Finally jumped into the frying pan known as twitter.

Apparently my blog sucks.  I agree.  I never update it.  I’ve been super distracted by work (the usual) and web 2.0 social media (aka twitter).  So lets add some content to try and turn that around.

First of all, I’m upgraded to all the new Wordpress 2.6 goodness, and I seem to have gotten out of my blog hacking.  I guess my password had been compromised.  I must admit I was using a pretty weak one.  Don’t tell anyone :-/.

Second of all, Everything has been going good round the box house.  We had our Pate reunion, our Hanson reunion, and even our college reunion (river trip).  There are TONS of new pictures on the gallery, and I’ve been contemplating using flickr instead of our regular gallery.  Something I thought of that would be nice for flickr would be a third party app I could run on my server.  Like a gallery, but it pulls from flickr.  I’ll see what I can find.

Third, despite all the trips we’ve had so far this year, we are not done.  We’ve got a trip to Jamaica coming up, and then to see my Parents in Colorado.  Busy summer.

Fourth and final, Payton is doing great.  He is almost 18M and will be going in for his checkup soon.  I’m calling 30-32 lbs.  He’s been pushing his way to the terrible twos pretty quickly, at least for us.  When he’s at the babysitters, he is an “angel”, but as soon as we have him that changes pretty quickly.  He’s all cool and happy up until you try to do something that wasn’t his idea, then the fireworks start.  He sometimes even does the running into another room and falling on the floor and crying with his head down.  It’s a good show, I think he’ll be a good actor ;-)  There are tons of new pictures of him up on the gallery as well.  I think not being around him is going to be the toughest thing of the trip to Jamaica.

Put another notch in the door jam. /me is 32.

I’ve been giving micro-blogging a shot on Twitter. My user name is calebgroom. Next I need to look for a plugin to sync up content that I put on twitter with my blog.

We happen to have a few cell phones laying around the house. Of course I have my new nokia n95 8gb, we also have the Sony Ericsson w580i, and we have a blackberry pearl that Summer uses. I have been messing around with the n95 and the w580i. I wanted to be able to transfer some ring tones I have been making from the n95 to the w580i. I have never messed with bluetooth before so this was all new to me. I have basically been living in the 1980’s as far as cell phone technology goes for the last 5 or so years.

Getting it going

So first on the Nokia

• menu
• tools
• bluetooth

From the Bluetooth menu:

• Set bluetooth on
• My phone’s visibility set to show to all
• My phones name I set to Mike (since thats my name you can pick any name you wish)
• Remote SIM mode I have set to off

Next on the w580i open the menu and select settings, then scroll left until you get to Connectivity:

• Select Bluetooth
• Turn On
• Visibility
• Show Phone
• My Devices
  • Select Add new device
  • Make sure your n95 is close enough and bluetooth is on
  • Click on “Mike”
  • Passcode: 00000

Now a dialog will open on your n95 asking to allow the connection and to enter the passcode. Enter 00000 and hit OK. Now the 2 devices are connected. In my case I wanted to transfer a ring tone from the n95 to the w580i. So now we need to grab the n95 and open the menu and go to tools, and then file manager. Find the file you want to send. Scroll to the file and click options then send, send via bluetooth, and then select the w580i (which by default is named W580i). Thats it.. super simple. Now you can use this file as a ring tone or text alert or what ever.

I have found about a million articles on the net for connecting 2 asterisk boxes using IAX2. What I have not found is many describing how to do this with SIP, so thats what Im going to talk about. Now since I am a FreePBX user I am going to talk about how to do this using the FreePBX web GUI. You can use this method if you use TrixBox, or Elastix, or PBX In A Flash, or if you just use FreePBX with your own distro.

I have 2 systems. To make this simple Im going to call them pbx1 (which for this example is in San Antonio) and pbx2 (which we will pretend is in our Houston office). First we need to log into the web interface on pbx1 and then get to the section where you configure trunks. Click Add SIP Trunk. Im not going to mess with any of the General Settings, or the Dial Rules. I am going to go straight to the Outgoing Rules. In trunk name Im going to call this trunk-hou-peer. Next I jump into the PEER Details box. I put the following into the box:

context=from-internal
host=pbx2.mhipriv.com
secret=strong_password
type=peer
username=trunk-sa-peer

Next, Remove all the settings from the Incoming Section. Hit submit, and then apply the changes.

Next we need to log on the web gui for pbx2. Now we are going to go from Houston back to San Antonio with this trunk. We need to add a new SIP trunk here. Follow the same steps as before, but now name this trunk: trunk-sa-peer You may notice that the name of this trunk is the username we used in the peer details on pbx1. Now in the Peer details on pbx2 add the following:

context=from-internal
host=pbx1.mhipriv.com
secret=strong_password
type=peer
username=trunk-hou-peer

Now you will notice that the username on this peer is what we named our trunk on pbx1. The context used in both is the same. This will give you access from pbx2 to dial an extension that is on pbx1 and vise versa. Now all we need to do is submit this and apply the changes.

Next all we need to do is create an outbound route to use our new trunk. For the sake of keeping it super simple lets assume you have extension 100-199 on pbx1 and 200-299 on pbx2. We need to go to the outbound route section and create a route on pbx1, name it toHouston and it needs a dial pattern that looks like this:

2XX

Click on the Intra Company Route. Then select our Houston trunk. Next submit and apply changes. Now head over to the pbx2 web gui and do the same steps only name this route toSanAntonio and for its dial pattern use:

1XX

Click Intra Company Route select the San Antonio Trunk, hit submit and apply. Now from extension 100 in San Antonio dial 200 and bamo thats it. You can take this a step further and even do toll-by-pass now.

I saw this sign at the gas station in the HEB parking lot in San Antonio, Texas about a month ago. The hand written note pretty much tells the story.

I have been working on a Domain Controller at work using Samba 3.0.28 and openLDAP. I was trying to setup my windows client computers to login then map some drives from various other samba servers we have. My logon.bat file looked like this:

@echo off
REM # SYNC THE TIME WITH THE SERVER
net time \\pdc01.mhipriv.com /set /y
REM # DELETE ALL MAPPED DRIVES
net use h: /delete
net use h: “\\pdc01.mhipriv.com\homes”
net use g: /delete
net use g: “\\server.mhipriv.com\apps”

This was working but causing some weird issues when you would log in from a windows client. I would get this error on windows that said:

There are open files and/or incomplete directory searches pending on the connection to pdc01.mhipriv.com

So I went over to microsoft google and did a search for the error. #1 google result led me here So I am reading and sure enough this is my problem. So then on to the answer.. WTF!!! You mean seriously you want me to wait and try it again.. Im thinking to my self “You have to be fu**ing kidding me” So I wait, and wait, and wait, and then went home for the day and then today I try again and still the same shit. So I decided to find the real solution. What happened is that in my smb.conf I set the logon drive = H: so samba was already mapping it for me and then I was trying to /delete it and then remap it, and somewhere in that process was the problem. All you really need to do is either set

logon drive =

Because the default drive is Z:\ if its not set, or

logon script = logon.bat
logon path = \\%L\PROFILES\%U
logon drive = H:
logon home = \\%L\%U

And make sure your logon.bat looks like this

@echo off
REM # SYNC THE TIME WITH THE SERVER
net time \\pdc01.mhipriv.com /set /y
net use g: /delete
net use g: “\\server.mhipriv.com\apps”

I hope someone out there finds this more useful than the “The best course is to answer No and try again later.” crap answer I found on the M$ site.

I have been on a bit of a tattoo kick the last 9 months or so. Most of the big stuff I have gotten has been on my right or my left leg. I have some work on my arms but nothing that couldn’t be hidden by a short sleeve shirt. Nothing that is, until last night. I have always wanted to have whats known as a full sleeve on both of my arms. Well we have finally started the one on my left arm. Its going to look so bad ass when its done. Mr. Luckys tattoo in San Antonio is where Im getting the work done. The artist is Weldon Lewis. Its my opinion that he is one of the best tattoo artists in the country. So now that my forearm has been marked for life it looks like I am going to be stuck wearing long sleeves to work from here on out. I see it as a very small price to pay to be able to have some wonderful art on my arms for life.

Yeah, hate me.. I got one. Its so freakin awesome. here are a few things that really kick ass so far about this phone:

• I am able to sync music to the phone via amarok using Linux
• I am able to browse the web using WIFI or my 3g data service.
• I have configured my n95 as a sip client and have it registered with my Asterisk server.
• The phone supports mobile bar codes
• The camera takes WONDERFUL pictures. The quality is very high!! And you can export them directly to flickr!!
• The phone takes really great video
• Did I mention I didnt need windows to add music to this thing??

Im sure there are other really great things about this phone too but I have only had it a couple days so I havent had time to check all the features out yet.

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

During our long road trip last night somehow the topic of Girl Scout cookies came up. In my thirst for random knowledge that will never repay the space that I rent it in my brain, here’s the most popular cookies:

1. Thin Mints (25% of total sales)
2. Samoas (Caramel DeLites) (19%)
3. Tagalongs (Peanut Butter Patties) (13%)
4. Do-si-dos (Peanut Butter Sandwiches) (11%)
5. Trefoils (Shortbread) (9%)

I’m sure I’ll commit these stats to memory and somehow and can’t remember the zip code from our last apartment.

Source: Wikipedia

The other varieties combined account for the remaining 23%.

Find the answers to that here

Well I’m back online after an extended down time. My main computer is dead. It will only run for a few minutes a day (and only on certain days when it feels like running). Tonight I managed to get it to boot and stay running for about 5 minuets before it died, which gave me just enough time to get this backup off that machine and install it on my temp web server. I hope to get a more permanent solution soon. I did go ahead and upgrade my blog to the latest wordpress so maybe it wasnt a total bust?

This CD has been getting alot of play time at work, on the road, and at home.

I shudder at the implications of me (of all people) listening to Christian Rock.

Well if you didn’t already know Nine Inch Nails has a new cd out. Its called The Slip, and it kicks ass. What makes it even better though, is it’s free!!!

Parenting sure does change your view on life.  I see a lot of things these days that I would have thought “eh, whatever.”  Now I look at it harder, or have a different reaction to.

The thing that made me post this, is that I have watched some shows that have kids/babies, but they are there as plot or character building.  The problem with this is that it seems the writers have the kids/babies in situations that I don’t feel comforatble seeing them in.

An example is in Battlestar Galactica where Chief is sitting there with the baby crying like crazy and not doing a thing about it.  I know it sounds weird, but that bugs me now, I mean really bugs me.  Also like in the last episode of Lost where Aaron is found by Sawyer in the middle of the jungle with Claire nowhere to be found.  UGH, just creeps me out.

As I said, when I was younger, I never would have really noticed that or cared.  Since I am now a father, it’s a total 180.

So if you didn’t know, Wyatt should soon be here, and both Laura and I are eagerly awaiting his arrival. We decided to make the best of an evening off for Laura and took some maternity pictures. Hope you enjoy.

Make sure you check out Laura’s blog for updates on the latest happenings. She is much better at keeping everyone up to date on things.

One of the main features of the iPhone is its built in browser that is ready to surf real websites, not cut down versions designed for mobile phones. From the Apple marketing material:

“iPhone lets you see web pages the way they were designed to be seen”

However, the popularity of the iPhone has led to an increase in mobile versions of websites that are designed to play nice with the smaller screens and slower connections. This isn’t a new idea but the increase in popularity cannot be denied.

Here’s my list of mobile sites that I visit on my phone:

• m.cnn.com
• m.si.com
• m.flickr.com
• m.youtube.com
• espn.go.com/mobileespn
• google.com/m
• google.com/reader/m/view - Google Reader is one of my absolute favorite applications on the iPhone.
• mobile.fandango.com - I use Fandango to check movie times and locations. You can also buy tickets through the website.
• gasbuddytogo.com - Check for the lowest gas prices in your area

I’ve found that a number of websites are checking your User-Agent and then directing you to the mobile version of their site if you appear to be on a common mobile device.

If this a passing fad?  Will common webapps like WordPress come preconfigured with mobile versions in the future?

There are a lot of funny emails that find their way into my in-box. While I have to question the authenticity of some of them sometimes, they are usually quite humorous nevertheless. Here’s a great example that I thought was worth sharing. Apparently, Verizon somehow angered a rocket scientist and he decided to have a little [...]

Well, I guess I better start updating wordpress a little more frequently.. I actually got it hacked earlier.  Haven’t found where yet, but I’ll dig into it later.

For those you looking, the gallery is here.

Alright, the pictures are messed up.  For some reason when I pulled them off the camera, they didn’t actually rotate.  That’s too much manual work through the gallery, so I’m calling a do-over.

I promise. They are on their way up to the server as we speak. Should have them ready to go by tomorrow.

Check it out, proof (in my opinion) that Guitar Hero slacked on the graphics for the Wii.

No, not me.

I think that this “word” is very interesting. It seems that with the proliferation of l337 speak and short hand texting for phones, our vocabulary is changing every day. What is interesting about pwned is that it is making it’s way into regular people talking. Regular people as in not computer nerds. Now where I’ve heard it is around people that work with computers, but as managers and higher up, and not even in the aspect of computers.

That’s really all I have to say about that, I just thought it was interesting to see such a word make it’s way into our culture, and with older generations as well.  When typically you see new words and ways of speaking follow a generation as they get older.

On the way home from work today I heard Radio Rookies: ‘Aging Out’ of Foster Care on NPR. Its a twelve minute story of a young girl who was placed into foster care after her father murdered her mother.

To hear this girl talk about why she wants to have a baby (to have a family) was pretty troubling and contrary to the thinking that I am surrounded by on a daily basis. And that’s why I love NPR - it takes me to places I’ve never been.

When I was 16 my VHS player always had a tape loaded. I would watch the early morning editions of SportsCenter and keep an eye out for a funny story or amazing highlight. If I found one then I would record that part of SportsCenter onto my tape when the show re-aired an hour later. Before there was YouTube there was my VHS recording. That was when SportsCenter meant Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick, Kenny Mayne and Charley Steiner.

Since then SportsCenter has turned into an hour long advertisement for Coors Light and studio analysts who are only on the set to argue with the other analyst. I long for the good old days.

They may be getting closer.

According to Le Anne Schreiber the producers at ESPN are making significant changes:

While on vacation last month, I recorded 10 day’s worth of 9 a.m. “SportsCenters,” beginning Feb. 15, so I could catch up on the sports news upon my return. I approached the task of review reluctantly, regarding it as punishment for taking time off. Once I plunged in, though, I was amazed to find myself enjoying hour after hour of “SportsCenter.”

They were not crisp, clean half-hours, but far more often than not, they were crisp, clean hours dominated by highlights and news, with remarkably few gimmicks, sponsored segments, cross-promotions or padding of any kind.

Schreiber, who’s job is to provide independent examination and analysis of ESPN’s media outlets, has the complete story hosted at
ESPN.com.

Yeah, the title kinda went with this post too.

I picked up Super Smash Brothers: Brawl a couple weeks ago. This game is amazing if you like fighters. There are a ton of features bundled into this game from single player adventure games to multiplayer online capabilities.

One of the most amazing things to me about this game is the complete history and worlds of past Nintendo games that are included in it, and how they bring it all together. True, not all games are Nintendo games, like Sonic and the specific Solid Snake character and levels, but the amount of history and cameos that are included in this game makes it a must buy for the hardcore “oldschool” crowd.

The part that makes it hardcore is that you can look through the history of games and see when they were released, what characters were in it, and can even begin to PLAY the actual games they were in (on some of them) when you unlock them. Seriously, there are so many features to this game, I’m not even going to attempt to list them all because I’m guaranteed to forget one or twenty. That’s what the website is for. What I think I will do here is touch on a few things that stand out to me.

First, in solo play, there are multiple modes including brawl, classic mode, training, and a couple others. The one that surprises me the most is the Adventure mode. When I played Melee, adventure mode was like a glorified classic mode (which is just a couple of stages with a “short story”, if that.) If you really look into it, the Adventure mode in Brawl is a glorified classic mode as well, but here there is a uniform storyline of the Subspace Emissary. Not only is it one full storyline, but it is LONG. When I started, I expected to finish within 10 minutes, much like in Melee. The next thing I knew, it was one hour later and I was only about 6% complete! Very Nice.

Second, the online play is where a lot of the fun is at. True, there are a LOT of bugs and shortcomings that seem to be hanging out, but all-in-all, the online play is a lot of fun. I should point out first that Nintendo is super paranoid about their “online experience”. They require you to exchange a friend code per game to play online with friends. When I first started the online portion it connected just fine, or at least that’s what I thought. Since I didn’t have any friend codes exchanged yet, I tried the anonymous play, but just sat in the waiting room beating the crap out of the sand bag, WOOHOO! Apparently, the servers were messed up and nobody was actually online. Once, I got some friend codes exchanged and the servers got running again, the online play picked up. The one thing that stood out to me that actually spurred me to write this post was the adding friends option. Now this is pretty lame in the whole scheme of things, but it impressed me because there is a big hub-bub about Nintendo being too strict with friend codes etc, but they way this works is cool. Basically, if you have a friend that you are brawling, and one of their friends join the brawl that you don’t know, you can just choose the option by their name to “Add Friend.” BOOM, done. This is just one step closer to the way things SHOULD be with the online experience with Nintendo games.

So the final word on this game… awesome. There are so many more features and many more things I could cover, but like I said, they have all been covered elsewhere and these were the cool points to me so far. So go check out brawl, and if you end up keeping it, here is my code:

3265-4719-5334

just be sure and let me know yours below.

It’s on like Donkey Kong.

…but you make the call.

Shipp, who was a non-factor the whole game, decided the entire game on just one play.

Remember the oil crisis and gas price wars of the 70s? Neither do I, but I hear it was awesome cause the price was super low (although we appear to be making up for it now, but that’s another story.) In the digital age, it looks like we are looming on a digital music price war.

I’ve been checking out the new Amazon MP3 service and man I’m liking it. Their prices are cheaper than iTunes and non-DRM to boot, oh and not to mention the 256kbps. The non-DRM allows me to play the music on any device I want, and not having to be tied to an iPod and iTunes. They even have a Linux client (SCORE!). It’s not super feature enhanced, but hey, at least it’s a client that runs in Linux. The reason for using this is so that you can buy full albums at the cheap price of usually > $10, and not pay $0.89 per song for a full album. These prices are crazy, I remember scouring the used CD pile at Hastings looking for anything good around the same price ranges with nothing but crap at Hastings. The main beef I have with the Amazon MP3 store is the interface. It is pretty clunky, but it works. The worst thing to me, is that they don’t have a flippin domain. C’mon Amazon, bust out the mp3.amazon.com or something. We ARE in the Web 2.0 days ya know.

So here’s the deal. Now that Amazon is doing this, there is all sorts of rumors that iTunes is looking at a subscription based service (I almost signed up with Yahoo when they were doing this). The catch is you have to buy a new iPod or iPhone. The other catch is that this is pure rumor, but who knows where it came from. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that someone at Apple started it to get a feel for what everyone would think and maybe get some buzz going about it to get some big wigs really thinking. Who knows.

Either way, the price war on music seems to be on now that the record labels are getting their heads on straight about digital music. I don’t see the price dropping significantly, but maybe some more, and with a subscription based feed, even better. Honestly I think this is good news for P2P peeps with all the rumblings of Net Neutrality growing and problems with ISPs blocking P2P traffic.

BTW, I promise I don’t work for Amazon. I just really like what they are doing with the MP3 stuff.

Have fun kids.

Last week I washed my car for the first time in a looonnnggg time. After a quick trip to San Angelo I returned to find my car looking the worst it ever has. Thanks to John Strunk I found out why. John posted a picture of his truck on Flickr:

Here’s the scoop from the San Antonio Express-News:

The dirty drops of rain splattering cars across the city doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world.

According to the National Weather Service the mixture isn’t mud, but ash.

The source of the smoky rain is a large fire in Central Mexico, near Mexico City, said weather forecaster Joe Baskin.

There could be dust from dust storms out of Monterrey in the rain, Baskin said, but the significant part comes from the smoke.

Last weekend Reagan and I went with Beth and Brian to the Witte Museum to see OUR BODY: The Universe Within. The exhibit contains 20 actual complete human specimens. Mmmmm…tasty:

According to their website all of the bodies originated from China:

All of the anatomical specimens contained in Our Body: The Universe Within originate from China and have been provided for the exhibit consistent with the laws of China. The anatomical specimens are not owned by the exhibitors, but are provided by a Chinese foundation to promote educational and medical research of the human body. While we do not have the specific identity of each anatomical specimen, they have been donated through medical schools and other research facilities in China to promote education, science and medical research of the human body.

The exhibit will be in San Antonio until May 26th.

Little did I know that before Laura and I got married, she is one of the best cooks around. Case in point: Monday night she was craving some sugar cookies. So while the storms raged around us, we proceeded to whip together the ingredients for Granny’s Cookie Jar Sugar Cookies (The grated orange peel makes them stand apart from other sugar cookies.)

After they were done, we of course enjoyed a couple, maybe a few more, then went to bed. Little did I know that the sugar cookies left something in the oven, even after we took them out:

 

Maybe I should shed the light on the subject…

 

To make a long story short, every time we goto Walmart or Target, I like to walk by the electronics department to see if they have any Wiis in stock. It has become sort of a running joke if you will. Well, on Tuesday, Laura was going to the Walmart on the north side of town, so of course, I told her to check for a Wii. When she got there, they told her that they had just got a shipment over in Ballinger (directions). My wonderful wife drove over and picked up number 7 of 10. In the rain. While pregnant. With a full bladder. Words do not do her justice.

I took in 10 books today to sell. The combined retail value of these books is well over $200, probably closer to $300. One of them still carries the $76.00 sticker price. When I heard the loud speaker call out my name I was full of excitement. My offer was ready. I thought, “How much will I get? I could really use $50 in my pocket!”

“Two dollars, sir”, from the man behind the counter. I think he probably began to explain why but the message was lost in my growing desire to climb over the counter.

“Total?”, I asked. He quickly confirmed and I made the walk of shame out of the store with the same number of books that I had entered with.

So late one night, I happened to stumble on a site that mentioned Converse First Stars, which are shoes for infants. Seeing as how both Laura and myself have some Chuck Taylor’s, of course I couldn’t resist getting Augustus some kicks too. (Laura is in denial that his name is going to be Augustus, for those of you wondering.) 

I setup the following shot, but I might have to retake it with some tips from Caleb.