I am testing out the wordpress app for android. So far so good.

It seems to work quite well.

On the front page of this site you will find my laws of computing.  Law 4 states “Computers don’t do what you tell them to do.  They do what a programmer told them to do.”  This is demonstrated quite clearly by some of my recent experiences with PowerShell. Read the rest of this entry »

So, I’ve been playing with PC-BSD on my Acer Aspire One 532h, and I was having problems with WiFi.  Turns out that my use of WEP with a shared key instead of open causes many problems with the automatic setup of wireless by various operating systems, Windows Vista and 7 included.  Turns out the answer is to manually configure it for all the operating systems

For PC-BSD I had to remove the lagg0 interface and manually configure the wlan0 interface for direct connect rather than using wpa_supplicant.

And yes, I am posting this from PC-BSD.

The magic lines in rc.conf

wlans_ath0=”wlan0″
ifconfig_wlan0=”ssid <yourSSID> wepmode on authmode SHARED deftxkey 1 wepkey 1:0x<yourkey> up DHCP”

Shut off email.  No seriously.  Shut off email.

I’ve been trying to get backups reconfigured at work for months now.  Everytime I try to work on it, something else comes up.  So today I put up a “Do Not Disturb” sign, and ignored my email.  I actually got real work done for the first time in about a month.  My day usually consists of one constant interuption after another and “please, will you do this little thing” which “little thing” invariably takes over the rest of the day preventing me from finishing the work I really need to do.

After getting backups where I wanted them, I checked my email and realized none of it was very critical, though everybody thought they had a really really important thing that had to be done right away.  I think I am going to keep the “Do Not Disturb” sign, and next time shut off the phone as well as email.

So last night I was looking through the Sunday Paper fliers, and found that Circuit City was running a sale on the laptop I had just bought.  The new price is what I actually wanted to pay in the first place, instead of what I ended up paying.  So I checked their website and they have a 30 day price guarantee.  Yippee!

So what does this have to do with dentistry? Well, I had the first half of a deep teeth cleaning done this morning.  Not lots of fun, and they numb up one side of your mouth/face.  It took about an hour and a half for the cleaning.  I listened to music on my Zune so I wasn’t totally bored (an idea I got from Steve Roberts). After the cleaning I headed over to Circuit City, and with half a numb face requested the price guarantee.  Which they gave me.

After I got my refund I headed out into the mall and joined up with my family for the end of their walk with the grandparents.  Then we did a bit of shopping and we came home.  I decided to play with the websites a bit, and sometime while trying to figure out Joomla to get a start on the GeoCon site, I could feel my face again.

This is a test post from my centro.

It appears that my old laptop is dead.  I was working on the site when our dog brushed past me and a charge of static zapped through my hand into the laptops headphone port.  A half hour later the laptop blue screened.  I finally got it running again for a half hour before is blue screened again.  Now it will only run about five minutes before dying.

Needless to say I was not happy.  So I went out and bought a very nice new HP laptop.  AMD with ATI graphics and Vista 64bit.  Three hours I tried to get it on the wireless network.  Just when I was about to give up, I tried entering all the connection data manually one more time.  And it worked.  Annoying.  The automatic process insisted the router was not talking to me at all.  Apparently some change with Vista makes the automatic association process break with some “older” routers.  Mine is only about a year and half old.  Tried the latest firmware updates, tried everything I knew.  Then it just worked.  These driver stupidity issues is why people hate Vista.