MikeBrum.com

I just bought a SNES from eBay and a few games (Super Mario Land, Super Mario Kart and F-Zero). I don’t think this falls under the realm of things that I need, but I sure did want one.

My next console purchase will likely be a Turbo Grafx 16 console (not the Turbo Duo). I’m also thinking about getting a Sega Genesis to pick up the Sonic games (I used to rock at those!), Golden Axe and Altered Beast. Those last two games were nothing short of awesome.

The Sega Genesis unfortunately couldn’t hold up to the battle with Nintendo despite a brief burst in popularity. The TG 16 had an even shorter time in the spot light and is a lot more difficult (read as, “more expensive”) to get ahold of.

Ah well… the things we do for nostalgia. These will all go nicely with my two original NES consoles and 50ish games.

As you know, I’m back from Hawaii. Let’s do the picture thing.

Here’s a great assortment of the turtle beach. There was only one actually on the beach, but there were tons of them actually in the water just a few feet out. You’d see heads and shells pop up now and again as they grabbed air and just hung out. Apparently, further out there are a decent amount of tiger sharks that try to prey on the turtles, but they don’t come in that far and the turtles tend to use the area as a nice relaxing spot. The behavior to come onto the beach only actually started about 4 years ago – so it’s a very new phenomenon.

After taking a bunch of pictures of that guy, I noticed a turtle pop his head up not too far from the shore (about 10 feet out) in a nice sandy part. I decided to walk out to where the water got to my mid-thigh and I just stopped waiting to see if I could find it and get some usable pictures. To my surprise, I spotted it about 5 feet to my front-left. To my even bigger surprise, the turtle started making it’s way towards me. I stood very still since I didn’t want to startle it and you’re not supposed to touch them. It ultimately stuck it’s head between my legs, looked around a bit and decided to head back over to where it was a few minutes ago. The turtle brushed it’s head against my leg and then used my legs to push off with it’s fins to head back to a bit deeper water. These are the two pictures I was able to get (that were usable) of the turtle right at my feet. It never breached the surface, so the pics are all of it under the water.

Here are two pictures of a crab that was hanging out near where the turtles were and a small lizard just outside the hotel lobby that was cruising around a heavy foot traffic area. I like random animal shots, so here there are.

And here is a wide assortment of different scenery shots I gathered from around the island. I don’t think anything really needs to be explained – they’re just all pretty cool.

Ok, leaving for Hawaii at 7:00am tomorrow and I’m leaving to meet up with my friend for 4:00am (so I’ll be leaving here around 3:30am).

I’ll probably have limited access while away, but if not, I’ll be back on the 28th. I expect to have a bunch of photos and that will probably take a little while to get everything sorted.

Either way – I’ll be online for the next few hours and then I’m out.

See you all in a week.

So here’s some pics from the fireworks display from last night. Remember that these were taken from my phone, so they’re not the best but very good for a camera phone that’s not even the best out there.

We got fireworks, some pics of Marria and I and the dog we were sitting near for the last couple of hours (he was super cute!).

Enjoy!

Went to the BBQ in Pittsfield on Saturday. That was a really good time. Got to see a lot of good friends that I don’t have enough opportunities to see. While that sucks, it’s always good to see friends.

I ended up taking off later that night and not crashing there, but I think that was probably for the better.

Anyhow, I’m not going to go into details or run a list of people’s names, but if you recognized me (not everyone did! ;) ), and talked to me, it was a good time!

Tonight Marria and I went to the Boston 4th fireworks display. It took too damn long to get to the fireworks, but it’s always worth the wait. They put on a spectacular show and it was very cool this year. I’ll post some pics tomorrow.

So it’s 7am and I’m awake. Not cool.

I have a 10:30 phone interview thing with the team lead for a position I’m going for at work. Well, to be honest, nobody has even really figured out what this role’s job will be exactly and what work it will entail, so hopefully we can pan that out today. I’ve been getting a feeling that it’ll be something I won’t like. I don’t know why – but we’ll see how things pan out.

I’m exhausted though and have a very busy weekend ahead of me. I’m planning on heading to the RoP BBQ on Saturday. I don’t know if I’m going to crash or head back later that night. Part of me wants to head back and be with Marria. The other part of me doesn’t want to do the 2hr trip again. Just gonna ride it out and see where it takes me. On Sunday afternoon/evening we’re heading to a friend’s who’s BBQing and then another party type deal on Monday. So there’s the making for exhaustion in there as well.

But I’m just wasting time now. I’m going to get my ass in gear and get ready to deal with an abundance of traffic. On most days it would just be because we have tons of traffic. Today it’ll be a mix of work and people traveling – so it should be a pleasant disaster.

I got up early this morning because both Marria and I are working today. I have a KVM that goes to my domain controller and my OpenBSD firewall. I tend to leave my video on the firewall and just let a tcpdump run for little more than amusement and curiosity. I know it’s not “secure” to leave it logged in, but since someone would have to -break into my apartment- to get access to the console, that’s likely the last of my concerns.

Anyhow, before I hit the shower I happened to notice something strange. There suddenly appeared a great number of SSH logins (and subsequent failures) to the box. Crap – someone was trying to run a dictionary attack against me. I don’t think it was a person. It was likely just some stupid bot that happened across my IP and noticed that I had something listening on 22. I promptly added a rule to block that IP and within a minute or two, mr. bot moved on it’s merry little way.

Kinda pissed me off – even though I know it wasn’t “personal”. I still looked up the IP and it’s somewhere in Asia (no real surprise).

Anyhow, so I’m sitting around at work not doing a whole lot. The HVAC system here is all sorts of fucked up. It kicks in, drops the temp by a few degrees and then shuts off without getting things remotely cool. I think we’re hovering at about 82 right now. (the temp on all the thermostats is set to 71 – which doesn’t seem to be doing anything to influence the system at all)

The really bad aspect of this (aside from the discomfort) is that it’s make the day drag.

Someone told me to “let my body adjust to the heat naturally and stop using the AC so much”. I don’t want to – I want to cool the fuck down and take a nap, damnit – is that too much to ask for? :)

I got my passport today. It took me damn long enough to get it, but I just hadn’t had a reason up until very recently since I had only been traveling to Canada. Hopefully I’ll be heading to the UK sometime soon if “things work out the way I hope they do”. But we’ll just leave it at that and I’ll try not to get my hopes up.

I think I’m going to take a day trip to New Hampshire with Marria this weekend. It’s been a while since I’ve been up there and it should be a lot of fun. Just head up with little to no plans and take it as it comes.

In the meantime, I’m trying to clean the bathroom. It’s getting kinda gross and I’m hoping to do a number on the tub. Take -that- mildew!

So that’s likely my glorious plan for the evening. Hit me up for some chat – I’m sure I’ll be around.

So on Tuesday for the last hour and a half before I left work I effectively babysat someone in another office who was on the phone with a very big customer that was having a rather difficult problem. He had already worked with them for about a day and a half and was not able to resolve their issues. If he wasn’t able to get stuff sorted out by the end of the day on Tuesday, then we were going to have to send someone onsite to try to figure out their issues.

The problem ended up being a rather obscure issue with IIS. For some reason our product didn’t register the transport sink properly and a bunch of mail was not being scanned by the virus scanner. It did get caught at a second level scan, but not the front-line, incoming scan. He had no idea what was going on. So I stepped him through finding the transport sinks, determining if our product was registered as one and ultimately manually registering our product as a transport sink with IIS so we would scan mail. Worked like a charm.

I ended up staying about a half hour later than I had to and took off as soon as we got them able to confirm that viruses were being captured and processed properly. Shortly thereafter, this guy sends a message to a bunch of management saying how he solved their problems and that nobody needs to go onsite, blahblahblah. (yes, I was conveniently left off of that message)

Then (here’s where it gets better), the customer emails in saying how great support was and how we solved their problems and singing our praises. He forwards that around to the same bunch of managers and still neglects to mention anything about the fact that he was completely incapable of solving this issue on his own.

Pathetic.

You know, if you need to take credit for shit that you don’t do, go right ahead. The people I work with and many of the people that were forwarded that message know what I did for the call and the customer. I just don’t understand how people can be so caught up with their own inflated egos to just pause for a second and give credit where credit is due.

I’m comfortable knowing that I’m better at my job than he is and could prove it without any effort. I just don’t need to prove it to anyone – deceptively or otherwise.

I took my laptop apart tonight. For a while, the screen has been fucked. It powers on and everything works with the exception of the screen being exceptionally dim. I can just barely make out what’s going on and I can see that it actually boots to the Windows login screen. I can hook up an external monitor and that works, but that somewhat defeats the purpose of a laptop, now doesn’t it?

I was hoping that in my boredom-induced tinkering that I’d find some “overly obvious” problem that could be resolved by wiggling a few wires, but no such luck.

I priced new, used and refurb’ed screens and I’m looking for anywhere from $375 installed to about $100 if I install it myself. I’d be all about just buying a used one and putting it in myself (since I’m very confident now that it’s very easy to replace), but I don’t know if it’s the screen that’s fucked or if it’s something else that’s just causing the screen to appear to be fucked. I don’t want (nor can I afford) to drop $100 and be completely wrong about this. Having an extra laptop screen if this one isn’t actually broken helps me not a bit.

But beyond that, I don’t really want to junk the thing because it does work completely fine aside from the screen issue.

Oh well. I was hoping I could magic up a laptop before going to Hawaii next month, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I certainly don’t think I can afford $100 right now with that coming up.