Thursday, February 21, 2008

Thursday February 21, 2008

Gas: I saw on 2/20 on my way home at 7PM that gas jumped to 3.099. I need to fill the Gladiator, wonder what it will be when I get done here tonight? It is at about half full, so it will take about 20 gallons. 20*3.099=61.98. Ouch.

Still messin with videos. Decided the most economical way to stream video was by using wmv's, so I'm using Pinnacle to convert my old MPEG-4 files over to wmv. I'm converting a 371MB file to wmv right now. It resides on my PC which is pretty darn fast for a PC by any measure. After 45 minutes we have converted 1857 of 12085 frames. At that rate it will take nearly 6 hours to complete the conversion. Ouch.

Think I will go home. Maybe I will see if gas has dropped back, seems like they typically jump it .10 then drop it .04-.08. Maybe I will just wait and see if the price goes higher. I had thought about filling up yesterday morning at 2.959 but decided I needed to get to work a few minutes earlier, seems like every time I have done that lately the price has jumped before I got back. Ah dunno.

Update 6.30pm: On the way home gas is at 2.999. What did I say?

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Wednesday February 20, 2008

Now I'm trying to figure out how to efficiently stream video content from our Intranet server. I can stream content, that's easy. Efficient is the key here.

Got the wlan problem solved. Each PC on the domain is required to use a proxy server (filter), users can't change that (well, they could, but that's another story), so if they are on the guest wlan the proxy doesn't exist and they can't get to the internet. No problem.

Wednesday February 20, 2008

To block user access to a specified WLAN in Vi$ta:
netsh wlan add filter permission=block ssid=guest networktype=infrastructure
netsh wlan add filter permission=denyall networktype=adhoc

Unfortunately the "wlan" code is only available in Vi$ta. I need to do this in XP. We want to keep our wireless domain PC's off of our Guest wireless access.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Tuesday February 19, 2008

Gotten a bit behind. On Friday I installed Pinnacle Studio 10 Plus. On my old XP PC I used Studio 9 to make training videos to post on our Intranet training site. I ordered Studio 10 Plus with my new PC, but no-one has asked for a training video since I built it until now. When I installed Studio 10 the install quit with a message about Vista needing a special install (found on the CD) so I did that, and then when it went on-line to look for updates it uninstalled and then installed a newer version from the website (nearly 2 hours total). Then, as soon as I attached the USB Port the PC BSOD with an error on my RAID controller driver (Marvell from Intel). Something in Studio 10 conflicts with the driver and whatever it did blew up my RAID array so the PC would no longer boot and I had no arrays.

I reinstalled Vista with all the latest drivers and patches after re-creating my array, then installed Studio 10 again , same results. I rebuilt the PC again and this time I installed Studio 10 on the XP partition where it works just fine.

And, of course, Vista wouldn't activate (Key already in use), so I had to call and get a new activation key.

I didn't have access to the Office 2007 install, so I tried using Offivce 2003 which works, but I decided that I missed 2007 so I've gotten access to it and I'm installing it now.

I'm still pissed off that Vista cannot run the Exchange admin tools yet, I still have a hard time imagining that the Network and Domain and Exchange admins at M$ are still using XP. Supposedly the Exchange 2007 admin tools won't even run on Vista although rumour says that SP1 fixes that. I don't have SP1 yet. So, I'm running my old XP in a virtual PC window so I can still manage the domain.

I'm still trying to get things working and installed. Good thing I had a fairly recent backup.

Gas: 2.959 last night/this morning, down from 2.999 on 2/17.

Friday, February 15, 2008

Friday February 15, 2008

I did it. Not as useful as I hoped.


Friday February 15, 2008

Gas 2.889 this morning. One of these days I need to sit down, collate all the pricing I have saved here, and draw a chart.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Wednesday February 13, 2008

Was surprised to see it snowing when I left work at 8pm. Wasn't surprised to note that gas had dropped back to 2.919.

Wednesday February 13, 2008

Gas: When I got off work last night gas had jumped to 2.99.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Tuesday February 12, 2008

What a change a few hours make. When I did the previous entry I was still shivering from the cold. When I left work at 4PM the temp was +11F and it felt warm. This morning at 8Am the temp was +5F and I left my hat and gloves at home; didn't even think about them until I was halfway to work.

Monday, February 11, 2008

Monday February 11, 2008

Coooolllldddd!!!!! -27 here now, I don't think yesterday's high got to -10. Went to Bemidji Saturday to try to take a look at RumJohn, much colder and windier there than in GR and we found that we could do nothing to help, it was too cold even in the garage out of the wind.

I think it is supposed to get above zero tomorrow, but that is a looong time at these temps.

Gas prices have been fairly stable the last week. Looking back at my notes I see that it was 2.889 on 2/2 and 2/5. When we went to Bemidji on Saturday gas in GR was at 2.879 but in Bemidji I filled up at 2.869 and thought I was doing well, when we got back to GR gas was at 2.849.

Been having a lot of fun with Google SketchUp for the last week, very nice program. I still can't make it do everything I want the first time but I usually succeed by the 4th or 5th try, far better than any other drawing program I have tried.

I'm still shivering, and it's been 30 minutes since I walked in the door. It's COLD out there!

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Tuesday February 5, 2008

Now that we have made several deployments we've come up with an addition to the instructions:

  1. Edit the local PC Policy


A. “Start”, “Run” “GPedit.msc”


B. Browse to “Administrative Templates”, “System”, “Logon”. Find the setting for “Always wait for the network at computer startup and shutdown”. Enable this setting.




  1. Reboot, wait for approx 30 seconds after the “Ctrl-Alt-Del” screen appears, then attempt to login to the Domain. Should work.