' mode and show the same thing on both screens.

The most annoying problem was just general slowness during boot, login, logout, and shutdown. I never did time it, but I would guess that it was taking 1 to 2 minutes to login, about 1 min to logout, 2 to 3 minutes to shutdown, and up to 5 minutes to boot and login. (Login took MUCH when I did it soon after booting.)

I still have it on an old GW Tablet and it is working fine (still slow). I posted my problems, but I still need to write up some more bug reports.

I can almost enjoy the vista...

2006-04-27T19:15:00.000-05:00

Ok, that was a groaner.

The latest build of Vista 5365 looks pretty damn good. I have actually had it on my primary work laptop for 4 days now. The last two builds lasted less than an hour! (Thank The Nine for Ghost!)

(Ok, I can't believe I just made an unintentional Oblivion reference. I guess 45 hours of game play in a few weeks is a little much.)

Back to Vista. I have a Dell D800 at work and 5365 has been working great. I have a few issues I have not been able to get around. I cannot use VS2005 to connect to SQL Express. It keeps telling me that it cannot start an instanced of SQL Express. I think it has to do with UAP (user access protection), but I tried to run VS elevated and it made no difference. I guess I should try it as the actual 'Administrator' account.

I am also having trouble getting Remedy AR User 6.3 installed. It comes as an SFX that then launches setup.exe with a special .ini file. If I run the SFX in XP compatibility mode, setup.exe still knows it is in Vista and bails. But If I try to run setup.exe myself (by copying over the files before closing the SFX), the XP compatibility stuff works, but it cannot find all of its files. I guess I need to figure out how to pass the provided .ini file to setup. Other then that things are good to go.

I still have not made the jump on my Dell XPS at home. Last time I tried, Aero looked great, but so many applications either turned Aero off (with a bunch of screen flashing and video mode changing) or just out right crashed that I only had it on my XPS for about 4 hours last time. I would have suffered through it longer but I went to a web paged that needed Quick Time and I let it install and when it tried to load the system locked hard. When I tried to reboot, the partition was corrupt. NICE. Again, thank The Nine for Ghost.
That Of course brings me to another problem with my XPS and Vista. My XPS came with Ghost (from Symantec) and normally all you have to do is hit Ctrl-F10 or some such during boot and it will let to re-image your system just like the day you got it. Well, it turns out that is reliant on the boot-sector and once Vista is installed, that process is no longer available. I had to build a BartPE CD with my SATA-RAID drivers and run the rebuild process manually.

Testing testing 123...

2006-03-31T16:56:00.000-06:00

OK, I'm creating this entry on a three year old gateway tablet running what is I believe 5342 of Vista ultimate. Not too impressive, except I'm only using only voice recognition. I have been playing around with the voice recognition capabilities of this build all afternoon and I'm pretty impressed. I'm doing this in our operation center so I've Been trying to keep my voice down and it has had to deal with all the other talking yet is working amazingly well.

This laptop is woefully underpowered, I would love to use this on my Dell at work, but this build just had too many problems when I tried it.

I also tried on my home machine, but the Valve's steam and steam related programs kept crashing.

Another quiet weekend almost over

2006-03-20T00:05:00.000-06:00

Thanks to my lovely wife and wonderful daughter, I had a nice quiet weekend.

I finally got the old Dish Network equipment boxed up to send back. The new DVR is great. It is really nice being able to record two things at once, or watch one channel while recording another, and being able to do all that with the local channels is even better.

I got out the Dell AIXM to try out Opera Mobile on it. Color me impressed. It even handles complex sites like Bloglines or the butt-ugly Slashdot. With all the downtown eateries getting WIFI, it looks like I may need to start carrying my AIXM again, and I think I will post on LockerGnome about it tomorrow.

Only one bad thing to report. Writely could not find any spelling mistakes in this post. Surely that is one of the seven signs!

One more time...

2006-03-17T14:47:00.000-06:00

Ok I am going to try for a blog-re-birthing. This is going to be where I write down all the *shiny things* that catch my eye, (not counting female body parts.)

The server is down!

2006-03-17T09:58:00.000-06:00

Ok, the server is not down, I just deleted everything.