xenowolf.com

2007-11-30T22:30:00.000-05:00

Elton John Rocks

2007-04-05T21:15:00.001-04:00

I <3 80s Music

2006-12-15T22:56:00.000-05:00

Catching up with the world

2006-08-20T09:33:00.000-04:00

Well, I guess it's about time that I get things back up to date. I've been away from the whole updating-the-site thing for a while, but I've been busy with real life and other things. Some big news to date:

- Emily and I are expecting, and he's due November 14th.
- I'm still at Appriss, happily plugging away at the various and sundry booking and records systems throughout Texas.
- Emily's taken a job at Kentuckiana Cancer Institute.
- My sister Laura is engaged
- Laura's moved to Indianapolis with Steven

I think that's about it. Hopefully I'll be putting some of my mindless drivel up here more often.

My wife says I'm retarded

2006-02-10T12:12:00.000-05:00

She's probably right :)

Crappy Media

2006-02-10T12:08:00.000-05:00

[12:08] Brent Selch: stupid courier-journal prints "Turin" instead of "Torino"
[12:09] Brent Selch: it's fucking "Torino" fucknuts
[12:09] Alex Morse: I've seen that a bunch of places.
[12:09] Alex Morse: there's a lot less quality control in the media nowadays
[12:09] Brent Selch: and more suck
[12:09] Alex Morse: yes, much more suck

Phrase of the day

2005-09-12T12:39:00.000-04:00

(12:33:05) macagain: Gee, haven't heard you say anything about the iPod nano......
(12:33:25) Brent Selch (AIM): I am pretending it doesn't exist so I don't go and buy it :)
(12:33:31) Brent Selch (AIM): *very* nice
(12:33:43) Brent Selch (AIM): best flash based player out there
(12:34:33) Brent Selch (AIM): the only negative I've heard is that it is *only* USB2 - no Firewire
(12:35:08) macagain: Have you checked out the iLounge.com -- they've got a cool PDF that is sort of "everything about iPods...."
(12:35:34) macagain: USB2 is as fast as FW, though, right?
(12:35:43) Brent Selch (AIM): faster, actually
(12:35:46) Brent Selch (AIM): for a single device
(12:35:56) Brent Selch (AIM): FW handles multiple devices better though
(12:36:14) Brent Selch (AIM): at least for high-throughput devices, such as DV cams, hard drives ,etc...
(12:36:30) macagain: don't get me started on FW hard drives....
(12:37:13) Brent Selch (AIM): true - you haven't had much luck, have you?
(12:37:42) macagain: I'm still a loyal apostle, but that whole LaCie and G4 thing really frosted my banana.
(12:37:55) Brent Selch (AIM): that's such a great expression :)

Conspiracy Theory

2005-08-05T10:58:00.000-04:00

I ran across the "Snape is Innocent" T-shirt the other day, and while talking to my co-worker Terry, he mentioned his theory about the ending of the 6th Harry Potter book - He thinks it might be plausible that Dumbledore created a horcrux himself - Fawkes. He even supported it by some interesting facts - Whenever Harry needed help from Dumbledore, Fawkes shows up. Also, at the end of the 6th book, Fawkes is mentioned as flying off after Dumbledore dies. Third, if you were going to pick an object to make into a horcrux, why not use an immortal being like a phoenix?

Reliving Childhood

2005-08-02T11:03:00.000-04:00

It seems that more and more of the parts of my childhood that disappeared over the years are resurfacing - take JELLO(TM) Pudding Pops - my local Meijer seems to be carrying them now, after a long absence from my local store shelves. Now all I need is a comeback of the Cosby Show, and my life will be complete :)

Fun with hectic work life

2005-07-22T23:01:00.000-04:00

We've been working on a fairly significant project here at the office lately - it's called Project Mercury, and it's slated to become Appriss's new middleware product. Fortunately for me, they've given us a large (by Appriss standards) amount of time and resources to get all our objectives for the product completed by the scheduled completion date, but it's still a taxing burden on our little team. I've been writing specification documents (ugh!) on all the individual modules for the project, and it just reminds me why I went into software engineering.

I hate writing in English.

Virus Lecture

2005-06-20T23:37:00.000-04:00

Today I gave a lecture for the Information Security class at Speed School. The associated presentation is available in PDF as well as a (very large) flash animation.

Amazon's Phone Number

2005-03-22T11:19:00.000-05:00

I placed and order today for a T-Mobile Sidekick II and ran into a problem. If you've had service with T-Mobile anytime in the past, they will automatically reject your order, and you have to jump through hoops to get anything taken care of to clear that up.

For all those people trying to get things taken care of with Amazon and having problems using the online help system and email, the Amazon Customer Service Number is:

1-800-201-7575

One call, and I had everything straightend out.

gCount kicks butt

2005-02-14T13:06:00.000-05:00

So after many returns of my laptop to Apple to fix some issues, I've become more reliant on my GMail account. That being said, once I got my laptop back, I still found it quite handy to use GMail, but Google doesn't offer a GMail notifier for OS X - that's where gCount comes in. It's a great little menubar/Dock utility that lets you know if you have any unread mail. If you've got a Mac and a GMail account, check it out. If you don't have a Mac, check out the Mac Mini - $499 for a sweet little machine. If you don't have a GMail account, email me and I'll send you an invite :)

Hilarity Abounds at Wired

2005-01-07T14:26:00.000-05:00

I was just reading Wired's "Vaporware Phantom Haunts Us All" article here and came upon the funniest reuse of a Monty Python quote I had seen in some time:

8. Apple Computer's G5 Chips at 3 GHz

Intel's in good company. Nobody hit the chip speeds they promised. In June 2003, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said IBM's G5 chips would be at 3 GHz within 12 months. It's been 18.

In response, Justin Evers submitted a "Reading from the Book of Apple, Chapter 4, Verses 16 to 20":

"Then did St. Steve raise on high the Holy G5 of Cupertino, saying, 'Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine Dell enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.' And the people did rejoice and did feast upon the renderings of lambs and toads and tree sloths and fruit bats and orangutans and lickable icons.... Now did the Lord say, 'Thou in 12 months, thou must count to three. Three shall be the number of the GHz and the number of the GHz shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither shalt thou count two-point-five, excepting that thou then proceedeth to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the number of the GHz, be reached, then thine will be great and powerful in my sight, however if thou shall have more than one button on thou mouse, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff thine's life.'"

Spam Sucks

2004-12-20T16:41:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm tired of the 500+ spams I get each day, so I'm taking some drastic measures. I read an article on Slashdot about a guy who had the side effect of less spam after his email was shut down for a few days. I figure, it can't hurt, so I'm going to see what a few days without an active SMTP server will do for my spam volume. Yes, there are a ton of anti-spam products out there, but I'm just sick and tired of spending CPU cycles dealing with their crap. If you need to reach me, check for me on AIM, or email me at xenowolf (at) gmail (dot) com. Normal email will resume for me on 26 Dec. 2004.

Update - Jan 7, 2005 2:35 PM
After about a week of downtime with my email, I did notice a significant reduction in the number of spam emails I received, on the order of 90% or so. However, I was still getting somewhere around 50-60 a day, so I took one last step - I'm now using ZoneEdit's MailFoward feature to pass my xenowolf.com email to my gmail account. The problem is now completely solved :)

Speaking of PHP...

2004-12-17T13:36:00.000-05:00

http://www.hardened-php.net/advisories/012004.txt - the gist is that there are some bugs with PHP - again - I'm glad I'm using someone else's code now - I don't need to do anything about it :)

The Holidays

2004-12-17T11:56:00.000-05:00

Doesn't it just suck how slowly the workday crawls by during the holiday season? It's barely noon and I'm already looking for 5:00. It doesn't help that it's the end-of-the-year crunch time, and everything is either highest priority right this instant crucial, or ignore it we can't finish it before 12-31 back burnered. Ahh well, at least the holidays also mean some good movies, plays, and other performances are about.

Welcome to the new XenoWolf.com

2004-12-17T11:26:00.000-05:00

Well, I've tried out a few new backends for xenowolf.com, and I've finally decided to use Blogger. It just works, and I'm tired of dealing with the regular old hacking of php to fix bugs - let someone else do it.