How 'Bout Them Cowboys?

Posted on March 21, 2006 1:04 PM

Sometime last year, around early November, I started working on a Photoshop. Because of all the problems that the Eagles were having with Terrell Owens, for a joke I wanted to make a picture of him wearing a Cowboys jersey. I started with some pictures of T.O. and Keyshawn Johnson trying to come up with T.O. wearing a Cowboys jersey with “81” on it. Eventually, like most of my Photoshop endeavors, I lost interest and never finished it.

I have to say that I wasn’t surprised this weekend to learn that my attempt at fiction had become reality. After hearing that the Cowboys had released Johnson just minutes after the Eagles had released Owens, I was fairly certain that the deal was done. I don’t think that anyone else was too surprised by the move. Love them or hate them, Jerry Jones and the Cowboys will always attract players with talent, no matter the risk, or the controversy.

This whole affair reminds me of when the Cowboys signed Deion Sanders. I couldn’t stand that guy and here he was on my favorite team. Once again, I will find myself cheering for a player that I despised in the past. And if they win, the victory will still be sweet, although maybe not as sweet as when it came from the likes of Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, and yes, Michael Irvin. As for others in the current organization, they’re all doing their part, supporting the new addition to the team, talking about “benefit of the doubt” and playing down all the “bad press” that Owens has had in the past.

I don’t have any blinders on, and I am sure the Cowboys organization doesn’t either. I know that T.O. has had his problems in the past, and typically people don’t change. Like every other Cowboys fan, I’m hoping that the guy has learned from his mistakes.

I do know one thing. The next time the Cowboys and the Eagles take the field together, it should be very interesting.
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Tags: Dallas Cowboys, Football, Terrell Owens

Today's List Of Annoyances

Posted on March 16, 2006 10:33 AM

1. iTunes: When iTunes can't find a song, it asks you if you would like to locate the song. That's all cool, but I would love it if iTunes was smart enough to check the new location for the next song that it can't find. I recently had a USB hard drive fail, so I had to move my music to a different location. iTunes wants to ask me for each and every song if I want to locate it. To avoid this, I can just import all the music again. Unfortunately that means that all my playlists that I've created are useless, and iTunes still doesn't know enough to realize that all the stuff I just imported is identical to all the stuff that I already have.

2. 1 & 1 Web Hosting: I own numerous domains with 1 & 1, with .NET hosting. I can't get each domain to remain autonomous. This basically means that if I use a .NET page (ending in .aspx) that is what I get for all the domains. Non-Geeks probably won't get what I am complaining about here. Basically when I make a change to one of my websites, that change shows up for all my websites, even though they're all supposed to be separate. This is one of the reasons I haven't moved off the computer sitting in my house, and why I haven't taken advantage of the hosting that I am paying $25 per month for. Here's a recent email that I got from 1 & 1 support:

Quote:

Thank you for contacting us. First of all I would suggest you to please avoid using "." when you name any file/ folder. There are few domains which are point to sub folders named with ".". You can host multiple sites if you are put them in the different sub folders. They have got nothing to do with other sites in other folders as they supposed to work independently. To run multiple .net application, it is the same principle as explained above. All the applications will/ must have their own web.config and default.aspx pages. To host multiple .net applications 1- you need to point all domains to root folder. 2- Use default.asp on root folder and redirect domains where ever actual sites are in sub folders. 3- Upload all .net applications with their own web.config and default files. Please make sure you need to ask us to enable any sub folder as an "Application Folder" where you upload the .net application. Also upload normal web.config file on your root folder which should not have anything to do with your other applications.

I especially like the part where the dude says, "They have got nothing to do with other sites in other folders as they supposed to work independently."

HA HA! As Sarge would say, put that in a Memo, and title it "Crap I Already Know" The keyword there, in case you missed it, was SUPPOSED. My problem is, this is not what is happening...

3. Yahoo! Mail: Seems like these days when I use the web based email from Yahoo! I get a message that says "There was a problem accessing your account" or something similar. Eventually I can get in again, but at this point I am seriously considering switching to my gmail email account. One of the reasons I went to a premium account with Yahoo! was for the pop mail access. I wanted to use Outlook to get my email. That worked great for a while, but then one day Outlook started downloading all email in my inbox again. Since I get 2GB of storage with my premium account, I had about 2K emails in my inbox. This caused all sorts of trouble, because some of the emails I had moved to folders in Outlook and now I had one email in the folder and one back in the inbox. Also there seemed to be no way to reset Outlook without a total reinstall of Windows 2000/XP (don't get me started). So, having totally given up on Outlook for my email, I use the web interface, which seems to be unavailable at least 50% of the time.



Ah... fonzie. Add/View Comments

Tags: 1&1, Outlook, iTunes, yahoo

An Ounce Of Prevention

Posted on March 13, 2006 12:25 PM

This Saturday the weather was beautiful. I was really looking forward to getting some stuff done outside. Some weekends I’ll spend the entire day inside, staring at a computer monitor or a TV screen, and then I’ll feel bad at the end of the day when I notice the sky getting dark.

One of my missions for this weekend was to get my motorcycle ready for the season. I brought the battery up from the basement, where I had it hooked up to a 1amp trickle charger. I had some worries that the battery was dead. I took it out of my bike for the winter, but winter came early this past year. We had some unseasonably cold temperatures in November and I was worried that I failed to get the battery out before the cold weather killed it.

I put the battery in the bike, and hooked up the cables to the terminal posts. I turned the key to ON and got absolutely no sign of life. Usually, if there is some juice left in the battery, I’ll see some lights come on. There’s never enough juice in the battery to start the engine after months of inactivity, but the lights indicate that the battery isn’t beyond help. Unfortunately I didn’t see any lights, however dim, this time, meaning that the battery was probably toast. Using jumper cables, I hooked up the battery in the motorcycle to the battery in my truck.

After a while, I got the bike started using the jumper cables. I put the seat back on, grabbed my helmet and took a ride. I only went about 3 miles down the road and turned around. On the way back, I pulled in the clutch and hit the kill switch, then put the kill switch back on RUN, and tried to use the starter to start the bike as I coasted down the street with the clutch in. When I hit the kill switch, once again I got no lights on the minimal display that my bike has. The battery was completely dead, not taking any kind of charge during my short ride. Unfortunately, when I released the clutch I must have been in too high of a gear or not going fast enough because the bike didn’t even start back up on compression. I ended up pushing it back for the last couple blocks to my house.

Later that day, Angela and I stopped at the bike shop and I purchased a new battery for about $40. They fill it with electrolyte for you and you have to charge it when you get it home. When we got back I put the battery on my trickle charger for a few hours. Angela went up for a nap, so I went out to check on the battery. Usually when I am charging a battery, I see little bubbles rising to the top through the semi-clear casing. I didn’t see any bubbles so I started to wonder if my fairly old charger was also dead. I drove down to the nearest Advance Auto Parts store and bought a new trickle charger for about $30.

When I got back to the house, I put the battery on the new charger. The new charger actually had indicator lights to let you know what it was doing, and when I hooked the charger up to the battery, it actually said that the battery was CHARGED. I installed the new battery in the bike and it started right up. I took the bike for a little ride and everything seemed cool. I ended up taking the new charger back for a refund since my old one still works.

The moral of this particular story is:

Take the battery out of the motorcycle before it gets cold enough to kill it, and before you give up the ghost on your charger, check the battery.

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Tags: Motorcycles

ATI All-In-Wonder Rage 128 Pro and Windows XP

Posted on March 8, 2006 9:18 AM

A long time ago, I purchased an ATI All-In-Wonder Rage 128 Pro video card. I have used it to record TV shows onto the computer and watch later. I remember the card working well, for the most part, on Windows 2000. At some point, I upgraded the machine that has the card to Windows XP Professional. When I say upgrade, I mean a total wipe and install of the OS. After I installed XP, I installed the ATI software and tried to use the card, with limited success. Just last night, I renewed my efforts to get the card working the way it did when I had Windows 2000…

It seems that the ATI software doesn’t play well with Windows XP. I am not sure whether it is the display driver or the ATI Multimedia Center (MMC) software itself. I downloaded the latest MMC software (7.2) from ATI’s website as well as the latest Windows XP display driver for the card. I’ve installed them both (and reinstalled them subsequently).

This is what happens to me, and has consistently since the Windows XP upgrade. I can successfully watch TV without any glitches. When I try to record TV, ATI MMC crashes probably 3 out of 5 times. Naturally, our hero is very saddened by all this because I would like to use the scheduling feature to schedule recordings of TV shows. I realize that the hardware is old, and I don’t expect much, if any, support from ATI. One thing that I do find interesting is, when I start up the TV and I get the ATI splash screen, it says “7.1” The file that I am downloading from ATI says it is 7.2 so I wonder if I had downloaded/used an older version initially. I’ve seen stuff posted on newsgroups talking about uninstall, deleting files, and deleting registry keys.

At this point, I am ready to give up for a little while… again. I think I’ll switch over to the next lost cause.
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Tags: ATI, All-In-Wonder, Technology, Video Capture