Fish

5 more fish going in to the tank today. I'll also be adding some non-living rock to the tank.

I'll need to measure Ammonia, Nitrite, and Nitrates today, along with salinity. I do that once a week.

New wine blog active

The new wine blog is now up. You can see it here.

Fuck you, Adaptec

I figured out why storage manager doesn't work on my Adaptec 2100S SCSI raid controller: It works under windows server 2000 but not under windows server 2003.

Basically, it means I have to run the card firmware at post for any configuration changes.

Pricks.

It looks like they're not supporting 2003 server using storage manager on *any* of their U160 scsi raid cards. You have to buy a U320 raid card for that.

Another 350 bucks from pricewatch.com.
No thanks.

Space ghost says:

Click the image to hear.

When you've got it, flaunt it.

Next wine event 2-18-05 California Cabernet Sauvignon

Enjoy wine, friends and fun at the next wine event:
February 18, 2005, 7pm.
California Cabernet Sauvignon $30 or less.

Special instructions: Bring some food to share with the group, and one bottle of wine per person or couple



Download printable directions and info here.
Get a mapquest map here.

Domaine pichot vouvray 2002

DOMAINE PICHOT "DOMAINE LE PEU DE LA MORIETTE" (WS 90), VOUVRAY, 2002

I really liked this 2002 vouvray. I probably have a couple of cases of this one, and it's definitely getting harder to find the '02. The '03 for me is too sweet. Wine-searcher.com shows some left here for about $11 a bottle. Look under the Loire Valley section. This one rated 90/100 from the wine spectator.

Storing wine

Storing wine for long periods of time in Colorado can be a problem. Low humidity will dry out corks and ruin wine before you know it. If you've got that special bottle of wine stuffed in a closet somewhere, then you're probably asking for trouble in the long run.

Once I was up to about 100 bottles in the basement, I knew I had a limited amount of time to find some way to store it, since I'd probably passed the drinking stage at that point. Once you've got more than a few bottles, which you drink out and replace every few months, you need to start thinking about storage.

Ideally you should be looking for 55F and 50% - 70% humidity for long term storage, no light, and no vibration. The humidity helps the cork do it's job. UV light will ruin wine, and vibration is pretty iffy as well.

A wine cooler basically keeps wine at 55 or so. Look for either a solid door or a glass door that has a UV resistant coating. These can be inexpensive, but they don't control humidity. You can probably get about 6-12 months of storage out of a wine cooler.

A wine storage unit, like the Eurocave show above, controls both temperature and humidity for long term (years) of storage. There are a number of units to choose from, and options as well. I have the 3-temp 260 (up to 260 bottles) in my house. I've been pretty happy with it.

It seemed a good compromise to building a cellar in the basement. I can't take the basement with me to the next house, and I probably won't outgrow the eurocave it for a while.

I already have a few bottles that I'd like to try in 30 years or so. One is the 2000 vintage grahams port. The other is the wine spectator wine of 2004 (100/100) 2001 Chateau Rieussec, 1er Grand Cru Classe, Sauternes, 750ml. Stuffing those in the closet for a few decades probably would result in a bit of disappointment in the end.

Our man Greg

open ports

Ok, well the server and my workstation are back. Computers do suck.

I've been watching my firewall logs for port scans. It's interesting to see what's going on out there. Backdoor trojan ports, spam IM ports, SMB ports...it's all really interesting.

UDP port 1026 is used for Messenger. You can read more about it here.

I was having some trouble getting NTP to work on my domain controller, but it's now synchronized with the NTP server out of colorado springs.

Computers suck

I hate computers.

This sucks.

4 more years.

Saturday

Backing up files from the server before I tear it all apart. I'm paranoid about losing data. The server runs a scsi raid 5 setup with a hot spare. I have one drive down, so I'll have to figure that out as well. I'm swapping motherboards while I'm at it. After that is all done, I'll have to set up the WAP. I've been putting that off too.

The symphony was fun, dinner was fun, and afterwards walked over to have some chocolate fondue. I'm not complaining.

Angry IP scanner

There is something not quite right with the IP scanner I've been using lately. It's not issuing TCP SYN requests to all the IP's in the class C test range I've been experimenting on. It must be a bug. it's a simple port 80 scan.

I can see it in the packet logs. Ping everyone, randomly issue TCP SYN request to some. I'll have to find another one.

Some time off this week. I start some new projects Monday, so I'm probably going to make a new CD mix. I have to fed ex some contracts and write up 2 quotes over the weekend, work on the fish tank, and maybe snow shoe in Estes park again.

Oh, I need to rebuild my file server too. Maybe I'll do that Saturday. Tonight is the symphony and some dinner first. I pick the girl up at 5:30 or so. It should be fun.

I've been goofing around all morning. The workout went fine. Maybe a shower and some errands/lunch would be the way to go.

I need to wash the jeep.

For that someone special

Port scanning

I'm over being amazed at the complete lack of any kind of security for most home users on the internet. How many products have I used which come with the default security turned off? The list is endless. Personally, I use a hardware firewall and make sure that it responds to NOTHING coming from the internet.

Today I decided to look around with a port scanner and see what was available in the local IP neighborhood. I found a bunch of ftp ports and some http ports. A more interesting IP has a wireless access point with WAN port 80 open. No security at all. If I wanted to, I could download corrupted firmware to the device, change his subnet, do MAC filtering, and see the MAC addresses of the local computers. It's completely open.

Will people never get it?

Maybe I'll look for some open network shares.

Dolts.

Who's your froggy

Happiness is

Wait wait wait

I spent almost 2 hours trying to get a prescription filled. Fuck, I hate that.

The workout went fine this morning. Tom is a gym rat now, so I'll have to try to keep up.

I may fly out to SF in Feb. for a concert. I'm looking into flights.

The gym is quiet again. Usually the first 2-3 weeks of the new year it's just crazy busy with all the new-years-resolution people. It's like that every year. It's getting back to normal.

Yummy

Sleeping

Sean's sleeping schedule:

Wake up at 3am every night.

Lay there for a while...sometimes fall back asleep, sometimes you're up for a couple of hours. No luck this time. I surfed the web until 5am.

I watched 'open water' last night. Creepy, but good.

Tonight I'm volunteering, Friday is the symphony, and I'm thinking snow shoeing on Sunday.

Blogger

Is it my imagination, or is blogger.com down a lot?

Well, it definitely sucks to be this guy. Poor David waited 18 years for some good Titan wind data and some schmuck forgot to turn on the communication channel. I hate to tell you Dave, but you'll be dead and buried before another mission to Titan. Nice try.

Bandwidth change

I ordered comcast internet the other day, and just switched from qwest dls to a comcast cable modem.

After a configure with the portable, I stuffed the modem between my hardware firewall and my lan. After a bit of niggling, it came up fine. I'm running on it now.

So far, so good. It appears about 2x faster than qwest dsl. It also looks like comcast will be upgrading to 6 Mbps downstream and 768 Kbps speed soon. I'm just not sure how dsl plans on competing with that.

I must be getting old...I remember my 1200 baud dialup modem and an apple 2e computer. Getting 300+ K/sec downloads is pretty surreal.

Email from Karen said she ran into my ex at the store the other day. It doesn't sound like a warm meeting. The ex made it pretty clear that she didn't want anything to do with anyone who is friends with me -- which is great in my book. I'd rather not run into her or have her show up at any event I may be attending, and having her disappear helps that happen. Maybe I'll get lucky and she'll leave the state.

Monday

Monday's suck even more when you've been playing in the mountains.

Boarding was fun. It was warm (40 ish). I dropped sister and her friend off at the airport this morning. 1 fish croaked right before I left on Friday morning.

I'm working on some patent research today.

My new cable modem showed up. Now I just have to figure out that wiring nightmare in the basement so the cable actually gets upstairs.

I hear Tom and Greg are sick...and now they've given it to Anita. She doesn't sound very happy about it.

I have about a billion loads of laundry to do tonight, and I'm thinking of steam cleaning the carpets.

Geyser Peak Sauvignon Blanc 2003

I tried this wine at the symphony last Friday. I really like the 2003 Chardonnay, and the Blanc was a nice wine as well. It's a fun wine that is easily under $10/bottle. You can get more info on it here.

Fish and boarding

I'm off to Copper for a weekend of boarding. It should be fun.

I threw a few fish in the tank yesterday to get the tank started cycling. I haven't gone down yet to see if they've made it through the night....

I haven't even packed yet, so I should get on that.

Blown sub

My velodyne SPL-1200 subwoofer is blown. Of course it's out of warranty. The service guy thinks probably 300-400 bucks. I looked at the power amp section but it seemed ok.

Fuck.

Late

Sister and friend came in about an hour or so late to the airport -- which meant I was picking them up at midnight. That, and they've got my last pillow.

Tired.

Fishless

The fish store is closed Tuesday and Wed. I'll have to wait on the fish.

Blah.

Long day

Today felt looooooonnnnng. I made some great progress on resolving and moving forward with a firmware problem using the arm based audio-video router designed for sprint. The unit is being tested now.

I'm talking with the client about adding some remote firmware upgrade capabilities. We're talking about either a monitored email account for firmware images, or a ftp server which would be used to hold the image. Some other options would be to email log files or status information for collection.

Other than that, I've been playing with the web based interface to the unit. The client only wanted a basic TCP command interface, with the router being the server. I'd like to come up with some dynamic http pages that would allow firmware upgrades, and basic unit routing detail.

Tonight I saw 'sideways'. It was pretty good. One of the lead actors really reminded me of James spader. The movie makes me want to learn more about wine.

I need to get a revised contract off to a client, and do some patent research for an IP firm in Texas tomorrow. I didn't go out for any fish to cycle the tank, but tomorrow I need to make some time for that.

Duey at Mondo Vino is holding some wine for me. I should run over there, stop by REI, and basically get a few things done tomorrow before volunteering at 6pm. That, plus a workout and actually billing some clients would be a good idea.

I've been thinking about H5N1 avian flu virus a bit. Right now we're only talking about bird to human infection, but with a bit of horizontal gene transfer in an infected host with an airborne flu strain, pandemic here we come. With a 75% mortality for H5N1, this new strain would make the 1918 pandemic with 3% mortality and 50 million dead look like a joke.

Sleepy

Yikes, It's early.

Snow shoeing was fun. It was a bit windy, and probably shorter than usual, but it was a good first outing in Estes Park.

I lost some gloves going up Mt. Evans last summer, so I've started an REI list for sometime this week.

Yesterday before we left I spent a couple of hours working on some firmware issue. I've got the problem figured out, but knowing *why* it's a problem is another matter. Tech support is in Israel.

I really like blogger. This is so much easier than Radio. Radio sucked. I have a work blog that hasn't had a post in a year. I'll have to use blogger to create a new weblog for that site too.

Last night Lori made dinner, and it was nice. It was quite a production but worth it.

I'd love to crawl back into bed, but I need to go to the gym. It's going to be a short week anyway, so I need to get some billing in...

Busy week ahead

It's going to be a busy week this week. Monday it's a food and wine pairing at Frasca. Tuesday I'm volunteering for two different organizations, Wednesday sister flies into town and we're going clubbing. Friday morning sister, brother, Lori and I are going to Copper until Sunday.

I need to buy some wax for my board. I've got more than a hundred bottles of wine in the eurocave now, so we'll probably bring some with to Copper. I'll have to remember my swimsuit for the hot tub.

The rest of the month is more of the same. I like boarding during the week because it's much more fun when you're not fighting the traffic and crowds. I think there are a few plays, a symphony, and a couple of wine classes this month as well.

I'm procrastinating on going to bed. Maybe I'll read.

Since this is my 4th post today, that means I've posted more today than in the last few years. That will probably make Dave Craigie happy. I'm digging blogger. This is too easy...

G-man came by on his way to a poker game. I sat in his spiffy car. It's pretty sweet. I personally dig the sultry female voice from the navigation system.

Ok, enough playing. I should get up early tomorrow and bill some clients. I have some work piling up. We're not leaving until 9am anyway, and snowshoeing will be my cardio tomorrow, which means no gym. It sounds like I'm the only one with a daypack, so I'll be carrying everyone's stuff.

Music

Fiona gave me a CD for xmas -- Missy higgins.

It's really good. The website is first rate -- great graphics, and you can listen to her new album online. Missy is Fiona's cousin from Melbourne.

The house is clean. I've got my gear ready on the floor for tomorrow. I'm eating banana bread....Delicious.

Atom feed setup

Ok. I set up an atom feed and link on the sidebar. The direct link to the new feed is http://www.sjvarley.com/weblog_files/feed/varley.xml.

If you use a reader such as NewsGator then just right click on the graphic and subscribe. It's that easy!

1-14-05 wine party

Last night's wine party was fun. The turnout was good, and a few new people showed up. I think we tried about a dozen wines.

The new pictures are up. You can check them out in the pictures section.

I'm trying blogger instead of posting by hand. I started rambling long before blogs even existed...and the time is long past to actually switch to something easier to use. I'm not generating a rss feed yet, but maybe later.

Today I'll clean a bit, do some laundry, and get some work done. The fish tank is still settling, so no fish today. Tomorrow I'm snow shoeing in Estes park.