Josh-Kerr.com

Ok, it’s 2:30 AM EST and I’m just now leaving work. That’s not bad you say? I was up at 4:00 AM CST this morning, to catch a 6:00 AM flight! So now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to crash….

You may or may not have heard about two ladies running through security at IAH, Houston International. Just incase here you go. Two ladies ran through an un-manned security station at IAH. 15 minutes later security monitoring the cameras noticed it. They then shutdown the entire airport. No plans were allowed to leave and those planes that were landing were not allowed to de-plane. I was one of the many who were stuck on a plane that wasn’t allowed to de-plane. Finally after an hour we were allowed to get off the plane. Those that didn’t have any connecting flights were allowed to leave however everyone else was stuck. Security re-screened around 300 people in the C-B Terminal link and God knows how many in the other terminals. After it was all said and done, they never found the ladies and determined that they were confused. TSA later said that they are no longer looking for the ladies as it seemed to have been an accident and there is no reason to believe that they did anything dangerous. Nice….

I travel for work, part of the job. But man did last night suck. I had a 5:10pm flight out of San Antonio to Houston to make a 7:10pm flight to Charlotte. Not too bad. I get to the airport with plenty of time to spare, too much actually, and grabbed a bite to eat. Wouldn’t you know that at the time my flight was supposed to be boarding, the previous flight was boarding. Turns out that my flight would be 40 minutes late arriving and thus forced me to find other means to get to Charlotte. The counter attendant set me up with another airline and everything was good. Or so I thought. My flight in DFW, another airline, was delayed by an hour and a half! I finally landed in Charlotte around 12:30am only to stand in line for 30 minutes to get my rental car. Finally at 1:30am I got to the hotel room. Gotta love the late late nights….

Well it seems that after I bashed my laptop the other day that I discovered some interesting information. It seems that Win Server 2003 has some of the worst driver support around. So it’s not entirely my laptop’s fault that the BroadCom drivers won’t work under anything but Win2KP/XP. So, Laptop. I’m sorry.

A little over a year ago my parents bought me a laptop for graduation. No not high school graduation, college graduation. While I could have used the laptop in college for obvious reasons, I was excited that I had a new computer. My folks bought me a Dell Inspiron 5100. It’s a nice little laptop with 20gig hard drive, DVD/CD-RW combo, 256Mb of DDR ram, ATI 7500 Mobile graphics card, and a 2.66 P4 processor. Like I said, it’s a nice little computer, designed for basic use, some programming, and/or a small server. So what’s the problem you ask? I’ll tell you. The Inspiron 5100 model laptops (and a few others) use the Broad COM 440x drivers that are only supported under Win2K and WinXP. This sucks big-time since I installed WinServer2003. Now I’m stuck with a server that can’t serve! In the past I had Gentoo Linux installed on it and it gave me some trouble. Looks like I’ll be installing it again. Hopefully the new Gentoo 2005.0 install process works just as well as my last install.

We moved into our house about a month ago and we still have no internet, phone, or cable TV! Ok, phone is a little bit of a stretch. SBC services out to where we live but its $30 a month for a basic no long distance land line. Steph and I are waiting for Time Warner to come out to where we live because we can get unlimited call anywhere we like for just $40 a month. Likewise we know that we could do satellite but once again we’re waiting for Time Warner. As for internet, we’ve shopped around only to find that dial-up is $60!!! I’m not paying $60 for dial-up. So the long and the short of it is that we’re waiting for Time Warner. They have a package that includes cable TV with some extra channels, broadband, and the phone service for $130 a month. Not bad considering it cost more separately. We’ve been told that we should be getting service first thing in February. I count the days.

Just thought this was a little odd.

1. Blogger is not updating my blog count. Been at 63 for the past 2 months now?!
2. Blogger’s spell check marks “Google” as a misspelled word?!
3. Blogger doesn’t have a built Google search or just a search utility for a specific account?!

It seems that we are making the switch again. First it was ASP.Net, then JSP, and now we’re doing PHP. I come from a PHP background so its a welcome change but I was actually wanting to go with JSP. I just purchased the Struts book and was ready to start “going to town”. Now I’ll be “going to town” with PHP. In all honesty though, I’m anticipating another switch back to one or the other by this time next week.

Well, it seems that once again we’ve been screwed. We were told that one of our clients would configure their web server in preparation for our ASP.NET-Mono-MySQL application. Then yesterday about an hour and a half before I left we were told that we would have to configure their server and install our application. Not too bad of a demand in itself except for the fact that we only get 1 hour to do it. The entire time we were developing this app, we were asking for a box to simulate the clients running environment. We got a box when were 90% done with the app but we were not able to run the same distro. That entire situation sucked big time with no real requirements/specs and we never developed and tested under the correct environment. Oh well, lets just get this over and done with.

Well hell, no luck in the emerging problem. Needless to say, I’ll be hitting up the forum again tonight to get a solution!