Merry Christmas

“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” -Isaiah 9:6

Merry Christmas to all of my friends in the Blogosphere. I hope all of you have a merry and blessed Christmas this year (and have plenty of good things to eat to boot)!

Here's my annual Christmas story quotation:

But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. {11}Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. {12}This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” {13}Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”

- Luke 2:10-14 (NIV)

Merry Christmas once again and to all a good night!

You're Gonna Want One

I finally got part I of my Shuttle XPC review up. You can read all about the SB62G2 at OfB.biz. This is a really amazing system — and it is part of an amazing lineup, including an Athlon64 supporting model that even has a built-in 6-type memory card reader.

OfB has awarded Shuttle our “Best of the Year” award for the SB62G2. It is an amazing little box and I highly recommend it if you're looking for a semi-DIY system that isn't just a plain old system. Very very nice. I figured with the cost of the barebones system included, a P4 2.6 GHz with HT, 512 megs of PC3200 ram, a combo drive and an 80 gig SATA hard disk comes out to less than $700 — that's quite a steal!

What a Good Day

What a good day it is when you can just spend some time reading a good book by a Christmas tree. That's what I did today. I probably should have done some work, since OfB has suffered in the last few months while other more pressing jobs took priority, but I didn't. Instead, I spent some time reading Soon by Jerry Jenkins, the co-author (who does all of the actual writing, IIRC) of the Left Behind series. It's a good, fast paced novel, and it's kind of nice starting from scratch rather than building up on what he's been writing since Left Behind in 1995.

Also, I did some cleaning up of my blogroll. Josiah moved his blog awhile back and I updated the link so that I could see when it updates again. I also removed two blogs, David's Journal and Jake Rinard's Journal, both of which appear to be (at least temporarily) dead. If either of you two are reading this — please let me know when your blogs resume normal publication so that I can add you back. In the mean time, this at least temporarily satisfies my urge to have a shorter blogroll (I like too many blogs, as it stands!).

This is my second blogroll cleaning spree, actually. A few weeks back I removed Ciaran's Journal (since Ciaran has moved over to a private “LiveJournal” rather than his public journal that I could link to). I hate to see the blogs go — although it certainly makes things easier than deciding to remove a blog that's still live. How does everyone reading this deal with their blogrolls?

Good Day/Hard Night

It wasn't much fun to install, however. Under my desk is — to put it in the best of possible terms — a messy war zone of technology. Having four computers hooked up (PowerMac, Dell desktop, Dell laptop and a “guest” system — presently the Shuttle XPC), plus all the other niceties such a printer, pda, cable modem, router, etc. leads to lots and lots of cables. Uhg! I decided to move everything out rather than just tossing the new KVM cables under there — to make everything somewhat organized.

Ha! That was 7:30 p.m. tonight. It is now 1:00 a.m. I got everything back in place and nicely bundled by 9:00 p.m. At 9:45 p.m. I realized that there was a low “beep” and static when using the KVM switch with my speakers on the G5. Hrfm. It was 10:30 when everything was completely moved out again and probably 11:15 when I realized the problem was the switch (both the 2 and 4 port versions do the same thing). The sound mysteriously disappeared when the Mac was directly connected to speakers, so I was sure it was the switch. Using a heavily shielded audio cable rather than the integrated KVM one didn't change anything.

I think it was about 12:00 when I realized the same noise could be heard when I switched to my PC desktop while the Mac was on — thus it seems that the KVM is vulnerable to sound interference and the G5 seems to be emitting a lot of it. About 12:10 I finally isolated the culprit - it's the G5's hard disk. When the hard disk spins up, noise appears on the speakers. Take that for what you will.

Overall though, besides very sore knees and back, I'm pretty happy. When the sound is at a reasonable level, you really can't hear the interference and when there is actually music playing, you can't hear it at all. If I leave my speaker volume low and turn the computer's volume up, I should be good to go.

Christmas is Expensive These Days

Christmas is getting expensive, according to a PNC Bank study. According to the study (and yes, this is real), the cost of Christmas went up 18.8% over last year. What is it, you ask, that went up 18.8%?

Well, that should be obvious. One partridge in a pear tree now costs $77.50. Two turtle doves come in slightly cheaper at $58.00. The really pricey parts of Christmas are the seven swans-a-swimming at $3,500 (which jumped 66.7% from last year), the 10 lords a leaping at $4,230.89 and the nine ladies dancing at $3,921.44. According to PNC Advisers, that brings the total price of Christmas to $65,264.28 — after all 12 verses, of course.

According to Jeff Kleintop, PNC's chief investment strategist, “the Index reflects the broader trend of productivity growth in the U.S. economy that has driven prices lower on goods while allowing prices for services to rise modestly.” Kleintop continued by noting, “whereas in the mid-1980s the cost of the goods in the song dominated the Index, the trend over time has been toward lower goods prices, such as the pear tree, and higher prices for skilled labor, such as the pipers.”

That's good to keep in mind.

Alpha

A friend of mine mentioned the Alpha Course to me a few months ago when I said my church was looking for an evangelistic outreach event. It sounds pretty nice — it's a kind of “Christianity 101,” so to speak. The said person lent me the book the course is based on from Nicky Gumbel too, and I've just started it. It seems pretty good. It has lots of good endorsements — hey, even Rick Warren likes it!

Anyone familiar with this course? Have you been through it?

/dev/random

Thought for the Day: There are two types of people. Those that think there are two types of people and those that don't.

A Charlotte, NC, lawyer purchased a box of very rare and expensive cigars, then insured them against fire among other things. Within a month having smoked his entire stockpile of these great cigars and without yet having made even his first premium payment on the policy, the lawyer filed claim against the insurance company.

In his claim, the lawyer stated the cigars were lost “in a series
of small fires.” The insurance company refused to pay, citing the
obvious reason: that the man had consumed the cigars in the normal fashion.

The lawyer sued…and won!

In delivering the ruling the judge agreed with the insurance company that the claim was frivolous. The Judge stated nevertheless, that the lawyer held a policy from the company in which it had warranted that the cigars were insurable and also guaranteed that it would insure them against fire, without defining what is considered to be unacceptable fire, and was obligated to pay the claim.
Rather than endure lengthy and costly appeal process, the insurance company accepted the ruling and paid $15,000 to the lawyer for his loss of the rare cigars lost in the “fires.”

NOW FOR THE BEST PART… After the lawyer cashed the check, the insurance company had him arrested on 24 counts of ARSON!!!! With his own insurance claim and testimony from the previous case being used against him, the lawyer was convicted of intentionally burning his insured property and was sentenced to 24 months in jail and a $24,000 fine.

Only in America, eh?

I wasn't able to find a quick confirmation on whether this was true. It sounds about right though.

Glider Fun for Free

Here's something for any and all Mac or Windows users who read this blog (just curious: how many Mac users read this blog anyway — I know there's Kevin…). Anyway, here's what I found: the publisher of Glider, that classic of classic games, has gone out of business. The program's other has decided to give the current versions away.

Glider Pro X is the latest version and works on Mac OS X 10.x. I actually bought a copy of this a few months ago and never got around to installing it (I was planning to do it this weekend). There is also an old copy of Glider 4.0 for Windows and Mac OS available if you don't have OS X.

If you aren't familiar with Glider, it's an amazingly fun little game where you attempt to fly a paper airplane around the dangers of a house. Hazards include paper shredders, flat surfaces and flying thumb tacks. As stupid as that might sound, the game's simple concept makes it very playable and as enjoyable today as it was a decade ago. If you haven't played it before, go download it and give it a try — it's worth a few minutes of time. Now if only there was a GNU/Linux version.

Tired

What a week. At the cost of sounding like a broken record CD, it has been a crazy week. After tomorrow, though, I expect clear sailing (not counting normal Christmas hustle and bustle) for the rest of the month. That'd be nice!

It's only 15 days 'til Christmas… are you all ready for it or saying “already?” I'm ready for the Christmas season, but I'm not ready for Christmas day yet. It'd be nice if it was around December 1 right now. Oh, well — still two weeks to finish decorating and all the other good stuff.

KVM Blues

Well, earlier this year I replaced my trusty Linksys 2-port ProConnect KVM with a Belkin E-series 4-port KVM switch. It's never worked quite right with GNU/Linux (I have to switch screens to get things back in order), but I lived with it. Unfortunately, even after adding a USB adapter to get the switch hooked up with the G5, things haven't gone well between the two of them.

The G5 works with the switch and PS/2 mouse and keyboard when I first boot it up, but if I switch and then return to that system, the G5 often doesn't see the mouse and almost never sees the keyboard. A few times, it didn't even see the keyboard at boot. sigh So it looks like I'm going to have to retire a 9-month old KVM and get a different one that works better with Macs (hopefully it will work better with GNU/Linux too). In the mean time, just as a word of warning: be aware that E-series KVM's don't seem to get along with Mac or Linux.