Yesterday I attended my second meeting of the local writers’ group in town. I wrote something for the meeting, as well as a shorter piece during the evening (they call it a “prompt” where everyone writes for ten minutes from the same prompt, or opening line).
Both of these pieces are available on my Original Writing page. “The Kid” was the prepared piece.
On 20 February 2012, just over a month from now, my blog will turn ten years old. This site, such as it is, won’t be as old, but I’ll have had a website for 16-and-a-half years. Last year I began writing a very long piece about how I’d been online for fifteen years and what it means to me, but I never finished it. Perhaps in four years from now …
(Via Yolande)
1. The fattest knight at King Arthur’s round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from eating too much pi.
2. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.
3. She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still.
4. A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class, because it was a weapon of math disruption.
5. No matter how much you push the envelope, it’ll still be stationery.
6. A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.
7. A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.
8. Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.
9. A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it.
10. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
11. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
12. Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other: ‘You stay here; I’ll go on a head.’
13. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.
14. A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: ‘Keep off the Grass’.
15. The midget fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.
16. The soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.
17. A backward poet writes inverse.
18. In a democracy it’s your vote that counts. In feudalism it’s your count that votes.
19. When cannibals ate a missionary, they got a taste of religion.
20. If you jumped off the bridge in Paris, you’d be in Seine.
21. A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at him and says, ‘I’m sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger.’
22. Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One turns to the other and says ‘Dam!’
23. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can’t have your kayak and heat it too.
24. Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says, ‘I’ve lost my electron.’ The other says ‘Are you sure?’ The first replies, ‘Yes, I’m positive’.
25. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? His goal: transcend dental medication.
26. There was the person who sent ten puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.
Via Tim Radney, here’s a quick and easy way to increase the number of error logs from the default of six.
His blog has a walkthrough in SQL Server Management Studio if you prefer the GUI.
[Note: If you copy and paste this code, please be sure to check the quotation marks. WordPress may change them to non-standard format.]
Using TSQL you can execute the following statement to increase to 99 files, simply change 99 to how ever many files you would like to retain.
USE [master];
GOEXEC xp_instance_regwrite N’HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE’, N’Software\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\MSSQLServer’, N’NumErrorLogs’, REG_DWORD, 99;
GO
Happy new year.
Good news, all three of you that follow this blog and are interested in my ShutOff application: it’s almost done! Luckily it hasn’t taken me over twelve years to get to this point!
Last week I realised that twelve years brings with it a new era: the death of anything before Windows XP, and the rise of Windows Vista 7, with 8 on the horizon.
30 seconds of pain. Mortifying. Two ways to describe my first television advert on Lloydminster’s local news channel. I did it as a favour for a chartered plane company in town, and when you take into account that I didn’t want to do any lines on camera, the end result wasn’t too bad.
To save you from mocking me, I’m not posting the advert here. M took a video on his iPhone and posted it to Facebook. If you are in our respective circles, you can find it there.
Speaking of tribute pages, here’s one to the immortal Tom Selleck, sent to me by Aidan.
(He also sent me to this Dave Coulier shrine.)
Since I’ve moved everything to WordPress, I was able to use a WordPress plugin for my David Hasselhoff Tribute Page, which you can now find here.
Today at the clinic, we did the second of three phases of network reorganisation. In the first phase, which we completed a week ago, our new server was set up with the EMR software, all data was migrated from the old server, and the vendor remoted in to make sure everything was up and running.
Phase two, which took place today, was the physical move of the server into the rack, along with moving the network patch panel and switch into the same rack. We delayed this because we wanted to get in the local network cabling company, who are really good at this sort of thing. They, along with the office manager, built a platform for the new cabinet, because we were all concerned about the weight of the thing against the wall. In any event, the cabinet isn’t going anywhere, and the server is locked safely inside now.
Phase three is to replace the existing D-Link router with a new SonicWall device, and then bridge our existing network wirelessly, to connect a new satellite clinic across the parking lot. It would have been a lot more expensive to run network cable (due to the weather conditions in town, going by the frost line, replacing the asphalt in the parking lot, etc.), so we got two EnGenius external wireless routers, and set one of them up as a Wireless Access Point, with the other being the Client Bridge connecting the satellite clinic.
We’ll only finish this third phase next week, but everything is configured, and the SonicWall should be a drop-in replacement for the D-Link. We anticipate a couple of problems because the DHCP range has been reduced, but nothing that a reboot on the clients can’t handle.
In any event, I spent about two hours setting up the notifications on the server, after it was moved into the new cabinet. There were two things I wanted notifications on: the RAID status, and SQL Server.
I played around briefly with using an external SMTP server, and then gave up and installed SMTP Server on the Windows box. After locking the SMTP up securely, I then enabled the email notifications in the RAID software, which for some reason didn’t want to send.
It turns out that it’s not a good idea to masquerade a domain you’re targeting that sits outside of the network (our email and email runs offsite). The SMTP service simply dropped the test email in the Drop folder and that was that.
So instead of reconfiguring everything again on the SMTP Server, I simply changed the target email addresses to my home email address. So now the RAID and SQL Server will notify the office manager and me if there’s a problem.
The SQL notifications I set up, per Paul Randal’s recommendations (here and here), were:
- Errors 823 and 824, for hard I/O errors;
- Error 825, for transient I/O errors (and which he calls “impending doom”);
- Severity errors 19 through 25.
As pointed out in his script, I’ve also enabled the error message to be attached to the notifications.
The other thing in SQL Server I wanted to be notified about, is failed maintenance jobs. At every step in each of the four maintenance plans, I added a Notification Task to fire on each failure, with emails to be sent to me and the office manager. This was a lot more time-consuming than the other stuff, because I wanted to keep everything consistently named, and the emails to look the same. It takes longer at this stage, but it will save us a lot of time in troubleshooting any errors later.