Magic City VitaeLog

I recently got a speeding ticket. With the fact that I didn't have my most recent insurance paperwork in the car (which expired 3 weeks prior), I had to go see a judge to enter a plea on my 'case'. The last time I had gotten a speeding ticket was while I was living in Southern California. The system there worked very well :

- You get a letter telling you how much your fine is.
- You pay it with the enclosed pre-paid envelope.

Of course, you can go to the courts and plead not guilty and get your time in court. In this case, I was caught, and I didn't feel the need to waste time fighting something I'd end up loosing anyway. Check in the mail, done with that.

This is a big thank you to the people of Boston. They are a good host to tourists, and I might say, some of the best I've encountered yet. We recently took the freedom trail which snakes across downtown Boston. With tour book in hand, we often stopped to make sure we were heading in the right direction, and to read about the items along the path. We (purposely) went off the trail to see items not on the trail (inexplicably, the tea party marker). While off the trail, and with our noses in the tour book, we were continuously asked if were we wanted to go. In some cases, people went out of their ways to approach us for help.

So, to the people of Boston : Great job. You make exploring your city a joy... now if you could just learn how to drive.

With the recent (unwanted) change in hardware for my server, I've found myself unable to get enough USB bandwidth together to run all my webcams. Since I don't want to run them at anything but 640x480, I'm left with the option to just have three webcams running : The YardCam, The OfficeCam and the LobsterCam. Since I'm not going to be in the office for the next few weeks, you won't see the Office Cam on at all :)

Hopefully, that'll be ok :)

As I said in my last post, I've been having difficulties with my server. I recently gave in with my personal workstation, and parted it with stuff from my old server to make a new, supposedly better one. The problem is that my ASUS M2n32 SLI Deluxe board is pile. I've had it in for RMA once already, and it came back with almost all the capacitors bulging. That means that they are going to die, soon, and most likely take something with them when they do. I have thoughts that some part of the CPU is already dieing, and I have cheap ram sitting around. I figure if the thing blows up, it blows up.

Well, actually, my personal workstation has been down, and I'm moving hardware around to see what I can pull together. I've decommisioned the old hardware for SATAN, and upgraded it to an ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe mobo, with 3GB of RAM and an AMD 5600 + on there. It's quick and toasty now, but I can't seem to get the drivers squared away. I only have one of the two GigE ports working. I had to put another NIC in there for it to route/firewall for me. I also have 3 IDE drives that I need, but only one IDE port on this board. I had to shuffle through my old bag of stuff and pull out an IDE card. I never thought I'd need that again.