Wednesday, April 19, 2006

More ways to talk to me than you can shake a stick at

I’ve updated my contacts page with about a million different IM accounts. Please someone ... talk to me ... It’s cold down here in the basement at the Deal Family Compound. And no one in the family ever visits me anymore. All 19 children have forgetten me.

Adium is cool.

Jon scribbled this mess on 04/19/06 at 06:07 PM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Tax Day, 2005

We filled our taxes on Monday, like most of the rest of the country I think and though we owed money, it actaully went pretty smoothly.

Except that UT wouldn’t let us pay with our credit card, so we had to send them a check. And since we don’t really use snail mail too often we had to scamble to find an envelope in the house at 10 PM.

This is what Re could find:

and here’s the other side of it:

Don’t you think the fine folks at the Utah State Tax Commission will appreciate the color and levity? And that it looks like we are a bunch fifteen year old girls passing notes in Geometry class?

Jon scribbled this mess on 04/19/06 at 01:05 PM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

I Don’t Understand Anything Anymore

A couple of weeks ago I was checking on the data traffic coming in and out of the studio and I noticed something odd. There was a steady stream of data coming from a machine on our network out to the outside world. It started at about 9:30 in the evening and would wrap up at about 9 the next morning. It’s like there was a small pirate internet radio station operating out of my network. Which is fine, I suppose, (everybody loves pirates, right? Arrr!) but we have to pay for the bandwidth, and if there’s something goofy happening on “my” network and I’m not the one who did it, I need to know what it is.

I whipped out my handy dandy packet sniffer and got to work. Ethereal also works, but then you have to muck around with X11, and I couldn’t be bothered with that.

Long story short. Our ancient HP LaserJet 5000 was sending out a stream of DHCP requests. And for some reason they were crossing our ‘net connection and going out into the wide, wild world. And this was happening every night, all night long.

I have no idea why it started to do this. It had been well-behaved for years. I changed it to have a static IP address and that shut it up. Simple, but mystifying as to why it decided to freak out every night.

Anyway, here are some screen grabs and if someone would like to offer an explanation, I’d be delighted to hear a technical discussion, wild guesses or even just sympathy from others who generally understand technology, but are every so often are completely confuzzled. (click for larger versions)

Here’s the traffic usage graph from our ISP. The big green blocks are the HP chatting with the rest of the planet.

This one shows that the HP (192.168.0.64) is “talking” to the broadcast addy (192.168.0.255)

And here we can see that we are dealing with DHCP requests.

The thing is… it already HAD an IP address. No one was bothering it, trying to take it’s address away. It had NO reason to want a different IP address.

Whatever.

I hate computers.

Jon scribbled this mess on 04/18/06 at 09:28 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Monday, April 17, 2006

The Great White North. Beauty, eh?

Finally got a moment and decided to say a thing or three about my trip to Canadia last week. As I said, I was exhausted when I got home. Traveling really messes me up. Anyway, here are a few photos from the trip.

Canadians have small cars. They were ALL this small. True story.

The startlingly phallic CN Tower looming over downtown Toronto. My hotel was really close to it, but I was too homophobic to go and visit it. OK, that’s not true at all. I was pretty much either busy at the press check or passed out in my hotel room from sleep deprivation.

and

That’s Kate. The Client. Who knows PMS 197 on sight and can pick it out from a line up. We made a deal. She handled the Magenta and Yellow and I was in charge of Cyan and Black.

As I was leaving I got attacked by Canadian Geese. I suspect that the authorities knew that I wasn’t a huge threat and instead of sending the Mounties, they sent the Geese. Geese can be mean, by the way.

All in all it was a good trip. The job printed well and we got loads done in a compressed amount of time. And I went to Tim Horton’s and got a cruller. Bob and Doug were totally right. Those crullers are awesome.

My one complaint on the trip? Got lost EVERY TIME I got in the car. For some unfathomable reason, the Queen’s Expressway (QEW) is called the Gardiner Expressway at different points along the same highway. Or possibly it’s the QEW in one direction and the Gardiner in the other. I was never quite clear on that. Which explains why I got lost every time I stepped into a vehicle. On the way from the airport to the printing plant, we got halfway to Niagra Falls (way passed the Ford plant if you are geographically familiar with Toronto), before we turned around.

And now I say “eh” at the end of every spoken sentence.

Damn those overly pleasant Canadians!

Jon scribbled this mess on 04/17/06 at 04:16 PM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Friday, April 14, 2006

That’s Where We Keep the Cream Rinse

Before I fled the country last week Ellis decided that she needed to change her hairstyle. She came into the living room, with half her head wet; the front half.

“Ellis, why is your hair wet?”

“I washed it!”

“Really? You got in the tub with your clothes on and washed your hair?”

“No! Not in the tub!”

“Where did you wash your hair, Ellis?”

“The toilet!”

Needless to say, we re-washed her hair in the tub and gave her a few instructions on proper respect for the toilet. And that it’s not really a swimming pool, no matter how tempting it looks.

Jon scribbled this mess on 04/14/06 at 10:38 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Novus

Proximus

Twitter

Favorite Entries

If you are new around here, the following entries have been reasonably well received. You might want to peruse these.

Holy Crap! Look at all this STUFF down here. It's awesome!