Well, I signed Maddie up for training classes last night. I looked around a little, but was feeling I needed to get her in to a class ASAP, so I went with Petsmart which is close by and had a class starting Monday night. I've watched them operate classes in the past and they seem to be alright. A buddy, Michael, who used to live in the Columbus area suggested a place they took their dogs to that use "positive reinforcement" techniques. If Petsmart doesn't work out, I'll check out that place.
Well, yesterday was a busy day. I converted a client's old server over to a new box running CFMX in the morning and headed over to another client's location to help them try to recover some corrupted data. (They didn't have any recent backups that were good—their raid controller card had begun writing junk data to the drive, so things were in bad shape.) I was able to get them back up in running to a degree, but there's 2 weeks of data I wasn't able to recover. They're sending their box out to a data recovery firm and hopefully we'll be able to get that missing data back. I was a little disappointed I couldn't help them out better than I did, but that's why I've stressed to them in the past the importance of backing data up. This isn't the first time I've had to help the client get the box up and running after a hardware failure.
Anyway, the day was pretty hectic. When I was at the one clients location, a couple of oddities arose on the box I put live, so I had to come back to the office to fix those issues. Fortunately, nothing was major and the problems didn't affect the core audience. I still was hoping for zero down time and thought I had planned accordingly.
Something to keep in mind when transferring a server: check Google for links to your site and make sure that you haven't forgotten about any aliases or non-standard links. There was a function of the site left in there for legacy purposes (to map old links from a static version of the site built in the mid-90s) and a few of the variations weren't working. Since those aren't referenced internally, when running on my stress tests and bot scans, it never came across the problem. Anyway, a search on Google may have found some of the variations before the client's client did. :)
The complete third season of Mr. Show with Bob & David is supposed to be released in August 2003. If you've never seen a Mr. Show episode, I'd recommend renting Seasons 1 & 2 on DVD—it's by far the funniest show no one ever saw. I just wish HBO would have pushed this show more. Even though I had HBO at the time, they did a lousy job promoting the show so I never started watching it until I caught a re-run one night. I've been hooked ever since.
Turned out to be a big weekend. I had planned to cut the grass for the first time this year on Saturday, but ChemLawn showed up—which put a stop to those plans. That probably turned out for the best, since Jenn & I got a ton of things done Saturday. We went to lunch and then ran a couple hours of errands. We then stopped back at the house to pick Maddie up. After picking up some boxes and taking them to Jenn's appartment (for when she moves next month—to where where not quite sure yet) we took Maddie to Antrim park.
Antrim has a 1.2 mile track which surrounds a large pond—which the dogs are allowed to swim in. That was the first time Maddie swam and I think it freaked her out a bit. She was all gungho the first time until she realized that her feet didn't touch the ground. She then panicked a bit and was very tentative around the water the rest of the day. She did go back in a few times, but she didn't go very far and always kept her footing.
We also let her walk for awhile without her leash. She didn't stay far, but there was a jogger who was afraid of dogs and when Maddie went to great her, the jogger got really scared—so I put Maddie back on the leash. I only let Maddie off the leash after noticing that almost all the dogs at the park were not leashed. There were probably 50 dogs there. I really want to research training classes in town. I think it's time. Anyway, we had a good time at the park and Maddie feel straight asleep once we got in the car and starting driving home.
A friend of mine (thanks Deron!) had forwarded me review. I've always found quantum science interesting, but I admit, it does make my brain hurt if I think about it too hard. :) The idea of "entanglement" is something I find extremely fascinating.
Quantum particles are said to be entangled when their fates are inextricably linked; if one is spinning clockwise, say, the other one has to be spinning counterclockwise.
Although not stated in the article, it's my understanding that once entangled, the particles can be seperated via both time and space and they remain entangled. This brings up interesting possibilities in communication.
I just got back from lunch—I went home to play with the puppy for awhile —and got to watch a bit of the news. I was really struck by the shear number of Iraqi people celebrating in the streets.
I've mentioned this a couple of times in the past to friends and family. When you've watched the news coverage on Iraq over the past 30 days or so, you'll notice that anytime they show a group of Saddam supporters, it consisted of 20-70 people—most of which are fully armed and in some kind of military guard (not necessarily official military garb, but military non the less.) Even the recent footage of Saddam walking around the streets of Baghdad, there were were still less than 70 people surrounding him. Granted, the camera man would try to be creative by standing in the middle of the crowd making it look bigger, but really it was quite a small crowd of supporters.
Now all the sudden the streets are laden with thousands (and tens of thousands) of Iraqi citizens all cheering and celebrating Saddam's regime being brought down in Baghdad. This tells me that without a doubt, the citizens of Iraqi are glad we're there and are happy for this liberation operation.
I was on ProgGods.com today and they had some release dates listed for projects I'm interesting in. It looks like Trevor Rabin is releasing some re-workings of the tunes from Yes' 90125—I wonder what that's like. It's also interesting to see that Queensryche is re-releasing all of their albums. I think it's a shame that they added bonus live tracks to "Operation: Mindcrime" though—it ruins the flow of the album if you ask me.
April 8th:
Man, Maddie poked me in the eye last night with her nose. I was trying to get her to move over and she raised her head real fast and poked me in my left eye with her nose. You wouldn't think a dog's nose would be that hard, but it feels like someone jammed their finger in my eye as hard as they could. I've been feeling crappy all day and my eye feels bruised. If it's still bothering me tomorrow, I'm going to call a doctor.
You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named "Bush", "Dick", and "Colon".
A Dream Theater fan is releasing a series of videos in DivX v5.03 format called "Nine Degrees of Backstage Tourbulence." The series contain backstage video from the guys in Dream Theater. I'm trying to download the videos now, so I may post an updated
Todd, Eric and I finally got together for the first time since like September to jam. I'm really glad none of you were there to witness it. :) I haven't played much in the past 4 months and it really showed. I really need to work on picking up my bass for a few minutes a day. I had really gotten out of my routine of playing every day once I started spending all my time w/Jenn and then when I got the puppy, my time grew to nothing. Anyway, I've got to get back in to the groove and and start playing every day.
Todd called me this afternoon and wants to put together a flyer for a drummer and I'd assume for a keyboard/guitarist/singer. We really would love to find a keyboardist who can play several instruments. There's a guy I have in mind who may fit that role, so we'll probably ask him to jam again. I can't wait until we get a drummer to play with, playing w/a live drummer makes such a huge difference. Playing to a midi drummer sure beats nothing, but it's just nowhere near the real thing.
Anyway, for as bad as I sounded (and was,) it sure was nice to get together again to jam. I'm really hoping this becomes a more regular weekend event. Honestly, when we play more than once every month or two we actually sound not too bad!
Ok, it must be science day today. I found a link to this article and just found it too strange not to post. Personally, I think this is ridiculous, but I'm sure people thought the idea of "an electronic buggy" was ludicrous too.
...the space elevator is a cable with one end attached to the Earth and the other end roughly 100,000 kilometers out in space. Standing on the Earth at the base of this "beanstalk " it would look unusual but simple, a cable attached to the ground and going straight up out of sight.
A new paper by University of Utah physicist Lior Burko, building on earlier work, raises the possibility that black holes may not annihilate everything, and that the potential for hyperspace travel is still open.
Someone posted a link to this site on the Flashcoders mailing list today. There's some very interesting Flash stuff and other miscellaneous programming related things on the site. However, you must check out The Flash-based version of "Donkey Kong." It's obvious a lot of time was spent to replicate the game engine, graphics and sound.
Look in the middle section for the "Games" icon--the first
icon to the right of that will launch the game.
Donkey Kong
Claims that man-made pollution is causing "unprecedented" global warming have been seriously undermined by new research which shows that the Earth was warmer during the Middle Ages.
Well I believe we have to be conscious on how we treat the enviroment, I've also found it odd how we people thought we an accurate view of weather patterns to declare we were causing the "Global Warming" pattern. We've only had reliable recorded weather data for the past 90 years or so (and you could debate that it's even that long.) Any real data analyst would tell you that that's nowhere near long enough data to accurately report a trend. The bottom line is we don't really know enough about weather patterns to acculate perdict what's going on.