Christy's Wishlist Updated

Christy's Wishlist has now been updated with a few items that she specifically requested.

As far as some other news/posting, I have some things in mind but am behind the eight ball in terms of time... Stay tuned to this channel for further (in the future) updates!

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Look! A Pastor Dean Post!

Check it out! Pastor Dean has posted. I have to admit that is a pretty good first post (and only one grammatical messup [the double "the"]).

Stop by there and give him a holler (link on the right side as well).

News over here - another photo album has been loaded up. Just in time for the annual Auburn vs. Alabama football bash too! At work, I'm still cleaning up the mess from Monday afternoon - though I do feel somewhat satisfied that I am getting more organized than I was previously.

As a wrap-up to this post, I want to tell why I have started blogging again. There's no single reason. In fact, I feel as if the more I blog, the more reasons I can come up with for blogging. I use this to "blow off steam", to get stuff off of my mind, to share my digital pictures, and maybe, in case the Lord tarries, to let the next generation of Todds have a little insight into this generation of Todds. Are any of those good, valid reasons to blog? I don't know. Maybe I'm just wasting time.

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Update Post

Yes, I haven't posted since Sunday - that's partially due to the unplanned-for visit of Christian to work on Monday. Christy got a nasty migraine and I had to pick up Christian from school - which meant that work effectively ended when I left to pick Christian up. Why do I say that? Well, I took Christian to work from school and tried to keep him out of trouble. I did keep him out of trouble but I didn't keep him out of everything else.

He helped me re-arrange my office. That put me out of business until late today. It took me that long to get my computer working (in the new location). Of course my office is still a virtual tornadic mess.

Hopefully, I shall be back to normal work tomorrow (and clean up the mess that is still left.)

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Another Photo Album

I just uploaded another set of pictures from the past. This time I found pictures from Christian's Easter Party at First Methodist Early Learning Center. What's really interesting is how well he sat *still* for snacks, lunch, and craft time.

I'm still not sure that Christy or I can get him to do that now. Enjoy!

PS. Christy is giving me some stuff to put on her wishlist. I'll post a blurb here when I've got that done.

PPS. I've made some progress on that book - finishing the battle of Marathon (Athenians defeat Persians) and now getting into the battle for Syracuse (Sicilians defeat [correction] Athenians).

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Licensing Changes - Followed Up

Wow. Not only did I receive a response from Mark of Sysinternals, I received a secondary clarification email. Although I will have to disagree with Mark on one point, I do have to admit I was wrong about the previous license.

Sometime, around February of this year, Sysinternals changed their license from a "free to use, anytime, anywhere" to a "free to use for personal use and personally owned machines only" - which is pretty restrictive. Although Mark stated that the Microsoft license is less restrictive, I'll have to respectfully disagree: the Microsoft license FAQ states clearly that you can only use the utilities on computers you personally own. (Still a no-use policy inside any organization. Mark stated that this was permissible, but as the Microsoft license stands, I don't think it is.)

I guess I can only recommend use of those utilities - but not actually use them on someone else's machine. Phooey.

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Licensing Changes

Some background...

A few months ago, Microsoft purchased the company Sysinternals. A company responsible for some great programs - most of them useful for troubleshooting Windows problems, such as Process Explorer, File Monitor, Registry Monitor among others.

The other day (in the Quixotic quest) I needed to get another copy of File Monitor, so I headed over to http://www.sysinternals.com and watched as it re-directed to a Microsoft site. Well, now that's a change. I started wondering what other changes might have been made, and then I stumble on this Licensing FAQ page. Now that's really new. Just for fun I pulled an older version of File Monitor off of my home server and I checked it's licensing:

This software is provided "as is", without any guarantee made as to its suitability or fitness for any particular use. It may contain bugs, so use of this tool is at your own risk. We take no responsilbity for any damage that may unintentionally be caused through its use.

You may not distribute Filemon in any form without express written permission of Mark Russinovich or Bryce Cogswell.

If you are interested in redistributing Filemon, either in original or modified form, or wish to use Filemon source code in a product, please send e-mail to licensing@sysinternals.com with details.

Simple. Clean. Nice for anyone who needs to use their software to fix problems.

Now back to the biggie I noticed on that Microsoft page:

Q: May I freely load or use Sysinternals utilities on computers that I support but do not own?

A: No. You will need to contact Microsoft Sysinternals Licensing (syslic@microsoft.com) and inquire about fee based licensing options.

What? This is a joke, right? Some of the best utilities ever written for troubleshooting problems on WINDOWS computers and Microsoft has now restricted their use. This isn't a small change, this is a HUGE change. Why even keep it free for download?

Update: I've written an email to both Mark and Bruce of Sysinternals using the email addresses found in that old license. I doubt I'll get a response, but it would be interesting to know if they know about this change.

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Last Friday Night

So what happened last Friday night? That Quixotic quest that I started with Google Desktop Search? I actually finished it! For whatever reason, I really got perturbed that I couldn't get GDS to run successfully. It didn't help that GDS was sort of teasing me - in that it would run for ten minutes or so before it finally failed. I stayed a bit late at work - uninstalling a piece of software, the installing/re-installing GDS, checking to see if GDS would run, uninstalling the next piece of software, repeat. After I had un-installed eight or nine programs (yes, eight or nine un-installs/re-installs of GDS), GDS finally started running for a bit. Then it failed. Oh great.

That started the next set of troubleshooting procedures - stopping running programs, processes, and services and then checking to see if GDS would run. An hour or so later, I had exhausted everything that I could stop, and GDS still didn't run. Bleh. However, that at least meant, that the conflict had to do with something attaching to explorer.exe and conflicting with GDS. I used Sysinternal's File Monitor to watch the file I/Os (reads, writes, queries) and saw that GDS was accessing one file quite often and failing on that access. I checked the settings set with that file (something to do with Stardock's IconPackager) and made a change. [In the file, the setting went from "Status=2" to "Status=1".] Restarted GDS, and voilà, GDS works. Unbelievable. A single little one character change and it made that much difference.

Completion of that quixotic quest was quite satisfying at the time. Maybe not so much in retrospect (in terms of time wasted...)

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Working On Albums...

If you check around a bit today, you should see the number of albums and number of pictures increase as I'm working on nothing but photos today. Check them out here.

More later!

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PS3 Nuttiness Continued...

That curiosity thing continued... I checked out some more of those PS3 eBay auctions. Guess what I found! This auction - the nuttiness (or scammage) continues. It looks like our friend "n.o.bound" found someone else to overpay, but not only that - check out that Seller's feedback. They're brand new to eBay and used a ton of "Buy It Now" auctions (at $1.00 or less) to pop up that feedback rating in a hurry. I wonder if this is a scammer scamming another scammer... Consider the first shoe dropped.

November 17th and the days to follow shall be quite interesting...

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Not Enough Caffeine Yet...

You know you haven't had enough caffeine intake when....

You're working on a spreadsheet: When entering data into a cell, you then need to append to that data and hit "F2" to edit it. When the cell data disappears, you attempt to do the same thing three or four times before you finally realize that the somehow the keyboard function lock has been cut off and instead of editing, "F2" is doing exactly what it's supposed to - that is "Undo"...

Bleh. I guess four cups of coffee don't suffice for me.

That's probably just a side effect of not getting enough sleep. Christian has been fighting something since last Saturday. He went to the doctor on Monday, but still seems to have a fever each day. The side effect of his sickness is that he's not sleeping through the night - which means that Mommy and Daddy don't sleep through the night. Let's see, last night I finally got to bed around midnight, but was up at 1:30, 3:00, and sometime around 6:00, Christy went and got Christian and placed him in our bed. All the waking led me to finally drift into a deep sleep around 7:00AM - just in time for Christian's normal wake up time of 7:30. (His internal "wake up" clock is deadly precise!) I could barely move and somehow dragged myself into the bathroom around 8:45AM. Late to work again! I hate that.

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PS3 Nuttiness

I was checking the stuff I've got on sale at eBay.com and remembered that eBay had set some specific restrictions on PS3 pre-order auctions. So what do I do? I pop "PS3" into the search field and hit enter.

HOLY SCMOLY! There are people paying $1,800.00 for a PS3 - that's not even available yet?!?!?!? The thing retails for $600.00! Now that's what I call a margin of profit! "Curiosity killed the cat" or so the saying goes - for me it should be "curiosity caused hours of thoughtless web-surfing...." I decided to see what kind of people were doing the bidding. This auction is one that I decided to watch as it ended. It shot from $1,674.00 to $1,800.00 in just the last minute. What was most interesting about the auction was the high bidder at $1,674.00 - it was the eBayer who goes by "n.o.bound". I noticed that they only had a 3 for rating (equals to a net of 3 unique positive feedbacks) but.... 2 of the positive feedbacks were for other PS3 pre-order auction wins. WHAT?!?!? Let me get this straight. You've already won and paid for two PS3 auctions - paying a total of over $3,000.00 for something that retails for $1,200.00 - and you're bidding for more?!?!? Ok, either this eBayer has too much money and not enough gray matter *or* I smell a scam...

And to think, I was considering cashing in on the PS3 pre-order madness too. Good thing I didn't meet eBay guidelines for that!

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About Gmail for Phones

Just found this. What is that? Well, it's a Gmail application for my phone. I've tried it out and it's pretty cool - I just wish it were a full blown Palm OS application (it's a Java app and as such it runs on top of the IBM JME that I installed on my Treo).

If I could just figure out how to put the launcher as a standalone menu application, I would really be stoked!


Update - Silly me. I forgot to look under the "Unfiled" category on my phone. When I did, there "Gmail" sat. Needless to say, now I'm very happy with this program. Good job Google!

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Oh Yeah

I still need to make that long post of the weekend. I'll try to get that done today - but with everything else, I'm not holding my breath! (So don't hold yours either.)

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Maybe Today!

Just posting that I hope I have enough time today to get everything done. I hope to get at least two items onto eBay, and one or two photo albums up. But the pile of work to do here is pretty thick... Time will tell.

I did chat with Dean last night (for maybe a minute or two). He's off at some sort of conference and told me that he was saving up and taking notes for six or seven posts to his blog. Woot! I will make sure that I check his posts out and notify you here as well.

Later!

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Minor Website Update

Just finished updating my home page to be more consistent with this blog look. I also updated Christy's Wishlist, my wishlist and the photo album's index page. I've got one or two very long posts coming. I just haven't gotten around to writing them.

Everything that I had up for sale at eBay has sold, so I need to get some more stuff out the door. Check back frequently!

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Waiting

Dean! Where's a post? Just one to say "Hello. I am Dean, and I'll drop some of my nuggets of wisdom (or whatever else might come out) from time to time here". I'm keeping tabs and I'm ready to answer any questions should you want to make some format changes or other.

Ok. Got that out of the way. I am hoping and praying that today goes much better than the last two days. Of course, it doesn't have to be much to be better - a lien on house from IRS and a broken vacuum makes for some bad days...

I've got lots of work to do, but that's not new. Stay tuned to this channel!

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A Wasted Day?

I wonder if I really did just waste a day. It certainly didn't start well, but at least it didn't end badly.

I started looking for the deed for the house - the documentation that the IRS needs to release the lien that they mistakenly placed on my house. Of course, I couldn't find it which necessitated a trip to the courthouse to get a copy. Not only that, but I wasn't at work that long before Christy called and informed me that the vacumm cleaner had died. Yippee! Another good day on the way...

I guess I then wasted most of the rest of the day trying to get the non-working Google Desktop Search working. I should have just given up, but somehow found myself on one of those quests to find out what was wrong and to get it working. Like the search for the proverbial fountain of youth... I've given up now - I'll have to leave my problem to the computer gurus at Google and hope they can fix it sometime.

I really need to get back to reading that book. That first battle just became more interesting since I realized that it is the origin for the meaning of the word marathon. Maybe I can force my way through the politics and name dropping without falling asleep.

In other news, I did sale something on eBay yesterday, and mailed it out today. Yeah, it wasn't much, but I did get rid of something I no longer used and got money for it in the process!

I also got my digital camera back from Christy. She used it yesterday - taking pictures at Christian's pre-K Halloween get-together. As soon I process them, I'll post some here. Christian - who can't stand to wear costumes - went as the only thing that didn't per se require a costume. If I haven't told you what his "costume" was - fell free to guess. You'll just have to wait on the pictures... :)

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