Another fire alarm at DCL today. It happened a few minutes ago. I did the usual rounds, kicking people out of the labs (and a class, where the TA questioned if he really needed to go outside or not,) and tried to empty the other offices I saw open.

I don’t know if it’s a language thing or what, but why don’t people know loud buzzing noise probably means something is wrong. Lots of people going towards the exits probably means you should go too. I think I’m going to email the business office on how many TAs I ran into that didn’t know to go outside when the fire alarm went off.

And if you didn’t want to go outside because it was cold and you didn’t bring you coat, tough cookies. It doesn’t matter if it’s a mistake or a drill or a real fire, you do the same thing every time. If you don’t, you die a crispy, crumbly death.

And for the second fire alarm in a row, I didn’t have a briefcase of tapes with me. Dammit. I really need to fix that. We’re doing backup server maintenance tomorrow, and then I’m going to run the November monthlies. Once those are done, I’ll clone the important data and take it offsite. No more delays.

People don’t respect fire enough.

It was homecoming weekend at U of I this last week, and we did it up right. I was a part of the Alumni band, so it started Friday afternoon with a rehearsal followed by the homecoming parade, and lots of drinky drinky. Too much drinky drinky. I don’t even remember drinking that much, but I did and was hurting the next morning for the 7am practice.

It is like college all over again.

Saturday’s game was pretty bad. The team got whupped, and it was cold and rainy. But it was fun sitting down in the endzone again, and playing Three In One on the field. Afterwards, we ‘tailgated’ at Tony’s where it was a bit dried and warmer. That night everyone else got drunk, and I was still hydrating.

Sunday we ate a big breakfast and went to Curtis Orchard (Curtis calls it his orchard) to get pumpkins. Then we carved. I bought two pumpkins. The first one is uncarved, the second is pictured here. I only used a highlighter, a TiVo sticker as a model, and a little pumpkin saw and a sharp knife; no stencils or anything. I mailed it into TiVo’s newsletter’s editor, and they thanked me for it and said it might be displayed in the next newsletter. Woot! Eric did a owl on a tree, and Tony did a funny face. You can see both of their pics off Eric’s bjournal.

Now I need to get my costume together for Friday… What do your pumpkins and costumes look like?

Stopped by Best Buy at lunch today to pickup the Indiana Jones DVD set, and Matrix Reloaded. Ever since we walked the Indy movies so much in the dorms, I’ve been aching to own a copy. But since I didn’t want to buy the VHS tapes, I had to wait until today when the movies came out of DVD. I also picked up the Matrix sequel so I could be primed for the third one on November 5th, which Chuck approved as another ‘field trip afternoon.’ Woot.

And I think that’s all the blog entries I have for today. Thanks for reading.

I got frustrated with View Source not working with IE6 again. Something happens that View/Source just doesn’t do anything. Normally, it loads the HTML source for a page in Notepad. But when it breaks, it doesn’t do anything.

I forgot how I fixed this last time. So I did some Googling, and found it happens when the cache gets too full. Not over quota, or anything. And I’m not entirely sure what ‘too full’ means. But clearing the Temporary Internet Files lets me View/Source HTML pages again. Call me nuts, but I also think my laptop is running faster. My cache was about 500 megs… Should a browser cache really impact my system that much?

Or maybe it’s in my mind. While IE was taking forever to clean the cache, I downloaded FireBird .7. I had .6 installed, but it’s hard training myself not to use IE. Old habits die hard, I guess.

There are lots of things I want to post about, but I’ll start with some interesting technology tidbits I found myself pondering today.

tivo.com”>TiVo announced a partnership with AOL to create ‘TV’s Top 5′ moments. Basically, AOL will monitor its users comments, voting, and chatrooms, etc. and come up with a list of the most-watched events on TV. AOL will digitize them and make them available on AOL. That, by itself, is cool (if you use AOL; no one I know really does.) What’s unique is the pairing up with TiVo to get the number of scenes most rewound and watched again by TiVo subscribers. AOL’s monitoring the most ‘rewatched’ TV. That’s pretty damn cool. Frank brought up the privacy issues — TiVo knowing that I rewound that part of Queer Eye three times, etc. tivo.com/tivoknowbase/root/public/tv1507.htm?”>TiVo’s privacy policy indicates they can collect all of that information, anonymously. And when you aggregate that information, you can do some neat things with it. I think that’s pretty cool.

My personal belief on information privacy should be strongly upheld for the ‘important things,’ like medical information, financial info, etc. I’m looking forward to grad school in information science to research how to take all the information people don’t think is important/critical — sports information, entertainment stats, etc. and using that to design entertainment models where everyone wins. The end users get programming and entertainment suited to them, and the marketing/advertising get things people will want to see.

In other news, I downloaded itunes“>iTunes today. Apple announced the port to Windows of their popular MP3/digital music jukebox recently, and it’s made them big bucks. iTunes lets you catalog and listen to, rip and archive your music CDs. That part’s free. It also has an online component where you can lookup albums and music by popular artists, listen to samples, and download digital music for $0.99 per song. You can often download full albums for less than you would buy the actual disc. The UI is a little awkward, but maybe I’m just a little sour towards Mac applications ported to Windows. (But it’s not as bad as CodeWarrior.) The online iTunes aggregates information on digital music sales like Amazon does. (People who downloaded this music also liked….)

It’s just plain cool. It’s probably going to make me want an iPod.

The sad part about technology is sometimes it goes as quickly as it comes. I was reading an article in the DI about the Concorde’s final flight. It’s sad when good technology just doesn’t take off (airplane pun intended.) You could argue the Concorde had its day, but like beta over VHS, we chose to go with something that’s not as cool/good/fast/fun to go with the crappier slower international airlines. Why break the sound barrier when we can go under it? Why put 100 people on a fast plane when we can put 2-3 times that on a slower one?

Hopefully, some day I’ll be able to fly at supersonic speeds. And when that happens, I won’t worry about missing any important television…. TiVo and AOL are already taking care of that for me.

One more time…

One more time…

I’m printing, but not doing anything? That’s odd….

Do you see this, Andrew?

A few things have happened that make me take notice of my life and realize I need to get some things in order.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is most likely the new govenor of California. That’s another good reason never to go to California.

The Cubs quit their 95-year suckiness for a temporary stint in the NLCS. They beat the Braves to get there. They’re playing the Marlins, who beat the Giants to get there. If I was making a bracket, I would be out at the first round.

And the Red Sox won too.

Let me say that again. Arnie is govenor, and the Cubs and Red Sox are fighting for the World Series. If I see Zane and the other Incarnations around the Doomsday clock, I’ll know it’s time. Until then, I gotta get some things in order.

There was a fire alarm in DCL today. It didn’t turn out to be anything, but it made me nervous. This was a full backup weekend, and as the alarm went off I was thinking “how many tapes can I grab?” I didn’t get any; there’s nothing prepared. I ran around, making sure the labs were empty, and then took an early lunch.

Thinking about fires at work reminds me of SSI, where the place I worked that _did_ burn down. It’s scary. I don’t want to think about losing everything I’ve worked for… again…

But rest assured by the end of the week I’ll have a new set of offsite backups prep’ed.

Speaking of off-site, the move to Siebel is only a little over a month away, and there’s a ton of things we still need to do. Just getting the networking squared away for the move is consuming alot of mine, Chuck’s, and Nate’s time. I’ve been trying to get WPA/EAP/TKIP working on a Cisco 1200, although we may not go with those as the APs for the new building. We need to get that figured out soon.

Go Marlins.