OOoh!!!

I found a list of the 10 geekiest T Shirts today!

I want them!!!!

Well, actually, I don't want ALL of them.

Just 8.

Kudos to anyone who can guess the two I don't want....

Why geeks shouldn't shop

I was doing some clothes shopping today (aside: why are pants cut in such wonky ways these days? I have never in my life tried on so many pants that were SKIN TIGHT in the butt and thighs, and HUGE-MONGOUS in the waist!!! WTC?).

Anyway.

When I was done, and heading to the checkout line (with ONLY shirts, thankyouverymuch) I took a side trip to the purses. For some reason, I really, really want a purple purse this fall, but I'm picky about my purses. They can't be too big, because I'll fill it and hurt my shoulder. They can't be too small, because then they won't hold everything I need (and I need a lot, but nowhere near as much as Adrianne, who carries cinnamon in her purse...).

It makes it difficult to shop for purses, particularly since there are so many different styles; it's hard to tell if purse A, which is long and narrow, is bigger or smaller than purse B, which is more square.

So, I'm wandering through the purse section, looking at purple purses, trying to figure out if they're too small, too big, just right, when suddenly a very, very geeky thought flits through my head:

"You know, they should put the volume of the purse in cubic inches on the tags, so you can adequately compare different styles!"

Sheesh.

In my defense, though, I've recently bought a backpacking pack for Peter, and volume IS printed on those tags. And, yeah, I severely chastised myself for being such a geek....

I heart free wireless

Can I just say I think it is SO civilized for cities, churches, and various other organizations to have free wireless?

I'm at the church while my kids are at choir, and between the church, Chapel Hill, and UNC, I have my choice of about 5 different networks to connect to.

I love the digital age!

That was WONDERFUL

Whoa! OK, kudos to the Carrboro Recreation and Parks department! They've always been incredibly well organized when it comes to registration; typically if you're at the department when they start registration, you can be done in less than 30 minutes, even if you're several people back in line.

But still, online registration rocks! I was done 6 minutes after registration opened!

And I didn't have to refresh even once.....

Why must it be this way?

Have I mentioned I hate Vista?

I typically bring my personal laptop into work, and use it to connect remotely to my work desktop. Makes it easy to refer to things in meetings, and it's more comfortable for my hand and arm.

When I got back from vacation, I had a ton of trouble connecting to my work computer; turns out my personal computer was storing an old IP address somewhere.

Well, last night Vista decided I needed to apply updates to my laptop. Lo and behold, this morning, once AGAIN I not only couldn't connect to the work network initially, because some of my security settings had gotten blown away, but I was also unable to connect to my work computer by name again.

Sheesh. I HATE Vista. I miss my nice, stable XP.

Man, that was more difficult than it should've been!

So, I got back from vacation yesterday, and pretty quickly got called with work problems (boo, hiss). Not a big deal, except I couldn't connect remotely to my work computer, which makes actually working significantly more difficult.

I didn't worry about it too much yesterday, even at 2:30 am (OK, I guess technically that's today), figuring my work computer had gone goofy, and I'd just reboot it this morning.

So I got into work all bright and early today, rebooted said work computer, and be damned if I still couldn't connect!

What the heck is up with that??????

I could connect to other computers, so I knew that it wasn't my laptop. I checked the remote properties on my desktop, and it still allowed connecting remotely.

Finally, a lightbulb went off, and I tried connecting by the actual IP address rather than the computer name. That worked. So, I sat and scratched my head (figuratively, anyway) for a bit; because, of course, the whole reason you give computers names is so you don't have to remember IP addresses!

Finally it occured to me that the IP address I had a week ago had probably expired, but it was very likely that my laptop, in all it's brilliant Vista knowledge, was trying to hold on to the old IP address. I flushed the DNS cache on my laptop, tried connecting again by name, and, lo, it worked.

But I did NOT need this on a post-vacation Monday after a 2:30 wakeup call!

Well, How about that?!?!

I was talking (ok, IMing) with a friend at work who lives in Apex, asking if his oldest can babysit yet (no, she's only 14 and I need a driver). That led us to the cost of gas, and he was commenting that when his daughter DOES turn 16, he expects the cost of gas to be so much that the cost to insure a third (inexperienced) driver will be less than the cost of the gas associated with the extra trips that her parents make driving her to and from her activities (when a parent drives her, the round trip doubles because they go back home during her practices).

As part of the discussion he said that to get her to her year round swim practice is a 40 mile round trip currently; 20 to drop off and 20 to pick up.

I was amazed, and made the throw-away (I thought) comment that I thought I could circumnavigate Chapel Hill and not drive 20 miles.

Well, thanks to gmaps-pedometer, I found out I was right! How about that????

Two Brushes with Fame

But no combs with infamy (sorry, yesterday was long, June's been interminable, and I'm a little punchy).

So, I was a bit out of e-touch yesterday, so this morning I'm spending a lazy Sunday morning in bed catching up on Facebook, blogs, email, etc.

And I discovered that some of the folks I know are kinda famous!

First was Bruce, newly elected Moderator of the Presbyterian(USA) General Conference (I hope I got all that right -- I'm a Methodist myself), and Trina's cousin, who now has his very own Wikipedia entry (under the category 'religious leaders', no less!)

Second was Trina herself, who apparently rules Google with her webmaster self.

The funny thing about Trina's e-fame is that she blogged about the original Google search where she found her name. By the time I googled the same search, I got not only the hit for her resume, but ALSO her blog entry! So now she's double famous!

Sweet!

In case you were wondering

a 100 ft. CAT-5 ethernet cable will stretch pretty much anywhere I want to go in my house.

I know y'all will rest easier now that you know...

Great Minds Think Alike

I was all ready to go on a rant today about the UNC Athletics website. Not a huge rant, but a minor one.

Before I did, though, I went to catch up on Trina's blog, and found THIS post. Apparently, it's been a bad day or so in the ether!

Anyway, so my rant.

The UNC Athletics site is actually pretty good. It's easy to navigate, and reasonably easy to find information on schedules, results, summer camps, tickets, etc.

I went there today to see about getting tickets to the NCAA regionals (baseball). Carolina is hosting, and I didn't get tickets last year, so really wanted them this year. I got there and found out (actually I suspected this all along) that I could not buy single game tickets, so I selected what I needed for the whole series, then went to the order screen to debate if I actually wanted to do it.

Like most online ticketing sites, they have a timer, 5 minutes in this case, after which the tickets will be released. So, I think and debate and think some more, and with about a minute and a half left, click on "Purchase". I then have to create an account; OK, no biggie.

Except the time it takes to create the account counts against my 5 minutes!!!! THAT'S not right, at least not without making it very clear somewhere! But if a screen has two buttons, one labeled "Release Tickets" and one labeled "Purchase Tickets", I'm by golly going to assume that clicking Purchase Tickets is going to, oh, I don't know, earmark the tickets for purchase, perhaps?

Sheesh. I hate bad websites.

Such a geek

But an exercise geek, or a geek-geek? Or both?

I am much happier when I excercise regularly. I feel better mentally and physically. I've been trying for quite some time now to get back into a regular exercise routine, and it's just not happening, primarily because my exercise of choice is running, and my kids aren't old enough yet to leave alone while I go out for a 30 minute run.

I did drag my old Nordic Trak out, and tried using that, which was OK, but then I got the 8-week sinus infection, and then some other drains on my time, and, well, yeah, still not exercising.

But on Sunday, I did exercise again. Didn't last night, because G had a baseball game (and yeah, coaching 6-8 year olds IS aerobic exercise!). I wanted to tonight, but also had some work to do from home.

But my laptop fits nicely on the upper arm of my Nordic Trak!

I just did 45 minutes of work-work while skiing! Granted, it wasn't a high intensity workout, but still!

And now I'm blogging and skiing! Multitasking at it's best!!!

But, yeah, totally geeky.

When numbers have imaginary friends

Awhile back I blogged about imaginary friends

My friend Ash just sent me this comic. Turns out numbers have imaginary friends, too!

I've been asking for this for YEARS!

So, for years I've wanted the maps of a mapquest or google maps, but the ability to trace a route and find out how long it is. I run (or I used to, and I fantasize that someday I will again....), and I always wanted to know how long my runs REALLY were.

You could sort of approximate the mileage using tools like mapquest, but only if you ran ONLY on actual roads. As soon as you take a bike path, you're hosed. And, if you know your pace well enough, you could guess at how far you ran, but that doesn't help you if you're trying to find a new route, or if you're just anal like me and need to KNOW!

Well, thank you Google! Check out this link; you can click on a starting point, and then click on other points on the map and the tool will draw a (straight) line from point a to point b, and tell you how far it is. Keep adding points, and poof, you've just mapped out your route!

The cool thing is how good I was at guesstimating how far I ran; I mapped out my old standard run, which I always told myself was between 3 and 3.25 miles. It was 3.26 miles!

I see hours of playing in my future......

Step away from the keyboard, ma'am

WARNING! Geek Moment Ahead. Those of you reading who don't care, feel free to skip this post.

So, there are times when, for a professional geek, I'm really kinda dumb.

We had some DNS issues today, which in English means that various machines forgot that they knew each other and therefore stopped talking to each other (computers very much follow the don't talk to strangers rule). It was resolved fairly quickly, and I was down in the Networking side of the building (along with about 50% of ISD) testing the stuff I cared about to make sure it still worked.

Now, when I'm at work I use my personal laptop to connect remotely to my work desktop; it does this by the machine name, which is really just a mapping to my IP address. Usually works very well, and I sometimes forget that I'm not really on the laptop.

So today I was testing, and there was one URL that wouldn't work, but only for me, so they decided it was an issue with my machine, and that releasing and renewing my IP address would fix the issue.

So, still using my laptop, I opened a command window, and typed: ipconfig /release, which promptly released my IP address.....

.....which meant my laptop now couldn't talk to my desktop. Which is not bad, I just walked back to my desk and finished the process.

The bad part, is that I spent several seconds trying to figure out WHY my laptop wouldn't talk to my desktop.

Um, because you TOLD it not to!!!! Doober!!!!

Jeez, I hate when I'm a dope!

Black is the New Green.

I just set my browser default page to Blackle. They purport that energy consumption by computers is directly related to the colors displayed on the screen: lighter colors use more energy, while darker colors use less. Could be bunk, dunno, I haven't read the details. But, whether it is or not, they've created a page, all in black, that's powered by the Google search engine.

Now, I love Google. It can find me anything from technical documentation, (What IS a SQL -38001 error, anyway?), to recipes, to a good restaurant. And black just makes everything cooler. So Google + Black? Sweet!

And if I save a few kilowatts in the process, well, that's cool too.

I Love Google

Who needs technical manuals???

Someone just stopped in my cube; they're getting an odd message on one of our test servers when they try to connect to another server, and were wondering how hard it was to flush the DNS cache. Easy as pie, I replied, and though I was 99% sure of the exact wording of the command, I've learned with Windows machines it never hurts to doublecheck.

So, I googled "flushdns", and within milliseconds, confirmed that I was right!

Aren't Statistics Cool?

Occasionally at work we "distribute" application users to one of two or three regions, based on the last digit of an employee id number. Theoretically, this should ensure an even, random distribution, since each digit should have roughly the same representation across the user population.

Since users come and go, sometimes our distributions get a little off, and we have to re-distribute the users; that's on my to-do list so today I was getting counts of the various "last digits". Out of 14,773 users, that means in a perfect world, each digit should have 1477.3 users associated with it.

The mean? 1475.2. The median value? 1479.5 The lowest count? 1434. The highest? 1514. That means that the counts fell within about 30 or 40 points of the average. How cool is that?!?!?!

Yeah, I'm a geek. This is the woman who picked her daughter's birthdate because of the cubes involved (9/27). Sigh.

Hell Hath No Fury.....

Like a geeky woman scorned!