managing stress in a fast-paced world

I half watched Meet Bill last night while working at home, it was a surprisingly good movie.

well 2008 is nearly over and I can’t believe how fast the year has gone by. I’m looking forward to 09, things are going to change for sure.

Picked this up on a random visit to Frys in Sunnyvale cheap at $39. Works perfectly too! Here’s a link to the product page. It’s basically a cordless phone, the base station works with POT lines but also connects to cellular phones using Bluetooth. So now I just get home and charge my cellphone and it automatically turns into my home phone. I can place my cellphone on the top floor and get good reception, the signal is sent to the base station and then to the normal headset the cordless phone works anywhere in the house. Other plus is that it works with 2 cellphones & runs on standard AAA sized rechargeables.

What a pain it was to reinstall windows! I had a Dell Latitude D410 that was having all kinds of weirdness. It couldn’t find any network shares, and the DNS would just fail to lookup random sites.

Anyways, I backed up everything and did a clean install from a Dell Windows XP with SP2 CD I have. First thing, install the wireless driver and I could browse shares again. Oh, get this I got a new Dual 2.4ghz & 5ghz wireless AP. I set it up to use WPA(2)-PSK which uses AES & TKIP… apparently the TKIP wasn’t working quite right. When using TKIP I kept getting messages like “the network has been compromised and will be disabled for a few minutes” WTF right? It’s some feature of TKIP where if a few packets are not verified, it changes the key and all clients stop working for a while! Switching to just AES fixed this.

Anyways, back to the Dell. After installing the wireless driver, I installed SP3, this worked fine, but I couldn’t install any updates after, they all downloaded but then failed. I found the fix on this site: http://blog.taylex.com/post/2008/05/Windows-Update-fails-after-SP3-Installation.aspx to work great and finished installing all the updates. I’m re-installing all the other apps now.

But sheesh, how would a non-technical user figure this stuff out?

I finally got WOL (wake-on-lan) working on my new home server! I picked up a Fry’s special like a year ago and have been just way too busy to build it. Also just recently there was a new bios update that allowed me to use the RAID card I had sitting around. Now I’ve got a few more TB’s of space and I can shutdown the server and bring it back up using my router to send a WOL packet. Saves energy and is good for the environment… gotta love the environment.

Sand Hill Road is currently having a power outage, the hot weather probably has something to do with it…

I guess $100 an hour for 17 hours in Vegas isn’t bad… I went to Vegas last weekend for a friends bachelor party. A group of 8 of us went, I actually got there about 2 hours before them and played blackjack until they arrived, won $200. The night was filled with limo rides and vip treatment at Sapphire, Prive, and Seamless. I guess at the peak of the night I spent like $400 in 30 minutes, but I did end up winning $400 total at the tables. I was actually hoping to win enough to pay for the flight, too bad I spent all the money I took with me and my winnings. On the bright side I didn’t touch an ATM or a credit card.

By 5:30am when it was time for me to head to the airport to go home, I had $40 left and couldn’t wait to leave. I’m too old to be partying in Vegas for 17 hours straight, by the time I go home I had $15 left and slept for the next 12 hours.

Maybe in another 10 years I’ll be up for doing something like this again.

A few weeks ago I was trying to use my Weber Q grill, it wasn’t happy… for a long time now only the front half of the rectangular burner would light. When I tried to use it, something was wrong, the grill was lukewarm and the flame was so low it would blowout sometimes.

Last night I took some simple green, couple of trash bags, a brush, a needle, a torch, a rag, and the hose to the grill. I read online somewhere that there is a safety valve on the Q and if you turn on the gas too quickly it boots into safe mode and limits the flow of propane. I opened the valve quickly and heard a “click” and the reproduced the problem. Open it slowly and it’s back to normal!

I scrubbed the outside and inside of the grill down, all the food droppings and stuff went into a bag and then a quick rinse with the hose and it was fairly clean. Next I poked all the clogged burner holes and tried to turn it all on again, no go. Eventually I used the torch and burned off all the oil and grease that had covered the burner and then poked the holes clean from the ash that remained. That did the trick, the burner lit all the way around!

Here’s where I got a little creative, I put the heat on high and a pan of water to steam clean the inside, it was pretty neat, alot more grease and grime came out the bottom and the grill was noticeably cleaner on the inside. I guess this is something I should do more often.

I don’t know what it was this morning, but it started when I pulled out from the garage, a car zoomed by the garage and scared the shit out of me, the lady driving it just looked at me as I stomped on the brakes only going like 5 mph.

Then going onto the freeway, I got cut off twice by the same BMW 335 in Los Altos, getting onto the freeway there was a long line so I went up Foothill Expressway, some jerk was blocking the right lane because he was trying to cut back into the left lane and bypass the long line for the freeway.

Immediately after getting on Foothill I got cut off by an Acura MDX, on the freeway, at Page Mill, a Jaguar refused to give me any room to merge on. A Ford Ranger truck almost changed lanes into me on 280 around Alpine Road…

I did make it safely into the office, but man what a horrible way to start the day.