Ok, planning some updates to the site. Getting ride of the twitter feed cause its really messing with my search engine information … weird things that should not be linked to this site. Also I am going to add a blog roll, the site has the hooks for it already, just a matter of linking to a few other sites to share the love.

Also been going more and more to IRC. not a random IRC place but a very specific one, making new friends and I can sometimes be found in #slackstuff channel on irc.liquidbabble.com. There are some really cool and interesting people in that channel. And they are willing to help out with all sorts of linux questions. For a better idea visit slackstuff.com

Well in the last few months, I went from a Motorola Q, to a Blackberry Pearl, to Samsung Omnia, to a HTC Touch Pro and a Blackberry Storm

I liked the Q but it sucked for battery life, it was getting to the point with everything off it would not last more then 7 hours without a charge, then service started slipping away at work and it started dropping/missing calls completely.

The Pearl was nice, but it seemed a “limited” phone, it was small, cute and had a good battery life. It also had some oddities that I couldn’t deal with after about two months. One oddity was that when I turned off the bluetooth indicator light, blinky blue light that says “bluetooth is on”, the phone would reboot. The inditicator light on, no issues, light off phone reboots. It was extremely odd, and after a half hearted search for a solution I gave up and ordered the Samsung Omnia.

The Omnia was a nice phone, it has a 5.1MP Camera that was actually quick and responsive, wireless, bluetooth and all the bells and whistles that I could ask for.There was also a lot of support for it if you check out Samsung-Omnia.orgIt did have its down side though. GPS was provider locked, ok not a big deal I could work with that. I did learn that I really dont like touch keyboards though. It is actually a good phone with a nice display and it was fast and responsive. I had am issue with my handset that was directly related to my handset and if it wasnt for that issue i would still be using it.

HTC Touch Pro, I really like this phone. A LOT. It is a nice phone, the screen is a little smaller, but it is a high resolusion screen, 480x640 on a hand held. It has a slide out keyboard and with a little help there is a lot that can be done with it. The default Verizon ROM Was S L O W. After a little work, a little reading I was able to get the TouchFlo interface both looking good and working well. GPS was unlocked as well with a patch. Basicly all the bells and whistles that the omnia had and a couple more because I can change the ROM and make it as light or as heavy as I want.  Here is a screen shot of my main page.

The final phone is the Blackberry Storm, I would not buy this phone or recommend it at all. The user interface is slow, it feels like they badly slapped the touch interface on the blackberry default interface. When rotating or typing, it is just slow. The push on the keyboard so it clicks is interesting but doesnt always work and i have been sending a lot of cryptic messages to people with this phone. In fact I would rather have the Pearl again than the Storm. I am not happy about this phone and wouldn’t have it if it wasnt for work.

Also a side note, so far I am not liking how Windows Mobile 6.5 works in general. I do not like how the Start Menu is no longer a menu but a shortcut to programs, I misclick to much for that.

No tags on this one.

This week I switched hosting providers, I am not getting any discount so I am not mentioning from who to who but as you can see my Tag Cloud is a lot smaller, the export didn’t save any of those, but the BlogEngine.net export did save all the articles, images, and posts in order so I will take that. Then all i had to do was upload my theme to the new hosting company and poof, everything works. It was actually kind of nice. If my old hosting company would have said anything instead of trying to do it on their own, i would have stayed with them. Their loss. Anyways I will start updating more regularly. I think I will do another post or two tonight just to catch up on a couple of things I have been doing.

Well I found a program that seems to work for posting better then what I was using. Just if i buy it I will post more, hey you get what you pay for.Ecto seems to work better, it even lets me delete test posts. I should use an image as a test, but i will get to that later. Right now not a whole lot running around in my mind other then I have some work to do tonight at 1AM.

I think I might buy this app and find out how it posts things to get the picture plugin to work better. Time to start the coding I guess

I might poke at it later, but for now a simple weekly tip
When you need to check someone's mail server you can use nslookup on XP and Vista

nslookup
> set type=mx

> server 4.2.2.2
Default server: 4.2.2.2
Address: 4.2.2.2#53

> velcrohurts.com
  Server: 4.2.2.2
Address: 4.2.2.2#53

Non-authoritative answer:

velcrohurts.com mail exchanger = 10 mx.velcrohurts.com.cust.b.hostedemail.com.

Authoritative answers can be found from:
>

Now to review this. nslookup is the name server lookup for most OSes.

set type=mx
that tells nslookup that we want to look for a mail record or a Mail eXchange record

server 4.2.2.2
This chooses a server outside of most peoples controller. This allows us to see our information from an external source that is not in our control to make sure our records are correct

The next part is the domain that we want to look up. In my case i used my email server. By telling me that it is the record has not been changed for a while or updated.

If you want to get seriously into DNS, I recommend setting up a linux server like Ubuntu, CentOS, or Slackare and setting up BIND atleast once.

So Happy Halloween all. Remember know when to say when.

My first ever pumpkin carving, the guts were an after thought but it did turn out nice, and i think i want to do it again next year.

So I am still waiting to get the Honda back from the shop, and that is turning out to be a little longer then I would like. Hopefully I will have it Saturday, but I am not 100% on that at this time. Then there is the issue with work, being work and being busy, I haven't done to much, or posted to much lately. I did however stop by the car show that the club I used to be in hosts every month, they had a good turn out of about 150 or so cars. Not to shabby. The family also went to a pumkin patch about two weeks ago and this is the part that gets funny. We live in Burbank, most normal people go between 5 and 10 miles to go to a pumkin patch. We ended up going almost 50 miles one way to a pumpkin patch because we liked it last year. Yeah no issues with the cars/trucks either. Seems I only write when bad things are happening. But I wanted to do a post because it had been so long since the last one, almost a month. Ok Peace out.

So lets break from computers just to something that makes me giggle a little. Last night was bad. So we were going to have Tuna sandwichs for dinner, and I got the good idea to make a couple of tuna melts. So I get the butter from the fridge, open the new stick and finish putting the first sandwich in the pan, this is when things started to go really bad. I knocked something on the counter and it knocked the butter and tray off. The tray landed right side up, on top of the butter. so picking that up the and then the smoke detector goes off. I flip the sandwich and it is only slightly blackend. Not a huge deal, just pay attention to the other side, and a pepsi sounds like a good idea. So I go to get the new box of pepsi from the bottom of the fridge, and it is stuck. A slight tug should get it out, along with the glass shelve above it, the  two gallon jug of water, the picture of tea and bottles of beer. So after unloading the shelf, one handed, pulling the soda out, putting everything back in, i get back to my totally burnt tuna melt. That was the only  sandwich that gave its life for the other two to be good. 

But wait, don't order yet! there is more! 

Adter dinner, I managed to step on and stub every toy and peice of furniture in the small apartment, on my way to taking the garbage out, all the way out, to the curb. This is normally not a big deal, and is usually a simple task, just roll the cans down the shared driveway to the curb. First can goes on, second can gets caught on the neighbors rear view mirror and does no damage at all to it. The third can magically catches on a different spot on the mirror and runs into the happy SUV. I didn't look last night at the damage to it cause i was scared it would be really bad, no issues though just a small couple of scratches. 

And the last point of amusement for the evening. 

After the trash went out, Tiki asked me to wrap up the tuna and put it my nemisis for the evening, the fridge. I open the draw to get a piece of saran wrap, and start pulling it, holding it in place, like i have done thousands of times, and it pops out, rolls into the drawer, bounces out and hits the floor. 

At this point i couldnt stop laughing and told Tiki and she sent me to bed. 

So I had a blog post all done up and good to go, when my computer blue screened. It is my own fault, I just plugged a hard drive into it so that I could work from it today instead of killing laptop batteries. I just cant remember what I had typed out.

So for that you get nothing other then my first real perl script

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $word = "Times";
my $number = 12;

print "$number $word $number is ", $number * $number "\n";

yup that's it.Simple, to the point, and does something. It is a begining and that is the important part. I am not trying to be a perl expert or anything, I am just trying to get the basics of it, after all these years.

I think I am also going to work on some powershell scripting as well sooner or later.

So I have a Zune now, and I am really loving it. I have discovered podcasts for the first time ever. They are really neat and simple and fun. The nice part about having a dedicated media player is that there is a centrel location to get podcasts. Some of the ones that I really like and have found lately are Coffee Break Spanish, Hak5 and some of the G4TV stuff. Yeah G4 doesnt get a link, they can find themselves.

This post is a bit different as I am not using Microsoft's Live Writer, but actually logged into the web site to do an update. Not like Live writer was doing anything other then telling me when I had mispelled words. It didnt really help with grammer (thanks for pointing that one out Kolbold) So back to the randomness that is me being bored at work.

Actually my question is, do blogs actually help people? I am using google analytics and I am seeing I am getting google results for things like
headless windows 2008 install
nothing special about me
adding bluetooth to yukon denali
Based on those things, my blog is useless. So far I am just a talker and not really showing much in the way of technology, I can do a lot and would offer answers if someone emails me directly, but in general I just babble about useless information, just like every other blog. So I think it will be time to get starting and actually do some things and show how to do things.

Ok so I need to work out an actual blogging schedule, just to keep things lively. I also need to check my email more regularly, seems I have a few unread email messages.

I did a computer upgrade this weekend, it has been about two years since I got new hardware so I went slightly over the top with an Intel e8400 and Gigabyte EP-35DS3L motherboard, It is just fast. It is a 64bit CPU and as my first personal one, it is nice. It is just smooth and fast and quite. I had a Shuttle PC prior to this, and yes it was cute and small, but it was OMG loud, It also generated a lot of heat, the CPU temp was an average of 59 Celsius, while this one is 40 at idle. I have a co-worker who put OSX on his but I havent tried that yet, I am just getting to Vista x64, it is smooth and fast, and has some fun issues, such as Flash doesn't work with the 64bit web browser. I haven't gotten any father then that yet but I am still dinking with it.

On an amusing note I just found out about Leeroy Jenkins!