Depending if you came to the site in the last 24hrs or not, you may have noticed an RSS feed. And now, you may notice that it’s gone. 🙂 Currently I’m updating the website by just editing the straight blog.htm file. Therefore, to create an RSS feed, I’d have to, in essence, keep up 2 sites, since I’d be manually editing both the htm, and xml. Fat chance that’s gonna happen. It’s cool in theory, but I think I’d rather just have people visit the site currently. Maybe in later versions of the website, I can incorporate something that will automatically do it. With that said, if anybody knows of anything that would significantly make my life easier with creating the xml for an RSS feed, please let me know (spruit@(remove)rebelpeon.com). I was playing around with various RSS feeds, and they are pretty nice. Well, if you’re totally lazy and don’t want to visit websites. Then again, I’m sure some people (like those people that tell me to setup an RSS feed) visit a lot more websites daily than I do. It does make it A LOT faster to parse through data, since it’s all in one spot. The RSS aggregator that I was using the other night was BlogExpress. It seems pretty nice. But as I mentioned before, I personally don’t see myself using it. I browse the web to 1) get news, and 2) to waste time. Using RSS feeds totally negate 50% of my web usage. That can’t be good.
In other news, I have been thinking about redesigning the website again. It’s working for now, but it just feels “eh” to me. However, I’m in no hurry, since I’ve got something up currently. I kinda want to do something more “hip,” but my artistic ability is lacking. Not necissarily the vision, just actually putting it into a usuable form. I’m sure the lack of html knowledge I have doesn’t help either, but Dreamweaver seems to be able to help me there too much. 🙂
Let’s see, I think I’m on a roll here, might as well keep going. At work, we had talked about deploying Windows XP to the student athlete labs. We had talked about this for months how a good time to do it, was over the winter break, since we’d have a month to get everything working. Needless to say, it never got worked on before the winter break. So, Monday, Nick, Jason, and I had a meeting and the labs were brought up. Since we had 2 weeks left, we kinda laughed at the probability of getting a new image going. However, I am happy to report after a day and a half of work, the new image is ready to be pushed out. What helps, is that with all the new user machines, we are deploying the vast majority of applications via group policy objects (GPO’s). This means, that we just have to add a computer or user to a specific group, and the software automatically installs when the machine boots up. Previously all applications were either included in the ghost image, or were installed by hand. When building a new machine for a user, it was typically a full day event. However, now, the time has been drastically reduced to (at max) 2 hours. Now, of course, it’s not just as easy as I said, because a lot of work has gone into making the applications able to be deployed via this way, but since all the backend work had been previously done, it took almost no time to actually do the labs. This included totally redoing the group policy for labs (locking down the machines, restricting access, etc). It’s amazing how much technology changes in 4 years. From everything that I’ve heard from the guys that worked at DIA before me, the labs group policy has never been totally redone since the original one was made in 99/00. It’s crazy how much hack ‘n slash was put into it for each additional deployment that occured after the original was made. It should’ve been redone each time because of improvements made by Microsoft to various options in GPO’s. However, that didn’t happen. Needless to say, this has been one of the fastest (if not the fastest) lab build and deployment. Hopefully from now on, it will always be so easy.
Food dryers are cool. I got one for Christmas from a relative, and Colleen and I used it last weekend. I love dried apples and bananas, so I’ve wanted one for awhile. We bought 4 different kinds of apples to try: Fugi, Granny Smith, Golden Delicious, and Pink Lady. Needless to say, the best dried ones, were the same as the best undried ones. The bananas didn’t come out too well though. They didn’t get fully dried (had some soft parts in the middle) and so they didn’t last. Also, since the drier manual didn’t say to soak them in an ascorbic acid bath (like it said to do with the apples), they came out almost completely black. How appetizing. Also, with the manual, whoever made it and thought that only took 6-10 hours to dry the fruit really needs to have his head checked. Needless to say, I started it at 2PM Sunday, and figured it’d be done by the time I went to bed, ~11. HA! I went to bed at 12:30 because the stupid things weren’t done, and then I woke up every 2 hours after that to remove the peices that were done and keep an eye on it. So at 8AM, before I was leaving for work, everything was finally done (well, except for the bananas, as I mentioned earlier). Grr. Oh well, gotta learn somehow. Plus cutting the fruit the same thickness really helps. Unfortunatly the bottom rack will always finish before the rest, so you still have to check it frequently. Plus, I like to have apple and banana chips, where they are leathery. Colleen on the other hand likes to have them still kinda moist, like the dried apples you can get in the store. I’m not really a fan of those, though, because they feel so disgusting. I like mine a lot more dried. Just more variation…wee…
Wow, this was an exceedingly long post. Yes, that’s how bored I am tonight. Well, I gotta go run over to Cunningham Children’s Home to drop off a form Colleen forgot to bring with her to work…