Woohoo!

Today is my two-year anniversary with Novell. It's hard to believe that I have been gone from Rackspace that long....

Anyway, I thought I would share with the world my congrats email:

Dear Phillip,

Congratulations on your 2 year anniversary with Novell! We would like to take this opportunity to recognize your contributions since your service date of Aug 28, 2006

Sincerely,

The team at Novell

pidgin.im

Like a lot of people in this industry, I have like 4 or 5 instant message accounts and each with friends or past & current colleagues associated. A quick run-down:

• AIM
• ICQ
• Gtalk (google talk)
• Yahoo
• Groupwise (corporate IM)

Over the years, and through my many operating platforms (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, back to Linux, etc.), I've used many different clients to connect to these instant messenger accounts with one interface (Adium, Gaim, etc.).

A while back, Gaim became Pidgin. Right now, I primarily use two operating systems (MS Vista (yes i know i'm a sellout) and SLED). I recently upgraded Pidgin on my Vista machine to 2.5.0 and immediately began experiencing "issues". The main, and most annoying one, was a crash whenever I would scroll my buddy list. I found this post and by replacing a DLL, was able to fix the crashing issue. Yay!

Now if only there was some way to make the buddies in my list small like you can with Adium...

I had no idea....

... that JFK International Airport was such a craphole.

I would take pictures but I don't know if that's against the rules or not.

Empire State Building

A hazy view of the Empire State Building taken from my BlackBerry...

Quick trip to the Big Apple(tm)

I'm heading up to New York City today for a quick trip. I'll be back in my own bed tonight! Maybe I'll snap a photo with my BlackBerry since I forgot my camera.

Me at the Great Wall

I have a bunch of pictures from when I was in the People's Republic of China in June. They are all posted up at my Flickr Photostream. Here is one of me at the Great Wall of China:

Amusing

Recently, the Americas leadership team of the Linux Sales Business Unit at Novell made a committment to shave their heads if the team finished the quarter at a certain percentage. The results are in:

I'm going to be perfectly honest here... ok I'm not. I will say though, it's not a huge change for the guy in the middle (hi Joe!).

Go Honda!

I took my wife's Honda Odyssey into the Honda dealership (Classic Honda - Round Rock, TX) this morning. We recently noticed a grinding noise when we applied the brakes. My appointment was for 8:00am and I arrived right on time. By 8:15 they had the issue diagnosed along with a couple of other things that I had not even noticed yet (I know what you're thinking, but you're wrong - just wait, you'll see).

So at about 8:20ish, they had me in a loaner vehicle and I was on my way to my barrage of morning meetings.

At 11:40am, I get the call. The Service Representative takes me through all of the work. Here is a high-level:

* Rear Brake Pads
* Front Brake Pads
* Resurface Rear Rotors
* Resurface Front Rotors

In addition, they upgraded the firmware on the computer in the vehicle.

The grand total: $0.00

All of the work was covered by Honda's AWESOME warranty program. Great Service, great warranty. Honda has made me a satisfied customer.

Go Honda!

AT&T FAIL!

Like many of my colleagues, I use a wireless aircard for my daily internet access when I am away from my home office. For the past couple of months, I've noticed some significant issues when trying go about my daily research and whatnot. One example is that I have found that I can't get to Google.

Seriously, no Google! How on earth am I supposed to function when I can't go google something? This also means that I can't get to my mail (which I host with Google) and just about anything else that is attached to Google (blogger.com, youtube, etc.). As you can imagine, this is *really* annoying.

Today I was so frustrated that I decided to do the unthinkable - I called AT&T Technical Support to see if they were experiencing an outage. Since my wireless account is paid for through my employer, I call the Business class tech support number, give them the corporate account number and password and begin to explain the issues. I make special effort to underscore the fact that several of my co-workers are experiencing the _EXACT SAME_ behaviour. After I give my 3 - 5 minute disertation on what steps I have taken to troubleshoot the issue (pings, traceroutes, etc.) the "technical support engineer" assisting me starts asking about which version of the software I am using. I decide to humor him and give him some details... After I, once again, explain that others are seeing the same issue and how I *really* don't think that changing anything on my computer will fix the network issues they are having, he tries to convince me to uninstall the device from my computer and update my device driver. Somewhere along the way here I become convinced that this guy doesn't know what he's talking about and I let it slip that his ideas are retarded. That's when he hangs up on me. (I can't say I blame him).

Anyway... My friend/co-worker and I start digging around online and find the following:

AT&T DNS Servers Broken

-and-

AT&T DNS Server Hacked in Texas

So why didn't the dude on the phone just tell me (or know for that matter) that there was some ongoing DNS issue? I specifically asked him if they were experiencing an outage and he told me that everything was "fine".

I've ended up just using OpenDNS for my resolvers now. Guess I'll stick with that for a while.

i lol'd

I took my oldest son to McDonald's today. I go to the drive through to order his "Happy Meal" and was greeted with this sign:





















This was one of those McDonald's with two order stations, so natuarally, there were two identically incorrect signs.

When I finally went to the window, I tried to explain how the sign was written incorrectly, they didn't comprehend my message. Oh well at least we all had a laugh at their expense.

Plaxo, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, AHHHHHH!!

I quit, seriously.

Today I am announcing my social network resignation. At first I found social networks a very handy way to manage my contacts and I still think of LinkedIn that way, for the most part. The problem is that every time I turn around, someone is trying to get me to join a New Shiny (TM) social network.

One could literally spend all of their time keeping their social networks up to date. Not me. I quit, remember?

Flickr!

about 11 months ago, on my old blog. I posted something about how cool I thought flickr was and how, since I had recently purchased a year's worth of unlimited uploads, I would be posting pictures frequently.

needless to say, i have not done so. however, I am uploading a crapload of pictures right now! :)

heading to Czech in September

my tickets are finalized!!

in a nutshell -

5 sept: austin -> chicago -> london -> prague
12 sept: prauge -> london -> chicago -> austin

should be a great trip. going to attend SuSE Labs.

insomnia

12:21... meeting at 7:30am. can't sleep :-(

btw, i'm 3o min into my ambien and still no luck.

here's to hoping i face dive into my keyboard in a couple of minutesakdl;fjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj

first post! (on this blog)

so i'm sitting here at my office (SBUX in Round Rock) and I start getting emails. I get 300 emails on my BlackBerry from one dude before I start asking myself "wtf is going on here". then it happens, I get 3 instant messages from other people who also have recieved a metric crapload of emails.

so naturally, i call the offender to see what the heck is going on (by this time my blackberry has rebooted twice!). apparently, it was a vacation rule gone south.... I saved a bit from my instant message session for your viewing pleasure:

offender name withheld to protect the... well, guilty.

(11:40:31 AM) Phillip: call helpdesk yet?
(11:40:41 AM) [name withheld]: on now
(11:42:13 AM) Phillip: btw, all the retracts that you requested for people that aren't on our corp mail will get a second email saying that you requested a retraction
(11:42:37 AM) [name withheld]: omg!!!!