So for Christmas a couple months ago, I received something I have wanted for years now - a gift certificate to ThinkGeek.Com.¹ I sat on it for a few weeks, debating on what I wanted to buy. Something really crazy, like my own DIY Neon Sign? Or maybe a super high powered green laser pointer - one who’s beam is visible 6100 meters away²?

But alas, I decided on something much more practical - I bought a Victorinox Cybertool 41³- a new Swiss Army knife. I’ve carried one for years, and although it comes in handy a lot, I wanted something with a bit more utility. Sure, I could get a multi-tool, but they tend to be huge and I much prefer something I can carry in my pocket.

Now looking at the picture, it doesn’t look that big, right? In fact, if you read the specs it doesn’t sound that big either - 3 1/2″ long, 1 1/4″ wide and 3/4″ high. But trust me, as far as Swiss Army knives are concerned, it’s friggin huge. Here’s a comparison between it and my old one.

⁴

Pretty big difference, eh? Here’s a ruler so you can see it a little better - my new one is over twice the width of my old one!

So what do I think of it? Well, after a few months it’s beginning to feel as natural as my old one. It’s a tad heavier, of course, and things are a lot closer together so it can be a tad tougher to open⁵ but other then that it has the same quality feel to it as the knife I’ve carried for 10 years now.

About the name - it’s called the ‘Cybertool 41′ because it contains 41 tools, and the ‘non-standard’ ones are customized to working on PC, servers, and other computer equipment. It features all the usuals, but then throws in a few new ones - like a driver with all the most popular Torx and Posidrive bits you’ll find, as well as a DIP switch setter (Really. I don’t know when I’ve seen a dip switch used in the past 5 years - kids these days have it so easy, pfft!⁶ )

All in all, I’m quite happy to have it now. And I feel secure in the fact that I know I’ll be able to survive in a datacenter, in the dead sea, or anywhere in between. Les Stroud would be proud of me⁷.

1. Seriously, I’ve wanted a gift cert to there for 9 years now! [↩]
2. That’s over 3 and a half friggin miles! [↩]
3. Here’s the link from SwissArmy.Com [↩]
4. Why the hell can’t I ever get photos to line up like I want them too. Screw you Wordpress. [↩]
5. Of course, it might also be because it’s new and doesn’t have that worn in feel to it [↩]
6. Seriously, I just built a new PC 3 months ago - not a DIP switch to be found, ANYWHERE. It’s so easy, it’s stupid [↩]
7. And I <3 Survivorman [↩]

Seriously, I have zero patience. Last Friday I ordered a brand new beautiful XPS laptop from Dell. They still aren’t done building it. I want it now.

Either I missed a field trip that was planned, or my office is closed today for the holiday. I’m the only guy here.

Well, time to take lemons and make lemonade. There’s work to be done!

This weekend in St. Paul will be cold. Bitterly cold. How cold is it? Look for yourself - Saturday’s high is expected to be -5 to 0. The high isn’t even going to hit one! Oi! Combine that with the fact my beloved Mishka will be away at some conference or another most of the time and I have a nice chunk of time to dedicate to myself.

So what to do? Play Team Fortress 2 the entire time while eating pizza from Pizza Luce? Only half right! The pizza I shall have, the video game though - I think I’ll be taking a break.

Most people know about the website/blog called PostSecret. Post Secret takes in postcards you send them with your secrets written down and publishes it to the world. It’s a way of getting things off your chest and being a bit of a voyeur into the deep dark secrets help by people. I check it out every Sunday to see the new ones.

But, I thought to myself, I’d love to see a site about breakups. A site that contains letters of anger, hurt, fear, regret and all that negativity that is contained within the human condition. And to that answer, I registered a website called LoatheLetters.Com. Loathe as in “To find repugnant“. Letters as in “Something one person left for another person with writing on it”. I bought the domains, and have been sitting on them for awhile, this weekend I’ll see if I can’t develop them into something.¹

I’ve been mulling over a few things design wise and have settled on something I think will be simplistic, but intuitive. And instead of taking a blog engine, I’ll see if I can’t write the entire system myself in something like ASP.Net. Why? Because it’s what I know - I’m sure Robert will be chastising me soon for not using RoR but hey, he’s the expert on that, not me. So that’s what I’ll be messing with this weekend - trying to get the backend written.

And, if I can find the proper number of layers required to stave off the arctic like cold hanging around I might head out to Medicine Lake to see this years Art Shantys.²I hope you can join me! Or, even better, go instead of me and film it and let me know what it’s like.

1. I also need to work on my DIY Electronic Engineer portal ShadeTreeEE.Com, too [↩]
2. On Sunday Shanty from Misfit Toys will be having a soup kitchen - woot! [↩]

Back in the middle of 2006¹ I had a sleep study done in the Hennepin County Medical Center’s sleep lab. After it was over, it was determined that I have a condition known as Delayed Sleep-Phase Disorder. I was prescribed some fairly powerful sleep aids² to help me get to sleep and stay that way, and all was well in the world. I’d go to bed around midnight, up at 6am, instantly and ready to go. It was pure heaven.

Then, I gained some weight because I took time off of work, and then I quit smoking and gained even more weight. So now I’m back to the way I was - and because I have seen the other side, it’s an absolute hell. It’s described as permanently having 5 hour jet lag. It’ll never go away. It truly is a walking hell - you are in this odd stupor, not quite awake - not quite asleep. And just when you’re about to go into that deep restorative sleep, it’s time to wake up and function in the real world.

Well, I’m tired of it. Especially with the possibility of going to school full time and still working, I needed to get this taken care of. So I scheduled a meeting with my sleep doctor, and he thinks that this added weight may have moved my light apnea over into serious sleep apnea, and suggested another sleep study in lieu of medication adjustments.

And that sleep study is tonight - the first night I could get in. It’s also my Mishka’s 27th birthday, and I’m going to miss it³ - but it’s for the greater good.
Sleep apnea + the prior condition places my current waking life in a plain of hell once thought unfathomable. Imagine living with a perm 5 hours of jet lag and someone shaking you awake every hour or so when you’re trying to sleep.

Yeah, that’s about what it’s like.

So I’ll be back there again tonight at 8:30 - this time armed with my laptop, it’s air card, and my DS - to do some work, play some games, sleep, and hopefully come back home tomorrow morning with a CPAP to ensure I keep sleeping. Part of me hates going through this again, but a larger part of me is really looking forward to it! Hopefully I can update a little bit during the stay there - hit the site up again around midnight and check out my Twitter.

1. June 21st, to be exact [↩]
2. Temazepam, brand name Restoril - once used by the USSR as a truth serum [↩]
3. But I paid for our kick ass dinner at Dixie’s AND sent her a ginormus bouquet of flowers to her office [↩]

Just wanted to wish you all a Happy New Year - may all your dreams come true and your resolutions resolute.

Our NYE wasn’t a very big deal. Mishka was getting over a really bad cold, and I am just starting a fairly heinous head cold - so we watched Repoman and Clerks 2 while splitting an old bottle of Martini & Rossi that was in the wine cabinet.

So it goes. Every other NYE seems to be foiled by illness, it just means next year it will be GO time.

Indeed, I know, this isn’t my usual daily posts full of wit and links - where they be? Well, it’s crunch time, and I’m being - well - crunched. But, me and Mishka did do our gift exchange yesterday. I gave her some Killer Bunny slippers, a few little things and, oh yeah, an iPhone. She gave me some video games, an XBOX360 Elite (Yowsers!) and the Family Guy big fat party pack - complete with ping pong and poker chips. That’s one DVD box set to down, 1 to go - here’s hoping someone gives me the M*A*S*H Martinis and Medicine Collection!

No, not The Office, but the office. Workshop. Datacenter. Server room. Den. Library. Whatever you want to call it - it’s the geek sanctuary inside of your home. The place you can leave PCBs strewn about and know they will still be there tomorrow. The place where no one questions why you have 27 90mm and 30 80mm fan grills¹. The place that gets your blood flowing, makes you want to complete that project, or maybe start one of the many projects you’ve been meaning to get around to².

I used to have one of those, but no longer.

And it sucks. Srsly.

At one point in time I had a nice 2 bedroom apartment. The larger one with the bigger windows was where I put the bed and other bedroom furniture, and the smaller one with the single window that gets deliciously blocked by a tree outside was my office.

I had a nice little shelving unit setup to act as a server rack. It held a half dozen computers, from an ancient Mac SE to a modern Proliant server. It also held all the networking gear, from a beautiful 24 port gigabit switch with all those pretty blinking lights and fiber optics, down to a wireless access point and the keyboard video and monitor needed to play with all those machines.

It also had a long plain table, about 3′ wide by 9′ long. That was my workbench. It held my soldering iron, soldering supplies and and anything I was working on - and would hold it in perpetuity, until I decided it was done or otherwise got rid of it.

Then, my lease was up, so I decided to move to a new place. At the last minute, that fell through, and I tried to stay where I was - but they had already rented it out. So I was stuck with what they had left, a 1 bedroom.

Oh, I tried to make it work - the living room was more or less the office now - minus the capability to leave things out for months or years at a time. I could try it, but when you live with people you need to be a tad considerate of them, and understand that although I have a method to all this, they don’t get it - and really probably never would.

So I did what I could to make it ok. I couldn’t really complete any projects - my style is to work on multiple projects concurrently, switching when I get stuck/bored/waiting on parts/etc - and I couldn’t start any new ones, because of space issues, and because I’d have to put the stuff away when I was done. That isn’t acceptable to me.

Then, I decided to move us to a loft. I thought it’d be great, and don’t get me wrong, I do love it - it’s just there’s even less privacy because it’s so open. There are partitions making 2 rooms of sorts, and one is acting as an ad-hoc office for me, but sound travels and I just feel so trapped in there sometime.

I really need to find us a new place when the lease is up, or rent a place I can call my own and move everything over there. Not sure what I’ll do yet.

So, do you have a sanctuary?

1. Really good deals on both and poor reading skills. Separate purchases, but I thought they would work together. I don’t know why I thought that. [↩]
2. I have a baker’s dozen of projects to start [↩]

Greetings,

I’ve done a setting change and a new feature.

First, the setting change. I’ve disabled comment moderation, as it seems as though my antispam software is doing a bang up job of blocking anything that isn’t human written - kudos to you, software.

Secondly, the new feature. I’ve integrated Gravatar into the comment system. Gravatar is a Global AVATAR. You sign up on their website with just an email address, and associate an avatar to that address. Then, any website that supports gravatar will then insert your icon whenever you leave a comment (based on your email address). It seems to work great, so give it a shot.

So it truly did snow. Right smack downtown we received about 5 glorious inches of it - and there’s more scheduled for tomorrow.
I did take some pictures looking out of the loft, which I forgot to upload and will do so when I get home. I was going to walk around taking photos, but it was cold and windy and the snow was falling pretty heavily so I said pffft, screw it - back to Team Fortress 2!

But yes, terribly sorry about not uploading a picture. Sometimes it can seem like such a pain - download to my PC, upload to my Flickr account, blah blah blah - I just wish something would do it automagically. Oh wait, there is - Eye-Fi is a recent innovation and one people have been singing the praises of. It combines a 2GB Secure-Digital flash storage card and a WiFi connection all in one wonderfully orange package. You can upload the photos to your PC or you can send them to 1 of 15 photo sharing sites - such as Flickr. The card holds onto new photos until it senses that the WiFi connection you’ve setup is available, and then sends just the newest untransferred photos on over. Don’t want the world seeing all your photos? Configure them to upload as ‘private’ and there you go. Convenience on go! I could really use it and *gasp* don’t ya know, it sells on Amazon and is conveniently on my Wish List! Oh, and with it I’ll need an SD to Compact Flash adapter too. Now get going - Christmas is only a few weeks away!

The St. Paul Winter Carnival is selling shares of stock this year. No, not stock like you’d see on NASDAQ, but a stock in the festival. It’s called the Stock in a Block program and for just $122 “the public can help keep the Carnival “cool” by buying stock in a block of ice. Five dollars from each stock sale will go to the Dorothy Day Center in Saint Paul to help provide warm meals for fellow community members in need.”¹

1. See http://www.winter-carnival.com/stock_in_a_block/ [↩]