Category Archives: geek

A very expensive card…

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In the last few days I picked up several cards for some upcoming birthdays. Then we decided to go to a friends house over the weekend…and I thought hey lets bring the cards and we can just fill them out while we are over spending the night. Just before I left the house I was putting all of our equipment into my computer bag and thought, lets protect these cards from getting messed up, so I simply slid them under the lid of my laptop. One thing led to another and we never touched the laptops all weekend. Come Sunday night I plugged my laptop into the home network and accessed it like I always do via remote desktop and carried on with my business. After a short while I noticed I was getting some strange network errors (not all that uncommon when operating via remote desktop) and figured I would just log into the laptop directly. This is when the problems started, mysteriously the screen was bright white with no flicker / pixel movement / or anything for that manner. Upon closer inspection I noticed this…

 

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Windows XP SP3, whats the scoop

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I have been hearing about this on several podcasts over the last 8-12 weeks, some ok and some very bad. So today I got the notice on the desktop and my laptop (not nicoles) that SP3 was ready to come in. I brought in the help of my Microsoft Home Server to do an incremental full drive image before I undertook the potential clusterf*$k of SP3 and then said, 'OK', do the update. So as I am writing this I have completed the SP3 update for the desktop and everything seems to be ok. One suttle difference I have noticed is the support for a larger desktop in RDP (remote desktop). I recently upgraded to a massive 30" monitor for the desktop but all of my power apps reside on my ultra protable laptop, so I still use it for all of my main computing source. Prior to SP3 the RDP connection resulted in a view of the laptop with about 15% of each side of the desktop lopped off with black bars, kinda like a letterbox DVD viewed on a regular TV where they lop off about 15% of the top and bottom to have good symetry. However since SP3 (about 10 min ago) the remote desktop connection mysteriously supports full screen support for my ultra large monitor. Not sure what else it will provide but for me this is awesome.

Windows Home Server, it is awesome!

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So I have been using a NAS to store my pictues/music/video and misc shared data for the last year. I am aware of what a network attached storage device needs to perform for the home PC user. Further I have a non-techie (Nicole) in my home to let me know if things don’t just work like they should. So I installed the HP MediaSmartServer over a week ago to perform backups, share folders and provide remote access to my home network. How does it work? I will explain Continue reading →

Language converter, Priceless!!!

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So I haven’t actually used this at work yet, but found it last night. I have been coding in C# for the last few years, but have been aware that other dot.net languages have some differing functionality and popularity. Sorry but I am not looking to go further down the path and learn C++ or other more verbose languages, so for me this is a stepping stone. I want to look more at the business side of things. So I was asked at my new job to come up with a simple web application (which I love the webApp idea) to display some results that query some web services that hook into the main program at my place of employment. Continue reading →