July 2006 Archives

Missy, Nick, and I went out to the Cole County Fair tonight to hang out with Eric and see his cows. We ended up walking around and watching a lawnmower pull and ATV Rodeo. To top off the night Eric’s dad made me shovel some cow poop.

I have some pictures of the cows here.

Today is Systems Administrators Appreciation Day . So it is your chance to give your system administrator a gift.

This is my gift to my friends who are system administrators :
The MP3 of the Real Men of Genius Mr. Company Computer Guy

If you don’t know what I do for a living I am a Network Security Specialist and I deal with things like lost\stolen laptops with important data on them from time to time. On one of the security list I am on somebody posted this MP3 of a Berkeley professor who had his laptop stolen and tried to scare the thief in his class.

I don’t want to call the guy a liar, but some of his story seems far fetched and other parts of it are just flat out crazy (the part about him being the only one who can verify the data hasn’t been accessed). The kicker is the part where he said Microsoft called him and asked him why he had registered two copies of XP.

Learn to say, "I don't know." If used when appropriate, it will be often- Bill Swanson

Like most people I am afraid to admit when I don’t know an answer to a question. I am afraid it would make me look unprepared or undedicated to my job. So this where I will end up “fluffing” an answer to a question. I might not know the exact answer but I probably know enough information about the subject to give an intelligent response.

My goal this week is when I don’t know exactly what the person wants to know to say “I don’t know the exact answer to that question but I would be more than willing to get that information for you but I do know (insert my knowledge on the ground birds of the North African plain).’

Do you remember playing Pac-Man as a kid and running through a whole weeks worth of allowance in 45 minutes? Well now you can bring back all of those memories right here*!

*Please send your allowance to me here to make this as realistic as possible.

Tonight Missy and I went to Jefferson City Martial Arts to watch some of the students get their new belts and perform some stunts and to see the best part:

After Darren got his hair cut we went out and ate at El Jimador. It was a great night and at the end I didnt even have to pay because Nick took care of it:

You can see the rest of the pictures here*

* My camera was doing something strange with the fast motion due to the speed/light. It has a cool effect but you cant see exactly who is breaking the boards.

This afternoon I saw something strange in the basement of the Capitol (not John Grisham strange, just normal strange) .

It was this “smartcar”:

More information about this car can be found at smartcarusa.com. I didn’t get to see who was driving it but would love to take it for a spin. I have a couple more pictures here.

Would you buy one of these?

Sunt facta verbis difficiliora

My motivational quote this week comes from the dead language that we all love, Latin. In English it is roughly translated to mean "Works are harder than words”. Once again the main point of being successful is doing rather then talking about doing.

Dear Summer,

Honestly 105 degrees is just a little ridiculous, even for you! I wanted to work in the yard today and spread some weed killer but I don’t feel like getting heat stroke. So if you could lower the temperatures back into the low 90s I’d be happy.

Love,

Jerry

I have wanted to change out the standard thermostat that is in our house with a programmable one to try to save some money on our electric bill (ENERGY STAR says it can save $100 a year).

Missy’s dad was going to help me but he got caught up at work so I figured it can’t be that hard and tackled it myself.It didn’t turn out that well and I ended up blowing up our house. Surprisingly it turned out great and I had it installed in about 15 minutes and it seems to be working.

Here is a picture of me in all my “I can install a programmable thermostat” glory:

Thanks to the awesome support from AQHOST we are now running the latest version of Moveable Type that was just released yesterday. If you are ever in the need of web hosting I don’t have anything but great admiration for AQHOST and they carry my highest approval rating of 6 thumbs up.

Now, I am off to play with all the new toys in 3.31

"You can't build a reputation on what you're going to do." -Henry Ford

You can impress very few people with what you are going to do and can impress everyone with what you have done.

Missy and I went over to our friends Stephanie and Brian’s yesterday afternoon to go swimming and have some dinner. We surprised Stephanie by brining over some Cake and Ice Cream for her birthday which is today.

As always we had a great time and here are some pictures from the event.

Yesterday at work was the day every geek dreams of… new computer day!

Here is a picture of my new baby!

Specs:
Dell Optiplex GX260
P4 3.0GHZ
2GB Ram
DVD+R/CDRW
80 Gig SATA Drive

And the best part:
Dual 19inch LCD Monitors

Missy took this picture on the Fourth of July and it is one of the coolest pictures I have seen in a long time.

We improve ourselves by victories over ourselves. There must be contests, and you must win. - Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon is one of the most well known and respected English historians in history. From his study of history he came to a very logical understanding of what someone has to do to be great. Other people can’t improve you no matter how hard they try, you have to improve yourself.

Hopefully I can remember this quote as I go back to work tomorrow after a week long vacation.

I hope you had a wonderful day celebrating America's Independence. Missy and I spent the day in downtown Jefferson City at the Salute to America Festival helping out my little brother with a quick stop off at her aunt and uncles BBQ.

We have pictures here.

I am about to die of a combination of heat stroke and a killer sunburn so I am going to go spend the next couple of hours in a nice cold shower.

I have never taken pictures of fireworks before with my digital camera but I had the opportunity to do so tonight. Holts Summit is trying to start an annual firework display and it just so happens that the fireworks were being shot at the end of our block.

So I grabbed my digital camera and this is what I got (I am either an artistic genius or I need to learn how to take pictures of fireworks).

We haven’t been to a pool party in a long time but that all changed today. Missy and I have some new friends who live in Holts Summit that we meet at American Martial Arts Academy. They invited us over to play in their pool and have an incredible dinner of T-Bone Steaks.

The night was great except I kept getting attacked by this little ninja.