pboehmer.com

2010.02.07

I had my first tower climb of the year. Its been a couple of months since my last climb and I was a bit sore the next day. Hopefully, I will get more climbs in this year. Construction is moving right along on the new network operations center. The Tate raised floor system is due to ship at the end of the month, so things will hopefully come together the beginning of March.

I am gearing up for spring and resuming the mods on my car. I ordered a Pedders bump-steer correction kit and some Stealth Auto bulbs to get rid of the egg-yolk turn signals. Next on the list is a set of BCR coil-overs from Circuit Motor Sports.

2010.01.17

I was in the process of reloading my media PC with the latest beta version of Boxee media software when I decided to upgrade the motherboard BIOS and ended up bricking the board. I contacted Logic Supply (where I purchased the board several years ago) and they hooked me up with a new BIOS chip which is on its way. I had to break down and reload the PC with *cough* Windows XP *cough* because the S3 Chrome chipset couldn't handle Boxee's OpenGL graphics under Linux. Boxee under Windows uses DirectX which seems to work pretty good.

Since my media PC was out of commission, I ended up picking up Patriot Memory's Box Office Media Player from Amazon. This small box (about 6x6x1in) handles just about every media codec and also plays ISO images. The box only cost about $130, but be forewarned that its strictly an enthusiast level device. The interface is lacking, but the message board support is helpful. Since the box runs Busy Box, anybody with a Unix background can tweak some of the internals.

2010.01.09

Hope everyone had a great holiday season. Construction started on our new office and is progressing pretty good. We will be moving a 3000lb battery pack this week, which will require opening a wall up to allow a forklift to come into the building.

My work is looking to move off of the traditional PBX system (Nortel Norstar) and is looking at an IP based system. We received some demo Cisco IP Phone equipment and are testing it out. Its been a fun challenge trying to figure it out. We have full tech support available, but we are in no rush and prefer to figure it out on our own. Its been interesting since none of us data guys are familiar with phone/PBX terminology and the phone guys are in the same position with networking. This is also the first time that we needed to resort to using a GUI to configure Cisco equipment.

2009.12.18

Woohoo! Got word this morning the my company's board approved the construction of our new network operations center (NOC). We are being relocated to another section of the building that used to be a call center back in the day and is now empty. The new NOC will have a raised floor system installed, a screen room (for wireless testing), our own dock and workshop, and all new furniture. Not sure how long the construction will take, but I plan on taking lots of pictures to show the progression. Here are pictures of the current room prior to construction:

2009.12.17

Things had been pretty quiet until last week. We had our first snow last week, while just a dusting, still managed to wreak havoc on Cincinnati traffic. Despite almost getting ran off the road by numerous vehicles, including a large garbage truck, the 300 handled flawlessly. This is the first car that I owned with ABS, so I needed to retraining myself to stop manually pumping the brakes. The 300s auto-stick and AWD features also helped me out a bit.

Last week, I also had a dentist appointment. This was a planned cleaning, but the week prior some of my bridge work had came loose, so I was expecting a simple re-cementing and be sent on my way. As usual, my luck wasn't that good and I ended up requiring two dental implants (either that or spend Christmas without teeth). I managed to get the surgery squeezed in two days ago and I am still home recovering. At least the pain killers are working.

2009.11.30

FreeBSD 8.0 was released over the Thanksgiving holiday. Features include, but not limited to, reworked USB support, ZFS is no longer in experimental status, and experimental NFSv4 support. You can download the i386 ISO images here. The release announcement can be found here which also has links for the errata and release notes.

I finished Modern Warfare 2 this past weekend and started playing it from the beginning all over again. So far the second time around has been a more enjoyable experience. A lot of the in-game dialog gives the impression that you need to hustle to your goal, but in the end it turns out that you have plenty of time to explore assuming there isn't a countdown timer active. I have also been hunting around for the intelligence pickups and trying to get more achievements this time around. Despite not playing the Special Ops or Multiplayer modes yet, I still highly recommend the game.