I talked to my friend

I talked to my friend Jeremy today, and we decided to rendezvous in Ames on Saturday, to watch Iowa State pummel the hell out of the UNI Panthers (hopefully). I haven't been to a football game for a couple of years, it should be fun, if we don't die of heat stroke. I didn't get to many games last year, since so many were televised, I didn't feel the need to attend. However, after ISU's pathetic display in the last 7 games of the season, I'm betting they won't be televised much this year.

"Madonna of the Yarnwinder," believed

"Madonna of the Yarnwinder," believed to have been painted in the first decade of the 16th century, was taken from Drumlanrig castle in southern Scotland at around 6 a.m. EDT.

CNN.com - Da Vinci theft at Scottish castle - Aug. 27, 2003

As the article points out, how would you ever sell it? And I hope the person in charge of security for the exhibit has been sacked.

Wow, how many stories about

Wow, how many stories about irrational religious zealotry can we have in the news on one day? I count four, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and Catholics all seem capable of causing more than their fair share of strife...

But I have ever thought religion a concern purely between our God and our consciences, for which we were accountable to him, and not to the priests. I never told my own religion, nor scrutinized that of another. I never attempted to make a convert, nor wished to change another's creed. I have ever judged of the religion of others by their lives, and by this test, my dear Madam, I have been satisfied yours must be an excellent one, to have produced a life of such exemplary virtue and correctness. For it is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read. By the same test the world must judge me. But this does not satisfy the priesthood. They must have a positive, a declared assent to all their interested absurdities. My opinion is that there would never have been an infidel, if there had never been a priest. The artificial structures they have built on the purest of all moral systems, for the purpose of deriving from it pence and power, revolts those who think for themselves, and who read in that system only what is really there. -Thomas Jefferson

I'm pooped today, I worked

I'm pooped today, I worked a 12 hour day yesterday, staying late to help some of the Resnet crew clean up after the Blaster worm that's causing problems in the dorms. Only 2 of the residence halls at UNI have internet access right now, as every student computer has to be manually checked, cleaned, and patched before the building is allowed on the campus network. Did I mention they aren't air conditioned? So, I spent about 3.5 hours going door to door on a floor full of freshman girls, which might sound good in theory, but at that point all I wanted to do is go home and sleep.

My mom tipped me off

My mom tipped me off about Allegiant Air yesterday, they're a low-cost airline flying mostly to Vegas from various cities, including Des Moines! You can get a round trip ticket for as low as $99, but I don't think I want to visit Vegas in August.

I really enjoy how some

I really enjoy how some faculty don't even bother to go look at the room they're going to be teaching in for the semester until the first day of classes. Then they inevitably freak out, because they've been assigned to a room that doesn't have a projector/computer/vcr/dvd setup in it, and now it's an emergency, because they've planned their whole semester around that. Guess who has to come up with a solution? The Scheduling office? The Faculty member? The Dean's Office? Or The Computer Guy? Yeah...the computer guy...

It's the first day of

It's the first day of the fall semester, here at UNI. It's supposed to reach 92°F today, so it's toasty warm, and crowded on campus. I've already been asked directions by freshmen at least 5 times. So far, the highlight of my day was watching a Goth chick, wearing too much makeup and far too many black clothes for the heat, strutting her stuff all tough, then getting nailed by a sprinkler that's watering the new sod. Her "cooler than thou" atttitude was completely destroyed.

Argh, our dryer died tonight.

Argh, our dryer died tonight. Well, it technically still functions, but when you hear the sound of metal-on-metal coming from your dryer, it's probably best to stop using it. It came with our house, and I'd estimate its age at around 20 years, so there's no way it's worth fixing. I ordered a new one from Sears, we'll pick it up later this week. Normally I'd want to see it in person, but I checked Consumer Reports' site, found a model they suggested as a "Best Buy" then saw it was on sale at Sears.com, and the sale ends in 1.5 hours. So, I ordered online, and they should e-mail me in 3-5 days and tell me to come pick it up. It's Sears Item #02662802000, Mfr. Model #62802 if you're interested.

Watching an episode of Trading

Watching an episode of Trading Spaces today, I think I found the carpet I want to put in our basement. It's called Legato Carpet, and it's sold at Home Depot. It looked neat on TV, all you do is stick it down, but it looks a lot better than the standard low pile peel and stick carpet. After a bit of walking on it, you can't see any seams, and if you ever stain a piece, you can just replace it. This seems like the perfect solution for our basement area, that we just use as casual TV room. I may have to head out to Home Depot tomorrow to buy a box of it, and give it a try. It's about $2/square foot, I think, but that doesn't seem too expensive, if it looks nice.

Interesting, my employer is listed

Interesting, my employer is listed as second in the US News & World Report ranking of Midwestern public universities granting Master's degrees. See, if you get specific enough, you too can be in the top 5! For instance, I'm the number 1 search result on Google for "Seth Bokelman", what are the odds? Actually, there is another Seth Bokelman in the world, believe it or not, but he lives in West Virginia, and I think he's in high school still, but I digress.

Why UNI is second, I don't know. I can certainly think of several dozen other schools in the Midwest I'd attend before UNI. In the state of Iowa, here are the valid reasons to attend UNI, in my opinion:

1. You're majoring in Music, Education, or Business.
2. You got a free ride scholarship.
3. Your mommy wouldn't let you leave the Cedar Falls/Waterloo area, so you're living at home.
4. You went to ISU or the U of Iowa for a year, but couldn't hack it, because the profs didn't babysit you, or you couldn't make friends, even with 25,000-30,000 fellow students to pick from.
5. You couldn't even get in to ISU or the U of Iowa.

And that's pretty much it. UNI is not a research school, the focus is on undergraduate education here (not that there's anything wrong with that). UNI doesn't seem to focus on being a leader in anything, however, and I've jokingly proposed several times that our school motto should be "Good Enough" as that's the prevailing attitude here. That's not to say I'm not grateful to work here, it just means I wouldn't encourage others to attend this school, given the other two excellent schools in our system, unless one of the above 5 conditions are met.

But still, the students come, though I don't know why. For instance, UNI has a Biology program, but the U of Iowa is a medical school, with a teaching hospital, and ISU is one of the best agricultural schools in the nation. Given that tuition costs for the schools are within 2-3% of each other, why would you choose UNI?

Well, all the college students

Well, all the college students are returning to campus in Iowa, which means our network connectivity blows. They're all plugging in their computers, which aren't properly patched, so they're getting hit with the Blaster worm and its ilk almost immediately. It's not affecting our computers here on the proper campus network, as we've got those ports blocked between the dorms and the rest of campus, but I know they lack that setup at ISU.

Unfortunately, all three of the state universities share the ICN, our statewide fiber-optic network, and the ICN has been suffering under the massive load caused by all this garbage. It was so bad this morning, I couldn't get much work done, because our internet connections constantly timed out as the ICN routers were stressed to the point of failure. Fortunately, I found a workaround, I'm VPN'ed into my home network, which works well, as I can route around the ICN. I can do this, because Cedar Falls Utilities is my ISP at home, and they have a 100Mbit bridge between their network and UNI, so my traffic between work and home all flows down that pipe, rather than through the beleaguered ICN. I'm limited to 1.5Mbits of bandwidth (my upload speed cap at home) but at least it's stable!

Update: I see Gary shares my pain with the ICN.

That's one of the blurbs

That's one of the blurbs over at The Onion, and it made me laugh, because I wasn't all that impressed by the blackout. During the Great Halloween Ice Storm of '91, our farm was without power for five days, so those sissy city boys with their 24 hour blackout don't impress me much. Did I mention it got down into the 30s, inside our house during that week? After 3 days, when we could actually make it to town, and back to school, I had to go in early to shower in the locker room, since we didn't have power or heat at home. We finally resorted to lighting numerous candles at home, to keep the pipes from freezing, as there wasn't a kerosene heater or generator to be bought for hundreds of miles in every direction at that point.

Being without power for 12-24 hours, unless you're stuck in an elevator or an iron lung, doesn't really impress me all that much, sorry. :)

I also learned that

I also learned that I suck at authoring web pages in CSS. Unless you're reading this via the RSS feed, you've probably noticed the weblog has a new look to it. I've been slowly customizing it, but I'm a total newbie with CSS, and I tend to break it a lot. I'm catching on now, I think, it's just all seems so odd and ambiguous...

I learned something new today

I learned something new today at work. Namely, how to use software for the blind and visually impaired. Probably a good thing that I learned it, given the prescription for my glasses. I got to install and mess with two of the most popular software packages, Jaws and WindowEyes. I've gotta say I like Jaws better, it's a lot more polished, though my faculty member said he prefers WindowsEyes to use. The stuff isn't cheap, at nearly $1,000/copy individually, but if you're blind, what are you going to do?

It works in a way that I didn't expect too, the software reads the words that are under your mouse cursor, so the blind actually have a good grasp of what the UI for an application looks like to the rest of us. It was kind of neat to watch my user navigating that way, though the software merely spits gibberish when I use it, because I move so quickly. People who can see just fine say I do things too quickly in Windows, so I'm not surprised that the robotic computer voice can't keep up. It helped a lot that this user was very proficient with computers as well, which I think is a requirement for using this kind of software, he had a better knowledge of the keyboard shortcuts for Windows than I did, which sort of freaked me out.

While setting up his new computer, I looked at his old one, which he had just moved, and had been unable to get working since the move. A quick glance showed me what was wrong, he had swapped the PS/2 cables for mouse and keyboard around (they use the same types of plugins) as well as plugged the audio cable into the wrong hole (line out instead of speakers). I've always thought they should have made those interfaces different, especially for the mouse/keyboard. Both the keyboard/mouse and the audio inputs/outputs are color coded, but that doesn't do a damned bit of good when you're blind. He was very happy to learn his new system came with USB peripherals, as you can't get those wrong.

This is freaky, these two

This is freaky, these two news stories showed up together on CNN.com just now. They both seem like something you'd see on Six Feet Under or Dead Like Me. First, a tourist in Las Vegas was walking barefoot (Barefoot? On the Strip? Eww!) when she got electrocuted by a traffic signal wiring box. Next, a surgical resident is decapitated by a malfunctioning elevator. I tell you, it's not even safe to leave the house anymore. Particularly gruesome is the fact that there was a woman stuck inside the elevator with the severed head for 20 minutes. That's gonna leave a mark...

Update: Alert reader Rowena Tan told me about this story, from yesterday. A long-haired carny (Gee, what are the chances of that? He should have stuck with a mullet) got his hair caught in a passing roller coaster car, and wound up dead. That gives us a trifecta of weird deaths in 24 hours. Truth really is stranger than fiction.

If you're my friend, you'll

If you're my friend, you'll link to me as such on Friendster. You can find me there at seth.bokelman@uni.edu.

I'm going back to my

I'm going back to my alma mater, Iowa State University, tomorrow, along with a couple of co-workers. We're going down there to look at their Kerberos implementation, because we'd like to use something similar here to tie our Active Directory to our ancient OpenVMS system that hosts the e-mail system for the campus. ISU has been using Kerberos for a long time, and hopefully we'll learn something. If I have time, maybe I'll stop in to harass John for a bit.

My friend Candace's grandfather disappeared

My friend Candace's grandfather disappeared in Cedar Falls last night. If you've seen this man, please contact the authorities.

Update: He's now been found! Just got this message from Candace:

Good news! My grandfather has been found near Ft. Dodge. My parents are on their way to pick him up. Thank you for all of your thoughts, prayers and help in spreading the word. My family and I really appreciate everything you have done these past few days. Thanks again. Candace

This site is finally back

This site is finally back up and working. The lack of updates over the last few weeks wasn't intentional, just had one of those perfect storms of technical issues that prevented Blogger from connecting to my server via FTP. My ISP decided to change IP addresses on me at the same time I was upgrading my server from Windows 2000 to 2003. I have a static IP, but they split up my cable node, so I had to update. This left me with several different variables to rule out before I could track down the problem, and I finally just gave up, built a new server, and changed my whole network topography at home, but the result is I'm back online, with a much faster server than I had before. I've got a few kinks to iron out in my web site still, but at least the weblog is working!

This site was down for

This site was down for the last few days because my ISP was changing stuff around, giving me a new IP. I got switched over to the new IP just fine, but they forgot to unblock my WWW and FTP ports, so it took a bit to get it all working.

I spent all of last week in Windows Server 2003 training, which was intense, but I learned quite a bit of new information and refined my ActiveDirectory skills somewhat. More on that later, I just finished watching Gangs of New York, which is 3 hours long, and now I have to pee.