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New Toy: HP 54111D Digitizing Oscilloscope

I've wanted an oscilloscope for quite a while. Between my various hobbies, it's surprising I never bought one. A couple of weeks ago I found one on eBay and snagged it. Yesterday, it finally arrived via donkey express, i.e. USPS Parcel Post.

I couldn't care less...

Sifting through the news today I've compiled a list of important breaking news that doesn't matter.

Megadeth, Testament, Exodus at The Tabernacle, Atlanta 3/21/2010

Battered and bruised. Feet ache from standing for five hours amongst other things. Yeah, I went to a show. It was great. Everyone that I told about this show, you should have gone and you missed out.

Another Fun Night

No, no sarcasm at all. I'm making good on what I intended with a recent purchase...

It's official: Conan's Last Tonight Show This Friday

NBC and O'Brien signed a deal late last night...

I'm with Conan

It goes without saying that I'm with Conan. He popped on the air during my formative years, filling the late night void left by Letterman's move to CBS. My adventures in watching late night TV.

I bought a new laptop

MacBook was falling apart, desktop needs a new monitor, what to do? Buy a new laptop!

The Flavored Cigarette Factsheet, Annotated!

The FDA recently banned flavored cigarettes. I don't smoke, and I don't really find the smell of clove cigarettes pleasant. That being said, I'm 100% against the ban. The excuses provided by the FDA for the ban are complete fluff and without merit.

Switch back to BlackBerry

The annoyances with the iPhone exceeded the wow factor long ago. I've simply been stewing. I finally broke down and purchased a BlackBerry Bold 9000 off eBay last night. Its arrival can't come soon enough.

More iPhone Idiocy - apprejections.com

From a Slashdot story, a new site catalogs iPhone AppStore rejections. The reasons behind the rejections are generally silly, and further indicate that the iPhone is a poor platform for development.

Stuff.

Useless post to pop the previous post off the top spot...

It's a CONSPIRACY!1

A few interesting developments on the scientific and religious fronts have left me scratching my head...

I Hate My iPhone!

Over the past few weeks I have realized something: I hate my iPhone! One particular annoyance hit home last night and inspired me to write this rant. Yes, this has all been covered before by others, but I must rant about my poor choice of a phone that promised such greatness.

Stupid Asterisk Tricks - CallerID Name Randomizer

Earlier this week I decided to finally add paging support to the phone system. It's really handy to be able to yell at everyone through the speakers on their phones every once in a while. One of our techs wanted the CallerID to be a bit more obvious when it's a page so that he'd know not to answer the phone with a, "Hello?"

AOL Spam Reports Idiocy

I'm the sys admin at an ISP. I handle the mail servers, and as such, I handle mail abuse reports. I have a love-hate relationship with AOL's spam reporting system. First off, we actually get reports! That being said, they do a few annoying things with the reports as you'll see after the break.

"Why Craig Ferguson Rocks" retracted

I withdrew the blog post comparing late night shows, and why The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson rocks. The Late Late Show and Craig Ferguson still rock, but the blog post rambled a bit too much to the point that it nearly invoked Date's Incoherency Principle.

Zimbra+350k Messages = Slow

I've had a few days of experience with Zimbra. It's not all roses.

So long Cyrus, Hello Zimbra

I've used Cyrus to handle my email for years. It's an excellent IMAP server. That being said, I don't have a massive deployment of mail users that are interested in only mail. For my personal needs I simply need email, oh and a calendar synced with my iPhone would be nice, and maybe contacts as well.

Varnish, Plone and nginx

Because it's dumb to hit a Plone instance for the same unchanging information time and time again, it's a smart idea to put a caching proxy in front of any Plone instance. Traditionally Squid was used, but Squid is a nasty beast. Some recent apps have appeared since I last played with Plone several years ago, in particular Varnish. The only problem, it can't serve content on its own. It must proxy to other servers. Fortunately Varnish is extremely flexible and makes it dead simple to get the desired result with the help of an additional lightweight web server. This should work with any other app server, be it Zope or a burly Java monstrosity.

AWA 15 Photos are up

AWA 15 photos are posted. Check the Photos page or read more for the link, which will take you to the photos page.