Our first stop was to rush to Earl's Court Exhibition center, where we met with Richard Bartle (read Richard's post here) to see the Doctor Who Exhibition. One of the best parts was seeing all the kids playing at being a Dalek: they had a model Dalek you could stand behind that had a microphone that changed your voice to sound like a Dalek. You could also move the laser and plunger hands up and down 
Richard then took us to one of the very few remaining Police Call Boxes in London that inspired the TARDIS. I'll include a picture with this post.
We had a great time with Richard as our personal tour guide. He treated us to lunch at The Mermaid's Tail where I had an excellent plate of fish and chips, my London staple, and also tried mushy peas for the first time. They were quite good, and much easier to eat than non-mushy peas.
Richard also took us to Covent Gardens where there are a lot of craft-type shops. We walked to Trafalgar Square and that's when I found out the secret about Admiral Lord Nelson's column. When we were in London for our honeymoon, I took a picture of this famous column. Little did I know that if you take a picture from a slightly different angle, you see not only Admiral Lord Nelson, but you also see Little Lord Nelson as well.
Richard was a wonderful guide, and we really appreciated his coming to meet us in London. We had a great time chatting with him, he's a very cool guy with a great sense of humor. Thanks again, Richard!
After parting, we walked around a bit more but were really losing energy fast. We took the 4:30 train from Victoria Station down to Crawley and had a short walk to the George Hotel, where we showered and promptly crashed on the bed and fell immediately asleep.
Here are a few pictures from the Doctor Who Exhibition.
You would not believe the day (or two) I've had. Let me start it a little early so you get the whole background. On Wednesday, Lorien and I went to Ellie and Wade's for a dinner and game night. We ended up staying until a little after 1am. I had a busy day of work Thursday, and made some last minute changes on the network excactly like I know not to do.
To make an undoubtedly long story somewhat shorter, I'll leave out the details and tell you I got off work around 6:30pm, and started packing as soon as I got home. I went to bed before midnight, but because of night-before travel jitters I didn't fall asleep until much later, around 12:30am. I awoke at 3:30am when Lorien's mom called to make sure we knew she was coming. We added the last few things to our luggage, closed it up, and headed to the airport at 4am. We got to the airport around 5:15am with our flight leaving at 7am. We decided to pay a little extra money and get upgraded legroom on United.
We flew to Chicago and that's when my phone started ringing. The last minute changes seemed to have broke something at work, and after several phone calls we got it sorted out. Then we flew to London. The flight was a miserable 7-hour baby-screaming and puking ordeal that I'd rather not go into detail on.
Now I normally have a problem sleeping on planes, but when there are several screaming children I find it even harder to sleep. So I didn't. I finished Alastair Reynolds' Diamon Dogs, Turquoise Days, two short novellas set in his Revelation Space universe, a 300 page book I started on the way to Chicago.
So the count is: Vacation Day -2: 6 hours of sleep
Vacation Day -1: 3 hours of sleep
Vacation Travel Day: No sleep
We arrived in London Heathrow airport just before 8am. Got through immigration without any trouble. We lugged our luggage (good name, that) to Victoria Station, where we put it in Left Luggage to store for the day while we did some sightseeing.
More coming up in part two!
We're taking less luggage than last time, one checked bag each plus a few small carry-on items. Clothes are limited to 4 days plus what we're wearing on our backs. We'll have plenty of opportunities to wash our clothes on the ship. I am, however, packing a small expandable tote in case we purchase something while we're gone and run out of room.
Just a few more hours and we're on our way!
In our tech support office, there is a chart with a movable arrow very similar to Fire Danger charts we see around fire stations. It has sections like Low, Moderate, High, and Extreme. The only difference is they removed the F, so it reads IRE DANGER with a director pointing to the current level of ire in the office.
From July 13th to July 29th we'll be on board the Carnival Splendor, here's a link to Splendor's Webcam, updated when possible every few minutes. Look out for us!
I've recently solved a pretty complicated problem for which I didn't find much information on the Internet. Here is a list of our requirements:
- Maintain a single-login desktop environment (on a laptop) so icons, data, etc are not split between user profiles
- Must be able to connect to two different domains
- Outlook must be able to connect to two different Exchange servers
The situation is this: my boss has a SBS server set up at home, running a family website, Exchange server, and other services. His laptop is taken back and forth from home to work daily. Data is backed up nightly on his home network, which also handles Windows Update synchronization and anti-virus definition updates. He also needs things to work when he's traveling and not connected to either domain server, but always should be working from a single user profile (eg. not having to manage multiple user accounts).
After a lot of tests and trials, here is the solution we came up with:
- Laptop joins home domain, connects to home Exchange server. The laptop caches passwords, so when he's not connected to his home domain, he can still log in with his account.
- A VPN connection is configured at work to run over the LAN. This eliminates the need to authenticate yourself whenever accessing domain-protected shares and servers. Since it runs at LAN speed, you never really notice it being slow despite the extra overhead.
- Outlook is configured with two different profiles, one for each Exchange server (home and work). The choice of profiles is made at Outlook startup.
This is a good solution to our problem. Since his updates and backups happen at home, the laptop is joined to that domain. The LAN VPN connection works fast in the office and keeps him from having to re-authenticate himself every time he wants access to a network folder. All of his email is accessible from Outlook, with the only drawback of having to choose a profile when Outlook starts. He is able to use the same user profile on the computer to accomplish all of this.
Surprisingly, I didn't find much information about people doing this anywhere. I would think there are some people in the same situation out there. Perhaps I just didn't use the right search terms. In any case, I present this solution and welcome suggestions to make it better.
I had a need to convert some audio samples from m4a to a "more widely available" format in Linux. Here's how I did it:
mplayer -ao pcm file.m4a -ao pcm:file=newfile.wav
lame -h -b 256 newfile.wav newfile.mp3
Real simple, like it should be.
Good: When translating your native language into another, might I suggest at least running the results back in to your language as a sanity check?
Better: Have someone else that knows a little more about the language than you take a look at it.
Best: Don't take jobs that you know nothing about.
By the way, the English should have said cafeteria, or even restaurant. Visit Engrish.com for tons of funny pictures like this.
I have nothing to say about this post.
Except that it's a shame Sharpies don't have a built-in spellchecker.
Lately I've been seeing a lot of motorcycles on the roads. With the rising price of gasoline, it's not terribly surprising. My wife and I are leaving for the U.K. on Friday and are preparing ourselves for the even higher price we'll pay there with our rental car.
That said, this is something I just can't understand:
Hastings is a book, CD, and DVD rental/sale store. The bag hanging off the handlebars is from there. With the riders' recent purchase, no doubt. Now I'm all for believing in the general kindness of mankind, but trusting the general public not to walk away with your new movie is just a bit too much for me.
Surprisingly, this is not the craziest part of the picture. What you can't see is where it's parked—at Costco, a warehouse food and goods store. What possible item you can purchase there and still be able to take home on a motorcycle I cannot ken.
We had a nice holiday weekend. It was great to have an extra day off, although I didn't really get much done. I helped my cow-orker Mont with his home renovation project, and he taught me how to tape drywall. He also ended up giving me a really nice Wagner power painter that needs some cleanup and possibly a new spray nozzle. It's about $500 new, it was very unexpected and cool of him to just give it to me. Apparently he'd been hanging on to it for years thinking he'd clean it up but he never did, and just used his new one he bought.
There are only a few days left before we leave on our vacation, and there's a lot to get done at work and at home before that time. As usual, I'll try to keep the blog updated, but I can't guarantee anything. I will try to post pictures as often as I can, hopefully on a daily basis.
Last night I dropped my mom off at, of all places, the Iron Horse, a downtown bar/restaurant. I can't stand the place, and think the food is awful (their catering sucks, too). I can't imagine how nasty "cheap steak" must be, but you get what you pay for. Somehow, her friends she was dining with love the place.
My in-laws, who run a downtown bed and breakfast, also steer people away from the place. I can not understand why people go there.
I finally got my copy in the mail last Saturday. I didn't watch it until Monday night, though. It was hideously funny. Most surprising was when I received the DVD, it came with an autographed silhouette of Trace Beaulieu!
This movie was about a mission to Venus. Why scientists would think Venus more habitable than Mars is completely unknown to me. Some spies find some kind of doomsday robot machine thingy and take some pictures of it. Because of this, the mission is changed and the schedule moved forward. Three of the astronauts are replaced with women. The men argue about this for some reason.
After launch, the Earth is destroyed in what looks like a series of rips in the film, but are probably meant to be special nuclear effects. The astronauts realize they are the last people left alive, and start to freak out. They also realize that because they used fuel to avoid debris from the exploded Earth, they won't have enough to safely land on Venus, so they have to kick someone out of the rocket. Instead, an emergency happens and one of the guys has to separate a booster stage manually via a spacewalk he knows he won't return from, because the boosters will fire when it happens. So one of the female astronauts goes out with him because he "doesn't have enough mass" to get it unstuck. Together they un-stick the booster and the rocket takes off, leaving them stranded.
But WAIT! What's that over there?? It's an empty Russian rocket in space near Venus! (insert deus ex machina here)
The two astronauts that were stranded now become the main characters of the story, but they never take their helmets off again, because now they're different actors with different voices! They attempt to follow the rocket, but a mysterious voice over the radio claiming to be the hive mind of Venus (or something like that anyway) tells them the rocket is gone, and they can't land on Venus because the people living there are peaceful and don't want any warmongering ex-Earth scum living with them. The voice tells them they will have a new beginning somewhere else, and that's about it. They kind of imply that the people of Venus shoot the Russian capsule off into space toward some other planet, but nothing is resolved.
Until vacation! Even better, there are only 5 more working days!