Tone Parsons

Since I’m too lazy to write something, I present you with a photo.

Arena football is an amazing thing.

I went for the first time last night to watch the Spokane Shock take on the Albany Conquest. The Shock were trailing by 10 for most of the game. Then… in the last quarter, they reversed it and won by 3 points at 49 – 46.

It was completely insane in the Arena.

I’ve never been anyplace so loud. People screaming at the top of their lungs, music blasting, the lights. It was serious sensory overload.

I took a few pictures of the game, click “more” to see them.

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Todays task: fix my laptop.

My work laptop is a Dell Lattitude 610. I’ve got a lovely docking station hooked to a couple of DVI LCD displays (via a StarTech splitter), and a wireless keyboard/mouse combo (so I can move from my sitting desk to my standing desk).

Having a laptop is great because when I’m on the road or take it home, I have all my work files with me (which helps when I get a call after-hours).

Unfortunately, I had a few things that weren’t working on it:

• ColdFusion MX7 refused to launch (who the hell knows why!)
• I couldn’t connect to any of our Raritan IP based KVM’s (firewall issue)
• When ColdFusion did work, the cfchart function refused to work on localhost (a corrupted font).

So… rather than mucking about with it all, I chose to take the easy route:

• Remove all but the base 19 fonts for XP
• Uninstall/reinstall Java
• Uninstall/reinstall ColdFusion
• Tweak the hell out of the damn firewall

Now it’s all happy again.

Of course, I’m going to have to add my fonts back in, a few at a time, to see which one(s) caused the issues with cfchart (I have and use a lot of fonts). But at least I have a baseline now where everything works properly.

Other news: Pure Shock Value

I’m heading out tomorow tonight to see the Spokane Shock take on the Albany Conquest in arena football. I’ve never been ot one of these before, but I hear the games are quite good (and the Shock are apparently ranked 2nd in the league). I’ll take the digital camera along and see if I can get a few good pictures (anything for content, baby!).

I’m back from my mini-vacation!

Portland was nice, the wedding was great, and it was good to hang out with my Dad and his new bride, Jennifer!

If you ever get to Portland, make sure to eat at the Black Bear Diner.  The prices are good, the portions are obscene, and the food is pretty damn good (well, at least the prime rib was).

We took it pretty easy on the drive. It took 6 1/2 hours to drive down and 8 1/2 hours to drive back (we stopped a lot… looked around.. and enjoyed the trip).

Today, I return to work.

If it could go wrong… it has.

I’m currently buried in e-mail hell (I’m trying to mine the important things out of my inbox), and several critical things came up during my 3 work days off. Heaven forbid I actually ever try to take a week off.

*sigh*

Other news: my youngest son, Skylar, celebrated his 14th birthday yesterday. Being that he’s a little geek (go figure), he wanted games for his PC. I picked up a copy of World of Warcraft (plus a pre-paid game card), Doom 3 – Resurrection of Evil, and Quake 4 for him. He also got Half-Life 2 – Episode One and the new Super Mario Brothers for his Nintendo DS.

Yup… he’s one happy kid.