Homework additions

Sitting in class and going over next week's homework, don't need to change INITCAP, only show that it does not work (print of error message). Then use LOWER.

TUPLE's are Records...

Apple - iPod needs updating

You know there is not much worse than going to class on a Monday night and having your Apple - iPod start skipping on you. Well that happened to me last night!!

I was walking back to my car and it started just passing songs up that were in my playlist. After spending $490 on a little music device, I was a little worried. Came home tonight and logged on to find the good news that there was a system update available for all the iPods!!!

If you have an iPod and you are using iTunes (not sure if this has anything to do with it or not, but hey, you know...) version 4.5 or later, get the download! You can get it directly from here, there is no verification on to the form, so any b.s. will do -- don't give them your real email address!

So anyway, today was a pretty full day and tomorrow the people come out to set up our new AVID Adrenaline System. It should be pretty fast, it is based on the HP xw8000 computer which is a dual-processor 3.2 GHz machine with 4 external Ultra 320 SCSI devices, of course the $35,000 price tag means that it should be really fucking fast!!

I'll let you know more tomorrow!

No More Homework Mishaps!

I am not going to have another week like this one at class for homework #2. Had class tonight, when I finished, I came right home and started on next week's homework. It is not due until NEXT Wednesday, but I am not taking chances on something happening with this weekend being the 4th of July festivities. Anyway, there are 15 SQL problems to solve and I finished 13 before my battery ran out on my laptop (only charger is on my docking station until next week -- bought new one on eBay). I will have to charge it up at work tomorrow and finish the last 3 tomorrow.

Damn I will be a full week ahead!! Anyway it is 2:00 now, I gotta meeting with our cabling company in preparation for Friday's wireless bit -- 8:00 AM Tuesday morning and it is 2:00 now, gotta go to bed.

ttyl

Barely Got Homework Done!!

Wow, barely got my homework done in time! I am not used to having to rush to get it done but just squeaked in under the wire on this one. Not quite sure how I will do on it but at least it will not be late. I am sure the professor will go over it tonight in class so I should know right away how I did.

Consequently, did not get as much done at work today and my regular routine of planning the rest of my week at the office did not get done either. There are a coulple of things that really need to get done soon or we will have big trouble at the office but since much of the office will be in and out with the holiday coming up, things should be ok.

Look out on Friday, wireless gets installed !!!

C'ya later!

What no links in this one, hold on -- check this one, it is a way to silently install Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0 so you don't have to look at things as if they are black & white boxes! (people in my CSC451 class know what that means)

I won my AC Adapter

Hey, Hey! I won my AC Adapter for my laptop from eBay for the low, low price of only $9.95. Pretty damn good considering the rest of the world wanted to charge $69 for the same thing. I was actually going to do the buy it now until I thought that hey, even if someone else does bid on it, I will still get to go ahead and bid $1 more and then will win it for under $15.

Well, back to work. I gotta get my homework done soon!!

L8r

@stake upgrades L0phtCrack to version 5 -- little different!

Well for those of you keeping track at home, @stake (formerly known as L0pht Industries -- hackers turned *cough**cough* Security Consultants) recently came out with their trademark product @stake L0phtCrack 5 which does not appear to do anything new except make use of the Rainbow Crack that I spoke of only a few days ago.

I used it and the only other thing that I noticed worth mentioning is that when you try to retrieve passwords from another machine (remote) it asks for credentials and then after authenticating you, it will install an agent on the remote machine and presents a warning that someone can intercept your transmission if you use this method. Now call me crazy but that means that this software (which costs a friggin fortune by the way) that is written by these "Security Consultants" has a gaping security hole in it from the start!! They are so busy trying to make it easy (ala Windows) for all of us, so we don't have to get off our fat asses (careful with this link :P ) and walk to the server to get this information, they are creating security holes for us!!!

Alright, well I gotta get to my homework or my professor will have my fat ass in a sling

Peer-to-Peer frustration grows!

Well, as I grow frustrated with other peer-to-peer technologies, I figure I will go ahead and try out bitTorrent. I know it has been around for a while but I have always been kind of against it due to the few times I had used it in the past, I just used the plain bt client and it seemed my connection would slow to a crawl! Well I decided to give it another try using one of the many bt clients. The one I chose was ABC [Yet Another Bittorrent Client].

I did not choose it because of some recommendation or because I knew it to be better than others, only because when I typed Bittorrent client in my Google toolbar, it came up near the top of the first page and the one line "description" looked pretty good.

If anyone has a better client for Bittorrent, please let me know by email -- randyw (at) gmail (dot) com.

Thanks and until next time....

End of yet another week with a fun weekend ahead!!

Well it is the end of yet another week and things seem to be going pretty well at the office. Tomorrow I am going to Swedish Days in Geneva, IL and I am looking forward to spending the whole day with my dogs walking around the parks and the shops (of course I will leave it to Leslie to go into the shops).

At work I have been researching our wireless access points and how we are going to secure these connections. It is starting to look more and more like the best alternative we have is Windows 2003 IAS (Internet Authentication Service) which is not a bad alternative, epsecially since we already bought it! So anyway, starting next Friday I will start looking for our WiFi information to be splattered all over in the form of War Chalking. Don't worry, if we become a victim of War Chalking, you all will be the first to know!!

Gotta run, going home early today to work on my homework for summer school!

C'ya all l8r!

Security Training today @ Work

Security training today taught me that the dream world that I I was living is is now dead. There was one simple tool that quite simply can put an end to your peace and harmony on your network and you don't even know it.... They don't even need access to your network, only need you to get to their website and present you with a logon box. If you have Windows, they have your password before the box even asks you to log into it!!!

The program is called Cain & Abel and it was created by a guy at oxid.it. Also there they have put together a GUI interface for the Rainbow Crack.

For goodness sake, with all the spyware out there, the average person does not stand a chance -- especially if they have high speed connectivity.

Anyway, short blog today, Riley has graduation from obedience class tonight and I have not worked him for several days -- he is repeating this level anyway so it is not that big of a deal, but still, we have to do well!!

L8r all!

Somebody Stop Michael Moore!!

This is just a short little blog, but I had to get this one in here. I am so sick of the liberal left media and their slanted coverage of every story. Finally someone with a national voice got an opportunity to sound off on it. Read this article and decide for yourself if the crap movie is worthwhile.

Unfairenheit 9/11 - The lies of Michael Moore. By Christopher Hitchens

L8r

Website is Updated With a Working CSS

Well I finally got my website updated and now have working CSS on the site (still don't know where the bug was before but oh well). Time to check it out for an update at Randy - Wilson dot Com. If you find any mistakes, I am sure I can rely on you all to let me know.

I am changing my primary email for non personal items to randyw (@) gmail (dot) com, that is the best place to get ahold of me from now on.

Oh and by the way, if anyone still needs an invite to gmail, drop me a line at that email above and I will get you one right away.

Off to school but I gotta run home first to get my books and homework!! Also gotta wish Casey happy birthday, after all he is 6 today. Till next time...

Ebay Buy and Euro2004 Video, Check'em Out!

Great buy on ebay!

I was just looking around today for a new power cord for my laptop. I found one for $59 so I thought, "wonder what it would be on eBay", turns out it is $9.95 (buy it now for $19.95). Then I found this great buy on eBay. Looking for things expiring in <1 minute and I was directed to WWf the Music VOl. 2 includes Bret hart and Stone cold!. Bought the thing for a penny and now the person needs to ship it to me (and they live 2 towns over) :P

Well, so much for that 10 minute shopping spree, lots of work to do today before class tonight. I think I am going to send my teacher an email to the Euro Cup 2004 video. If you have not seen it yet, I suggest you check it out, it is really quite funny!!

Till next time...

Casey's Birthday!!!!

It is my dog's 6th birthday today!! I will have some pictures that I will post from our visit to the dog park later today, gotta leave work early so that I can go because I have school on Wednesday nights. You can always see some good pictures of Casey and see the latest updates of how he is doing in school, etc.

Send me a note and I will send you some of his birthday cake from Jessie & Choppers Place in Geneva!

L8r all.

1:00 AM and Tired as HELL!!

Oh man it is only 1:00 AM and it feels like it is 3!! I am waiting for a friend to make some changes to a database so I can roll out some changes on a project we work together on (#downloadfriends on IRCHighway). He told me over 2 1/2 hours ago he was going to eat dinner and would be back in less than an hour, I'll bet the bastard fell asleep (j.k. SHaRK). Anyway, giving up now.

Cool thing though, just got a new DVD surround system (Sony Dream System), here is the picture of it.


Anyway, it plays Super VideoCD's which my old dvd player did not, so I have been burning some SVCD's and watching some movies tonight. Just playing around.

Till next time - when SHaRK is awake - Keep on bloggin'

Day that Seemed Like a WASTE!

What a wasteful day today was. I got to work early this morning because I am on the committee to determine my organization's success sharing (profit sharing) team. We had our meeting and of the 4 of us on the team, I was the only one who was ready with my current data. Talk about pissing me off!!! This took about an hour.

Then we had a staff meeting at which the person who usually runs them was on vacation so it was very disorganized and very little got accomplished. So that wasted an hour followed closely by it being the day we all go out for birthday lunches, which was cool -- always nice to eat!! That took about 1 1/2 hours which brought us up to about 1:00 PM.

That is when I actually got to get started on some work, but alas it was not meant to be. Between interruptions, people needing help with their projects and other things that just kept popping up. I got almost nothing done today.

By the way, I am trying out some new things with my blog today, specifically I am emailing this blog to my server and now I am setting up an ATOM.XML feed from my server. If you want to view my blog inside of any given RSS feed reader, go to http://www.randy-wilson.com/blogger/atom.xml!!


Till next time, keep your eye on the prize and your feet on the ground

Not Looking Forward to Class Tonight :-(

Damn just thinking about class tonight and I am getting a headache! Came across a page dealing with RSS (discussed in an earlier blog) and found a pretty cool *free* tool to help along the way. Pluck is what it is called. Not sure about the quality of it but hell it is free after all. The reason I mention it is because the company also has integrated into the product a way to get your "Favorites" or "Bookmarks" from multiple locations (ie, home and work) without having to synchronize back and forth and back again.

Also, in addition to the other things, Pluck also has a way to share sites on the web and make weblink notes so multiple people can collaborate on a project over the web. The fourth thing it has is an Easier Google Search.

I am going to install on my machine and I will come back with some interesting tidbits!!

Summer School & Monday's, Not a Good Combo

Well, today is yet another Monday. Last week started my class for summer school (God, I thought I was done with that crap). Got a group project assigned and on Wednesday, I got into class and sat next to one of the only females in my class and we ended up getting into a group of 2. May add more by the end of today but I don't want anyone in my group who does not live close to home/work.

The real down side to this class is that the class meets on Monday's and Wednesday's for 3:15 each night!! It is only 5 weeks but that really puts a drain on the week. To make matters worse, the 4th of July holiday will steal one of our class meetings and the Professor's wife is due to deliver a baby right around that time too. If we have to jam everything into 8 classes (instead of the usual 10) it will be really tough.

Right now we are only doing stuff that we covered in my last 2 quarters but some of the students have never seen this stuff before. Can't wait till we get to some new stuff.

Till next time, check out this blog!

Gmail is Going Well

Well, I have gotten into gmail pretty good and now I get more invites than I can give out. I am at a point where I am giving to friends of friends.

Gmail seems to be a very cool mail system but there are still some bugs that I and some of my friends are finding. Being the diligent beta testers that we are, we report them right away, the down side seems to be that you get no confirmation that they received the report nor if they are doing anything about it.

I will keep you posted, until then Gmail away!!

After Millions of Requests, Comments are now Available

Alright, millions of you have asked for it.

And now it is available to you, you can now provide comments on my blogs! Why you would want to, I don't know, but hey, it is your life, your opinion and your time.

Enjoy...

God I hate people who don't post blogs for weeks at a time then like 3 in 1/2 a day!!

RSS Technology - Found Again

After years have passed since the last time I came across this, I "re-found" this really cool technology a few weeks ago and an agent that is even more cool. The agent, NewsGator, allows me to get my RSS streams in Microsoft Outlook and considering I use Outlook all day, everyday, this only makes my life easier. If you have no idea what RSS is, check out here.

Enjoy until next time.