cygweb

Hope everyone reading this is having a happy 2003 so far. My holidays have been excellent - I was off work for the last two weeks, returning to the office on Monday.

I received a lot of great presents this year:

Well, I had two weeks off from work and I'm back in the office today. UGH. I'm doing a lot of month-end reporting for December. It doesn't look like any of my stuff broke during my absense. Maybe I should have rigged some failures? ;)
What a slate of playoff games we had this weekend - two one-sided shootouts on Saturday and a couple of nailbiters on Sunday. I watched all the games to varying degrees; I was most interested in the Steelers game. I can't believe the Packers lost the way they did and that the 49ers won the way they did. The Steelers' 4th-quarter comeback was great to watch. I really didn't think they were going to pull it off.
I'm still way ahead in my fantasy hockey league. As long as I don't totally coast and keep managing my roster, I should do fine.
WCYG got a little work over the weekend - I'm currently tweaking the automatic crossfading parameters so it sounds more natural. I should have used the time off last week to record some station ID's, but Melissa kept me pretty busy. We had a lot of good time together last week; we did some shopping and saw "Catch Me If You Can" and "About Schmidt" during the week. Both were excellent movies.

I added a WCYG block to the site last night. It includes the URL to the WCYG stream, the currently playing song, and, once I fix it tonight, a list of recently played songs. Read on to find out how I did it.

Squishdot 1.5.0 was released today by its maintainer, Chris Withers; his announcement is here. Squishdot is the Zope product that provides the structure and majority of the look and feel for this site. I've been waiting for this release because it will allow me to upgrade my Zope server to v2.6.0; I want to do this because the Win32 version of Zope 2.6.0 fixes some incompatibilities that v2.5.1 has with the Photo product and Imagemagick. I use the Photo product and Imagemagick extensively on my family website, and I like to have the ability to move my websites seamlessly between my computers, regardless of what OS they're running.
Thanks, Chris!

Even with the rules that protect the QBs and WRs and encourage passing, in today's NFL it is definitely defense that wins championships. I was hoping for a Raiders win since they beat the Titans a week ago, and because Tampa Bay knocked out Philly. It just wasn't meant to be. Tampa Bay has a great defense and finally has a mediocre offense to complement them. Congrats to the Bucs. And congrats to FedEx, whose "Castaway" ad was great! The Matrix, T3, and Daredevil trailers kicked ass too!

I haven't been doing much writing here lately, and I apologize. Besides enjoying the playoffs and Super Bowl, I've been busy researching HDTV-related information and gathering a lot of user opinions related to HD-capable TVs and HD receivers/antennas. I hope to get a HD setup going later in the year and I want to make sure I'm informed before the credit card is charged!

In other geek news, I've got WCYG tuned pretty much the way I like it - if you're listening to it and reading this, let me know how YOU like it.

In an effort to reduce my "server" computers from 2 to 1, I may be rebuilding Cosmic, the server that houses this website. I've had great availability with Mandrake Linux 8.0, but I can do a lot more with the machine if I move some hardware over to it and run Windows 2000 on it again. That would allow me to move WCYG over to it as well, and then Maestro, the machine that currently hosts WCYG, could be rebuilt with a more stable hardware config and used as an audio workstation and gaming machine. I probably won't do this for a while, and for all intents and purposes, this site and WCYG will work the same after all the changes.

I had quite a bit of activity at work over the weekend since I began a 2-week stint of pager duty and the W32/SQLSlammer virus got into our network and slowed it down quite a bit. We've cleaned up and patched most (if not all) of our MS SQL 2000 Servers, but we're still trying to locate all of the user workstations that might have Microsoft Desktop Engine 2000 (which has the same vulnerability to SQLSlammer) and patching them. Of course, a lot of what I'll be doing this week is evaluating all of the available security patches for Windows 2000 that I haven't productionized and see if we need to get them deployed. This job can be so fun... :(

I just found out from a Rush.com email yesterday that the band will be releasing a live DVD from their Vapor Trails tour. Here's the info:

"RUSH IN RIO" will be a 2-Disc set containing Rush live in concert, filmed during the Rio de Janeiro show last November, plus an exclusive mini-documentary and behind the scenes footage of guys on tour while in Brazil, written and directed by Rush photographer Andrew MacNaughtan. The DVD set will have worldwide release in a variety of international formats. As well, look forward to special packaging and artwork designed by Hugh Syme.

Yay!