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Weren't you recovering from something heart-ish around the last time we sent Doug a present, too?

Ah, OK. Apparently Microsoft's on-site search wants me to download stub installers instead of redistributables.

Why is the redistributable package for .NET 2.0 22MB while the 3.0 - 3.5 versions are only 2.7MB or so? And should I be installing both, like the old VB runtimes, or does the 3.0 series supersede 2.0?

One of the things I've found out is how much it sucks to be that close. My contracting customers pretty much don't call me unless they need me, because I'm at least 45 minutes away from all of them. Mr. Penisbreath whose office is right next door to mine wants me to go over and chat face to face...

I made some fried chicken on Sunday and since I had some flour left I tried a grand experiment: Chicken-fried bacon. It was awesome, even though I did burn the first couple pieces. The main problem with poutine is that I don't know where to get young cheddar cheese curds. There's a particular...

I don't view viruses as much of a threat these days, and I like the fact that I can easily install AVG for people so that they don't have to mess with it. I like Avast better for its P2P and IM scanning options (read: the main ways that threats are likely to gain entry on most home computers)...

Slashdot has a discussion today that might be interesting and relevant.

Fortunately, since I disable daily scanning on every system where I install AVG, it's not been an issue for anyone I know. I'd be awfully pissed if it was an issue, though. I install AVG a LOT. This is the second huge AVG issue they've had since the release of version 8 of their software, too...

Yes. I spent most of my morning with an Eee. I set it up to dual boot XP and Ubuntu. It's a lot snappier in Linux than it is with Windows, especially for boot time. The model I was working with had a Celeron CPU and a 120GB hard drive. I had it side by side with a new Ubuntu-based desktop...

I'm not sure CPU performance is a particularly big deal with those things. They're meant to run a web browser and not much more, after all. Not being able to upgrade RAM sucks hard, though.

Had one briefly. I hated the gamepad and really only wanted to play one game.

Why does the USA not have Poutine? French fries + gravy + cheese curds. Holy crap that just sounds awesome.

I know all about depression and I assure you nothing about it is great.

Wait. What? You're making a huge and fundamentally incorrect assumption about the nature of any other political party that might exist. Right now we are divided between social progressives and social conservatives, and the actual behavior of both parties seems to veer away from what might be...

Well, it sure as hell explains why I hate my Wii so much.

Pandora finally added classical music. I must say that I am pleased and impressed. The devout, sensually minimalist works of Arvo Pärt lead to 21st century movie soundtracks, 19th century choral works and medieval plainsong. I'm finally experiencing what the music genome project was supposed to do.

Liberals by-and-large don't listen to talk radio as it exists for conservatives. Air America was an attempt to create something similar. Many liberals who did attempt to listen found the tone of the discussions there rancorous and off-putting, and it's generally a nonentity in terms of its...

Only if no one else does. Remember the Reform party? I know that it was backed by Perot's billions when he was running, but it had a real, larger, more effective apparatus than the Libertarians, Greens or US Constitution Party, all of which have been around for decades with nothing to show for...

I'm a National Public Radio guy. In my car, it's NPR or nothing.

I have a tab permanently opened to meebo and Google's IM seems more reliable than Yahoo's for me.

IIRC you have to create a mirrored-only mount point for /boot and then you can use LVM to created a RAID10 set with some amount of data on all of your drives. The whole softraid setup is really, really nice compared to Windows, though.

Doesn't the new Adobe crap only use 3D features on the card if you have a new-ish nVidia Quadro?

Stereodude, if you can pull yourself away from Fox News and talk radio, you might consider spending a month or two in the fine company of the BBC World Service, from the CBC or Australia's ABC. The election is over. Rush is just going to be sputtering about the secret muslim gay penis...

I can tell you from experience that drives that are more than about three years old that have been used in a server are more likely to fail, no matter what you do.

I get a lot of use out of Solarwinds IP Monitor, but it's neither free nor open. For that matter, it costs a bloody fortune. But it works really well and integrates SNMP and WMI management, which makes it really nice for general network management.

I normally use Linux for that sort of thing. I think it's silly to pay thousands of dollars for user licenses just to serve files.

Yes, Ts have discrete nVidia graphics. They use a Quadro chip as I recall. I'm told it's fairly underpowered, but Intel's X3100 isn't a speed demon either.

Microsoft Outlook gives me rage.

My gaming rig still has a CPU that's clocked faster and I just ordered a Radeon 4870. And I'm sure I still have more disk space. :P

Ew. I'm not sure if it's the same thing, but I know that some motherboards these days use Jmicron controllers for their IDE ports, and that for some weird reason that whole setup routes through the motherboard USB controller. Basically it sounds like Jmicron-anything is something to avoid. :\

Yeah, they aren't having any of it. No changing mail clients. The guy paying the bills doesn't want them using anything different because he thinks they would be less productive working with unfamiliar software. I'd put it on Microsoft but I have a feeling that they'd just tell him to move...

Er... RyanVM patches can be integrated with its own updater or through nLite.

I am trying to make these people not have an SBS server. They're being RBL'd to hell because whatever dumbass set their server up left it as an open relay, and they're sitting on a Comcast dynamic /24 IP. Anybody with a halfway decent anti-spam configuration doesn't want herpes-over-SMTP from...

You are not helping my murderous rage at the moment.

Outlook 2003. Google Apps for domains. Four users. Their settings are all correct according to Google. I've removed the Antivirus software they were using from their PCs entirely. I've deleted and recreated their Outlook profiles. I've deleted and recreated their PSTs. Besides the E-mail...

Have you maybe looked in to making a .ZAP file?

Doesn't SQL Server prompt you to install all the dependency crap? You can in fact make .MSI files with transforms that specify different configurations, and .MSI files that support installing multiple programs, but on the whole it's very complicated for a non-expert user to do that stuff. There...

May I ask why you would put a fairly high end graphics card in a machine intended as a server? I won't even install graphics drivers in anything I use. Anyway, if the PSU is decent quality, that load is completely do-able. I've put nVidia 8800-series cards on Antec 300W-powered systems and...

I had another 750GB -AS die this morning. It was actually kind of spectacular, and judging from the burns on the drive cage there was either fire or arcing. I smelled it, and there's visible damage to the smaller of the two ICs and some of the traces. I checked my other 750GB -ASes and that...

Apparently I typed 9300. I meant the 9600. I've gotten them for $115. I pair them with Gigabyte motherboards that have a 780G chipset (uh... GA-MA78GM-S2H). Total cost is about $185 as I recall. If I didn't want the nice onboard graphics I'd probably just buy the cheapest Gigabyte board with an...

The AMD's numbers are pretty sad, but I'd still say there's value to be had in AMD-land. It's just not found in their top-end chips, which is the only thing being tested in the article. You can buy a decent AMD motherboard + one of the lower-range quad (9300) or three core Phenoms, for less than...

I usually take strips from typical brown shipping boxes. The kind that Newegg uses and is pretty much everything UPS brings me. I'm not saying it's perfect or anything, but they compress pretty well and they can stand up to having holes made in them.

I don't have anyplace to put it. And no, it's all going in a dumpster.

I am having to move my office at the moment. I'm being moved from one storeroom closet to an even smaller one. As a result I'm having to throw out a huge collection of spare parts. Today I'm tossing working Socket A, 754, 939 and 478 motherboards, Pentium 4 and various Athlon and Sempron chips...

Service is not fine. It's poor, even on the business products. I don't want a 20 minute wait time and some godawful hold music to talk to someone about replacing a $30 DVD drive. I want to press 1, 2 and tell Charlie in Atlanta my Thinkpad serial number and be off the phone in under two minutes...

If she's OK with the money, point her toward an R or a T. My impression of the SLs is that they're carrying some of the lower-end Ideapad crap into the Thinkpad line, and I'd rather avoid that. Latitudes mostly just aren't that impressive. They don't have the quality of construction and they...

Apparently the demo unit for a lot of the Windows 7 stuff at WinHEC last weekend was a 1GB netbook with a 1.0GHz Via processor. That's pretty ballsy for a Microsoft beta OS.

They are as much computer monitors to me as they are screens for watching movies and the like.

$250,000 a month?!?

Application compatibility is going to suck no matter what. That ship has sailed. As time goes on virtual machines are going to be a better solution for a lot of that, and for the rest I'm really hoping to see a move in the direction of largely platform-independent web applications. I'm looking...