Jeff Billimek’s Journal

Today was a pretty busy day at work. Aside from all of the scrambling we’re doing for the next release, we also had some work to do in response to the big ‘SimpliFares‘ announcement today.

After I left work I stopped at FedEx to ship Larry’s fine 24-70mm L f/2.8 lens back to him. I used my Delta discount and got a good rate.

When I got home I noticed that freeside was locked up. This is a bit concerning because it happened once or twice a week earlier until the HD crashed. I did a fresh install of XP and not much has been done to the computer other than installing SP2 and all of the latest patches and security updates.

I checked the event logger and saw nothing about why it would have locked up. When I got home there was nothing on the screen so I disabled the power-save option on the monitor and also disabled the screen saver so if/when it happens again I’ll be able to turn on the monitor and hopefully see what was on the screen at the time of the lockup.

For the first time in a long time I had a couple of hours to play World of Warcraft and enjoyed every minute of it. I completed a few quests and got about half-way to level 27. It was a great time and I was happy to see that I could defeat level 29 skeletal warders.

I downloaded a new program from wowrankings.com which will collect a ton of detailed info on your character and upload it to their website. I ran the client and have a fun profile page for Nokie.

Just before our wedding I ordered the cool-looking new Microsoft wireless Intellimouse explorer 2.0 with the smooth scroll wheel and side-to-side scrolling. My existing mouse was dying so this seemed like a great purchase. The mouse works great but I noticed that the ‘middle button’ (pressing down on the scroll wheel) requires considerable force and is hard to get used to compared to other wheel mice I’ve used before.

Jen got home and was in a happy mood which put me in a happy mood too. We made dinner together. We had the wonderful curry tofu dish that is our current favorite. I worked on the rice while Jen worked on the tofu.

Dinner was great. We ate the dish which was a combination of rice, browned tofu (with a type of yeast sprinkled on top), garbanzo beans, coconut milk, and red curry paste. It was very scrumptious. While we ate, we sat in the living room and watched an episode of Star Trek. It was great fun.

After dinner I noticed a large water spot near the base of the refrigerator. I sopped it up and considered that it might be coming from behind the fridge. I pulled the large side-by-side refrigerator out (it is on wheels so it moves quite easily) and saw to my horror that there was a lot of water behind it as well. All signs pointed to a water leak somewhere.

As I investigated the area I determined that the water was originating from a water line connecting to the freezer near the top of the unit. It looked as if water was leaking from where it connects to the fridge. I looked inside the freezer and didn’t see anything out of the ordinary other than some ice near the ‘chute’ where the water pours into the trays from the water line. I don’t know if that is normal.

I cleaned up the water and decided to check again tomorrow morning to see if it is still leaking.

I’ve also been considering new synchronization methods for files on the laptop to the desktop computer. In the past I looked at the built-in ‘Offline Folders’ and came to the conclusion that it sucks.

I currently use a program called ‘Save-N-Sync‘ which does an excellent job of real-time file synchronization. I have it monitor everything in ‘My Documents’ and with a few exceptions it does a stellar job. I have it replicate (in real-time) all files from my laptop’s ‘My Documents’ to freeside’s ‘My Documents’ folder. It will trust only the source files on the laptop which ensures that everything always looks like my laptops file in that directory.

This has worked pretty well so far because I’ve been primarily using my laptop ever since I got it and freeside (the desktop) has been acting more of a file server instead of a desktop machine. I may be changing the behavior as the study gets more inviting and there is more incentive to use the computer down there.

At the same time, I play WoW on both the desktop and laptop and have a need to keep character data and plug-in data in sync between the two computers. I played with Save-N-Sync tonight to see about the ‘bi-directional synchronization’ option. It works great and ensures that that latest files are synchronized between both computers regardless of which one is changed. The only problem is that Save-N-Sync can’t run in a mixed-mode where one directory is bi-directional and another is source-only synchronization. In addition to that the ‘real-time’ mode doesn’t seem to work with the bi-directional. I also can’t run two copies of save-n-sync at the same time.

I synch all of my html stuff between my off-site web hosting provider and my local linux box (turing) every day via rsync and it works great. I’ve always wished I had a way to use rsync in a windows environment. I did some googling and saw that there are some solutions available and plan on looking at that in more detail.