Disconnected

Posted on 24 July, 2010 by Spark E.

I think my subconscious is trying to tell me something. For the third time this week, I have left the house without my cell phone. This is very strange for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is my OCD. My OCD pretty much insures that I have checked for all of my usual necessities 3 times before leaving the house. I have NEVER forgotten my phone before this week. It kind of freaks me out. Suddenly I am aware of the multitude of things that could go wrong during the day. Things that can easily be remedied with a phone call but would ruin the day if I didn’t have the means. I have to carefully monitor the gas in my tank while I am driving. What was that noise? Was it the engine about to give out?? What if a server is down at work and no one can reach me? What if I see a really cool wreck and I can’t take a picture of it with my phone? What if I get in a wreck?? What if my engine quits, I get into an accident, a server goes down at work and I can’t take a picture to prove that it actually happened??

I am trying to imagine how we ever got a long without cell phones. I remember driving a ticking time bomb of a car from Montana to Texas all by my lonesome. I was 18 or so and virtually no one had cell phones. The car died several times in the middle of nowhere and somehow I managed to get it running again and limp to a town. Now I get a little nervous driving around in a metropolitan area without my cell.
How F-ing sad am I?

What’s even more odd – now that I think about it – is that I use modern technology like the Internet and HULU to watch old TV shows that were on before I was born.

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Blogs and Pictures

Posted on 22 July, 2010 by Spark E.

Now we have come to the point that usually takes all the fun out of blogging. At least blogging with WordPress. That point is the obligatory photo. For some reason, when we view a blog post we expect some kind of image that magically embodies the entire essence of the written material. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so if you write two thousand I would expect you’re going to need a bonus pic. So I’m gonna pop one in here and try to arrange it to suit my extravagant taste…

The pic was easy to upload to the included Picasa storage space. ( 1 Gig) Maneuvering the photo is not as easy as I would like. I can’t say that it is any more difficult than WordPress. I could probably edit the html and get the pic right where I want it, but I don’t really want to go through the effort. And I shouldn’t have to.

What you can see in the photo is a network panel I set up for a small office. Came out pretty nice. Six network runs and five, two line phone runs from a VOIP router. What is not in the photo is the WiFi network wireless access point. It is mounting on the ceiling above the equipment. I used one of those new D-Link “green” (as in: energy saving) Gigabit network switches Model DGS-2208. It is mounted lower right. I have 2 of these at home and they seem to work fine but they do not work well in an office environment with network applications. For some reason the ports randomly go to sleep and the PC’s start reporting network storage device failures. Not cool. Though it does run cool. I love to save energy but not at the expense of reliability.

Back to the blogging features… I cannot seem to find the page break feature that allows a portion of the post to be shown on the main page of the blog, while only showing the complete post when the reader clicks the “read more” link. I like this feature because then people don’t have to wait for the whole long page page of posts to load.

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This is simpler than I expected.

Posted on 21 July, 2010 by Spark E.

Not a lot of overwhelming options on Blogger as compared to WordPress. I’m digging it. Now instead of being distracted with all those bells and whistles, I can get right down to brass tacks. Or is it “brass tax”? Should probably Google it before posting it and making an ass of myself.

Nah.

I’m just going to continue. Stay tuned for more fascinating posts like this one.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Introduction

Posted on 21 July, 2010 by Spark E.

So this is my new bloggety-doo-dah. I’m doing this on Google’s blogger.com to try it out and see if’n I like it. Also because I don’t have to maintain it on one of my own servers.

Ah, introductions… I’m Spark E. Ok, so that is not my real name (…yet) but my friends call me Spark and I prefer it over my given name. Please feel free to address me as Spark. That is, if you address me.

I will add more to this introduction and tuck it away as the “About” page which seems obligatory. But this will do for my first post which I apparently need in order to preview my layout.

Oh, I’m going to post all kinds of unrelated items here. Mostly things that tick me off which I don’t expect anyone to give a rat’s ass about. But, I also intend to post things that I need to remember later and that may benefit others. Things Linux related especially.

I hope this doesn’t turn into one of those things I start and then never really do anything with. But it might. Probably will.

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