We've gotten it inspected and approved, and we have a permit. Time for some campfire style cookin'. Tonight Porkchops, the 4th, Hotdogs and burgers.

The factory I work at is closing down for a week.. Guess that means I'm out of a paycheck. awesome.

Well, the only thing I can do. Is vow to never abandon her again, and try to remain her friend. I know I'm not her ideal best friend, but I hope she understands how I feel.

My "gender influence" senses are tingling amongst the JAFAX staff. Am I the only one that sees Liz is manipulating a handful of men in the JAFAX staff? Not to mention her friends latch onto her and agree to everything she says. It's like high school all over again! "Well we have plenty of artists on staff who'd love a shot at work on the website." So... that sounds to me like, that in worst case scenerio, she just wants to abuse her position as staff to promote her own work. Which is not that impressive.

Here is a contest from Along for the Ride to win a bunch of great slings!

<a href=”http://www.alongfortheride.biz/contest-s/49.htm”>Win the Essential Babywearing Stash from Along for the Ride (one Beco Butterfly, one Hotsling baby pouch, one BabyHawk Mei Tai, one Zolowear Ring Sling, and one Gypsy Mama Wrap)</a>

And here is a contest from Nature’s Child to win a starter set of cloth diapers!!

http://blog.thenatureschild.com/2008/06/beat-heat-summer-con-
test.html

(Matt wants you to know that this post was written by his dearest love)

If you know where my PSP is let me know...

There was more to this, but Jon childishly deleted it. Dumb arguing over nothing. Why can't they just shut up and let me workNULL

This is a the difference between <br> and <br /> The job description of a web designer So seriously people quit yer bitchin', cooperate, and let me do my job. That's strike 2 of any validation I have for your groups intelligence.

So.. this is a letter at first written by uhm... my mom dictating my little brother, and then the rest is written by my little brother. (My mom - pretending to be my little brother): Dear Joe Do you know how to alternate a game If you do please change This game To were you can create a carictor I will pay you $10 Becouse This game is boring as hell OK Jo IF you can change The game To were you can chioce your own wepon and create your carictor & add a easy Skill Level To The game and To be able To pick your own SKills and control magics. (My brother): PS. MOM wroght this The game I want you To wNULLnt you to work on IS DarKCLOud PSX2, Do not Brack game ow and IF you have To Bearn it To do this go ahead The only NULL is a letter I can't make out. Whether it's suppose to be an a/o/e is beyond me. I just know it's a mess. I preserved capitalization and punctuation. O.o my family is screwed up.

So, I passed off a bottle of beer batch two to a friend at a local cafe - he said it was the best beer he’s ever tasted. Me thinks he needs to get out more often, perhaps try a place that doesn’t serve big-named American beers. Batch three is ready but untested - need a good reason to drink besides “Wednesday.”

If you’re up a cartoon that seems like the writers have ADHD and freebased a concoction of caffeine and sugar, I’d recommend ぱにぽにだっしゅ (Pani Poni Dash). It satirizes Japanese cartoons and culture along with a bit of exported Americanisms. Make sure to watch it with subtitles to translate the background signs and text to double the laughter. If you quaff homemade beer, be sure to swallow fully before laughing.

I'd like to write something a little different this time around. I help with an Anime (Japanese animation) convention known as JAFAX (Japanese animation, film, and art expo). Every year, I run the game room for them. The JAFAX game room is practically a small con within the con itself. This year JAFAX and the game room was huge, and amazing. We had lot's of things we experimented with, but had a few bit of issues with software and event planning. We (Seijinohki Soft) would like to apologize for those issues, and are glad that we were able to resolved them. There were ~150 in the room during our main event, and we would like to thank everyone who was there. But who I would like to thank the most is my friends who should up to support me: YG (my dearest friend), Griff, Legistrate, Whitehat, Silversong, Xiro (I'm glad to see you're still there), Josh, Oni, Jeremy, Katherine, Ulmka, and Culver. If you guy's didn't visit me while I was there, I might have gone insane (The bad kind)... Also, Velex, thanks for writing our software and hanging in there during the live run of the software. Most importantly, I would like to thank all of you who came to participate in the tournaments. There were lots of awesome matches and I wish I could have been more 'awake' and less busy to watch them.

FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL FAIL

fri morning I get called in to work because of some trouble, no shower, didn't think to take one when I got home. Sat. wake up, thinking I can relax a while, then the computer club wants to go have lunch before the geekout thing. They dart off on us expecting us to come right away, so I quick had a shower w/out shaving. Sat all day didn't get home, but actually got some work done on some projects. Sat. night I went over to Ricky's who lives near GVSU, stayed the night, didn't shower and of course no shaving. Sun, no shower after 4 hours of sleep, I wake up. I don't feel right taking a shower at someone else's house. I end up spending my entire day in GR/Holland/Allendale going over/doing JAFAX stuff and hanging out for a bit with a few friends and talking with old ones. When on the way back a friend who moved back in to the state wanted to come back to Kalamazoo with me. So cool, we get back to kalamazoo around 2am, stayed up for a while messing around with stuff, get to sleep at 6a. I then get called at 9a this morning to come into work again! And no shower. :P So now I'm sitting here at my desk with a pretty good bushle of hair growing on my face... and I'm pretty tired. It's not that it wasn't all fun, not that I didn't have alot of fun this weekend... It's just wow... I probably really stink right now. :P

We've been having problems with our Dish Network receiver losing its signal more and more often. It didn't seem to have anything to do with the weather. It happened one day in January and has gotten significantly worse since. Dish sent someone out who promptly diagnosed the problem as a tree had grown into the path between the dish and the satellite. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a clear answer as to how this happened during the winter when trees aren't growing and don't have any leaves. It seems that losing its leaves would have helped improve the reception. Now I might have believed this if not for the part where he explained that the tree was only blocking one of the two satellites the dish receives signals from and that we would have no problem with local channels. This is wrong. If it loses signal, it loses all channels every time we checked. Oh well, he's going to come back and move the dish and rerun the cables. Hopefully, this will fix the problem regardless of the cause....

We had a visitor today at the office. Apparently, these two kids had gotten a flat and were a little suspicious of their jack. They also discovered that they had no tire iron. We were able to help them on both counts but that was not the end of our little adventure. The tire was "frozen" on. It took probably twenty minutes to a half hour to pry it off. We didn't stop there either. The spare didn't fit. Now there are probably several ways this could happen. In our case it turned out there were two spares. The spare that came with the car was... can you guess? It was rusted into the storage spare. It took probably another 45 minutes to unscrew it using a pry bar and hammer combo. We finally got them on their way but it brought up an important point. Please try putting the spare on your car. It won't hurt much and the experience will likely teach you a thing or two....

So, I tried another brew - Weizenbier with my mini-beer kit.  Unfortunately, my assistant was not here!  Watching the birth of his child or some unlikely excuse.  Thus, I didn’t get the batch correctly made the first time.  About an hour later, I remembered that I forgot to mix in some boosters.  since it was so close to sealing up the keg, I thought I’d try adding boster late.  So, I uncorked the keg, added booster, and stirred.  We’ll see if it turns out or if I spoiled it.  

As for batch two, the “Canadian Draft,” it was a success. A few bottles were less carbonated than the others and there was an unexpectedly nice sweetness to one. Also, when looking at the bottles in the fridge, it looked as if the carbonation bubbles only came half-way up the bottle. Really funky looking, but there was no separation in the liquid. Nevertheless, still very good.

I've decided to attempt starting my own con: Project Con Check it out, we'll need all the help we can get.

We went to a place called the Rainbow Grill in Grandville on Chicago DR. I had driven by the place daily for a while now. They've had a sign up for "Old fashioned bubbly chocolate sodas" and my curious got the better of me. Now it turns out they have to different parts to the restaurant. One is a normal restaurant with waitstaff. However, there is a separate room that doesn't have waitstaff. Instead, there is a phone at each table and some menus. Once you know what you want you call in your order. There are people who bring out your food and someone wandering around making sure you had water and such. It was an interesting experience and the food was good. The soda from the sign was good but had so much ice cream in the top that it was difficult to eat or drink off of it without it overflowing. The biggest thing was that it was *really* laid back. People kept to themselves, there wasn't a bunch of wait staff running around, it was quiet, and no one seemed to mind the kids....

Well, I’ve spent the last 6-9 months typing in the Dvorak Keyboard Layout. A little history lesson for those who don’t know much about qwerty and why it sucks. Qwerty was developed as a standard typewriter layout to prevent the typewriter from jamming as often. This means the most frequented keys are spaced out so that they are in harder to reach spots on the keyboard. Of course, as we made the switch from the older typewriters that jammed often, to more reliable typewriters, and eventually to computer keyboards, the standard layout was never changed. Dr. August Dvorak had designed a more logical layout in the 30s, which focused on putting the most-used characters in the English language on the easier to reach keys, but people were already too adjusted to the qwerty layout for there to be any real push to switch. Dvorak’s layout is more ergonomic, meaning its easier on your fingers/wrist, which would mean a less severe Carpal Tunnel problem in the US. It’s also argued that since it is a more efficient layout, higher speeds can be achieved, and the learning curve isn’t so steep.

My personal experience with dvorak was a good one. With qwerty, I would occasionally get really stiff/sore wrists when I spent too much time on my computer, when i was using the dvorak layout, this didn’t happen once. I achieved a maximum speed of ~70WPM during the brief period I was using it, but that was still slowly increasing to this date. My maximum qwerty speed was over 100WPM, but that speed difference didn’t bother me. I’m quite sure if I had decided to stick with it, I would’ve been able to reach 100+WPM.

Alas, dvorak still has some minor setbacks, none of which are it’s own fault. All Operating Systems will support dvorak, but that doesn’t mean it will be a pleasant experience. Many shortcuts are set to the keys they are for ease of use (See Ctrl-Z Ctrl-X Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V). Those shortcuts are no longer in the lower left corner of the keyboard, but scattered across the entire thing. When gaming in dvorak, support is limited. It usually means a good 10 minutes of re-mapping keys to what they should be. The only exception to this that comes to mind right now is the Linux SecondLife client. It also raises the problem of when someone else uses your computer and isn’t able to figure out how to type. All of these reasons don’t bother me too much. Unfortunately as an aspiring sysadmin, I need to keep in mind that I will be on a lot of different pc’s and servers while I’m working, and it just isn’t worth the trouble to have to worry about keyboard layouts all day. To anyone that doesn’t hop around computers very often, I’d highly recommend giving it a shot.

So long dvorak, you’ll be missed.

Temporary website for Jafax 13. Until I get access to post it, this what I've created so far. http://www.seijinohki.net/jafax13

The guy said Henry is showing signs of ADHD. He also said his gut is that Henry will be diagnosed as such at some point in the future. However, right now he did not feel comfortable stating it for sure. He gave some information on things to try and the names of a couple people we could talk to if things do not get better with Henry. Hopefully, he will grow out of it or least learn to deal with it. We'll just have to keep working with him....

I recently had the opportunity to setup Automatic Proxy Detection for a customer. I’d never taken the time to figure it out before. It worked in both IE and Firefox and was kinda neat.

It turns out that when you start your web browser and you have automatic proxy detection enabled it attempts to find a file at the URL http://wpad.yourdomain.tld/wpad.dat. In my case it would try for http://wpad.mattscott.org/wpad.dat. If that file is found it runs the javascript in it and sets the proxy settings to however they are defined in the wpad.dat file. Here’s what we did. I’m using example.com as my domain to protect the guilty.

Create a DNS Record

We created a CNAME for wpad.example.com that pointed to a web server. In this case a Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 running IIS. An A record would work okay too but given the fact that this will probably never be a server’s primary name record a CNAME made sense to me.

Create wpad.dat

Now you need to create your wpad.dat file. We found several examples on the web. Here’s an example. Google can help you find more:

function FindProxyForURL(url, host)

{

if (shExpMatch( host, “192.168.1.*” )

|| shExpMatch( host, “127.*” )

|| shExpMatch( host, “localhost” )

|| shExpMatch( host, “*.example.com” )

|| isPlainHostName( host )

|| dnsDomainIs( host, “.example.com” )) {

return “DIRECT”;

}

return “PROXY proxy.example.org:8080;”;

}
The first section inside the if block tells the browser to connect to the destination server directly if one of those conditions are met. You’d normally do this to bypass your proxy for a host on the local LAN. The second section is where you define the proxy for use with everything else. It’s just a javascript function so you could probably go pretty crazy with the thing if you wanted to.

Once you’ve created your file copy it to the root of your web server. One thing that we noticed was that IIS wouldn’t server the file initially because it didn’t have a mime type for a .dat file. So we added a mime type of application/x-ns-proxy-autoconf for .dat files and we were good to go.

Create a DHCP Scope Option

The last thing we did was create an option in our DHCP scope to define where your wpad.dat file is. I don’t believe his isn’t strictly necessary since a machine should generally attempt to connect to a host called wpad in its own domain. I see it as a good idea though because you might run into issues if you ever have guest machines on your network or if you are using some sort of split DNS tunneling over a VPN client or something like that. It was a recommended step so we did it in DHCP on a Windows Small Business Server 2003.

Create an Option 252 Entry in DHCP

To create an Option 252 entry in DHCP, do the following.

1.	Click Start, point to Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click DHCP.
2.	In the console tree, right-click the applicable DHCP server, click Set Predefined Options, and then click Add.
3.	In Name, type WPAD.
4.	In Code, type 252.
5.	In Data type, select String, and then click OK.
6.	In String, type http://Computer_Name:Port/wpad.dat where: • Computer_Name is the fully qualified domain name of the web server computer. • Port is the port number on which automatic discovery • \information is published. You can specify any port number. By default it uses port 80.
7.	To add the option to the scope right-click Scope options,under the scope you want to add it to and then click Configure options.
8.	Confirm that the Option 252 check box is selected.

Unless I left something out, that about does it. All you should have to do is to check the Automatic Proxy Detection box in your browser and you should be good to go. In Internet Explorer you can sort of push this setting down via GPO. Of course it’s one of those whacked out policies that users can mess with if they know how. In Firefox I am not aware of a way to automate this but I’m sure somebody’s written something.

Enjoy!

Yep, there was a big hype about solaris 2008.05. One review even mention it as being ‘What Ubuntu hopes to be someday’. Sorry folks, I’m going to have to disagree. I booted the OS onto my laptop today, and spent the majority of my morning dealing with its various short-comings. The OS has finally evolved into a LiveCD, years after all of it’s Linux competitors have done the same. I was greeted when i first booted up by a console-login and no graphical interface, hopefully just a compatibility issue with the on-board graphics on my laptop, though the GUI worked just fine after logging in with a blank username/password. (I feel like I should be automatically logged in with a LiveCD, maybe I’m just too picky)

I’ve ran my share of CD-based operating systems in the past, I like to test out an Operating System and see what it has to offer over others. OpenSolaris has got to be one of the slowest live distributions I have come across, launching firefox and bringing up a local start-up web page took a good 30seconds, pretty disappointing. Since it was running so slow, I decided to jump right into installing it on the disk, I had already freed up about 20GB of unallocated space to install it to. Unfortunately, the Installer was bugged on my system, and I never made it that far. It recognized my root and swap partitions from my kubuntu install, along with the ~20GB of unallocated space. OpenSolaris has a minimum of 3GB diskspace, and a recommended 7GB. Trying to be generous, even for an OS I didn’t expect to get a terrible amount of use from, I tried to allocate 10GB to a solaris partition. Unfortunately, every time I tried to continue and write the partition to disk, the installer automatically changed my disk allocation to .1GB, and as a result wouldn’t let me install.

Next, I thought I’d try formatting the disk with fdisk and then running the installer. This requires becoming root on the terminal. My first thought was to ’sudo su -’, unfortunately it didn’t come with sudo installed. My next attempt was a ’su root’ and a blank password, which wasn’t the answer either (Probably for the best :-] ) Finally, I checked the sun docs and found that ‘pfexec su’ does the trick. I’m in as root, I can’t complain too much here, this was more because of my inexperience with solaris in the past. (On a side note, ubuntu will tell you how to run commands as root the first time you open a terminal in the livecd, something the opensolaris dev team might be wise to consider adding.

Next, I figured it was best to follow sun docs to go on from here. I started with the format utility, it recognized my drive and had me select it. After selecting it, it asked me how many cylinders my disk had, where I’m sorry to say I got fed up with the whole thing and gave up on opensolaris for the time being. I could’ve used prtvtoc to try and read a cylinder count from my disk, but I was too frustrated at this point to want to.

With the completely new design and advertising scheme for opensolaris, I hoped to see a more user-friendly environment. I’m sad to say that this wasn’t the case for me, I hope those of you that decide to try it yourself get a bit of better luck than I do.

It was pretty boring. Her parents are in Wisconsin so we didn't have anywhere to go. Saturday was Jake's graduation party at least. I guess he's got baseball other weekends so he had to do it over Memorial Day. It worked for us at least. My mom had grad parties up near Beal City so we couldn't bother them. Interesting thing about Jake's party is that he's going to donate to charity instead of sending thank you notes. Its a nice gesture and more practical than the traditional thank you. People don't *really* care about the thank yous we just feel they have to sent....

So. I was doing some reading this weekend about parasitic worms. I do crazy things sometimes. I found the life cycle of the hookworm most interesting. Here’s a worm whose larva can be absorbed right through your skin. Then they ride around in your blood and get stuck in your lungs. At this point their journey is just beginning. These little guys burst the capillaries in your lungs and then begin the long crawl. They worm their way up and out of your lungs and then down into your stomach. All of this happens without the host having any idea what’s going on.

One in your small intestine their work is pretty much done. At this point they latch on, drink your blood and mate with each other. Just one great big hookworm party.

If you are interested, Google knows lots of stuff about the hookworm. If you don’t feel like typing, click here http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:official&hs=c1G&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=hookworm+lungs&spell=1

ty to those that came over, it was fun.

I recently acquired a system of brewing beer, something called Mr Beer. It’s a cheap kit and what the heck, I don’t have the enough room for a full-size adult kit. So, I’ll use my plastic children’s toy to make a brew.

The first recipe is Vienna Lager. Baseball and hockey on the over-the-air HDTV, a few purchased beers in the fridge, and pizza from across the street: perfect beginnings for or Aaron and I to brew. After we did some arm curls with existing beer, we starting boiling the “booster” following a can of flavouring mix. Told you it was for children, too easy. Mix in the plastic key, add yeast, seal, and let set for two weeks. Then, with fourteen 20oz bottles, transfer the beer, add sugar, seal, and wait another two weeks for carbonation to set in.

So, the first batch results: “quite drinkable” according to Aaron. Our sights were set low and they were excessively exceeded. Amazing. And cheap, like $15 for the keg + $5 for the batch of the beer works out to $1.43 a beer or 35¢ if you don’t account for the initial keg purchase.

Next up, Canadian Draft, whatever that entails. Only one more week until we can open the bottles, maybe during the Redwings.

Just a reminder to all those interested, we are having our house warming party tomorrow (5/24 sat) at 5pm. If you need directions/address, please call.

Learn the difference people! Lower res: To have less pixels to display an image with e.g. 800x600 is lower res than 1024x768. Lower Detail: When models have less poly's or lower res textures. When a game uses less special effects and rendering filters. Why do people use "Lower res" to describe graphical differences when they should be saying, "Lower detail".

We went to Frederick Meijer Gardens and the kids had a blast. We have a membership to the Grand Rapids Children's Museum and they're doing this thing that each month for the next few you get free admisison to another similar place. This month we can get into the gardens for free. The kids had a lot of fun in the children's area. We finally took the tram ride around the park after missing out the previous times that we have gone. The kids practically fell asleep at the end but we had fun. Melissa and I had no idea there was so much more to the park that we hadn't seen. We'll have to go back so the kids can play at the mini-farm they have. We'd probably have to go back by ourselves to see the sculptures....

I'm not sure about other people with kids that are young but for us going out to dinner takes planning. In fact it is often an all day project. The first part is running them ragged. In order to accomplish this we took the kids to PlayWorld in Jenison. This needs to be scheduled appropriately because you want them to sleep until closer to the sitter's arrival. This way they are bright-eyed, bushy tailed, and easier to deal with. The sitter, of course, is the most important part. You need to get the right sitter because you cannot take them to dinner and the right sitter ensures that its fun for them. The wrong sitter can mean screaming moments while you leave and that's not fun for anyone. It apparently worked because the sitter seemed to have an easier time of things tonight. The kids love her and she's really good with them. The only weird thing is that she has a tendency to buy them things when she comes over to watch them. She doesn't need to do that. Oh well. All that work just so Melissa and I could go out with her parents for dinner. Her dad's birthday is this week and there is no way we were going to try and take the kids for anything nicer than McDonald's. Although, even McDonald's requires careful gauging of their moods....

The National Marrow Donor Program is the registry that is used to find people to donate bone marrow. My wife and I recently signed up and you should as well. Its a pretty simple thing to do and unlike donating blood there's not much in the way of continuing effort once you've signed up. (You should be donating blood as well.) The only thing you'd have to do is keep them updated with your contact information. I'm pretty sure you can handle that....

my faith in people has back at least a little... YG you are slowly beginning to understand, just think of what needs to be apologized for and forgiven. Have the courage to tell me.

It seems tradition for something lousy to happen on or around my birthday. It also seems that if I'm around other people than it can happen to them instead. Mother's Day falling on my birthday this year meant we were visiting my family for the weekend. This year my mom's boyfriend managed to fall, cut his hand and break several of his teeth trying to avoid stepping on my daughter. I'd be unhappy but I'm just grateful that it wasn't me. :)...

... why do I like this series? I thought after watching it at first it was just really emo and trying to hard, but I gave it some thought. I realized it's very very complexed and well written.

I had hoped that it wouldn't happen. I'm a geek, everybody knows we have no social skills. Who would torture me like that? Susan. I should have known. The second she came into our office and wasn't asking me for help I knew something was up. My boss and I share an office, and she never asks my boss for help. A minute later my boss calls for help in the back board room. Oh well, I got through it and everyone was, hopefully, just as uncomfortable as me....

Well, digiband has been coined "The American/open source simulator" for Guitar Freaks and Drummania, and is 1 of only 2 surviving simulators listed in the wikipedia entry for Drummania. So I guess with that said, I should probably start working on it again and expand it for support for Rockband... Just we won't be able to do Karaoke... I don't know where to begin on that. We must do what we can to surpass our rival: DTXMania. :P

We took the kids out to Grand Haven for a couple of hours today. They had never been there so we thought it would be a fun way of getting out of the house. Henry loved the lighthouses and the drawing in the sand. We got a couple of pictures of Henry out on the pier. Mommy and Sammi decided to stay off the pier so it was just Henry and I. It was a bit nerve-wracking even with just Henry since he constantly wanted to look down off the side of the pier. It was a lot of fun though. He waved to the boats, and of course, asked what *everything* was. We finished it up with a short walk along the beach and Sammi and Henry practiced their letters in the sand....

I mentioned Henry a day with mommy all to himself. Today was Samantha's turn. She played a little bit with mommy and than slept for about four hours. I guess Mommy and her played hard. :)...

Melissa had some time off this week because of semester breaks and whatnot so she decided to spend the day with Henry. Part of this involved going to Playworld. Henry said it "rocked", complete with devil horns. (Thanks Uncle Dougie!) This brought up another Henry-related issue. Kids like to try and get Henry in trouble. Henry is not a subtle kid. You pretty much know where he stands for better or worse. Other kids, however, are a lot more sneaking. One kid spent about a half hour trying to get Henry into trouble. We know this because he bragged to his other three year old friends that he was going to do it and Melissa overheard him and than watched him in his various attempts. It is not the first we've seen kids try and provoke Henry. It is hard because he doesn't get that sometimes kids will be mean to him only when the teachers/adults/parents aren't looking. He's not a subtle kid. You pretty much know where he stands. Melissa decided it was time to leave when a bunch of useless parents decided their 14 year olds should be playing tag in the same area as three year olds. What exactly goes through some people's heads?...

Well 1 vice down, now for #2 and 3. I will now be no longer drinking anything unnaturally caffeinated and no more fast food. That's this months step to living healthier... Now for a bit of frustration to relieve. WHY IS TRYING TO FIND SOMEONE YOU MATCH, LIKE FINDING A JOB! And why is it everytime I find them: They take everything I tell them completely wrong, or find someone they think is better and go for them instead (the last one is dating a guy that she had told me specifically hates weeaboos or aka Otakus, yet she's a huge weeaboo...) I guess it doesn't help that when I really like someone I become slightly obsessed and say crazy things... But if just given the chance I would be faithful... I mean 6 years... If only Vel were ACTUALLY female then maybe it would have really worked out. Why do women take body weight so seriously. Especially women WHO ARE FATTER THAN ME! I think that's the biggest turn off women have with me (as to say Women are more shallow than they say they are)... But what other guy do you know can play 2+hrs of DDR at time in the 5-8ft difficulty range. Next time I hear a woman bitching about there weight, I think I'm just gonna totally chew them out... Maybe if I was a pot smoking, rap and or hip hop music listening, brain dead drone. If only the one chick who regulars the computer club... (Why I can't remember her name, I don't know... oh wait, that's why, because I was trying to faithfully wait for someone who just ended up hating me instead!) Had any kind of interest in me. I think I could fall in love with her... but she probably has a boyfriend that she's not telling us about, or is one of those women that bs and say, "I'm a geek and wouldn't date a geek". (Talk about yet another shallow statement. I'm not gonna say how many times I heard that one before....) The other turn off, I think, is the lack of degree. So what!? I have a stable job... my own car... why care about something so petty? Just because I didn't get through college, doesn't mean I didn't work my ass off to get into a decent job. Though the pay is shit, it gets the job done. Look at this website for example.. HOW MANY FUCKING WMU CS GRADS EVEN KNOW HOW TO CODE SOMETHING LIKE THISNULL And yes it's all hand coded. Nothing, not even images for the borders were stolen or borrowed. So hands off my javascript bitches...

Melissa had her pinning ceremony. My mom and Melissa's parents came out for it. I missed most of it with Sammi so I cannot really comment on it much. I was told it was a bit boring but that's par for the course with graduation ceremonies. I still do not know where the idea of giving out pins to the graduating radiology tech students came from but it is what they do apparently. The most important thing is that we're getting closer to having a normal life again. She's passed her classes and that is one step down. Now she needs to finish her clinical time and pass the board exam so she'll be certified. That is all just step 2. Step 3 is the important one. She will need to get a job. She's supposed to work for St. Mary's Hospital as part of her deal with them. However, you never know if or when they'll actually have a job for her. I'll just be happy when she's around more. If we need to cut back on expenses than so be it....

I know you're blocking me again, When will you let go of this grudge... Everyone says, "You're a glutton for punishment". I will stay strong, You final got what you want, I don't love you anymore. So what else do you wantNULL Let's analyze why you're mad at me: I lied to you and told your mom anyways about us. Well think about your mom for a second, you kept secrets from her, which is as bad as lying... I didn't want your mom to be angry about that because I figured dealing with your anger would be easier to deal with... Nope, guess not. 2. Lying to you about Vel... Uhm... why do you care? Seriously? You didn't want anything to do with me that way... so why does Vel matterNULL Besides.. yes, I did lie about that, sorry, but It was already headed that direction without you. I lied to a few other people before I lied to you. I just don't want friends fighting each other... It's not just you.

Well everyone, we just moved. This also means we are having a party. :P Everyone, come join us! The party will be on may 24th, we now in a bigger house, and with a big back yard. The house is located: here YG, Anime Addicts, Computer club, Jafax, kohta group, Pizzahut posse, and the all of you are welcome, and I'd appreciate it if you all came. :)

The weather is getting warm and the kids got to try out bare feet for the first time of this year. They rarely where socks or shoes in the house so they were pretty excited when daddy let them run around outside the same way. I may have created a monster here....

I see you've unblocked me... but if it's okay to talk to you now, you need to tell me.

well, they told me our bill would be $103 after taxes and cable box rental, it's $130... They gave me a cable box that has this eternal hum on it's audio output and has green and purple scan lines through the component signal (HTF did they manage that.) The box has no configuration for volume output (sounds like the volume out is too low, which might be causing the hum.), HD mode (480p, 720p, etc), and aspect ratio detection/correction. The box doesn't mask channels we don't have. The box is designed to solicit us while we search through the guide. The icing on the cake however is TCP port 25 outbound. I would have been fine if they would just tell me, "no we can't open that port it is blocked." Instead I call to see what can be done and they tell me that it is my equipment blocking the port and that they don't block ports. Even worse they tried claiming they can't do anything to help me because I'm using third party software... What is not third party software to them? I've never seen a charter OS or charter Mail client... They tried telling me it's my firewall or router, but we're using linux as a computer connected directly to the modem and no iptables rules set... This is of course after we disabled routing rules IPv4 forwarding, IP masquerade, etc. Lying to your customers is worse than just telling them, "No we can't do that..."

Earlier this month I posted about Microsoft Owing Me Money. Fortunately after some help from friends over at the Consumerist, three hours of phone tag with Microsoft, and numerous support e-mails I have gotten my refund from Microsoft and my Hotmail account closed successfully.

I updated my source code to my active directory realm today, to address a bug that prevented users from signing in after a user typed in an incorrect password. I didn’t realize that copying a DirectoryContext was not a shallow copy so it was updating the service account information with the incorrect username and password. As always the code is available here.

I'm really not fucking amused with myself.</content>

I had a bit of an expression of anger to post, but a friend of mine made me realize, it's pointless to be angry, it's pointless to like her anymore too. Guess it's time to press reset.

http://www.seijinohki.net/story.htm It's finally complete... though it's a sad ending...

Adobe Illustrator has never been the most user friendly program and I have dealt with it, but tonight just about put me over the edge. Plain and simple Adobe - start releasing stable projects, it is bad enough that your software was the weak link in the PWN2OWN computer security contest but I am still finding many bugs in CS3 inhibiting its usability.

Earlier this week I wrote about using JAAS authentication in Sun Java System Application Server (or Glassfish) against Microsoft Windows Active Directory. Unfortunately using the default implementation I had many complications during this process, and decided to write my own more versatile JAAS realm (which is LDAP based) to authenticate users against Active Directory.

Recently I have been trying to eat more healthy and be more environmentally friendly and have been approached by a few of my friends who have been curious as to why I have made this decision, and asking for some suggestions for their own similar endeavors.In light of April often being considered as health and wellness month and environmental awareness month I figured it was time to provide some answers.

Yeah, like underwear.

t’has been a while. Wow that contraction didn’t work at all. For more examples of strange contractions, see urban dictionary’s entry on “t’would”:

James: Wanna go hang out at the mall next week?
Jill: T’would be cool.

But I digress, it is my pledge to make a post with more substance than content. Or vice versa, whichever sounds better. Underwear aside… eh, let’s try again.

Hi, I’m Brian. This is my blog and it hasn’t seen the light of my thoughts (I’m conceited that way) in about… let’s see here… just shy of five months, all told. No doubt when I started I didn’t imagine I would suffer quite a dry spell all at once, but there you have it. I’ve gone quite inward about the whole thing. What is a blog? Why do I need to use it? Is it possible to swallow one’s pride, as it were, and still commit one’s thoughts to paper for everyone else to see? Maybe not, but I guess I don’t care anymore for I’ve given up seeking the answers to such questions.

I work for a company that recently bought another company and you can read all about that over here. I neglect the mention of specific names because that would mean SEO which gets on my nerves. I’ve been doing all sorts of neat work on new features, new designs, fixing old things, and staring out the window in anticipation of the massive crowds set to arrive on April 9th. Yeah, you know what I’m talking about, let’s torch this joint!

“Olympic Torch” this joint, that is! That’s right, the torch is coming to San Francisco and I’m gonna be at ground zero when stuff happens. I’m not sure exactly what will happen, but if you’ve been watching the news recently, you know it will be worth a few photos.

Security heightened at Golden Gate Bridge
Olympic Torch Relay Descends Into Chaos
Olympic torch relay should be confined to host country says IOC official

Officials in Paris were today forced to extinguish the Olympic flame and carry it by bus when protesters against Chinese policy in Tibet tried to seize it.

Can a protest ever ‘win’? Perhaps in time, a ‘win’ can be felt. In Paris, a more immediate win was experienced when the Olympic flame, nay, spirit which travels the world for everyone to see, amidst thousands of security personnel had to be put out and confined to a bus. My friends in Paris, I say to you, “good show”. We Americans now have a protest to out-protest.

But I digress, (yes I did that twice. Don’t tempt me should you not wish a third.) there are other things on my mind as well. Doctor Who, for instance. It was recently revealed that Richard Dawkins would appear in an upcoming episode, as himself!

“People were falling at his feet,” says Davies, creator of the BBC’s flagship show. “We’ve had Kylie Minogue on that set, but it was Dawkins people were worshipping.”

I guess I can’t imagine how Dawkins fits in to all of this but I hope it at least involves a turtle that can fly.

And on that note, Battlestar Galactica was good, if not a bit uneventful in light of all the promises made. I suppose that’s how they get you hooked for the entire season. Maybe I should just wait till the season is over. It’s much more fulfilling to watch a whole season over a few days than feel cheated at the end of each 40-minute segment. Though I suppose to make it a social occasion would be a good excuse to have “Friday night plans”. Oh who am I kidding, I don’t know anyone else who watches this show.

Well, back to my life, which, at this moment, includes me going to bed.

Ever since ATT started putting VRAD/Lightspeed boxes around West Michigan I have anxiously been waiting in anticipation for this service to become live in my area, well I checked online today and to my pleasent s.urprise IU am now eligible to get Uverse. 

I love you, that is all.</content>

My employer uses Java for all applications written in house. Recently we have started to switch over to using the JavaEE standard for all new applications. Unfortunately, the LDAP module in the Sun Java System Application Server (or Glassfish) does not always play nicely with Active Directory, in fact most of the time it doesn’t play nice at all. So in my free time, I have developed a JAAS module that seems to work nicely with Active Directory.

I have a customer that has felt it necessary to secure the network ports in their conference rooms. The goal was to make it impossible for untrusted computers to access the LAN and if possible dump them on to a VLAN that would allow them only Internet access. Rather than detail the whole project I’ll just provide a couple of links that helped me out and explain a couple of difficulties I faced. I am still working on the guest vlan portion of the project and will update the config below when that portion of the project is complete.

Switch Configuration

We used a Dell PowerConnect 6248 switch in this case. During R&D for this project I also made 802.1x authentication work on a PowerConnect 6024 and a Cisco Catalyst 2950 series. I actually made things work with the Catalyst first by following this article http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/lan/catalyst2950/software/release/12.1_9_ea1/configuration/guide/Sw8021x.html. The important bits of the config for the PowerConnect 6248 are as follows:


*snip*
! This enables dot1x globally
dot1x system-auth-control
! This sets up the radius server. 192.168.1.5 is a Windows Server 2003 server running IAS
aaa authentication dot1x default radius
radius-server key "abcdefg"
radius-server host 192.168.1.5
exit
!
! This port requires authorization. This is the default.
interface ethernet 1/g1
exit
!
!This port is forced into an authorized state.
interface ethernet 1/g2
dot1x port-control force-authorized
exit

Windows Client and Server Configuration

To configure the clients and server I used this article: http://alextch.members.winisp.net/802.1x/Defending%20your%20internal%20network%20with%20802.1x%20and%20Microsoft%20PKI.htm.

This article pretty much got me where I needed to be but here’s a couple of things to note.

1. You have to make the registry change found on Page 13. There doesn’t seem to be any way around it. If you find one, let me know. The plan is to make the change in a logon script.
2. How your computer names are stored in the certificate issued to the clients is important. The default settings had been changed on the system in this case and this caused some problems. I successfully used a Subject Name Format of None and checked DNS name. I also used a subject name format of Fully Distinguished Name with nothing checked underneath. I do not fully understand these options so YMMV.

Keeping that in mind you shouldn’t have any problems implementing this using the two articles that I linked to. I may eventually get really motivated and take screen shots.