I have never been so excited about a laptop before.
This thing is amazing.
I came into work this morning - had a call during breakfast that the mail server was down... again.
I told them what to do while on the phone (essentially "reboot" since it is an MS server), then came into work.
Got here and saw that I had a voicemail message and a written message on my desk.

The voicemail was from a woman here that doesn't speak english all that well and her network connection was out.
The written message was from a consultant we have in house that I spend entirely too much time on trying to deal with his totally fucked laptop. It turns out he got a virus last night and it messed his system up and he wanted me to fix it. Awesome.

So I went up and talked to the non-english speaking woman. Her network connection is working again - it comes and goes. I have already swapped out a network card from her machine - no idea what is causing this - told her I will look into it.

Then I went and talked to the consultant guy. It turns out it was a trojan and he worked it out with a few people, including MS themselves on the phone for a few hours last night. Glad it wasn't me.
He still had a few issues that I waded through and then came back to my desk so that I could burn him a CD with some more software on it that will help him (spyware scanning stuff).
In order to burn this CD, I will have to reboot this machine because it forgets that it has a CD-ROM unit in it about 5 minutes after booting up.
Perfect.

So I wasn't in the best mood - although I'm always grinning in the mornings and the evenings now that I'm riding the Vespa, that thing is wonderful. (it got knocked over in a storm the other night and it knocked off some more paint - but on plastic this time - it is an expensive toy for it to get knocked over so much)
Anyway - got to my desk and there was a pile of Mac there. My father-in-law was back from the States and had delivered my new Mac laptop - 15" Alum PowerBook.

I unwrapped it and I am blown away by how well the thing is constructed. Haven't turned it on yet and won't really do much with it until I get Panther on there.
I need to read through the docs too before I do too much with it - but since Apple is designed for morons, I figure I can just start it up and be alright.
It is so light and thin compared to my other laptop. About half as thick, slightly wider, and slightly less deep.
The keyboard is fairly nice, will take a little getting used to - but not too much I don't think.

I hope all of my drooling won't now ensure some problem with this beast.

Oh yeah, if you are holding GAP today, try to get out early. IRN still looks good, but mainly if you got in yesterday. PCS is good, and HMN is probably the best bet if you don't want a penny stock and are getting in today.

In closing, I have decided to go on a 10 mile run this Sunday with some other runners.

I don't know why I took this long to get around to it...
I have been blocking pop-ups at first with Firebird and then now do it under IE with the new(ish) Goolgle toolbar.

Finally today I decided to block banner ads (not all of them - I actually left the Slashdot banners since I sometimes am actually interested in the stuff they have up there).
Went in and did it via the hosts file - redirecting ad servers to the localhost.
Can also do it on the firewall, which I might do at work just to limit the amount of bandwidth used on our already overloaded connection.

I wish there was a way so that it wouldn't leave a gaping hole in the page and then a broken image symbol there, but that is all part of the browser issue.

I'm still looking forward to my laptop tomorrow.

My new l5" Alum PowerBook laptop is coming tomorrow.
I just need to pay the $858 duty on it and then it is all mine. So shiny and pretty.

I won't have Panther yet, so I'm not going to do too much to the laptop other than try to learn how to use it.
I will use the serial to order a copy of panther to be sent to my mom's place for when I go there for Thanksgiving.

There is a guy here in the office that rents space here that will bring in Panther for me when he gets his Mac in - so I will have access to it - but I still want the actual stuff for myself as well, so I will be paying for my own - but I can install it from his a little earlier maybe.

I started officially trading someone else's portfolio last Friday.
On a $15K investment, they are currently up $1K, and on a $12K investment, they look to be about $300 up.
I think I can resolve those to both be an additional $1K within the next 2 days.
(today is GAP, IRN, and RNR would have also been a decent one. My code scans over thousands of stocks, does its thing, and then spits out about 20 that it says to buy - I then do my own analysis and pick the best ones out of there. Working quite well.)

We have a tech guy that comes in and fixes things here when I'm either too stupid or too busy to do it myself.

He has a Sony/Ericson phone that is pretty nice - or I should say he had it - he now has a very nice color Blackberry. Nice and small - very good looking device.
I immediately decided I wanted one too - and my fiancee was standing right there and saw it in my eyes and she inquired about it with him since she knew that I had Christmas and a birthday coming up.
But it turns out that particular thing wouldn't be the best for me anyway.

I have gadget envy :)

Well, this is likely only fun in the sense that Slashdot people might appreciate it. I know my fiancee doesn't think it sounds at all fun.

I like Scrabble. I play it everyday. I proposed to my fiancee via Scrabble. I take digital pictures of every game that I have played the past few weeks (and will continue to do so and am starting up a part of my site to log them).

I don't win all of the time - I usually break 280, but my fiancee pretty much always breaks 300 and sometimes 400 (I think about 5 times that I can remember).
I'm just not very good at spelling - I can never remember how anything is spelled. I frequently transpose letters, and if it is something where that is feasible sometimes then I will always get it wrong (friend/freind, Michael/Micheal - those look equally wrong/right to me).

But I love to watch the shapes that unfold from the game.

I decided long ago that I would create a Scrabble "heat map" - that would play thousands of games and keep track of which spots on the board are played the most and then color them accordingly - the more frequently used spots are a hotter color than the spots that are less used.
Obviously the center tile would be always played, and then others are less played.
The tiles are naturally going to gravitate towards the triple/double word/letter squares.
So if you generate a map and then reposition those squares, you should be able to replay the games and then get a different heat map that is more biased towards their new positions.

The human logic behind playing the game is relatively easy - but translating that to programming has been unusually hard for me.
Getting a program to play like a little kid is easy - but getting it to play the way a good player does is harder - and that is what I am striving for.

Then I thought about just brute forcing it - effectively just toss letters at the board, see if they all form words, if so, that is a legit board - repeat.
That way you could move through the entire solution space of Scrabble.
But that space is huge.
Well, I should say that the possible space is *HUGE* and then the limits within that due to actual words is much much smaller - but still huge.

Assuming I am remembering my math correctly, the total possible solutions ignoring if there are actual words on the board or not is:
225!/(100!*125!)
That number is bigger than Excel will allow, and I'm just gonna go ahead and assume it is hugeness.

Assuming that I can write a program that can generate (notice I don't say "play") and then analyze a game for it being "legit" so that it can do about 100 of these in a second... then that would take... way longer than normal time allows for us to be around for - along the same timespan of encryption...
Which makes me think of distributed.net - they break encryption via a large network of comptuers.

That way it would be feasible to keep track of only legit boards (using the standard competition Scrabble dictionary, which I have a digital copy of) and know exactly the bounds of the scrabble solution space via brute force.
You could look at your end game and say to your game partner "oh, we just played solution #575,845,903 - cool"

Anyway - I have some code done - but the idea of storing that much data makes my stomach hurt.

As a result, I will keep on and finish the heatmap version and then if I feel like it, move on to a distributed project.
I am currently working in Perl, but I might go ahead and just do it in C since I will have to move that way anyway soon enough.

I gots me moderator points. I haven't had those in over a year.
I feel so special that... actually, I don't really care.

I traded in my rental scooter for a different rental scooter. This one has the same problem, but right when you start up - meaning that if you can get over that problem, then it is good to go.

I finally got the crashed server here fixed and now need to get the scanning/printing software back on it, the RAS stuff setup, and the antivirus stuff (which I'm sort of wondering if that broke it in the first place - I think it is just a coincidence).

I refuse to come in this weekend - I have been coming into work on the weekends for far too many weeks now and it really ruins the whole weekend to spend 4-8 more hours at work.

I have one client now that I am trading his portfolio - if I can do well on that, I think I have two more that are interested.
I can have up to 15 in a certain type of setup (which this guy isn't part of) before I have to register as an RIA - which I think is largely just a lot of paperwork, but nothing more than that from what I can tell.

Last night while trying to return videos, the scooter I am renting died going up any hills. So I turned around and drove home.
Turned the scooter in today.
Was hoping to go do the equivalent of the DMV here. But I got a phone call while exchanging the bike and they told me that a server was down here.
I got in and the SCSI drives on it were totally dead.

So from 9:30am this morning until now, I have been rebooting this thing and tearing it apart and trying different ways to maybe salvage anything out of it.
Our backups also apparently didn't back up this server - a dangerous way to learn a lesson, but actually not too bad in this case since this was our secondary domain controller and only really did that and print serving.

It is an old PII 400 with 256MB RAM in it and a slow cd-rom. It is taking absolutely forever to get anything done on it.

It is 3:30pm now and I think by 4pm I should be able to start putting Win2K on it. I'm really not enjoying this and I think I'm not in a huge hurry to get this back up tonight.

I so hate IT work. "Sure, you will do some IT work and then all of the programming for us here."
By that they meant that they have no programming work and what they do have, they will expect me to get done while the network here is always crapped out.

On the good side, I have a few clients for my portfolio management and stock market advice business - so hopefully soon that will start generating some real money and I can stop doing this job that I hate.

I am trying to exchange my money for goods and services. I was taught that this is normally how it works, but apparently once you move to Bermuda, that stops.

I have tried to buy an Apple from a store in Canada - they said that they would do it, but Toronto is apparently fresh out of the new AlumBooks.
I then tried to do it from the online Apple store. They wouldn't ship to Bermuda.
I tried to do it at the US Amazon - they wouldn't ship to Bermuda.
I tried to do it at the UK Amazon, they don't carry Apple stuff.

I haven't looked to see if there is a UK Apple site that will work with me.

I was a die hard Mac hater and now am willing to try switching - hell, I'm tall and relatively normal looking, they could frickin put me in a switch ad - just work with me here.

"Here, I would like to give you my money in exchange for shiny things."
"Great, hand over to... wait, where are you from? Oh? Okay, sorry, can't do it - thanks though."

At work, my laptop can make it okay. It is air conditioned in here and I have it on a desk. I even went so far as to put a small pad of paper under it so that some air can get under there (in theory).
But at home, I have the laptop on my... well, my lap. It gets hot, the fan on the processor doesn't work, it overheats, and it dies. I can't start it up again until it cools, which takes about an hour.

Then when I get to work and try to reset the DHCP on it so that it will grab a new IP on our network, it will aknowledge that I have a network jack and that it is working, but it tells me that my DHCP server is not working (which I know that it is).
I can either keep asking it to try and eventually after about 25 tries, it will be like "oohhhhh, THAT DHCP server! Riiiight, okay, working." - or I unplug that network cable and plug in a PCMCIA card. It will tell me that it doesn't work, then I pull that out, and then put it back into the built in jack and then it usually works within 5 tries.

I figure that is really how computers should work - like crack addicts with ADHD.

I tried to buy an AlumBook yesterday from a site in Canada, but the guy I need to talk to wasn't there. I hope that it doesn't have the Canadian keyboard... I didn't even know there was such a beast until I read about it recently.
I will try again today to get it.
The fellow hasn't responded to my e-mail - it bugs me when people don't reply to their e-mails within an hour of getting it. The fact that someone doesn't check their mail makes me distrust them :)
Especially if they want to take my money for comptuer stuff.

This new Mac will hopefully run cooler and be more durable for my commute. I walk and take the ferry with a Crumpler messenger bag (it is called Very Busy Man - which I'm not). This commute - presumably the bumping of walking - seems to be what killed my laptop since it worked fine prior to that.
The new Mac will have built in wireless, so I'm gonna wireless up my apartment and hopefully that will make my fiancee stop freaking out about the wires. (mainly one wire, which I don't even notice - but she acts like I dug a 10 foot trench in the living room and filled it with dead rats)

With duty, this laptop is going to cost me about $4K USD. My Vespa cost $5K I think. They are both shiny and design prettiness, and generally used by snobs. I guess that is me.

My code generated stock picks for today are (all Longs here):
NDE
EEFT
DUK
FAF
EBAY
MERQ
FE
GXP
MHO
HRS
NANO
AMSG
ADVS
CATS

I always try to warn myself of this and then assume that everyone is so dumb that they will do the most outrageous things and be totally unable to do other things.

But they always one up me and get more retarded.

These people I speak of are in my office. I have been spoiled in the past and I worked in tech offices - and I was a fucking programmer for starters.
But now I am the IT guy/programmer - and by programmer I mean "never program because all I do is IT".

I have one of the owners here that is totally baffled by synching his phone with his machine - he gets embarrassed by it, and so then he stops calling me to help after I spend hours trying to fix what he fucks up and re-explaining how it all works. He happens to be my father in law.
Then the other owner - the brother of the other guy - he thinks he knows what he is doing, but he is far more retarded. He can't figure out his phone, so he buys another one. He also can't comprehend how to synch his phone with his computer correctly. He says that having a button shouldn't have to happen. We worked it out so that it will synch when he sets the phone down on the base - but he still somehow fucks that up. I have gotten to the point now where I tell him I'll look into it and then never think about it again. Yesterday he called me up and told me that every message he was sending out was getting sent back saying that it had a virus. Then I get up there and he immediately gets on the phone and just talks about random shit and tells me in a whisper that it is important - I think he just wants to feel important and the phone does that.
I looked at his mail and it turns out that nothing he is sending is a virus, but something someone else sent out was a virus, and he wrote to this guy about it. He won't let me type on his keyboard or use his mouse, and he tells me the mouse is broken - and then really loudly "MAYBE I HAVE DIRTY BALLS?!!! GET IT?!! DIRTY BALLS?!!!"
I tried to act like it was even remotely amusing and I had never heard it before.
He also didn't know how to Zip a file. That took half an hour how to show him - and even then, he didn't get it at all - I'm sure he will call me back up to do it again anytime he needs to do it in the future.

Then universally, every fucking user here thinks that Office XP and Windows XP Pro are the same thing. They don't get the distinction between software on the OS and the actual OS. I try somewhat to tell them, but they just glaze over and smile and then go back to being retarded in their little retarded world.

Any error message at all - ANY - and they call me and want me to come and look at it. I will then tell them just to ignore it, and they act as if I told them to ignore the fact that a dog is gnawing on their genitals.

And I must say, WinFax is by far the shittiest business product I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with.
I have a user that seems to crash it all the time. She used to swear that Win98 was her problem and that she wanted to be on XPPro - so I upgraded her to XP Pro and now she says "I never had any of these problems when I was on 98".
I don't bother reminding her that she indeed have the same problems then.

Jesus - I can go on and on and on. I hate this job so much.
I really hope my side company can make enough money so that I can bail on this shit job.

They taunt me every now and then and talk about giving me programming assignments, but then they go back against that and then they have this IT shit.

hate. grrr. hate. grrr.

Well, it is very hard for me to talk about this after being anti-Mac for so long.
I wouldn't exactly say I'm part of the "switch" capaign or anything since I haven't really used the thing yet, or even bought it, and I don't have too much terribly against Windows.

But I have decided on getting one of the new AlBooks (the aluminum alloy ones with built in bluetooth, a 1.25ghz processor, 15" screen and all that).

I have been reading up on the new XCode with the upcoming panther release, and I dare say it sounds quite cool.

I might later decide I hate it, but for now, I'm excited.
Going to try to buy it tomorrow and have it brought in next week.

Over the weekend I helped someone with a Toshiba laptop. It had WinMe on it and was totally hosed.
The hardware itself was good, just the software was a total wreck.
I told the person that I was probably going to suffer the wrath of the PC gods, but my laptop was really good and reliable and strong.

Today my laptop died with a pitiful grinding fan on the CPU. As long as I let it cool off, I can use it for a bit before it dies again.
I took it all apart, but it is nearly impossible to get to the processor and the fan.

So it is briefly working right now.

What is funny is that now the PCMCIA network card that I got when the built in network card broke... well, it broke.
But now the built in network jack work.
Weird.

So I now need to decide what my replacement for this thing will be. I know that it will work for a bit, so it isn't a huge deal that I get it replaced immediately.
In the States I would just have something shipped to me, but I'm in Bermuda where the laptops here cost way more, and they are about a year old in terms of models.
I have the excellent advantage that my inlaws are currently travelling in Toronto right now, so I can get something there with them and then just pay them when they bring it in (and pay duty on it).

I know that I saw an HP in Wired that I liked, and then I know I have been contemplating the new 15" Ti Power Mac laptop.
I've also contemplated doing a powernotebooks.com laptop maybe even with Linux on it - but again, since I'm pretty much limited to things that can be purchased in Toronto in person - I'm thining BestBuy and maybe a Mac store.

Time to hit online before my laptop heats up too much.

(I can recall hearing something rattling around in the laptop, and it did for a long time - when I opened it up and was up to my elbows in there, I never found anything loose. I also managed to knock the esc key off and can't figure out how to get it back on)

I had braces in my youth. Along with the braces came an overzealous orthodontist who removed much of the enamel from the sides of my molars when taking the bands off of those teeth.
As a result, I quickly got cavaties in every single one of my molars... in the side.
From what I understand, that is pretty rare - the only holes I have in the top of the teeth are from where the dentist had to go in that way to repair the cavity - but they complain about how thick the enamel is there and is hard to get through.
Goes to show the power of acid I guess. Lactic acid in the case of my tooth decay.

So anyway, my teeth are bothering me again - I brush my teeth religiously and I have been shown over and over how to do it, as if I'm mentally retarded and just can't grasp the concept and that is why my teeth are like this.
I rinse with water, I then floss, I then rinse with water, rinse with Listerine Tartar control, then rinse with water, then rinse with ACT and yet I still go to the dentist and get treated as if all I do is eat candy and sand and drink sodas.

While I was thinking about having to go and how much this time will cost me and how much pain will be involved, I wandered mentally off towards those disposable toothbrushes that are battery powered that rotate the head and such.
I recall that they had a series of ads showing that if you press too hard, it will stop - preventing you from using too much force on the tooth.
I thought that sounded good since the dentist is always claiming I press too hard, even though I have a soft toothbrush and do it as light as I can and still get anything done.

Then I got to thinking about it, and the more I think of it, the more I think it is a marketing description of a bug in the product.
They released these things to compete with rechargable ones which only replace the head. They are likely seeing a decrease in toothbrush sales enough due to these that they decided to market their own version, but disposable.
The problem with those is that they have a fixed lifetime of power in them, you can't recharge them.
With the ones that you recharge, if you press too hard, the motor will strain, but can draw more power because it will be recharged again right after you are done and put it back down on its stand.
Whereas the disposable ones are not going to get recharged, and they need to last some period of time that is reasonable to the consumer - so they can't waste that power on fighting high pressure.
So it is likely designed to just cut off if the load on it is too strong - or perhaps did this anyway due to the motor giving out.

Either way, I think the ad campaign was a side effect of the design, but I don't think it was designed to help those that push too hard.

I wonder if I can just have the rearmost molars removed? They were fine until I had my wisdom teeth removed, then stuff moved a bit due to the new freedom and as a result, the gums have receeded. The dentist of course blames this on me, as if I sit at night and focus on making my gums pull back.

Ugh.

There is a dentist here that I've heard allows you to watch DVDs while you get work done. I'm gonna bring in Marathon Man and just continually repeat the "Is it safe?!" scene.

The virus is on Symantec here, http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.swen.a@mm.html - apparently it exploits Kazaa and a few other routes - one of them being e-mail. It exploits a bug in IE 5 and 5.5 that then allows it to be automatically run in Outlook and Outlook Express when opened or even previewed.

There have been a series of patches ever since 2001 that fix that issue - but judging from the large volume of these dumbass messages that I'm getting, people are retarded and both not patched and installing these things.

I have been getting a lot of virus e-mails lately. I don't open them (well, at least not in an e-mail client), but I can see that they aren't legit.

They are claiming to be from Microsoft and to contain patches for my system. The mail doesn't come from Microsoft and instead is out of comcast - so unless Microsoft is testing its new distributed patch e-mailing system, I'd say this is a new virus/trogran/worm whatever trying to spread.
From the amount and increase that I have seen, I would say that it is working. People are installing the "patch" and effectively infecting themselves and then spreading it to other retards.

I saw the new Mac laptops and I like that the keyboard is a bit different, the speed is better, and they don't get as hot.
I was hoping for a higher resolution, but can't get everything.
While I was reading about the new one online, I saw that it had an aluminum alloy case - so much for being called the Ti.
Then in the background, on TV, I saw multiple times in an hour an ad for the new Mac laptop - and they say that it is made of titanium. I think I believe the website more than I belive that dude that played the Fly that speaks in the ad. Even if he did use an Apple laptop to beat the Aliens in that forth of July film.
I wonder if they considered trying to get Martin Lawrence for that role - he was great in that Great Escape movie. Silly Germans.