Personal

I know a lot of people are interested in getting the PS3 but most people can't find them. If you want a XBox 360, I think most stores have them in stock. The gaming system that I think a lot of people disregarded this season is the Wii. Sure, it is basically a slightly upgraded Gamecube with a funky controller, but people seem to love the controller so far. I know I've been thinking about getting the Wii simply because it will use up some of my kids extra energy by using that controller. They love their Gamecube and XBox, even the 2 year old, but I suspect they'll really like the Wii also.

One aspect that people don't know is that Nintendo doesn't lose money on the hardware, which Sony and Microsoft cannot say about their consoles. It'll be interesting to see how things pan out over time.

One thing I wish would happen, but still haven't seen, is a drop in prices of the original XBox. We have one currently, and I'd love to setup another one in the kids room.

Last year, our brand new furnace developed defective parts. This year, the hard drive that contained 90% of the websites that this server hosts died. Thankfully, I have backups for this blog automated and pushed onto a different physical drive every night. There was a 6 hour time window between the backup finishing and the hard drive dying, so no content on this site was lost.

I'm not sure about the other sites. I will have to look into it more when the people hosting the actual server hundreds of miles away get back into the office on Monday. I'm just thankful that my backup plans worked and I was able to rebuild this site on a different drive on the same server.

This site has always had very good uptime, definitely not "5 9's, aka 99.999% uptime" but good for donated hardware and donated software. I've never actually physically seen the server but I've upgraded it quite a bit over time.

So, if anything, I'm thankful I didn't have to rebuild the server on a holiday. I only had to do a quick restore and restart some services after a reboot.

Check out the website here.

It's an NES emulator, in Java, preloaded with US, Japanese and prototype games.
Not sure how it is legal, but it looks pretty dang cool.

Of course, I will advertise it here and someone reading this will win it and I won't. I have the worst luck with contests, but you can enter here.

Go here to vote so that the X-Box 360 wins. Right now it is getting around 86% of the votes, so I suspect it is going to win either way.

There will only be 1000 units sold at that price, so I suspect there is no way I'll be able to get one since all the internet tubes will be clogged, to use a senator's phrase.

My custom license plate recently came in and most non-computer people have no idea what it means. People that deal with SMTP at all should know what it means. Why did I choose to get it?

#1. It was available. The initial motivation was a joke that snowballed into a custom license plate within the span of a few hours. The other custom plates that were attempted were either filtered or already in use.

#2. The old Dodge Neon TV ads, back in the generation 1 era, used to use "Hi." at the end of the commercials. The ads should have said "Hi, you'll need to replace my head gasket every 40,000 miles due to a design flaw!" but I doubt that would fit on the screen or sell many cars. Thankfully that problem is long gone on any recent model.

#3. It is easy to remember when filling out paper work.

#4. I'm a huge nerd.

The reactions from people that know what ELHO means have ranged from "That's pretty sweet" to eye rolls, which is what I expected anyway.

I totally forgot about this until a Google search for somehow popped up a reference to the DOOM FAQ with my name and MSU e-mail address in it.

To quote:
"Aaron Fredrick Tiensivu (tiensivu@student.msu.edu) - Command line parameters"

I remember on the night of the release, most sane people were playing the game to try it out. I was curious and remember trolling through the executable to find any hidden or undocumented command line parameters using 4DOS and a hex editor. I ended up finding quite a few and sent off a quick e-mail to the DOOM FAQ author soon after. It is pretty neat because later versions of the retail DOOM came with a copy of the FAQ right on the CD.

I don't mind listing that e-mail anymore because I doubt that 'student' remaps to 'pilot' anymore and that account has always been a favorite to spammers due to how often I used it back when you didn't need to worry about spam engines searching for e-mail addresses on mailing list posts and websites.

The early days of the original "throbbing" N version of Netscape, the SLS distribution of Linux 0.9x and the heated debates on the benefits and disadvantages of using a.out or ELF format. I honestly didn't care that much back then but some people made quite a fuss over losing a register on the x86 platform and how inefficient the older versions of GCC became due to the ELF format.