Author Archives: David

XC Skiing

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It’s been a very long time since I was on the skis … either lack of good snow, illness, or scheduling problems, have made it hard to get out on the trails.

Today we were able to break that trend … after Ginny was done with church, we went out to Busse Wood Forest Preserve.

With both Ginny and I getting to the health club on a regular basis, we’re in pretty good condition … and it was clearly evident with our skiing.   Neither of us got worn out.

It took me a bit of time to get my rhythm back, but once I did … it was pretty good.

The only down side of this outing was the temperature … it was pretty darn cold.   Well, that’s kind of to be expected with winter sports … but my thumb got so cold it was hurting.

All in all, we did about 2 hours of skiing … and covered about 5 miles.   Not bad for our first time out.

One of these days I want to get back out to Yellowstone in the winter … it’s absolutely beautiful there and next to zero crowds.

‘Tis The Season to Upgrade! (or not)

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Yes, it’s that time of year again … UPGRADE TIME!

With the release of Fedora 12 a few months ago, I’m taking the holiday break from work to get my servers up to a more current version of Linux.

The fact that Fedora 10, the version of Linux I am currently running, is no longer going to be updated added a little more incentive.

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Real Estate Appraisals

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A recent experience has got me wondering how many errors are made in the home mortgage industry.

Ginny and I are in the process of applying for a Home Equity Line of Credit (HELOC) so we can do some improvements to the house in the next few years.

As part of the HELOC application, they did an appraisal of our house.

When they got the appraisal back, they informed us that our original loan offer had to be revised because the value of our house was significantly lower than our own estimate.

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Creating Bootable Ghost Recovery USB Flash Drive

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Those of you who follow my blog (or know me in person) are well aware that I’m a big fan of Norton Ghost backup software.

One of the major problems I’ve had with Norton Ghost is the fact that it only provides the ability to create a recovery CD … it doesn’t provide any ability to install the recovery software on a USB flash drive.   USB flash drives are much faster that CD’s and are read/write, so they can be updated at a later date.

After a bit of digging, I’ve figured out how to create one without too much trouble.

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Report as SPAM

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It’s nice that many of the major mail providers give you the ability to report a message you’ve received as spam … but some of them make it far TOO easy to report something as spam.

I’ve noticed that many of the big names put the “Report as spam” button way too close to the delete button.

Let’s take a look at some of the providers …

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Working Out

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Those if you who follow me on Twitter will know that I’ve started going to the health club in a pretty regular basis now.

I try to work out at least 3 times a week. Monday, Wednesday, and once on the weekend (usually Sunday morning, while Ginny is at church).

So far I’ve been doing quite well and have stuck with it. I’ve seen noticeable improvement in my cardio health, and the last time I had my blood tested my glucose level was down markedly. Ginny has also commented on my general appearance. I’ve lost 10 pounds and my jeans are a bit looser.

My routine us to do 30 minutes on the elliptical machine in cardio mode (targeting 139), then 20-30 minutes of strength training in the other machines.

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Activate AHCI in Win 7

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Last week I decided to start playing around with Windows 7 on my laptop … just to see how it’s going to work.

Luckily I have a spare SATA hard drive, so there was no risk that I would damage anything permanently.   If the Windows 7 install went bad, I could simply switch back to XP on the original hard drive.

Well, it’s been a little more than a week with Windows 7 and I’m quite impressed.

One thing I noticed is that the hard drive controller wasn’t for the AHCI I thought was configured.   Then I remembered, when I had the motherboard replaced due to the video problems, the default hard drive controller settings would be in place … and the default is to use ATA instead of AHCI.

Theoretically, AHCI should give me better performance than standard ATA.

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Splitting the NID

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For the past few weeks we’ve had a lot of static & interference on our home phone line … it doesn’t effect the Vonage line, so I figured it was coming from outside the house.

Well, it turns out the ‘NID Splitter’ we have in the phone box is giving out.     A NID Splitter is a device that plugs into the Network Interface Device that acts as a DSL filter for all the inside phone wiring.   A NID is the box where the telephone companies wiring interfaces with the house wiring.   Everything on the ‘Customer’ side of the NID is is your responsibility, anything on the other side of the NID is the telephone companies responsiblity.

It’s called a NID Splitter because it lets you split the phone line signal into two parts … one part that goes directly to the DSL modem, and the other half that goes to the house phone wiring.   The NID Splitter filters out the voice data on the phone line so it doesn’t interfere with the DSL signal.

Since I don’t have a replacement NID Splitter I tried a few things …

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