Daily Doings at the Line of Death Bar & Grill

I was going through old files this past weekend, and came across some notes for some projects I worked on from 1997-2000. One of the projects I worked on at that time was for the US Air Force. I was part of a virtual prototyping initiative betwen the Government and the leading-edge players in the aerospace industry -- Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin. Each company was already doing CAD (computer-aided design), but used different 3D modeling packages -- if I remember correctly, Boeing used CATIA, someone else used AutoCAD, and Lockheed Martin used a home-developed (and proprietary) system called ACAD.

How would these companies exchange part and airframe information? This was where VRML came in. VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) was selected as the lingua franca between the various players. Companies would export their data to VRML and send it to another company, who would then import it into their system. Companies would use a plug-in to a web browser to view the VRML data. The ultimate goal of this project was to reduce part and/or airframe design time and cost.

( I got to play with Cool Stuff for a while. )

This fall, legislation was passed and signed declaring the Friday after Thanksgiving as Native American Heritage Day.

This is something that has been long overdue. We, as a people, have mistreated the indigenous people of North America for many years -- taking their land, appropriating their resources, mocking their customs. It is time to start undoing the damage. And that means more than showing up and gambling at their casinos.

Personally, I'd like to see this become a federal holiday. Government offices, post offices, and banks are still open today.

As one of my colleages -- Rev. Three Feathers -- recently said, we should use this day to reflect on our own heritage. ( Mine's Italian and Polish. )

Every year, on the Friday before Thanksgiving, NPR's Susan Stamberg manages to mention her mother-in-law's recipe for cranberry relish in a story. It's become an annual tradition on NPR. Here's this year's installment.

I've been wanting to make this for years, but didn't have the freezer space for it. This year, I think I can squeeze it in.

The ingredients include sour cream, horseradish, and onions. The end result is Pepto-Bismol pink. It sounds gross, and looks gross, but how does it taste? I'll have to make the dish in order to find out.

This afternoon, I took out another box of computer printouts from storage and started going through them. This was a combined box, having printouts from two previously-gone-through boxes. (The last time I accessed it was 2000 or 2001.) Most of it was old email. Some of it was copies of what I already went through. Some of it was too painful to read. So I pitched most of it into the recycle pail. I culled a few things I'd like to either save or scan, like "The Companion's Holiday" poem that a friend and fraternity brother (now deceased) sent me.

I have enough pieces of paper floating around or filed away, and I'm fighting an ongoing battle with reducing it. Unless it's a club newsletter, I really don't need to have paper floating around if I haven't looked at it in over five years. I'd rather store the information electronically. I couldn't do that in college because I didn't have a computer.

I also pulled out box 131, which had plastic carrying cases for floppy disks, some floppy disk mailers, an old 5 1/4" floppy drive, some 5 1/4" disks, and some brand-new QIC-80 tapes that were still in the shrink wrap. I'm going to freecycle most of it after the Thanksgiving holiday is over.

This afternoon I made a side trip to Staples in Middletown, and they had a box of the blue fine-line Uniball Roller pens I was looking for the other day. I mostly use them for paper journaling (when I occasionally open up the paper journal), note taking, and signing checks. So I guess I was wrong about Uniball phasing them out. Anyway, I went home with a box of the pens.

Now if they only had a pack of slash folders in stock. These are great for keeping papers for current (and not-so-current) projects. They're like a file jacket, except there's a diagonal cut across the folder, showing the top portion of the contents. Instead, I went home with a 5-pack of wave folders.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at OfficeMax, looking to buy a box of 12 Uniball Roller pens. Those ar the ones with the plain black barrel. They didn't have any in stock. I suspect they've been discontinued by the manufacturer. That's a shame, since I've been using those pens for nearly 20 years. Instead, they had the Uniball Vision, which are OK in my opinion, but not exactly my style. I settled on a 3-pack of Uniball JetStream pens, which look and feel nice in my hand.

I hope these will last me for a while.

I've also noticed that the regular Uniball Roller pens dry up after years of disuse, even if I store them upside down. Perhaps that's why they were discontinued.

Scanning and reading through the old newsletters for the Dayton DECUS LUG brought back a lot of old memories, mostly good. I remember the times we got together, the presentations we sat through, the food we ate (we miss the seafood chimichangas at Casa Lupita), and the conversations we had -- some lasting for hours until we had to go home.

Attendance in our little group used to be in the hundreds (at least that was the size of our mailings), even though no more than 20 showed up for meetings. Then Digital got bought out by Compaq,which got bought out by HP. DECUS evolved into Encompass, which evolved into Connect. Now there's about 6-7 of us that get together once a month for dinner and conversation. All of us are current or former system administrators and system programmers who like to "talk shop" after hours.

Now, most people -- including myself -- get most of their tips and help through online forums, blogs, and the like. This has me wondering: are user groups dead? Or have they gone dormant? Or do they still exist in an online form?

Dayton's DMA has undergone a similar transformation, from what I know. Even though I haven't been active with that group in years, I'm guessing their turnout for meetings is very small compared to what it's been years ago. I got tired of the constant product marketing, and the dog-and-pony shows, so I stopped attending.

...to my Windows networking problem.

The Windows application layer might not think I have a network, but if I go deeper to the physical level, I have one. I can ping the systems. And I can probably ftp between them, if I open up the right port (21). So.....why not run an ftp server on the laptop, and an ftp client on the desktop? That'll enable me to do what I mostly want to do: transfer files between the laptop and the desktop.

I initially chose the Home FTP Server from snapfiles.com. After some iterations futzing with the configuration -- I needed to set up an account and a virtual directory on the server -- I was all set. I fired up the command prompt on the desktop, connected to the laptop, and transferred a couple of files.

The next iteration of this is to use the FileZilla client on the desktop, and the FileZilla server on the laptop.

Of course, I need to keep security in mind, so I need to remember to close off port 21 after I shut down the ftp server. And I should only run the ftp server when they're connected.

As Oliver Wendell Jones would say, "Piece o' cake."

Shout-outs: Happy birthday folkmew and diva_di!

After several email exchanges with Jacky in Australia -- my colleague from techrepublic.com -- his last recommendation was for me to wipe my C: partition clean and do a brand new install of XP. I told him I'd rather not do that. It would take me days, if not weeks, to reinstall everything I've had on my system in the past 8 years. Although I'm quite certain that it will get rid of a lot of the problems I've been having with the system. (Rebooting and/or reinstalling gets rid of many problems with Microsoft software.)

So I'll just continue doing what I'm doing -- going to the library to download large files onto the laptop, copy them to a flash drive, and copy them to my desktop machine.

I did find a network diagnostic tool at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914440 . But alas, it only works under Service Pack 2, and I've already upgraded to Service Pack 3. Of course, I can always rollback to Service Pack 2, run the tool, and then reinstall Service Pack 3.

Just got back from a nice little housefilk in Columbus this afternoon. Just the thing for a cold, gray November day in Ohio. The attendance: infobits, host Alison (WINOLJ), braider, fuzzyvanman, rms_butterfly, joecoustic, robin_june, myself, Ron, Jesse, and peteralway and archiver_tim came all the way down from Michigan to be with us. We also had some of Alison's friends from OSU there, taping, filming, and having us sign release forms. Apparently they're doing a project on filk music for their Folklore Studies course.
Lots of music and mirth were made. It's been too long since the last one.

Now I get to go back up my computer, one partition at a time. It's time to do so.