Almost 2 weeks done at my new job

by Michael O'Connor
Categories: Biking, Work
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Published on: March 30, 2006

I am learning about how the code works at my new job, and getting use to the coding procedures that must be followed for coding. I also been biking to work every day, I will admit I am getting hunger and hunger during the day. It is nice to get the extra exercise in, but I don’t like the idea of eating more, but I can not just not eat more, I am getting so hungry that it gets distracting, so I want to eat to keep myself focused. I have eaten 5 meals today, and I am still hungry right now. Also I have noticed that my waist has gone down also. I got a new belt 3 weeks ago, and I was using the 3 hold from the end (the middle one) and now I am on the last hole, and will need to get a new hole punched into it soon.

The last 2 weeks have not been good to be my stuff

by Michael O'Connor
Categories: Misc (no other place to put this stuff)
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Published on: March 30, 2006

Last Thursday the gem stone fell out of class ring. Then today, my iPod fell on the ground, and then bounced once. That distorted the hard drive. I hope that is the last thing to get damaged, but I fear it is not.

What the heck is wrong with the french

by Michael O'Connor
Categories: News
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Published on: March 29, 2006

Well France is in the news again, for riots. I wonder what is wrong with that country. A couple a months ago it was muslems rioting, now it is the unemployed rioting. That country is going to either fall into civil war, or collapse soon.

The Irish Tin Whistle

by Michael O'Connor
Categories: Irish Tin Whistle
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Published on: March 28, 2006

Well I have been messing around with the Irish Tin Whistle for all most a month. I still stink at it, but at lest when I am practicing, it is starting to sound like the song that it is labeled. I do need to find a book with Irish Tin Whistle music in it at all levels.

It is begining to look like spring

by Michael O'Connor
Categories: Biking, Work
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Published on: March 27, 2006

Well the temp is starting to go up. This is good news for me since I have been biking to work every day since I started my new job at The Switch last Monday. Also I am quite pleased with myself today, I was able to bike up Bates St with out stopping. I probably should do some work outs for my upper arms. I can not want till the weather get warmer so I can wear my shorts for my morning bike rides, or not have to wear a coat for the bike ride.

Respect for other peoples propriety

by Michael O'Connor
Categories: Biking
Comments: 2 Comments
Published on: March 26, 2006

What ever happened to respect for other people’s property. Case in point, today I biked down to the store to pick up some stuff. I locked up my bike out of the way, to get to it you had to go out of your way. Well when I come out of the store, some on had rammed a cart into my bike, and being where it was you had to go around a barrier to get to the place where the bike was, so the person that did it, more then likely did it deliberately. What ever happened to curtsy, and respect for other people’s propriety. That was about 1 and 1/2 hour ago, and I will admit I am still fuming about it.

Todays workout

by Michael O'Connor
Categories: Misc (no other place to put this stuff)
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Published on: March 25, 2006

Today, I went down to the gym, I will admit I have not really worked out, until recently. I went for the leg press, last year I was up to 650 on the leg press. When I set at it today, I started out at 400, but over the course of about 45 minutes I worked myself up to 700, and by the end of the day I was up at 720. I am going to set a goal of getting it up to 1000. The biking I have done up Bates St, probably have helped a lot. My legs hurt while I was doing it like all get out, but I hope to be able to do that 720 (and more) with out pain. But for now no pain no gain.

This should stop the defacement of my video section

by Michael O'Connor
Categories: Web Site
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Published on: March 24, 2006

I have set the promotion of the uses in the database for me video section to select only, if I need to add something I can change it for the time that I need to, then reset it. But for now in the video section the promotion is set to select only, that why the system for the video can only read the database, but can not write to it, so the people trying to deface it can not. This is only a temporary solution until I find another system to use instead of phpNuke.

My collage class ring

by Michael O'Connor
Categories: Random Thoughts
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Published on: March 23, 2006

Today when I was washing my hands, the gem fell out. I will admit I am not at all happy about that, I got it back ’99 it should not have fallen apart in less then 7 years. I called the manufacture of it, they said if I send it in, they will fix it for free. I will be sending it via UPS soon, my right hand ring finger is going to feel odd for a while, almost always have it on.

Free Time (where did it go?)

by Michael O'Connor
Categories: Random Thoughts
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Published on: March 22, 2006

OK, I know where it went but gee I miss it. The “problem” is as follows, I now have a longer commute to work (instead of 5 minutes it is now 15 minutes) I am heading into work earlier since it is a longer bike ride and I will sweat I think it would only be nice if I did take a shower when I get there so I don’t smell up the place. Then since I am trying to pick up the Irish Tin Whistle, I have dedicated about 30 minutes a day to practise. Then, I am trying to correct a bad habit of mine, I have not really been saying prayers at night, so I have set aside about half an hour a day for that. I am working out of the Lutheran Hymnal for the service of Vespers for it, and using a supplemental book called the Daily office to go with it. So right there I have just taken about 2.5 hours out of my that I use to have, so I am trying to get every thing I use to do in, with 2.5 hours less. Oh well, maybe I should cut some things out, or maybe I have to many hobbies lets see I have

  • biking
  • keeping fish
  • Ham Radio
  • Short Wave Radio Listening
  • Police band scanning
  • Armature Photography
  • Irish Tin Whistle (a new hobby I will admit)
  • This blog (I do consider this blog a hobby)

Oh well what is life with out hobbies, and hobbies add riches to life, man I must be one of the richest people alive with the amount of hobbies I have ;-).

My Video section

by Michael O'Connor
Categories: Web Site
Comments: 1 Comment
Published on: March 21, 2006

Does any one know of any good web aps for sharing videos, I am getting tired of child hackers defacing the phpNuke site I have, and I am thinking the best thing will be to change the video section to something else, instead of having to upload a backup of the database ever few days. Using phpNuke was the bigist mistake I ever made for that section of my web site.

Well the first day at the new job went well

by Michael O'Connor
Categories: Work
Comments: 1 Comment
Published on: March 20, 2006

Well today was my first day at the new job, down at Union Switch and Signal. I think it went well, and I am excited about my future there. I got to meet the group of people that I will be working with today, that is always good.

My Churches Sermons are now being PodCasted

by Michael O'Connor
Categories: Church, Technology
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Published on: March 19, 2006

Our church is now podcasting the sermons from Sunday morning if you want to know the RSS feed for it you can get it here, just plug this into your iTunes, or what ever podcatcher you use
This is now possible, because one of the computers I built up for the church yesterday. I have moved the new Linux box from the churches NOC to the church proper, and connected the mic line to the output of the sound system.
Because of the new podcasting stuff, the audio system is now my responsibility, the previous person thinks it would be best for one person to do both, instead of 2 people dealing with the audio system. It is nice to see the hours of work I put into this computer being fruitfully, the computer itself took about 5 hours, that is install of the OS (Linux:Red Hat Fedora Core 4), configuring the system, then installing audacity and all the libs that were needed just to get audacity up and running. But it is nice to see the fruits of your work.
We still need to run a cat 5 cable from the network up to the computer, but for now, at the end of the service I will be dumping the raw audacity data to a USB key drive, to bring it home to do the work on it. That involves increasing the volume since it is so low when I do the recording. The only thing I have to figure out how to do is remove the low hum that gets into the recording, if any one has any suggestions on how to do this let me know, also remember we have a budget of $0 no more no less, so nothing involved buying any software or hardware.

Here it is almost 11 and I am just finishing up here

by Michael O'Connor
Categories: Church, Geekdom
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Published on: March 18, 2006

Well this has been a bit of a long day. I have setup 4 Linux computers, one was to replace the churches older file server, the only one only had 1.6Gb of disk space, and we were down to the last 2Mb, the new one has 160Gb of disk space on the partition that is going to hold the churches files. The next computer is one that was placed up near the churches audio system, this way we can record the sermons from every Sunday and podcast them (I will post a link when I get the podcast server up and running). The next computer, is one for use when I am working on other computers, it will be nice that if I am working on a problem, I can look things about it up on the web, so this one is the “research” computer so I can research things about the computers if I am stumped on the when I am fixing a computer for the church. The last computer is one for the church’s library, so that when some one from the church is using the library they can look things up on the internet, and maybe type something up in a word processor (I do have to add printer support to the system)
When I started, I thought I would give “ubuntu” a try. Big mistake, it does not let you set a root password, and for the life of me I could not figure out what the root password was, so that killed that system for being the file server, and I did not want to deal with it, I knew Red Hat, so I went with FC4 for the systems. I know it for the most part so it was just easier to deal with then trying to force a new system to work the way I think it should work. I already know the steps I take to force Red Hat to work the way I want it to work, so it was less work to do that.
I been working since 9am on the churches computers today, and here it is 11pm, and I just have to move one last computer up to the new location to get all the stuff done, then I will head home to take a nice (earned) rest (sleep sounds great at this moment to me 😉 )
Well it has been a busy day for me, so by for now, and look her tomorrow for information about the podcast that my church will be doing, I will be setting that up tomorrow.

One major problem with Linux

by Michael O'Connor
Categories: Geekdom, Technology
Comments: 2 Comments
Published on: March 18, 2006

I love Linux, don’t get me wrong, but it does have one problem. This problem is this, if you want to install a program, you may find that you have to install more libs then you care to. Take today, I am working on getting a computer up and running for my church so we can record the sermons on it, and put them on the net in mp3 format. On my Mac at home I use a program called audacity, a very nice program to work with. So I decided that I would use it on a Linux system to do the recording. Well when I went to install it, I find out I need to install wxWindows, ok no big deal. Well then as I keep going at it I find that i have to also install 4 other libs, as I try to install one, it says it needs another so to install audacity, I had to install the following 5 libs, wxWindwos, GTK+, gLib, ATK, and finally pango. This is the problem to install one program you have to install a lot of accompanying libs (dll for those of you in the windows world) What Linux people need to do, is eather include in the build systems, or the RPM or what ever, include the libs that you will need to run the program, I am a programmer, and a computer geek, but you will never get a non-geek to use Linux if it takes hours to install a simple program, and one forth of that time is spent just searching the web for the libs you need, and the correct versions. Right now I am still working on compiling gtk+ (I have been at this for 3 hours now)
To those of you that write Linux programs, or libs, maybe consider this, people don’t what to have to search high and low for the libs they need, just package them all together so you get what you need when you are set to install a program, many end users will not have the patiences to look for all the libs they might need, heck I don’t even think they would know how to deal with this situation, if you want Joe six pack to use Linux, you will have to meet him half way. Now if you don’t want end users to use Linux, but just computer geeks, well you are well on the right path, because only a geek will take this kind of time to make things work.

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  • Got 2 new radios recently by Michael O'Connor
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    Back on Nov 24th I went out to the DE Ham Radio Outlet, to get a Yaesu FT-710 feild. While I was out there I also picked up a FT-891 for my car, since I recently got my general upgread for my ham license. I have not had a chance to play with the FT-710[…]

  • Got lucky at home depot the other d… by Michael O'Connor
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    The other day I went down to a local home depot to pick up some stuff to build a small attena mast for my balcony. One of the items I needed was a block of wood for the base. When I went to the wood section the guy there was helping another customer cut some[…]

  • Got my ham upgread and other stuff. by Michael O'Connor
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    Back on Oct 11, I took the test to upgread my ham licnense from Tech to general, yesterday I got the email from the FCC that my license in the database has been updated. Also last week I decided to join the ARRL. Over the years I have heard of 3 things that the ARRL[…]

  • Listening to 40m tonight by Michael O'Connor
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    Tonight I setup my 40m attena to tune around the 20m band of the ammature radio band, while I did not key up (still have yet to make any contacts on my new privileges that passing my general exam granted me) I did enjoy tuning around. It took me some time to get my attenas[…]

  • During this goverment shutdown by Michael O'Connor
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    Well I been Furlough durning this goverment shutdown. I have decided to not waste the time. So I took a Skywarn class and got a skywarn certification. That was on Friday Oct 3rd, so now I am a weather spotter. Then last week I spent studing to upgread my Ham radio License from Technitian to[…]

  • Getting back on the air by Michael O'Connor
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    For the last few years I have been off the air. And recently decided to get back on the air (Amature Radio) This was persipitated when my old car (a Scion IQ) died, the computer of it got fried. So I had to get a new car. With the change of the car I took[…]

  • The Switch 2 “game key cards&… by Michael O'Connor
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    I think Nintendo is make a mistake with the “game key cards” the new digital only game cards that Nintendo is doing. With the situation where more 3rd parties are doing those instead of a real game card. I will not buy a game that not fully on the disc or on the cart, which[…]

  • The Switch 2 by Michael O'Connor
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    Well looking at the new switch 2 that is to come out soon, I originally was excited and was thinking of pre-ordering it. But after the news of both the system, and the games, my doubt started to set in. Then I looked at the launch line up, and found none that I wanted. And[…]

  • This is a banger of a year for JRPG… by Michael O'Connor
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    So far this year we have gotten some great JRPGs Persona 3 ReloadedShin Megami Tensei V: VengeanceLike a Dragon: Infinite Wealth And there are still more coming, coming on the 5th of July the one I am most hyped for The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak and latter this year we are getting Metaphor:[…]

  • weight loss continues, but end is n… by Michael O'Connor
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    Today I weighed myself and came in at 130 pounds. When I started I set a goal of 125 pounds. So only 5 more pounds to go. I am a long way from where I started, I started at 300 pounds on March 31, 2022, it been about 15 months since I started this diet.[…]

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