A day at the Flea Market

Today, we went to the Kane County Flea Market which was a pretty good time, we got some cool stuff and had a good laugh when we saw some things walk by that were the definition of "One man's trash is another man's treasure".

Since I was not there looking for trash, I ended up getting a new set of poker chips (the 11.5 gram size) in an aluminum case as seen below:

We also got some nice blown glass things, one is a serving plate and stand and the other is 2 "ornaments" that were hand blown by a lady who drove up from Tennessee. She was very nice and we told her we would be sure to come to her booth next time and bring some friends. There company is called the Ornament Boutique but I do not think they have a website, so no link! I do not think that we will use them as Ornaments though, we are planning on hanging them in our kitchen as they will really shine nicely in the sunlight and with our glass insert tiles on our kitchen backsplash.

We also spent a good amount of time talking to the Old Hydrangea Lady, don't yell at me, that is what she calls her business. We got to talking because she lives very close to where I grew up, I saw the phone number and asked where she was from and she said, "Oh, you probably never heard of it" to which I replied "try me, I know the area pretty well". She told me Heyworth and I said "Shoot, I grew up just north of there in Normal".

That pretty much took care of the day. Till next time, keep your toes covered when you walk the grounds after the carnival (there was elephant dung everywhere!!).

Finally got my grade posted

Well I was a little bored tonight after dinner so I came online and found that my Professor from my last class (Dr. Morris) got my grade posted. I somehow squeaked by and got an A in the class with a 96.5% overall grade in the class. I knew my project was very good and I also knew I nailed all the queries (especially the ones for extra credit), what amazed me is that we got a 109/100 on the project!! That means on the entire project, we missed one point -- that is just friggin' amazing considering all the places where a coding error could have been made!

If you want to see the results of all my coursework from DePaul since I started there, you can do that from my DePaul page.

Anyway, that will do for now, I am going to pick up some of my wife's dry cleaning today at the place next door to the cigar shop my project partner works on Saturday, I will make sure she knows the grade is posted!

Till next time, keep your nose to the grindstone and your brain sharp!

A Milestone in my blogging

This blog marks my 100th blog since I started blogging (probably my 90th since I actually started blogging more than once a month).

I really don't have anything important to say so I am just going to let the world know that my 100th blog is my most boring ever!

A Nun Walks into This Bar

A nun, really needing to go to the bathroom, walked into a local Hooters. The place was hopping with music and dancing, but every once in a while the lights would turn off. Each time after the lights would go out, the place would erupt into cheers.

However, when the revelers saw the nun, the room went dead silent. She walked up to the bartender, and asked, May I please use the restroom?" The bartender nervously replied, "I really don't think you should."

Why not?" the nun asked. Well, there is a life-size statue of a naked man in there, and his most private parts are covered only by a fig leaf." Nonsense," said the nun, "I'll just look the other way."

So the bartender showed the nun the door at the top of the stairs, and she proceeded to the restroom. After a few minutes, she came back out, and the whole place was hopping with music and dancing again. However, they did stop just long enough to give the nun a loud round of applause.

She walked up to the bartender and said, "Sir, I don't understand. Why did they applaud for me just because I went to the restroom?"

Well, because now they know you're one of us," said the bartender. "Would you like a drink?"

But, I still don't understand," said the puzzled nun.

You see," laughed the bartender,"every time the fig leaf on that statue is lifted up, the lights go out in the whole place. Now, how about that drink?"

An Irishman Walks Into a Bar

An Irishman walks into a bar in Dublin, orders three pints of Guinness and sits in the back of the room, drinking a sip out of each one in turn. When he finished all three, he comes back to the bar and orders three more.

The bartender says to him, "You know, a pint goes flat after I draw it; it would taste better if you bought one at a time." The Irishman replies, "Well, you see, I have two brothers. One is in America, the other in Australia, and I'm here in Dublin. When we all left home, we promised that we'd drink this way to remember the days we all drank together."

The bartender admits that this is a nice custom, and leaves it there. The Irishman becomes a regular in the bar and always drinks the same way: he orders three pints and drinks the three pints by taking drinks from each of them in turn.

One day, he comes in and orders two pints. All the other regulars in the bar notice and fall silent. When he comes back to the bar for the second round, the bartender says, "I don't want to intrude on your grief, but I wanted to offer my condolences on your great loss."

The Irishman looks confused for a moment, then a lights dawns in his eye and he laughs. "Oh, no," he says, "Everyone is fine. I've just quit drinking!"

FavOrg for updating your favicon.ico in your IE Favorites

FavOrg is a program that will go through your IE favorites and update any favicon.ico files that are out there on the web. This is pretty cool if you are at all interested in being able to decipher which links are for what site and you can tell the distinction of the site by a 16x16 (in pixels) icon.

Of course, I don't know why PC Magazine decides they want to charge you to download freeware from their servers -- $5.95 per download for a 540K file... WTF?? That pissed me off so bad, I went out and found the file elsewhere just so I could post it here for all of you to get FOR FREE. Damn you PC Magazine, that is enough B.S. for me to want to cancel my subscription to your magazine.

I really don't know if anyone will use this program but it is very cool and should work for most people who care about this stuff. Ok, seriously, I am going home now... it is getting late and I miss my dogs!

More Images converted and finally got around to putting up a favicon.ico

Check out my FAVICON.ico that I finally got put up on the web. Damn Internet Explorer still seems to have some issues with it, but there seems to be ways around that. I am just now getting used to playing with the php and getting things to work the way that I want them to in my gallery but I still need to tweak some more. My next step will be to employ a content management solution (no idea what I am going to use yet).

There are still lots of things that I want to do on my website but I am not sure where I am going to start. I am going to try to get my favicon onto my blogger account if it will work that way.

I am not putting much more in this blog cause I want to go home and see my dogs! Till next time, keep on surfin' the web and keep that machine spyware free!

Insistant tinkering pays off

Well over the last few hours I have been tinkering around with some PHP and MySQL things and finally found one of the things I was looking for. I have been looking for a way to store my images in a database so that the recall can be faster and also not rely on as much hard coding. Found this open source project called Gallery and one of the developers works for my hosting provider which makes implementing it a breeze!!

Anyway, I am slowly getting my images converted over, but here is the start that you can go see now!

You can also create an account and sign up for when I put up new albums you will be notified (don't worry, you can also specify that you only want to see certain ones). There will also be one's that are limited to registered members only.

Till next time, visit the gallery and get your fill of pictures!

Lots of changes to my website...

Tonight I made lots of changes to my website, most of all I changed a bunch of things on the About Randy page and created a page for Riley's 2nd Birthday (well actually it is 3 pages of image). I also did a bunch of little cleanup things to make my entire site pass the CSS Validator tool.

I am not sure if it will work from this page, but the non-blog pages were successful. My next thing is to learn PHP and develop some sort of database/gallery thing for all my images, since that is what most of my site is anyway.

Gotta run, talk to you all later, till then just remember that every man who has a dog is a loved man!

Ohhh, what a day!! and it's only 10:30 AM

Today I came into work and saw a birthday card and a cake pan sitting on my desk! My first thought was "Oh no, this thing has been sitting here since Friday" but fortunatly that was not the case as I was soon to find out. Anyway, after looking through the card I started going through my emails (which numbered in the 100's after being gone for 3 days and not even logging in once). After about half of the emails, someone came downstairs to grab the cake and put it in the refrigerator because they were told that I was not coming in today.

You see, I was supposed to take my two younger (not the youngest) brothers-in-law to the zoo today (Brookfield Zoo) but my wife could not get off work to take them with me. I soo wanted to go to the zoo though, it was driving me nuts not to be able to go, oh well!!

So anyway, I went upstairs to let people know I was here and met the new person who started in our department today (Johanna McFadden) and I explained some of the things about the computer & phone systems to her. While I was up there, I got bombarded with questions about my birthday and my Gladiator equipment, sadly which did not get delivered. I let everyone know that the rest of the birthday was great!

Now I am back to actually getting work done and find out my web server needs to be restarted and my intranet server is running low on disk space (127 MB free) while the data drive on that system has about 30 GB free so I gotta move a bunch of stuff over to that disk container.

Gotta run for now, till next time, keep your virus scanner up to date so your private stuff doesn't get infected with a worm.

My birthday & other interesting stuff today

Today came and went with lots of surprises and a party at the end of the day which was a lot of fun. I have had a high volume of beverage and am getting ready for bed. I just wanted to post that my birthday was a lot of fun and Riley had a blast on his birthday also.

In case you are just dying to see what else happened on my birthday in history, you can go here for a quick look!? Just tp get you started, I will finish off the coumn whth the way it would be if you had the same birthday. July 24th is a great day in history.

Riley and Casey started off the day by going to the Big Boy Park(pictures will be following...) then we went home and I started getting ready for my party. Since it is both Riley & my birthday.

Ok, going to bed now, l8r...

Got the first delivery of the day

Home Depot just came and delivered the refrigerator for my party tomorrow. What, you didn't know you were invited? Well it is almost my birthday, here is a countdown in case you missed it.

Anyway, delivery just came and as I was sitting outside one of the people a few blocks away came by and the conversation went like this:
HER - Are you and Leslie moving?
ME - No
HER - Darn, I wanted to buy your house
ME - Sorry, not for sale (laughing and waving)

It is kind of nice to know that all of your neighbors (who have seen your house) like yours so much.

Oh well, enough of that I need to run out and get some stuff to stick in that brand new refrigerator and wake up the wife to get her cleaning it. We both took the day off so that we could get some things done around the house, and now it is after 8:30 and she is still sleeping like a baby. I better go wake her up or she will sleep until noon.

Alright, that is all for now, maybe more later (if you're lucky). Till next time, keep your feet on the ground so your head doesn't wind up there!

Still working on the GFI Spam Issues

Last night I was up until after 2:00 AM installing the spam software and finally got everything working and when I came in this morning someone says to me (about 10:00 AM), "kinda weird, I have not gotten any email today". I went to the server and there were no messages but there was one service that had not correctly restarted. Now I am working with Eric at GFI-USA trying to resolve why it won't allow me to upgrade my Access Database to a Microsoft SQL database and it keeps giving me the most cryptic message I think I have ever seen (sarcasm) error is "An error occurred while converting the database".

I thought to myself, "Self, wow, that is amazing, an error message that tells me an 'error occurred'" Anyway, after running through several steps with this guy to try and resolve the problem -- all he did was basically read the text of their knowledge base article to me, he tells me to run their trouble shooter and email him the file, of course the file is 17 MB so I had to ftp it to him. He will be getting back to me tomorrow with the solution to the problem

Anyway, gotta go work on the backup problems now, so until next time, keep your feet in your shoes and your shoes out of stinky stuff.

Work-a-holics Not-So-Annonymous

Well low and behold, I did not get done with my spam software update today. I was at work until after 8 and still was not able to get it finished. When I got home my wife let me have it and called me a

(thanks for the picture Gwen.)

Of course she just got home a short time before, but she won't remember that anytime soon. I have to get that done tomorrow along with getting the backup server working or I will be in Deep S*@#.

Alright, time for bed if I am going to get up as early as I need to tomorrow. I just know someone is going to have a minor crisis tomorrow at the office and they are going to suck me in!!

Till next time, when the dog starts hitting you with his nose, it means -- Outside, NOW!!

Updating Spam Software - GFI customer area

Today my big job is to update our existing spam software GFI Mail Essentials from version 9 to 10. GFI Home is where we get the software from and have used it for about 3 1/2 months without any problems and it really has cut down on the spam that we get in our Inbox (of course I have it set up to got to everyone's junkmail folder so that gets loaded kind of fast). So far I have a good amount of reading ahead of me, the manual for version 10 is 121 pages long and I really need to print it out. I just printed it to our color printer and did 4 pages per page and double sided so it will only chew up 15 pages (I am so environmentally friendly).

Ok, well I will comment back on how the upgrade went so that everyone will know whether they want to make the big jump from GFI Mailessentials 9 to GFI Mailessentials 10.

Till next time, keep the spam out of the inbox and in the can where it belongs!

Finished wireless configuration

Today I got all the remaining laptops hooked up with the wireless and ready to go where no laptop has gone before (in this building at least).  Thank goodness for Cisco getting their access points and their NIC's in synch, it made this job a lot easier than we started out with.

Today my office went out for lunch to celebrate the July birthday's (mine included).   We went to Olive Garden and I think everyone ate the Soup & Salad lunch. Lucky me, I now get to go out to dinner on my father-in-law to Mon Ami Gabi which is a French Steak House. The food is really good but it is very over priced as a steak house. I think you are paying alot for the hoidy-toidy people who work there and their self-important French Style. The last time I went there was in April 2003 when everyone in the USA was boycotting anything French, there was like 4 people in the whole restraunt!! Funny as hell!!

Almost forgot to let you know the best part about dinner tonight, I get to hang out with my Godson his older brother, Ryan, neither one of which I have seen for a while.

Till next time, keep your soap on a roap and your butt a one-way street!!

Finished ADIC change over for Scaler24

Well, today I finished my change-over for the library drives for my ADIC Scaler 24.  Not too big of a job but with all the other interuptions, it ate up most of the day.  It was nice to have a Monday where I did not have to think about what time I was going to leave to go to school.  Speaking of school, grades for project are still not posted and of course final exam grades are not going to be posted till later this week.

I am actually looking forward to see the grade that I got on my project and of course the class, but I am most concerned about the project grade.  If anything were going to make my day, that would be it.

Leslie has BUNCO tonight with the Ladies in the neighborhood and I am looking forward to getting some things done that I can check off my list. The first thing I am looking forward to finishing is the garage floor baseboards which are a vinyl coated material that comes in a 120' roll and should be a minor challenge.

Till next time, keep you eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel.

Ordered my Gladiator Garageworks Equipment

Hey, I finally got around to ordering my Gladiator stuff for my garage.  Gladiator :: Whirlpool is so cool and actually stands up to quite a bit also!  Mine will be here on Friday the 23rd, just in time for my birthday 'party' along with the refrigerator that we ordered.  It will all look so cool once it gets in.  I will post pictures on my page where you can see it in all its glory.  The floor, the walls, the fridge and the GLADIATOR!!!

Till next time, keep you hands to yourself -- pervert!

Service Pack 2 for XP training class today

I am at class today learning about some of the gotcha's of Windows XP Service Pack 2. The instructor seems very knowledgeable and making things fun as well. We just broke for lunch and now I am getting ready to go into food coma and I am missing some of the points of what he is saying because I am playing around on the web. Of course he is answering specific questions about the Windows Firewall product. Not nearly as good as a program like ZoneAlarm.

One of the things I need to find out is if the firewall exception tab will remove the file that has been added after an exception has been putting into effect, then the program is removed, does Windows Firewall automatically remove the exception from the list...

Another thing to do is change the inf file for the Firewall defaults (C:\WINDOWS\INF\NETFW.INF)

Will check and find out later.

Going back to class now, till next time, keep your fingers to the keyboard and the palm to your mouse!!

SBC & Wireless Connection

So, how many people does it take to hook up 4 wireless access points? Well, according to SBC, it takes 5 (not including me)!! We are hooking up our wireless access points today and they took them to their lab on Monday to do some "staging" so they would just be able to "plug them in" today.

They have been here for about 45 minutes now and don't have a single one plugged in yet -- not to mention the fact that we have not started programming any of them... oops, guess I spoke to soon -- first one is up!! Better get going now, they will certainly be ready to start programming the first one within the next hour!!

Cya'll later!

Class to take for second course Fall 2004 - Course Details

I need to find out about signing up for this course as a second course for the Fall '04 section. Course Details show that Dr. Danny is the professor and course is based off of articles and discussions -- largely grading based on group project and class participation.

Finished the project... now on to the Final Exam

Well we did it with time to spare! We finished our project and printed & bound it, man did it look good!!

I was very proud of the work we did and so much so that I made 2 extra copies and when it came out in color, with the professional binding, both of us were very impressed with it. I will throw a link up to it later but don't want to piss off Dr. Morris by posting any information about it.

Alright, alright, I will post it right now but you will have to get to it from my depaul page, but I'll set an anchor for you to make it easier to get to.

Let me know what you think.

CoolText.com - Where YOU make the image!!

Putting the finishing touches on my project for CSC451, I came across this really cool site that allows you to make your own logo (mostly text, but what do you want for free). CoolText.com - Where YOU make the image!! was the location of the site and the image that I made can be seen here K&R Konsulting. The really nice part is that it took me about 45 seconds including rendering time for this logo to be made!!

Gotta run! Next time, you will hear about my project (unless I put some more things up before I go to class).

Putting the finishing touches on our Class Project

Well with a little help from our friends at Microsoft (for the Books Online) we wrote all the queries and code ourselves for our final project and while it is not yet done, we have about 1/2 hour maybe to finish it up. I am actually very pleasantly surprised considering there were 2 other groups from our class at the DePaul Naperville campus where we decided to study at. Both of those groups were still struggling with lots of the things that we finished long ago!!

I must say this was the best group project that I have ever worked on and if I get a chance to work on another project with Kristie, I will leap at the opportunity to do so. She really made it easy (especially when you consider what happened just a few short days ago). I am very pleased to be done with this project but will unfortunately be starting school again in 8 short weeks and starting all over again!!

Till next time, keep your eyes open and your zipper shut.

Really Nice Visio Tutorial

Found this really nice Visio Tutorial through my university class bulletin board tonight. This gives a good breakdown of how Visio works to build a database. This is one of the things I was trying to do on Saturday while working on my project for CSC451.

This will come in handy for many classes yet to come. I haven't gone all the way through it but the part that I am working with seems to work really well.

L8r.

Summer School, again!!

I am really hitting a wall with my Summer School class project (thanks Professor Morris). I am working on my project and it seems as though I am getting no where fast. If we are able to get done by Wednesday at 6:00 PM, I will be very amazed!!

No time to chat so, Till next time remember, a rubber in the hand means no goo on the shoe.

Summer School Project getting there, with some serious bumps in the road

Well today was the day that I was supposed to work all day with my partner on my summer school project. We made some really good progress on the thing but when I met her at her work (Great Ash in Addison, IL), I was confronted with some really bad news... Last night she was arrested for DUI (driving under the influence of alcohol). The morning was basically shot cause she was trying to get things organized and get her car back. She could not go get her car for a full 12 hours after the arrest was made. So at 1:30 PM I took her to the tow yard and she paid her towing bill and we picked up her car.

Once we got back to her work, we went right to work on the project. We really started hammering things out at this point -- thankfully much of Kristie's things were done so I just needed to get her help with interpretations and making a few changes to her ER Model once we were able to start developing the database. As I have mentioned before, I am using Microsoft SQL Server and most of the rest of the class is using Oracle 8i on the University's Server (HAWK).

We finished much of the project and now I just need to develop the SQL statements that will allow the web pages to run smoothly.

Gotta run for now, till next time, keep your socks on your feets or your toes will be (dog) treats!

Test Driving Concept Cars

Today I got to take part in a pretty cool test of people who currently owned SUV's and were looking at getting new SUV's in the upcoming couple years. At this test was a group of SUV's that are currently available at dealerships as well as some that are concept cars (which may or may not ever be released as model year vehicles).

The nice thing was that they were not trying to sell us anything, just wanted our opinions and gave us $125 for the 3 hours that it took. We looked around the cars and gave each car a rating on about 30 different points then they asked what we would pay for that car, and if it were available at the price we quoted, would we consider buying the vehicle. After this, we got to test drive each vehicle as they asked us questions about things like handling, acceleration, braking, visibility, appearance, roominess, etc.

It really was a lot of fun and of course the vehicle that I liked the best was the Nissan Pathfinder CONCEPT SUV. If that vehicle becomes available, it will not be until 2006-2007 on the early end.

Till next time, keep your feet on the ground and your head out of the clouds.

Working away in class

I am working away in class and figuring out more new cool things for my final database project. We will be working on it this entire upcoming weekend with no time to spare for anything else. My parents want me to come down to see them (considering they came home because when I talked to my dad on Father's Day I told him I was), but to my defense, I did not know that I would not have all the tools to do our final project until after tonight's class which means a long weekend of getting stuff done at the last minute.

Also, my professor (his wife actually) just had a baby girl THIS MORNING and he is here teaching right now -- 8 hours later!! My wife would string me up by my private parts if I even joked about that!

Just found out that our first homework grades are posted online and I got a 66!! I have not gotten a grade like that in I don't know how long, but I think his grader really messed some things up, going to talk to him after class to cover these things that I missed -7 points on, like making my boxes with soft corners (instead of 90 degree angles) -- this is database design, not Art class for 1st graders!!

---- talked to him and grade was changed to an 84 which I can live with considering I did not do as well as I should have, not to worry, homework #2 will bring that average up :)

Gotta run, time for more note taking!!

Till next time keep your hands in your own pants, you know you like it better that way -- pervert!!

Funny as HELL!!!! Rock Paper Saddam

This is funny as hell, good ole' Saddam, playing Rock Paper Saddam Scissors. Sorry for the short blog, but you gotta check this out!!

--updated URL 07/08/04 15:53:00

Prepping for painting

Well as traditional around my place, right after the fourth of July it is time to start on our new projects around the house. This year we are having much of the interior of the house painted (pictures forth coming) is being painted and due to my Graduate School time commitment, I will NOT be doing the work myself.

I am having a painter who has done work for us in the past come in and do a little more. This time we are having the garage painted, our master bed and bathroom and one guest bed and bathroom. The painters name is Tom Zack, no not the former Chicago Bear & Pittsburgh Steeler, this guy is totally different person.

Anyway, I need to get the garage prep'ed for mudding and priming tomorrow.

Till then, keep your pants above your knees and your hands where we can all see them...

After all the looking... 825826 - Missing network connections icons in Windows Server 2003

Wow, what a day!!! Today I had the day off work but went in for a short time and when I did I decided to do some updates on several of the servers. Kind of a good thing I did, who knows how long my Network Connection icons have been gone from Windows 2003.

Anyway, after about 2 hours of searching, playing around and trying different suggestions, I finally put the words together enough on the Microsoft Support Site to get the answer I was looking for. Man you want to talk about a major pain in the ass, it is not a big deal if you are using DHCP, because you don't need access to the network connection properties, but with static IP's it is a whole different story. 825826 - Missing network connections icons in Windows Server 2003 was the KB article that spelled out the problem that I was experiencing, but you have to read to item number thirteen (that's 13) before you see anything that relates to my problem, and it nails it right on the head. So, 4 reboots later, I finally get to address my specific issue and first server worked like a champ!! Now on to the next server, 4th reboot and still no dice, didn't make a difference, it told me that the "uninstall is already in progress" but alas, it was not. Three more reboots later two of the four icons show up, the other two are still not visible, makes it kind of hard to do a "bridge" of the adapters if you can only see 2/4 of them!!

Anyway, I guess I will be staying at work late tomorrow to try to get that done after everyone is gone!!! Wish me luck.

Till next time, keep your feet to the coals so your ass doesn't touch them!

Happy 4th from the Wilson's

Well I did not get around to blogging yesterday, spent most of the day away from the computer and had a little get together of some friends at night. All of them had kids so it was a pretty early night, still I was not able to get my ass on here and tell you about my life (does anyone read this anyway?).

Well it is July 4th, while this means little to those of you outside of the USA (and of course UK-- sorry about that little ass kicking we gave you back then), it is a big day for USA. I found (and stole) a little fireworks display that I wanted to show everyone I know. Check it out right here. Happy 4th from the Wilson's Well I am off to another party today and I just got back from a run with my dogs and need to shower before the party.

Tilll next time, keep it wrapped in a condem or you will be wrapped in one of these.

AKC Results came in today

Well, today when I arrived home from work/project time, I had an awsome surprise waiting for me!! We recieved our title for Riley (I assumed Casey's would be here tomorrow) but that was not the surprise I was referring to. The dog that beat Riley and Casey in the dog show was disqualified because the handler should have show at the Novice B instead of Novice A!! So what that means is that Casey got 1st and Riley got 2nd!!! Check it out at the AKC Events.

As if I were not already very proud of them, this only makes things better!!

See their pictures here and soon I will update their pages(Casey and Riley to reflect their outstanding accomplishments!!! Hell I may even do it tonight!!

Till next time, keep your eye on the prize and hands out of your pants.

Finally getting somewhere...

Finally getting started on my CSC 451 project, we got a good start on our tables and reltionships. Going to work now on my day off...

Take a look here at what is getting me through this stuff.

That is all for now, more to come later tonight after I get home from project work...