James Whitt’s Blog

Well, I’ve managed to upgrade wordpress and gallery again. It’s been a while, so the versions were pretty far behind. One nice benefit of this upgrade is that the photo gallery is now working again. Enjoy.

Hopefully nobody has noticed, but I have upgraded the blog software to the latest and greatest version from wordpress. It was only about 9 or 10 version behind and 2 years old. If you have tried to go to the photo gallery, you have noticed that it currently isn’t working right now. I’m trying to find time to get that working again. I need to upgrade the gallery software and then upgrade the connection plugin to work with it. Hopefully I’ll have it done by next week. Summer is always the time when I have the least amount of time; Trying to finish the basement, clean the garage, get the yard respectable still, and jet skiing. I’m also working on getting my Solaris Systems certification, which I would like to have done before next year.

You heard right, Google thinks that my ip address that I use at my home is located in the UK.  I know this by the pages google displays to me and the ads I see.  When I do a search on google, I get sent to UK google.  I can go back to the regular google, only to be sent back to the UK google.  The ads on google also display adds for people in the uk.  I got to other sites that use Google Adsense and they will only display adds for the UK.  It’s starting to annoy me.

I’m going through Current for my ISP.  From the looks of it, they are based out of New York.  The service is great and when I do traceroutes, it never goes near the UK.

I’ve spent a couple hours trying to find a way to let google know of the issue, but it’s close to impossible to find a place you can just send an email to let them know of the issue.  I actually had an easier time finding a snail mail address for technical support.  If anybody knows how to get this corrected, please let me know. 

Haven’t posted lately because I’ve been so busy.  The few times I have posted, I posted stuff on the family blog since this one is more technical.  If you’ve left a comment and it didn’t show up, that’s because my comment system has been getting blasted with spam.  I’ve tried my best to sort it out, but some probably got lost.  We’re currently working on our basement, so once that is done in a couple months, I’ll probably start working on my MAME cabinet.  Until later, have a good one.

My friend, Mike Hauenstein, had passed away Friday morning at 3:05 am.  His wife, Ann, has posted a message on Mike’s Blog that sums up what happened.  His obituary was also in the paper and I’ve copied it below.

HAUENSTEIN Michael, age 27, of Monroe, Ohio died Friday, October 20, 2006 at 3:30 A.M. at Christ Hospital after winning his battle with cancer. He is survived by his devoted wife Ann, his beloved son Tyler J., his loving parents Tom and Debbie Hauenstein, his supportive sister Sara Hauenstein, grandparents Ed and Mary Jo Heichelbech and Emil Hauenstein. He is also survived by many other family and friends. Funeral Services will be Monday, October 23, 2006 at 10 A.M. at the Paul R. Young Funeral Home, 3950 Pleasant Ave., Hamilton with Pastor Jeff Raker officiating. Burial in Rose Hill Burial Park. Visitation will be Sunday from 4-7 P.M. at the funeral home. In lieu of flowers remembrances may be sent to the Tyler J. Hauenstein Educational Fund at any local 5/3rd Bank. Condolences may be sent to mikehauenstein.com or www.paulyoungfuneralhome.com

We’ve been talking about the Mentos and Coke experiment.  In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, if you add mentos to coke, you get a big eruption from the bottle.  I’m not going into how it happens right now.  We were always curious what would happen if someone drank the coke and then ate the mentos.  Thanks to YouTube, we have the answer.  Check out the video below to see what happens.

Update 6/27/2006:  Sorry, the video was removed from YouTube.  It was a great video though.  I couldn’t find another video of someone eating mentos and coke together.  I’m just going to put up a video of what happens when you add mentos to a bottle of coke though.

For some reason I cannot sleep at all tonight.  Nothing major coming up to keep me awake, so not sure what’s going on.  Talk to an old friend Bryan today and hopefully I’ll be able to see him sometime soon.  Been so busy that I haven’t really seen friends lately and I want to change that.  Ever since I’ve been in college, I’ve never really seen my high school friends except for a couple times a year.  That’s another thing that I want to change.  Kind of cool because I found a bunch of them on myspace.com, so I sent friend requests out. 

Besides that I was reading my friend’s blog (Mike who has cancer).  Really want to keep up with him as much as possible because he can really use friends right now.  I know how bored I get from sitting around for a couple hours, let along for days and months.  Might drop him a line tomorrow since he had another operation yesterday.  Think that’s enough time to heal for a bit.  Been working on the house a lot, and the yard is starting to come together, well resemble something that doesn’t look like a jungle.

Also looked up some information on installing Gentoo Linux on a few servers.  One is my personal server which is a G4 Xserver (PowerPC).  I’ve had Gentoo installed on it before, but now I want to install it with a RAID1.  Haven’t figured it out completely yet, but working on it.  I also have a DL360 at work that I’m trying to install Gentoo on which I keep running into problems with.  Spent a little bit tonight on it so maybe I’ll get lucky with it tomorrow.

Anyways, going to try to get some sleep. 

So, here’s the background of what I’m doing before I really get into my rant.  I have my Inspiron 6000 laptop that I’m giving to my wife since I’ve gotten a new laptop for work.  I’ve decided to reinstall windows, just so that she has a clean system without all the development stuff and other nonsense.  About 4 - 5 years ago, I bought a Windows XP Professional disk from my school at the time (University of Cincinnati).  I’ve used this disc to install Windows XP on this laptop a couple times.

This time around, I went to activate it and was informed it has been activated too many times and that I would have to call the phone hotline (888-571-2048).  No problem, called the number and a automatic voice asked me for my installation ID.  I then was connected to a representative that also asked me for the installation ID.  I guess Microsoft has outsourced this department to India.  I have no issues with India, but I do have issues with very thick accents that I can’t understand.  Take someone from deep Kentucky with a thick accent, I would have an issue there also.  So we went through the entire thing, and the woman informed me that this is a technical issue and told me to call the technical department).

So I hung up and called the technical department (888-346-5229).  After waiting for 13 minutes, I was connected to another thick accent representative.  Luckily, his accent was as thick and I was able to understand him a little longer.  He asked what my issue was, and I informed him about the account activation.  He immediately told me I had the wrong department and he was transferring me to …. the activation department.  Luckily I caught him and explained they had just sent me to him.  We went through the issues.  One thing that bothered me was all the questions they asked.  Phone number, email, full name, etc. He then gave me a SR number and said he would transfer me to the support department. 

Another 7 minutes of waiting and someone picked up.   The asked for my name and SR#.  The second I told them this, they immediately said they’re transferring me to technical support put me on hold before I could say anything.  After waiting for another 23 minutes on the phone, I hung up.  Luckily, I have another copy of Windows XP Professional, so I changed the activation key to that one and it activated fine.

This kind of treatment is amazing.  First the require you to activate the product, then they limit the times you can activate it before making you call in and wait possibly HOURS, then the product ends up needing to be reinstalled every 6 months to a year.  I can only guess that since the corner the market, they are just trying to frustrate customers into just buying another copy instead of waiting on the phone for hours.  I know why I switched to Linux and this just adds another reason.  If anybody knows a good place I complain about this to, let me know. 

While I was over Justin’s place this weekend, for some reason I remembered an awesome Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Preview Spoof that I had seen on Talk Soup on E!.  The preview was pretty funny and Talk Soup had turned it into a homosexual preview which was pretty funny.  Took me about 20 minutes, but I finally found it.  Decided to upload it to the site so others can see it.

Since we are going to be at a more permanent residence, we have decided to get a land line now in addition to our cell phones.  Called Cincinnati Bell up and they have turned the phone line on today.  Our house number is (513) 731-3562.  It’s active, but since we’re not living there yet, you probably will only reach us after work when we’re working at the house.  We’re taking our answering machine / phone there tomorrow so you will be able to leave messages for us.

Also, we finally picked out the colors for the master bedroom tonight.  You can download the pdf of the specifics here.  We decided to go with a blue color set for the bedroom.  The walls will be Morning Breeze Flat, ceiling will be Diamond Light Flat, trim will be Polar Bear Eggshell, and the doors will be Morning Breeze Eggshell.  We’re going to stop by Home Depot tomorrow to pick out samples to verify our choices, and if everything goes well, we’re going to start painting the ceiling.

Update (01/06/06):  Oops, through some little issues with Cincinnati Bell, the phone number is actually (513) 731-3562.  I also changed it above.  Pretty nice phone number for me to memorize since my cell is (513) 885-3562.