Personal

We have seven chicks that have hatched from our initial batch of eggs. They are now outside in the coop. Being the technical fellow of the household, I set out to get the coop Internet-streamable last Friday night (11-07-2008).

In the coop, which has power, I have a Thinkpad 240 running Windows XP Pro with 192MB of RAM. I loaded up the LifeCam 2.04 software and created a Stickam account. I've been switching back and forth between the LifeCam VX-3000 and the VX-7000.

There is Cardbus ethernet card that connects to a dedicated access point that is setup as a bridged client to the home AP. From there, it goes out the house internet connection, which is EVDO Rev A. Hardly any wires are involved, even the internet connection.

The Thinkpad 240 has a mobile P2-300mhz CPU. It is tremendously slow launching IE 7 with Flash 10, but once loaded, the chicks stream pretty fast. It is a wonderful use of a laptop that has a failing LCD connection and an infamous IBM DeathStar hard drive.

You can see and hear our chickens, as they peck at the camera and each other. It is a good way to keep an eye on them from inside the house. We also installed a remote thermometer under the heating lamp so we know what the temperature is for the chicks out there.

You might wonder.. why all the technology? I say, why not. It is neat to see how people on the internet react to baby chickens chirping, playing and pecking at things. I doubt many coops have electrical power, internet access, a wireless access point, remote thermometers and door locks. Thankfully, I already had the spare wireless access point, semi-broken laptop, and a handful of webcams to choose from.

Eventual goal is to use Windows Home Server with mControl to be able to monitor temperatures, lights, and other aspects of the coop from anywhere in the world.

You can watch the live stream here. You can find more information of the hatching process on my wife's site here.

I've setup a dedicated section of my Facebook profile as a picture gallery of the first hatching here.

Go here, enter in your address, and it will show you where you need to go to vote. Thankfully mine is not too far from our house, but I already knew the location due to voting in 2004.

If you were like me and had a hard time finding the actual proposals as they will appear on the ballot next week, go to the actual Michigan government website here and read the proposals as they will appear next week.

If you are looking for general voting info for Michigan, go to the Election page of Michigan.gov, here.

As for who you vote for and what you vote for, I don't care! That's what makes this country great. Freedom of choice.

Kicking and screaming (not really), I've been adding Media Center-esque devices to our household over time - mostly from Woot auctions because I don't want to put a lot of money into stuff like this, for now. I can say though, is that I'm very impressed with how the newer firmware on the Hava interfaces with Windows Media Center and how the well the Pinnacle PCTV 800e works, on a Thinkpad T60.

When I'm at home, I "drive it like I stole it" on my Dell 2707WFP monitor, and the ATI X1400 really shouldn't be able to keep up with the amount of HD scaling it has to do, but it does it surprisingly well. I'm curious to see how well it will behave on the newer models like the Thinkpad T500.

Long story short, there is a new cumulative update for Media Center that came out in October 2008:

Fixes an issue in which you cannot seek through recorded TV shows on Windows Media Center systems that have digital cable tuners. Additionally, the recorded TV shows display the incorrect length.

Fixes an issue in which Windows Media Center Extenders cannot reconnect to a host computer after the host computer resumes from the suspend mode or the sleep mode.

Fixes an issue which is introduced by in Microsoft Knowledge Base article 950126. In this issue, a video that is paused may resume if you minimize or maximize the Windows Media Center window or if a screen saver starts.

Implements support for Digital Rights Management (DRM)-free copy for digital cable tuners that have the latest digital cable tuner BIOS versions that support DRM-free copy.

Expands the solution that was introduced in Microsoft Knowledge Base article 950126 to improve the experience of recording analog TV broadcasts to include set-top box scenarios. Previously, some analog TV broadcasts were blocked with the "protected content" message.

Note: This solution does not apply to configurations that use analog TV over digital cable tuners because the BIOS of the digital cable tuners provide content protection.

KB 955519 - you can read about it here and download the binaries here (x86/x64).

This is an unreal site that a friend posted and allows you to zoom in to the day to day stories, all the way back to the 1900s, for the overall time line of events.

What exactly is Web 2.5? I have no idea. I just made it up. I'm still wrapping my head around the difference between Web 1.0 and 2.0, other than 'visitors can provide feedback and content'.

Transcript from the 9/24/2008 Springboard Series Virtual Roundtable, "Under the Hood: Windows Vista Performance...Need Answers?" hosted by Mark Russinovich. From boot times and applets to common "misconfigurations" and how to fix them. Mark and a panel of customer IT pros and subject matter experts discuss how to optimize Windows Vista and what IT pros can do to improve overall system performance.

I helped out on this webcast in Redmond and answered many questions behind the scenes during the actual event. Transcripts are now available for download of the RoundTable.

If you want to see a replay of the video/event, go to this Technet page here, or enter this address into your Windows Media Player or any other player than can handle mms:// links with streaming .WMV content.

If you are following my wife's site at all, you'll notice that she has a "pet project" going on. If all plans go according to plan, we'll soon have a bunch of chickens on our property.

Of course, the first thing I thought of was to come up with a way to get a webcam out there and how to broadcast it to the world. I know I've seen other chicken egg hatching videos/channels on Yahoo Live and other video sites.

We do have all the proper permits, so we're legal.

A lot of people are giving up on Michigan, even McCain. I try to avoid politics, and as strange as it sounds, I'm happy I will be seeing less political ads. I'm just burnt out on the process already, and it is only the beginning of October.

West Michigan, little by little, is becoming a little mecca for healthcare, IT, and the movie industry. Are there dark days ahead? I'm not sure, but to a certain extent, I already believe Michigan has seen the worst of this before the rest of the USA, due to our manufacturing industries drying up and closing down since the late 90s.

Disclaimer: Despite what Google AdSense might think (I've seen McCain ads show up), if political parties were a musical genre, I'd be classified as "Indie". Traditionally I vote for 'who will harm me the least'. Read into that however you want. If political parties were a religion, I'd be agnostic.

We've gone from flash mobs to Facebook pillowfights in Grand Rapids, Michigan and I have to say I think it is pretty neat. I wish I would have known about it and I might have dared to bring my kids with me. With all the worry over the economy and everything else, it is good to see a *positive* news story about something local.

You can read more about it here.

Update: There is now a video of the pillow fight on YouTube - also, very Web 2.0-y. Looks like a lot of fun!

A small snippet in case the article goes offline:

Grand Rapids, MI (WZZM)-- More than a thousand pillow toting Facebook enthusiasts descended on Rosa Parks Circle in downtown Grand Rapids Sunday for what may be one of the largest pillow fights ever.

"It just started with me inviting about 100 people to the event on Facebook. It was originally just for a few friends and then it just exploded," said Rob Bliss who organized the event.

Participants squared off in teams based on the color of their shirts. And then the drama started to build.

The clocked ticked down as the theme song from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly western blared from speakers.

If nothing else this pillow fight battle proved how powerful Facebook and other social websites can be at unifying people under a coming cause.

This is a pretty neat case study, and I have to admit it is a pretty slick Sharepoint site that I like talking about when people wonder about Sharepoint and what it can do for productivity.

Disclaimer/disclosure: If you've checked my LinkedIn profile, it is pretty obvious that I work for CDW/Berbee so this post is slightly biased.

You can check out the case study here.

Tracing back to what would be a defining moment in my life is the Atari XM-301 300 baud modem for the old Atari 8-bit systems. Of course I didn't know it at the time, but there was no turning back once I had called my first BBS and chatted with the SysOp. I would eventually run a BBS a few years later off a floppy disk on my Atari 1040ST, once I had my own phone line. I still remember our old main house line number in Rockford and the BBS phone number. I still have the US Robotics modem that ran the last version of my BBS, and it still works, and still has the 'Not for Resale' badge on it due to obtaining it through the BBS SysOp program way back when.

Why did I sleep so late
Lost my mind for seven days straight
If I go for seven more
Paint an eight on my door

I haven't had much to talk about lately - just been busy with life.
Inspiration comes and goes, and it seems to be coming back again, slowly but surely.

#1. Prevent applications from stealing focus. As an example, while I have been typing this blog entry, iTunes has stolen focus on me over a dozen times to tell me that is a processing a new directory while adding files to the library. If I minimize a program to the tray, I want it to stay there until I restore it or flash the tray to notify me that it has an important message for me. Please behave and honor my requests. I'm only picking on iTunes at the moment because it keeps driving me mad in the past 10 minutes. I accidentally hit the space bar when iTunes popped up unexpectedly and canceled my music import.

#2. Kill off modal dialog boxes that prevent using a multithreaded application - three applications that suffer from this off the top of my head are Windows Media Player, Winamp and iTunes, when adding files to the library. I understand adding and removing files from the library has to be an atomic operation to prevent race conditions, but I should be able to play songs while the process runs in the background. You could argue that this is an application problem more than an OS problem, but I've seen plenty of OS operations use modal dialog boxes when they were not necessary.

This isn't a problem only on Windows, because I've seen and suffered the same behavior on OSX and Linux.

It is one year since OCS 2007 went RTM/RTW and it is also SysAdmin day.

This is what I will be doing:


Setlist:
Movin' On Down The Line
Goodbye Daughters Of The Revolution
Stare It Cold
Go Tell The Congregation
Show Me
She Talks To Angels
Forever Young
Whoa Mule
Lost My Drivin' Wheel
Oh Josephine
God's Got It
Wiser Time
Drop Down Mama (1st time played)
Downtown Money Waster ->
Thorn In My Pride
Wounded Bird
- encore -
Tied Up And Swallowed
Don't Do It

Sorry to anyone that has tried to leave comments the past week or two. There was a bug in the blog site that essentially disabled any new comments from being submitted. Special thanks to Alun Jones and others who let me know that it was broken!

Sometimes anti-spam measures work a bit TOO well.