194
12/30/04




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Cake

One of my favorite bands is Cake. Their sound is unique, funky, and fun to listen to. Their signature trumpet sound accents many of their songs. Their lyrics are sort of odd, almost nonsensical at times, but nearly always thought provoking. They have several albums out beginning with Motorcade of Generosity (1994), Fashion Nugget (1996), Prolonging the Magic (1998), Comfort Eagle (2001), and Pressure Chief (2004). At first glance their albums are confusing because the cover art of very similar on all five.

Some of their lyrics are objectionable (I think so anyway), but for the most part their music is just great.

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    193
    12/29/04




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    back to work

    After 5 1/2 very nice days off of work, I find myself back at my desk at work. Amanda and I had a great Christmas and a fun time visiting both of our families. We did a lot of driving, but it was a good time.

    In all, I was given $9.00 worth of lottery tickets as gifts this Christmas. I ended up winning five bucks. Hrm. I did better than the "older Pennsylvanians" that the lottery benefits, but not by much :-).

    I heard about the devastating tsunamis that occurred over the weekend. On Yahoo's front page today they had links to different charities one could give to, such as AmeriCares and Oxfam. They also had Unicef, but unfortunately their web server couldn't handle the load of extra traffic today probably caused by the extra publicity. That is a shame.

    Anyway, I have nothing in particular to write about so this'll be my last sentence for now.

    Comments
    • Well I guess $5.00 from lottery tickets is better than a donation made in your name to the "Human Fund".
         Posted by Shaw on 12/30/04

    192
    12/23/04




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    busy!

    This is definitely the busiest time of the year. Amanda and I have gotten all of our shopping and wrapping done. We have all of our travel plans lined up for visiting her family and mine. We have some days off coming up to relax and enjoy seeing family.

    Work has also gotten busier lately. I have undertaken some new projects which sound exciting and a bit complicated at the same time. I'll become more involved with them beginning in January. Lots of people at work are taking time off around now. Some people aren't even coming into work at all between Christmas and New Years. Cool. I'll be in the office just two days next week. Maybe those of us in the IT dept who are at work next week can set up some kind of Half-Life or Unreal game. Heh.

    if you != "boss"
        { print "Last year Eric and I played Scorched 3D at work on Christmas Eve"; }
    
    else 
        { print "Last year Eric and I did a lot of work on Christmas Eve!"; }

    This will be my last blog entry until Wednesday the 29th. Merry Christmas to you! Safe travels to those who are traveling.

    Comments
    • When I know no one will be at work I bring in my PS2 and play games all day. Just got NFL Street 2 and American Chopper. I watched National Lampoons Christmas Vacation yesterday. Merry Christmas
         Posted by Big Ohn on 12/23/04

    191
    12/20/04




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    Credit Card Checks

    Are you familiar with credit card checks? They are checks you can use to pay for anything, such as balances on high-rate credit cards, car payments, or mortgage payments. When you use them the amount you write the check for gets applied to your credit card instead of being withdrawn from a checking account. They are advertised as being a great way to pay off higher interest credit cards because credit card checks usually have a low interest rate. There is a lot of fine print you should read before using them though. There is usually a service charge for using them. In addition, if the interest rate on your normal credit card purchases is higher than the rate on the credit card checks, your monthly credit card payment will be applied to your lower interest balance first. In my opinion, these things are dangerous.

    My main beef with credit card checks is the fact that my stupid credit card company sends me 4 or 5 of them every month. They might as well be sending my credit card number or my debit card number and PIN to me in the mail each month. Heck, they might as well send cash or write "free blank checks inside!" on the outside of the envelope. If someone were to steal my credit card checks, they could have a field day with them. I know the charges can be disputed and whatever, but I don't have time to do that every month. I'm pretty sure MBNA doesn't read my blog, so if I want them to stop sending them, I probably should give 'em a call, eh?

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      190
      12/17/04




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      Make your own bootable CD

      Eric wanted to flash his BIOS on a new Linux box he's building. The problem was his floppy drive was misbehaving so booting from the floppy and then running the flash utility wasn't going to work. Additionally, the flash program was DOS-based. He asked if there was a way to make a bootable CD so I did some research. I came across a neat Windows command line utility (those are rare) that allows you to make a bootable CD. The need for alternative bootable media is increasing since some PCs these days are shipping without floppies at all. The full text of the tutorial is here, but here is a summary:

      The steps to create a bootable CD are:

      1. Download this Zip archive and extract it somewhere on your machine.
      2. Add the files needed to upgrade your BIOS to cds\clean\bootdisk\ folder. You have about 2.5MB available space on the bootimage (2.88MB floppy emulation). Do not add your files to cds\clean\files\ folder! Optionally you can edit the file cds\clean\bootdisk\autorun.bat and append a line to run your flash program.
      3. When you're done customizing, you open a command prompt, change to the BCD folder and run "bcd clean" to build your ISO image and burn it to your CD writer.
      It's very simple. Using this utility was the first time I had ever initiated a CD burn from a Windows command prompt. It was neat.

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