I downloaded the VMWare of PC-BSD 1.3 today at work. (800KB/s… wish I could get cable) Anyway, I was thoroughly impressed. They have one of the coolest package management utilities I’ve ever seen for a *nix distribution. http://www.pbidir.com Basically their .pbi file is like a .exe file… only for PC-BSD. I downloaded and installed Firefox real easy like. Plus it has a software manager similar to Add and Remove Programs. I quickly removed Firefox too.
PC-BSD uses the KDE windows manager. Konqueror is the file/www browser. For shits, I ran it on The Second Acid Test. It rendered 99% correctly! Firefox 2 couldn’t do it… neither could IE6 or IE7. I thought that was interesting so I mentioned it.
Griminal Grim's Ramblings
After years and years, I finally bought a car that I wanted. Not because it was a good deal. Not because my dad bought it for a good price and fixed it up. Not because I traded a computer for it. Not because my uncle said “The dealership would only give me $1000 on trade.” I wanted it because I wanted it. Granted, I’m too cheap to actually pay a lot so I settle on used… but I think that is just good economical sense. I should still be able to find something for around $6,000 - $8,000 that I like.
I’ve always liked the looks of Monte Carlos and Impalas. I’ve always been a Chevy guy. I just like the looks of GM branded vehicles. I wanted either one of the above cars in burgundy or black. On the way to K’zoo Saturday the wife and I saw a black 2002 Impala with privacy tinting for under $6,000. I recently sold my 1995 Blazer and had that money so I juggled our funds to get the needed money to buy the car. It’s in the driveway tonight. Of course there’s 12″ of snow on the ground and ice everywhere… so I can’t take any decent pictures. I will soon though.
We’re planning on building a 60′ x 40′ pole barn this year. The 40′ x 24′ we have now will be converted to my garage/play toy holding area. Yay! Now that I feel secure at my job, its nice to be able to plan things.
Griminal Grim's Ramblings
It’s amazing. After more than six months at my new job, I’m still happy as a lark. Its hard to believe that being happy can make you more efficient. I find myself not getting on the Internet to “break the boredom” and more to do actual research. I find myself thinking about tasks I need to do at work during my off time. I’ve actually caught myself doing research at home for work! I usually cut that short though.
We’re testing a new groupware product to replace Groupwise. We were going to go with MS Exchange… we have the $50K in the budget… but we just can’t see spending that much when the users are already used to using non-Microsoft products. 10 minutes before I left work today, I threw together a quick spamming program in VB2005. I just logged in and the app is on it’s 1300 message.
Griminal Grim's Ramblings
Our Internet connection went down last night after the ice storm. I figured I’d give it a day to “de-ice”. When I still didn’t have a connection I went over to the DSL end. The antenna looked like it was 10 degrees off. I climbed up and gave it a twist and the Internet was alive and well. I snugged the clamps down. I guess I never got around to actually tweaking the antenna. I got a signal and left it there. The signal strength normally ran around 9. Now it’s 39! I wasn’t even getting that good of a connection with my laptop right under the access point.
Griminal Grim's Ramblings
I went to my friends house yesterday armed with my wireless goodies. We strapped a 24dbi grid antenna to a 10′ piece of 1.25″ PVC pipe. I was able to find one network from his house. It was locked down but at least he knows that signal could get to his house. I don’t know if he’s just gunna bite the cost of using a local WISP ($50/month) or try to do a Cable hijack. That’s his decision.
I setup my PVR PC to act as a NAS for my home. Its an AMD Athlon XP 2800 with a 250 GB system disk and two 320 GB drives in hardware RAID1 for redundancy. I was going to use a Linux box but the PVR software I wanted to run doesn’t work with Linux. I also setup a SABnzbd server on the machine. Using a one-click greasemonkey script in Firefox and my free Verizon news servers, goodness flows!
I got phase one done of the I.T. Helpdesk program I’m writing at work. We put it into production last week. It is using a MySQL database backend. (I’ll have to post some more screenshots soon.) I have to say that it is my best work to date. Visual Basic 2005 blows VB6 out of the water! What would have taken me hours to do in VB6 takes me minutes in VB2005. I’m glad I never applied myself to learning VB6 more. I did the bare minimum while I worked with it. I didn’t want to waste my time learning eight year old technology. .NET 2.0 is so much different than VB6 that I think it would really have hurt more to try to switch. I’m guessing that .NET 2.0 is roughly 30% like VB6. That’s it.
I’ve never been one to learn from books. Seeing examples, videos, or lectures sinks in a bit more. I guess I’m a visually oriented person. I’m planning on including some VB2005 training into this upcoming years budget cuz I can. 
A four day course should really help me wrap my head around things.
Griminal Grim's Ramblings