Thursday, August 23, 2007

What have I done?

I did it. I signed up for the LaSalle Bank Run Wild for the Detroit Zoo 5K Run. After reading Josh's blogs on running, and remembering when I used to run (I was all city in high school track and captain of the track team, okay that was almost 20 years ago. Call me Al Bundy). Instead of talking about it I'm doing it. The run is on September 16th which gives me about 3 weeks to get in shape. The last time I ran in any competition was in 2000 and before that 1990. It was a spur of the moment thing, while racing sailboats in Key West the boat team decided to run this race. I went to a local sporting goods store, purchased running shoes and went to the starting line. Our boat, Wild Thang, finshed 10th. Overall I finished 101 out of 132 with a time of 30:45. I'm a bit heavier & older now so my goal is to not die during this run.

What have I done?

Time Remaining

Monday, August 13, 2007

SPAM or a sign?

I just received 13 emails, all with the same date & time stamp, all from various usernames at aogheliservices.com, all with a randomly named PDF file containing a stock tip. Looking at the full message headers they appear to be sent from random IP's from around the world & random email programs. Sounds like a standard spamming program that spoofs everything.

My email account is using a third party spam filtering service, Emerald Spam Shield, and then sent through another open relay list and spam filter on the mail server.

Why am I getting these?

I know. I should buy the stock, that's it. The sign I was looking for.

Monday, August 06, 2007

Cricket

For the last few weeks I've had the pleasure of working with a gentleman from CA who is in town consulting on our current project. He was staying at a hotel on I-696 and Dequindre in Madison Heights (he said it was cheap). One day he looked tired and told me a tale of a cricket that kept him up all night long. Several days later he says,

"You remember that cricket I told you about?"

"Yeah"

"I found it, it was under the bed stand table. I pulled the table back and there it was. The biggest cricket I've ever seen."

"Did you kill it?"

"Once I saw him I didn't know what to do, so I reached in the drawer and grabbed the first thing I saw..." (pause)

"No, you didn't"

"I did, I smashed him to bits with Gideons Bible"

"You know you are going straight to hell"

"I know"

Friday, August 03, 2007

BSOD

Many of you may have noticed I've added a "Days Since BSOD" to the side bar of my blog. While I didn't have a true BSOD, it was bad enough. My Acer TravelMate 4400 died. I was working away when it went ker-plunk. Blank screen. The hard drive lights were still on and the drive was spinning. I looked closer and noticed that screen wasn't blank, if I got real close I could see what looked like images burned into the pixels of an old monitor. I was able to move my mouse. I went to unplug it and take it to the window to see more. That was all she wrote. It died at that very moment. Never to boot again.

I ran to the local MicroCenter and purchased a new laptop. I got one of the cheaper models since my experience has been they last about two years no matter what you pay for them. I purchased a Toshiba Satellite A215-S4697 with Windows Vista. This is my first real run with Vista. Once I figured out where they hid everything I was up in running. Took the hard drive out of the old laptop and put it in a USB enclosure and in a few hours I was up and running again.

While this isn't a true BSOD, it is the beginning of my counter.