There and Back Again

My Almost-Arrest

    I arrived home on Tuesday evening (7-24-07) like I do on most evenings – in my car.  One thing was different though, I could feel it as I turned off my engine.  I looked up at my front door, and sure enough, something was different, neon-green different.  It was a notice about there being a warrant out for my arrest if i didn’t pay my overdue parking fines!  Thankfully my name was not the one written in loopy red pen on the top of the notice, so I promptly called into the Honorable Judges offices the next day and explained how I have been living here for like more than a year and that dude listed on the notice hasn’t been here in all that time, or if he has then I sure hope they tell me about it because that is just freaky to be rooming with someone and not even knowing it!

The Wheels that Rolled

    Don from work experienced this story first hand, so this is in his words… with much artistic license of course.  “I was outside getting something out of my car and saw something moving that didn’t seem like it should be moving, so I looked up, and lo and behold there was a set of wheels rolling down the road as nice as could be.”  I still don’t know how this happened, whether the wheels (a dualie like on the back of a tractor trailer – two wheels side by side) detached themselves from the axel of some unfortunate truck, or rolled off the bed of a truck they were being carried on.  It was funny though, seeing them sitting innocently by the side of the road, looking like they were pretending to not be out of place, and still attached to a vehicle.  Someone came and took them later…

Harry Potter!

I went to see harry potter last saturday with Laura.  It was a great movie, I need to get and read the last book now.

Sick!

I think I am getting a cold, so I am going to bed.  NOW.

Today I stayed after work for a little while and setup a pretty cool network inventory software – Open-AudIT. Since this involved a decent amount of siting around and waiting / configuring, it also afforded me some time to wait for some calls to get returned from work contacts on the PST clock, which wasn’t all that bad.

Open-AudIT is a network inventory system, meaning that it provides a nice categorical list of all the hardware and software connected to your network. Assuming windows pcs and servers, it can take advantage of WMI to scan all this information from one central location, meaning no intrusion of installing software everywhere. Why?

• Search for a specific application (and version) and find where it is installed
• track license keys for software, and see what computers are using them
• see hardware info on all computers (ok, which servers have 4 gig of ram?)

I haven’t spent much time playing with it yet, but it is pretty cool so far. I also discovered a cool thing while setting this up. We have a virtual server at work (2 actually) meaning that we can emulate a whole computer with just a ‘file’. This came in quite handy, because all it took to install this as a test, was to make a ‘dif’ off of an existing virtual machine – this way i don’t run the risk of ruining any existing servers when i just want to test (think sandbox). This first step took all of 10 minutes. Then i was a little bummed because I had to setup a whole LAMP stack (actually WAMP, since this was on windows) – untill i found this project on sourceforge: XAMPP. This was the cool thing. It only took about 30 minutes to download, install, and reboot this thing. and it was bascially all configured for me out of the box. Downloading, installing, and configuring each of these would have been quite a chore – not hard – just time consuming. Many linux distros have LAMP installation options out of the box, but I was supprised to find something like it for the windows platform (they have it for mac and linux as well).

Today I also decided to dig my trumpet out of its case and give it a practice. It felt good to play, even though I couldn’t last very long. I don’t know when I last played, but it was probably over a year ago. Crazy – It takes me back to high school practicing in my room at home. odd how memories are triggered like that.