This is a day late, but I got the NXE (New Xbox Experience) downloaded yesterday,a nd I must say, I am impressed. The new interface is easy to use, Graphically Pleasing and I can see why Microsoft thinks this will help target 'non-gamers'.

Elsewhere, I was offered a part-time position as a PHP developer, so I finally got a break and can follow my dreams to a great career. I am also working with 2 friends to form a partnership and get our business license. Stay tuned more for that.

Nanobyte is coming along quickly. I got comment functionality working, but not fully implemented. I also broke my backend to allow posting articles, so it's been a few days since an update has been posted there.

More Good news, My webhost has extended my plan to include UNLIMITED STORAGE AND BANDWIDTH.

I'll wait for you to close your mouth and wipe your chin..

Now for some not-so-good news. My server had a catastrophic failure. First, the largest of the 2 Hard drives went out, and I spent about 3 days getting everything recovered from it. That one is under warranty. 3 days ago, the OS drive started failing. Another 18 hours of drive recovery.. and this one is out of warranty. I think it was the power supply, as once I replaced that and changed P2P-EXT timeout in the BIOS to 1MS everything is working more stably, still need a new hard drive though.

I leave you with the hard drive I WISH I could get:
Dream Hard Drive

I came across something I just just HAD it share today. I decided it was about time I reinstall Steam, since I formatted my PC a few weeks ago. While I was downloading the Steam installer, I noted the system specs:

System Requirements

* Windows 2000, XP or Vista
* 64 MB RAM
* 400 Mhz processor
* 1GB HD space (recommended)
* Internet connection (broadband recommended)

Sure, they look pretty standard, unless you are familiar with Steam. I knew there was one serious flaw in the requirements, but went on installing anyways.

Before I formatted my system, I had backed up my Steam folder - all 21GB of it. That would be for exactly 4 games from Steam. 21 is a little more than 1 if I may say so.

Anyways, I finished installing the client, and decided to download the Left4Dead demo. I received a dialog stating: Disk Space Required: 2220MB Once again, That is over 2BG of data, that I was told by the steam requirements I wouldn't need!

My goal here is not to complain that I was lied to. It is instead to bring a humorous to people's attention. If you are going to install Steam, PLEASE make sure you have at LEAST 20GB of free space.

I had quite a bit of accomplishment on Nanobyte today. User profiles are in place and functional, code highlighting is working and I was able to fix a handful of bugs as well!

The updated code has been committed to SVN.

You can view all the Nanobyte updates at: www.nanobytecms.com

I always try to keep politics out of my rants.. not because I am afraid of starting something.. but because there is always something to say. That said, I have one thing to say:

Get out and vote, or don't whine about the electees!

Alright.. now on to more important matters.

My Xbox finally came back for repairs today. This is the end of a 6 week process that made me rip out my hair. IN late September Mary and I planned on a night of Guitar Hero, but instead got the 3 red rings of death (RROD). I called Xbox, and they were very cordial and stated that I would be shipped a box to return the unit to them in.

2 days later that repair was canceled. I called back and repeated the process. I was told that I would receive a mailing label by email to use this time. This was also canceled 48 hours later.

My third call did not turn out any better, but I was assured it would go through. Now, please note all these calls were canceled because I do not have a standard street address, and instead have a "Grid Address" in the form of N12W12345 MyStreet Dr., where N is North, and W is West.

The fourth call I was pretty upset, and was told that they were not allowed to make any more service calls for me because it had failed too many times. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with that person's manager, and was once again told I would be emailed the shipping label.

Can we guess what happened next? Yes, this call too, was canceled. I put it off for about a week, then finally called back. When I was asked if I was SURE I could receive mail at this address, I went off on the person on the other end. They put me on hold for no less than 19 minutes and finally explained that my address would not validate because it was in their system twice.

Twice. Wouldn't that send up a flag that someone maybe should have taken as "Oh, I guess this is the correct address". I received a Box overnight, and finally got my Xbox back today - exactly 7 days later. The only consolation is that I was sent a brand new unit (mfgr date 8/29/08) which means it will not have the same flaws, and will be MUCH MUCH quieter. Oh, and a free month of Xbox Live.

My good friend Nick has given me an early Christmas present. I had previously mentioned that I have been laid off. I have been planning on finishing Nanobyte in my spare time beginning next week.

Nick was nice enough to get Nanobyte an official website. The new home of Nanobyte is now www.nanobytecms.com!. So far I have just copied the files over, so it looks identical to the test site. I soon plan to make it "pop" if you will..

All Nanobyte news will now be posted on NanobyteCMS.com.

Well, I had planned a great post for yesterday, seeing as I got Bacula working on my domain at home. Unfortunately I was dealt a blow and had to skip out on the posting for the night.

I was informed yesterday that my last day at my current job will be Friday. This is not due to any reason other than over budgeting. Thus is the life of a contractor - thrown to the proverbial curb. What is even worse is I was in the middle of several automation projects and I was defining standard procedures for PC imaging - something that was needed desperately here.

My next few days will be busy - but I sincerely hope I can get some posting in, as I have been having slight withdrawls from it.

I spent the majority of last week trying to set up my server as a PDC (Primary Domain Controller). I followed a tutorial online to do this, and got pretty far in. When it came time to add users however, I received several errors.

I was trying to add a user using the smbldap-tools, which once working proved to be very handy.

The road I took to get the scripts working on the other hand - not so fun.

I tried various tutorials, then decided to stick with one that seemed the most relevant for my situation on the opensuse wiki.

I Googled this error and came up with the solution:

There is another trick: go to Local Area Connection Properties of windows >
Tcp/ip properties > Advanced TCP/IP Settings > WINS tab, then add the ip
address of your PDC server (assumed it's a wins server either) and in the
netbios setting choose "Enable NetBIOS over TCP/IP". Good luck.

I plan on writing my own tutorial that is more explanatory about how to go about this massive configuration, but for now, please refer to the tutorials I have linked.

Well, last week was no less eventful that the week before it. Taranis - my server - was having some issues and it turns out the OS drive in it went out. This was due to a few reasons. Windows Home server balances storage every60 - 90 mins regularly, and the OS drive was having some write errors which were aggravated by the constant activity. On top of that, I ran some hardware diagnostics and saw the Hard Drive operating temperature was about 120 degrees F. With proper airflow, they should be closer to 90 degrees or less.

Unfortunately, I only had an 80GB hard drive for a replacement. Instead of putting the smaller drive in the server, I replaced my desktop hard drive, then used that drive for the server. I spent alot of time debating whether I wanted to use Linux, or stick with WHS. After hours of backing up my data, I decided to try openSuse.

OpenSuse is great. It's very easy to install and very robust. It has a package manager similar to aptitude on Debian. My plans for the server now are being extended to PDC, File and Printer server, as well as VM host for 1 or 2 virtual machines. When the server is Idle, it uses 244 MB of RAM and 300-400MHz of CPU. I am very very happy with the performance of Novell's Linux Distro.

To find out more about openSuse, you can visit their website at Opensuse Dot Org .

In other news,, not much has been happening. I hope to have some time to put more work into Nanobyte soon, since the server has taken priority. Once I get the server into a functional state once more, I'll have a chance to post a few tutorials based on the new setup - including Bacula, tightvnc, xrdp, samba, ldap and more!

The past few days have been extraordinarily busy. Mary ended up winning the contest to play onstage with Weezer, and I didn't get home that night until 1:30 AM. She did awesome, and rocked..Hard. Unfortunately, they were having security issues so no one got to go backstage, and Weezer didn't even do autographs, so Mary was pretty bummed.

I also ended up working on the theming for Nanobyte quite a bit more, and I really like it now. I'm going for Blues and Blacks for simplicity and professionalism.

I also have been working Second shift Yesterday and Today to cover for a Co-Worker that just got married (Congratulations Chris!!), so my entire schedule has been thrown off this week so far - and to add to it, I get to come in at 7 AM tomorrow.

Ive decided I am going to try to go back to school and get my AA degree in Network Administration, and maybe persue a BA. I've taken up some scripting tasks at work and I'm trying to relearn VB and VB scripting, which is actually not as hard as I remember luckily. Maybe I can get out of the Helpdesk someday!

Anyways, I guess that is it for now, but stay tuned!

P.S. - The picture is from the concert, Mary is the Violinist up front in the skirt.

Ironically, the day I post a YouTube video, XKCD posted a comic about YouTube commenters.