So there is a peace corps reunion in Fort Collins This weekend (August 22-24, 2008)

Peace-Corps-Reunion

After all the Peace Corps has its roots here in Fort Collins and CSU.

I got bored playing code monkey and decided to surf through griffjon's journal. Which prompted me to update mine. In November Beth and I bought a house. Owning is so much better than renting. We are currently updating our living room and kitchen. We initially set a budget of $5000, but i think we are going to blow by that. When one renovates it is far too easy to fall into the trap called "might as well as".

I mean if your floor is torn up to put in hardwood, you "might as well as" replace the cabinets... then you "might as well as" remove the pantry to put in more cabinets, and "you might as well as" tile the couter tops....so that is where we are today.

Well I will be starting a new job next week. It is an IT job working with open-source software! Never thought people would actually pay me to work with open-source. Anyway CSU has this giant telcom switch that handles all calls within/to/from campus $5,000,000 worth of switch. Anyway on the side is a commercial PBX system that runs the voice-mail on campus. What I'll be doing is working with a program called Asterisk. It is an open-source PBX solution that incorporates VoIP technology. Basically the PBX system they have in there now is ancient and proprietary (a very bad combination when trying to upgrade or add features) so my job is to write an interface to the old system using Asterisk. It is going to be crazy tough, but very challenging and will finally get me away from repairing bad windoze machines all day.

In the effort to prevent Harley, our lab puppy, from scratching the paint off the inside of the door when she needs to go outside, my wife Beth (a doctoral candidate in psychology I might add), hung a small bell from the door nob and we have trained the pup to ring it with her nose every time she needs to go outside. Unfortunately our dog has learned the trick a little too well and will ring the bell, step outside and immediately want to come back inside as if just to see that we will open the door for her. The funny thing is... oh wait the bell is ringing, I need to go open the door...

Ever since the unfortunate event some people like to call an election, I have been hearing from some of my democrat friends that they are going to leave the country.

CNN.com says that "The Canadian immigration Web site had 115,000 hits the day after the election" - up from an average of 20,000. A new web site sprung up becuase of this interest.

Canadanlternative.com

I truly hope this does not happen, because these are the very people we need here in this country. Instead of moving out of the country, maybe they should move to another part of this country, say Ohio, New Mexico, and even Colorado. Yes I know they are the "Red" states, but this is where the fate of the nation will be decided 4 years from now. Here is are top ten reasons not ot move to Canada.

No the subject is not an oxymoron. As part of my very low earning part time job, I fix other people's Windoze boxes. Occasionally I get one in that is so full of virii and spy-ware that it won't boot even into safe mode. There are several ways to remove viruses from a non-bootable box.

1. You can take out the hard drive and slave it to another computer.

2. You can download BartPE and make a bootable windoze CD. BartPE has a Mcafee plugin that you can add to the iso, as well as a standalone called Stinger.

3. YOU CAN USE LINUX! Yes ladies and gents there is a flavor of Knoppix I found called LinuxDefender it comes with BitDefender an anti-virus software. Even better yet, LinuxDefender comes with NTFS write support so not only can you find the pesky virii but you can fix them! You can even update the virus definitions online. So far I have only run it on my XP Pro partition of my home computer, which had no virii, but I will update this this coming week as I use it on all those buggy student computers. Happy Hunting.

After being told that "cool" nerds have one I decided to sign up. My idea of what this whole "blog" thing is a much less annoying version of the "group emails" that I recieve from certain friends. I chose the username since it reflects many aspects of my life. Like "Why did America re-elect that dumb-ass?" I am currently trying to decide, do I stay in Computer Science, switch to something else like internation studies, or get a real job ( haircut part is already done).