Just a simple post on some updates on the site. I changed the blog page around alot as you can tell. Moved the sidebar to the other side to match the rest of the site and resized all the items in it. Also since I know one is going to tell unless I say it, so, I moved the previous and next links on the bottom around so they look right. They were lined up with the content and didn’t look right but now it’s lined up on the full width on the bottom.

Besides that, I have a few more pages I need to still work on so no more “Under Construction” pages showing up. Well that’s it for now.

I was waiting outside my class room at school with a few of my class mates just doing the usual. One of them said out of no where something about how over used the the elevator was. I was really watching after he said that and he was right. I even over heard one woman say to her friend “I need to save my energy for class”. What the hell? Now I know why we are one of the fattest nations in the world. Within 15 minutes, I must have seen a good 20 people use the elevator and maybe 5 people use the short flight of stairs. I also saw half of the people that used the elevator about to walk to the stairs but saw the elevator and ended up using that instead.

That’s just my random rant for today.

For being wise, they are completely useless. I had alot of mouth pain over the last few days so I ended up going to the dentist just to have it checked out, just to be safe and plus it been quite awhile since I have had my teeth cleaned. The dentist took one look at my mouth and sent me to get a new x-ray. He came back in and first thing he asked was “They need to go” Just what I wanted to hear. Anyway, as much as I was trying to avoid getting them pulled, it seems like I have no choice for this.

So I have not been using vista for a bit now. At some point I ended up switching back over to windows XP and just never switched the hard drives back. Maybe since I am now thinking about I might just do that.

Wait, what am I thinking? I am just to lazy to do it so it will probably never happen.

I am also trying out VMware Server 2. I installed it on my Linux server just to play around with it. So far it is quite awesome. Its free (Always a Plus) and it runs very well and easy to manage. Its all web based so I can use any web browser on any computer in the house except my iMac (ill explain in a bit). How it works is that you log into the web console from any computer on the network or external if you forward the ports on your router (unsafe but people do it). You can manage all the OSes you have running on the server, start, stop, restart, everything. Also it has a web console so you can view what you would see if you where at the monitor. Neat stuff here.

Well here is my little problems. VMware forgot that people use Macs, well just like most other companies, and left out a working Firefox plug in for the web console. This sucks alot because I use my Mac for almost everything. It’s my main storage and, well, just everything. I hope they come out with a patch or plug in or even application that will let me do this. Lucky me, I have my trusty ThinkPad.

So again I did something I should not have done. Even though I had everything I needed and complete instructions and followed them almost exactly (probably how my problem started). So I worked on it for hours including completely drenching myself in used motor and transmission oil, dropping every tool in the pan and made a huge mess. Nothing unusual for me. So when it got to the fluid level check thing, I think there was something wrong with the guide and told me to do the wrong thing. I ended up dumping at least half of my new synthetic ATF back into the bad oil pan and now it turns out that I needed it because it was very low after that and the transmission started slipping very badly. Very badly.

Because of that, I ended up leaving it over night and brought it to my awesome mechanic, Paul. He is the owner of Allison Auto, which if anyone is living in the general area of McArthur airport on Long Island NY, go to him for any car work. So far everyone I have told to go there has always gone back to him. Sorry. Ranting again about his place. Anyway to get back on track, I brought it there first thing in the morning. The first thing he did was say that I should not have done that myself (duh) and took it for a test drive. Remember, at this point I did not know what I did wrong. He right off the bad said “you’re low on fluid”. He didn’t even get passed 100ft of the building for him to figure that out.

Now that we knew what was wrong, he had his employee, Shane, fix it for me. I was there watching and also showing him how to get where he needed to get to. Filled it up to it running out of the fill tube, sucked out a certain amount of transmission fluid and brought it back down and than Paul tested it out again. Much better this time. Still didn’t work like I wanted it to but he said it might take a few days for it to work around and clean itself up and stuff.

This better fix my problems I have been having with this. The next adventure is coming up soon when I have the money. The dreaded timing belt. That’s a huge job in itself. Luck, this time I am not doing that myself.

The flapjack challenge is a huge pancake the size of a turkey platter. Actually it overhangs the edge in some places. Biggs was of course the one who wanted to try it. I have all the pictures from that event taken from Krass’s Blackberry. The rules are simple.

1. You have within an hour to finish it.
2. When it goes down, it must stay down.
3. No one else can help you.

If he beat it, he would have gotten a shirt what says “I ate it” on it, but Biggs did not get it. The pancake beat him. First time I have ever seen Biggs not be able to eat all of something.

Well here are the pictures to enjoy. I will be making more posts about the trip soon enough.

This weekend I am going on another adventure to visit my friend Krass up at Clarkson in Potsdam NY. I had my other two friends Biggs and Diana (Krass’s girlfriend) tag along with me this time. Last adventure was just me and Biggs but that’s a whole other story. I’ll tell that at some point.

So to start, Clarkson is just about 400 miles exact from where I live on Long Island to get there. I had to pick Diana up from Iona College in New Rochelle at 2pm when I had a class at 11:40 to 1:20. I ended up missing that class and leaving early. Of coarse as usual, Biggs was not ready at all. He didn’t even have his cell phone on him all morning when I was trying to contact him to tell him what time to. Besides that, I got lucky with finding him. I just sort of waited outside waiting for him for like 10 and than he just pulled up. He than has to go get ready and than pick up a car charger from best buy using our friend, 40, and his discount. I wish i worked at best buy just for the dam discount.

So we get on the road, and everything was smooth sailing till we hit the Throngs Neck Bridge. There was road work on it (nothing unusual) and they closed one lane out of three when there should be four. I love my ez-pass though. It makes my life so easy. We make it to Iona and pick up Diana and get going. Everything was nice and fasted pasted till we hit a huge amount of traffic when i-287 west merged with i-87 north right before Tappan Zee Bridge. That was fun. Than we stopped at the first rest stop at Sloatsburg, ate, and left. Simple as that. This gets better.

When we hit Albany, the crazy random exit to enter the same road again worked out just fine. Usually messes me up every time. That had some congestion but at exit 14, it just stopped. There was a huge accident what shut down two of the three lanes and there was 6pm traffic. I was just about to walk out. After that whole issue, i made it to the correct exit and the first few turns till the one road. I sign did not seem right but I took what I saw and went with it. Turns out we went the complete wrong direction and went something like 40 miles parallel to where the school was and winded up in some random town I can’t even spell. Something like Speculator. Well we backtracked like 40 miles more and still had like 100 miles left to get there and it was 9pm in the mountains. Very fun indeed.

I think we finally made it when it was 12:30 or something and when we got here, Krass was getting or looking like he was getting raped his friend Brian.

Well that’s the story so far. I have more to post like from today but I didn’t get the pictures yet. Trust me, its funny stuff.

Later.

So I was thinking randomly the last two days that I want to convert my Jetta from a Automatic transmission to an 6spd Manual. I found a shop called Force Fed Engineering in Deer Park that has much experience with doing this type of conversion. I also plan on doing some small upgrades to pull more power out of my already powerful 1.8T. I mean of coarse I will not be doing any of this anytime soon. Just something I will start working for.

I was talking to my professor after class with another class mate Thursday. We BSed for a while about random computer related things. So while talking, some how we ended up finding our way to the main datacenter in the college. If you did not already know, I go to SCCC or for the long island noobs, Suffolk County Community College. Anyway, he ended up bringing us into the datacenter. I really do not know how he trusted us to go in there. I wish i got to take pictures but I ended up forgetting to bring it. Than again, I did not know I was anyway. I brought my camera this time just incase.

You really have to see what hardware this college has. From my memory, they have an IBM Z-Series Mainframe, two of the old IBM terminal system which very soon they are going to replace, and a full rack of Cisco VoIP servers that run every phone on this campus. That’s not all though. It also had three or four racks of HP DL360 servers, another rack for the data storage, another rack with a SAN with 14tb of space, and two racks of just the routers and wireless AP servers.

Wow, that was alot of typing.

Anywho, if I get pictures of this awesome room, I will upload them for everyone to check out.

Ok, I spoke too soon. It turns out that this does not work in IE. It just does not work. Lucky for me that I helped my friend Andrew setup a VPN server. I think I will make a guide for that soon since it is harder than people think.

Also, its my birthday today.

I know. Your all so excited.