More updating in progress. Changed the media menu so there will be no need for so much of the drilling down. While I was at it I managed to export some pictures from the previous weekend in Iowa. It was quite a crowd. The more the merrier as they say!

The pictures are here - http://media.thesergents.net/pictures/2006-Pictures/2006-12-Christmas2.html

• http://www.litebackpacker.com/ - Lite backpacking equipment
• http://www.backpacking.net/beginner.html - Good information about backpacking ideas and what to pack and other advise.

BWCA

We got to Jackfish Bay this last time we went. 9/12/05 - 9/16/05

Hope everybody has had a great start to the new year! Another one under the belt. Sam is going to be one in a couple of weeks. Almost impossible to believe.

Still making a ton of changes. Footloose and fancy free. If you happen to visit thesergents.net and it's not immediately responding it's because I've broken something. I realize this is nothing new. And looking through old posts I can see that I have written that statement on several occasions. If I had search working I would prove it. Where's that list again?

Unfiled

• online apprentice
• Luthier Schools
• http://my.execpc.com/~nostberg/
• http://www.madinter.com/
• Musical Instrument Makers Forum
• http://www.cybozone.com/luthier/ - Interesting links of reading materials. Looks like they are working on getting something up and going someday.

Luthiers

• http://www.reynoldsguitars.com/

Pieces and Parts

• http://www.gilberttuners.com/ - Gilbert tuners. Nice.
• Allied Lutherie
• http://www.stewmac.com
• http://www.lmii.com

Still having a hard time believing it. Our good friend Josh Green died on 12/19/2006. We always had this joke of rating things by look and smell. Looks good, smells good was obviously the ideal state, but others were not necessarily bad. For example his old brown truck that took us from Minnesota to Virginia Beach, VA to pick up his '68 mustang looked bad and smelled bad (thanks to some mice that built a nest in the air intake). Got us where we needed to go, and back again.

Josh and I sat closer for longer than two men should ever have to. In the booming days of Net Perceptions we shared a cube space no bigger than the average toilet stall. Too many stories to even recount. We shared many good times and a few sad ones. He was always willing to help a friend out. Must have put about 100,000 miles on his honda civic doing so.

Here is the link to the Caring Bridge site for Josh.

Looks good, smells good.

Been trying to figure out the javascript weirdness for Safari. Had done searches before without success. This time I came up with this from Apple's web site. Actually comes in handy. Didn't help me solve my problem. Will require much more brain power than I had at the time.

14. How do I debug JavaScript in Safari?

Safari's "Debug" menu allows you to turn on the logging of JavaScript errors. To display the debug menu, open a Terminal window and type:

• defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

Now relaunch Safari and check the "Log JavaScript Exceptions" menu item in the Debug menu. In Safari 1.3 and above, select the "Show JavaScript Console" menu item and the JavaScript Console window will open to display JavaScript exceptions. For Safari versions before 1.3, JavaScript exceptions will appear in the Console application (/Applications/Utilities/Console).

Safari 1.3 and above supports explicit logging of arbitrary information - similar to Objective-C NSLog() - function by using window.console.log() in your JavaScript. All messages are routed to the JavaScript Console window and show up nicely in a dark green, to easily differentiate themselves from JavaScript exceptions.

We had expected this for some time, yet it's still unfortunate.

Grandma passed away January 3, 2007 at the age of 84. My cousin Sean has the details of her rich life. To quote..

• Margaret Elizabeth Deaver (Parker) was born in Randolph, Missouri to Harvey Parker and Gladys Elizabeth Parker on March 8, 1922. She was married to Donald James Deaver and had 10 children, almost countless grandchildren and great grandchildren, and even a couple great-great grandchildren.
Grandma flew out to Maryland to help take care of me after my auto accident in high school. She was a very caring and special person in my life. The countless summer days on the farm in Nebraska. I will always remember her laugh and here great smile. Truly one of a kind.


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Poppy Seed Bread (or cake, as it's too good to be bread...)
Bread:

• 3 c. flour
• 1 1/2 t. salt
• 1 1/2 t. baking powder
• 3 eggs
• 1 1/2 c. milk
• 1 1/3 c. oil
• 2 1/2 c. sugar
• 1 1/2 T. poppy seeds
• 1 1/2 t. vanilla
• 1 1/2 t. almond flavoring
• 1 1/2 t. butter flavoring

Topping:

• 1/4 c. orange juice
• 3/4 c. powdered sugar
• 1/2 t. vanilla
• 1/2 t. almond flavoring
• 1/2 t. butter flavoring

Directions:
Mix together ingredients. Place in (2) 9 x 5 greased and floured loaf pans. Bake 60 - 70 minutes @ 350 degrees. Remove immediately. Cool 10 minutes and then spoon topping over loaves.

• http://www.csszengarden.com/
• http://www.alvit.de/handbook/
• http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
• http://www.wpdfd.com/editorial/basics/index.html
• http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic/
• http://www.cssvault.com/
• http://glish.com/css/home.asp
• http://webhost.bridgew.edu/etribou/layouts/index.html
• http://www.positioniseverything.net/
• http://www.stylegala.com/

These are all the old links from the bookmark database on the old site. I was really missing some of these, so I exported them and am going to put them here until I can figure out how I'm going to get organized. That happens so rarely I'm sure these will be here for quite a long time.

url and title	notes
Slashdot	News for nerds. You know the drill.
Google News	Really cool summary of events.
Star Tribune	Minneapolis news
Pioneer Press	Minneapolis/St. Paul news.
My Yahoo!	This was my favoral portal. I've moved on since then.
My Way	This is the most awesomest portal site ever. In my opinion. I am thinking about giving up My Yahoo! permanently. I don't use all those calendaring features and such anyways.
Audacity	This is an excellent multi track editor. I don't know why I didn't try it before. Well I did, but it was too long ago. Bottom line - it rocks.
Stewart MacDonald	Guitar pices and such
Music Makers	Another good site on making ones own instrument.
Xiph makers of OGG	ogg vorbis is cool. Don't know weather I should put this under software or music? You decide!
Free musics	Some good pdf's and the like. This guy has his stuff together so to speak.
Guitar archives	Good tab and such
Guitar Building infos	This site had some good info and links on building guitars.
Ecasound multitrack editor	This is the tool I use to record and mix my music.
JK Lutherie	Good books on guitar making, tube amps and other such fun things.
Sweep Sound Software	This is some cool stuff. Need to play with it a lot more.
Ardour	Really cool sound mixer/editor of professional quality for linux.
Sheet music plus	Lots and lots of sheet music. Will be good if and when I get up to speed with all this guitar stuff.
Arkiv Music	They have some really obscure classical music recordings.
JpGraph for PHP	This possibly saved my life for work stuff. Very easy to use way to generate graphs in php.
PyX	Python Graphing library. Looks like it could be cool. Haven't tried it yet though.
Python module archives	Good place to look
RFCs	The more you can request comments the better off you are.
WWW Consortium	Like I could ever forget this link.
Bluefish HTML editor	I like this one.
FAQ for C++	should keep track of
RFC on SNMP	blah
STL docs on SGI	Standard template library docs on SGI's site. Wish I could find them somewhere else also. These are kinda outdated.
STL starter help	This helped me when I was first starting up with C++ again.
CGI Specification	Environment variables and the like, oh joy. Actually seems to have some of the only really solid information I have found. Better than the damn rfc's anyhow.
PAM howto	Good info on PAM
Any GUI for Python	Should really keep an eye on this. Could be incredible if it works.
Plone	Cool user friendly project based on the CMF for zope. Looks like it could be cool. A must try
Python Imaging Library	This is some kickin' image manipulation libraries for python. They are used in my picture database. They don't seem to update them very frequently, but they seem to be rock solid for my needs.
CSS Help	This is a good little resource for Cascading Style Sheet tutorial stuffs. It's been invaluable for me as I get more into web development.
Python Cookbook	Tons of fun reading.. If you are into reading about python that is..
RDesktop for Linux	TS client for linux. Greatest thing since sliced bread.
Pine	Best mail client ever
GNU Mirror	One of my favorite GNU mirrors. Seems like I can always get in at this one.
Debian rsync mirrors	mirrors for sync
Tridia VNC	A comercial type supported version of VNC
Gnu Privacy Gaurd	Use this! Please?
Tight VNC	Compressed VNC
Strip for PalmOS	Great tool to keep things private on the palm
GAIM	Best IM client out there for Linux.
Freshmeat	Good place to look for software
W3M Web browser	This is truly cool for those of us who are still into text everything.
W3M mode for emacs	This matches with the ultimately cool web browser w3m. It's emacs mode w3m. I don't know if it gets better than this.
Phillips binary kernel module	This allows better resolution on my webcam. Pretty darn nifty.
Tom's Fonts	This guy has made a lot of really cool fonts.
Plucker home page	Really nifty tool for loading html on a palm pilot. I enjoy it very much. Also has some neato scripts to help download webpages and parse stuff. Very cool indeed.
Rogue for the Palm Pilot	This rulez. That's all I have to say.
VNC the original	The original vnc package. I think it is still at that address, but I do not really go for it often. Using tightvnc more these days when I need to.
PGP 4 Pine	This is the plugin I use for pine
iSQL Viewer	Java tool for database administration. Trying it out now, will get back and fill in more when I get it to work.
Oak DNS Server	DNS Server written in python. Looks to be very cool. Have not had a chance to try it yet.
BWCA	Boundary Waters kind of official like site.
DNR of Minnesota	They have a really nice site.
Mountainbike	good place to try and get motivation.
Sierra trading post	Usually have cheap camping stuff and such.
Erik the bike man	This is one of my favorite spots to get bike stuff here in the Twin Cities. They are super friendly and always willing to help out. Been buying stuff there since '98.
Chequamegon Area Mountain Bike Associati	This looks like some good times. Will try to go this summer and update with findings.
Twin Cities Bicycling Club	Good events and rides and news and info and stuff.
Canoe Country	Good info on the BWCA
Corvette Parts by Mid America	Madvet has tons of pieces and parts. What did people do before the Internet?
Classic Car Wiring stuff	Good site that has wiring diagrams and all sorts of neat electrical stuff for old cars like my Vette.
Bestest tire size calculator ever	Ever needed to know the dimensions of a tire before buying? Josh sent me this link. Very cool tire size calculator.
Corvette FAQ	Quite a bit of good information stored up here. Just found it recently and need to dig into it a little more.
Vintage Wheel Works	Some really cool wheels. Dana like
Volunteer Vette Products	Misc vette catalog.
Corvette Collection	These are the folks I bought my Vette through. Very helpful and extremely staight forward. I will write more words of praise once spring gets here and I can actually drive it.
Eckler's	Possible new favorite shopping site. They have the functionality to let you "lock in" your year of Corvette. Makes browsing for parts a breeze. They seem to have just about everything with a mix of reproduction parts and upgrades. Nice.
Zip Early Corvette Store	Some really odd stuff here. Even weather striping which I will need.
Newstalgia Wheels	Good place to get a look at different wheels
Paragon Reproductions	Dad pointed me to this one. Chrome and other fun stuff for Corvettes that need it.
Vette Finders	Fun to look at what Corvettes are going for and to peek at what others have done.
Corvette Action Center	This is my favorite Corvette forum I have found thus far. Most people on there are pretty helpful and knowledgable.
Every FAQ known to man	Hopefully it can remain open. The last time I looked they were having some difficulties.
Internet Software Consortium	Good dns and dhcp and stuff.
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture	Sound drivers that really work.
Big Brother	Here's some cool software for monitoring the network.
Ettercap sniffing stuff	Haven't tried it still, but I'm marking it just in case I want to.
OpenSSH	Must have!
NTP	Network Time Protocol
Exim	Best MTA in town!
SNMP Daemon	for linux and such
Debian Packages	nuff said.
CFEngine	Powerful configuration utility
Solaris Package Archive	Very necessary sometimes.
Sun Freeware	Excellent site. Helped me out of a pinch more than once.
Virus scanner for Exim	Should really look into something like this.
RS6000 documents	help help help
FireWall Builder	Really cool tool for building iptables rules.
FreeBSD handbook	Once upon a time I used this as a resource for some stuff. I don't really need it anymore, but figure I'll keep it around.
Smart Streams	Good list of realplayer type sites.
RAID Zone	Cool hardware.
JNCS	Once upon a time this was where I purchased all my computer stuff.
Tolkien-esk art gallery	artsy stuffs
Microsoft deceptions	interesting read
Plucker Books	Books and information in palm doc format for viewing on the palm pilot
13 Ways to Hate VB	Thought this article was interesting. Don't know how long it will be around.
The Onion	If you don't laugh there's something wrong with you.
BOFH	Bastard Operator From Hell.
Huumor, it's funny stuff	I like this site. Seem to always be able to find what I'm looking for.
Stick Figure Death Theater	You have to check it out if you haven't seen it already.
Star Trek Drinking Game	Lucky we didn't know where this page was in college. It would have given us too many extra ideas.
Interface hall of shame	This is seriously funny stuff. I love it.
Dave Zeisler	Dave's page of stuff and things. He's got a picture database also! What more can one ask for?
Jim Haley	Jim's got a page too! Pictures and other such fun. Check it out.
Jason and Melissa	The Kolb's family photos and other goodness!
Sean Gomez	My ultimately cool cousin Sean has a pretty nifty web site started. I really like the look and feel. Nice!
Josh Green	The Greenz.net is Josh's little family site. Check out pictures of Addie and the Mustang. Could you ask for more?
Classical GuitarShop	Awesome site I found from googles advertising while doing some searches for guitar info.
Classical Guitar Store	They have lots of sheet music I have not found elsewhere.
Guitar Salon	Check out the $10,000 and up category! Good guitars and some nice articles. They have a pretty nice forum also. Been hitting this one a lot lately.
World Guitarist	This site has a ton of links to just about everything having to do with classical guitar. They seem to have articles also, but I have yet to read them. Time, need a lot of time.
Classical and Flamenco Guitars by Classical Guitarra	Pretty neat place that makes guitars in Paraguay of all places. If someone is interested in a lower price guitar that is possibly of good quality this might be the place.
Rosewood Guitars	Yet another little guitar store. This one is in Seattle. Always fun to look at what is currently out on the market.
Jeremy Locke - Luthier	Pretty cool Australian luthier. Has a bunch of articles and stuff I should probably read if I ever find enough time.
Guitar Gallery Music	The site may not look like much, but I have ordered quite a few items from them. They have almost everything you can think of and can get things in a hurry. Nice service!
Fine and Rare Classical Guitars	Check it out. This guy is in Boone Iowa. Probably a good thing I wasn't into playing classical when I attended Iowa State.
The Podium	This place is right by the U of MN campus. The people are super friendly and quite knowledgable about guitars. It's also the only place in quite a few miles to carry really nice classicals. Sure Guitar Center might have a few, but they are still from the big names in luthiery and there isn't much variety. The Podium also has quite a bit of sheet music stacked on their walls. Can get lost in there for quite some time.
Dan Zeff Guitars	Another guitar store that has a pretty nice online presence. Also a great variety of classical guitars.
Classic Gutiar International	Pretty nice web site. Don't know a whole lot about it other than they have a lot of guitars that are expensive. ha!
Tornavoz Music	Somehow these guys were split off from Guitar Salon. So they are the importers and Guitar Salon is a store front or something. I'm sure you can find it somewhere on their website. Just trying to keep score here.
Classical Guitar Midi Archives	Kind of cheese-like, but pretty helpful when you are trying to figure out a song. They have a midi scores for almost every classical guitar song there is.
Prisloe Guitars	Really good looking handmade guitars.
Sheet Music Catalog	Have yet to purchase anything from this site, but they sure have a lot of stuff.
Classical Guitar Sheet Music	Another site where there are certain classical guitar scores for download.
Paracho del Norte Custom Guitars	Pretty neat custom classical place.
Collins Guitars	Nice handmade classicals and steel strings. Most notably he uses a 12 hole bridge which I thought was a really good idea.
Every Note - Sheet music downloads	Pretty nifty site with PDF downloadable music. Seems to be mostly in the $1.50 - $3.00 range for scores. They have a huge selection and are adding more all the time. Need to see if they can get some Torroba in there.
Zavaleta's La Casa de Guitarras	Zavaleta's La Casa de Guitarras specializes in classical and flamenco guitars made in Spain. Or at least that's what their site says. They have quite a few higher end instruments. Fun to look.
Classical Guitar Tablature	Tons of classical guitar tab. It's okay in a pinch over standard notation.
Minnesota Guitar Society	Good lists of local concerts and general classical guitar regional information.
Bridge Classical Guitars	Another classical guitar monger. I think I stumbled across this one because he carries both Schramm and Angella. The web can really be a fun place sometimes.
Casa de la Guitarra	This site has some really interesting history bits. More reading necessary.

It was sad to be at Grandma's funeral, but good to see so many family members. Got to visit with the majority of my eight trillion cousins. We shared some good laughs. The line of the weekend had to be "I'm pretty sure you can't say that to a kid".
You know what Steve, I think you're right.

Had a mighty fine steak at Dude's Steak House. We managed to take up about half the restaurant. If you're ever in downtown Sidney - stop by and check it out. Sam enjoyed from Fried macaroni and cheese nibblers. Who would have thought?

Had a few beers and some people played some pool at Goldy's Bar and Grill. Okay, I have to be honest. I started to write this up thinking about linking to maps of Sidney, but after two google searches and successfully finding websites for both establishments I have to admit I'm impressed. Not sure who is going through Sidney making sure everyone has a web site and that it's actually findable in Google, but they are doing one hell of a job.

Make that three for three. The funeral was held at St. Patrick's. I hadn't attended a service there since I was much younger. The remodeling job they did was amazing. I was quite impressed with the look of the church. Didn't even remember to pack the camera for this trip. Derned.

So, back to work it is. After a long holiday season, that I can't say I'm going to miss, it will be good to get back to normal. That is after Sam's upcoming celebration. Time to monkey around.

Still going through some gyrations configuring everything. Getting a handle on how it might be better to layout all the content, fighting with some javascript elements like the menu, and importing all the mucked up blog entries from the old wiki. Figure if I do a couple of imports everyday it will only take me until the end of the year to get them all in. By that time I will want to redesign the whole thing again, so it will work out perfectly.

Trying to find some time to sort through some more pictures. Me thinks it's about time for some archiving. Have a ton of video to go through as well. That requires a little more time and quite a bit more concentration. Onward and upward!

Record time indeed. I gave myself a 10 minute break during work to set up an RSS feed for my site. I didn't really think I could get it done, but in fact I did! How's that for some Django power?!?

The feed is now located at http://www.thesergents.net/feeds/latest/. I tested it in Google's reader and it works just fine. Just tested it under Safari as well - looks good. If you're curious I followed these simple setup directions almost exactly. The only tricky thing I had to do was define a get_absolute_url method for my Page class. If only everything were that easy.
I'll try to get some of those fancy little xml logos up and put the link meta junk in the header so feed readers will automatically pick it up. Maybe a post lunch project.

A lesson to be learned from typing the wrong e-mail address! A Minneapolis couple decided to go to Florida to thaw out during a particularly icy winter. They planned to stay at the same hotel where they spent their honeymoon. Because of hectic lives, it was difficult to coordinate their travel schedules. So, the husband left Minnesota and flew to Florida on Thursday, with his wife flying down the following day.The husband checked into the hotel. There was a computer in his room, so he decided to send an e-mail to his wife. However, he accidentally left out one letter in her e-mail address, and without realizing his error, sent the e-mail. Meanwhile, somewhere in Houston, a widow had just returned home from her husband's funeral. He was a minister who was called home to glory following a heart attack. The widow decided to check her e-mail expecting messages from family and friends. After reading the message, she screamed and fainted. The widow's son rushed into the room, found his mother on the floor, and saw the computer screen which read:

• To: My Loving Wife
• Subject: I've Arrived
• Date: January 10, 2006
• I know you're surprised to hear from me. They have computers here now and you are allowed to send emails to your loved ones. I've just arrived and have been checked in. I see that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you then! Hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was.
  P.S. Sure is freaking hot down here.

This site

This sight is powered by the exceptional Django web framework running on Twisted proxied by nginx. Depending on your viewpoint (optimist v. pessimist) this site is either mostly working or somewhat broken at any given time. As a developer the urge to tinker and play with new technologies is irresistible.

While cleaning up the old blog entries I ended up with a bunch of somewhat arbitrary links. A little window into my browsing habits, at least when they are all munged together like this.

• Spotlight from the command line in OS X
• http://www.vintage-instruments.com/ - A crazy little site I had never seen before selling vintage guitars
• http://www.housesofminneapolis.com/ - Great start to a site that has a ton of information about houses in Minneapolis. All sorts of fun to read about.
• http://www.winlike.com/ - crazy ajax window manager deal. Useful or cool?
• http://www.naturalchild.org/guest/john_gatto.html - Kind of depressing article about schools not doing much good for us.
• http://oodt.jpl.nasa.gov/better-web-app.mov - good presentation on the most popular web frameworks that are out there today.
• Minnesota guitar society.
• 12 fret guitar store has some cool classicals
• Really funny Rush for dummies. Might help to know some Rush tunes to actually make this funny.
• Douglas Adams 1999 essay on the internet.
• Classical guitar composers list.
• Free SprintPCS ringers
• Chuck Norris Facts. I haven't laughed that hard in.. well a day or so.
• The Naxos music label has a boat load of classical CD's - that's what they do.
• Guitar Review magazine

It's been a couple of months since I moved The Sergents to Google's Hosted Apps, and I'm here to give both thumbs up. Currently we're only taking advantage of the email and calendaring, which works really well. It can be a bit of a pain if switching entirely over off an old system. There's no importing of mail into Google's mail. Sure, contacts, but not the actual mail. I can imagine that would create a nightmare for support personnel, but it sure would make it nice. The alternative seems to be to exist in both the old realm and the new - simultaneously. As with most technology there doesn't seem to be an end game. Rather a long series of blunders, rehashing, reloads, reboot, and reconfigurations. Somewhere along the way it ends up being better. I think. Maybe it's more that it became so horrible and busted that any semblance of working order is euphoric.

This chicken recipe has quickly become one of our favorites. It's pretty easy to make on top of it which then makes it a staple menu item.

Ingredients

• 2 tsp. olive oil
• 2 shallots, chopped
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 4 boneless, skinless chicken breast halves
• ½ cup flour
• ½ tsp. salt
• ¼ tsp. black pepper
• 2 Tbsp. butter
• 2 Tbsp. dry sherry
• 2 Tbsp. fresh squeezed lemon juice
• 1 Tbsp. capers

Directions

In large skillet, heat olive oil. Saute shallots and garlic until tender; set aside. Pound chicken breasts to an even thickness. In small bowl, combine flour, salt and pepper; dredge chicken in mixture. In large skillet over medium heat, melt butter; lightly brown chicken (2 to 3 minutes per side). Increase heat to high. Stir in sauted shallots and garlic, sherry, lemon juice and capers. Continue cooking until sauce thickens. Serves 4.

Under Safari the menu to the left over there was not working out. Really weird that it would randomly display, or not. Or sometimes would render, but incorrectly. Couldn't find any love on Google or any of the Yahoo! groups or message boards. This made me red. I finally started deleting references to CSS files and pulling out javascript at random. The solution? The order of the CSS files matters. At least in my case. Heck, it might even be documented somewhere, but I have to say I've read quite a few YUI docs and have seen nothing of the sort. So in the end I had to make sure that container/assets/container.css was not before ??? - yet to figure that one out. Maybe before the initialization of the menu javascript? At least it seems to be working for now. Wait until I start doing some of the windowing junk I want to do eventually. World of hurt.

Call me crazy, but I think it's fun.

I don't know if I've laughed this hard in quite some time. You don't need to be a guitar player to appreciate this parody.

YouTube - Yngwie Malmsteen Parody

I nearly messed myself. Oh my...

Well we forgot our camera again. Not often you get this many family members in the same place at the same time. Luckily someone remembered!

That little guy sure knows how to make a mess!

Had a couple of really fun events this weekend. First was Knowledge Front Friday mixed with the company holiday party! Not sure it gets any better than that. Everyone came over to the Sergent compound for some ribs. It was sufficiently messy that Zoe had a hard time keeping up with floor cleanup duty. She will survive I think.

Second was Sam's first birthday party! Had a few family and friends over and it still seemed like a full house. With kids ranging in age from 10 months to 6 years anything could happen (could be argued the outer range was 33 years). It was actually pretty calm. I missed getting pictures of the actual cake eating, but got it on video. I think we've got about 1 hour of video to get off the camera. That means about 5 hours of video processing time. Have to get that in the schedule some time.

Having a helluva time trying to complete any requests on iTunes music store tonight. Got a gift certificate for Christmas and this is now my third time attempting to redeem it. Each time I'm able to perform a couple of searches that end up taking minutes - then nothing. Can't even receive another answer. I understand how hard it can be to build a system to do massive searches (just trust me on that one), but for a company who is supposed to have their bread buttered in this arena it's a bit embarrassing. So, egg in your eye Apple. You're not so peachy in my melon any more.

You can make it up to me by giving me an iPhone when they become available. Thanks...

Just took the accent quiz. Kind of a fun little non-scientific test of your accent. I think most of the people I talk with fall in this category, but would be interesting to see if it might pick up some of the Minnesota accent in people? Didn't really see what might cause that score to jump.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The Inland North
The South
Philadelphia
The West
The Northeast
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Choose your domain

There is a webmail for every domain hosted here.

• http://webmail.cryogasinc.com
• http://webmail.quoteya.com
• http://webmail.unnyne.com

and so on.. If your domain is not listed hopefully you can figure it out from the above links. If you are experiencing any problems please Contact Dana and let him know.

After years of using a Logitech trackball I needed to change it up. Went to the local Apple store and picked up a Mighty Mouse II. I have to say, like most things Apple does, it's pretty slick. A few things take a little getting accustomed to - like the touch sensitive shell. The mouse clicks by pushing the entire outer shell down over the whole bottom. Like a car body floating over the suspension. To ''right click'' I need to have none of my finger pieces touching the outer shell where my index finger usually rests. It's taken me almost a week to train my hand. Old habits die hard. On top of it all, my life is spent in a web browser, and for those that don't know - if your hand is already on the mouse the fastest way to go back is to right click and select back (usually the top most selection available). With this mouse that little operation can be tricky to perform. Not impossible, but definitely takes some getting used to.

Heck, if I can switch to a Dvorak keyboard layout I can manage to master this mighty mouse. Maybe.

• You know more than 10 people who own boats and they all park them at the same marina in Annapolis
• You can pronounce and spell "Pocomoke," "Mattaponi," "Accokeek," and "Havre de Grace"
• You prononce "Bowie" BOO-ie not BOW-ie or BAUW-ie
• 1 hour is an easy commute to work
• You have more than three recipies for crabcakes
• French fries just don't taste right without Old Bay
• There are more than two crab places in your town
• Even your high school cafeteria made good crabcakes
• You got your first lacrosse stick before you were six years old
• You call all turtles "terrapins"
• You refer to your state as "Merlind"
• Your mother shops at Hecht's
• You still call Six Flags America "Adventure World", or even "Wild World"
• You still remember the Wild World commercial (Wild World's the cure for the summertime blues!)
• You can tell the difference between the smells of septic and marsh.
• You not only know how to eat hard crabs but you also know how to catch them, cook them and tell the males from the females.
• You don't think that Assawoman Bay is a strange name for a body of water.
• You know perfectly well why Rehoboth is called "Little San Francisco"
• M R Ducks makes perfect sense.
• So does C M Wangs.
• You think Salisbury is a big city.
• You think of dumplings as wet slippery squares of boiled dough.
• You and your boss take off of work when the fish are running or the ducks are flying in..
• You've eaten muskrat at a church dinner but think it's better the way you fix it.
• You think of "Dairy Queen" as a pageant title and not a place to get an ice cream.
• "Formal wear" is a ball cap, a flannel shirt and Timberlands.
• You still root for the Orioles even when they suck
• You'll never understand why tourists come to DC.
• When in Florida, you can only laugh when you see signs saying "Real Maryland Blue Crab Cakes!"
• You color with "Crowns", take a "Share" with "Wooter" and think the president lives in "Warshenton."
• You know the difference between Glen Burnie ghetto and Catonsville ghetto.
• Your whole family lives within a 200 mile radius of your town.
• Dale Earnhardt's accident was a close personal loss to your father
• At least one man in your family is a waterman
• You plan for "The Festival" a year in advance.
• During the summer, you spend more time in Ocean City than at home.
• Margret Heater, Hedspace, Jepetto, Outside Joke and Mary Prankster are people you think are "Famous"
• Your radio dial is stuck on 99.1
• You actually get these jokes and pass them on to other friends from Maryland.

A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts: "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man below says: "Yes. You are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees N. latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees W. longitude."

"You must be an engineer" says the balloonist.

"I am" replies the man. "How did you know."

"Well" says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost."

The man below says "You must be a manager."

"I am" replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"

"Well", says the man, "you don't know where you are, or where you are going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in the exact same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault."

I did a blog enty about this, but actually downloaded it from somewhere.

• nutrigrainad.wmv

gleaned with respect from http://maradydd.livejournal.com/293666.html

C: You are a paranoid schizophrenic who spends most of your time confused about which type you should be, convinced that blatantly false things are true because your extreme efficiency leaves no room for sensible error checking. Moreover your terseness encourages people to interact with you badly, providing incomplete and ambiguous instructions for which you nevertheless come up with a legal interpretation, even though most of the time it is completely nonsensical. People come to you because you promise them simplicity, not realising that below the surface you're a rat's nest of issues. In the end you are always abandoned for someone like C++ or Python.

Python: Python cares deeply about you and does its best to make your life easier. Python is willing to try new things to make you happy -- "Sure, I can do generators, if that's what you want" -- and really doesn't mind if you're seeing other languages on the side. It insists upon arranging the cupboard into strict rows, but you stop noticing after a while, and eventually you come to prefer your shelves organized this way. Your friends think this is weird until they start dating Python too.

Ruby: Your older sister is the most popular cheerleader in school, but she's kind of a slut. You think that maybe if you add more features, the boys will like you just as much.

PHP: You've seen what works for Ruby and you think it will work for you too, but you haven't figured out that lipstick doesn't go on your cheeks and you shouldn't brush your hair with a mascara wand.

C++: C++ has seen people in love, and thinks it has everything figured out. C++ thinks it loves you, but it errs on the side of being controlling when it thinks it's being concerned and caring.

Ada: You are far more flexible than C++, and know how to be strict and forgiving at the same time. However, your tendency to wear the bondage and discipline gear all the time, as opposed to when your lover asks you to bring it out, frightens people off. You need to learn to stop calling people "worm" and "slave" in front of their mothers.

Java: You try to be loving, but you were raised by a commune of 60 nervous women who have told you that everything you do is loving, even when it isn't. Your unhelpful behaviors have never been corrected and everything you do is subtly wrong and destructive.

JSP: You are Java's younger sister, working in a strip club to pay for your women's studies degree.

Perl: You're incredibly enthusiastic and you have five different ways of doing anything that anyone could possibly want to do. As a result, you tend to overwhelm people and you leave a bad impression on people who could otherwise benefit from knowing you. You promise people answers to all their questions, but you're not ready for a real relationship. You like to guess what people want, but tend to jump to conclusions. When other people would say "what, really?", you've already gotten out a ball-peen hammer and a tub of beeswax. Because of this, people find themselves speaking to you using a range of expressions and vocabulary even more limited than what they'd use for someone who didn't speak the language at all.

Smalltalk: Smalltalk won't meet you outside Smalltalk's apartment. Smalltalk says that if you really loved it, you wouldn't leave.

OCaml: You know yourself to be fast, smart, and extremely reliable. However, you look kind of funny and nobody really wants to talk to you. You spend most of your time sitting in a public library glaring at people, occasionally yelling "NOBODY HERE APPRECIATES MY GENIUS!" and getting kicked out.

Prolog: You are a deaf and blind synthaesthete, who experiences the world entirely through smells, each of which triggers expansive flurries of poetry and music in your mind. Certain problems are trivial for you, but nobody will ever understand the answers you give them, because your numbering system involves colors that cannot be perceived by humans. Prolog can sometimes have a good time with people, but it's hard for a person to stay with someone who only wants them for their ochre vibrato.

Lisp: Lisp cares about you, but really loves itself more than it will ever love you. Lisp thinks that it's the world's greatest lover, and it is a lot of fun, but it's completely blind to its own inadequacies. Watch out: it flies into a rage if it finds you've been seeing C on the side. Lisp swears up and down that it can be anything and anyone you want, and in a lot of ways it's right, but in the end, it's still Lisp.

Logo: Lisp's adorable 7-year-old niece who likes to play with her toy turtle. On casual conversation, she proves to be disturbingly worldly and well-informed. You resolve not to let your kids play around Lisp's house. Thinking about using Logo in any serious way makes you feel a bit dirty.

Visual Basic: You're a fifteen-year-old girl with her very own computer in her room, pinging random strangers on AIM and claiming to be a 23-year-old girl who wants to cyber with them. However, your efforts fail at convincing people, mostly because you aren't very imaginative and most of the things you're promising them are ideas you ripped off from other sources and changed slightly, leaving them less believable.

ASP.NET: As above, except you're a fifteen-year-old boy.

Objective C: You grew up in a cold and loveless home. Everything you know about love, you learned by listening to Smalltalk and Lisp's sex parties in the apartment next door. Now you have met a sweet young thing named Darwin, and you are eager to please.

Dylan: Sombody sat Lisp down and told it it was too clingy. Now it's bipolar.

Twisted: Twisted Python not only loves you, it loves everyone, in 10ms intervals, on demand. But once you learn to take turns, you don't notice the difference.

E: E is very clear about its hard limits, and there are a lot of them. It tells you up front what you're not allowed to do, and sometimes you end up forgetting what you can do without pissing it off.

lex/yacc: lex and yacc are those twins you have a one-night stand with every couple of years. In the intervening period, you forget all about the neat tricks they can do, and every time you meet up you end up learning them all over again. But they're really rather one-sided, and schizophrenic in the same way C is, so in the end it's good that they're not after you for a long-term relationship.

Haskell: Haskell is pretty, but always uses an elaborate range of prophylactic techniques. By the time you're all in place, the person you're with no longer resembles Haskell. If you've had other lovers, Haskell doesn't like many of the things that you may have come to enjoy doing with them. Haskell will pretend never to have heard of these things, and call you a pervert.

SML/NJ: You cannot take anything away from a relationship with SML/NJ that you did not bring with you. If you leave anything at SML/NJ's apartment when you break up, SML/NJ will leave it on your doorstep without ringing the bell.

Assembler: Assembler has no limits -- none whatsoever -- but you have to make it do what you want. It will not make a move to help you; assembler just lies there.

FORTRAN: FORTRAN isn't a real relationship. Telling people you're happy with FORTRAN is like telling people you'll be happy taking care of your cats for the rest of your life and don't really need another person.

TASK: Shoot yourself in the foot.

C: You shoot yourself in the foot.

C++: You accidentally create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying, "That's me, over there."

FORTRAN: You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue with the attempts to shoot yourself anyway because you have no exception-handling capability.

Pascal: The compiler won't let you shoot yourself in the foot.

Ada: After correctly packing your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream, and shoot yourself in the foot. When you try, however, you discover you can't because your foot is of the wrong type.

COBOL: Using a COLT 45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. CHECK whether shoelace needs to be re-tied.

LISP: You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...

FORTH: Foot in yourself shoot.

Prolog: You tell your program that you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn't permit it to explain it to you.

BASIC: Shoot yourself in the foot with a water pistol. On large systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.

Visual Basic: You'll really only _appear_ to have shot yourself in the foot, but you'll have had so much fun doing it that you won't care.

HyperTalk: Put the first bullet of gun into foot left of leg of you. Answer the result.

Motif: You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the bullet, its trajectory, and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams.

APL: You shoot yourself in the foot, then spend all day figuring out how to do it in fewer characters.

SNOBOL: If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.

Unix: % ls foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o % rm * .o rm:.o no such file or directory % ls %

Concurrent Euclid: You shoot yourself in somebody else's foot.

370 JCL: You send your foot down to MIS and include a 400-page document explaining exactly how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep-fried.

Paradox: Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can, too.

Access: You try to point the gun at your foot, but it shoots holes in all your Borland distribution diskettes instead.

Revelation: You're sure you're going to be able to shoot yourself in the foot, just as soon as you figure out what all these nifty little bullet-thingies are for.

Assembler: You try to shoot yourself in the foot, only to discover you must first invent the gun, the bullet, the trigger, and your foot.

Modula2: After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in this language, you shoot yourself in the head.

CLARION: You tell your computer to create a program for shooting yourself in the foot with a .22, but unfortunately, it only provides ammunition for a rocket launcher. Once you go into the source to fix the program, you find relevant proof that JFK really WAS shot by Lee Harvey Oswald.

JOVIAL: You go find the compiler writer and shoot him in the foot.

PL/I - You try to shoot yourself in the foot, but a third foot is secretly allocated before either of the previous two has been freed. You are then informed that a foot has been shot, with no indication given as to which one.

Cool is... toasta

It's a ceramic toaster. One piece at a time. It won first place at the macef design content. Wonder if we'll ever see them produced. In this toast-lovers mind it would be a great thing.

• http://www.guitarsessions.com/ - Melbay's online guitar news letter thing.

• http://www.publicradiofan.com/podcasts.html - Podcasts of public radio stuff. Cool.

• http://board4.cgiworld.dreamwiz.com/list.cgi?id=koh0130&now=1 - pretty impressive site of classical guitar videos that actually exist.

• http://www.irs.gov/formspubs/ - just what it says. Form and publications.

• http://www.kcrw.org/

• http://www.google.com/services/free.html - Google's free services. How I used to do searching on my own site. Worked okay.

• http://www.podcastalley.com/

Classical Music Stations

• http://king.org/

• http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/

• http://cpr.org/

Totally Random

Not sure where this stuff came from. It was here already. One of those things.

• http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ - CIA World fact book. Interesting.

• http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/ - Funny blog.. Good stuff.

• http://www.letsdish.net/ - Meals for later kinda thing. Katie sent it to me. Will check it out.

• http://www.moleskineus.com/ - Totally need some of these notebooks someday. Only have about 30 of the old school ones at home.

• http://www.djangoproject.com/ - possible cool python framework. Jason B sent this my way

• http://video.lisarein.com/dailyshow/ - Daily show videos

I'm totally in love with Textmate. It is by far the best text editor I have ever used. Going on about 6 months of constant use now and I learn a better way to do something every day. Today I installed a bundle that helps manage bundles and my life just got that much better. Found a bunch I didn't even know existed. A Django template and Python bundle? Rock.

This thing totally rocks. I think the GetBundle bundle is now part of the standard release. Just hit the Bundles menu and pick the GetBundle item. Install, find.. It's really that easy.

I know - two youtubes in a week. Can't help it though. This one is way too funny. It's a pretty right on impersonation. Don't know that Steve Jobs is necessarily the hardest guy to impersonate. The skit is a hilarious take on the Macworld introduction of the iPhone.
Here's the link to youtube if the embedded object thing doesn't work.

Well, we had the first broomball game of the year last night. Wasn't such a good outing for the Wrecking Ballz. We lost the game and I managed to sit, not so gracefully, on my ankle. Possible season ending injury. Luckily I have lots of Advil and a nice black walnut branch to help me get around.

Have to say it was really nice of the U.S. Pond Hockey Championship people to hook me up with a little first aid. They sure didn't have to, but were happy to help. Usually the championship is held on Lake Calhoun. This year, however, the ice was not sufficiently frozen in time, so they moved it to Lake Nokomis. Might have to take Sam down there to check out some of the action. That is - if I can get my bum wheel rolling again.

Some helpful tips on safe storage and time limits by the U.S. Food and Drug administration - Refrigerator storage chart

Commercial mayonaise only 2 months after opening? Jeeze.. I think we've used it after years. Maybe that's why didn't feel well during 2003.

Experiments on multiple levels. Our favorite family photographer had us bring some accessories for the one year photo update. They turned out great. Makes me laugh.

The other end of the experiment is using Flickr to post photos on the web. I'm trying out their free account right now. I have to admit it's pretty slick. The reason I stayed away from all the services like this before had to do with the fact you had to upload one image at a time. Now there are bulk upload tools that make the whole process painless. All sorts of neat organizational features are built in. Apparently we can print pictures directly from the site now. Still trying to get this figured out (along with the rest of my life), so I'll make sure to report back once I get it nailed down. Until then shoot on over to our pictures - http://www.flickr.com/photos/tnegres/

Update: Added some more thumbnails. Like I said this is an experiment. We'll see how it goes.

Here are some instructions for getting access to mail on this server. It's the new one of course.

Outlook Configuration

As you go through the screens should look similar depending on which version of Outlook Express you are using. If you have the full blown version of Outlook most things should be in similar places. I'm afraid I don't have a full version of Outlook to use as an example.

When??

Sunday, November 12th. Don't change stuff before that unless you're sure you want it to break.

Reconfigure for the new VPS setup

• Goto the menu and select Tools then Accounts
  • 
• Select your account and click Properties
  • 
• Make sure the information looks the same here - of course with your email address where it says E-mail address
• Click on the Servers tab
  • 
• Here you should change the Account: to be your email address with domain name. I should have sent everyone an email before the changeover with this information. It would be something like dana@quoteya.com or bob@cryogasinc.com.
• Your setup may say POP3 or POP instead of IMAP. Either is just fine. If you are curious of the differences please let me know.
• Finally, make sure the checkbox for My server requires authentication under the Outgoing Mail Server.
  • 
• If you are curious as to what is behind the Settings button under the Outgoing Mail Server section looks like here it is. I just left the defaults which should work just fine.
  • 
• That's it! Everything should be working just fine.

Web Mail

Short and sweet to start with.

Where to go?

After Sunday, November 12th to access your E-mail through the web you'll need to go to webmail.yourdomain.com where yourdomain.com is the domain part of your email address. So for bob@thesergents.net I would go to http://webmail.thesergents.net.

How to Log in

• Your user name to log in should be your full email address ie. bob@thesergents.net
• Your password should have been supplied to you already. If not send an email to me at dana.sergent@gmail.com and I'll work it out with you. Or just give me a call.

Ingredients

• 1 pkg. boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• 1 8oz. pkg. reduced-fat cream cheese
• 1 pkg. mushrooms (your choice - I prefer button or baby bellas)
• 1 medium onion
• 2 pkgs. reduced-fat Pillsbury crescent rolls

Preparation

Preheat oven to 375 (basically following directions on back of crescent roll package). Brown chicken, onion and mushrooms together over medium heat. Remove from heat when cooked through and stir in 8 oz. pkg. cream cheese until melted. Open crescent rolls, and pinch seams of two triangles per piece together. You will get 4 squares out of each can of dough - recipe will make approx. 8 squares will some filling left over. Put chicken mixture on one side of square and fold over to seal dough. If you prefer, you can use some egg white to seal the top of the square and sprinkle breadcrumbs over it as well. Bake in over for 11 - 13 minutes, or until lightly browned.

My Snoball USB Microphone came in last week. Have only had the chance to do a couple of recording sessions with it. Have to say for a home studio it's the bomb. The sound is surprisingly clear. I thought there would be some strange hum or odd buzz I'd just have to live with. Not the case. And it beats the heck out of going from old junky microphone to the mixer through a bunch of odd connections into the computer. Just the mic - right into the computer. Garageband recognizes it right away. Set some levels. Start recording.

If I can get over the red light syndrome I'll try to post some classical guitar recordings. For those that don't know there is a specific syndrome that occurs when the red record light is on. Its effects range from fumbly fingers to completely forgetting a piece of music you've played for years. Usually hits me about halfway through a song. The stumble will happen, then I will completely forget the rest of the music. At least for about 2 seconds, but when you're trying to record some songs a random 2 second pause in the middle of a song doesn't sound too slick. A little too long to classify as extreme rubato

CityRag has an interesting page about the 20 greatest guitar solos. It's not that interesting of a list in itself. It's been done many times before. What is interesting is that they have links to the youtube videos. You can go watch the guitar solos. That's pretty cool. But Stairway to Heaven as the #1 guitar solo? Really? And Guns 'n Roses November Rain is on the list but Sweet Child o Mine not even listed? Shouldn't that be the other way around? There are some great ones on the list however. Go have a look and listen. Blame me for the waste of time later.

Jeremy sent me this over instant messenger just moments ago. No, he's working very hard! He was just thinking of a friend in need of a smile. Now I'm doing the same. No! I'm still working very hard.
It's not quite a fun Friday fact, but should be treated as one.
The Douche Card

Someday, when the time is right, I will make some home movies again. They will go here.

I like music. Music is fun. Music will go here.

I think Amazon's recommendation engine has finally lost it's marbles. I've become accustomed to the targeted advertising for sterling silver earrings and little pretty trinkets. I mean every guy needs a hint now and again for gifts. I had myself convinced it's because I look at classical music and books on saving space in houses... and heavy metal.. and electronics... There goes that theory. Lately it's gone to far. Red hand bags - Womens jackets - Stockings. It must be time for me to recognize that Amazon.com thinks I am a woman. Soon, like much of the junk mail I've received in my life, it will probably say Welcome Ms. Sergent when I log in. Great. So much for collaborative filtering.

Indgredients

• 1 Package Tatertots
• 1.5 lbs ground beef
• 1 or 2 cans Cream of Mushroom soup
• 1 Onion

Preparation

• Preheat oven to 350 or 375 (check package of tater tots for correct temp.)
• Brown ground beef with onion on stove
• Mix in cream of mushroom soup (I bought two cans - not sure if you will need both, as its 1 1/2 lb.s of beef)
• Pour into 9x13 dish
• Top with tater tots
• Bake in oven for 35 - 40 minutes
• Put cheese on top for last 5 minutes (there are American or Cheddar singles in the fridge - you pick

Kurt, you send me some weird stuff sometimes. (like EPIC or the nintendo game theme medley) This one was pretty kick ass.

A powerful commentary/presentation by Professor Wesch from Kansas State University on Web 2.0. Very definitely worth the watch even if you don't think you know anything about "the Web". You probably know more than you think you do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE&eurl=

About once a year I take the time to troll through my applications looking for things I'm not using in hopes that I can bring myself to delete them. Once in a rare while I run across a gem of a program I had no idea was even there. This is just an occasion. Not the biggest waste of time there has ever been, that honor still belongs to Line Rider, but a time waste nonetheless. This silly creation took about 5 minutes. The program is called Comic Life and was one of the rotating stable of little bonus programs Apple installs on all their new computers. This could be the start of something silly.

Experimenting with tags. So far, so fun.

A few years back this video was all the rage. For some reason we've played it quite often in the office over the last year or so. If you've never heard the Numa Numa song or seen the video now you can to both in one shot. This was one of those poor souls like the lightsaber kid who become famous for fairly innocuous pieces of video. Still, the song is catchy. And if you hear me singing it you'll at least know where it comes from.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc9EC1sLehA

Been a bit since we took new pictures of the Sam man. He's a few steps away from walking. Always on the move lately, so it's hard. Managed to capture a few here. Sticking with my flickr photo page for now. Been enjoying the service enough. Might have to get a pro account if we keep it up. Still so many choices out there between Picasa and .Mac I'm still not sure where we'll end up.

Ended up shooting a few pictures of the big snow we received here in Minnesota. Poor Zoe was up to her belly. That can't be a lot of fun. Taking pictures of it can be though.

I know everyone loves the post that says Sorry, haven't blogged forever - been busy. I won't put you through that. I'll only apologize because things have been hectic.

And without further ado! Sam pictures. He's such a little boy now. Kate and I can hardly believe it! Go on over to our Flickr page to see all of them.

Now back to our regularly scheduled non-web related activities. If there is such a thing these days.

It's rule 3471 in Dana's handbook of life. Do something you enjoy every day.

Yesterday was full of things I enjoy. First and foremost Kate and Sam returned from visiting Nana in Cedar Rapids. Hanging out with the beautiful Kate and Sam I am is always top on my list of things I enjoy. I would like it here or there. I would like it anywhere! Yes.. more new pictures...

Then I had the chance to sit down and tear into a guitar I recently picked up from eBay. It is a Benjamin Garcia, and a pretty nice guitar in my opinion. The craftsmanship isn't top notch, but that was the main reason I made the purchase. Gives me a chance to fiddle and fuss without feeling too bad for the guitar. So last night I began work on replacing the tuners, nut, and saddle. Next on the agenda is the finish on the top. Props to Katie for letting me set up shop in the house wherever I happened to be when the thought to start this project crossed my itinerant mind. I try not to make too much of a mess. Here are some pictures of the work in progress. My fingers are still recovering from sanding.

With the growing archives of video we have I thought I would try this experiment today. I have uploaded a movie containing some clips of Sam and Mom early on - then Sam and Zoe later on. Will see how this handles on the web site. Too much video and not enough storage or bandwidth it seems. The little guy is too funny.

Just a quick Sam update. Mostly because we have the technology. I am a geek after all.

I forgot how much I don't like Internet Explorer. In fact, I dislike it so much I rarely even test my own site with IE. So, as many of you probably know - and I just found out, IE7 doesn't really care for what I've done with my YUI menus and all the javascript.

Have to give credit to the engineers at Microsoft for the great and descriptive Internet Explorer cannot open site operation aborted error message. That really helps a person figure things out. Thanks!

Google to the rescue - http://www.technovelty.org/code/web/yui-rendering.html - For me it turned out that I had activated the menu in a way that IE doesn't like. I had

YAHOO.util.Event.onContentReady("mainmenu", YAHOO.thesergents.loadmenu);

I thought that would be really cool to use the onContentReady, but IE doesn't like how that modifies the DOM while the page is rendering. Or something. What I actually needed to do was

YAHOO.util.Event.addListener(window, "load", YAHOO.thesergents.loadmenu);

which waits until the window load function is triggered after the page has loaded. That's cool. So at least that cleared up the annoying error. Now the submenus stopped working, but I'll live with that. That was enough personal hacktime for one day. Time to get back to work.

Oh - and this kid likes turtles - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMNry4PE93Y
Had to end on a happy note.

Something happened while I was attempting to fix the spam filtering. I'm working feverishly trying to get it back up and running again. Sorry to everyone for which I host mail. Hang in there..

After many hours of hand wringing and tooth gnashing I finally managed to cobble together some form of a working mail server. It should be mostly working now. Receiving messages should most definitely be working. Sending might be a little hairy and scary right now.

The problem all started yesterday morning while trying to upgrade the spam filtering system on our Virtual Private Server. It was already a bit of a hack - qmail, spamhaus rbl, and spamassassin. Somewhere along the way stopping spam stopped stopping, so I had the bright idea "Hey, just upgrade everything" as if that would fix it all. bzzzzzzt wrong answer. Ended up making things way worse. So bad in fact qmail would no longer give any helpful error messages. Since being on the VPS I haven't been a huge fan of qmail. Too many pieces. Too many things to break. Too hard to track down. So I ended up installing my old standby Postfix. There's something to that name.
The installation went smooth enough. A few minor problems dealing with all of my virtual domains and users, but nothing a little google help and a whole lot of trial and error couldn't figure out. The biggest problem with smtp has always been authenticated relaying of email. So that people at Cryogas can freely send email through my server to anywhere and still not open it up so spammers can blast their warez out to the universe. In the end I was able to get dovecot and it's SASL implementation working. It's a bit of bubble gum and bailing wire right now, but that will improve shortly.

If people are having any problems whatsoever with their email - and they are hosted on this server - get in touch with me through appropriate means. Sorry for the headaches. That's why we love technology. Right?

In 17 minutes I was able to post an ad on craig's list, send out a W9, take 2 phone calls, and put this little Sam clip together. It demonstrates the various stages of the being known as Sam all taking place within several minutes of each other. I'm a terrible editor when it comes to video of the little guy. Should probably be a lot shorter than 2 minutes, but I can't seem to cut out any more. You'll just have to suffer.

Now if only all my 17 minuteses could be that productive!

The Minneapolis chapter of the Sergents is all present and accounted for. Immediate family and friends are all okay too. Thanks for all the phone calls! It's great to hear from everyone. Sad it's surrounding such an event.
Most of us in this neck of the woods drive over that bridge at least once a week. Many people daily. Not much else to say.

Good news in the Sergent household (Minneapolis division). Sam is going to have some company! He's got something to say about it.

Hunting pheasants with GPS (Grandpa Sergent).
Mowing the lawn with Sam.

Further evidence located on my flickr photo page

Not a lot of time to post antics and musings lately, so pictures will have to do. The darn phone cameras really aren't so bad so long as you hold them really steady. This is from my afternoon walk with Zoe under 77 in one of our numerous Minnesota state parks.

Looks like we're having a girl! Exciting times indeed! Here's her first photo! She's already a looker.

Dad, I'm going to need my old double barrel 20 gauge back if you don't mind. Thanks.