Our last giant pleco died a few weeks ago, and even with the economy where it is, finding a suitable candidate was a pain. As of today I’d like to announce that effective this afternoon, the position has been filled. “The Sucker” has accepted a full time position with room, heat and water, lighting and all meals included.
As an added bonus, he matches the driftwood log already in our tank (seen left)
]]>Introducing Princess Gracie:
With the recent demise of my photo gallery (possibly to return, if I find a gallery system that isn’t horribly nasty), I thought I’d post a recent photo or too. Not my dog, but it is my photo, so that’s good enough for me. ]]>
He only eats live food, so he is a ton of fun to feed. We’ve already managed to lose one cricket into our kitchen, luckily the cricket was never seen or heard from again, hopefully being smart enough to avoid venturing out where our killer cats could not quite manage to kill him. Luckily crickets don’t live long…
We’re hoping he’s actually Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud (from Saudi Arabia), and that he’ll be grateful when someone finally kisses him, but honestly the odds seem pretty low at this point.
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Mmmm… Gravy! For the record, this is last night’s leftover gravy with the lid removed.
Oh, and it was delicious!
]]>Anyway, as a result of the successful betta experiment, I’d like to introduce everyone to my new fish, RC.
Of course it also helps that I’ve had a few upgrades since then — In fact, the recent death and subsequent replacement of my printer/scanner/copier is in large part why I got around to cleaning up tonight. So, without further ado (a phrase which I have been known to use — I can only assume Ado refers to the 9th century archbishop), I present my office.
Note that each photo is linked to my photo gallery which has a “view original image” button that will let you view an image in high resolution, should you so desire…
I work from home, and spend the majority of my day here, which is how I justify my two Samsung 245B 24″ monitors, one mounted above the other. I also have a 17″ widescreen which I use primarily as a TV.
The phone to my left is a Grandstream VoIP phone — I’ve long since canceled anything resembling an analog landline and run my own VoIP PBX.
Behind me is my watercooler and fridge, mini server rack, and my Gorilla Rack storage shelves.
On the bottom-left hand shelf is my full size tower server shelf, consisting of a duplexing networked colour laser printer, two of my Windows 2003 servers, two of my four APC 1250 SmartUPS, two drobos, an Apple Airport Extreme (gigabit version) and a KVM switch.
I’ve had these cases for several years now, although the hardware inside has been replaced a couple times over with upgraded components.
Last, but not least, my mini-network-rack:
This is an old Sony audio gear stand, currently holding three Dell Optiplex boxes, running FreeBSD based router/firewall package pfSense, Linux based Trixbox PBX, and my final Windows 2003 Active Directory domain controller. Above the servers is my 24 port managed 10/100 switch, and below is my Shaw digital cable terminals which supply my office with a poor selection of digital music, plus my cable modem. Finally, the bottem shelf contains a set of emergency network destruction tools, should the need arise.
A fair improvement over the disaster that was my office before the reorganization:
Since you’re here anyway, have a seat… 
… and tell me what you think — What should I change, what is well done, what would you change?
]]>It started out, I had two images and wanted one to overlay over the other. Sounds simple enough, but as it turns out, this was far beyond the capabilities of Windows’ Paint. Sure, I could paste an image into another, but the image was jagged, and put politely, looked like crap.
So I’m thinking I need a easy to use, preferably free (or at least free trial) image editing problem. Lots out there. paint.net came to mind, so I downloadeda trial and fired ‘er up.
Wow. Seriously, wow. Okay, so it’s not Photoshop. But it’s also not $649, so that works out well enough.
Photoshop is, frankly, overwhelming to me. I’m graphically untalented, I’m not even familiar with the terminology or what the various icons do, but paint.net was oddly intuitive, the help was actually useful for a couple shortcut keys.
Within 15 minutes I was doing some basic editing, and within half an hour, just a bit of a cleanup and suddenly one of my images looked exactly how I envisioned it in my mind before I started, that’s a first for me.
So, thanks paint.net!
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