Joshua's Blog now with actual content!

Well, I did manage to fly in on Tuesday morning... at 3:30, got home about 4AM... woo! I did have an awesome time, got some pictures, had a few drinks... ton of fun! I honestly didn't want to come home on Monday night, but here I am. Work has been hell too for me, from our master clone machine (from Dell... we order GX620s... we have FIVE DIFFERENT CONFIGURATIONS!!! WHAT THE HELL?!) failing it's hard drive right before the clone was finished to things slowly coming along with Active Directory. We're almost there, but we're cutting it really close. I still need to write an AutoIt script that can find out what group you are in and map the appropriate drives for you. Ugh we're really close to blowing this whole thing... really. I do have more to talk about that, but I need my rest - badly... still haven't recovered from my time back at work... I will soon, almost there.

Well, this week has been very busy! Starting with my vacation being over for work last Monday (woohoo?), going to a Windows Server 2003 training for two days in Denver, CO (more on that later). Monday and Thursday were the only days where I wasn't doing anything special, because on Friday I am flying out to Las Vegas with my dad to celebrate my birthday that happened earlier this month... and I'll be gone until Tuesday morning (taking the red-eye flight back home Monday night). Thankfully I'll be able to get online though, so I'll have time to write about my flight experiences (hopefully better), my time up in Denver for the training, and my time out in Las Vegas - not to mention what is going on at work right now too!

Over the last few days since I've rebuilt my network (which still has problems, grrr), I noticed my website visits dropping. A lot. Like from about fifteen unique visitors a day to none... none at all. At first I thought it was because my site was down for about 9 hours, so some of the search engine web crawlers decided to write my site off for a bit... but then I posted to my site, and told friends to check it out... and they got "Page cannot be displayed". That made me think about a few things... first off I have been using Bit Torrent recently, downloading music from Alex Hephaestion from his Ambient Nights website. Don't worry, all of his music is free to download! So I stopped the download, thinking it has saturated my connections (not speed because I was only averaging about 40KB/s, my pipe tops out at around 165KB/s for now) but that still didn't fix the problem. Next up was checking it from my phone, thinking those people aren't smart enough to troubleshoot on their own, heheheh... also down. Then I decided to check my traffic policy on Kerio WinRoute Firewall, and sure enough, I forgot to add an entry to allow traffic on port 80 to the server! Man did I feel stupid! Yup, me feeling stupid - who would have guessed?

Anywho, I apologize for my gazillions of readers who visit this site every 2 seconds for an update, and for those lurkers out there that refuse to leave comments!

Hopefully GibixOnline will stay online from now on.

Well, it has finally happened... the government is watching me. Why? I do not know... I have done nothing illegal at all! At least, not to my knowledge. My guess is that you don't believe me at all... but guess what? I have proof! Yeah, that's right! Real, undeniable proof, taken from my own living room window with my own camera!

When I first saw this truck across the street, I thought nothing of it. Recently everyone in Colorado Springs has decided that it costs about the same to run air conditioning in your house compared to 17 fans (fans include window fans, box fans, and ceiling fans). Well, I should say everyone in Colorado Springs but us... but that is a different story (hell, my room lights flicker when my neighbor has his a/c turn on, it's quite annoying!). I almost ignored this big truck, but I decided to look closer!

Look at that equipment sitting on top of that truck! I don't think a plumbing company needs three antennas and a satellite dish! Here is the full, unedited photo (2032x1524 ~ 4.3MB).

A close-up view of the equipment on top of this so-called plumbing truck. It is looking quite believable now isn't it? I'm not done yet though... there is another piece of evidence that I want to show you. Look closely at the upper left of the truck's logo.

Do you see it? I do, but for those of you who are still being stubborn I will provide you with a slightly modified picture, only the color levels have been edited in this picture.

There! Now you see it, it looks like that the truck used to be an Airborne Express truck. Yeah, very spooky now. It looks like the truck used to be labeled something else before Airborne Express though, let me clean it up for you.

There, clear as day! "TOP SECRET GOVERN I SPY TUC" which looks suspiciously familiar to "TOP SECRET GOVERNMENT SPY TRUCK" if you ask me.

I hope this opens your eyes to the fact that the government will spy on anyone with no reason at all! Whatsoever! I haven't done anything, yet look at the truck across the street! This is scary, so if you don't hear from me later you'll know what happened! SPREAD THE WORD PEOPLE, EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW! WELL, EXCEPT FOR PEOPLE YOU HATE.

Don't forget your tin-foil hats people... they're important too! They keep the government from reading your mind! And your wallet!

Well, the website has been down for about 10 hours today, due to me thinking I can rebuild this network better than it was.
Apparently not, but it did consist of rebuilding 3 machines. Two domain controllers and one member server. Thankfully the internet was only down for three hours here, and my SMTP server for my mail was only offline for five hours, so hopefully I didn't miss too much email. My longest strech was getting the webserver back online, I can never remember what steps I need to have the domain account access the web pages and have the proper privilages. This time, I did remember all of the user security settings I needed, but I forgot to allow ASP.NET 2.0 access to launch in the Web Service Extensions Manager.
But hey, it all seems to be working right now, so woohoo! I'll post more later I think.

For those of you who install Visual Studio 2005 and the Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK, everything should be fine and dandy. If you have Internet Explorer 7 installed (whether in Vista or as the beta on Windows XP), you'll notice that you can't really create a project using the New Project Wizard (by selecting Visual C++ -> Smart Device -> Win32 Smart Device Project). All the information you'll receive from Visual Studio 2005 is a simple "Creating Project <Project> Failed..." in the status bar. Helpful isn't it? Well thankfully Visual Studio for Devices blog has the answer.

All you have to do is add a registry key to allow the wizard to open an internet explorer window.
Open the following registry key:

And add the following Key

Retry creating the new project and everything should be fine!

[source]

Flight #3

Nice! Well I was hoping for an uneventful flight back... you know... nothing to write about. It turns out that during the preflight check there was a "small hydraulic line leak" on our plane, a DC9-40 - it was so small that it needed to be towed to the hangar to be fixed. So here we are in the Detroit Municipal Airport (DTW) and are quickly rerouted to a DC9-30, which now has a small problem in the left gear brake. Go Figure... we'll probably miss our connecting flight home too! I do hope that this one is flight worthy... WOO it is!

Flight #4

Ok, we landed fine... thankfully. Problem was our connecting flight was two concourses away! We had ten minutes to run and ride the rail there. Thankfully a gate attendant let us in after they closed the doors. We are on a Boeing 757 flown by Delta, it is one of the song aircraft, so ours was pink for breast cancer. They have Linux driven monitors in all the chairs. How do I know this? The system crashed and had to be rebooted! Hehe. I've been watching the news about the missiles fired from North Korea and Wimbledon. They even have a channel that lets you view flight information. We're flying at 34,001 feet (10,362 Meters), 497 MPH (800 KPH), 404 miles (646 KM) covered and its 8 degrees fahrenheit(-13 degrees Celsius). We should arrive in 1:46 at 7:26PM MDT. See you there!

Whoa the flight attendants were just told to sit down... This could get turbulent. *worried*. The guy I'm sitting next to is huge! Ugh. The chick on my other side is studying with a huge book for the PSATs, though she was quite nice.

Oh yeah, turbulence.... Wow! 1 degree Fahrenheit! Brrrrrr. You know, they need to work on that ETA thing. It's just about 7pm right now in Colorado... And we're not even in Oklahoma! That and we're turning southwest to *attempt* to miss some storms. Doesn't look like that'll happen though.

Hmm, -2 degrees fahrenheit (-18 degrees Celsius) outside and we are at 36,001 feet (10976 Meters)

Hehe, in a minute we are about to fly over Wheeler, TX. That is kinda cool.

Well, it seems that those two blurbs were quite random, but I must say that the Boeing 757 plane was nice, even when we hit turbluence it really didn't feel too bad. I'm just glad our luggage was alrady at the airport when we got off. Saved us a huge hassle.

[NOTE: This was written during the flights on 2006-06-30]

Flight #1

Well here I am writing to you from about 37,000 feet... quite the uneventful flight so far. I haven't gotten out my laptop yet, but I just might... Who knows? Well I do... I think. I must say that this flight is quite warm, which is weird because they are usually freezing. (The guy next to me is studying a presentation on ADHD... Or maybe he has it... He keeps looking around suspiciously). This flight lasts about 1 hour and 45 minutes, which (ASSHOLE!!! The fricking guy in front of me just smashed my legs with his seat! To make it worse he just kept throwing his back into it! Weird that h e encountered resistance... I wonder why? Oh yeah! I am sitting here!! Agghhhgghhhgg! No laptop now... *sigh*) is way too long because I am 6'3" (190 cm)... way too warm! Damn we've only been flying for 30 minutes. I think I'll just sit here and listen to my music... Damn hot air is drying out my contacts.

Oooooooh, the captain just came on! He sounds excited today! Cocktails and wine available for $5.00! Some cheap-ass "trail-mix" for $1.00! Correct change please. Ugh.

Thanks to the ASSHOLE in front of me, I can't even put my food tray down! Arggfgfgnbfbfgfhgh. Once again, clueless, he tried to get it even further back... Well guess what AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN! UNLESS YOU BREAK MY LEGS - FUCKER! Aisle seats suck, always getting hit.

Ok, there is this weird lady in row 5 (I'm in 9) that keeps looking back here, popping her head. Like a prairie dog! I'll see if I can get a picture ... It's pretty damn funny!

Ok, I swear that this fucker in front of me is trying his hardest to break my kneecaps! Oh goodie a nice song just came on Kono Sekai No Doko Ka De {somewhere} by Kuwashima Houko, the seiyuu {voice actor} for Filia in Slayers Try and Kasumi in Dead or Alive 2 - 4 (and going). Pretty song, pretty voice and can someone do something about that damn air? It SUCKS that (oh great! 30 minutes left!) this is the same plane that'll take me to Detroit...

We need another seating area for moms and babies! I mean, it sucks that their ears hurt when they pop, so they cry, but my ears hurt from their crying!

Nice! Attempt #4 by the Kneecap Basher! I swear...

Flight #2

Well, we're on our second flight right now, and I actually have room for me to use my laptop, albeit without internet service (kinda sucks, but at 37,000 feet it is understandable) I just spent about 10 minutes trying to get the above paragraphs off of my phone. First problem was I don't have activesync installed on Windows XP MCE yet (on my laptop) so I had to reboot into Windows Vista Beta 2 and use their built in activesync. That was a pain because of how slow it runs on my laptop, installing drivers, and getting pissed at the UAC. NOTE: If you click on it a ton of times, it WILL pop up for every one, it just waits until everything starts working. Pain in the ass I tell you, but not as bad as Mr. Kneecap Basher. This flight we were all put in row 26, which is in the very back. Nice thing is, the guy in front of me hasn't leaned back yet. Bad part, the bathrooms are right here, and man are they busy. (AHHHHHH TURBULANCE ACK ACK - ACK MORE - AHAAAAHAHHHH NOT COOL - I HATE FREEFALLING! That's why I don't do well on rollercosters.) Damn, power-down time.