Memnison Journal

If I’ve been quiet again, it’s because my main PC in my office downstairs (where I’m exiled to pending the doc saying I can go up and down stairs again) has been zapped by a nasty virus. It got past my Trend Micro antivirus, and started disconnecting various things on my PC (including the virus [...]

…if y’all have any experiences with the service, mention them here; I’m curious how well this will work and how useful it will be.

This year, we consolidated our bank stuff from three different banks to one local credit union; two of those banks had just been eaten in big-fish eats littler-fish takeovers (one of which was handled by the FDIC as the bank went bust), and we were paying a hideous amount of money in fees for sneezing [...]

The Bruce Schneier Action Figure!  At $100, it’s a steal!  Be the first on your block! Now, i’m just waiting for the RJ Johnson and Bill Roper Auctioneer Action figures…

We’re facing a foot of snow or better in the next 24 hours, and the phone and internet are *already* up and down like a windowblind today.  Highly annoying.  Comcast says it’s weather-related failures – which makes me worry about what we’ll do if we get first snowed in and then frozen with sub-zero temperatures! [...]

As some of you may have sussed out, since November of 2007, I’ve been working 99% of the time out of my basement office…with a huge long line of doctor’s excuses, bases on either my non-healing foot wound, or my weak response to infections casing raging problems on and off.  The office finally said that [...]

I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to set up a Ubuntu server for the house, and running into various problems.  The most pressing one at present goes like this: (1) Large capacity hard drives (above 350G) are all SATA (2) The old computers I have here that could easily be made servers don’t have SATA connections on [...]

….never hurts when you’re setting up your fonts and browser and such.

There are now more contractors in Afghanistan than soldiers; just another part of the dumb practices that I’ve seen over and over again in the US government – all the way back to my mom’s job with the feds in meat and poultry procession oversight. When in doubt, contract it out, and claim that that’s [...]

Part one of ‘why I weren’t posting none’ is that the internet connection here at The Marmotage has been deadly sucky at best.  Details on the tech wrangle are after the cut.

Some time ago, Susan’s aunt gave us an old PC that was too wimpy for her use, and I set it up as a house server under Ubuntu Linux, but I’ve just had a myriad of problems with it.  The burner doesn’t work.  The Samba setup is damaged beyond repair and you can’t connect to [...]

I maybe have a dozen or so tapes left out of probably a hundred plus;   there’s a huge stack of prerecordeds I have to sell / donate / give away.  Susan is willing to eBay the more valuable ones, but she needs to get an idea as to how much they’re worth.  Best I have [...]

The VHS to digital conversion is actually working very well; going through a ton of tapes. Basically, the process goes like this: 

I recently started (with the help of Roxio’s Easy VHS to DVD) my long-awaited digital coversion efforts, starting with the VHS tapes, and have been making a lot of headway in the process. Some of the stuff that I’m running into in the tapes are things I no longer care so much about, and those [...]

To access the office’s intranet and server stuff, I have had a lot of trouble with using their VPN access system; I can’t go into details about it, but the old system was crude, impossibly slow and prone to total collapse.   The new system is a ton simpler, and less technically problematic. There was two [...]