Bad Fan, Good Win

Posted by JC at


I have to say that I can't be considered a good Utah fan (I am admitting this right now). Last night, I was watching the game and when the Beavers scored with 2 minutes left, I thought the game was over - ok so I thought that maybe Utah could drive down and score a touchdown and get the 2-point conversion, but I wasn't up for watching the overtime. Utah played like crap most of the game, so I was a little upset. Now, if you know me I get way into these games, so I turned it off because I was worrying so much. So I had laid down to go to sleep - one of the main reasons I wasn't going to watch the last couple of minutes is because I was tired - and a couple minutes later I hear: YYYYYYYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA (kind of like thunder).

That's right, all of those Utah fans were cheering after Brian Johnson brought in the two-point conversion. I turned the TV back on and got worried again because there was still a lot of time. Of course, the defense finally stepped it up like it needed, and Louie Sakoda brought home another W for the Utes. Make it 6-0 for the Utes. Louie Sakoda will be the MWC special teams player of the week, and maybe the overall player of the week.

Just as a thought, Oregon State is coming off a good performance last week, so this team was very confident. Even though their record doesn't reflect that, playing a team that played well the previous week is always tough (especially on short rest). You can look at the NY Giants from last year to understand this concept. Record wasn't great, but a solid performance against the best team made them better the last week of the season. Same thing going on here for Oregon State. However, I don't think field rushing was justified. Whatever, glad for a big win this week.

uofu sports football sleep

Tooth

Posted by JC at


I know that I said Anna would be bloggin' about her teeth, but she decided against it (I am unsure why). Well, I had to get these pictures from her that she took and put them up. I am not putting them up right on my blog so that you are warned. They are disturbing (they were much more disturbing in the larger quality). So, if you click on the link, you've been warned.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE TOOTH

Let me know what you think.

anna

Don't Say This...

Posted by JC at

I get these things forwarded on to me all the time. Usually I don't look at them (sorry), but I watched this and had a good laugh. My wife really liked it too. Good thing I have never said any of these things.


anna Humor

AWS

Posted by JC at

Before I get in to my main point here, I have to say that my wife is awesome. She had her tooth pulled on Friday and she is doing well. I know that it hurts like no other, but she has been strong through it all. Expect to see a post about it soon on her blog.

This past week I had the opportunity to got to a conference with my job. The conference was all about Amazon Web Services (AWS). For those of you who don't know, AWS is basically a hosting company for your website (i.e. the place where I keep all of the files, pictures, etc.).

The cool thing about AWS is it's all about the cloud. I know it sounds funny but it is a pretty simple idea that is taking over the internet. The cloud is suppose to be more secure and more reliable. With a normal hosting company, you have a machine where all of your information is sitting, and if that machine goes down then you are hosed until they get it back up. With the cloud, they replicate your data across a few different machines in different locations, so if a machine goes down, your data should still be available because it is sitting on another machine somewhere.

Probably the coolest thing about AWS is its flexibility. You pay for what you need. For example, if I have a super busy site, and lots of traffic, I am going to want more servers on the back end servicing those requests. But what if I am a company who doesn't have a lot of traffic on my site, but tomorrow I release a new video that becomes hugely popular. With a normal hosting company, you call, ask them for more machines, pay a lot of money, and eventually get it. With AWS, you turn the machines on yourself (through the internet), they fire up, and you pay for them while you use them. When traffic dies down, you can turn the machines back off, and you are done paying for them.

All in all, we learned a lot about the different services that AWS provides and how they all work and so forth. We also heard from some companies that are using AWS (I can only remember Podango right now). I love learning new things about technology.

In a couple of days I will post something about life, since I know some people are probably tired of all the technology :). In the mean time check out AWS and enjoy.

technology anna

Cookies

Posted by JC at

Just wanted to share a quick experience I had today. I have about 5 different browsers installed on my laptop (Firefox, IE7, Chrome, Opera, Safari), and today I was seeing some weird behavior. I work for a company, The American Academy, that uses Drupal for a lot of it's development. I was only able to sign in to the site using Firefox. None of the other browsers were working. When I would try to sign in, I got no errors, and it would try to redirect me as if I was logged in, but I wasn't. I cleared all of my cached data, and reinstalled all the browsers, and so forth...

I determined that cookies weren't be set as they needed (internet cookies are the way to track that a user has visited your site and keep small pieces of date about that user for when they return). The cookie that said I was logged in was being created only in Firefox, but not in any of the other browsers. After about a 3 hour excursion to find the answer, we found it.

Every 2 weeks or so my computer runs an update and changes the time back one hour from the actual time. That means that I have to manually change the time. This past time, it turns out that I changed the month ahead as well. Here is what it said:

It is certainly not November. It turns out that Firefox is the only browser that doesn't use the local machine time to handle cookies, and so it was working fine. All of the other browsers were setting the time of the cookie as if it was 3 months from now when I returned, meaning that I was automatically logged out. Changing the date back to September did the trick and I am back in business.

firefox technology work

Chrome

Posted by JC at

Just a couple of days I posted about Google Reader, and all of sudden Google surprises me with a new tool that I thought would never come...the Google web-browser. That is right, Google has joined the browser war with their own browser: Google Chrome. This has been rumored for a long time but it was certainly never confirmed until Monday. Today it is already out.

Now, I have only been using this browser for about 4 hours, but wanted to post a few first thoughts on it. It is fast. It is unbelievably fast. There is no messing around with this, you get everything as fast as you can. I definitely love that. I like how they handle tabs. Every tab is it's own process which means that you can see exactly what is going on. In the task manager it looks like the screen shot there, so for each tab, I have my own process. The reason this is so great is because now if for some reason one of my tabs gets out of control on memory, I don't have to close my whole browser, rather just the single tab. That is done as follows.

Pull up the Chrome Task Manager by pressing Shift-Esc while in Chrome. You can see exactly which tabs are using how much memory. If you click on the "Stats for Nerds" button you can see how much memory in total everything is using. It also reports memory use for other browsers as well (Firefox, IE, Safari, etc. - this is cool) So, I want to close my "Google Reader" tab so I do so by clicking the process and pressing the End Process button. Now for that tab I get this:

Awesome. Now I can control my memory much better than with Firefox or any other browser for that matter. A couple of things is that I wish were better. First, I wish there were some more addons. This may be a feature in the future, but for now, what you download is what you get. The other thing that I dislike about the browser is that if I close the entire browser, I can't save all my tabs to open back up next time. However, this shouldn't be much of an issue because I don't plan on closing the browser unless I have to. If you want to learn more, check out the comic that Google put together. Happy Browsing.

(I will let you know what is actually going on in life in a couple of days.)

technology google

What do you read?

Posted by JC at

Living in this digital age has brought about so much information online. I read everything online basically (except for school textbooks). There are so many sites to visit and new things to be posted everyday. There is so much to take in and so little time to do so.

A couple of weeks ago I had about 15 sites that I would visit at least once a day. Besides Slickdeals, there were several blogs I would check and then news sites and a few others. Checking all those sites takes forever. The biggest pain is that half the time there isn't anything new on the sites (especially on people's blogs), so that means that I was just wasting time. About this time I was doing a project for work with Google Alerts. Somehow I came across this awesome service that Google offers: Google Reader!

If you look at the screenshot above, you will see that I have all of my sites divided by category on the bottom left and then all of the new stuff on each site shows up on the right. I can narrow down what I want to see from just "Blogs" to a single site. The nicest thing about this service is that I can visit 1 site, see everything that is new, and move on.

As a quick note, the site must have an RSS feed. For blogs, the blog must be public or you won't be able to connect to the RSS feed. Lastly, mine is all color coded, but that does not come standard with Google Reader. That is because of a nice Firefox addon, Better GReader. I know there are other similar services out there, so if you know of something better let me know. Oh yeah, it only checks for updates at most every 5 minutes, but may check less frequently depending on the RSS settings of the site it is checking. You have no control over that though. Check it out. It is definitely worth your time.

firefox technology

Props to the U

Posted by JC at

Just as a quick update, the U made this decision:
"After consulting with Network Operations (NOC), Information Security Operation (ISO) and the Compliance Office, it has been decided to suspend the process of locking student's accounts for exceeding 2GB of data transferred in a 24 hour period, effective immediately."

Props to the University! This is great news and I am very happy. They are still monitoring the systems though and the limit could go back into place if things get out of hand. But for now, I am happy.

uofu technology

What the...??

Posted by JC at

I am not very happy with the University of Utah internet right now. In fact I am pissed off (sorry for my strong words). This is getting pretty ridiculous. So, if you ever see this screen, then you know you have uploaded too much.


So the problem started about a month ago when our computer just died and I could not recover anything from the hard drive. After that experience I decided to backup everything online. I started using a company called Carbonite. They gave me a two week trial period in which I uploaded about 60 GB in 10 days. I didn't have any issues with the internet during that time.

Well, this past week I have had my internet shut off twice. The first time I thought it was because we had downloaded over 2GB in one day. When I called to talk to the Help Desk and they said they couldn't do anything and it would turn on in 24 hours. I didn't realize it was the backup that was causing the issue.

The computer then shut off again on Thursday, and I figured out that it was the uploading that was causing the issue. I called them and asked why I didn't have my internet shut off a month ago when I was uploading about 6 GB a day, but now I had already entered a contract that I couldn't get out of. They said that because of some updates over the summer, the limit was not being enforced. What the? So now I was just SOL...They did say sorry though. How sweet of them. They told me the internet would work in 24 hours.

So, imagine my surprise this morning when the internet gave me the same error as above. I exceeded the limit yesterday - I'll leave it up to you to figure out how we were able to upload 2GB yesterday when our internet was turned off the entire day. I have called about 10 times and they keep sending me in a circle saying no one can help me. I am really upset. Twice now the University has basically screwed me (for lack of a better word). I finally talked to one guy who said he would see what he could do even though he wasn't the person who should be taking care of this. After 5 hours no resolution has been found. I'll update you once something gets taken care of. Who knows how long we'll be without internet though.

--I am at work typing this up.

*********EDIT*******************
They must have got sick of me calling. They finally fixed it. Thank goodness.

uofu technology

Phelps and Myst

Posted by JC at

So this week has been an intense one for all Olympic fans. You have to give it up to Michael Phelps. 8 Gold Medals is amazing, but even more amazing is he one all 8 of the events he was in, and in 7 of the 8 he now owns the world record. That is mind-blowing. The thing that is most amazing to me about it, is that he can swim every stroke. A lot of the Olympians come to swim one stroke only and that is their main focus, but Phelps is able to swim every stroke (note that he only swims the backstroke in the 400 medley) and excel at all of them. Crazy. If you haven't been able to see the 4x100 free, or 100m butterfly, then go check out the videos of them on nbcolympics.com. You won't regret it.

Also this week, my wife and I have been a couple of classic computer games - Myst and Riven. These games are awesome. Now, I do have to warn you that the graphics are very primitive but the gameplay will overshadow this one downside to the game. If you have never heard of Myst or Riven then it is probably because you were never into gaming, or else you weren't into gaming when the first cds came out. Myst came out in 1994 and was one of the first ever games on cd (to think that we have games now on DVD or on the internet that have better graphics shows how quickly the gaming world has advanced).

Riven is the sequel to Myst. The basic story/idea of Myst is that you have come to a new island (age) and you don't know how you showed up there. You have to find clues and think how to apply the clues in the different worlds. Clues are almost never obvious how they apply - in other words the clues don't tell you to spin around 3 times and count to 10, rather you get some numbers and have to try different things to apply those numbers). Anyways, Myst is fairly easy compared to Riven. Riven is near impossible I would say. Obviously it is possible because someone has done it, but it is seriously one of the hardest games ever. I ended up using the walkthrough because I was getting upset, but whoever thought these games up is very very creative. I would definitely recommend this game, and my wife got hooked from the minute we started playing. I love classic games.

Here is a video of most the games in the series - I have only played the first two, but plan on playing more!


games sports relax

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