Digital Impulses

My Corvette gets crunched (a little)

Lesson Learned: Corvettes are $Expen$ive to repair.

So, having just left PC Club in Hawthorne after purchasing some parts for my Media Server project, I get in my car and start to drive out of the parking lot.

As I was slowly approaching the exit of the parking lot, a Silver Ford Expedition was backing out of a parking stall and backed in to the right front fender of my car. Now considering he was just backing out, he could not have been doing more than 3 or 4 miles an hour.

The poor guy never had a chance. As low as my car sits and as high as his SUV is, he never saw me.  He immediately stepped out of his truck and approached me and my car gingerly; stating he was very sorry and that he did not see me.

We looked at both our cars and could see that the damage seemed to be very minor.  We exchanged information and he stated to me that if a t all possible, he would rather keep it out of the insurance and pay for the repair of my car himself.

I said to him that that was fine by me and we departed on our separate ways.  Having got all of the information that I thought I might need, I figured that if he decided to flake and refuse to pay me, I would just call up his insurance company and file a claim.

On Monday, I called my Corvette dealership and asked them who their preferred body shop was.  They referred me to “Performance Paint” in Lomita and I took the car over there to get an estimate.

It seemed like a professional enough place and I was helped by a guy by the name of Grant.  He went over the accident damage to the car very minutely and pointed out to me some things that I would not have seen otherwise.

Being that my car is made of fiberglass, what can at first look to be like minor damage usually turns out to worse that you would think.  In a nutshell, after about an hour of entering all of the information into the computer, Grant came out to the lobby and handed me a 3 or 4 page estimate that totaled about $2,500.00 

Needless to say, I was thunderstruck. Thank god I was hit and did not do the hitting.  I arrived home and called the guy who hit me to deliver the bad news.  He was as surprised as I was and immediately stated that that amount of $$ was way more than he had expected and he would need to report the incident to his insurance company.

Again I state to him that this was OK with me and offered to take a copy of the estimate over to his house.  We agreed for me to drop off a copy of the estimate in his mailbox later that night.

Hopefully, State Farm (his insurance company), will behave stand up and take care of this without too much of a hassle.

Musing...

I am sitting here at work, looking out the window from my desk, staring at a slate gray sky that threatens to empty itself of rain, but does not.  There are tiny little spatters of water on my window, but that's about it.

Looking out at the row of cars parked just below my window, I do not see the tell-tale DRY PATCH of asphalt around the perimter of the car that so well informs of a prior rain fall.  My car has been parked out there for 3 1/2 hours and it seems to be pretty dry...

Home Network projects

In terms of my home office cleanup, I have a pretty good idea of what I am going to do with the plethora of peripherals that are currently attached to my system.

I am going to set up a 2^nd PC and hang a lot of the secondary devices off of it.  I can share a printer and if I need to scan something, I can do it from that station.  It will also serve the process of being a FILE SERVER and an APPS SERVER, all in the same package.

The piece of mind of having personal data and media files off-loaded to a different Hard Drive will add much needed piece of mind.  That and the fact that when it comes time to having to re-image my son’s PC due to the inevitable Spyware/Malware/Adware creep inherent to P2P file sharing systems, there will be nothing to back up because all of his data will be off of his machine.

I’ll grab his box, ghost it, and re-map his drives. Bingo.  A fresh box, as often as he wants it. 

Nice.

Now to get the hardware together to build me a File / Apps Server…

Terrible Metrolink Train Accident in Los Angeles

Ther has been a terrible, terrible train accident this morning in Los Angeles.  A car was left illegally parked in the middle of the train tracks and it caused the Metrolink train to crash into it and derail. 

The Metrolink train then jumped the rails and crashed into another train in tracks that were running parallel.

11 dead and hundreds injured.  A suspect has been detained by the police, who believe he was involved in a possible suicide attempt.  More details in the news.

L.A. Times Story

Minor clean-up

Cleaning in preparation for the REAL clean-up

I spent most of the afternoon and early evening yesterday in my office, cleaning up and organizing a lot of the stuff around my immediate work area in preparation for the inevitable “

spring re-org” that I do once or twice a year.

The rat’s nest of cables behind my desk is truly scary.  I really need to to do something about it.  I have to prioritize the peripherals that are going to be connected to my machine and (firewire and USB) and find a place for tham to co-exsist happily, space-wise.  Currently I am looking at:

• Epson PhotoPrinter (USB)
• Kodak Digital 4”x6” Instant Photo Printer (USB)
• HP 2400 DPI Scanner (USB)
• Sony External DVD Writer (firewire)
• Treo 600 Cell phone (USB)
• HP IPAQ rx3715 PocketPC (USB)
• Logitech Web Cam (USB)
• External 200 GB Hard Drive (USB)

As you can see, this is the primary reason for the rat nest of cables behnd the computer. It’s no wonder the light flickers in my office sometimes… 

I might even have to look into upgrading the POWER SUPPLY in my box, as the draw from the USB ports might be a concern. 

Also, I seriously have to look at the sheer # of programs installed on my box and somehow pare that down to the programs that I use regularly.

Areas of concern (multiple apps for the same function):

• Image Editors
• Instant Message clients
• Web Browsers

Well, I have my work cutout for me over the next few days.  I am going to take the time this time around to do it right. 

Right.  Uh-huh.  Famous last words…

Absent again...

Flying around to stay in place

Well.  What can you say?  I was last here 15 days ago.  No, it was not my intention to stay away for 2 weeks, but it seems that no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to blog consistently.

I had made a 2005 Resolution to blog more or less on a daily basis and I have been unable to do that. Time marches forward, inexorable in its progress, not stopping to let anyone catch up.

So, what have I been doing for the last 2 weeks? 

Well, the project to “build a PC in a Kitchen Drawer” has been placed on indefinite hold by it’s owner, as he has decided to actually scrap the entire "PC in a Kitchen Drawer" idea and build the PC itself into the front wall of a Closet that is near where his current computer is housed.

It may be a full year, literally, before we see any forward progress on this project.

Web-based Remote Surveillance System

After having that project moved to the back burner, we have instead re-focused on getting a web-based security system installed on a PC.

The center of the system is a 4-port Video Capture card that has a built-in Web Server and records video to the Hard Drive.  Once you punch a hole in the router, *theoretically* at least, you should be able to pull up any of the 4 cameras by just entering the External IP Address:whatever port # into your Browser and then view the LIVE video stream.

Well, so far, after 2 visits to the store where the PC is and a combined 10 hours of effort on my part, we are 0-2. 

We have bought 2 different video capture cards and neither has worked right.  One of them refuses to display video on the screen and the other’s software was so atrocious, that it was simply unworkable.

During all of this, we outfitted this PC with an additional 512MB of PC2700 333Mhz RAM and an Nvidia 128MB AGP Video card in the hopes of resolving the issues, but the upgrades had no effect other than speeding up the PC somewhat and giving XP a little more breathing room…

Discovering PodCasting

In the interim, I was turned on to “PodCasting” by the Scobilizer, Robert Scoble (a Tablet PC Evangelist for Microsoft).  Specifically, he turned me on to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code and I have been having a blast listening to all of The DSC’s created by Adam since late last year.

As a matter of fact, doing so has inspired me to create a Podcast of my own, so I am looking into just how to do that, what equipment I need, etc.  It is going to be a lot of fun to see if I can get my Podcast mentioned on Mr. Curry’s DSC. 

We’ll see…

PC in a Kitchen Drawer...

I just NOW ordered 4 sticks of 512 MB DDR PC3200 Memory from Crucial.com for a Mod Project me and a friend are working on.

@ 139.00 a stick, the memory is hideously expensive, but should be well worh the price when coupled with an Intel D915GEV Motherboard and a P-4 3.0 Ghz CPU.

We are considering taking the guts of a PC (all new parts) and somehow mounting them into a Kitchen Drawer.  With slits on the front for the Optical drives and the Card reader, adequate ventilation is all we think we need to worry about.

Man, this is going to be SO much fun...  :>)

Never-Ending Rain...

Jesus.

For the 1st time in my life, I am getting sick of the water.  It seems like it has been raining steadily in L.A. for like a year, but it's only really been about a week.  I can't remember what a blue sky with clouds and the Sun look like. 

It has been overcast and wet since the last week of 2004. 

Even I, who generally likes overcast, gray weather patterns, am getting sick and tired of dealing with getting soaked or rained on anytime I step foot outside my house. 

I suppose my less than sunny disposition to the weather may have a lot to do with the fact that I am currently dealing with an Electrical Short on my car that is causing the Driver's Side (of course) window on my 2002 Corvette to go up and down randomly and REFUSE to come back up. 

Unless I open and close the door about 15 times. 

While getting soaked.

This has led to a throughly miserable experience in this rain and something that I need to get fixed ASAP.  Mr. Murphy seems to be having himself a right good laugh at my expense lately... 

Yup, he sure is.

From the Palm to Windows Mobile 2003

Happy New Year!

I got an HP iPAQ for Christmas.  I have been using it for the last 9 days and so far am very, very happy with it.  My main use for this device will be WiFi hunting (War Driving) of OPEN WiFI hotspots and unsecured home routers to explore.

For that purpose, it rocks.  I got some software for it that automatically notifies me of any networks I'm near and then prompts me to connect to them.  Once it connects, It will show me a plethora of stats for that network, including IP, Subnet, DNS Servers, etc.

I plan to take my Ipaq with me on early evening walks around my neighborhood and I plan to "MAP OUT" my local neighborhood in terms of WHO has WiFI and whether it is OPEN or not. 

Fun stuff, indeed.