the occasional occurrence

Well, I am finally doing it. So long to my home brewed blog. Welcome to the new, uh, new dowski.com.

It doesn’t look that much different cause I like the way my site looks. I read somewhere that orange never looks good on screen. It looks good on my screen(s). What do you all think?

Let’s see…lately I have been busy at work. I did some training sessions with faculty and staff on the new (Outlook/Exchange) email system. Then the students came back and I was plunged into parasitic program purgatory (hello Welchia/Nachi worm). A few students’ computers were infected with the virus before arriving on campus, and once they connected them to the network…well, it was a mess. The main problem is that the students use mostly an 11Mbps wireless network that was completely saturated with virus traffic. We contemplated shutting down access in the residence halls, but instead we worked with Residence Life to contact the students with the infected computers and get them cleaned up. It was kind of fun, in a spook sort of way - monitoring network traffic, identifying infected machines, matching a name to an IP address, contacting the student and saying “We were monitoring the network and noticed that your computer has a virus.” Surprised some folks I think.

We are quickly approaching d-day (d for delivery). I can’t tell you when that will be exactly, but mid October should be fun! Sarah finally came out and said it today - this is going to totally change our lives. It’s really exciting though. Funny story though - we initially were going to name the baby Naomi if female, Curtis if male. We then started calling the baby “NaomiCurt” since we have decided to wait to find out the gender. Well, we have gotten so used to “NaomiCurt” that we are afraid of calling the poor child that name after birth. As of now, we scold each other if one of us says “NaomiCurt” again.

On the wireless networking front, I am up and running with a new cantenna. Last time I used a Dinty Moore beef stew can that was bigger than optimal for the 2.4GHz signal I need to receive. This time I went with Allen’s baked beans (tasty I might add - they are Sarah’s new favorites). They are just about the optimal diameter and I have two of them linked together end to end with a conical collector on the very end. All in all, I get a more reliable if more directional signal now. I still don’t have line of sight to the campus, but I am shooting over the trees and getting a pretty solid signal. It works well enough that I can run a remote desktop connection from work to home with no problem.

Our new apartment is working out great. We do miss our washer and drier, but friends Rick and Chrissy have graciously offered to let us do laundry at their place once a week. They are awesome - even treated us to pizza rolls and a movie last Sunday night. The movie was “Breakdown” with Kurt Russel. Good flick. I like suspenseful movies that aren’t spiritual or gory. It reminded me of “Frequency”.

The Browns lost their season opener. It was a tough loss. Sarah and I listened to the whole game on WMMS over the net. I hope they can smear Baltimore this weekend. It’s amazing the vested interest I can have in a sport I have never played for people I have never met who I would probably have not very much in commmon with, but - GO BROWNS! I think everyone needs someone/thing to cheer for. But that’s another blog entry (a more directed one).

christian

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2003 at 10:49 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.