A Week Of Lists: Monday – Books I’d Like To Acquire

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For someone that doesn’t read a lot, there are a number of books I have on a wishlist of sorts.

Some of these I read in school and have fond memories of, others I’ve never read but want to.

In no particular order:

  • The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4, by Sue Townsend
  • I am not Esther, by Fleur Beale
  • Face, by Benjamin Zephaniah
  • Bacon Sandwiches and Salvation, by Adrian Plass
  • Cabbages for the King, by Adrian Plass
  • The Growing-up Pains of Adrian Plass, by Adrian Plass
  • The Horizontal Epistles of Andromeda Veal, by Adrian Plass
  • Plass At Christmas, by Adrian Plass
  • The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass Aged 37 3/4, by Adrian Plass
  • The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass, Christian Speaker Aged 45 3/4, by Adrian Plass
  • The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass, on Tour: Aged Far Too Much to Be Put on the Front Cover of a Book, by Adrian Plass
  • Stress Family Robinson, by Adrian Plass
  • Stress Family Robinson 2, by Adrian Plass
  • The Theatrical Tapes of Leonard Thynn, by Adrian Plass
  • The Jesus I Never Knew, by Philip Yancey
  • The DiscWorld Series (or at least the first one), by Terry Pratchett
  • Johnny and the Dead, by Terry Pratchett
  • Johnny and the Bomb, by Terry Pratchett

I think that is enough for now!

  • Why I follow Jesus, by Adrian Plass

A Week Of Lists

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This week I plan on making several lists, some more useful than others.

Today I made a list of employment agencies that I intend to visit tomorrow while Kelly is at work. I’ll take her up, drop her off, make my rounds and then see where I go from there.

This is also a list of lists I’ll make during the week:

  • Monday – Books I’d like to acquire
  • Tuesday – DVDs I’d like to acquire
  • Wednesday – CDs and Games (and such) I want
  • Thursday – Ideas I had to make money (that I probably won’t use)
  • Friday – Things I’d like to accomplish within the next 12 months

Yes, today is boring. I don’t care 😉

Spawning in the Game

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Someone should write a song entitled “Spawning in the Game” to the tune of “Singing in the Rain.” Maybe it’s too cheesy? Maybe not.

I’ve been playing BF2 for a couple of days now, since re-discovering the game (I was bored with Command and Conquer with myself, wanted to find some new people to socialize with online). I’ve mostly been playing with the guys at ISI, the Iron Sharpens Iron Christian Clan.

I’m still looking for people to LAN with, and possibly some games to buy when funds become available for such, so if you’re a PC gamer who plays BF1942, BF:V, BF2, and live in the Augusta/Rockingham/Shenandoah county areas of Virginia (or know someone who does!), maybe you should drop me a comment!

Looking For Networking

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I’ve been playing a lot of BattleField 2 the last couple of days, since discovering the 1.5 patch. It’s a whole lot of fun, and while I’ve had a lot of fun playing random strangers online, I’m looking for some more local people to LAN with. If you know anyone in the Harrisonburg/Rockingham County area of Virginia who plays Battlefield 1942, Battlefield Vietnam, Battlefield 2, a relevant mod for any of these, or any of the games in Command and Conquer’s First Decade, leave me a comment and we’ll look into hooking up.

I’m not looking for competition gaming, what I’d like is a group of cool people who happen to enjoy playing games. It’d be really nice to find some of my friends were secret LANners, but I’m not sure I see that happening 😉

Targets

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I’ve been evaluating some of the material objects I have recently along with how and how much I use them, and one of the things I’d like to use more is my BB gun. Gifted to me for Christmas 2008 and barely used since, I’ve been thinking I could ‘recycle’ some of the soda cans that will ultimately be recycled anyway and create a small target range against one of the brick walls of the house or another similar location whereby I can safely pull the trigger without bodily nor property harm, and also get some more regular use out of it.

Other targets I have in mind right now are more personal-goal oriented. I need to find a job or some source of reliable income, and I also have a couple of website ideas to document and build. If anyone in the area has Flash experience and has a serious interest in collaborating on a fun project then hit me up.

The Weird Things I Found..

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I came across something awesome while shopping for Kelly’s Christmas stuff a week or few ago, one I think I should share briefly. I found a puzzle which was a picture of a lighthouse:

I thought “Huh, looks cool..” and I moved on down the aisle. Then I thought “wait, haven’t I seen this before?”

Lo and behold, it is a photo of the lighthouse at Cape Reinga (Ree-ung-ah) at the northern tip of the North Island of New Zealand.

Needless to say I bought it, and she opened it at some point yesterday 😉

I also found a pack of 100 (I think?) cookie cutters, which were also opened around the same time, and a green cover for the iPod Touch her mom got for her, and so meanly told me (I had to keep it quiet!).

Anyway, that’s basically what I got my wife for Christmas 😉

Christmas Shopping

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I did some Christmas shopping for Kelly today, bought a couple of things (I won’t say what they are — she reads this!) that I think she’ll like a lot. We still haven’t set a budget for each other with a few family members left to buy for, but I’m expecting it to be around $20 each and so far I’m fairly well under that. I still have a few ideas left when we actually set a specific number and I have a target, we’ll have to see how it pans out.

It’s difficult to find time to go out and buy things for Kelly though, because we live 20 minutes or so from the nearest worthwhile shopping space in Harrisonburg. With two Walmarts, Target, Ross, Big Lots, Michaels, the various Dollar stores, it’s just a great place to shop rather than the Dollar General and the few small stores in Broadway, and the Family Dollar in Timberville, everything else is more specializing than I’m looking for usually. But Kelly usually works from 9:30-6, meaning she’s gone with the car from around 9-6:30, and driving the truck is not a very appealing idea financially, so unless we have a day like today (where I dropped her off and will meet her for one of her work functions before coming home), I have to break away from our evenings together or on the weekend some time. I’m sure she feels similarly, because a one-hour lunch break isn’t very long when you have to traverse traffic on the roads and in the stores.

With this in mind it is little wonder that more and more people are migrating to online purchases, or at least online-research before going to the stores to buy (there is something about a face-to-face interaction, and having a store to take something back to rather than paying shipping for an RMA etc).

This is how I usually shop, let’s use me as an example:

  1. Think about who I’m buying for, and have a few core ideas about what they like. I like computers, I like guitar and music in general, and I like fun stuff with some kind of purpose.
  2. Think about stores that carry items that fit these categories. For example, Thinkgeek, Walmart, Music stores.
  3. Visit the online stores and get specific ideas. Specific t-shirts from Thinkgeek for example, maybe look at the electronics section on the Walmart website, or guitar or other music equipment at websites like MusiciansFriend.
  4. Research and try to find a good deal on each specific item. Google’s shopping site is a great tool for this. Often what I find can be found just as good but at a lower price if I look hard enough. Keeping in mind, however, that while many online stores are completely reputable, some aren’t. If I come across a site that is new to me I may run a few searches to see if other people have had good experiences or not.
  5. Weigh up which idea is the best for the person I’m buying for. Maybe they don’t need the guitar I found, or they wouldn’t appreciate the T-shirt I’m looking at, or maybe it is just out of the budget I had set for them.
  6. Give it a couple of days, depending on whether I am buying online or in-store (if in-store it is more likely to be an immediate decision, but still not necessarily). I’m not usually one to make a rush purchase if I think I have some time to think about what I’m about to do.
  7. Make a final decision, and buy it.

There you go. My 7-step guide to buying Christmas stuff. Unless you want to take a month to work through your family, I also recommend doing this process on several people at once 😉

It Has Been a While!

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Wow, I keep realizing how long it has been since I wrote an entry here. Most things remain the same. I still don’t have a full time job, although I interviewed with a county school system earlier this week and also applied to a year-round resort, both IT positions. I also have another 3 jobs to apply for this afternoon (hopefully) that are also IT and not terribly far away.

I’ve done some work on my monitoring systems for my servers. Over the last few months I’ve developed several methods for providing close to real-time outage-notifications and misc. monitoring for the three servers I administrate. The system I currently have primarily does two things: Service unavailable notifications via Twitter, Email and Txt message (via email), and corresponding “It’s available again” messages, and system monitoring using an Eggdrop IRC bot for each server with basic commands.

I’d like to expand this system at some point in the future, by migrating the system monitoring system from Eggdrop to a Perl bot. This would allow it to be more portable, and hopefully have a smaller footprint on the server it runs on. It would be nice to have IRC-based announcements for server-up/server-down as well as more minor alerts, like high CPU usage, high RAM usage, high hard disk partition usage, etc. We’ll see how that goes at some point in the future.

In more interesting news, I believe we have pretty much finished our Christmas shopping. All of our box to New Zealand items have been bought, and we are waiting for 3 of them to ship or arrive by mail. All but one (I believe) of the remaining items have been wrapped, and they’re all sitting in a corner of our room waiting for everything else to be ready to go. We’re just waiting for 2 items to arrive (apparently they were mailed recently), and another to be mailed. I checked yesterday and it was still pending.

I recently provided a redesign for a fan-site, I’ll try and post screenshots later. I’m also working on upgrading/updating the Infinitley-aLive website, and moving away from WordPress. I’m undecided yet as to whether I’ll use SilverStripe (as on http://chris.i-al.net/) or if I’ll build my own fully customized CMS for it. Having been looking at CodeIgniter, it may be a fun first-project for a CodeIgniter site.

Lastly, if you find yourself in need of some web-design or web-programming, or a shell account for almost anything, or just basic webhosting, leave me a comment or something. I am happy to work with your budget so long as it fits mine, I’m happy to work for the testimonial and for a reference for my resume if I feel a need to use it, and you’re happy to provide the details I need. I accept paypal, and cash or check if you wish to meet locally. Also, if I can’t do something I’ll let you know quickly, and if I can I’ll point in the direction of people who are able to fulfill your requirements.

Be Careful With Mechanical Devices

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ATC DeviceThis is an ATC, or an Air Traffic Controller. It is a belay device, used to add large amounts of friction to a rope when working on high-ropes courses. A couple of months ago I was working on such a high-ropes course (I won’t name it, nor will I name the individuals involved). We were working with a middle-school group, and operating a team-belay system. In this system, there are anywhere from 4-5 people working on belaying another person who is taking on the element we are focusing on. The way team belay works is that the first person in the line is the anchor. Their responsibility involves wearing a harness to which a carabiner attaches with the rope and the ATC. Their job is to pull down on the rope coming to them, to make a tight connection between them and the person participating in the element. That is all they do, if the person falls, or it is time for them to come down, they should let go and stand firm. The next 2-3 people stand in a line beside the anchor, and their job is to pull the rope through the ATC so that there is no slack between the ATC and the participant. The last person in the line is responsible for coiling the rope, so that it is not left on the ground to be trampled on should the belay line need to move (IE, following the participant along an element such as a catwalk or mohawk-walk). Depending on the situation, and generally a good idea anyway, an additional person will hold the back of the anchor’s harness so that in the event the participant outweighs them, they aren’t lifted off the ground at any point.

Anyway, this is relevant because I was working a high element using team belay, and the anchor was a young girl with long hair. It got caught in the ATC when the participant was coming down from the element. Some quick thinking and movement from the team of facilitators meant that safety was never a risk for the participant, and after about 10 very intense minutes, we were able to free the hair and lower the participant to the ground.

I was wearing my harness, unusual in the circumstances, as I was facilitating and not participating in any of the technical work beyond instructing the young people on what they needed to do. I was also the one who anchored the anchor, as it were. She was a small girl, and the participant larger than she, so I put my hand in her harness to hold her down. As I was doing so, she tipped her head and said “it’s caught, my hair is caught” – in my stupor I checked I wasn’t pulling it with my hand slipping behind her harness, and removed it again. But still, she had her head to the side. It was at this moment I looked at what was happening and realized Bad Things(tm) were going on. I called over the other two facilitators on the ground (a third was up a tree, working on fixing an earlier problem whereby he had lost the pull-rope through a pulley for an element). They pulled down on the rope to relieve tension from the ATC, but it wasn’t enough, the hair had got itself well and truly stuck. I ran for the equipment shed, and about 30 seconds later was attaching a new ATC to the rope just up from where the stuck one was, before attaching to my harness (God works in mysterious ways!).

This allowed us to work freely on the problem ATC device. As I said, it took about 5-6 minutes from this point (from point of realization to getting the new ATC in place was about 2-3 minutes) to get the hair removed. Someone had the genius idea to pull half the rope through, and that then it may be removable with an extra 1/2″ of space to work with in the hole. Unfortunately, this end of the rope was the one with tape around it marking what it’s purpose was, and wouldn’t pull through. And so, off to the kitchen one of the facilitators went, intending to take the vehicle they’d brought. He returned a few seconds later with a pair of scissors, and we cut off about 3 inches of the rope end. It was a matter of seconds at this point before the rope was removed, the hair untangled. It has since been reinforced that all hair must be tied back and away from all places where such things may happen to entangle and trap individuals.

Chromium

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I did some reading up on Google’s Chromium, or ChromeOS over the weekend, and I have to admit I am intrigued. There are a number of things I’d like to see before I actually used it, and I have my suspicions that it may be the beginning of other things while still being “the one that didn’t make it,” but still, I’m interested in where this will go.

I’d like to use something like ChromeOS (though not necessarily ChromeOS) to run an internet cafe, for example. It could be ideal in the right corporate environment as a compromise between thin clients and fat clients, using web-apps either in-house or remote services such as Google Docs or Microsoft’s equivalent. If this were the case it would need to be able to authenticate using LDAP/Active Directory or other authentication protocols.

Also, the right users would have no problem using a basic PC using only Chrome (or something like it) to access web-applications if it were well-configured and well-presented. A flamer on Youtube suggested it wouldn’t last long if Apple produced iPhone OS-based tablets, and I wouldn’t be surprised if an upcoming Microsoft release followed a similar idea. And as is almost usual, it wouldn’t surprise me if a Linux OS or two use this as an opportunity to do similar things.

Anyway, for those who haven’t caught up with ChromeOS, or Chromium as it is now called, here are some links and videos, thanks to Google.

ChromeOS Concept:

ChromeOS Demo: