Jacob’s Insidious Ramblings

Well, yesterday I had truck problems. For a while my A/C compressor has been having issues with the electronics so I unplugged a sensor so the clutch would disengage and go into free-spin since the compressor was stuck on the ON position. That worked for a while until yesterday. I was in the drive-thru of a Jack-in-the-Box that is attached to a Shell gas station and when I was told to pull forward my truck decided to die. I figured it just hiccupped or something like that. I tried to start it and my truck squealed then died again. At that point I figured out what happened. Nobody was behind me so I pushed my truck backward to get it out of the way. It was still in the way of people wanting to get gas. I decided to see if I pulled power from the compressor maybe it would free itself up. I could not get the red plastic pin off that was holding the power plug together. A guy came by and offered help and was able to get that sucker unplugged. That of course did not free it up. After that he got the idea that since the belt was crap now anyway, I may as well try to get my truck totally out of the way. I figured, why not…

I got back into my truck and swallowed hard as I prepared to start my truck and then hurry up and back it into the space that happened to be behind me. I got the truck started and revved the engine and put it into reverse and backed it up. I got it in place and turned the engine off. Thankfully I did because the belt was about to catch on fire from that little bout with friction. It was smoking at the point of the compressor. I thanked the guy and he went on his way. I ended up thinking that while I figure something out I may as well be where I can look up prices for parts and all that jazz. I was down the street from my mother-in-law so I gave her a call. I spent a few hours over at her house and I ended up calling my father to tell him the fun news. He offered to help. He does not live in Houston so he had a drive ahead of him.

I got dropped off back at my truck and my father came on by. We started to look closer at the truck and noticed it has a belt run diagram with a method for running the belt without the A/C on the run. We figured it is worth a try. The bad thing is that there was no standard belt size documented without an A/C that would work at either Advance Auto Parts or O’Reilly Auto Parts. We ended up cutting the bad belt and mapping out the run with the old belt. On the 5th belt or so we got the right size and tested my truck. It took us around 5 or so hours total to get this knocked out. Nice thing is, we did not have to purchase a compressor for an A/C that was broken for other reasons, which would have been a waste of time and money. I drove to work with my truck today. It has run nice and quiet so far.

Normally I am fine with Exchange, being the resource hog it is, but I was having to uninstall the damn thing the other day and it was being a huge pain. Let me set the stage, I had an Exchange 2007 server running as a VM and I had another one that was running full on the hardware of another server. I wanted to keep the latter one and remove the former. The problem was, I had to remove all replicas and everything else before uninstalling. I got everything removed except something that was replicating in the Public Folders database. I never could get it to replicate fully. For months off and on I was looking for answers that would not leave me hacking away at the low level parts of Active Directory. I finally found instructions that made some sense. Move the replicas. Well, I ran the script from the ‘Exchange Management Shell’ and it finished. I checked the status with another command and it showed it was not working still. There was nothing important in the database so I read that you could delete the database when it was not mounted and then when you remount the database it would recreate the public folders from scratch. I figured it was worth a shot. After it recreated the database I did the move replicas again and that seemed to move them. It did take a little bit before it was done. After that I deleted the public folders database and I was able to uninstall Exchange and remove that VM from the domain. Normally I do not get very upset at the little odd Microsoft quirks but man, that really did irritate me a lot.

Back on April 20th I took a plane to Boston and spent a week in Sandwich, MA(which happens to be in Cape Cod). It was work related so I did not have much idle time to see the sights. The flight was not much fun as it was over 3 hours each way. I did like the temperature up there. It stayed nice and cool the entire time. if only the South Texas area had that kind of weather constantly…cool weather I mean, not the snow that MA has.

It is hard to believe that my Son is one year old today. It actually does not seem like too long ago I was holding him on his first day out. He has learned a lot and so have I. Heck, in a few years he will be old enough to go get a job.

Not too long ago I went to a Microsoft Event to learn more about Windows 2008 and of course get a copy of it so I will be able to set it up and learn about it even more than I already knew. The reason I said ‘already knew’ is because not too long before I came to the event I was able to work on Windows 2008 Standard up at work. I got it running on a new server and it will be our Terminal Server.

It has a few new features that I find very useful. One is the TS Gateway. It allows you to use the Remote Desktop Connection to burrow through a TS from the Internet using only port 443(https) and either connect to the TS itself or to other servers(and workstations). Of course you can lock it down and it actually works rather well. It works the same way that Outlook 2003 and 2007 fully connect to an Exchange 2003 or 2007 server safely over the Internet. It uses what is called RPC over HTTP(s). Let me just say that the TS Gateway makes things easier on the remote connection front. No need to mess with VPN bs or anything like that. Of course you would want to always make sure the TS Gateway is up to date. The TS Gateway requires at least RDC version 6.0. Windows XP SP2 with the RDC update or Vista come with it. Part of the settings are under the advanced tab on the configuration portion of RDC.

Anyway, another neat trick is something they seemed to have swiped(at least the idea) from Citrix. You can have a Web page, authenticated and encrypted of course, set up to share programs. This works well and allows you to run the program from the TS like it is running on your workstation. It even natively supports Dual Monitors. It is actually called RemoteApp. It is a bit more limited than it’s Citrix counterpart but it works just fine for regular usage. It does not support sharing applications per user. When you share an application, all users that are allowed to bring up the RemoteApp can run those apps. One glaring irritation is that the RDC version required is 6.1(partially due to the ActiveX plugin that comes with that version only). It currently is not being released as a separate product or update. It is part of Vista SP1 or XP SP3. SP1 for Vista has been released and seems to work well but XP3 has not been released but is scheduled to this month. We will see how well XP SP3 works…

It looks like it has been a while yet again since my last post. I am still doing great at Glacial Energy and keep finding more to tinker with. My son is doing well, it is nice to be a Father. When I am not working or trying to spend time with my family I try to sleep a little. I have not had time for any real side projects in a little while. I plan to make some time for some, in other words… less sleep. Nice thing is, I usually can go a while on little sleep before I crash and burn. Up at work I have been playing with DRAC cards on the Dell servers. I have seen them before and know of the Compaq/HP version of it but never got to install and configure one before. Anyway, time to end this post… later.

I know it has been way too long since I have graced the Interweb with my presence. A lot has been happening these past few months that my blog lay slient. I will start with my Son of course. He has been doing great, he is a very good natured baby so far. He smiles a lot and will laugh often enough. He is eating solid-ish food along with his soy formula.

On the job front, at the end of July I took a new job at a company called Glacial Energy. It is not a bad place to work and the responsibilities have increased compared to the job with Wells Fargo. I enjoy the responsibility so that is always good. It is also more along the lines of what I like to work on and do. I manage the network, the servers, and the workstations. Of course I also do the helpdesk part of the job, which is not bad. It does help that most of the people that I talk to are of a nice sort so it makes the troubleshooting a rather calm affair. I am slowly trying to improve the way things are done and optimize my job as to make things easier on everyone.

Now, on to some of my hobbies. I have of course ‘mastercontrol’ as the AD server here at home with ‘zoidberg’ running a RAID 1 setup using two 230GB drives. I have a third sitting around just in case one fails. Unfortunately ‘zoidberg’ currently seems to have a problem when it comes to uptime; which I may have found the solution to it. As usual my mind seems to revolve around the computer and related topics and so most other hobbies tend to take a back seat. I do want to work more on my chess playing and get back into trying to learn the guitar. I have some natural talent with chess but no music talent at all so the latter will be a bit harder to do.

I got a bicycle from my niece Jessica and her husband. I have kept finding excuses to not fill up the tires with air so I can exercise more. I need to start because when I look at my Son I do sometimes think of what would happen when I depart from this rather buoyant body I am attached to. If it were to happen before he is grown then that would of course not be a good thing.

As you can see I have done a bit and have been mulling over a lot of things recently. I know I ought to update this blog more but time is not a luxury that I seem to have a lot of.

Well, it’s official. This morning my son gave me his personal rinse. My wife, Nicki, was going to bathe him and so she got his diaper off and handed him to me so she could get the water going. I was holding him just fine and then he happen to cut loose on me. Thankfully it was only pee and not the other, not to be described, stuff. What made this even more ’special’ was that I had just finished showering and shaving and had some clean clothes on. Needless to say I had to take a second shower and look for clean clothes. Nicki told me it would happen one day. I guess I can now be part of that ‘Peed on Parent’ club.

Well, my wife had our child on April 17th, 2007. In a C section way so she has to recover for a few days. He is 8 pounds 9 ounces and is 20″ long. His name is James Paul Smock. I am so happy to be a father. It truly is one of those kind of feelings that are hard to describe. I will talk more on this subject soon.

As you may have known, I moved hosting late last year. I had everything backed up but not everything got restored. I finally got the Honeymoon pictures imported into our little gallery. Click here to go check them out. It will open a new window.

It is getting closer to the due date for that youngin of mine to come out. Of course he will come out when he is ready so it may happen sooner. He is of course due on or around April 27th. I am really looking forward to raising a child. I know it is not all fun and games, but I know it will be a blast overall.

Earlier this week we went for the latest batch of ultrasounds and the nurse that was doing it said that our child is a boy. Looks like I may need to purchase some cigars soon for the big day. Also, Merry Christmas. You know, this should be a good Christmas…

http://pictures.smock.com/
Go here for the newest ultrasounds.

I had the chipset fan on my motherboard go out a few weeks ago which started to cause rebooting issues every few days on my main desktop. I found a replacement the day before Thanksgiving. It is a huge heatsink without a fan which seems to be doing the job. I think that the job was done to Windows before I got a chance to fix the problem. Before, the reboots were so sudden Windows could not do a BSOD and now Windows seemed to be doing BSOD’s on me. After debugging the dump file it looked like it was the network driver(I hope). So far things seem to be stable after updating all the chipset drivers and network drivers. While I was at it I went ahead and updated my video drivers. I will be hoping that things are stable this coming week. If not then I may have to reinstall Windows. If that does not fix it then I think my MB may be crap and I will have to rip hardware from my secondary workstation. That is something I really do not want to do. Anyway, later…

Well, Thanksgiving came and went with only my stomach aching along the way. Christmas will be along in no time and it may be a little slim this year, presents wise, but that is fine. As long as I have my family and friends I am good to go. Not much else is happening. Work is work and keeping me busy as usual which is good. We have our tree up with not much of any thanks to me as I had to work the day after Thanksgiving. My wife and the in-laws went and picked up a tree. I was fine with that as I am not that much into trees when it comes to this time of year.

Well, I know our kiddo is not too far along yet but the ultrasound pictures are showing our child as developing well. I am hoping to have all of the pictures uploaded to pictures.smock.com soon and plan to try and keep it updated with new pictures as it gets closer to ‘go time’. I know kids can be rough but we have wanted this child since even before we got married so we are thrilled. I know I am handling the pregnancy better than Nicki, which is obvious as she is carrying the ‘heater’. I do not think that it would be as bad for her if she did not feel nauseous sometimes. Overall I get a bit nervous sometimes because it is a slightly high risk pregnancy. The odds are getting better all the time but I am a bit pragmatic if not a slight pessimist about most things. I am putting my faith in God on this one and hope what he deems best is in alignment with what we are hoping for. Well, that is it for now.

Well, that is sort of what the kiddo looks like so far on the ultrasounds, at least according to my Father. Every day I tend to think about the fact that my wife is pregnant and how happy we will be to corrup…err, raise a kid.

It seems that our attempts at conception did not go unrewarded thankfully. We have been trying for a while and I am glad it finally happened. I really do not care if our kid is a boy or girl. I cannot wait until I can corrup…err, teach our child in the ways of being a Smock. No easy feat I assure you as being a Smock is wrought with many trials and tribulations. Only after years and years of work can that name, which everyone loves, be earned. Man, did it just get deep in here from typing that or what?!? Anywho, I will, as usual, update my blog often. Yeah right. I will just say this, I will make more of an attempt now that I have something to talk about.

On Saturday 06/10/2006 I saw the movie Cars with some of the family. I thought it was a good movie. It was of course a movie for kids but it was fun to watch even as an adult that acts like a kid sometimes.

I got a copy of the newest beta of Microsoft’s most recent offering of Windows. The install is beyond simple from what I have seen so far. I am installing it on my Dell Latitude C640. All the specs are fine for it except for the video card so I will find out how bad the new GUI runs on it. I may post a few more items with it as the topic with my thoughts and comments soon.

I do not normally go much into topics of real personal value but I think I will for this post. I was looking at my Grandpa Smock’s tribute site because my father updated it by using a picture gallery software and I wanted to see how it was going. It did get me thinking of some of the people over the years I have lost that were close. Now remember this is by no means a comprehensive list because it is past 1:30 in the morning and I am a bit tired.

One of the first people I lost was my Grandmother on my Mother’s side. I never really got to know her because she died when I was two, but from what I was told she liked me a lot which makes me feel better.

Another was my Grandfather on my Mother’s side. He died when I was 15 if my memory serves me right. I do wish I could remember going to his funeral but because of a bump on the head that same year I kind of lost the memory of his funeral, among other things. He is where my Mother got her smart alec side and of course from both of them is where my brother, sister, and I got it. He was almost always joking and enjoyed getting a rise out of people. I do remember that about him.

Up next on this somewhat emotional ride is my Grandfather on my Father’s side. He died on October 24, 2004. The only reason I know the date is because of the site. As I grew all the way to become an adult with him around I remember him of course better. He was a man that was hard-headed, strict, and did not often make jokes. It was not until I got to my mid to late teen years when he started to soften up to where I noticed it. Every time I visited he made a point to see me, even if he just got into bed he would get back up to at least say hi. Sometimes toward the last few years of his life I would try to make it over there to do a crossword puzzle with him or stratch off a few lottery tickets. I never got over there as much as I would have liked to. As usual, you do not always think of such things until it is too late. I do miss him…

I know that I will always miss these and others as the years go by but am glad I have a wife and family to be with on those tough times.