Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

Gotta love The Daily Show!

It seems our fair city is absolutely crawling with democrats. Anyone know a good pest removal service? This town needs a good fumigating.

I've never been a big fan of sports games on the XBox, but the cover of the newest edition of Madden Football releasing today made me laugh.

Oops. Maybe they'll send everyone that registers their game a little stick-on Jets uniform.

So it's what, day 5 of the Olympics? Here's my take so far:

• The US is apparently really good at swimming
• We suck at air pistol marksmanship (but do not underestimate the accuracy of, and willingness to use, our gun-powdered and rocket-propelled versions anywhere in the world)
• We can arbitrarily exceed or fail to meet expectations at gymnastics, inspecific of gender (but if those Chinese gals met the minimum 16 yr old age criteria I'll move to California and vote the Obama Bin Laden/Clinton ticket - I'm calling bullshit on that one)
• Synchronized diving is not a prime-time sporting event (supposedly this is also a gender specific event, but I got a very strong feeling that all parties involved were definitely in touch with their female sides and they should probably just do this one as a unisex thing, like wrestling)
• We whooped China's ass at hoops in front of over 1 billion viewers in their own hizzouse

and last, but certainly not least:

• Never. Ever. Give a sabre to a US woman.

I'm already pretty bored with the whole thing. And the fact that the Chinks hope all this brouhaha will help ease our concern over their behavior in places like Tibet and Darfur nauseates me. You could just as easily argue that Georgia (not the one by Alabama) and Russia are really the same thing.

Oh?

Wait.

Nevermind...

Please bear with me as I work on rolling out the new and improved home of Hopelessly Aporetic (lots of new geeky goodness here). There are still quite a few bugs to iron out so it's likely to be a little unsettled around here for a bit. I'll do my best to get stuff calmed down as soon as I can, but until then I am still pretty happy to have something running other than the IIS 7 default page...

[Update 1] - Finally got permalinks and comments working (I hope). A bit of a PITA trying to get this new dasBlog version working on IIS 7. First off there was no <modules> section under <System.webServer> in the web.config file, and then something called the "blowery.Web.HttpCompress.HttpModule" would throw an exception if you didn't end the url with a trailing "/" character (helloooo?), so I commented it out and so far so good (I hope). Next up, try to import all of my old content...

[Update 2] - W00T! (as in I am happy, not the recent and totally lame 2 day woot-off! that just ended with no 'banjo of consternation' being offered). The content import seems to have worked with nothing more than a couple of quick cut and paste operations from the old site. Next on tap will be some skinning love (obviously this plain vanilla wrapper just won't do, now will it?)...

So yesterday the Dumbocrats in the US House of Representatives proposed that the government should nationalize US oil refineries in order to "better control the flow of the oil supply."

This is such an obviously bad idea that it really doesn't merit further criticism from me. Perhaps we should let the Amish control the gas supplies instead...

So. I was just wondering how all the V1 iPhony owners are feeling about the latest news from [Cr]Apple?

Let's see, the V2 iPhone offers 3x better internet speeds and worldwide coverage via AT&Ts' 3G wireless service, opens up the OS for 3rd party apps (finally!), doubles the storage capacity (woohoo - 8 whole gigs, WTF? Why not 32 or 64? Is [Cr]Apple flash memory that special?), and it finally adds MS Exchange synchronization (the lack thereof was definitely one of the biggest show stoppers with V1 for me).

The best part? You'll be able get all this for about one-third of the $599 price tag that the original 4GB iPhone sported (of course, you'll eventually have to pay all of that discount and then some back to AT&T since their 3G data plan is $10 more per month than the EDGE plan - since you will get locked into a two-year plan, add $240 to the new lower price, and more if you want to add text messaging to your AT&T data plan).

I'll wager that all the early adopter fanboys are feeling really good about that decision to camp out at the [Cr]Apple store to snatch up one of those crippled, obsolete, V1 phones right about now. But at least it looks like they can get a firmware upgrade, which just shocks the hell out of me given [Cr]Apple's history of leaving users to swim in their own misery when it comes to OS upgrades - who knew?

Kind of ironic that their stock dropped 4% after the announcement too. I guess even the AAPL shareholders seem to be tiring of the way that bunch in Cupertino treats their loyal users. Can't say I didn't warn you though...

PS - and no, you won't find me queuing up with the rest of the rabble at the [Cr]Apple store on July 11.

The Colorado State High School Rugby Championships are being held tomorrow at the "First Municipal Rugby Stadium in the U.S.," and, since I've never been to Infinity Park Stadium before, I headed over to the online home of the Glendale Raptors to see if I could find a map. I found the map fine, but what stuck out the most on their website was this little chunk of the right-hand section of the home page.

Good Lord that's one ugly chick (probably of East German descent). If all the Glendale Womens' Raptors look like this they should probably win the Women's National Championship without any problems whatsoever...

The fine folks over at Microsoft Research have just opened up a way-too-cool new public beta for all of us astronomy geeks. It's called the WorldWide Telescope (or WWT for short).

Just WTF is WWT, you might ask? The answer to this question and many more can be found in the overview, but I've included a quick shot of the general description to get you started:

Long Zheng over at http://www.istartedsomething.com/ has already created a very nice tutorial that shows you how to do screen captures with WWT so you can create your own out-of-this-world desktop wallpapers.

Very cool stuff, I must say. Go download it now - you know you want to.

And no, Mac-boy, you can't play with it...

OK, I'll confess that I like the Justin Long "Get a Mac" ads as much as the next guy. I think some of them are actually pretty humorous - but I have to say that I am starting to get a little weary of them constantly bashing Vista's reliability in the latest round of ads to hit the tube. I realize that [cr]apple is doing anything they can to gain some traction in their hopeless war for market share with Microsoft, but I think some of the tactics they are using in their current ads are simply ridiculous. Either that, or I must be the only person in the world that is not having any problems with Vista, especially when it comes to reliability (as measured by continuous uptime in my geeky little mind).

Here is a screen clipping from my "daily-driver" PC at the office:

This screenshot was taken this morning after I installed the "Patch Tuesday" updates that downloaded overnight. No reboot necessary. This machine has been running without a reboot for close to 35 days and counting. The last time I had to reboot was on April 9th, and that was because I accidentally allowed Windows Update to apply a security patch for Office while I still had Outlook running - but that was my bad and not a "Vista reliability problem." Prior to that, the last time it was rebooted was when I installed Vista Service Pack 1 on February 21st. Before that, the last time I had to reboot this PC was when I needed to power it down to replace a failed graphics card back in mid-January - but once again, this was not due to a "Vista reliability problem," it was due to a hardware failure (so it would be more accurate to say this was a Diamond/ATI reliability problem). 

In the interest of full disclosure I do have to admit that this machine was suffering daily blue-screen crashes there for a while in early January. But those were being caused by the failing graphics adapter, and this behavior ceased when I disabled that device until I got a replacement (this PC has 2 graphics cards so it can run 3 or 4 monitors, and suffering with only 2 displays for a week was really painful). Vista reliability problem? Nope.

I realize there are folks out there that do have issues with Vista, and I do feel sorry for them. But part of me thinks that a lot of these problems are probably self-inflicted as well. Feel free to go get yourself a Mac if you think it will solve your problems with Vista (and you can afford one and don't mind never being able to upgrade the hardware). Just don't go quoting "Vista's reliability problems" as your excuse, it won't fly with me.

Performing "Sweet Home Alabama" with backup vocals by the Red Army Choir (yes that Red Army).

You just can't make this stuff up folks. Nikita Khrushchev is probably rolling over in his grave (not to mention poor Ronnie Van Zant).

Gotta love that hair too...

Meh, it's raining here today. Yes, it does actually rain in Colorado occassionally, but I can take some comfort in the fact that I know it is snowing in the foothills and mountains at elevations above 6,000 feet (or about 500 feet higher than my house). I actually like rain every now and again, but I am more of a thunder-boomer fan and this constant gloomy cold drizzly stuff we have been getting since last night is just downright unpleasant.

When we get thunderstorms, it usually rains like hell for a half hour or so, you get some wind (tornadoes are rare), a good light show, some big ka-booms, and then everything calms down again and the sun comes back out while the rainbows put on their finest colors. Generally this is not a problem (unless hail is involved or the power goes out). But when it rains slowly and constantly like today, it saturates the ground - and when the ground gets saturated in my yard, it decides to pool in one of my basement window wells. If it rains long enough, eventually the water will build up to the point that it will start to leak in from around the window sill. Not good, but it could be worse (there are 3 other wells that will stay dry, I just have the one trouble-maker).  

This is not entirely unexpected because it has occured about once or twice a year since I bought this house (and May is our rainiest month). My usual remediation plan is to use my shop-vac's pump feature to suck the water out before it gets high enough to infiltrate around the window, but I do have to keep vigilant when it starts happening because the well will refill to the fail-safe point about once an hour once it starts going. This routine usually works pretty well since it does not happen all that frequently, but it can definitely get old when I am still doing it at 1 or 2 in the morning. Plus the shop-vac is cumbersome, noisy, and bit of a pain to get setup for pump duty. Meh, again.

So when I woke up this morning and checked our "well," I was not terribly surprised to find that the water level had risen to about 1" below the bottom of the window. Having just suffered a major pain in my patoot with a broken drain line that flooded the basement floor a couple of months ago, I was not at all amused at the potential for more water down there today. Nor was I all that thrilled at the idea of having to possibly endure another marathon session with the shop-vac. Triple-meh.

So this time I decided to do something different and headed off to the Home Depot at 7:45 this morning (did you know that it is not very crowded there at all at this hour on a Tuesday? It was actually quite a pleasant experience - no parking hassles, now crowded aisles, no lines - just me and the contractors). There I plunked down $150 for a small submersible pump with a built-in sensor that automatically starts the pump-motor when water is detected, and shuts itself off once it has sucked it back down to a depth of about 1/4 inch.

All I had to do was connect it to a garden hose, place it in the window-well, plug it in, and watch it do its thing for a couple of run/stop/restart cycles to make sure that it was actually working as advertised. The well has already been sucked dry and seems to be staying that way. I can hear the pump cycle every 10 minutes or so, run for about 5 seconds, and then it goes back to sleep - with zero interaction on my part. I now have enough confidence in it that I could probably get by just forgetting about it until the weather passes (but since I'm so paranoid about water + basement combinations now, I'll still be checking on it every now and again just to keep my comfort level as high as possible - wouldn't want to get complacent now would I?).

Total time invested in my latest "water event"? A couple of hours, max. Not quite what I had in mind for spending some of that "economic stimulus" tax-rebate money we got last week, but it did buy me some precious peace of mind. And at this rate, I figure that the somewhat pricey little pump will have actually paid for itself in the form of "my-time-saved" by the end of the day (or at least by 1 or 2 tomorrow morning when I am not having to babysit the shop-vac).

I am thinking the next house I buy will be on stilts though. I've had it with "water features" in basements...

Want to get some fresh rock for your Zen or Zune (or God forbid, an iPod), for the price of just a little bandwidth?

Nine Inch Nails is following the precedent set by Radiohead and is offering up their new album, "The Slip," as a free download. You can choose to directly download an 87 Meg zipfile containing the album as high-bitrate MP3s, or you can use your favorite BitTorrent client to grab the tunes in CD quality FLAC or Apple Lossless (M4A) formats, or as even higher than CD quality 24/96 WAVE files (although you will need pretty good audio gear to take advantage of the high-def WAVE format). All downloads are DRM-free and also include a PDF file containing all the liner notes and artwork from the album. You can even download all 4 formats if you feel like it, all you have to do is provide them with an email address so they can send you an unlocked url to get you into their download location.

Way cool! Go grab yourself a copy and let the head-banging commence!

For those of you that are still hooked on retail packaging and physical media, the band will be offering this release on CDs and LP vinyl later this summer (but it won't be free). Mucho thanks to NIN - you guys truly do ROCK!

Feeling lucky?

It seems that HP is promoting their new HP Pavilion HDX Entertainment Notebook PC series by giving away one of them a day for the 31 days between 08 May and 09 June. You can find all of the details at bink.com (amongst others), but in a nutshell, each of 31 different websites will be conducting some sort of sweepstakes/competition offering the new notebook as the grand prize.

This new HP looks to be loaded too. According to the folks at Bink, the prize package consists of the following:

"The HP HDX Dragon comes with Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit) and is powered by an Intel Core 2 Extreme Processor X9000 (2.80GHz, 6MB L2 Cache, 800MHz FSB). Other features include 20.1" diagonal WUXGA High-Definition HP Ultra Brightview Widescreen (1920x1200) 1080p, 4GB DDR2 System Memory (2 Dimm), 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800M GTS, HP Imprint Finish (Dragon) + Fingerprint Reader + Webcam + Microphone, Intel PRO/Wireless 4965AGN Network Connection and Bluetooth, 500GB 5400RPM SATA Dual Hard Drive (250GB x 2), Blu-Ray ROM with SuperMulti DVD+/-R/RW Double Layer, Integrated HP HDTV Hybrid TV Tuner and 4 Altec Lansing speakers with HP Triple Bass Reflex subwoofer, and 9 Cell Lithium Ion Battery.

The entertainment notebooks will come with these software titles: Microsoft Office, Corel PaintShop Pro X2, Corel Painter Essentials, Corel Ulead Video Studio Plus 11.5, Symantec Norton Internet Security.

For the gamers in us the winners will receive the following games: Viva Piñata,Microsoft Flight Sim, Microsoft Flight Sim Expansion Pack, Gears of War.

And since this is an entertainment beast, you will enjoy the following Blu Ray movies out of the box: Pirates of the Caribbean - The Curse of the Black Pearl, Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man's Chest, Pirates of the Caribbean - At World's End.

The total retail value of each of these prizes would be over US$5,000."

For me this definitely seems like it might be worth the investment of the small bit of free web-surfing time it will take to enter. The first contest starts tomorrow (02 May) at http://www.absolutevista.com/ 

You can't win if you don't play, right?

For you XP users that also happen to be MSDN subscribers, the CD ISO image for XP SP3 is now available for download. If you don't have an MSDN subscription, look for the new service pack on Windows Update sometime in early May (if I were to hazard a guess I'd say on or about May 5th, a.k.a. "Patch Tuesday"). If you want to check out what is going to be in this service pack you can download an overview from here.

This is probably all my fault since I just spent the better part of a week repaving not one, but two Windows XP machines (don't ask). After doing a clean install of XP with SP2 included, the very first hit on Windows Update included 95 OS patches and security updates. Of course, you still need to hit WU about a dozen more times or so to get an XP PC to the point that no further updates are required. If Microsoft Office is installed this number goes up significantly. Between the hardware and software updates I'd bet the number of patches I installed on each of my "fresh" XP+SP2 builds went well into the high 100's.

Grrrr. Thanks Microsoft, an XP SP3 CD would have come in mighty handy about a week ago.

Fair Warning: I am going to get my car washed this afternoon, so count on rain...

It appears that I am being exiled to NYC for a few days next week. I generally try to avoid venturing east of the Mississippi River, and I especially detest going places with such ridiculous population densities as found in NYC, Boston, etc. All things being equal, I'd just as soon stay out here in the wide open spaces that we enjoy in the wild wild west. So wild in fact, that just yesterday our HR manager had to send out a corporate memo on what to do if approached by a mountain lion or a bear.

What? Just lions and bears? What about tigers? Oh my!

But duty calls and Manhattan here I come. I'll be easy to spot, just look for my cowboy boots and shirts with pearl snaps.

Good thing I have one of these though.

The World's Greatest Laptop Bag

Don't leave home without it. I just wish that the 17" version was offered in Swiss Army Red like the old one I have for my 15.4" Dell was...

Yesterday, Intel announced that it is cutting the prices on their Core 2 Quad Q6700 processor by half (from $530 to $266). I suppose this discount will officially mark the end of the road for their 65-nm Kentsfield processor line, and paves the way for volume shipping of their new 45-nm Yorkfield heir-apparents later this summer. It's great news for folks that may have been considering a quad-core upgrade though. The Q6600 (2.4 GHz) and Q6700 (2.66 GHz) are great processors that offer a lot of overclocking headroom. At the new prices ($224 and $266 respectively), they are an absolute steal! Of course, the new 45-nm line does offer better performance and lower power consumption, but you will now be paying a premium price for those advancements in Intel's CPU technology with the Q9450 running you about $90 more than the comparable Q6700.

If the thought of upgrading to a quad core CPU trips your geek trigger, now's definitely a good time to get in the game. Let the Kentsfield clearance sale begin!

Okay, so maybe that little file corruption problem has been giving the Windows Home Server folks a pretty bad beating, but this $539 deal for an HP EX470 Media Smart server over at newegg.com is pretty hard to resist if any of you are still in the WHS market. And if that sale price ($20 off their regular price and $40 off retail) isn't enough to grab your attention, they are also throwing in free 3-day shipping (except to HI, AL, and PR), and a wireless router as part of the deal.

This is the base WHS offering from HP so it only ships with a single 500GB drive. At first glance, this small amount of storage capacity may seem like it's a bit on the puny side to many users, but what it really offers is enough space to at least get started implementing your backup and file sharing strategies, and still remain immune to the file corruption bug (that can only occur on WHS machines using multiple disks and the WHS Drive Extender technology). Since Microsoft is working on this problem and plans to release a fix sometime in June, this presents a great opportunity to go ahead and get started with WHS on a single disk configuration, and then add more disk capacity after you get the patch. The HP will hold 3 more internal drives, and you can also start daisy-chaining external USB drives if that's still not enough room for your precious media collections.

I don't have any details on the wireless router, but what the heck, it's free right? This really is a great deal folks. If you are at all interested in joining the Windows Home Server club, this would be an excellent time to do so. Don't dally though, the sale price on this combo deal is only good through April 30th.

Can you believe it's already been 9 years since Columbine? Make sure to take the time to hug your kids and tell them you love them today.

April 15th is a date that generally strikes terror in the hearts of all tax-paying Americans, and I am certainly not immune to those feelings of pending dread that occur each year as this date looms. But this year is different for me, and I am absolutely thrilled that April 15th has finally arrived. Ecstatic in fact.

Did I suddenly decide to become a tax-renegade? Nope, I still had to bend over and grease up for my good Uncle Sam as I do every year (actually worse than ever FWIW).

Then why am I so tickled about the arrival of the Ides of April? Because today marks the first payday in several years that I am not required to contribute any portion of my check to the ex-Mrs. P. in the form of an alimony payment. As a result, I am officially declaring today as "A-Day" (a.k.a. "Alimony-free Day") in celebration.

As of today, my disposable income will begin getting a well deserved (and long anticipated) boost. I have not been totally freed from the ties that continue to bind me to her bank account balance since I am still obligated to cough up a significant child support payment each month, but I really don't mind doing this because it directly benefits my kids' welfare, and I would spend at least that much on them if they lived with the current Mrs. P. and I full-time anyway. However, having been forced to pay her an additional "spousal support" stipend each time I got a paycheck was a different crap-burger to chew on entirely, and I am completely overjoyed to finally be rid of that particular financial burden once and for all. I must say that being liberated like this feels reeeeally good. "Cry Freedom!" I'll not reveal exactly how much this event will be impacting my bottom line each month, but let's just say I can fully relate to how those folks that get to burn their mortgages after making the last payment must feel (and if you were to go calculate the monthly payment on a $300,000 mortgage at 5.75% over 30 years you'd be right in my newly liberated, feelin' good ballpark).

Happy "A-Day" everyone! The drinks are on me. I know it's also tax day and that's a drag, but I must beg you to please try to remain tolerant and understanding if I do spontaneously erupt with a big old ex-pat Texan "Yeeeeeeee-haw!" every now and again today...

For laptop users, the ability to hibernate a Windows session can be a pretty useful tool. In a nutshell, hibernation allows Vista to copy the contents of your computer's memory to hard disk and then power down without completely turning itself off, thus saving precious battery resources and allowing you to pick up where you left off at some other time (like after you get off a plane). Pretty cool, but it comes at a cost.

If hibernation is enabled on a PC, Windows will create and reserve a file called hiberfil.sys approximately equal in size to the amount of RAM you have on your system, even if you never intend to use hibernation. If you have a PC with 4 gigs of memory, then this feature might be silently laying claim to a pretty substantial piece of your disk real estate. In "always-on" scenarios, where you are running a Windows machine that you never intend to hibernate, you'd probably think it would be nice to just turn this feature off and reclaim that huge chunk of wasted disk space that you'd previously been freely donating to the OS. 

In XP this was an easy thing to do, just open the Power Options in the control panel and uncheck the box to allow hibernation. In Vista this is not the case, there are no Power Options settings that will let you directly control whether hibernation is enabled or not. All is not lost however, but you do have to get up close and personal with your administrative command prompt in order to enable/disable this feature.

To disable hibernation in Vista you need to take the following steps:

1. Click the Windows button and type cmd in the Start Search box.
2. In the search results list, right-click Command Prompt and click Run as Administrator.
3. If you have UAC turned on, you will need to give it permission to Continue.
4. At the command prompt, type powercfg.exe -h off, then press ENTER.
5. Close the command window.

To re-enable hibernation simply repeat the same steps and use the substitute comand powercfg.exe -h on for step 4. 

Or if you are really a Vista shortcut geek, you can simply type the appropriate powercfg.exe command in the Start Search box and hit Ctrl+Shift+Enter to execute it (Ctrl+Shift+Enter is a keyboard shortcut to run a command with admin privileges). A command prompt will flash and disappear, but since the powercfg app doesn't give you any feedback when you run it anyway, you won't really be missing anything.

So go grab yourself that extra disk capacity, it could come in mighty handy on machines that might be starving for some available disk space.

Yesterday I mentioned that I had to do some impromptu remodeling in "Dexter's Lab" but I didn't have any pictures handy when I created that post. Since I am working from home today (due to the fact that it is currently snowing sideways in beautiful metropolitan Arvada, CO), and since I once again have a fully functioning home office at my disposal, I thought I'd go ahead an share a couple of the before and after snaps with you (while it's still fairly clean). 

Demo-time (note that the wood trim and cleats are all that is left of Workstation #1).

I think we found some of Saddam's WMDs in my basement.

Presenting the new and improved PC Workstation in "Dexter's Lab" (disregarding the fact that there is no flooring done yet). Note to self: replace colored tape with real labels on the main power panel:

The PC menagerie consists of the following (from left to right): Domain Controller (white-box; old-ass AMD K6-2 running at a blistering 450 mhz), Web and File Server