Rinsefirst

I’ve been thinking a lot lately on what exactly it is I enjoy doing. Is it programming? Running servers? Running my own company? Telling others what to do? Having ideas? Marketing? All of the above? All I know, is that I can never know enough.

I’ve recently started reading Quicksprout. Earlier this month, they posted something on how to choose the right job for your career (No, they aren’t the same thing, read the post). I’ve started to believe that perhaps I’ve managed to over-extend myself, causing myself to burn out from time to time, where all I do is cyber-slack.

I strongly suggest if your one of those people who are now job hunting, that you read Quicksprout’s article. It might just get you thinking about something you hadn’t considered for your future.

The last week (and undoubtedly the next week) is going to be quite busy due to the week before school mad-rush to get things done that I have every year. For me, that means drinking WAY to much Mountain Dew. Thankfully, they just released a new flavor (Game Fuel) that supposedly contains 120mg of Caffeine (enough for me).

I have come to love all of the various flavors (and their variants) of mountain dew, everything from:

• Regular Mountain Dew
• Mountain Dew Code Red (Red)
• Mountain Dew Livewire (Orange)
• Mountain Dew Pitch Black (Purple)
• Mountain Dew Baja Blast (Taco Bell Blue)
• Mountain Dew Game Fuel (Red/Orange)
• Did I miss any?

So far, I think the one I miss the most is the Pitch Black, probably cause it’s the only one I really miss.. Game Fuel is a good stop gap though, at least if they bring me Pitch Black in time for Halloween again. I would also love to see them release Baja Blast in a can… That way I don’t become like pavlov’s dogs and just assume that if I’m drinking baja blast, that I’m eating nachos as well (to late probably).

One thing I find funny though, is how many people out there have something funny regarding mountain dew on youtube. Here are just two examples:

• Mountain Dew Man
• Old Woman Dew

Yes, I know they are both weird links.

Well, that’s all I have to say about dew at the moment :-).

So last night, Amber and I worked for about 4 hours to try to come up with a design that we liked. After about 10 different tries and hours of searching istockphoto for the right graphic, we finally settled on a design we both liked. I started what was sure to be a challenge to CSS at around 2:00AM, and finished roughly around 5:00. I’ve tested in in IE7 and Firefox, but there may still be a few glitches in IE6 that I’ll be working out here. It’s also missing a lot of content, but I still felt it warranted getting it online.

The site is again hosted with Dreamhost, and was built again on top of their amazing one-click installs of Wordpress. It features sIFR for the headings, an all XHTML/CSS design, and to top it off, a pretty cool trick to keep the bandwidth down (the page is under 100kb, and features only 4 images).

I plan to post more about some tricks I’m going to be implementing over there to try to save/make some money on the wedding… Afterall, any help you can get in paying for a wedding is good these days, as they are now starting to cost the same as a down payment on a small home. Amber will also be blogging over there about the process, which should be cool to have our first collaborative blog project. In case you didn’t catch it, she also updated recently (encourage her to keep doing so, after all, what else is there to do during lecture.)

I suppose I should mention where the new blog is at… It can be found at http://www.ourvows.net/. You can also find it in my blog roll to the right.

I kind of want to document this because odds are I will do it again.

Active Directory is a domain server that is built into Windows Server 2000, 2003, and probably all future versions of windows server. Basically it’s user and policy management for rather large networks. It integrates “well” with exchange server (email) as well as a half dozen or so other Microsoft server products.

Well, for security reasons, when you connect up a computer to the domain, there is an exchange of “keys” as the “machine” joins the “domain”. These keys are more or less unique to the individual machine, such that, if someone trys to do something on the domain using another machines name, it’s not allowed.

Lately, I have been trying to get a Samba 3 file server working within our domain at MSA. So far, getting it to do what I want hasn’t happened. In the process of trying to make this happened, I found out something interesting.

See, when you join the domain, you first name the computer, and then use administrator credentials to get it joined. It turns out, that if you name a machine the same thing as your domain controller, and then join using administrator level creditials, very bad things happen… Especially if you only have 1 domain controller.

Quite a few weird things start happening. Logins stop workings. Shares stop working. Errors everwhere.

Turns out the fix it quite simple, once you find it. You simply have to re-add the original server to the domain. The steps can be found here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/260575

So, you may never work with an Active Directory server, but if you do, and you ever have a problem like this… give this a whirl. Now if only I could solve the original problem.

Google released a newer version of Google Earth Today featuring the heavens… Now when your sitting alone at night in the center of a light poluted city, you can still star gaze… with even some reference to help you find something almost useful in the heavens. You can get it as part of the new GooglePack:

I probably haven’t said this clearly yet, but I got my new Jeep Compass 2007 edition last friday. It’s fully loaded, all tricked out, and I am in love with it. The plan right now is as soon as I can get my hands on Amber’s camera (I want nice pictures), I will post them to the site in a detailed description of why I love my vehicle. Until then, I’m going to share my lesson of the day with you.

My new vehicle has a sun roof.

My old vehicle had one too.

In my old vehicle, when the sunroof was open, you knew it. You could feel the wind. You could hear the wind. Almost to the point that you sometimes regretted opening it. On the upside though, it reminded you to close (put it back in) when you were done. My new car though, makes no noise, and does not give away at all that it is open. So when I was showing someone my car today and opened the sun roof for them, I completely forgot to shut it when I arrived at my next destination.

Normally, no big deal, but of course, it rained.

Thankfully, when I discovered it, it appears that most of the water landed in the middle of my car, which is for the most part, plastic. Very little cloth. No electronics. The dash was fine… and besides some water in the front of the roof, the ceiling was for the most part dry. However, I still came home and dried everything by hand, making sure I got every drop, and that hot air blew on the stuff that I thought might still be a little moist (floor, etc.)  I’m hoping, this will spare me from any long term smells or damage.

However, it did get me thinking about my sunroof and taking care of problems that arise from it. I did some quick google searchs to see how best to clean up my mess. While doing so, I stumbled on Volksblog, a nifty little blog that had this nifty little how-to on how to care for your sunroof. I thought it would be worth sharing with anyone and everyone who has a sunroof, so here I am, linking to it.  So go check it out.

In other car news: Nascar finally ran their race today… Not normally a big deal except it’s a Tuesday… a 2 day rain delay… Just crazy. I think I beat my dad, but the real time scoring was all messed up but who knows. It’s almost Chase time… and last time I checked, my driver (Jeff Gordon) was the only one to have clinched a spot in the chase.

Well, off to do something other than computers for a bit.