Race Results of Hot Chocolate 15K

Well, 3 weeks ago I ran the Chicago Marathon and finished a painful 5 hours 13 minutes for an 11:56 pace. Yesterday, I ran the Hot Chocolate 15k and did substantially better. Of course it doesn't help that I ran the whole thing instead of a run/walk and didn't try to maintain my slower pace.
Finishing in 1:03 with a pace of 6:51.

in reference to:

"18 Randy Wilson 1822 West Chicago 39 M 1:03:50 6:51"
- http://www.hotchocolate15k.com/results/15kageres.txt (view on Google Sidewiki)

Barely midnight on vacation

I am on vacation in Philly now and it is barely midnight and our friends are ready for bed. Well maybe it has something to do with the time of traffic. Our vacation now involved vacation

IronPort Support Portal -- Entire day of email GONE

So today, I started getting messages on my iPhone about 8:00 AM that my spamfilter gateway was having "issues" but it was just saying that it was taking a long time to scan a message and it came across as a Warning. These happen every so often if someone has a file zipped inside a zip, etc or just a very large attachment (that should have been bounced back anyway).

So when I get to the office, I start looking into it and it has gotten worse, now the messages are critical and they keep on coming!! So my first thought is to see if we are getting attacked by some sort of DDOS or some other method that is stopping all incoming and outgoing mail from passing through the IronPort. After realizing that nothing sinister is going on, I decide to go back a few days and see what we are dealing with. Well, Thursday of last week, IronPort (now a Cisco company) sent out a notice that there was an update to their proprietary OS from 6.1 to 6.3. This morning I decided, since I have to reboot the thing anyway, I may as well do the upgrade also. Well, that was my first mistake, and I know better...

Cutting it short, if you ever are experiencing a problem, a major change to the system is usually NOT the answer. Now you don't know if it is something with the upgrade or the previous problem still going on or now previous problem is complicated or what!! Well fortunately I have been working with a Good Ole' Boy named Bill (Bill seems to be a serious southerner with one heck of a twang). We are still going but things are slow moving today and as it is already 2:30 PM, the day is all but wasted!

IronPort™ Support Portal

iPhone update, so far it's not looking good

So I just downloaded and started the update for the 2.0.1 update to my iPhone and from the looks of things, it seems to have frozen up my desktop -- my laptop is reporting time of 10:58 PM and desktop is stuck on 10:47 PM. Everything outside of iTunes is simply showing the hourglass and the progress bar on my iPhone "Updating iPhone software..." window is stuck on the same number of dots on the install line...

Hey, now is your chance, if you can't wait to get your own iPhone, check out the Apple availability page to see if your local Apple Store has the iPhone in the color and size of your choice.

UPDATE: So good news, iTunes caused a blue screen of death (BSOD) and my iPhone was not completed with the update yet. So after I turned the computer back off then on, it tells me that it is in recovery mode and must be restored. Wow, guess I should have waited to find out if this update has multiple problems. It is in the process of recovery right now, keep your fingers and toes crossed for me!


UPDATE: So it looks like it may not be as bad as it originally looked. I now have iTunes telling me that it is restoring my phone (about 1/2 done according to the bars) and my phone is telling me that a restore is in progress, but also giving me an activation alert (we will see where that goes from here...



UPDATE: ...And back to the concern... iTunes successfully restored my iPhone (or so it reported), then my phone restarted. As soon as it came back up, iTunes changed it from "restoring rwilson's iPhone" to now "restoring rwilson's iPhone - Aug. 4, 2008". I thought it just did that?



UPDATE: Well this will be my last update on this. The restore worked about as well as a 6/10. Why give it a six out of ten? Well, for one, after the restore, it came up with the same screen again, so I had to set it up as a new iPhone which means all my settings for my Exchange server, iTunes music, videos, podcasts, images, ringtones, everything had to be copied back over to the iPhone. This is not so bad because I knew to do a sync before the upgrade to 2.0.1, but not everyone knows this and there was never a warning that it should be done.

Maybe it should deserve a 7/10 instead since it did remember the music, videos, photos, etc that sync'ed previously (although it was set to sync ALL by default). As soon as I changed the selector from All to "Selected..." it remembered what was selected previously.

Till next time, happy iPhone'ing...

I finally got my iPhone

Well today my iPhone finally came in. The Apple - iPhone was backordered as I am sure you can imagine, but nonetheless, mine came in today. So you might ask, what am I doing up after midnight on a work night, what else but ripping dvd's to put the video on my phone :)

So far the grumblings that I have heard regarding certificate issues with the Exchange server seem to be completely unfounded. Not only did it not give me any grief about our certificate, it only asked if we wanted to accept it or cancel -- choose accept and you are done, the certificate gets installed on the phone by itself!! Let me say that again, self-sign certificates are not a problem with the iPhone 3G, period!

Now I am just checking out all the software in the AppStore and working with many of the free applications -- I won't pay for one till I know someone else who has already dropped their $2.99 on the app! :)

Till next time, I will let you know more as I learn more about the iPhone!

So it's my birthday...

So today is my 38th birthday. As anyone who knows me can attest, I always take my birthday off work and like to sleep in. You may be asking yourself, if he likes to sleep in, why is he typing his blog at 7:59 AM? Did the baby wake up? No, that was at 4:00 AM, then I went back to sleep.

So what is the reason for waking up so early on your day to sleep in? A guy from my office called me in a panic, you see he is going out of town and his iTunes erased his ipod... that's right, he f*&*ing called me to ask how to get his music back onto his ipod!!! Now that I can't get back to sleep, I may as well complain about him as much as I can.

Now this guy is a nice enough guy, but when the hell does someone decide not to show me any respect and call me at 7:15 AM because he can't get his music to sync to his iPod? I am off work today and tomorrow (as is he) but when I get back to the office on Monday, I think his computer may start to suffer from some boughts of spontaneous reboot.

As for now, I am going to take my dogs for a walk (after all it is also one of my dog's birthday -- he is 6) and then I am going to get ready to take my son to swim lessons and later today, we are off to the Cub's game!! Go Cubs Go!!!

What is BlogThis! ?

Well for starters, I can now get to my blogging a little easier. Using BlogThis, I merely have to click this link and it will start a new window where I can start typing about whatever I want to blog about...

Obviously I use Blogger (been using it since long before it was a Google property) and now I have found a way to blog without having to go to the blogger site, log in and then start writing. I love all my readers (you know I do) but the extra steps are just to much sometimes.

So anyway, here is to my continued blogging and hopefully we can stay afloat and not have year long spans in the future!

What is BlogThis! ?

New Movies

Well as anyone who knows me can attest to, I love collecting movies. I have recently started migrating my DVD collection into an HD-DVD and Blu-Ray collection. Yes I am one of the fortunate ones who can take advantage of both formats as my player. I own the Samsung BD-UP5000, which has turned out to be simply awesome!

As of right now, I have 1,271 movies in my collection and it keeps growing every week. The nice thing is since my player will play both blu-ray and hd-dvd, I can take advantage of the stores that are dumping their hd-dvd's for less than $10 each!!

You can always see a dynamic view of the latest movies that I have watched right here (0n the left). As I watch a new movie, this list will be updated ... ok, well as soon as I publish the title to the Internet.

One question that I seem to get is always, hey can I borrow this movie or that movie? I generally don't lend out my movies as I have tried this in the past and it has typically never been a good situation. No friendship is worth ending because of a dvd worth about $15-$30. Of course some of my movies are worth considerably more than this as they are entire series of tv shows (like Sienfeld, Friends or Alias) . If you want to read about my views on lending movies to friends/family, check this out.

Till next time, enjoy the blog and go watch a movie -- me, I am going outside to mow the lawn.

Firefox 3.0

Well, after a long trial to get Firefox downloaded (it was available, then it wasn't then it was again). I am using it now and so far, the differences are very nice. One thing to consider before jumping in with both feet, if you have been using Firefox 2.xx for a while, you are no doubt in love with a few add-ons (or Extensions). If you are in fact in love with a few extensions, take the time to make sure that those extensions are available for Firefox 3.

One of my favorites is FasterFox - it is not available
Another favorite is Tab Mix Plus - you must go to the developer site, then the forum, then choose the developer's edition of the tool (or just get it here)
Several others that I had installed with 2.xx do not have compatible versions available (yet), but they are extensions that I can live without.

Till next time, here is to the World Record!

Back on Track ... I mean it this time

OK, this time I really mean it. My last post was on December 17, 2007 which was 16 days after my son was born, it is not June 9, 2008 and he is now more than 6 months old.

God, so much has happened in my life! Of course I am talking about my personal life here, my professional life still remains the same, PDRMA.

I have been blessed with Michael and he is really allowing Leslie and I to live our lives like never before. Sure we have had the occasional sleepless night, but they have been very few and far between. Michael is a good sleeper for the most part. Of course now that he is starting to teethe, it is a bit harder to catch my good 3AM zzzz's.