Archive for November, 2004

  • All Sorts of News Update

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    It has been awhile since I posted, so I thought I would get at it for awhile this afternoon while I have a little break. First off, I have been promoted here at the Help Desk, first reported by Rekabutt.com. I am now the student manager here and am anxious to try and put my spin on the Help Desk. I have a number of meetings with my boss this week to help get started and have my first student meetings planned for the end of the week. All of this does mean that Rebekah will not be working for the Help Desk any more as it would be wrong for me to be her boss. So she is moving up to Web Services where she will get to work on different projects which will hopefully help her get a job in the web development field after she graduates. All in all, good news all around there.

    Next up, Thanksgiving! Much turkey and cheesy potatoes were eaten, the food was somehow kept down while watching the Bears game and some laziness ensued the rest of the weekend. I did get some X-Mas shopping done while at home and got a nice decoration for my cube at work. If you havenít seen it yet and have the chance, I would highly recommend it. I also got a case of Snapple to help save some money on my daily juice habit. I also got America (The Book), an amusing read. There is a bunch of other little things I got too, but I won't go into all that detail.

    Snow, I am tired of it already. Driving back to Chicago last Wednesday, I drove through a nasty snowstorm around the Quad Cities and then after eating lunch in Joliet with Rebekah and her family, I got to drive through the snowstorm up I-55 to I-355 as well. Then this morning I wake up to find an inch or two on my car. I think it is following me or something. Not a good sign for the Winter.

    That is most of the major news I can think of now, I hope to have pictures of my Christmas tree up later this week and I have a number of old picture sets that I need to post, including from TheChris's 21st b-day.

  • Rant about ALF, not the alien from Melmac

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    I just got done reading Chris's rant and couldn't help but comment myself about the cowardly attack on a lab at the University. While I may have some hippie ideas sometimes, mostly about the environment, I personally have no problems with animal testing for new drugs and cures for diseases. If science is to move forward to find better ways to treat what ails you, animal testing is a necessity. I will be blunt and say it, I would rather see 1000 rats die to make sure a new medicine coming out doesn't kill me or someone I love. To have people break into a lab, destroy equipment and ruin research to free all of the animals, except pigeons, it definitely irks me.

    Today, President Skorton sent out another e-mail to the campus explaining that these anonymous people from ALF (Animal Liberation Front) sent an ultimatum to the University to stop the testing including the names of the researchers and their families to media outlets. Hmm, so you send an e-mail that can be interpreted as threatening in these times after you perform what can be construed as a terrorist act. With the FBI involved, it wouldn't surprise me if they use some of the tools they have with the Patriot Act to find these idiots. Honestly, why would you include the names of researchers and their families? That is just stupid and made your crime from vandalism into a possible terrorist act. I hate to see things taken to their extreme, but if these idiots get thrown in jail for 20 years because they are charged with terrorist acts, I will have little pity for them because they are just that dumb. I hope those 88 mice and 313 rats being freed make up for all the extracurricular activities you will be enjoying in ìpound you in the assî federal prison. Also, when they are inevitably put in hospital care there, make sure they donít get any medicine that had any animal testing before it came out. We would hate to make hypocrites out of them.

  • Web Site Info

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    I was scouring my stats for this month and am quickly finding that the best thing to raise your search results on Google is to have a photo album that uses keywords. This month I have jumped from around 200 search results on Google to over 800 and the month isn't complete yet. I have also noticed a jump in overall hits and bandwidth used making this month the highest in most categories with almost half of the month to go. Also worth noting, ASmallOrange got the country names resolving now, so I can check the different countries hitting my site. Apparantly there are a number of people in Spain who love MyTungsten as that country accounts for over 13% of my sites hits. With all this, I can say that MyTungsten and Dude Week are definately web sites on the grow, unlike some other Content Webring members whose sites have dropped in PageRank lately (Asstastic and FBroz).

    Also, I have updated my Wishlist for those of you that are interested.

  • He Works Hard for the Money

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    Ah the 24x7 on-call for the Help Desk, how I love thee. Actually, it hasn't been that bad so far. Ever since we started doing the 24x7 shifts, I havn't been woken up at night really and it has been a fairly easy 150 bucks per week that I have done it. This all changed last night, an odd set of circumstances caused both Internet connections for the entire University to go down at the same time. This happened at midnight, so I started getting calls from on campus shortly thereafter. While this is a unique occurance, I did get a call at 3 in the morning about it as well after putting a notice on our phone tree. Needless to say, this morning I am a bit tired. I may have gotten off easy in the past, this week I earned my money for doing on call.

    Update: For more detailed information about the outage, you can click here

  • Firefox isn’t a threat huh?

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    I read an article this afternoon with quotes from some higher-ups at Microsoft claiming that they do not think Firefox is a threat to their market share with IE. Although I was a bit peeved at the tone the Microsoft folks used, I quickly realized this is a good thing. As long as Microsoft keeps thinking that Firefox doesn't have a chance of succeeding, that is time that Firefox can grow without the giant going on the offensive. One million downloads in the first day and the extensions/themes site still behing hammered the day after, Firefox is here and it is for real.

    If you havn't switched yet, please give it a try by clicking on the button on the sidebar. Switching takes less than 5 minutes and it is free. You won't have to worry about spyware and other security holes and you get features like tabbed browsing and a basic RSS reader. This is where web browsing is headed, get on the train now and enjoy the safer ride.


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