Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

It still bums me out because he is the type of comic you either "got" or did not understand at all. It is an alternate way of 'thinking' and not in terms of drugs, as to why a lot of his jokes were funny, combined with the delivery. I've been watching a lot of the show 'Intervention' lately and it pains me that the producers of this show couldn't get to him before March 31st of this year.

I mean, the writing was on the wall, as evidenced by this review: http://blogcritics.org/archives/2004/09/24/131428.php

Some people make bad choices, and sometimes it only takes "one time", kind of like pregnancy, to get hooked on something. Sure, people are all wired differently, so some people can smoke a cigarette and not pick another one up for years. Thankfully, I never went down that road, I just saw all of that stuff as a waste of time and money. If you need that sort of short term escapism, you might want to work on the underlying issues instead of going for the 'quick fix'.

I just recently found out that it wasn't a heart condition that killed Mitch but a speedball, aka cocaine and heroin. I'm hoping he had been clean for a long time, like he said he was, and just had a bad night, grabbed some 'junk' and did his normal amount. The crummy thing with human tolerance levels is that they lower over time, and that might have done him in.

Of course, I am sitting here drinking a Diet Mt Dew which is filled with caffeine which is like my own version of a speedball, so in a certain sense I have no room to judge, but I know that drinking a 2 liter tonite isn't going to kill me, and it is legal. That is probably a bad analogy, but I can see very easily how these sort of things can happen. That's why I avoid addictive things as much as possible because "I know me". It is the same reason I've avoided World of Warcraft.

Mainly I'm just bummed there will be no more "new funnies" from Mitch. Mr Pibb didn't even have a degree.

It is a rare moment when you walk into a store and go "Wow, look at the picture quality on that TV!" and have a price that is affordable. I've seen some pretty amazing TVs but they also came with pretty amazing prices. This TV was cheap-ish and it had a HDMI connection. Practically unheard of.

I was a bit of a newbie to HDTV and home theatre stuff in general when I bought it, and the more I research into it, the better I feel about the choice I made. A lot of people ask why I bought a 4:3 HDTV. Well, 80% (or so) of the content out there is still geared towards that aspect ratio and the two game systems hitched up to it, the XBox and the GameCube, are mostly 4:3.

You lose less picture real estate when watching a 16:9 movie on a 4:3 TV than watching 4:3 movies on a 16:9. I thought about getting the 29 inch 16:9 version of this TV for quite a while but decided to go for the 32 inch 4:3. They share the same electronics and EEPROMs for the most part. With some careful tuning of the service menu, you can adjust practically all the little settings on the TV you could imagine.

From reading the various forums, it looks like there are some bad sets out there so maybe quality control has problems from time to time, but knock on plastic, my set has been flawless.

Combined with the Dish PVR 942 (which I mainly got for the bigger hard drive), using the HDMI output, it's a GREAT "little" home theatre. If you use a HDMI to HDMI cable, you get true digital video and true digital audio all thru one "USB-like" cable. Very sexy. I don't have a receiver yet that can process all the channels/etc, but for now, I like how simple the setup is. I just wish HDVI switcher boxes were more common and more affordable. I know there is a lot more involved, especially HDCP/DRM related, to deal with, so I know where the cost is coming from.

http://gallery.tiensivu.com/gallery/christmas_2005

Let's see, in the past week, I've programmed about 100 phones for a school district, delivering on Tuesday. I also smashed into a wood trailer while backing out of the driveway with the Caprice. Thankfully it was about a 2mph nudge so it just bubbled in the bumper. When the weather warmed up later on in the week, it popped back out by itself.

Due to the impossible driveway, and my new title as Crockery Lake Driveway Derby King, I picked up a Troy-Bilt snowblower at Lowe's after work that day. Of course now that I have it at home, the snow is melting due to rain. It was a wise purchase anyway, even if I had to stick it on the credit card temporarily.

Nothing says Merry Christmas like paying about $1000 worth of bills on Christmas Eve. America's healthcare system seriously needs some overhaul. I wish drug companies were not allowed to advertise on TV. I think it is one of the major driving forces behind prescription prices going so crazy, besides the crazy lawsuit settlements that juries tend to hand out. Something isn't right when your individual health insurance for your family per month is larger than your mortgage.

I'll write more later. Sabrina was spoiled a little bit early for Xmas. A Compaq Armada E500 laptop and a Canon 5MP digital camera. I know a lot of people wonder why a 4 year old is getting stuff like that, but she is a 4 year old going on 12, and she takes very good pictures already. Thankfully my workplace was doing an inventory reduction to get rid of old stuff, and fortunately a lot of that 'old stuff' was perfect for Xmas gifts. That is where the laptop came from and it is also built like a tank, so she can rough house with it to a certain extent. This is a natural progression, considering that she was playing the GameCube at age 2.

If I didn't love my current job so much, and I wanted to move to Washington State, I'd be all over this like Kristie Alley on Krispie Kream donuts.

http://blogs.technet.com/exchange/archive/2005/12/21/416390.aspx

Nice.

http://cdoom.d3files.com/index.php?page=news

In a round about way, yes, this indicates I found a $9 copy in Grandville. I couldn't resist giving my MSI 6600GT video card a work out.

It's at EB Games for that price apparently.
I think EB Games was bought out by GameStop so maybe it holds true at GameStop too, I don't know.

Here is a link for it anyway:

http://tinyurl.com/ccsub

I know the running joke about Doom 3 was that it was too dark, but that seems like quite a price drop.

On my desktop machine (which I just added 3 hard drives to, and a video card in the last month), I was using a retail copy of Windows XP I received from some MS thing I went to years ago - I probably don't even have the CD anymore, but either way, it was a legal copy and it might have even been from the XP launch party.

Today I'm woken up to the 'you need to reactivate since we think you're a horrible pirate and installed your copy on a brand new machine' activation... with a 3 day timebomb.. great... like I don't have enough things to do this week.

So, yada yada, won't register on internet, call the clearing house, fight with the automated attendant that doesn't seem to want to take numbers but needs you to speak 'yes' or 'finished' or 'mother may I'... I don't know why but that just irritated me more.

It's activated again but it still put me in a foul mood.

People often wonder why I have 3 15k RPM SCSI drives in my workstation at home in the year 2005. 2 reasons: I can, and I also seem to have a lot better data lifetimes with these drives. Most systems these days are I/O bound and once you get a disk subsystem that can pump data at high rates, even slower CPU machines "seem" a lot faster.

This study of SATA drives seems to back up my armchair diagnosis:
http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?msr_tr_id=MSR-TR-2005-166

aka

http://tinyurl.com/deppx

I've seen this firsthand now, after hearing about it here and there on various message forums. Most of the time it is related to Symantec's SymEvent driver leaking non-paged pool memory and causing STOP errors. You will want to FTP into ftp.symantec.com and go into the /public/english_us_canada/symevnt/ directory and download sevinst.exe and run 'sevinst SAVCE' (assuming this is for Symantec Corp Edition)

I was having a lot of terminal servers in the past going down from lack of non-paged pool memory and this answers a lot of questions I had.

Anyway, it also seems that there are a few W2K3 post-SP1 VSS updates available from Microsoft, specifically KB 887827, which supercedes KB 833167, which is already included in SP1.
I've got the SymEvent driver updated on the server in question at the moment and disabled VSS for the timebeing since everytime VSS starts up on this server, a few minutes later, you will get a nice STOP error.

If it keeps failing, I'll try out those hotfixes.

I'd love to hear comments from other people about this.

Edit: Looks like people are talking about it here too -> http://tinyurl.com/c42ah

Spotted this on Bink.nu and it is too good not to spread the word:

http://www.2x.com/securerdp/

2X SecureRDP for Windows Terminal Services dramatically increases the security of your terminal servers by accepting or denying incoming RDP connections by IP, Mac address, computer name, client version or based on time of day.

Sometimes, well, more times than I'd like to admit, I commit to projects that I know in the back of my mind that I don't have adequate time to commit to it. Case in point, I agreed to check out a family friend's system a few days ago and it is still sitting in my living room, waiting to get looked at. It's not that I've been exceptionally lazy, but rather that things have been pretty crazy around the house again right now.

Between massive car repair bills, sick kids, security audits, xmas shopping, and a LITTLE relaxing, my time is very limited these days.

A couple nice things I did do this week though was upgrade my video card in my home system from a GeForce 4 Ti4200 to a GeForce 6600GT. I also got Cassandra the same card as an Xmas present because her Creative GeForce 2 was getting a little long in the tooth and her brand new Narnia game refused to run without any type of Pixel Shader support. Pixel Shader 3.0 support should be enough for a while I hope, and as far as I know, only Far Cry takes advantages of PS 3.0 so far anyway.

I didn't want to go 'balls out' and get an ATI X800 or even a GeForce 7800 because I don't want to invest a lot of money into a "dying" standard that is AGP. Our next systems will be PCI-Express and when that happens, I won't have a problem going the extra mile. I got an amazing deal on these MSI refurb cards from NewEgg anyway. My guess is that people tried to stick a volt modded PCI-E BIOS on these cards and killed them originally. Either way, the price per card was 1/2 than it was at Circuit City for the same card. We didn't need the game bundle or the other packaging that normally ends up in the trash/recycling anyway.

Our LCDs max out at 1280x1024 and 1024x768 for native resolutions, so the fact that games might run a bit slower at 1600x1200 is a moot point for now.

It looks like there are some worthwhile bug fixes since 10.0.0.938.

http://tinyurl.com/abop7

aka

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ent-security.nsf/ppfdocs/2005062413405248?OpenDocument&ExpandSection=2%2C1

I love the howardforums.com for handy information from time to time including this nugget of goodness. I tend to like to hack on my cellphones quite a bit, as in figure out every little feature or bug, not the 'bad' type of hacking.

Anyway... most of these aren't Motorola specific except the ones that start with "##"

[snip]

*22807 will cause the handset to search for service only in the PCS F block. Most VZW CDMA1x 1900 is either PCS A or PCS B. VZW uses the other PCS licenses primarily for overlay (CDMA1x 1900 &/or EV-DO 1900) in Cellular 850 MHz markets.

Here are the *228 (*ACT) codes:

*22800 = Cellular A-side
*22801 = Cellular B-side
*22802 = PCS A
*22803 = PCS B
*22804 = PCS C
*22805 = PCS D
*22806 = PCS E
*22807 = PCS F

On pre-VZW interface Motos, press Menu then 073887*. Turn on the FTS and exit the menu. Press Menu and then left softkey to activate FTS.

On new Motos, CLR replaces Menu in the instructions above.
##DEBUG also works.

(first line left-to-right) strongest active PN offset, active PN Ec/Io, # active PN set, # neighbor PN set, CDMA carrier channel;

(second line left-to-right) strongest neighbor PN offset, strongest neighbor PN Ec/Io, # candidate PN set, status (e.g. IDL=idle, CON=connected to traffic channel, PAG=incoming message on paging channel), termination event (e.g. MR=mobile release, BR=base release).

3rd line contains your RSSI db [signal strength essentially]

[/snip]

The best part about these tools is that for some of the utilities, you don't even need to be running R2 to get most of the features. Case in point: The Print Management Console that I wrote about last month.

So, in other words, if you are running on a 2000 network, you might want to grab this package.

http://tinyurl.com/9ugg6


X64 version:

http://tinyurl.com/ajclf

Normally I'd post the long link but some browsers like to munge them up.

Oh and R2 RTMd on the 6th... I've just been too crazy busy to mention it.

This is just a personal pet peeve that I see more and more programs doing. It is typically done by programmers that either didn't have time to come up with a decent icon or didn't know how to change it within Visual Studio. When I see programs that use defaults in their resources like 'Form1' and such, it just gives me the impression of sloppy coding, even if I haven't seen the underlying code.

Sure, you could use a resource hacker program to insert your own icons but I wish more programmers would not use the default icon sets.

Here is an example of what I am talking about if this isn't making any sense to you: