Boycott Christmas.

I heard a report on the radio this morning which said that there are 26% more Americans who will be more than 30 days late on credit card payments during Christmas this year than the same time last year.

Christmas is becoming more and more difficult to afford as the cost of living in this country continues to soar, while at the same time, big business is doing everything it can to instill the belief that it is customary to spend thousands of your hard-earned dollars on gifts during this season.

I mean, pay attention to the commercials... you'll see companies advertising a Plasma screen TV (that costs $2000 or more) as being "The perfect Christmas gift"... either that or a "Suzuki ATV or Dirt Bike", a diamond ring, a Mercedes Benz, etc.

I remember when an elaborate Christmas gift was something that cost $75. It's just really sad when we need to bleed the common man dry in order to "stimulate the economy".

It was estimated that the average family spent $910 on gifts during the 2006 holiday season, and that was expected to increase by 5% or 10% this year.

In response to all of this, most of my family has decided to only buy gifts for our children (in the name of Santa), and to limit those gifts to less than $50 each. So, we've managed to keep our spending to less than $200, while still getting together to celebrate and enjoy the season as a family without having to worry about how much credit card debt we'll all be in next month!

I wouldn't want to be in Geordi's shoes...

Alright, I know I'm a huge nerd for even noticing this stuff, but whenever I watch Star Trek: TNG I like to pay attention to the technical terminology that they use.

I was just thinking about one of those things today and would like to put it into context for everyone (all two of you who might read this).

Data says something like: "The neutron radiation must be interfering with my positronic net..."

First of all, if Data is being exposed to neutron radiation, that probably means that everyone else is too, which would be incredibly bad. After all of the times where the Enterprise crew is exposed to one type of radiation or another, they should all be covered in tumors.

If Data has a positronic brain, that suggests that his brain is at least partially composed of positrons, which are the antimatter counterparts of electrons. In case you didn't know it, antimatter is the same stuff that they use on the Enterprise in their photon torpedos. Whenever antimatter comes into contact with regular matter, it releases a huge amount of energy in the form of an explosion. If even a small amount of antimatter were to find its way into Earth's atmosphere, there would probably be something like a nuclear-bomb-sized explosion as a result... plus gamma radiation to boot.

That being said, I would hate to have to be in Geordi's shoes when he opens Data's head up to work on it. Dr. Noonian Soong, who built Data, had better have taken a hell of a lot of care in making sure that the positrons in Data's head stayed there. Otherwise, Data would be a walking nuclear explosion waiting to happen:

Working on a Saturday with VMWare

Occasionally, in my line of work, I wind up working on the weekend or at night. Yesterday, I had to go in to the office to do some work on our web servers.
Usually, there are other people at the office on Saturdays, but my car was the only one in the parking lot this time (it hasn't been this clean in a long time, so I took a picture to savor the moment).



The yard outside the office makes it difficult to go inside and work.



The part of the building where I spend most of my time, when I'm not running back and forth to the printer on the other side of the office. The server room is on the right, with my office down the hall.



The server room...



My desk...



Today, I was tasked with converting the two web servers and their domain controller into virtual machines. This can be a difficult and time consuming process, but I've done it many times now and have it nailed down pretty well. In this case, I prepared a dedicated server which will run (free licensing) VMWare Server and host the virtual machines, instead of using one of our existing VMWare servers. This is a Dell Poweredge 2950 that we had originally purchased for use as a new accounting server, but the upgrade of our accounting systems was a project that got pushed back until February of 2008, so it was okay for me to take this system temporarily. It has has a Dual-Core Xeon and 3.5GB of RAM, as well as four hot-swappable 73GB SATA hard drives (foam emanating from mouth).

In case anyone who reads this is ever interested in moving a physical computer into a virtual environment, here's the steps that I take to do it- it works like a champ every time:

1. On the source machine that you want to convert, install the VMWare SCSI adapter driver by using the "Add New Hardware" applet under the control panel (if this were a Linux box, I've found that you can sometimes skip this step and install the driver after you've cloned the machine, but it's usually a good idea to install it beforehand).
2. Create a new Virtual Machine on your VMWare Server. Make sure that you create a large enough .vmdk (VMWare Hard Drive) to facilitate the source disk. You will also want to create extra disks if you have more than one that you wish to bring over.
3. Use a bootable .ISO image to boot the VM for the first time. The image should have a version of Norton Ghost that includes the TCP/IP Ghosting option. Note that while you boot the machine, you'll need to supply the VMWare SCSI adapter drive so that the drives will be recognized. I normally use a customized version of Bart PE to boot the system, and give it the driver when it boots up, although you could also include the driver when you create the Bart PE .ISO image.
4. Use a bootable CD to boot the source machine. Run Norton Ghost and clone the drives over TCP/IP.
5. Once that is done, you should be able to reboot your VM and be able to your converted system!

This is a great way to consolidate your hardware, and it also makes for a very simple disaster recovery plan of your server (you can run a batch file that copies the .vmdk files off to another machine as often as you wish).

My Accomplishments

Since I've been sick and have stayed home from work yesterday and today, I'm proud to say that I've accomplished more than in a couple of hours than I could have ever dreamed of doing at work. Besides napping, eating chimichangas, and consuming enough Echinacea to kill a 5-pound tumor, I've already aptly defeated two classic Nintendo games.

First, I thoroughly vanquished Count Dracula in "Castlevania". As you can see in the picture above, I even rubbed it in a little by demolishing a good portion of his castle on my way out after stomping a hole in Dracula's head. I would have finished the whole thing off, but I ran out of dynamite.

Next, I decided to go after an evil wizard in "Wizards and Warriors".

This game also provides for about an hour-and-a-half of raging 8-bit entertainment. I only have one qualm with it though, and that's the 'Cloak of Invisibility' that you pick up in one of the underground levels. Sounds like a cool item, huh? Maybe at first, but either it's defective somehow or all of the monsters in this game can see in infrared, because when you put it on they can still see you.

Here I am, you can clearly see me sporting my new cloak, not realizing that a bat is about to swoop on me from behind and kill me with a rabies infection:

And, this is my dead body, still invisible (although you can see my leg dangling over that rock):

That being said, if you ever play this game, you should avoid that thing just like princess Penelope at a frat party...

Penelope is like a doorknob... everybody gets a turn

Finally, after many distractions and countless urges to go to sleep, I defeated the wizard and scored the girl.

Now I'm off to take a nap before putting some more well-appropriated time into my Nintendo emulator.

God Bless America.

Robin Strikes Back... The Return of Robin

I've been really sick and decided to stay home today, and in my boredom I remembered this site. I usually have been posting blogs on Myspace, but I think that Myspace is a different crowd of people (or they're at least on there for different reasons) and I like the idea of blogging here where it's a bit more serious and intellectual.

I changed my blog title to "The Pale Blue Spot", which is in reference to Carl Sagan's book, "Pale Blue Dot". It reflects many of my feelings of the true place for our planet and our species in this universe, and of the big picture that so many of us never stop to think about as we rush through our busy lives.