The new Virgil (Virgil II, Virgil Jr.?) is now online and working just fine. Currently, I haven’t noticed anything that’s failing to work. In fact, several things are now working that weren’t working on the old server. It’s also processing data noticeably faster.

I must say that I really enjoy using the VMware Remote Console to take control of the server, rather than Secure NetTerm or any other normal remote terminal applications. I’ll have to investigate being able to use it over the Internet (while still preserving security).

Just yesterday, Michelle got some iPod accessories. First was an iStation IP106 Docking Station. This was something she’d been talking about for a while, and I wanted to do something for her with some of the tax return money I’d got. It works and sounds great.

Second, was a Monster Cable iCarPlay Wireless FM Transmitter, which let you play your iPod via your car’s stereo by broadcasting on an FM station. It also recharges the iPod via the cigarette lighter. This one came from Glen as a belated Christmas present, since the original Belkin model was nowhere to be seen in the past 3 months – being constantly unavailable from their Web site. From various reviews, however, this one seems to be better than the Belkin. It, like the docking station, seems to work just great.

Now, Michelle can have music with her no matter where she goes.

I finally got my new watch. It turned out that I didn’t get a kinetic auto relay, or even just a kinetic, after all. Instead I got a basic Seiko 5 Automatic. (The actual one I got is slightly different than the one from this link.)

But – after meeting a barrage of sales people who had no more clue about their stock than I did from just looking at their display, and stores that would either not order anything in for me or, if they did, would give me no kind of discount on the list price, I got it from a Kavar jewellery store in Lime Ridge Mall, Hamilton. The woman working there was actually friendly, and offered me 30% off the list on anything I might get. But of the two watches she had on display, one was a basic automatic and I ended up getting it for just $111 including taxes. (If I’d gone with the one I’d had my eye on, even with the discount, I would have paid around $500 – plus I would have had to wait for it to be ordered and then make another trip to pick it up.)

This one works just fine. The only problem was that there was no one on staff to resize it for me, but it was no problem going to my local jewellers here in Burlington to get that done.

Trying to reinstall FC3 on the new Virgil has been delayed by 3 days now due to overall stupidity. No matter what I tried I couldn’t get the large DVD .iso of the OS to download with Star Downloader (my download accelerator). I finally gave up and and started to download the set of individual CD images.

Then – to make the whole debacle even worse – I realized that I already had the image stored on my host computer. So I didn’t need to download it at all. If it weren’t for the fact that I’ve now immortalized this incident in my online pages here, I could just pretend this never happened and move on…

Update: Oh, but wait! It turns out that the DVD image that I have is somehow corrupt. I can’t say how it happened, since it worked before, but now it’s giving me a “bad descriptor” error. So, even though I should have known better initially, it looks like I’m back to using the invidual CD images again after all.

Okay, my archive links now work properly. I’d been missing a “</script>” line in my archive template. Bizarre.

To be more precise, if you scroll down to the bottom of the right-hand side of this page, where the buttons for previous months of my writings exist, you’ll have a problem using them.

Under Mozilla, you’ll see some annoying code at the top of the screen (even though it works aside from that). Under IE, you get nothing but a blank page.

I’m not sure when this started happening, but I’ll be looking into it shortly. It doesn’t happen on Michelle’s home page, so it’s something I’ve inadvertantly done to my own…

My solar powered watch stopped (again) several weeks ago. I managed to leave it out in the sun during one day since then and, after that treatment, it started working again, albeit with the “slow tic” that indicates it’s low on charge. There hasn’t been another even semi-sunny day since then when I could leave it out again.

I’ve had problems with this watch from day 1. When I bought it, there weren’t any available in Canada that I could find, so I mail ordered it from an online store in the States. But it wouldn’t keep its charge and, every so often, I had to send it back. It’s had its “motion” repaired several times, and I’m sure it’s been recharged under some high powered solar lamp during those times too.

It’s no longer on warranty. I’ve also managed to crack the faceplate. At this point, I think it’s silly to keep hold of it. Instead, I’m going to invest in a new watch.

This time, I’m going for an automatic. Or, to be more specific, a kinetic. Oddly, when I first pondered the solar vs. kinetic issue, I’d been under the (false) impression that neither allowed you to wind them manually. While it’s true that my solar watch doesn’t let you wind it manually, the kinetic watches do. So, when I made my decision, I thought that the sun would be more reliable than body motion. I wish I could take that earlier decision back now – especially given the grief I’ve had with my solar watch. (However, to be fair, I’m sure that most people don’t have the problems that I did – I was just unlucky.)

In any case, here’s the Seiko I’m currently considering. Of course, this is the one that I’d really like, but, at an extra $100 on top of the already somewhat steep price tag (relatively speaking of course), I’m not sure that I can justify it. Even to myself. And I’m pretty good at justifying things to myself when I want a new and cool gadget.

(Putting things in perspective, neither one of these holds a candle to something like this, which would cost you more than some cars. Although, again to be fair, I believe that this one is an antique, plus it’s got some precious metal worked into it too. I think that you can get a Rolex for under $1,000 if you look around.)

I’ll go to a our local jeweller with all of this in mind and see what they can offer me.

Update: I’m feeling more justified as time passes… <grin>

Okay, I’ve finally started working on the replacement for my server in earnest again.

I’ve got the host up and running with RedHat Enterprise Linux 3.0 and GSX Server 3.1, and the VM (which will be the actual Internet server) with Fedora Core 3.

I must say, it’s been a while since I’ve looked at RedHat’s offerings. Fedora is a garbage sale of all sorts of essentially useless services. Or, to be more precise, services that might be useful in certain cirumstances but, as a whole, most people will probably never need. So, it’s been interesting learning what these new things are and then disabling them.

I still have to fine tune the host (RHEL also has many of these mostly unneeded functions), and I’m definitely having problems with the guest. I can’t, currently, compile the kernel since I’m missing some header files for some reason. (Even though those files exist on my other installs.) Time to blow it away and reinstall. But I do have an ever increasing firm grasp of what I should be doing.

Aside from being a paraphrase of something that kept getting repeated on a certain Star Trek: TNG episode, this aptly describes the new Microsoft Optical mouse by Starck (or should that be S+ARCK) that I received last week. (Hover over the “Choose a color” link to see a proper picture.)

Getting it ended a slight saga, since I’d ordered it online two and a half weeks before that from ByteWize Computers. (The last time I checked, these weren’t sold in the stores I would normally go to.) I never got notified that it had been shipped and, being too patient for my own good sometimes, I waited longer than I should have before calling to ask what had happened to it.

I called the first time the Friday before it actually arrived. They said they’d check into it and get back to me. I called again the following Monday, and was told that it had been shipped from a different warehouse, but that they’d try to figure out where it had gone – and get back to me. I called again, and was given a UPS tracking number which still didn’t show anything because “it hadn’t been entered yet”. This was slightly strange since I’d ordered it so long before that and had requested regular post at the time. Apparently they decided to ship me a new one, via courier, at no extra cost.

Typically, it got sent to my house where nobody was around to sign for it. I got that straightened out, though, and got it delivered to work the next day.

It’s now at home and working just fine. I like it a lot better than my old one – which was starting to “creak” (or squeak as the case may be) and getting on my nerves. The glowing blue band looks sort of cool when all of the lights are off.

The one issue I had with it was when I first plugged it in and Michelle was unable to control it. I soon determined that I had the same problem. Since I’d tried it out at work without any difficulty at all, I assumed it had something to do with my computer or the drivers. About fifteen minutes later I realised what the problem really was – it was my shiny mouse pad. Since this is an optical mouse, apparently the laser light was bouncing off of its surface in ways that interfered with its sensor, making it think that the mouse had been moved in ways that it hadn’t been. I replaced the mousepad (which is a same, since it was a nice Escher pad that had been a gift) and everything then worked like a charm.

Some time ago I got quite frustrated at being unable to get an AVI of last season’s finale of Nip/Tuck burned to SVCD so I could watch in on my TV. In the end, Michelle and I ended up having to watch it in the study on our new 20″ LCD (which wasn’t that much of a hardship).

Well, since then I’ve got a new computer and a DVD burner. So I can now actually create proper DVDs. At least in theory. So far, I’ve had equally little luck getting this thing to burn to DVD. I’ve experimented with just about all of the big pieces of DVD authoring software out there – at least those that I could find via a Google search. None of them have managed to produce anything I could view even on my own computer (as a DVD) – let alone get me to the point where, if my computer can view it, I could test it on my TV (or, really, my NAD DVD player which is supposed to support DVD+RW).

The furthest I’ve got so far is to create the appropriate directory structure – but every time I burn that, the result isn’t recognized as an actual DVD video disc. (Yes, I’ve also tried different burning software.)

I’ve also managed more recently, after stepping back a bit and trying TMPGEnc utilities to break things down step by step rather than going with the all-in-one suites, to create an MPEG-2 file that’s “broken”. It converted my AVI (an hour in length) into something like a 3 hour in length MPG. The last 2 hours are simply the last frame of the AVI. Plus, I can’t move from time code to time code. The AVI itself works great, but not so the MPG conversion.

So, I figure that I need to get the conversion process working first – before I move on to the DVD creation of the MPEG-2 file.

There are just so many variables here, though, that I don’t know where to go. Is it just this one somehow “corrupt” AVI that stopping me from making a DVD movie? I guess I’ll experiment with some other video clips – like, say, our wedding video – to see if I can get that to work. But there’s still something galling about not getting this one clip that I’ve been fighting with for 6 months now to work.