Not So User Friendly

Working with a diverse mix of operating systems, I seem to find new reasons to hate windows on servers more than the rest every year.

Add requiring hitting 'Ctrl-Alt-Del' to login to the list. I can't remember for sure if I've ever had this actually byte me, but it would only take one time of moving the monitor of a KVM from a *nix box to a windows box and forgetting to move the keyboard to really begin hating that 'feature'.

Of course, that is just a sub-feature to hate of the foolish insistence on providing local 'security'. These features make sense on a desktop or a laptop ... and almost never make sense in a server environment. If someone is looking to cause you harm has physical access to the server, you are already screwed. All of these nonsense 'security' features only make administration more difficult with no advantages.

Bathtub High

They are re-enameling and painting our bathtub again. This time its guaranteed for two years, so hopefully it will actually last for awhile. The fumes are pretty intense in spite of all of my attempts at increasing ventilation in the apartment.

Pandora

In other geeky news, I recently upgraded to a paid Pandora account. I had been meaning to do so anyway for the past couple of months, considering how much use I get out of it, and with the recent limitations of 40 hours a week it seemed time to finally do so. The lack of ads and not having to press the "are you still there?" button every couple of hours make it work the 3 bucks a month alone.

Google Voice Invite

I finally got around to signing up for an account with Google Voice (formerly known as Grand Central) a couple of weeks ago, and as I was about to create this fresh knew Blogger blog, I received an invite.

The first question, of course, was what number to choose. I doubted there would be any 212 numbers available, and my expectations were met. Next I tried 'deekevin', which didn't work out. 'deekev' gave quite a few possibilites, but I didn't see any that appealed to me. 1979, the year both my wife and I were born, and according to Gizmodo, the final year before the digital tsunami didn't provide me with any good results. Next up was variations of date formats of our anniversary, where I finally found something I liked, in the area code in which I consider myself to have grown up in. Not using an NYC area-code may become a problem at some point I suppose, but it looks like it is only a $10 charge to change numbers if that does end up being the case.

I installed the Google Voice App for my G1 ... I can finally easily ignore wrong numbers, telemarketers, and etc in an easy fashion!