Computerjargon.com

Courtney and I spent a fantastic evening with friends at Mt. Fuji Saturday. It’s the first hibachi type restuarant I’ve been to. Loving asian food I’m surprised I hadn’t gone earlier. The food was fantastic and the presentation was entertaining. Chefs at a hibachi gril spin and play with their utensils in ways that typically I would get in trouble for. I was completely blown away by the quality of food. The fried rice was actually fried! I assume it somehow magically browned in the white take-home containers we get from other fast-food asian eateries. I did learn one secret that night. Enough butter on anything will make it superb. A cup of butter will work on everything from eggs to lobster.

Incidently, the truck still stinks of the leftovers even after being aired out for 2 days.

Dear Santa,

All I want this year for Christmas is the rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Hope all is well,

jason.

One of the changes I’ve had to deal with when I migrated to Minneapolis is management of security cards. Yes, I have received no less than 3 security cards which get me in to and out of places I need to be. I have the following:

The waver - This little blue card gets me into the parking ramp. I wave it in front of a black metal pad and the gate goes up for me.

The swiper - This speckled blue card gets me into the office building and up to the appropriate floor. To my surprise, not only do I need this card to enter the building but the elevator won’t even budge unless I swipe the card through the reader. This card gets swiped through a red/green lighted reader.

The magentic wallet - This card gets me actually into the office after I exit the elevator that required “the swiper”. I’m not sure the color or current location of this card but it must be somewhere in my wallet because all I do is hold my billfold up to an unmarked black pad and the door unlocks.

Apparently the sniffle season moved into Minnesota this past weekend. I’ve been surrounded this morning by people unable to properly use a tissue and administer nasal decongestant. I never thought the sound of a slow, drawn-out, inhale could drive me so crazy. I’ll bring in my bottle of Allegra tomorrow and hand out some free samples.

One of the items I lost in the server crash of ‘05 was my Subversion source control server. I had to answer the hard question, “What do you do if your source control server goes down?” I had two options: 1. start re-writing code as quickly as possible or 2. start scrunging around the corners of all my computers hoping to God one of them had a copy of the source. I lucked out, my laptop had all the latest code. In fact, it even had changes I hadn’t checked into the repository. w00t. That’s one big win for me.

So I brought the repository back online yesterday. This time I opened it up for anonymous read access. Feel free to browse the projects over on Broken Industries.

After passing the 4-year mark at my employer I decided to seek adventures elsewhere. This week I started a new job, working down in the warehouse district of Minneapolis again. The work is more technology-focused and a little more organized. It’s a good step up from what I have been doing for the past couple of years.

I was sad to leave my post in Plymouth, though. I will miss the good bunch of people working over there. They are working their tails off to change a company’s entire outlook on business. It’s a hard uphill battle to wage. I just ran out of steam.

Incidently, I now work directly across the street from a previous job I had 5 years ago. While interviewing for this job I kept starring into the window of the room where I used to sit. “There’s the bathroom I used,” I kept thinking. Unfortunately for them, it looks like the pool table is no more.

After a 2 year hiatus, comments are once again back online. There is one caveat though. The comments are moderated. So feel free to curse me out.

So, lets recap the score. Chad may have beaten me back online , I’ve got an RSS Feed and moderated comments. Best get crackin’ Chad. I’ve got somethin’ cookin’ in the crockpot.

Grub boot error 17

I stared at that phrase for two days. I worked some computer magic, tinking with in inner depths of my computer. After all my hard work it now said:

Grub boot error 21

I decided to take a sledge hammer to the computer, metaphorically, of course. I ended up hitting it too hard losing all my data, along with all my family’s websites. Pissed would be an understatement of my feelings.

So I started to rebuild. I focused my attention away from the server and back to my desktop PC. I needed to do a little research. My desktop hard drive spun for a few minutes, lights started blinking, then pow, nothing.

My desktop PC failed 4 days after the server crash. 3 brand new hard drives later I’m slowly rebuilding everything back. The server is mainly back online. All data, including archived email, web pages, and pictures are gone, never to be seen again. So I present to you the Computerjargon.com 2005 edition, REBOOTED.