Posts in month: November, 2004

Wow! Those guys at forbes.com are really sharp– Such insight, such intellegence!
</sarcasm>

The view from the window:

Yep that’s snow. The first batch of the year arrived last night in a temper tantrum of rain, sleet, ice, and finally, . . . snow.

I’m off to make cranberry pudding and mince pie for 15 people– Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Well, after promising to do so for months and months I finally finished a website for a friend of mine Matt Rossi. You can check out the new page by clicking the link on the sidebar or by clicking here.

In all honesty, I have no idea what Matt’s deal is with the whales but the site turned out pretty well.

Matt’s brother Michael designed the fantastic graphics and I made it into a functioning site completely database driven for simple dynamic updating– In short, it’s way cool.

This brings me to a somewhat touchy point, hopefully not to be taken incorrectly by those who read it.

I am a computer geek by trade (and somewhat by choice, I do enjoy it) and because of this I often have friends, friends of friends, co-workers etc. ask me to help them out with various computer problems. I’m usually only too happy to oblige but lately it’s been getting out of hand. People call me on the phone and without so much as a “Hi! How are ya?” launch into their computer woes, or they stop by my desk at work and say “Hey Ian, when you get a second could you…”.
Maybe I’m being a bit thin skinned about it all– just a little case of the winter time blues, but feeling like you are being taken for granted is never fun. Now I understand why every single one of my computer geek friends and co-workers charge money for services outside the office setting.

I guess I’m just too nice/stupid/willing to please for my own good sometimes.

I’m reminded of an old axiom about finishing last but I’ll refrain, this post is whiney enough already.

So I finally joined the year 2002 and bought a Tivo from my friend Josh for 75 bucks. It’s just an old fashioned series one with a 30 hour recording capacity but I’m loving it!

I have to say I’ve had it two days and I already don’t know what the hell I did without one. It really makes TV something you watch when you feel like it or when you have the time. No more scheduling life around TV (or, as is more often the case, forgoing things I’d like to watch for real life commitments/slackness/forgetfulness).

So far on the season pass list:
The Simpsons
The Family Guy
Futurama
Nip/Tuck
King of the Hill
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
… and about 1/2 a dozen movies I picked out of the browsing list.

One of the most interesting features Tivo has is it trys to guess what kind of show you might like (based on what you have watched/recorded in the past) and if it has the disk space it will record them for you. So far it obviously doesn’t know me very well since it recorded Maury(daytime talk show) and some children’s show called Recess. I think the reason for the strange choices might be because some of the previous owners information is still stored in it’s little head.. but even Josh doesn’t watch children’s shows.

This weekend I plan to install TivoWeb and Tyserver which will let me program my Tivo from anywhere and download all of the shows for burning to DVD. If anyone knows of any other good Tivo hacks let me know and I’ll scope them out.

Oh the geekyness factor is huge ain’t it?

I was marveling at how much I have come to depend on FireFox’s built in search engine feature this morning and decided to whip up a quick search plugin of my own for the phone book at UIC (my employer, in case you didn’t know).

It turns out this is much simpler than I expected it to be. The docs are right here if you want to take a crack at it yourself some time.

You can install my plugin by visiting the install page (Wordpress doesn’t like j-script it seems, hence the other page).

One note; it currently searches only based on name, not netID or department. Since 99% of the time I’m looking up someone’s e-mail address it serves my purposes. If you have an interest in a version of the plugin that searches by the other criteria drop a line here and I’ll gladly hook you up.

Oh, and I know the icon looks like a bananna. I made it yellow because my phone is yellow, deal with it.

That’s right folks, the season is rapidly approaching. I always love this time of year, the hustle and bustle, the good cheer and of course, the shopping!

In that vein, every year on the day after thanksgiving nearly every store on the planet has super-special deals to get the good little consumers to empty their pocketbooks so we’ll all have something shiny under tree come Dec 25th. This year I have the edge. Someone has compiled a list of the “Black Friday” deals before they are available to the public. Check them out and plan ahead!

http://www.bf2004.net/

Oh and speaking of holiday cheer, check out this link.

Apparently a bunch of smart guys got together to see if they could turn some really crappy vodka into some pretty good vodka by using a Brita water filtration system to filter out the impurities and chemicals which give cheap vodka its nasty aftertaste (and beforetaste and duringtaste for that matter).

Surprisingly, it seems to work pretty well. I happen to have a Brita and I recently bought a new set of filters for it… I might just have to give this a try.

Just in case you don’t have your finger on the pulse of the internet (perhaps jammed straight up your ass instead?), Craigslist is a very cool, and completely free place to sell things, buy things and do anything you might otherwise find in the classified section of your local newspaper. I’m a huge fan and read it farily regularly but this has to be the best craigslist post ever:

Amen brother, amen.

I don’t know if you really care, oh constant reader, but I recently updated www.ianknox.net to point directly to this page. Previously it had a re-direct page and a frame that was screwing with search robots and made for a generally less-than-pleasant surfing experience. I even got Apache to do the whole virtual name thing so my other domain points to the right spot as well. I also added a favorite icon which you can see in IE by bookmarking this page (or by just viewing it in Firefox/Safari).

Hopefully this will further my goal fo being the top Ian Knox on google. I have a long way to go to get past the political cartoonist from Ireland and the evangelist from Coventry (UK) but I’m going to do what I can.

Oh by the way, in Microsoft’s new search engine (still in beta), I’m already #1

Gotta love them odd translations! I just submitted this to Engrish.com but I thought I’d share it here too.
The instructions to my external firewire HD enclosure.

Wow.

Well the web server is back in action after the move and I have a few things to catch up on.

First, to quote Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, let’s take the recent unpleasantness. It appears that Dubyuh is going to be in charge for another 4 years. It hurts the soul, it really does. I hope these guys are happy!

Second, I moved. It was pretty painless since I hired movers. It’s absolutely amazing how fast three burly Mexican guys can haul all of your worldly possessions across town. Here’s a picture of the outside of the building– more to come once I find which box I packed my digital camera in.

Third, I hurt my eye… sort of. For several days before The move my left eye was very irritated, as though there was something stuck in it. This wasn’t too surprising since I was stirring up a ton of dust and grime while I was packing everything. As the days went by I tried a lot of stuff to clear it out; blinking while holding me head at a certain angle, dousing it under the faucet, Visine by the gallon but nothing worked.
One day, while trying in vain to locate and eradicate the interloping particle, I saw something odd. One of my eyelashes had inexplicably decided to grow out of the bottom edge of my eyelid. Since it was growing straight down, it laid across the cornea causing the irritation. I yanked it out (yes it hurt) with a pair of needle nose pliers and WHAM it was 100% better. I realized afterwards that this must have been bothering me for some time even before I noticed my eye was irritated. It was as if something over the last weeks had been bothering me and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it and now that feeling had gone away. Judging from a quick Google it looks like that hair took anywhere from 2-4 months to reach it’s eye-jabbing length. I can just imagine it creeping in slowly irritating the eye in tiny increments until it finally gets close enough to a nerve to make me notice.

*shudder*
Bodies are weird.

Fourth and finally, I have been pondering the subject of “hipsters.” Matt (My ex-roommate) and I discussed them at length one morning on the way to Augies and Matt pointed out that they nearly always wear mesh backed baseball caps and t-shirts which they consider ironic in some way, but really aren’t. Obviously someone agrees with me:

…old-timers and the hipsters who have just shown up. Young post-collegiates in ironic T-shirts and forklift drivers in sincere ones.

It just goes to show you that there isn’t a single original idea in the world, not even about hipsters.