I am very disappointed, I just did a Google Search on 'chris wiegand' and the real me was #7 and #10. Apparently I am also an actor, painter, life style coach, white water rafting guy, and the wife of some other guy. How odd that there would be plenty of other people with my same name, I always thought it was a little more unique (although there's a guy in NJ, another in MN/WI, and I think one in St. Loius with whom I compete for the coveted cdwiegand/cwiegand/chriswiegand logins on various sites - I've even friended one of them on Facebook).

The following was posted to my LiveJournal, but they are not my tweets. Apparently the ChrisWiegand from Twitter and my ChrisWiegand LJ account are not entangled. Well, a password change should fix THAT problem....

• 09:01 Enjoyed Patti Plinko's clinkety-clonk, Jane Birkin-esque junkshop blues last night. #edfest #
• 15:15 What just happened??!! Saw Internal tonight. Still getting my head around it. #edfest #

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A pic we just took of our family.

A touching GLBT-related short movie (just 3 and a half minutes long). Don't watch if you're offended by GLBT-related things, but then you'd probably not be watching my blog (who does anyways?).

Hehe, this video is rather funny. Hmm... maybe I can ask krisw if we can get some help around the house...

*This*, if true, would piss me off so much if I were a registered Republican. Being as I'm allergic to the religion right, I'm not, but I certainly am a fiscal conservative re: government spending.

Got your OpenSolaris 2008.11 box with a static IP and suddenly DNS doesn't work? Here's the fix:


Make sire you have a entry in your /etc/nsswitch.conf file:

bash-3.00# grep dns /etc/nsswitch.conf
hosts: files dns

then run
/etc/init.d/nscd stop; /etc/init.d/nscd start


[Courtesy of http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=82014]

It seems that when using DHCP the daemon fixes things for you, but when you switch from dynamic to static it throws the nsswitch.conf back to just files, meaning it won't use DNS for ping queries (or any computer name lookup). I can't think of WHY you would do that in the Internet era...

In case anyone who reads this wants to configure relaying through an Exchange 2007 server for *specific IPs*, look at this blog entry, which details how to create a new Receive Connector, allow only specific IPs to access it, and set it up so that they can relay anonymously without allowing everyone to do so. Exchange 2003's UI was much easier to use when figuring this out - it's kinda non-obvious how to do it safely (without creating an open relay).

I am now 32 years old. Aaaah - I'm like the cryptkeeper!

Ok, for those who didn't know yet, we have a new baby! Picture at Flickr. 8 lbs 12 ozs, 50cm tall. Yes, that's apparently how they measured him. They had to convert it to inches for the birth cert. So he was born in the ambulance, on Chambers between Iliff and Mexico, at 5:13pm. We had to call 9-1-1 and the paramedic's came, got her into the ambulance, and thankfully grandma was able to take Isaac so I could concentrate on Kris.

We're now at the hospital, teaching him how to latch on for feeding. Isaac appears to be doing his first sleepover at Grandma's house (YAY!!!!), which actually makes this a night where I'm not responsible for any baby (as the nurses still take care of new baby, at least a little bit). As we take more pictures of him we'll make sure to put them on Flickr - we'll probably make a 1st year set for new bug once we've got a name down.

My wife and I would do this when we were on the phone. At the end of calls we'd say hi to CIA guy and FBI girl, or we'd reference them when we were talking about people listening in on either side of the conversation (or other people in the room, so we might not say everything we wanted).

Hehe..hehe.. Utah, you can come out of the closet now! And now we know the reason Windows 7 runs faster than XP - it's really running Ubuntu!

This page has some real gems for quotes:

[...in the area of civil rights, it's even worse -- Obama has people on his transition advisory team who are, get this, gay and, gulp, non-white.]

[... Obama really is a radical hellbent on destroy America with gays, blacks, and extremists who believe corporations should follow some rules.]

and

[But back to the matter at hand--conservatives who are in stunned disbelief that Obama isn't following the usual rules of an election whereby right-wing hacks get to have all the administration jobs even if they don't win the election. How are they to deal with Obama's brazen and outrageous decision to implement the policies the public voted for?]

Oh dear. It appears the right forgot that THEY LOST. The public is either a) fed up with Emperor Bush's crackpot big-brother policies (which is SOOO anti-Republican that Reagan must be spinning in his grave) and corporate favoritism, or b) they're dumb sheep, or c) they are the 3 thinking Republicans in the whole nation (in which case they're misguided, but they're cute so we let them stay).

Okay, here's my annual list:

1. Lose some weight. I am starting off this year with about 190 or so pounds - I should be around 145, so I need to lose 45 or so and at least 25 minimum this year. I really do need to lose this weight - I'm technically obese. The best way to lose weight is to reduce calories (yes, burning more calories is good, but they've found that the best method to actually lose weight is to reduce caloric intake first and increase burn second), so I need a diet. I'm thinking that a) I need to start eating breakfast, b) I need to stop eating out at lunch (except maybe once a week), and c) I need to start cooking dinners, which leads to:

2. I need to learn to cook real food. Not chef-style stuff, but the kind of stuff that takes an hour at most and 10 ingredients at most (or so). I need to start taking notes from Food Network, and making what I want to make instead of what people say they'll eat. I need to experiment, and I also need to start planning out dinners.

3. I want muscles. Not big bulging 'you live at the gym, no?' type muscles, but at 31 I shouldn't be so flabby and weak. I've been thinking about how to do this, and sadly club memberships are just kinda expensive (although I have thought about trying the 10-day trial at a local 24 hour fitness to see if it hooks me). I have no room for exercise equipment, either, and running/jogging outdoors when it's freezing is NOT my idea of fun. So the jury's out on this one. I'm still thinking about how best to do this under a budget and with little room, but actually get real results. That said, I really won't have time for anything (thanks to our next bundle of joy coming out sometime this month!) until the weather is nicer, so I should be able to figure something out.

4. And finally, I want to start looking nicer, specifically my hair, skin, clothing and shoes. I will be picking up books and magazines, getting ideas, and visiting Kohl's and Target from time to time to start building up my wardrobe and start taking care of my look.

Numbers 3 and 4 are really about wanting to look nice and to have a good impression on others, and 1 and 2 are about losing my weight and being healthier. Now I need to actually sit down and write out a list of how I want to go about getting these things done, and giving myself timelines. Hehe - I should make this an Agile-style project, with little standups with myself and 2-week sprints. Ah well, off to bed I am.

4.

Okay, so I recently got an Apple Airport Extreme for the holidays. We have two at work, they're nice and powerful, do IPv6, disk and printer sharing, 802.11n, etc. So now we have a 500GB disk on our network, available to all. I decide I needs to write myself a little backup app, as most of them out there either cost money (which I prefer to spend on our kids) or suck. I could have written a xcopy script or deltacopy script for Windows, and a rsync script using just file paths for my wife's Mac, and then something for my solaris and linux sides/boxen/machines, *OR* I could write a nice Ruby app for all of them. Guess which I did?

So, 154 lines of Ruby code later, and it's working. It not only copies the file, but I have one unit test (ok, I need to write more, I know, I know, if I b*tch about using TDD at work I really should do it at home too...), and it supports directory/file exclusions (yeah, that would be because in Vista, c:\users\chris\music and c:\users\chris\my documents\my music are the SAME FOLDER - that was 20GB wasted on my network...) and basic logging. Oh, and I pulled in (not in line count above) someone's ThreadPool class so I could multithread it. I may pull that last bit out, though, as my personal laptop is a Celeron single core and the network's not so fast (nor my disk) that multithreading is likely giving me a performance bump.

Once I've got this working great with my backups, I'm going to put it on my wife's iBook, her Windows desktop, and use it for some of my Solaris junk. I may even consider doing some version detection, so that I can save older versions of specific folders/files, kinda like how CVS does it. Vaguely. I'm allergic to CVS, only less so than SourceSafe.

On to other things, I'm finding I enjoy playing the drums on Rock Band 2 more than the guitar, but only on Easy. I don't yet have the coordination to hit the drum pedal and bang a thingy at the same time. Speaking of that, I HATE HATE HATE the drum pedal. My ankle is KILLING me. I wish I could put it further up front, but the bars prevent that. I just don't know how to move it, or myself, so that it's easy. I would probably do better if I could hit the pedal without killing my tendons in the process.

And finally, I really could probably have just worked from home today - CB was the only guy in the office. Everyone else was either working from home or not working at all. Admittedly I was at least productive. Okay, well, time to go - I need my beauty sleep.