Podcasts and Walking

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I try every morning to go for about an hour walk with my Fiance’, it helps wake me up for the day, gets the blood pumping and hopefully ease me into the whole exercising everyday thing.

I’ve found having something to listen to helps make the time go by quicker, I tried listening to the radio but I haven’t found a station that I like. They either play silly music I don’t like, behave a little stupid or start taking calls from random strangers who complain about stupid things.

I like music but I prefer it in the background while I’m doing something else to being the only thing I’m doing. This morning I decided to try something a little different and put a podcast on my cellphone (which is what I’ve been using to listen to the radio on.). I haven’t listened to any podcasts in a while so I wasn’t exactly sure what was out there and started looking around. I don’t want something to “heavy” as I’m half asleep at that time in the morning, its got to be something light hearted, funny and at the sametime interesting… ideally I would like to learn something new while going for a walk.

So I tried a Stack Overflow podcast with Geoff Atwood and Joel Spolsky and it was actually very good, I’m not sure if I actually learnt anything but it was entertaining the recording quality was very good and time did fly by. I know in the past I used to listen to LUG Radio which I enjoyed too. If my morning commute to work was longer (its currently less the 5 minutes) I would listen to more podcasts.

If you know of any good podcasts leave a comment and I’ll go look it up.

Wedding stuff & lists…

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weddingCakeCoupleGift Lists, Guest Lists, To Do Lists, Play Lists, Wine Lists…

Been Working on wedding stuff and I’ve come to the conclusion that weddings are all about lists. ?Between Claire and my self we’ve made alot of them, and I’m expecting even after the wedding there will be more lists.

For those of you who have been following the wedding planning closely (mostly friends and family of the bride…) things are moving along smoothly, I’m not sure exactly how many days it is until the “big day”, and I’m not too stressed about the things I have to organise.

The honeymoon is mostly booked, there are some minor logistical matters to sort out but they can only be done closer to the time. I just have to make sure that me and my groom party (or whatever the groom version of Bridal Party) show up at the right place, on time, dressed in the appropriate attire… and that I say the right things (“I do”… been practicing that 😉 ).

Speaking about appropriate attire, I have been informed that I can not get married in jeans and a t-shirt… even if I swap the t-shirt for a shirt with a colar. So I’ve organised that this week myself and one of my trusty 2 bestmen are going shopping to pickout something that doesn’t make me look like an undertaker. I’m not sure yet whether to buy or rent, we’ll decide that once I find out what effect the clothing will have on my bank balance.

The other thing that I’ve been responsible for are the invitations… which admittedly have been taking a little longer than they should of, those I should finish up and post this week still. ?So those of you who have been checking your post box everyday eagerly awaiting them will have to do it a little longer.

And thats the end of my list… for now… there are a few things missing from this public list, but those are stored in Google Docs with entries in Google Calendar to remind me.

Remote desktop to console session on Windows 2003 Server

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One of our clients Windows 2003 servers was doing strange things, on connecting to the server via Remote Desktop all you got was a blue screen (default windows background colour). My guess was that a session or 2 was still running in the background and needed to be killed off, but because we couldn’t get access to the server via Remote Desktop or physically we had a bit of a problem. Thats when I remembered the following neat trick.

If you pass /console (/admin on newer versions of the Remote Desktop Client) to the Remote Desktop Client (mstc.exe) and then connect to the server you connect to the servers console and not a new terminal server session. I believe there are ways to specify that you want to connect to the console in the hostname field but I haven’t gotten that working yet.

In my case it allowed me to kill off the troublesome Sessions and get access back to the server.

Found this info on this site. (Which BTW is a useful site.)

Proxy servers in Google Chrome

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Network Access MessageAt the office we have a weird Windows 2003 install running the ISA Firewall/Proxy which sits between us and the outside world, for some as yet unknown reason we get brown “Network Access Message: The page cannot be displayed” error messages occasionally when visiting websites (like the example on the right.). I haven’t been able yet to find the cause, but it gets frustrating when some sites are inaccessible for no reason.

In order to get trouble free internet I installed a linux machine with a squid proxy, now the problem is that I don’t always want to use the squid proxy as it comes with its own internal network issues on our network.

After a bit of research I found that Google Chrome can be made to use a defined proxy by supplying a command line option. I created a new shortcut for Chrome and set the target too:

“C:\Users\Dale Nunns\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” –proxy-server=192.168.0.20:3128

That makes it use my squid proxy (192.168.0.20:3128) when ever its started from that shortcut. Another nice option that I stumbled across awhile ago is to add “-incognito” to the end to start the browser in incognito mode.

Nokia 6280 – The aftermath.

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Below are a few pictures of a friends Nokia 6280, well whats left of it after a dog has chewed it… The dog in question was a Boxer dog, not mine (I don’t have any dogs).

Hope my friends don’t mind me uploading the pics…

Flickr Camera List

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Next time I’m in the market for a camera I must remember the Flickr Camera Finder list.

Which is a list of the most popular camera’s used on Flickr. No real surprises on the list, I would’ve expected the iPhone to be the most popular Cameraphone, even though it takes bad pictures.

Canon at the top of the list of manufacturer’s doesn’t surprise me either as they make good, affordable camera’s and they appear to have a large percentage of the point and shoot users.

The Kodak camera’s that are listed there was a little bit of a surprise but I guess thats more because they’re perhaps not as popular in South Africa as in other parts of the world.