Archive for January, 2006

Comcast is a Large Corporation (eww)

Monday, January 30th, 2006

Large corporations are usually a pet peeve of mine, and Comcast is no exception. I’m having trouble with my connection, and so I tried to get a phone number on their site. There’s no number even listed, and since I was having problems with the connection, I couldn’t use the chat function. Finally, I had to email support with a request for the phone number.

I love how you press buttons that say you’re having trouble with your connection, and the voice on the other end says, “Please visit comcast.com for support.”

After I called, they said it would be until Friday that someone could come and check my connection. I’m thinking of looking into DSL.

Why do I always get blamed?

Saturday, January 28th, 2006

Email from Matt, one of our pastors:

Ben…
This week, my computer has started talking to me… “hi Matt…This is your computer. I just wanted to tell you I love you.” – it’s usually sometime after 10:00 AM…
So, first question…did you do this?
2nd…how do I make it stop?!
Blessings,
Matt

I can’t imagine why he’d suspect me…

Nightmare Part II

Monday, January 23rd, 2006

We had about 6 inches of snow today, and Jill and I went and played in it. We made a snowman and let Ubu out. He was scared at first but then tried to hunt birds.

Earlier today, the power went out. When I went to reboot I discovered my hard drive had been corrupted by the outage. So I put it in Target Disk Mode and tried to repair it:

repairing

However, after that it got an error and I had to reformat. This is the second time in just a few months that my hard drive has crashed. In fact, this is a NEW hard drive since the last one got corrupted beyond repair. Fortunately, I’m getting quite proficient at re-installing and rebuilding my stuff from backups. My last backup was on the 12th, which is not as recent as I’d hoped, but I must have inadvertently messed up my cron job.

Hard drives, even older ones, are amazing things. They can store libraries worth of information in just a few square inches. But they seem to be corrupted easily, which is really frustrating. I’m thinking I should invest in an external hard drive for quick, easy backups.

New Baby Harlow! :)

Monday, January 16th, 2006

Today around 3:30 lil’ Harlow arrived :) 8 pounds, 10 ounces….. and he’s one good lookin’ newborn! The name is still undecided though, and Julie said we could blog and get feedback about what people thought about the possibilities! So, tell us what you think…. the options are….[drumhill please] Steven, Luke, Daniel, Martin…. and any combination of those! Steven Luke is on the top….but some wonder if it is too full of L’s. Personally, I am all for L’s in names! :) Of course there is always Martin Lukether Harlow :) tell us what you think! remember there is a delay in posts b/c we have to approve them first (down with spam!)

Job, Life

Monday, January 16th, 2006

I did, in fact, quit the job at the post office. I missed my office job :( I sorta didn’t blog about it yet because I feel so wimpy about quitting after 2 days. But I just didn’t want to continue if I hated it. Good news is I have a couple job interviews lined up for techie/office help type positions this week.

Renee, the gal I recorded with at UMass, has a few of her songs on her site – link. I did many of the instrument tracks.

Finally, I’ve been thinking about writing some essays and posting them. Some crazy ideas floating around my head, even though I’m not much of a writer. We’ll see what happens. What else is there to do while I’m waiting in the PvP queue in WoW? <– gaming reference :)

More Site Stuff

Friday, January 13th, 2006

I managed to kill the customized blog I had, so it will be a few days until I can get it to fit within the main site again. For now, at least it’s fully functional!

I’m also working on updating the “archives” section with a page about all my coding projects, not just this site.

More Site Stuff

Saturday, January 7th, 2006

I managed to kill the customized blog I had, so it will be a few days until I can get it to fit within the main site again. For now, at least it’s fully functional!

I’m also working on updating the “archives” section with a page about all my coding projects, not just this site.

Website Revamp

Wednesday, January 4th, 2006

I’ve been revamping the site for the last day or so, with Jill’s help. I think we’re both very happy with how it’s turning out. I’m actually starting to get comfortable with PHP to the point where I don’t have to look everything up all the time. I made a new contact page and eliminated the “etc” page. Also, I am starting to really love and utilize CSS to its full capacity, which allows me to have a unified look to every page.

Now I’m browser testing, and Internet Explorer (the red-headed bastard stepchild of browsers) is producing different results as usual. Of course, most internet users use it, because it comes with Microsoft products. So web developers are stuck trying to code for a browser that doesn’t follow the rules of code interpretation (because it hasn’t been updated in years). If you’re doing complicated layout, it can get frustrating because your site looks different in IE versus Firefox/Safari/Netscape. There’s not much to do about it either, until the world smartens up and stops buying Windows.