They just issued the Last

They just issued the Last Call for the Wi-Fi network here at Gnomedex, so I'll be signing off now. I've had a good time, and if you were wondering whether or not you'd enjoy it, I can say without a doubt that you would have. I'm not one of the LockerGnome fanboys, I'd never met anyone here before, though I'd chatted with Gretchen some, and Howard and I have e-mailed each other before. I still had a good time, and I'm surely going to come back next year. At $99, it's a bargain in terms of the quality of speakers we got to hear, all of which were gracious to anyone who wanted to chat them up elsewhere. I never saw any of them trying to get away from a fellow geek wanting to talk tech with them.

If you live in Iowa, and are a tech person, it's a no brainer, you should come to this conference. If you're farther away, pay a visit to our fair state, things are pretty cheap here, and you can have a great time here at Gnomedex on a very limited budget. Everyone has been friendly, and the LockerGnome people have worked their ass off to pull this whole thing together. Kudos for them on pulling it off with nary a hitch, (other than the rogue wi-fi networks that caused havoc the first day).

So, when can I register for next year?!?!?!

Ray has Tim O'Reilly's PowerPoint

Ray has Tim O'Reilly's PowerPoint presentation from today. Not sure how it'll seem without him to accompany it, but it's there if you'd like it.

Jason managed to jot down

Jason managed to jot down some of Dvorak's better quotes in a couple of entries. I think some people were pissed at him for such a non-serious and somewhat inflammatory speech towards Mac users, Cat Lovers, and Bloggers, but he was still sort of funny, though not really insightful or informative.

Tom Bridge has more coverage

Tom Bridge has more coverage of Gnomedex speakers, and since he believes in capitalization, it's a little easier to read than Beth's stuff. :)

I'm at the Google Party,

I'm at the Google Party, wrapping up Gnomedex. A band called Soul Mind is playing, Google is providing good food, beer, and free hats! I grabbed an extra one for my dad, he likes hats.

Just because you're among fellow geeks doesn't mean you should let your hair down TOO far, earlier I saw an older geek in the 45-55 age range looking at porn on his laptop, and while he was nearly in the corner table, it was pretty obvious to anyone within 35 feet what he was looking at. Ick.

I had a good conversation out in the hallway with Rob Malda of Slashdot earlier, I mentioned the RSS block to him, and he said they'd already caught it and added the IP to their list of firewalls, so that the RSS ban wouldn't kick in again. I also talked to him about the time he Slashdotted one of our servers at work. I didn't hold a grudge. :)

We talked for probably 10 minutes or so, he's a smart guy, but talks at an almost manic pace that's even hard for me to keep up with. We talked a bit about weblog software, and other things which I won't mention here. Someone said on their blog that Rob has no filter between his brain and his mouth, talking with him is total stream-of-consciousness, which is fun.

Hmm, I don't see Rob

Hmm, I don't see Rob Malda anywhere around, but Slashdot won't let me access the RSS feed, it says I'm abusing the feed by requesting it too often. What's really happening is about 150 people are online from one IP address, using NAT, so it just LOOKS like I'm abusing it.

Dan Gillmor is talking now,

Dan Gillmor is talking now, he's another smart guy, who really GETS weblogs, after Dvorak made it painfully obvious that he did not. They're not all about people's cats. I don't even own a cat.

Gillmor is right about the need to verify things they post, and even has the Kaycee debacle mentioned in his slides.

John C. Dvorak is on

John C. Dvorak is on now: "I'd use a Mac [like Tim O'Reilly] but I can't afford one."

I have this observation to

I have this observation to make: Tim O'Reilly is a fucking genius.

Beth is a blogging machine,

Beth is a blogging machine, I can see her about 8 feet from me, typing quickly on her tablet PC. She's got some great live coverage of Gnomedex, so if you're wondering what's going on here, check out her site.

Tim O'Reilly is speaking now,

Tim O'Reilly is speaking now, too bad I didn't win a free O'Reilly book earlier, I love their stuff. I can't wait to see the new TiVo Hacks book that they're coming out with.

Tim: "How many of you here use Google? You're all Linux users!!!"

Unbeknownst to me, my RSS

Unbeknownst to me, my RSS feed hasn't been working for like a month! For some reason, when this blog was upgraded to the newer version of Blogger, the RSS publisching option was disabled! My apologies to anyone who wanted to use RSS, I didn't realize it was broken!

Woo hoo, I won a

Woo hoo, I won a copy of Microsoft Plus Digital Media Edition from Beth the Microsoft chick!

Jim Louderback from ExtremeTech.com is

Jim Louderback from ExtremeTech.com is presenting now, showing us how to build Home Theater PCs. They're nice boxes, and I'm happy to learn that SnapStream can change the channel on Satellite and Digital cable boxes. I'd always figured that wouldn't work, so I've never tried their stuff. Time to give it a look now!

Corey Bridges: "The source code

Corey Bridges: "The source code for Windows is out there [on the internet]. If you want it, you can get it."

I'm in the ZoneLabs breakout

I'm in the ZoneLabs breakout session now, with Corey Bridges. I caught the tail end of Chris Pirillo's demo of RSS, enough to say that he drank the Kool-Aid on RSS. I think RSS is great, I use it every day, but I don't think it's going to change the world, just because I don't know any Users who have really adopted it yet. Geeks get it, but I don't think my mom does.

Just to show you how strange downtown Des Moines is, I attempted to return to Burger King again today for breakfast, and found it CLOSED! What Burger King isn't open on the weekends?!?! I got milk and donuts from a Pakistani guy who runs a bizarre little convenience store on the Skywalk. His store even sells beer, which is weird. Though there was a customer walking out with a 40 of Bud Light as I walked in...

I'm well rested, and ready

I'm well rested, and ready for another day at Gnomedex. I'd blog more, if the wi-fi would cooperate, it's still flaky.

Yesterday, Howard Butler spotted me wandering around looking for a place to eat lunch, so I wound up sitting with him, and some geeks from Minnesota. We swapped information about the various campus environments we work in, while eating tasty cake. After lunch, Rob Malda from Slashdot gave an interesting, if somewhat rambling, talk. I asked him who he saw as Slashdot's biggest competitor. He said he didn't think they had any competitors. I couldn't think of one either, which is why I asked the question. :)

Malda also said, when asked about Linux on the desktop, that he's doesn't think it's going to materialize anytime soon, and that Apple beat Linux to it with Mac OS X.

Kevin Ugangst from Microsoft's Media division gave an interesting speech, and showed off Halo, which is coming out soon for the PC and Macintosh. I already have Halo for my Xbox, but damn it looks great on the PC, with more weapons, vehicles, etc. thrown in. I hope it doesn't come out for a while though, as I have plenty of games to play right now.

I skipped out on the movie night to go eat at Spaghettiworks (thanks to alert reader Emily McMahon) with my wife, then we drove over to Clive to visit with some friends and see their new baby. According to Mike, I missed out on free beer, but I can handle that, as long as they didn't call my name for any prizes that I wasn't there to win, such as the Windows Media PC. I'll freely admit now that I'm picky about these sorts of things, but I really didn't want to watch movies projected onto a screen with a projector that wasn't quite bright enough, with mono sound. No thanks, I've got a 53" widescreen HDTV at home with 5.1 surround sound, and my living room isn't filled with fellow geeks tapping away at their keyboards. :)

Okay, I think I got

Okay, I think I got my wireless issues sorted out now. There are about a dozen random ad-hoc wi-fi networks, and my machine was jumping between them all, which kept disconnecting me. I made my machine a little less aggressive now, and it seems to have stabilized.

This Google stuff is fascinating, the amount of thought that goes into even their ad placement is really impressive. They use off the shelf PC hardware for their datacenters, they showed us some funny pictures of the first Google center at Stanford, it looks like my junk room, with an assortment of old PCs. Their router handles 256Gbps of traffic!

The Wi-Fi is a bit

The Wi-Fi is a bit unstable, so I'll try to get this sent out before it kicks me offline again, but so far I'm having a good time. I went to the first breakout session today with Kyle Bennett from HardOCP.com, who really knows his stuff when it comes to hardware. Nelson Minar from Google is speaking now, showing us how Google works behind the scenes, it's pretty fascinating stuff.

Okay, I'm at the convention

Okay, I'm at the convention center, and I have the Wi-Fi up and running. It's even 802.11g, so I'm connected at 36 Mbps. If you're wondering which geek I am, I'm the one in the black t-shirt that says "It must be user error". :)

Thanks to Eric Sink, one of our speakers today, for helping me get online. He' s also sharing his little table with me and my laptop.

For breakfast, I wound up at Burger King, a few blocks south of the Hotel, only $2.17 for a sausage biscuit and milk, much more reasonable than the $2 toast at the Savery.

I think I'm the first

I think I'm the first Gnomedex blogger awake today, no one else seems to have updated yet. That's probably because I didn't stay up until the wee hours like everyone else. I've got a little more bandwidth now, as I've bypassed the lamp/phonejack thing, and increased to 34K. Unfortunately, I somehow forgot or lost the cell phone cable for my computer, so that's not going to be an option, but I should have Wi-Fi once I get over to the convention center.

Now comes the quest for food, I'm not getting room service, it's $1.95 for TOAST!

We're in Des Moines at

We're in Des Moines at the Savery hotel. If you're a fellow attendee, stop by room 334 if you want to meet me. :) The Savery isn't the most geek-friendly of hotels, they charge $1.00 for each outgoing local call, and I'm only get 26,400 baud out of this crappy phone line, though I'm hoping that's the lamp thing that I'm plugged into, I'll have to try bypassing that later, or I'll just go to my cell phone for wireless data, as it's faster than this primitive stuff.

It's called broadband, Savery, look into it!

Since I'm from Iowa, I feel that I can bash Des Moines. I've never stayed in this part of the city before, and tonight when we went looking for a place to eat in walking distance, we didn't find much. A Domino's Pizza, a Quizno's, and that's about it. We wound up at the Marriot, a few blocks down, eating at Allie's, a restauraunt in that hotel. They had good food though, and it wasn't totally absurdly priced like many hotel restaurants.

I do wish this area of Des Moines was more like the area of downtown Minneapolis, full of great bars and eateries. Here, most of the restaurants were already closed at 7:00 on a Thursday night. Not exactly a happening place...

Today is a Pseudo-Friday for

Today is a Pseudo-Friday for me, since I'm heading out to Gnomedex late this afternoon. I'll be sure to do some serious blogging while I'm there, as everyone else will be too, and the availability of wireless access will definitely help. Time to make sure both of my laptop batteries are charged up! My wife, Holly, is going with me, though she's not attending the conference. I guess having to live with a computer nerd is enough for her, she doesn't want to attend a conference with a bunch of them too, so she's going to be visiting some friends and family in the Des Moines area while I'm geeking out.

Because UNI buys hundreds of

Because UNI buys hundreds of computers at once when we re-do our labs, we're able to negotiate great deals with Dell, and this year we negotiated some super savings, that extend to faculty, staff, students, as well as their friends and family. Until the 15th of this month, you can order a brand new computer through UNI and save about $400-$500 off what it would cost you normally from Dell. You don't need to be affiliated with UNI in any way, as I asked about that, and was told "If they can spell UNI, they can purchase a computer on this deal." So, here's the deal, it's a Dell Optiplex GX260 machine, you only get one choice of CPU speed, the 2.66Ghz chip, which is where the most bang for the buck is right now anyhow. There are several other options you can see on the link, especially in regards to monitors and optical drives.

Here is the link:

Dell Deal

To see the pricing, click the link above, then click on "Click Here to enter the Dell store and view specially priced systems recommended by the University of Northern Iowa." Then, choose the offer on the left, it should be listed at $966 or so with the default options. If you're looking to spend less, don't freak, you can. Just remove the parts you don't want.

Unless you're a serious power user or play a lot of games, you only need 512MB of RAM, 1GB isn't really necessary for most home users (myself not included). :)

I, personally, like the 18" LCD display, though you may not even need a monitor, if you've got an old one you're happy with, though these new flat panel displays are great, they take up a lot less room, and cause less eyestrain because there is no flicker with LCD technology.

In regards to the CD/DVD drives, my suggestion is to go with either the DVD/CD-RW combo drive, or the DVD+R/RW drive for a few dollars more. Either drive will let you burn CDs and watch DVDs, but the latter drive will also let you burn DVDs, for only about $45 more than the first..

In regards to video cards, either the integrated card, or the 32MB Radeon card is fine for word processing, the WWW, e-mail, etc. Neither one is a great gaming card, so if you're going to plan on doing some 3D gaming on the machine, just go with the cheap integrated video, and pick yourself up a separate 3D card to install when the machine arrives, such as this one:

GeForce 4 Ti4200 Video Card

Other than that, the default options should be fine, though I do like the USB keyboard a little better, but it's your money. Same goes for the speakers, the ones with the subwoofer sound nicer, but if you don't play many games or much music from your computer, you won't need them.

This is really an outstanding deal, I've already helped at least a dozen faculty members order them for home, one professor even ordered 3, one for himself, and one for each of his two kids, the savings are that good.

This machine also comes with a 3-year Next-Business-Day On-Site Warranty, so if something breaks, they send a guy to your house the next day who will fix/replace it for free.

Lightning struck a tree in

Lightning struck a tree in the neighbor's backyard last weekend, causing our loss of a 27" TV, dishwasher, a surge protector, and, as we found out last night, our garbage disposal too. Not enough damaged to warrant an insurance claim, just enough to make it hurt...

What a busy couple of

What a busy couple of weeks I've had! I celebrated my 27th birthday on the 24th of June, got some nice presents from my family, but didn't do much else.

The new faculty have started to arrive, and I just brought up my first Windows 2003 server in my domain at work. It seemed to go pretty well, though the users are griping because a group policy change now resets their home page to my default every day, rather than letting them choose it. Oops. Don't know if I'll find a workaround for that one or not, they may just have to suffer. It's actually not a bad solution, since they tend to ignore the e-mails my co-worker and I send them. Then they do something dumb, like delete jdbgmgr.exe, or turn their computer off in the middle of a service pack installation, even though they were e-mailed about it several times...

And last, but most certainly not least, Star Wars Galaxies has been released. I'm having a blast with this game, I never really got into EverQuest, and haven't played any other MMORPGs, but several friends of mine and I are all playing on the same server. If you're looking for me, I'm on the server called "Intrepid" and my character's name is "Morrolan".

I need to come out of my shell a bit for the next few weeks, since I'm heading to Gnomedex later this month. I'm guessing that those people who have been clicking my name on the Gnomedex blogroll would like to have something current to read before the conference.