On the Second Day of Christmas...

Well, no true love of mine gave me two turtle doves today, I'm afraid. Well, not really — why would I want two turtle doves? And skip the French hens too. But, since I didn't wish all of you a Merry Christmas on

Christmas day, please accept my belated wishes. With eleven days to go, I've decided to post a short note of thanks to each member of my blogroll over the remaining days of Christmas. I present the Eleven Blogs of Christmas.

Going in the present order of my blogroll (which may get confusing, since it shifts based on the updating of blogs), I'm going to start with my Missouri blogging buddy Michael (of Time to Believe). This seems an appropriate way to start, for, among other things, Michael always reminds me to be thankful. Michael has posted 130 “Thankful Tuesday Two” posts in which he takes a moment to be thankful for things we might otherwise take for granted. Thanks, Michael.

Server Repairs

After a run of over 200 days of uptime (and 22 months of overall operation), cedar, my company's server (which hosts several dozen sites), started to crash every four or five days a few weeks ago. This week, after trying a few other things, I asked my data center to run diagnostics on the hardware. I suspected perhaps a RAM issue. We scheduled a four hour window tonight from 1900 to 2300 CST for a motherboard and RAM test. If that didn't find anything, I had tentatively scheduled a 600 to 1000 CST slot on Monday to run a hard disk diagnostic.

As it turned out, the data center wrote me less than an hour after they started diags to tell me they had found faulty RAM, had replaced it and re-run the diagnostic successfully. Whether this will solve the problem once and for all, I'm not sure, but it certainly sounds good to me.

Yes, I'm a Cell Phone Geek.

I took CNET's Cell Phone Geek quiz. Here's what it said:

Cell phone geek
Face it—you're a cell phone geek. On one hand, it's great that you take the time to know about the technology as you can dispense valuable advice to friends and family. But cell phones aren't the be-all and end-all of human existence, and there's more to life than knowing the differences between Motorola and Nokia. Also, remember that not everyone shares your passion, so unless you're with your fellow geeks, keep your diatribes to yourself.

I have actually expounded on the differences of CDMA/GSM and Motorola/Nokia before, so I guess the shoe fits. How about all of you?

Let's ReMEMEber Some Things

Unconscious Mutterings has us doing free association. Let's see what happens if I try it with the ten words they gave me:

1. Replenish::Pickles
2. People::Alex
3. Trend::Text Messaging
4. Girlfriends::Depart
5. Spirit::Holy
6. Banshee::Video Card
7. Oasis::Palm Trees
8. Thrills::Roller Coaster
9. Fountain::Pink
10. Boxes::Day

And, let's try Word Beads as well.

“It may seem as insignificant as a gnat, but being an apologist for using memes to fill space requires much devotion to the art of composition, for we must serve up such apologies on a silver platter.”

That was easy.

Ed Returns (for Me)

My good, if backward, friend Ed has been missing from the blogosphere for about the last six months. If you didn't notice, don't feel bad. He only disappeared for me, or so it seems. For whatever reason, WordPress took a disliking to my IP address, and I could only view Ed's blog erratically for most of the year and not at all since July. Whenever I'd open the page, it would say there were no entries. I knew there were entries from looking in the Google cache or viewing his site via ssh from another computer, but any of the computers on my network — Mac OS X, GNU/Linux or Windows — could not view it regardless of browser.

This was doubly frustrating since I host his site.

Fortunately, Ed had agreed back in July to make himself a willing guinea pig for SAFARI 2, the same software that runs asisaid, and will be running at least four other sites within the next two months. I decided to make Ed's blog the first site — other than asisaid — I'd actually deploy SAFARI 2 to. It was a bit of a puzzle to figure out how to convert the WordPress database, but he is now up and running with a nice theme he designed that matches his two other sites.

The best part of all of this is that I can actually read his blog again!

Thinking of Phones

My cellular contract is ending in two weeks and I'm pondering a new phone. The one I have, a Nokia 3600, has served me well, but I'm thinking I might be able to do better. Particularly, I love the built in camera, but at 640×480, I still regret when I only have my phone and not my camera. I don't expect my phone to replace my much more serious digicam (a Sony Cybershot DSC-S75), but I would like it to take printable quality photos if possible. As much as I like the pictures from my Nokia for the fact that without the camera in it I would not have them at all, they are usually less than perfect.

So, for the last six months or so, I've been following the new Nokia N90. It has a Carl Zeiss lens, 2 megapixel CCD, flash, digital zoom, etc. It is in a flip phone form factor, which it uses to provide a twistable viewfinder for the camera. It looks really nice and runs an updated version of the same Symbian OS with Series 60/S60 interface that the 3600 runs. However, three things emerged that dampened my enthusiasm. First, the price is $499 with a two-year contract (it is $799-$999 without). Second, it is supposedly very slow and unresponsive. Third, it is only available for T-Mobile presently.

Ok, so that's not so good. But Nokia has some nice non-flip units in the pipe. I'm not so keen on flip phones anyway, so I've been looking at the N70 and the N80. The N70 is a traditional Nokia “brick” with a 2.0 megapixel CCD but sans the Zeiss lens. The N80 is one of these new slider-style phones with a 3.0 megapixel CCD. The problem is neither of these has yet been picked up by a carrier in the U.S., and when they do, I wonder if they too will be fairly pricey. I'm guessing the N70 might be closer to the $200-$300 range, but that is still a lot of money for a phone. (The N80 is not yet even FCC approved.)

With that in mind, I'm considering either the Nokia 6682 or one of the several Sony Ericsson 1.3 megapixel camera phones (such as the Walkman W600). Sony, like Nokia, uses Symbian, but places the UIQ interface on top of it instead of S60. All of these are in the $0-$200 range, after the incentives that come from reupping a contract with Cingular. My main requirements are that I want a Symbian GSM (preferably with EDGE support) phone, I want it to have as good of camera as possible and I want Bluetooth; I think these phones are the only ones that fit those requirements, but I'll keep searching.

I need to decide: do I bite the bullet with one of these presently available phones or wait a few months and see what comes about concerning the Nokia N-Series phones? I'm leaning toward the latter, but if the prices are astronomical, the wait won't do me much good and perhaps the models I do like wil be unavailable.

Anonymous Posting

Sometimes I wish blogging was a bit more like a forum. There's a few posts I might write if I could post them under a pseudonym or anonymously that I won't or can't post under my real name (yes, in case anyone ever suspected otherwise, I really am Tim Butler). I could start up a second blog, but that wouldn't have the same readers and blogging isn't anything, in my estimation, without the community of other bloggers and readers that comment.

When I use to be on some forums, on occasion I would create an alter ego to ask questions I couldn't have tied to my name. (For instance, I use to post on several web hosting forums and when I went to shop for a new web host, I didn't want my old one to know that I was asking about other hosts.)

For now, I'm stockpiling these entries in case I get a good idea what to do with them. Hmm.

All is Well

The song of the day, from Michael W. Smith's Christmas:

All is well all is well
Angels and men rejoice
For tonight darkness fell
Into the dawn of love's light
Sing A-le
Sing Alleluia
All is well all is well
Let there be peace on earth
Christ is come go and tell
That He is in the manger
Sing A-le
Sing Alleluia

All is well all is well
Lift up your voices and sing
Born is now Emmanuel
Born is our Lord and Savior
Sing Alleluia
Sing Alleluia
All is well

Now In Technicolor

Here's a fun little “Color test” that checks… well, it checks something. The first time I tried it, I got 88% of the answers right, and it told me I was “the master.” The second time, I got 100% of the answers right and am still the master. Give it a shot.

Talk About Pressure

I do a fair number of computer service calls, and for the most part, I'm never too worried if I cannot fix things. I try to explain problems as I find them, and that way I do not just come to the client at the end of the job and say, “well, it'd be cheaper to buy a new computer than have me fix this.”

Some jobs, though, there is a lot more pressure to succeed. Yesterday was an example. My dad called me around 10:00 and said his boss was having trouble and wanted to me to do a service call. As it turned out, the networking issue at hand (a small one — this is a small custom cabinet shop, not a place with a bunch of office computers) was solved quickly and I was able to offer some other advice which I felt hopefully merited my pay, but it was a lot of pressure! Normally, if a client wasn't happy they just wouldn't call me back (although that is rare), but in this case, my dad would have to live with an unhappy client.

At times like this, successfully completing a job is especially sweet.

As a side note, it was interesting in another regard. I never imagined that someone as mechanically un-inclined as myself might end up drawing a check from the same company my dad works for. Interesting day, needless to say.