Updated designs, new shirts

Continuing along the path of learning and creating things I like, usually obscure, generally related to movies or TV. I have added a few more shirts to the TeePublic site.

Utah! get me two.

Continuing with the art, I have done a bit more with procreate app. I added a handful of commercial brushes and textures, notably some from TrueGrit Texture supply and VisualTimmy. I’ve done a few things for folks and a bunch more for myself. A few of the more notable designs follow.

As the title suggests – a Point break reference. This one is one of my favorites. I plan to draw in my friends head to all 4 presidents.

A few months of bad artwork

As 2020 marches on in its awful reality, I’ve been plugging away at work and attempting to pacify my anxieties with poorly crafted, esoteric, low-brow art work. Since most of what I draw or otherwise create are things I want to see (never mind that I hate almost all of my own work), and that I think there may be 1-3 other people in the world that may enjoy or at least get a laugh out of it, I have started putting it on RedBubble and TeeSpring. If you’re super bored (which you likely are if you’re reading this) and want to see some of what I have made, it’s almost all available here or here. Attached are a few examples of the nonsense that I churn out with alarming regularity, like a steady stream of garbage.

Lift embargo

Many years ago I wrote about my love for dystopian, apocalyptic movies with the Mad Max series being right at the top of that genre. For me, nostalgia value for this series is very high. I recall watching “The Road Warrior” on my parents console TV in my basement as a kid and marveling as Lord Humongous relentlessly attempted to get his hands on the “guzzaline”. “They be refninin’! ka-chunk, ka-chunk”, as so eloquently stated by the pilot. Years later I would see “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” in the Clintonia theater and be re-invigorated by the story – even if a friend has recently equated it to a wasteland Peter Pan.

Perspective and shading and other fundamentals

Drawing has never been something I was great at, but nevertheless it is something that I enjoy. Trying to do a little bit every day and learn some of the fundamentals that I never paid attention to in my drawing classes has been an uphill-both-ways-in-the-snow trudge. Shading and perspective have always alluded me as has true proper symmetry (hence why this is just half a head). I think most of this just takes practice, but I am positive there is a natural talent component to real, natural, from imagination drawing that I don’t quite have, too. I am finding that patience and attention to detail is a struggle, I get impatient and just want to move on to the next part, mostly for fear that I will obsess over something small and never finish, which then causes me to rush even more. This being an aspect that has always been a problem for me not just when I was in art school, but pretty much always, as very large blocks of personal time have always been at a premium.

Comic style is the new Comic style is the new Comic style

I have recently been particularly inspired by some folks that I find to be incredibly talented – notably Mash -up master “Butcher Billy“, prolific skate and multidisciplinary artist Tim Baron, as well as comic style artist Felipe Flores, and Super7, the company that makes all of the great stuff from our youth. I wanted to make an homage to my youth. I *loved* the “Back to the Future” movie. Fourth grade me had the jean jacket and a puffy vest. I got my first skateboard – an event that would later shape my entire life – based on that movie. I also loved Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. As very young teenagers, that movie was a first date for my eventual wife and myself. So, with some Procreate and Photoshop work, a lot of reference material, and a load of how-to videos on technique…here is my “Marty McFly” trading card.

Prophecy say Gelfling learn more photoshop

Re-learning skills from 20+ years prior is no easy task, especially when working in a medium that was not your comfort zone. For me it is a slow process, but it is enjoyable and relaxing. I spent a little more time playing around with photoshop and Procreate have yielded this Dark crystal homage and a Boba Fett & IG-88 Campaign poster.

I want to be able to make designs that can more easily be printed on things such as stickers, shirts, etc. This seemed like a reasonable path to start with. Simple lines, really basic shading, etc.

Portraiture-ish

A few quick sketches. Done in Procreate.

It's all ball bearings these days, boys.

Thor M. “Fletch” Odinson…always hitting water buffalo and pining after Gail Stanwyk.

Rings and Jewelry 2017 – 2019

Another pastime of mine over the last few years has been making jewelry. I took some classes in the 90’s while in college to learn how to design and create jewelry, and I really enjoyed it. So, after repeatedly almost losing a coin that I had carried for many years that was very important to me, I decided to try to dust off some of the knowledge of working with precious metals and make something to prevent that.

Bubo the owl..

Clash of the titans was a constant on HBO when I was a kid. The mythology, the adventure, the creatures, and the stop motion animation were captivating to a kid watching them over and over on a console television in a midwestern basement in the early 1980s. While the movie may have been panned by critics, it remains a staple of my “comfort flicks”, reminding me of a fantastic, carefree youth. Bubo the owl was a divine, technological marvel to a young viewer such as myself. Here is my crude homage to such a wise old …..robot? What the heck was Bubo other than a mythical creation of Haphasetus that bested those Stygian Witches? Does it matter? Bubo rules regardless.

Thanks for giving this dumb ol' bird a second chance

Revisited Flash Gordon (1980) again. I always loved the Vultan character played by Brian Blessed. Made with Procreate and Photoshop using the True grit texture supply brushes – beat Tones and Debaser Inkers, specifically. Based on a paused scene in which Voltan is commanding his hawkmen in battle. I always just liked when he says “Gordon’s Alive!?!” While stranded on Arboria.

Most of my stuff is pretty simplistic, based on something I can see, and usually turns out like a comic page or a silk screened skateboard graphic on a low quality run. There is definitely something nostalgic about it, though.

Art, Skateboarding, nonsense, and updates

It’s been a bit. Life gets in the way, but it keeps on keeping on. I’ve been busy. Busy trying to re-learn things like photography, jewelry design, illustration, and other things I let slide over the years of working too much and doing fun things too little. Well, in the last two or so years, I started diving back in. Nothing outlandish, but enjoyable nonetheless.

I have started re-learning photoshop, got a new camera body, started skating more while my body can sorta still do it, and generally just trying to not miss out on the fun stuff. Below are a few of the illustrations I have worked on. Most of this is done in Procreate on my iPad Pro (which is a fantastic art creation device, BTW), or in photoshop. The rest are Coin rings that I have made for various people or myself, or just for fun. Maybe I’ll post some more as I do it, maybe I won’t. Either way, most of it ends up on my Instagram page.

The chronicles of LASIK

The ramblings on this site never seem to have any consistency. Actually, that’s a bit of the point. And to that point, I am going to journal and present something that I have wanted to do for as long as it has been doable. LASIK. Laser eye correction, to be more specific. I’ve wanted to not wear glasses or contacts since the day I got them in the 9th grade.

From back in the days of PRK to the original LASIK and now the iLASIK, I’ve always wanted to do it and either not had the means or the guts to make it happen. So, at age 40, and after several folks I trust had it done, I finally decided to take the plunge. Since my nature is to research stuff as much as I can, this was no different. However, I never really found a fully detailed account of the process that I could absorb, so, since I have this space I decided to create one for anyone else like me that wants to see the down and dirty details of the process. Hopefully this will help someone make a more informed decision.

Star Wars: The Force Awakensand it's associated parodies

I am and always have been a huge Star Wars fan. I am old enough to remember ESB and lucky enough to have seen ROTJ in the theater. However, I, like many die hard fans, was completely turned off by EP 1, 2 and 3. So much so that I have erased them from my memory and consider them to never have existed. That is why I wasn’t terribly excited when I heard that there was a new one being released (and being directed by J.J. Abrams).

Repairing things: the lost art in a throw away society

Perhaps I’ll be coming off as a “walked to school uphill both ways in 10 feet of snow” old guy, but when I was growing up in the late 70’s and early 80’s it seems like we fixed more “things”. If your refrigerator had a problem, you called a repair guy. If your TV went on the fritz, you called a repair guy. If your clothes dryer broke, you had someone come to fix it. I once disassembled a 1973 Honda with nothing more than a Chilton book from the public library with moderate success; it’s not that hard to try and you’ll always learn something in the process. Having this history, it made me a bit disheartened when some lightning damaged a substantial set of electronics that a relative of mine had and the insurance adjuster just called it all bad and they paid for new. Now, I get it, newer electronics are more complicated and more susceptible to EMI. However, TVs in particular are really just big PCs nowadays. A power board, a motherboard and a giant LCD. That’s it. Oh, and a case and stand, neither of which is critical to the operation of the device. Knowing that, I took both broken TVs, a 55″ LG, passive 3D smart TV and a 32″ samsung and took them home along with the LG blu-ray player. My logic was that, at the very least, I could have fun showing the kids how to take them apart and we could go over the insides. Little did I know that for the small sum of ~$140 I could repair not one but both of these devices. Disassembly was a snap, the hardest part was finding a surface area large enough to set the 55″ face down on. Once open it was pretty clear that this would be pretty simple if I could get the parts. To the right is the inside of the 55″, it was a tad more complicated but as you can see it is really a quite simple device. The board on the right is the logic board, essentially a purpose built embedded PC. The board on the left is the power board. The power board on both devices was intact, but the 32″ would not power on. The 55″ powered on and went into a boot loop. I suspected damaged flash so I found a used one on ebay for $114. It was removed from a cracked screen item of the same model. Incidentally, the LCD is pretty much the only thing that should keep you from repairing a device like this. It’s not often cost efficient to replace the screen since it is the bulk of the device cost.

Hey Joe brewing coffee mug

I’m a bit of a coffee nut. I love good, high quality coffee. I’ve written about it many, many, many, many times. In fact, I have a hard time getting going before coffee in the mornings, having been a coffee drinker since I was ~17 (I have no clue how my teeth aren’t stained; it baffles the dentist). I don’t drink soda, just coffee, water and beer. So, when a kickstarter for the Hey Joe brewing coffee mug was brought to my attention, I thought “wow, why has no one done this before?”. What is it, you ask? It’s a battery powered, heating, coffee brewing mug. That’s right.

Found Item: Fisher Price Adventure People Opticon

I’m a sucker for my old toys. I never throw anything away and I still have a huge amount of my toys from the late 70’s through the 80’s. That is what makes this find so interesting. I had a few of these “Adventure People” manufactured by Fisher Price, and I played with them a lot, but I had all but forgotten about them until I pulled this one, the “opticon”, out of a box my oldest son and I were looking through. I had no memory of this whatsoever because it was so obscure, until I saw it. Memories came rushing back, I clearly remembered getting it in Bloomington, IL at what I believe was Montgomery Wards. There is surprisingly little on these toys on the ‘net, but they are readily available on ebay and there are collectors out there still able to find carded figures(!!) The Opticon was pretty cool because of the large crystal in its back and the fact that it folded over into what I always called a “sleep” mode.

Scanning a Plex library manually

I recently had a weird problem with my plex media server in that it would crash upon trying to scan my library. After a great deal of debugging, I finally found what the problem was (a file that was named in such a way that it caused the scanner to crash). In order to debug this problem, though, I came across some great under-the-hood tools within plex (which is all python, very cool). After reading this link, I moved all of my Movies out of the main folder. At that point I moved the files back in, one letter at a time. My Plex server is a CentOS 6.5 VM that mounts a ZFS NAS. I moved the files one starting letter at at time

Adesso MKB-125 keyboard review

Are you old enough to remember the amazing IBM model M keyboards? I am. And I loved mine. I had several of them as did my roommate from that time.

I remember in the mid 1990s working for a consulting firm in central IL, and during that employment one of the tasks put to us was to install a network with new PCs. Since this was a large company we were doing this for, they wanted to write off all of their items being replaced (or so I was told), so we threw the old stuff into a gigantic dumpster. During that install, we trashed likely more than 100 IBM Mechanical “clicky” keyboards. A few of us were devious enough to stow a few away. Several of us them for close to a decade after.

Why plex is everything iTunes should be and how to Install it on CentOS 6.5

If you’re not familiar with Plex, you should be. It’s one of the most flexible, well supported, useful pieces of entertainment software ever written. Oh, and it’s open source. That’s right, it’s free. And it’s cross platform. And it will run on just about any device. It’s quite amazing, actually. Plex also supports a myriad of plugins and features such as Channels, DLNA and cloud sync as well as the notion of clipping existing videos such as youtube content for display on your television or other devices. This alone makes the package worth setting up. However, it also does some really amazing indexing of your media if it is named correctly. As an example, I love horror movies, so naturally I have quite a few of them on DVD. Some of them are obscure. With Plex, this is not an issue as long as the movie exists in IMDB (or a few other sources for more obscure or foreign films). If it does it will pull down all of the metadata on it and display it. Very, very slick:

Greatest coffee mug I've ever owned. (16oz Contigo Autoseal Stainless Steel Vacuum Insulated Tumbler)

One of the gifts I received from my wife this year for the holidays was a Contigo Autoseal Stainless Steel Vacuum Insulated Tumbler, 16 Oz. she knows just how much coffee I consume and shares my love of good, artesian and small roaster coffees. I was excited when I popped this out of the stocking, but I honestly wasn’t prepared for just how awesome this mug really is. I generally don’t like to use plastic for travel mugs so I have an assortment of stainless steel and ceramic travel mugs.

Messenger bag – revisited – Timbuk2 Command Laptop TSA-Friendly Messenger Bag

I’ve written in the past about my love/hate relationship with messenger bags. Well, I decided to revisit….and I must say, I’ve changed my tune. I believe that the problem I had was the fact that I wasn’t getting the right messenger bags. I did a little reading and found that there are messenger bags and there are professional class courier bags.

After reading and reading and reading and reading, I finally had it narrowed down to two bags. The patagonia half mass and the medium sized timbuk2 Commute Laptop TSA-Friendly Messenger Bag. Now, I’m a huge fan of patagonia stuff. I have some of their jackets, down “sweaters” and shirts. They’re a cool company that makes durable stuff, but timbuk2 is on another level when it comes to bags. I picked mine up from Amazon so I could get the prime shipping, but they’re available directly via timbuk2 for $104.25. I chose classic black since it looks more professional in my opinion and despite my disinclination, I need to look like a grown up sometimes.

How I gave up Facebook and why I don't regret it.

Roughly a month ago I gave up Facebook. Let me clarify: I did not delete my account. I deactivated it. The difference is important to help understand my actions and for anyone that is considering taking a break from FB but may not want to delete the Facebook world entirely (or “commit facebook suicide” as others have called it). the difference is explained in decent detail here.

Flash back to early 2005. I was working at a .edu and signed up for Facebook to help check out and evaluate student employee applicants (yes, people actually do this). After that, the account mostly sat idle until around 2007 when others started adding me. From there it just snowballed into an unwieldy free-for-all social quagmire. It became time consuming. It became far too much like work to troll through everything that was there.

Boba Fett, 1981

While at my parents last weekend, my oldest son together with my youngest brother both pointed out that they’d found one of my most prized possessions, both as a 6 year old and even today at 38 years old.

A Star Wars action figure that I had thought was lost to the sands of time, used as a dog chew or generally played with and abused by a 6-7 year old in the early 1980’s then tossed into the abyss of garage sale and second hand toys…..My original Boba Fett.

Streaming options for movie lovers

I am a big fan of movies. I had an enormous VHS collection, then lasterdisks, now DVDs and Blu-Rays. I worked in a video store back in the early 1990s. I minored in film in college. For a period of time during college I saw literally every movie that was released in the theater, even if I had no desire to see it. I wanted to appreciate any artistic value it may have. Before we had kids we spent a great deal of time and money on going to the theater. I frequent the ebertfest film festival. I guess I was “that guy”. I wanted to be a film maker or a cinematographer. I’m probably a step or two away from the folks in the movie “cinemania“. All that said, I clearly like movies and a lot. So, I tend to take my experience fairly seriously (within the budgetary constraints I have). I like the streaming media options available now and use them a lot. I find a digital format easier for consumption and am a big fan of the plex platform both for its transcoding functionality and it’s ability to present web media in a convenient, standard format on my TV. I had been using a hacked AppleTV for this. I like the Apple ecosystem for many things, but having to jailbreak the ATV and install sometimes fairly untested apps into it was a pain, especially since other people need to use this device. Enter the Roku.

Traveling with bags

I’ve done a fair amount of traveling in my life, specifically in the last 11 or so years. During those years, I have been all over the world, both personally and professionally, and I learned that checking bags is inconvenient. I stopped doing it. I will never check a bag if I’m traveling for less than 7 days. I have always taken a backpack as my personal item / overflow bag. I’ve had quite a few, Targus, Ogio, Jansport. I tend to prefer Ogio backpacks and have owned 4 of their backpacks in different styles, 3 of which I still have, and my original is still in use today be someone else. I like a bag that can hold quite a bit of stuff, but that isn’t inconveniently huge. I’m pretty picky about it, actually.

Why you should host your own [social media] content

Yes, that is me in a ridiculous beret. No, I don’t actually walk around in a beret, it’s just for “artistic shock value”. But, just like most people, I have had a “social media ” presence for a long time. However, unlike many, I have had an “online presence” that predates stereotypical social media by a very long period of time. I have a fine art background. I’ve always enjoyed creating things, drawing, photography, writing, video production, basically anything that lends itself to creativity. I enjoy social interaction and love to share my creativity, with some caveats. This is where it all starts to unravel. When it comes to technology, people need things to be easy and 99% of the population doesn’t want to understand how the internals of things, social media included, works. It just needs to be simple. This is why, and how, entities can take advantage of the masses. They can, in trade for making it easy, use your content and images for marketing and basically anything else they want. For example, I use twitter a lot. Twitter used to allow for better 3rd party image hosting since they don’t really support inline images very well (it’s better than it used to be but it’s still an afterthought). So, in order for users to attach images, they have a service called twitpic (there are others, this one is arguably the most common). Here is what they say about your image content:

RIP Chloe Buraglio. 1997-2013

A constant figure in our lives for the last 15+ years, Chloe was our faithful companion. I recall taking her to work with me in my early days in the networking industry, going in on Saturdays to study and lab stuff up as far back as 1998. I would often drive an hour from Bloomington to Champaign to let her out and walk her while Rebecca was studying during her time in veterinary school.

Finnish war mead – SotaSima

Based on some comments in the thread of my how to make simple mead how-to video, I threw together this 1 gallon batch of “Sotasima” or “Finnish War mead” based on this recipe. I, of course, took out the refined sugar and substituted honey. Here is the result:

I don’t think I’d make it again, it’s very tart regardless of the fact that it’s been bulk aging for a year and that I used a sweet yeast. It was a fun project, though!

Top 5 post-apocalyptic movies

I’m a huge fan of post-apocalyptic movies. In fact, next to humorous horror / gore movies (that’ll be my next list), I think they’re my favorite. This is a subject that my longtime friend and fellow movie enthusiast (as well as ex-video store co-worker) Sean Holland and I have discussed at length. In fact, this is eventually to the be subject of our first podcast. So as not to spoil the content of said podcast, I’m just going to give a list with minimal detail as opposed to a complex description of my reasoning.

Doggie Doo

On a lighter note, someone got this toy for my oldest son for his 4th birthday. I laughed so hard a lost my breath when I head the sound.

Exercise for the oversubscribed, how to get and stay healthy in 2013 and beyond.

I’ve been a pretty active person for a long as I can remember. I try to stay physically fit and have done a lot of competing in my life. Triathlons, 5k, 10k, century bike rides, submission grappling tournaments, boxing…..lets just say I like to get out and push myself. I’ve trained with several guys that fought in the UFC….granted, they kicked my rear….but that doesn’t change the ffeact that I worked with them over the course of the last 10 years of my training.

Holidays — Cross post from coldlocals.com

–I feel that this post is worthy of a cross post from coldlocals.com since it is a very important topic for me.

This time of year always reminds me of a time in my life that was a pivotal, life changing period for me. In 1988, I was transitioning out of BMX and BMX Freestyle and was looking for something individual, something I could do that didn’t require a team or a group but was something I could do myself, as an individual. I had a few friends that felt the same way, we really just wanted some way to express ourselves that was a little nonconformist, more individual and where social, economic or any other categorization made no difference. BMX tried to meet this bill, but it was a bit of an outcast elitist club. It required a large investment, which I made with the help of my parents and a paper route, but it still felt too ……connected and beau monde, especially in our small town and area of Illinois. In small town midwest america, this is pretty common. If you’re not in, you’re out, or at best you’re on the periphery. I didn’t want that. I already felt a tad alienated having been an only child for 12 years and suddenly having 2 brothers I had to share my oversubscribed, working parents with. The late fall of my 8th grade year 2 new kids moved to town. Both were from out of state and both were obviously a bit different than the standard mid Illinois small town kids. They skated. They were both cool and very open about skating. They were happy to kick around on a board with whoever wanted to. I had investigated skateboarding around 1984 and found it difficult and frustrating. The problem was that I didn’t have a good grasp of how the equipment worked or anyone that could show me the proper way to do anything. Also, I had a Valterra, which was a low quality excuse for a decent setup. That had now changed. I had not one, but two independent examples of skateboarding. One from the east coast, one from the west. I was sold. I had to learn this. This was my entry into a life defining part of my existence. For Christmas my mom drove me the 30 minutes to the decatur bike shoppe. This was the only place I knew that had skateboards as I’d seen them when I was there getting BMX parts. I toiled over what to buy, this and a few shirts were to be my christmas present. The clothing was a required part of the gift, I was able to sweet talk her into letting me get some skate shirts. I had absolutely no idea what was necessary. I had enough money to get a deck, grip tape and that’s basically it. I had to use the trucks and wheels from my 1984 Valterra (which didn’t fit right) on this new acquisition. I chose (based on the graphic) the Vision Psycho Stick.

Yeah, Ocean

I watched this video over and over and over and over until I wore out the VHS tape. These guys were wizards on a board. I think Ocean is like a professor or something now.

Fantastic video. It makes me very nostalgic of the past.

Weirdest "Action Figures" ever.

The other night the boys and I were out and about in Urbana, IL. While we were roving around, we stopped by the Art Coop. I like to get my art supplies from a local source if possible. While we were there, I happened upon a shelf of very odd “action figures”. I wanted to buy them all but settled for pictures of the most strange.

I really enjoyed the “Lunch Lady” one for some reason. Not shown “Crazy cat lady” (with included cats).

RIP, Barley.

Another New Glarus Oktoberfest in the books!

We didn’t get to go last year due to my son Zach being born….this year we were determined to makeit up for the staghorn cask tapping. Well, we were successful. It seemed a bit more low key this year, but the food was amazing and the beers were…..better than can be described. The staghorn cask was wow-factor good.

Here is a little video of the cask tapping I stitched together.

Google Street view in C-U

It's HOT! Swimming pool time.

Photo archiving

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of photography. I’ve been into it since I was young, doing skateboard photography and eventually ending up with an undergraduate degree in fine art photography. I was a film hold-out and didn’t move to a digital format (at least for anything other than point and shoot) until 2006. I am also a pretty serious mac user. I can work on about any platform, but everything I own, save for a linux server in my basement and a D-Link NAS, is apple. This can be a blessing and a curse. I’m a hoarder. I never delete anything. I have huge amounts of disk in my NAS that house primarily backups of things I never want to lose, most of which are home movies and photos.

Archiving stories, memories and randomnessor, Cold Locals

One of the things about the internet is that it is a good place to put things that you never want to forget. Stories, pictures, music, video, anything. Once it’s on the ‘net, it’s likely there for good as there is no way to know if it can ever be completely deleted. As I thought about that, and as I near my 37th birthday, I relaized that there are a lot of things that are word-of-mouth stories about “adventures” that myself and my friends had as youngsters growing up a bit different in a rural Central Illinois town. Make no mistake, we did a lot of really fun, cool stuff back then. We were fearless, rule breaking, limit pushing little jerks.

Happy Holidays from the Buraglio boys!

Me and my boys

Zach is here!

Zachary Dean Buraglio arrived at 4:10PM on December 16, 2011. Everyone doing well, and Zach got to come home the very next day!

iMessage; I've been left wanting

I had very high hopes for iMessage. With the release of iOS 5, one of the big new features was iMessage, the ability to do Blackberry messenger style messaging on an iOS device. I had really hoped that this would be something like wifisms or the DeskSMS app for Android. At the very least I was hoping for iChat integration with iMessage.

Evocative?

A major TV network hit me with a nastygram telling me that my T-Shirt that I had made, and never sold or even bought for myself, was infringing on their copyright and trademark of a certain high school character played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar that carried a giant phone. I dare not even mutter the name, which was in the title of the shirt, for fear that the media giant come and take away my will to live.

Caffe Ladro

Some friends were nice enough to pick me up some of my favorite coffee from Seattle, Caffe Ladro. I first had caffe ladro back at the supercomputing conference in Seattle in 2005 and I’ve loved their stuff ever since.

The last frontier

I spent some time up in Alaska recently (Fairbanks, to be exact) and I have to say, it was pretty intersting. I taught the ipv6 workshop and participated in a few other talks at Joint Techs, Summer 2011. I didn’t have a ton of time to spend all around the last frontier, but I did get to do a bit of light hiking and exploring on my last day there (before Delta Airlines botched my return flights). I think other than the conference (which was really good), the highlights were certainly the food. I had an Elk burger at The Pump House, ate myself stupid at the Alaska Salmon Bake, had a few really good brews and a delicious bison burger at Silver Gulch Brewery, and hung out until the sun went down (wait, it never sets in Fairbanks in July) at The Marlin. (Yelp). All were totally worth while. While Fairbanks was a little smaller of a college town, it’s a big city in Alaska. If I ever make it back there I’d really like to hit up the Chena hot springs. If I had it to do over again, I would have taken my nice DSLR camera and made another trip to Silver Gulch (the northernmost brewery in the United States). Oh, I also saw the northernmost Denny’s, which was proudly displayed on a sign.

A Brother!

Thats right.we're sporting a van.

Another Baby Buraglio on the way!

Sexy Saxman Serenade

Refered to me by Sean Holland, I found this video to be immensely entertaining. What is not to love about a weirdo running around shirtless playing a George Michael song on a saxophone?

iPad 2.of course I want one.

I got a 64Gig Ipad for xmas. I love it. I use it all of the time for work, at the gym (for watching video on the bike) at home and on the road. It’s a great device, even though I was underwhelmed when it forst came out. After using it a bit I realized that it’s like a hybrid between my iPhone and my MacBook. A more convenient device for quick but more detailed work or entertainment.

Meatloaf Travis

RIP Joker 2000(?) – 2011

"Portlandia" is amazing. "I dream of the 90's"

Portlandia is amazing.

Mind-Fi

This is a pretty funny sketch/ad for the thow portlandia. I may have to watch this show.

WordPress woes.

I’m extremely irritated by the one last blog that I host on wordpress that I just can’t seem to get converted to any other format. WordPress, while a very nice publishing platform, isn’t quite compliant with the XML standard in the way that they format their export files. So, what that means for anyone that has a decent sized blog that they want to move to anything other than wordpress, is that they may be out of luck. Google has a pretty robust set of blog conversion tools, which worked for me for all of my sites, personal and business……except for one. As stated here, wordpress2blogger gives me “not valid XML” error when trying to convert. I’ve cleaned this file as best I can by hand, but it’s enormous and I’m still missing pieces. It’s irritating and at this point I’m almost ready to keep this one as a one-off and install mysql, wordpress, etc., etc., etc…….

Just in time for xmas.

Recommended by longtime pal Sean, I got a great holiday kick out of this.

Merry xmas 2010.

The Walking Dead

I saw this over at my brother’s blog, and it looks pretty amazing. I’m a really big fan of zombie and post-apocalyptic stuff and this appears to have high potential. I’ve not read the graphic novels (although I will be obtaining it and reading it before the premiere), but if Mike says it’s good, it probably is. AMC has been pumping out some really good stuff, lets hope this lives up to the trailer.

The walking dead

I saw this over at my little brother’s blog, it looks pretty amazing. I’m a pretty big fan of post-apocalyptic AND Zombie stuff, this one looks like it delivers. I’m not familiar with the graphic novel, but if Mike says it’s good, it probably is. I’m going to order it and check it out before the premiere of the show. AMC has been really pumping out some good stuff lately, lets hope this lives up to its trailer.

Android (Nexus One) or iPhone?

New Glarus Oktoberfest 2010; Tapping the Staghorn keg.

We went up to New Glarus, WI this past weekend to celebrate Oktoberfest. It was a fun filled weekend with a lot of good beer and good friends. A bit more low key than I expected, which was all the more appealing to me. Below is some bad cell phone footage of Dan Carey (brewmaster of NewGlarus Brewing Company) tapping the wooden staghorn keg (cask?) that I shot with my phone after several mugs of Staghorn.

Beer making 101, Bottling

Only 2.5 years after the original “Beer making 101” video was posted to Google Video was posted, I finally got some time to edit together a “Beer making 101, Bottling” segment. It was a bit thrown together, so the quality isn’t that great, and I had to edit out some stuff due to youtube’s 15 minute duration restriction, but you’ll get the basics.

New lens..new inspiration.

I’ve really been getting back into shooting images lately, only 4 years after my wonderful wife encouraged it by getting me a digital replacement for my old, metal bodied Pentax 1000 that I used before and all through college. Keep an eye on my flickr photostream if you’re interested, I have been publishing quite a bit.

The wormhole coffee shop

The video of The Wormhole Coffee Shop was sent to my by my younger brother today. This place looks to be so full of awesome; I had to watch this video twice. It’s like my childhood and my adulthood had a baby and that baby was an amazingly cool coffee shop! What is not to like about Doc Brown’s DeLorean Time Machine!?!

I’ve never been there, but as soon as I get back up the Chicago area, I’ll be making a special trip to get some coffee at this place. Any place that has a coffee drink named after a Ghostbusters character has to be pretty cool.

Shades

Red sky at night, sailors delight.

UNIX is 1

Beautiful Losers

I had been wanting to see the film “Beautiful Losers” since I’d heard of it, and I finally had the opportunity to sit down and really enjoy it. This is certainly a movie worth your time if you are interested in real artists, living and working like real artists in todays world. I originally wanted to see this because of the heavy influence from the skateboarding world (a world I spent a very good deal of my youth in) but also because I had always aspired to be an artist (and even went and got a degree in arts and technology). I have a great deal of respect for folks like Mark Gonzalez and especially Ed Templeton, for their great artwork and their fierce adherence to being creative and living life on their own terms.

Splintering of data

I’ve more or less realized that as I get older, my memory retention is getting worse. I have always had a pretty good memory, but it’s oddball things that I remember, like quotes from Ghostbusters or my friends phone numbers from grade school. I’ve never been great at taking notes and so, to that end, I’ve decided to work on doing just that. I have taken one of the many oddball domain names that I own, in this case coprophage.net and started documenting my technical (both work and non-work) related stuff there. I plan to use this site as more of a personal blog and coprophage.net as my personal tech-diary kinda thing. I’ve already put a few posts up there detailing some Juniper SRX firewall/IDP things I’ve run into and have also added a Cisco AAA post. Mostly I just want to detail some of the things that are odd, have poor documentation, are hard to find answers to or things that I just want to be able to reference later. So, if you like geeky, network related cisco, juniper, foundry, and security related text, head on over. Hopefully it won’t fizzle out and I can keep it updated. Don’t expect it to be correct all of the time, or even relevant to the current techno-babble-buzzword-of-the-day. It’s mostly for me, but if you find it useful, thats great too.

Movies galore.

I’m a huge fan of movies and film. I have a minor in film studies from Illinois State University and did (sometimes still do) a bit of video art. I’ve embraced the technology at this point and use Netflix quite a bit and watch movies as I get time.

I have a fairly extensive DVD (and now Blue Ray) collection as well. Here you can find the top few movies off of my Netflix queue.

So far, so good.

I’m liking the move back to blogger so far. I do miss some of the flexibility that wordpress gave me, but overall I’m willing to trade that for not running a database server anymore. Blogger is available over IPv6 using the google over any v6 resolvers, which is very cool, and the VPS I moved to at ARP networks to host DNS and basic HTTP is also fully v6 native. I’m also really, really liking the move to flickr for my photo hosting. I paid for a pro account and have been very pleased with the integration and wealth of tools and apps. I have to say, though, that the entire reason that this move was spawned (other than the fact that I’ve been thinking about it for a while) is that I installed an app called PicPush on my Android Nexus One . This app allows me to automatically publish all images taken with my android device with 0 user intervention (and allows for a timer to to so; I have mine set to 15 minutes). Here you can find all of the images in my “Mobile” flickr set. There are things in there from as far back as my Treo 600, but most of the stuff is relatively new and always updating as I snap images.

"The Cloud"

Outside of networking (and even within networking to a certain extent), the buzzword of the day is “The cloud”. All of your data will be in “the cloud”. Think Skynet. Cloud computing is how much of our data is handled today. What is that, you ask? “Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computersand other devices on demand, like the electricity grid.” –According to wikipedia. Why is this even remotely interesting? Well, as of now, much of what I do has been moved into “the cloud”. My contacts are stored within google’s massive cloud, as are my emails, calendar, and now this blog text. I have an Android based phone now, even the config that my phone is built from is in the cloud. I’ve moved my photos into flickr. My mail is a Google Apps domain. Why would I do such a thing, you ask? Because it’s REALLY freakin’ convenient. I don’t have to run a server anymore. I don’t need to keep up spamassassin signatures or maintain any postgres or mysql databases. Its also scary. All of my data is not under my control anymore. Once it hits the internet, it’s never possible to know for sure it’s gone should I want it removed. This is a frightening thing when one considers the privacy ramifications. I’ve been slowly moving to this model over the last 5 or 6 years. I was an early beta tester for the google apps and moved my mail around 2005. Other data has been slowly migrating since then.

Blog update via SMS message. Crazy.

Another blogging move

My Blogging has come full circle. I had originally investigated CMS/WYSIWYG type blogging years ago using blogger. After about a year I moved it to my own self hosted service using newsbruiser, then to movable type, and finally to a self hosted wordpress instance. Well, I’m moving all of my web hosting away from my colocated server and to other locations. For my own stuff, I’ve move all of it back to blogger using a custom domain. So far, so good. All data imported, custom redirects (via apache on my ArpNetworks VPS) all working. Custom domains up and running. Google has really done a good job with the ghs adoption into blogger. Now I just need to get my twitter feed integrated and images moved in and I should be good to go. Hopefully it can stay here for years to come.

Complainers.

Several folks have complained that my daily twitter summaries are a bit too chatty. So, to satisfy the few folks that actually subscribe to the rss of this blog (that I rarely have time to update lately, thus the twitter feed), I have moved it back to a weekly summary. There. Stop complaining.

Yeah, those pictures are just random.

Seeing if this Buzz2Twitter an

Seeing if this Buzz2Twitter and Reader2Twitter stuff actually works. http://reader2twitter.appspot.com

I believe my soekris box has f

I believe my soekris box has finally died.

@Vap0rz yeah man. I'm underwhe

@Vap0rz yeah man. I’m underwhelmed by iPhone 4, but ill still probably get one to mess with at some point

@devivo yeah, those are bad.

@devivo yeah, those are bad.

@AmericanPicker was an awesome

@AmericanPicker was an awesome season premiere tonight!

Can't WAIT for the @AmericanPi

Can’t WAIT for the @AmericanPicker premiere tonight. One of the most interesting shows on TV. Maybe they’ll make it down to centr’il someday

@engineerz I sold my iPhone 3g

@engineerz I sold my iPhone 3g and offset most of the n1 cost.

@engineerz. yes and yes. I lov

@engineerz. yes and yes. I love the nexus one so far but I’m curious to see the new iPhone announced this week.

@VonWelch yup, I just popped i

@VonWelch yup, I just popped it in the n1 and it worked

@tsrimovsky hmmm sounds like a

@tsrimovsky hmmm sounds like a job for a generator…oh wait, nevermind

@knassery Well Played.

@knassery Well Played.

Checking out doubletwist on my

Checking out doubletwist on my mac for iTunes replacement with nexus one. So far I’m pretty underwhelmed. Clunky, slow, seems to half work.

@trombonekenny Skaar and I fou

@trombonekenny Skaar and I found it in about 10-15 min. Mostly it was skaar as I’m new to geocaching

Kickball league starts tonight

Kickball league starts tonight.

I love that my Android Nexus O

I love that my Android Nexus One has a functional IPv6 stack.

@knassery I used broadvoice fo

@knassery I used broadvoice for a while.

I just realized that I didn't

I just realized that I didn’t use the #ccsp2010 tag one time yesterday. ::shrugs::

@weeklyroast Ive had att the

@weeklyroast Ive had att the last 3 yrs and am equally happy w/them

@weeklyroast vzw is a great ne

@weeklyroast vzw is a great network too. I personally don’t like the bb experience but vz offers 3 android phones.m.

@weeklyroast look at android d

@weeklyroast look at android devices as well. Iverecently dropped my iPhone for a nexus one running android

@ancker010 its the principal,

@ancker010 its the principal, not the implementation.

@ancker010 The point is that t

@ancker010 The point is that they’re taking options away. I agree that it’s probably necessary and not that bad, still a #fail for consumers

New AT&T data plans for #iPhon

New AT&T data plans for #iPhone is #fail. Lame. http://bit.ly/aLWdTN #att

Good night back on the mats bu

Good night back on the mats but I think my sub wrestling days are numbered at this point.

@SeanMHolland you'd better lis

@SeanMHolland you’d better listen to your mom, Jay.

@SeanMHolland the man is alway

@SeanMHolland the man is always trying to keep me down

@SeanMHolland someone needs to

@SeanMHolland someone needs to tell me my team can’t win the adult kickball season 2 years in a row so that I can.

@wrtrgrl77 that is pretty much

@wrtrgrl77 that is pretty much how I’ve operated my whole life.

I just heard my imac reboot fr

I just heard my imac reboot from the other room. Hmm, odd. That should not have happened.

@RadishSpirit I remembered it

@RadishSpirit I remembered it 🙂

For some reason my N1 running

For some reason my N1 running 2.2 disables all wifi networks I have it save. Hopefully its simple user error.

@engineerz are your eyes water

@engineerz are your eyes watering and head closed up? If so I’d say yes. 🙂

@RadishSpirit that is a fine q

@RadishSpirit that is a fine question

@RadishSpirit mine was up at 0

@RadishSpirit mine was up at 0545.

@chrobb true, both are pretty

@chrobb true, both are pretty awful.

@devivo I'd like to give it a

@devivo I’d like to give it a try in all of my free time 🙂

Thinking about doing some geoc

Thinking about doing some geocaching. I’ve always wanted to give it a go but never have.

@engineerz really well so far.

@engineerz really well so far. I’m still getting used to the diffs.

@decks24 kickball this season?

@decks24 kickball this season? My team is set to dominate again this year.

@queritor no more west coast?

@queritor no more west coast?

"When you see the robot, drink

“When you see the robot, drink!” Futurama is the best show EVER.

@decks24 possibly the best rye

@decks24 possibly the best rye I’ve ever had.

@modrzeje Not nearly as cool a

@modrzeje Not nearly as cool as ass pennies. http://bit.ly/baUzo0

Nexus one in hand. Android 2.2

Nexus one in hand. Android 2.2 loaded (and awesome) thanks to @icepick74

Oberweis coffee ice cream is l

Oberweis coffee ice cream is like a coffee orgasm.

@wrtrgrl77 that's an easily ac

@wrtrgrl77 that’s an easily accomplished task

@BillGlick User error.

@BillGlick User error.

@VonWelch Yup. I sold my iPho

@VonWelch Yup. I sold my iPhone on ebay and ordered the N1.

AT&T 3G Nexus One ordered. #an

AT&T 3G Nexus One ordered. #android #Google

@wrtrgrl77 do it.

@wrtrgrl77 do it.

@queritor oh yeah. That site i

@queritor oh yeah. That site is a train wreck that you can’t look away from. I love it.

http://youropenbook.org/ may b

http://youropenbook.org/ may be the greatest site I’ve found in recent history.

@prezmcmahon tor still works a

@prezmcmahon tor still works as designed. it’s not meant for high performance, it’s meant to aid in privacy, however, it can be tuned some.

@ancker010 nice ride! But keep

@ancker010 nice ride! But keep up with me? Not likely 🙂

@knassery I'm an awesome sysa

@knassery I’m an awesome sysadmin, btw.

Afternoon project complete. In

Afternoon project complete. Installed ceiling fan in the boys room. It even works : http://twitpic.com/1qg4rw -)

@kenstone we did the same.

@kenstone we did the same.

Monkey hate clean.

Monkey hate clean.

Blah. Can't seem to shake this

Blah. Can’t seem to shake this head cold. Its too nice out for it and I want to cycle

Upgraded to @cyanogen 5.0.7 DS

Upgraded to @cyanogen 5.0.7 DS-test7 on the HTC Magic. Upgraded seamlessly, seems quite a bit snappier now. Thanks for the hard work!

Farmers market sounds like fun

Farmers market sounds like fun for this morning.

@devivo Not the bore worms!

@devivo Not the bore worms!

#pfSense 2.0 ipv6 tunnel scrip

#pfSense 2.0 ipv6 tunnel scripted and working again. Needs GUI but I’m tired.

@jlgaddis I have one. Shoot me

@jlgaddis I have one. Shoot me a pm and ill send it over. We are a huge consumerof their gear

@modrzeje nice

@modrzeje nice

Thanks @AAirwaves, 3,000 bonus

Thanks @AAirwaves, 3,000 bonus miles from #americanairlines for my 3 hours of delays last week.

See, we're putting new cover s

See, we’re putting new cover sheets on our TPS reports.

@modrzeje #fail. You owe me c

@modrzeje #fail. You owe me coffee.

Just burned up a 48Gig SSD and

Just burned up a 48Gig SSD and an 8G flash drive thanks to @modrzeje leaving the wrong power supplies bundled with USB hub. Thanks dude.

Digging the #twitter #android

Digging the #twitter #android app

gw kernel: pid 11127 (tor), ui

gw kernel: pid 11127 (tor), uid 256, was killed: out of swap space. Soekris setup just isn’t powerful enough for tor, I’m guessing.

@Vap0rz incredible is more ele

@Vap0rz incredible is more elegant. Droid more of a workhorse. I like ’em both but can’t have either.

tor running on my #pfSense box

tor running on my #pfSense box. Pretty trivial to make work from CLI. Maybe I should make this a package……..in all of my spare time.

The HTC incredible is a really

The HTC incredible is a really sweet device. I wish There was a gsm version available with AT&T 3g.

blah, I think my lawn mower is

blah, I think my lawn mower is dead.

Lamenting the loss of my iPhone

Last weekend my son put my wife’s iPhone in the dog water. Needless to say, it didn’t survive. Since I had an old Blackberry 8100 I decided to give my iPhone to her and take the Blackberry until we could either replace or repair her damaged phone. This was a much harder transition that I had anticipated. I used the 8100 “Pearl” for about 6 months before upgrading to the original iPhone back in 2007 and had no issues with it. In fact, I thought it was a pretty nice device. However, after using the very user friendly and application rich iPhone for nearly 3 years, I came to discover that it was exceedingly difficult to transition back to the Blackberry. I had no idea how much I depended on my phone for entertainment, work, scheduling and just basic tasks until it wasn’t there anymore. It was also a bit of an eye opening experience to see some of the very rudimentary things that an iPhone just can’t or won’t do that I had forgotten. Even though I’m sure that these are documented and discussed ad nauseam all over the internet, I wanted to put them here as a reminder to myself.

Making mead. A simple process.

I’ve been making mead as long as I’ve been making beer, and frankly, mead is much easier. I’m not a big wine drinker or really even a fan of wine, but mead is so easy to make and it turns out well with minimal work so I make it a few times a year. Here is a quick and dirty howto on making simple, traditional mead that I threw together a few nights ago:

It's been a while.

I’ve not updated in quite some time. The main reason being that I’m too busy/lazy to recompile php and need xml support to use mobile apps to compose and post….the second reason being that I’ve been using twitter a lot. You can follow my [using random] rantings and thoughts here if you’re interested. If not, I should be updating this from time to time as well with more [hopefully] well thought out, in depth stuff. Until that next post, here are some twitter stats:

iPhone? Android? Pre?

I’m frustrated. I really love my iphone. I’ve had one since the beginning, but I am feeling a bit of device envy for some of those “other” phones out there. I really like that I am basically carrying a unix box around in my pocket, and that I can install apps and sync calendars and contacts and send and receive email…..and that it all works seamlessly from my mac. Many of those things are actually pretty straightforward and widely available…..if you have a PC. Now, RIM has released the new mac Blackberry app, and it works pretty well…it’s like 2002 for mac users with blackberries! This is the niche that the iPhone filled. Unfortunately, all of the politics and apple-ness has also come with that nice package. They want to control the user experience, and for the most part they do a fantastic job of it. I’ve always been a big apple fan, even when their OS sucked (and how; remember OS7?), but I’m also a control freak. I want to be able to tweak….without violating some arbitrary user agreement. I want to be able to run the apps that I want to run, not what some carrier or some hardware company wants me to run. So, to that end, I will be considering all other devices that can perform similarly when the time is here to upgrade.

My son is a marketing front page.

Luke is featured on the front page of the Woods photography studio web page!

WCIA news interview

I got interviewed for the WCIA channel 3 news for a cell phone tracking/hacking follow up story. They cut out a lot of the interview for other content, but I still had a few comments.

Darwinism at it's finest.

’nuff said.

"Mother Lover": Another classic SNL digital short.

I’m a big fan of the commercial and digital skits on SNL, especially if they’re a bit on the “too far” side. This one is no exception, Mother Lover.

And just got good measure, a bad copy of the “Mercury Mistress”.

BJJ Purple belt

This week I received a Purple belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu under Jack McVicker. Having trained in bjj since about 2002 under Jack, it was a very great honor to receive this promotion. Training with the high level guys that I work with several times a week certainly helps progression of skill and technique, of course having great instruction doesn’t hurt either.

In this image are (left to right) Rob Andres, Jack McVicker, Peter Roubal, Me (Nick Buraglio)

3d pancakes?

I used to love watching SCTV reruns as a kid in the 80’s. I think I need to buy or rent the boxed set.

Also now I want pancakes.

If you love something, let it go: Or, The Black Bomber finds a new home.

When I was 18, much to my parents dismay, I purchased a motorcycle. My first bike, a 1974 Yamaha RD 350 , was a two stroke street bike. I did not know how to ride a motorcycle, had no helmet, no license, no insurance and no license plates. I bought it for $250 and had to learn to ride it to get it to it’s new home. I liked this bike and rode it all summer (with no license, insurance or plates) back and forth to my girlfriends house in the country. Although this bike was great, I wanted something with a little more guts. Enter the “black bomber”. For sale in my hometown of Clinton, IL by a guy from France named Patrice-Andre (Pete) Prud’homme. I bartered a bit with him, buying the bike for $400, a fortune to me at the time, and money I really didn’t have. I scraped together everything I had and took the rest from a low limit credit card that I had gotten for college. This bike would be a defining item for me. I rode this bike everywhere. It was loud, big, very unique and a stark contrast to the “crotch rockets” that many people around my town were buying at the time. This was one of the reasons that I really liked it. I rode this bike to and from college when the weather was nice enough and back and forth to my girls house. It was very reliable and got decent gas mileage. It started having electrical problems so I had to scrape together money to have pretty much all of the electrical that I wasn’t able to do my self re-plumbed. A headache that cost me about a month of road time. A time came around then, though, that I thought I wanted something else. Something a bit more cruiser-ish. So, I sold this bike to Marty Maher for (if I remember) $400. He paid me in installments and I kept the title. Marty was younger and his parents would not let him ride the bike so he traded it to Eston Ehalt for a guitar. Eston had the bike for a few months, I believe, until he let it fall into a car, breaking the clutch handle. Then, it sat. During this time I bought a 1983 Honda Shadow 750. I rode this for one summer (1995) and then sold it so that I could concentrate on going back to school instead of paying for all of my unnecessary toys. One day, while working at Sorrento’s Pizza, Eston approached me and asked if I was interested in buying the bike since he was moving. I offered him a low ball price and after haggling for quite some time, we agreed on (barely over) what I’d originally offered. I had the title the whole time anyway =) The bomber was mine again. This bike needed work at this point so it went to Arteman’s cycle repair and had the top end redone, new seat, new tires, and lots of other work. I then moved to Bloomington to finish college once and for all. The bomber came with me, being the reliable, inexpensive and loyal transportation that it was. Many a morning it set off my roommates car alarm as I left for work. He would later joke about the sound of me starting it every morning. I rode this bike from first clear day until first snow regardless of temperature during what I like to call the “motorcycle golden age” of my life (translated: I could barely afford gas in my car and the bike was MUCH cheaper. Also, it looked cool). As I worked at connecting point, my employers commented that they didn’t even know I owned a car for 6 months into my employment. I rode this bike everywhere, always almost out of gas, I even ran out one evening around 2am on Towanda-Barnes road, getting gas from a generous (and mildly annoyed at being awakened) farmer after pushing it for 20 minutes. Then I moved to Champaign and the traffic was just different. I never really rode it much over here, as every time I did I’d nearly get run into. It sat in my garage, being started just enough to keep it road worthy. Then it sat some more. Then I moved to Savoy and, after being started and verified as working, it sat even more.

Haircut

I went about 6 weeks without a haircut for the first time in about 10 years…I also had somewhat of a hobo beard. You be the judge.

iPhone OS 3.0

Finally, finally, finally. The iPhone 3.0 OS that was announced this week is finally adding features that the original iPhone should have had. Features that some of which, other than a software addition, were always possible, not new, but nonetheless unavailable. The features include: Exchange 2007 remote search support MMS Copy/Paste Read and compose email and text messages in landscape …among many others.

Some screenshots, linked via BGR:

We’ve finally stepped out to 2004 with the addition of MMS. MMS is a luxury, I agree, but i used to use the heck out of it and the fact that it wasn’t available on such an elegant device such as the iPhone was, frankly, stupid. The argument that we should “email photos” holds no water since (being very generous) only 20% of people have smartphones that can get email. Copy/Paste is also not new, but was something that I could understand not being in the first rev of the iPhone. The touchscreen implementation was completely new and I’m sure it was hard to get that aspect just right. A little late, but Kudos, apple. Exchange 2007 remote search support….ehh, I don’t really care that much but I may care more if I have to switch to exchange for work email. Lets just hope we can have more than one ActiveSync account since now google offers a push calendar solution that I’m pretty much fully invested in.

Another tri?

Several people have mentioned triathlons to me in the last 2 weeks, which has me thinking…..could my injury riddled body, damaged from years of skateboarding, distance running, boxing and submission wrestling handle another triathlon? I have not participated in one since 2006, and really not trained properly for one since 2005…..I have also not run any event runs or races since 2007 (or run at all since 2007 due to my very beat-to-hell back). Could I participate, perhaps not quite as competitively, in something like a sprint tri? I should be able to train very little and still have no issues with something like a sprint….at least in my mind. The last event run I ran I did without training at all and finished respectably.

Hardcore punk church dancing

Set to Minor Threat‘s “Filler”, some of the church dancers have surprisingly similar dance styles to hardcore.

Courtesy of the one and only Sean Holland.

2 more SNL shorts are a hit…("Wii guys" and "I'm on a boat")

I never thought I’d be on a boat….

Hilarious…..no other words….

My first watch ever, a cat in the hat winder.

While rooting through a box in my basement, I came across something that I had no idea I still had. It was my very first watch, a cat-in-the-hat winder. I remember receiving this little treasure as a gift for xmas, probably around 1980. I was really young so memories are a little hazy, but I do remember wearing it proudly to grade school on it’s black leather band (now lost). I pulled this thing out of that box and it was like a blast from the past. Now that I have a 7 week old son, I find myself thinking about stuff I never, ever thought I’d spend mental cycles on, what kinds of things will he remember when he is my age? Will he save everything like I apparently did? Amazingly enough, this watch still works. It’s a hand winder with some kind of a swiss movement. On the case back it reads:

Recent finds

Lately I’ve been going through old boxes of stuff, organizing and cleaning up. I never really packed well, or unpacked some of the stuff from when before I was married, with many things just thrown in boxes with reckless abandon. In rifling through the ill-packaged containers of my junk, I’ve happened across some treasures. Here are some examples:

I’ve also found things like the glass and keychain from my senior prom as well as the dried corsage. I still have yet to find my nearly never worn Limited edition Star Wars fossil watch that Rebecca bought me in 1996. I know it’s down there somewhere.

My wife is the coolest.great 34th

My wife is super cool. Not only is she a great mom to our son, she’s smart, hot and actually listens to me when I talk about stuff I know she’s not interested in. Case in point, my birthday. I’ve always been a fan of watches and timepieces, and shes bought me several watches for my collection over the years. This year we are a little busy and I actually forgot about my own birthday until she reminded me. All that aside, I’d been reading up on watches on my paternity leave from work and really learning about movement types, etc. I’d been rambling (possibly incoherently) on about automatic watch movements for a few weeks and mentioned how I thought that it was cool that Orient still did their own automatic movement even after Seiko had purchased them. Well, low and behold, she got me an Orient Dive watch…which I had planned on buying for myself at some point. That is cool enough, but she went above and beyond and got me a sweet zulu band for it from Panatime, probably the best source for getting bands. I am truly blessed.

Photoshop

There was once a day not so long ago when I had a wealth of knowledge about photography, photo equipment, color photo processors, digital image retouching and the hardware and software that it entailed. …..well, 11 years later and a lot of that has changed. When I was doing it, digital cameras were terrible. They didn’t even compare to a good SLR or medium format camera. So, I stuck with what I knew, emulsion based photography, and got passed up. My wonderful wife, after hearing me comment on not have a decent non-point-and-shoot digital camera, went and bought me a Canon Digital Rebel XTi for xmas of 2006. I love canon’s digital offering. The only problem was, all of my old photo lenses are Pentax based, as I liked Pentax for film. [Does anyone want to buy some Pentax lenses?!?!? I have a bunch] So, on to digital imaging.

I love t-shirts.

Anyone that knows me knows that I love T-Shirts. They’ve been pretty much the only thing I have worn for the bulk of my life, much to my mother and wife’s dismay. That said, there are a lot of shirt ideas that I’ve had in the past but I’ve never had any mechanism for making them. Often it’s not economical for local print shops to make just 1 or 2 shirts from a design, so a consumer needs to order them in bulk, making it not economical for the consumer. Enter the internet. There are so many ways to get this done now, from Custom Ink.com, to Zazzle and Cafe Press to Spreadshirt there are a myriad of ways to get a shirt made. I opted to put most of my stuff on Spreadshirt so that anyone can buy a shirt that I thought was cool enough to make. I’ve added a link to the “shop” at the top of the page for anyone that wants to look. This brings me to my newest shirt, the “Mac from It’s always Sunny in Philadelphia RIOT shirt“. I didn’t find an “official” one so I decided to make one. It also has a small barcode of “RIOT” on the bottom of the back of the shirt, just for an added touch. There were a few others out there but I preferfed a different font (even if it wasn’t exact).

Funny Star Wars "spoof" (ok, it's not realy a spoof)

My cousin Tony sent this to me and I was in tears laughing as I watched it. Listening to someone that has never seen any of the star wars movies all the way through try to explain the plot is pretty funny. The animations help a little too.

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

You know you want a Cold Locals Shirt

Image manipulation via either Photoshop, Gimp, or whatever is a wonderful tool and can provide hours of entertainment. In keeping with the skateboarding theme of the last few days, I decided to mess a little with some of the images and came up with this:

So retro! So old school! Wow, it’s a xeroxed image!

Reminiscent of the old do-it-yourself style that was so common in early skateboarding, I just had to have this image from the archives on a some sort of apparel. Through the magic and wonder that is the internet, I had nearly instant gratification. A Short Sleeved T- Shirt, a long sleeved T-Shirt, and even the always stylish hooded sweatshirt. Now you can show your colors if you were a Clinton or Wapella, Illinois skateboarder from the early days.

Skateboarding, how I miss it.

Many know that I was, and still am, a huge fan of skateboarding. I started around age 12 (1987), while in Jr. High and continued through college up through probably 4-5 years ago. Being from a smaller Midwestern town there is not a lot to do, and not a terribly large amount of outside culture. Magazines are something that we’d read to get updated on the newest tricks, what was new, who rode for what team, etc. There was no internet, and videos were often too expensive for most of us. Being the industrious bunch we were we tried to make our own skate ‘zine (several, actually), without the help of a computer, scanner, digital camera or any experience whatsoever. Well, I had totally forgotten about the very first one, titled “Cold Locals” circa 1988-1989 until I happened across it while looking for something completely different in a box from my parents house that I had never looked in. In there were a bunch of old skate pictures from the late 1980’s up through probably 1991 or 1992. Since I cherish these pictures (yes, the tricks are a little dated as are the clothes) so I thought I’d post a few on here along with scans of the very first (and only) issue of “Cold Locals”.

Cracked video

A recent post about integrating our new son into our family of four legged kids led me to a goldmine that I never knew existed. Von Welch sent me a funny video from Cracked.com. I had no idea that they had video, and most of it is pretty darned funny. Anyway, Von sent me this video, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Coffee Facts

It’s a widely known fact that I love good coffee. There is something about waking up to the great smell of coffee brewing and then getting a drink of the first cup of the day that is invigorating. I like to cook, and I really like to make interesting things and I really, really like to make stuff that tastes good (who doesn’t?), so when I make coffee I try to make the best tasting coffee that I can. Well, thanks to Twitter, I discovered Ken from Weekly Roast (actually he added me after I posted about my French Press) So, when I found that Ken had a blog detailing the finer points of brewing a good cup of coffee. He also has a start up business roasting and sellingfresh coffee beans. Some of the stuff I already knew, similar to making beer, good tasting coffee depends on good tasting ingredients. Use of a water filter is a must, and freshness is a definite factor in drinking good coffee. I was already using a french press and have always been pretty adamant about not drinking scorched, old coffee, but some of the things about bean freshness that he posted was pretty surprising to me. Check out his blog and online shop for some great info and coffee. I have a bag waiting for me at home that I can’t wait to try!

Luke Patrick Buraglio

In keeping with tradition, Luke decided to make a grand entrance after much drama at 0627 on December 30, 2008, weighing in at a svelte 6lb 10.7oz and 21″ in length. Both Luke and his strong, resilient mother are doing exceptionally well. There have been a lot of friends and family swinging by to visit, with more to come.

Keep track of updates at his little corner of the web.

pfSense 1.2.1 released

Once again the pfSense team has given the open source and commercial community another great release of their marvelous firewall software. CHECK IT OUT, DONATE, or HELP OUT!

System sending mail on submission port over ssl

I have a few cron jobs that run on my home mac machines and I like to get the notifications generated from the MAILTO parameter. Well, a while ago (I believe after the comcast acquisition of insightbb), this stopped working. I did a little debugging and it is my belief that port 25 is being blocked outbound from the comcast network. Many people speculatethis, and as a network engineer I think it is actually a good idea. First, port 25 isn’t *really* the port that you should be using for host to mail relay. I was always taught that the submission port was best practice per RFC 2476 . In practice, many folks don’t use this port simply because since as far back as I can remember documentation has always pointed end users at port 25. So, long story short, something I wanted to do for a long time was to set up a special account under my google apps that can be used to relay and record this data, as well as be used for things like an email wild card for my domain. I was about to embark on hacking up the postfix installs then I came across this macosxhints article. It’s a very handy walk through of doing exactly what I wanted to do, relay mail on port 587, over ssl through my ISP to an externally hosted email account. Very handy.

Happy Holidays!

I enjoyed this….white guys that dance as poorly as I do.

…obviously it’s Mac, BTW. [ad#longer]

More updates on pfSense Layer 7 QoS.

These guys are rocking right along with the Layer 7 QoS stuff for pfSense.

I can’t wait to get some time to test it.

[ad#longer]

adsense

test post

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IPv6, Vmware Fusion, Wireless

I’ve been revisiting IPv6 a lot again lately, and one thing I wanted to do was to get my home network back running IPv6 again after having it off for a while. IPv6 isn’t that hard to understand, configure, route or use, it’s just different and I need to know it well for my job so this is a good excuse to play around and re-read some of the books I bought years ago on the subject. Since my lovely provider, Comcast, has no plan to deploy v6 yet I turned to one of the several IPv6 Tunnel Brokers. I had used the Hurricane Electric Tunnel Broker service a lot when first pawing at v6 years ago, and my tunnel info was still there. OK, Tunnel up. Reverse DNS delegated and working. Router Advertisements flying all over the network and modified EUI-64 addresses all looking good. <br></br># ifconfig <br></br>lo0: flags=8049<up> mtu 33208<br></br> groups: lo<br></br> inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000<br></br> inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128<br></br> inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5<br></br>vic0: flags=8843</up><up> mtu 1500<br></br> lladdr 00:0c:29:38:49:eb<br></br> groups: egress<br></br> media: Ethernet autoselect<br></br> status: active<br></br> inet6 fe80::20c:29ff:fe38:49eb%vic0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1<br></br> inet6 2001:470:1f07:447:20c:29ff:fe38:49eb prefixlen 64 pltime 604786 vltime 2591986<br></br> inet 192.168.209.11 netmask 0xffffffc0 broadcast 192.168.209.63<br></br></up>

AWESOME

Taken from Fail Blog, I found this absolutely hilarious.

Wolverine Origins

The new Wolverine origins movie is highly anticipated by pretty much everyone Ive talked to. I’ve been searching the ‘net looking for a decent trailer, even though I know it’s not released it. Well, I found a trailer. the quality isn’t the greatest but at least it gets the point across that the movie looks pretty darned awesome.

Blackberry Storm

A lot of folks have asked me about the Blackberry Storm. Well, it looks like an impressive device, and if I still had Verizon Wireless and didn’t already have an iphone 3g, I’d very likely have one of these. Rumors were flying about initial firmware issues, sluggish behavior and general buggyness, but it appears that they’ve been working on the problems and have fixes either on the way or already here. Howard over at Howard Forums did a decent review, check it out here:

Layer 7 work for pfSense!

I’m not really sure how I missed this, probably because it’s some students doing the work, but nevertheless, it’s very exciting. This is something that has been unavailable for the most part under *BSD, but available for quite some time under Linux. I personally don’t like iptables and find it much less elegant than pf, both in implementation and practice so seeing this work is very encouraging and I can’t wait to test it out. Adding this into pfSense is a very exciting thing!

More new shirts from Found Item Clothing!

As many know, I love T-Shirts, and the only thing better than a great T-Shirt, is a great shirt from a classic 80’s movie of my childhood. Thank goodness there is Found Item Clothing. These guys recreate so many of the shirts from classic pop culture and just all around great movies (they also have a pretty good movie/dvd review section). Anyway, in keeping with their awesome tradition, they’ve released even more new shirts. I mean, come on, where else are you going to find the shirt that Jack Burton wore in Big Trouble in Little China or the Skeleton shirt from This is Spinal Tap pains takingly recreated in every detail?

Schlafly Imperial Stout

It’s been quite a while since I did a beer review and I’ve had SO many unique brews since the last one, but the most recent beverage I had worth writing about was the Schlafly Imperial Stout. I was able to enjoy this the other night thanks to my brother-in-law Rob. I would highly recommend this big brew to anyone that has $ to drop in one big, dark, powerful beer. It’s got some good undertones of bourbon with a little bite, but overall pretty silky. I like the Schlafly brewery and, since I’m only about 2 and a half hours from St. Louis, I like to try their stuff and support a [kinda] local brewery.

iPhone linux

That iPhone Dev team has decided to port the linux kernel and BusyBoxto the iPhone and write a completely new boot loader to support dual booting.

iPhone Linux Demonstration Video from planetbeing on Vimeo.

I’m not sure that it really means anything for everyday users of the iPhone at this point, but it’s certainly interesting for geeks, hobbyists, code hackers and possibly developers. If I had a spare iPhone I might give it a whirl just to see it work, but since I don’t I’ll just be satisfied with the announcement. Any way you look at it’s pretty nifty.

John Carpenter's "The Thing" —remake with G.I. Joe

This was brought to my attention by Mike Aref AKA JokerJitsu and I HAD to post it. It is too good to not watch. I’m a big John Carpenter fan and having The Thing remade using G.I. Joe characters, with the care that was used to do this deserves talking about. [ad]

Helpful ACLs and details for HSRP, GLBP, VRRP, etc..

Always being on the lookout for good, well put together information, I came across this network oriented technical blog, and it was a pretty helpful find, containing many of the ACLs and details for HSRP, BGP, OSPF, VRRP, GLBP. I posted a comment containing VRRP-E information. Anyone that has to deal with these protocols will likely find this a decent reference, and since they’re all things that network engineers use all the time, it’s nice to have them all in one place. I would suggest adding his RSS Feed to whatever your favorite RSS reader is. There is a lot of good information there and (unlike myself) the author seems pretty diligent about keeping it updated with useful information.

The pain involved in porting a land line number to a cell to save a few bucks and keep a number

** Check comments section for follow up details.

Where to actually start on this……. Since the availability of LNP (Local Number Portability) I’ve contemplated moving our landline number that has been in place for about 10 years to a family share type of line on our cell plan. Why, you may ask, would one even bother to keep a land line in this day and age other than e911 service or a DSL or other data service line that requires it? History. We have had this number for so long that it would be almost more trouble to get rid of it. Certain people don’t like to call cell numbers, certain people have it programmed into their phones, etc, etc, etc. The list goes on and on. A few other reasons that are of note are the fact that some people just don’t like talking on a cell phone. A “traditional” handset is far more ergonomic, doesn’t get hot in use and can be easily extended to multiple handsets. But wait! VoIP! VoIP! Yeah…..read the fine print. I’ve deployed VoiP before in a small enterprise, I know the things that can *not* work with VoIP, and the fact that it’s not technically classified as phone service by the FCC can sometimes (but not always) make it painful to get a ported number out of there should you want to move to a new service. I did strongly consider both Vonage and Broadvoice but ultimately decided against it after discovering the aforementioned details and, more importantly, Comcast took over my are for my data service and it became “comcastic” (translated, less reliable). Cable VoIP is an option in my area as well but the price point isn’t much better than a traditional POTS line. So we’re back to a cell line. Why not, I have thousands of rollover minutes and they are just going to waste in their current state. At this point I was ready to bite the bullet and try it out. I have existing service with AT&T and am relatively happy with it so I figured, what the heck, now I need to find a way to make it work with a friendlier handset. There are many, many options for this at this stage in the game. I looked at pretty much all of them that I could find. I read the reviews, tested a few out and ultimately ended up with the Dect 6.0 Cellfusion Caller Id 2HS No Jack. The only shortcoming I found is the lack of an answering machine, but the cell voicemail should cover that, or so I thought at the time. As an aside, they do offer a Cell fusion with an answering machine but the extra money turned me back to the original. Both are DECT systems which, in theory, means less interference. Voicemail was still an issue, since I don’t want to have to check the actual cell device to see if there is a message waiting for me. A visual or auditory indicator would be optimal. I couldn’t really figure out an elegant way to do this, so I’ve opted to try forwarding unanswered calls to youmail, which i thought would update the WMIon the phone system I bought, but it only seems to be able to update the MWI on the cell…bummer. Option hack #2 was to still use youmail and have it send an “email” to a special “mailing list” I create that has my and my wife’s Email to TXT/SMS addresses as members so we’d just get a txt message to each of our regular cell phones and check it from there. …..it’s a hack, I know. I have a feeling that I’ll be returning the original phone system and getting the one with the answering machine since there are so many dependencies in my current methodology.

Watchmen

This looks really accurate as far as recreation and is a freakin’ cool storyline.

I’d stand in line to watch this.

New Star Trek movie

I have high hopes for this one…but my expectations are going to be hard to meet. It looks decent enough from the trailer.

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Verizon Blackberry storm debacle

Verizon Wireless Blackberry Storm “Private Sale” causes a furor

I’m not a verizon customer anymore but if I really wanted one of these and drove into the store to get one [before actually reading the flyer first] I’d probably be a little miffed.

Verizon Blackberry Bold debacle

fail blog

Every day I like to wake up and see something funny, it starts the day out right. Lately that funny thing has been exuberantly provided by the Fail Blog, a random compilation of often spectacular everyday failures. Anyone can submit a “failure”. Here is a recent example:

and here is a recent favorite of mine that was found on youtube:

It’s a decent way to get a chuckle.

Audio Books and the iPhone/iPod/iTunes

I am a fan of audio books since I rarely have time to read any fiction (or even nonfiction) anymore the iPod (and now iPhone) have been a great help in making my time more versatile and allowing me to enjoy some books that I would otherwise not have time to enjoy. The biggest limitation that I have run into is that iTunes (and by nature the iPod/iPhone) doesn’t play as nicely as I think it should with mp3 files as it does with it’s m4b, the format it uses for audio books, and many of the free audio books come as mp3 format. With the m4b format you can get playback from the “bookmarking” of where the file was last played from. More info on the file format can be found here. So, as I found, there are many ways to do this. Being a command line junkie like I am, I was obviously searching for a way to just get this done under terminal on my mac. I came across this page which had a few ways to do it and found that the easiest way (for me) was just to use the command <br></br>mpg123 -s /path/to/file/audiobook.mp3 |faac -b 80 -P -X -w -o /path/to/output/file/audiobook.m4b -<br></br> which works perfect, the file can be added directly into itunes……assuming you have all of the binaries installed to make it happen (I didn’t but it was easy enough to get installed). For anyone that *doesn’t* have them installed, I highly suggest installing MacPorts. Once you have MacPorts installed (the instructions are very easy and it’s fairly painless to install), you’ll need to install mpg123 and faac. To accomplish this open terminal and type

Funny twist on an 80's classic video

I thoroughly enjoyed this wacky version of a classic 80’s video.

It seems to be pretty popular too, I bleive it has over a million hits and it’s own “Pipe Wrench Fight” cafe press site with shirts.

My old office burned down!

My old office building located on Neil street in Champaign burned down this morning! It was an old building, built in 1870 I believe, and had a significant amount of issues being that old. It had been undergoing a major renovation since floors two and three had not been used since around 1970 and 1940 or 1950 respectively. The employer that I worked for, Sol Tec, INC. purchased the building around mid-to-late 2001 and sold it a few years later. I left the company in late 2002 but was primarily responsible for getting fiber pulled into the building and relocating all of the Internet Providers services and facilities there around early 2001.

AT&T Femtocell beta?

According to engadget mobile, AT&T may be following suit and begin testing Femtocells. This is great news for anyone in a marginal coverage area that is able to get terrestrial broadband. I, for one, would love to test one (especially if it meant I could finally have 3g). More info can be found here.

Chloe on "Pet on the Set"

Our dog Chloe was on “Pet on the Set” on the local morning news. Here is the clip:

Rebecca wasn’t in this segment one but was there in the background. Now both Dexter and Chloe have been seen across Illinois on the broadcast news. Fun!

It's always sunny

I happen to love It’s always sunny in Philadelphia. I find it’s lack of tact and willingness to push the envelope of good taste refreshing. In fact, one of their recent episodes (who pooped the bed) has a striking similarity to a funny story from my college days when we told everyone that Carl pooped the bed (which he really didn’t, but damn was it funny).

Urbana Beer and Chili cookoff 2008

As I have done every year (save one) since its inception, I headed over to the annual Urbana Beer and Chili cook off in Downtown Urbana. My expectations are never really high because of the usual things that go along with running such an event in a college town. It is promoted by Jay Goldberg Events, the owners of the canopy club if I understand correctly. It is more or less worked by volunteers who know little to nothing about the beverages they are serving, but there is a decent selection (I believe all coming from Premium Brands distributor). It has been held in the parking garage in downtown Urbana for the last few years and, although it was a beautiful day, I got fairly sunburned waiting in line, which brings me to one of my major gripes about this event. I like to buy tickets in advance. One has to pay a “convenience fee” if they purchase online. The fee plus the ticket amounts to more than if I were to buy the tickets at the door. Fine. They need to cover some kind of costs for providing stuff online. I can accept that. I can also accept that every year I get there early and STILL never get the tasting glass that they offer to the first N people that arrive. The tasting glass issue was remedied this year, I got my first one ever. I was pleased about that. The other fairly significant issue is that they either A. Don’t have many chili options B. The chili runs out before everyone gets inside or C. both

It's always sunny starts TODAY

Probably one of the sharpest, most rude, envelope pushing shows on TV. Ever. I’ve been a fan since the beginning….and it seems to only get better.

Buraglio's Pale Ale

I decided it was finally time to brew one of my favorite styles for myself. I jumped in with both feet on this one, what I hope to be a VERY hoppy Pale Ale, which I’ve so creatively titled “Buraglio’s Pale Ale”. The recipe can be found on Google Documents here. Here is an image of it fermenting after 2 days. This was my first batch ever that actually needed a blow off tube rather than a simple airlock.

Found item clothing has some new shirts.

I’ve long been a fan of Found Item Clothing, they have some really obscure shirts that aren’t found elsewhere and are pretty diligent about reproducing them as closely to the original as possible. I have several of their shirts and have always been very happy with both the quality and the service. In keeping with their tradition of finding cool ideas from (often underrated) 80’s movies, they’ve introduced the “Death Before Disco” sweatshirt from Stripes. Stripes is one of my favorite movies from my youth (along with most other Bill Murray comedies).

I'm obsessed with Kuato again

This seems to come around every year or so and I always enjoy it.

These Quaids are a snooze fest.

This is AWESOME! I can’t believe I missed this when it was aired.

RIP Evan Tanner

I always enjoyed watching Evan Tanner fight and really liked his aggressive style. He had a great ground-and-pound game but was a much more well rounded fighter as well as an interesting person than what most MMA fans saw. Anyone that read his personal blog on any regular basis saw that he was both a charismatic and gifted person and troubled individual. I never had a chance to meet him in person but the game and the world will surely miss such a unique individual.

Let the kegging begin!

I got my keg order in and it looks like I can fit 2 kegs plus a co2 dispenser in the beer fridge. The local homebrew club got such a great deal on the kegs that I decided to put off switching to all grain and spend the money on a kegging system. I was able to get five used 5 gallon kegs plus new seals for $80 through our local club (we did a huge order).

Lots of brew tasting

In the last few weeks I’ve been in what can only be described as a mission to taste as much good beer as I can. On the short list, all of the stuff at the the Morgan St. Brewery in STL (the dark wheat was excellent, as was the altbier).

I’ve also been on a Belgian Ale kick, having just bottled mine a few days ago. The Hoppin’ Frog Belgian Strong ale is a favorite of mine.

Great image

There is something wrong, and yet so right about this image.

I didn’t make it but I sure do love it. I don’t work helpdesk but I used to have a bunch of helpdesk guys that would “human shield” me from the customers and some of the stuff they had to deal with was un-freaking-believable.

“I can’t get my email, you’d better turn that damned server back on!” -Angry Old guy who would yell and hang up. Circa 2001

In honor of the Olympics:

I saw this when it was originally aired, and it’s just as funny today.

Man on Wire Movie

This Movie / Documentary looks very cool. IT should be playing at Boardman’s soon. This guy is crazy, but it kinda makes sense.

It’s getting great reviews:

“I am afraid of heights. Now you know. That is one reason I was helplessly engrossed in “Man on Wire,” the story of how Philippe Petit crossed eight times on a tight-wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center on Aug. 7, 1974. Another reason is that the documentary, a hybrid of actual and restaged footage, is constructed like a first-rate thriller.”- Roger Ebert * * * *

pfSense certificate chain import code

I updated some code to make importing certificate chains work under pfSense. It’s been a long time coming and the code is probably messy since I’m not a programmer but, for anyone that needs this, it should work.

There are 4 files that need touched: captiveportal.inc system.inc services_captiveportal.php system_advanced.php

All are contained in the tar file here.

These were all written under 1.2, so using them on other versions may cause unforseen weirdness.

Buraglio's Milk (sweet) Stout recipe.

Since many folks have asked for this recipe, I decided that I should actually go and copy it from my notes to my Google Docs archhive of recipes.

This beer was a bit of a surprise, I made it with some pretty old ingredients a little last minute and didn’t expect much from it. I pitched it onto an existing yeast cake from my vanilla porter and just let it go. It was the 3rd batch I’d ever done and, boy, it turned out GREAT. I still think this is the best brew I’ve ever made. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to *truly* recreate it’s uniqueness in origin but I will certainly be making another batch of this in the next few months.

Belgian Ale

I made a Belgian ale this weekend, I had most of the ingredients here already, including a good WL Belgian Ale Yeast blend. It’s currently fermenting away nicely

The recipe can be found here or here for the google document version (it will update as I add notes).

Yup, it's a boy.

In keeping with Buraglio tradition, we’ve spawned what doctors have deemed to be a male.

I think he’s already working on his x-guard too….

Argh.

I’m a little frustrated with the WordPress conversion, overall I think it’s probably better than movable type, but the primary driver for making the changeover was so that I could use the mobile support that came out for the iPhone. Well, I seem to be running into a fairly common bug in it, in that it doesn’t seem to be able to read my configuration or write to my pages. I’m quite confident that it is either a. something I need to tweak, or b. something that will be fixed soon if it is in fact a bug. I’ll probably did a little deeper into it tonight to make sure that it isn’t a problem on my end.

New shirts up on found item clothing

There are a wealth of new shirts on Found Item Clothing as well as some interesting reads on their blog, It goes to 11 Check em out, he has some pretty slick T’s like the shirt from RAD.

or the shirt from Breaking Away starring the always enchanting Jackie Earle Haley.

Throw him some biz, he always ships fast (I have several of his creations).

WordPress it is.

I’ve been thinking about moving this blog over to movable type due to the more user friendly and extendable nature of it, even though I don’t like the idea of a mysql backend (my old MT install just uses sqlite). With the useful iphone support and ease of use It just seems like the right thing to do…..and since it’s already pretty much done, here it is. Note the cheery default color scheme (6/27/2008, it’s probably going to change…..)

Home brewing 101

I spent some time making my Oktoberfest (yeah, I know I’m like months late) and decided it might be fun to try and film it to show others that it’s actually pretty easy and economical to make a 5 gallon batch of home brewed beer. Well, after about an hour and a half of editing and a realization that my camera work for this one really kinda stunk, I was done and had a 30 minute “documentary”. It’s not the greatest and I have found a few places that I don’t like the editing, but it’s already uploaded to Google video (it was too big for YouTube). It’s about 30 minutes long, so if you wanna watch it, be aware of that:

Related..

This is pretty funny, it came up as a related video to my stupid coffee clip…

I like coffee

I got a new imac (and it’s awesome) and was messing with capturing some video on the built in camera and editing it with iMovie… Anyway, I like coffee and here is the result:

So dumb and yet so true…

Well.a lot has been going on

A lot has been going on. I’ve been to Aruba on vacation and to Canada for a great conference. Summer is here and I’m gearing up for the MS150…..It looks like we’re sticking around Champaign for a while longer, but life’s about to get a little more interesting……..

Thats right, I’ve gone and procreated.

I couldn't resistI had to skate

So I watched a few skate videos last night and I HAD to get my board out. I’m pretty awful anymore but I did manage to get some bad video of me doing a few simple tricks.

I think I could pick up some of my old tricks, I may try some curb work at some point and see how well that goes….

Skateboarding

Man, watching the Lakai Fully Flared video atmy friend Sean’s suggeston makes me really miss skating every day. At 33 It’s a little hard on my body after all the abuse but I did get the board out and do a few kickflips and curb tricks for the neighbor kids today. It was worth it but, unfortunately, it made my body really feel the years of abuse. I may kick around at the C-U park a little tomorrow…… Hopefully I’ll still be able to walk afterwards……..

Foot Fist Way

This is a MUST see.

Support BSDcan

Sweet Cider (based on edwort's

Sweet Cider (based on edwort’s apfelwein)

Chloe's cream aleFrom the BrewBlog

Honey Light Lager From

Techno Viking

’nuff said

Caffeine Amounts In Popular Soft Drinks

Look up your favorite soft drink and see how it compares to others. This is not usual data on the back of the label. It’s interesting that the diet drinks have some of the highest levels.

read more | digg story

Apple + WiMax?

Sources tell us that Apple may include WiMax, the high-speed, long-range wireless broadband technology, in an ultraportable 13″ notebook computer, and possibly across the entire MacBook Pro line. Check the link (and the great apple vintage shirts!) for info.

read more | digg story

iTransmogrify, embedded Flash converter for iPhone

iTransmogrify! is a bookmarklet for iPhone which transforms embedded Flash content into direct links to natively supported formats. That means YouTube videos and MP3s can now be played from the iPhone’s Safari web browser with just a few clicks. Seeing it work is the best explanation.

read more | digg story

The Best 19 Movies You Didn't See in 2007

No one really has enough time (or money) to see every movie released every year, but shamefully too many great films are left in the dust. Sure, maybe you’ll see a couple of those indies that are making the rounds on the year-end top ten lists, but even those critics missed a few good ones. Watch all of these.

read more | digg story

Sesame Street DVD Disclaimer: "It's For Adults Only"

A disclaimer upon watching the Sesame Street Classics DVD claims that it might not be suitable for children.

read more | digg story

Thin MacBook Laptop Concept Images

With Macworld approaching, many concept designs are circulating to demonstrate how Apple might design the upcoming “thin” notebook. Our multitouch article generated a long discussion with a number of unofficial mockups posted.

read more | digg story

David Lynch Hates People Who Watch Movies on the iPhone

As much as I respect DAvid Lynch, I have to disagree about watching movies on the iPhone (or laptop, or any mobile device). It’s too darned convenient when traveling, even if it does change the experience. From Gizmodo: Always thought that watching movies on a tiny portable device is a crummy experience in pretty much every way possible. Crazy-ass director David Lynch (of Mulholland Dr., Lost Highway and Twin Peaks fame) thinks so too. Vehemently. And even if he is a little nuts, his faux iPhone ad both educates and entertains.

DARPA Develops Brain Chemical to Replace Sleep

In the “huh? seriously?” category, and as the line between science fiction and reality becomes increasingly blurry, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has always led the pack in terms of weird & wacky innovations. This time Darpa-funded scientists have found a drug that eliminates sleepiness with a nasal spray of a key brain hormone, with no apparent side-effects.

read more | digg story

The 20 Best iPhone and iPod touch Applications

Here is a review of what some have dubbed the 20 best iPhone or iPod touch apps.

read more | digg story

Apple Docking Patent Works Great with Ultra-Slim MacBook PIC

“This Apple docking station patent shows a screen base in which you can slide in a MacBook through its side. While this would be difficult to do with current MacBooks, it fits perfectly with the idea of the ultra-light, ultra-slim MacBook that allegedly will be presented at MacWorld.” The images and description looks quite cool.

read more | digg story

Apple may offer external optical drive with new sub-notebook

Mac maker Apple Inc., which later this month will unveil its first sub-notebook design in over a decade, is likely to offer an external optical drive as an optional accessory, according to a new report.

read more | digg story

Google to reveal phone in February?

Google has reserved two booths for the Mobile World Congress in February, and we must assume that it will be sporting some kind of hardware exhibits in all that space.

read more | digg story

Next iPhone software update to allow copy-paste

Apple will release an iPhone software update during MacWorld Expo 2008, well informed sources confirmed MacScoop. But it appears that the unpolished iPhone sofware version recently leaked on the Internet doesn’t include all the features of the final release.

read more | digg story

iphone firmware 1.1.3

With the impending release of the iPhone firmware 1.1.3 there are a lot of additions, most important to me being the inclusion of multi recipient SMS messages (something that should have been there from day one). cre.ations.net has a video of one of the other cool features, movable icons (something available with a jailbroken iPhone for a long time). Anyway, it’s nice to see apple actually including it. I’m still waiting to see the *actual* release date, it’ll probably be around Macworld, but who knows. …now all they need is MMS to be compliant with phones from 2003.

Brewing extravaganza

Since I’ve aggravated a (likely very old) back injury once again and can’t train or work out nearly as much as I used to until it’s healed, I have decided to try my hand at making beer….and wine (or is it cider?)….and mead….

I’ve gone a little overboard.

I’ve bottled my first batch, an English Brown ale, and after bottle conditioning for about 2 weeks it’s actually pretty darned good. Nice and clear, not cloudy like I would have expected. I got a little anxious waiting for the beer so I threw together a spiced orange mead based on the recipe Ancient Orange Cinnamon & Clove Mead.

Google phone plans to be announced Monday

This could easily be as big as the iPhone….

The long-awaited announcement of Google’s phone plans will occur earlier than expected, and not in the form previously laid out, says the Wall Street Journal. While it had been suggested that an announcement would come November 13th at the earliest, the Journal’s sources say that it will mostly likely happen Monday, November 13th at the earliest, the Journal’s sources say that it will mostly likely happen Monday, November 5th, and with different carriers. T-Mobile is still involved, but the other main party is said to be Sprint. Foreign carriers may be included, but have not been mentioned. Google is again said to be working with cellular networks and phone makers to promote an “open” application platform, courting companies such as HTC, LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. With T-Mobile Google is claimed to be going even further, cooperating directly on building phones using its software. When the efforts of any of these collaborations might bear fruit remains unknown, but Journal proposes that the earliest date for sale of a Google-ready phone would be mid-2008.

Secure Your iPhone: What's in that data file?

The Contents of the /var/root/Library/Keyboard file on an iPhone contains all non-default dictionary words. Not likely a problem, but it’s a good idea to know if personal or private information is being stored on a mobile device. Since I’m doing a lot more security stuff now in my new position, I have been trying to apply some of the things I like (such as apple and mobile hardware) to the position. I believe it to be very important to know how/when/why potentially personal or private information is stored. This is likely not an issue for most people but the more info we have the better.

iFuntastic Auto-Jailbreaks iPhone v1.1.1, Makes Custom Ringtones

New version of iFuntastic will quickly and easily jailbreak iPhone version 1.1.1. You can add your own custom ringtones, too. It does all the old stuff on both old and new iPhone versions. I have a feeling that there will be a firmware upgrade coming pretty close to the Leopard release this week, which will likely break all of this again….. Let the madness begin (again).

read more | digg story

Let the unbricking begin-iPhone Elite team announces "revirginizer" release, thousands likely rejoice.

Over at Google Code, the iphone-elite team has released their revirginizing tool, which is designed to rebuild your iPhone’s seczone lock table. After using this tool, the team suggests, your 1.0.2 unlocked iPhone will return to its pre-unlocked state and be safe to upgrade to 1.1.1. I’m sure that this is a VERY welcome release for those that unlocked their delicious little iPhones with an early release of iUnock or anySIM, which basically prevented an upgrade (or bricked an unlocked phone) to Firmware 1.1.1 because of certain things that were changed/rewritten on the baseband radio. Get the TUAW story here.

13 Bargain Websites that are Cheaper than eBay

eBay is great and all, but the days are getting fewer and further between that you can actually find a good deal on there. I found this little article that has 13 other places to look. That said, eBay is still a pretty good place to find obscure stuff, even if you do have to pay a little more.

read more | digg story

It's almost time!

Office Space by superfriends

iPhone or not?

Well, I’ve decided that I think I’m going to wait and not get an iPhone. As much of an Apple zealot as I am, this may seem like a strange choice. Well, with a lot of the details surfacing with it’s impending release, I think it’s just too early. While I believe Apple is a very good company and makes quality hardware and software, I think that this is far too new of a market for them. The lack of a[n easily] user replaceable battery and a brand new touchscreen technology is just too many new variables. I was always taught to never buy into a first release of something that is very important, let someone else work out the bugs. Instead, I’ve decided to still switch to AT&T (from Verizon, whom I’ve had for years) to make it easier to change devices and to get rollover and to go with the Treo 680.

Those crazy Sith

Apparently Sith lords don’t like rude cell phone users either.

Sofa King

Genius…..

What a turkey

This is probably the WORST thing I’ve seen in a LONG time. I like the look on the jiu jitsu grapplers faces as he tries his sorcery on them. Not even pathetic, just sad…….

Learning Ruby

I am not a programmer, but the idea of creating useful software intrigues me. I’ve taught myself enough Python to do simple things and I can usually modify and understand most Perl scripting as well as do some stuff in PHP. Ruby is something that I always heard was really nice (much like Python), so I decided I was going to try and learn some of it. There are some really useful tools for doing things on your OS X mac with ruby (and Python), things like RB-Appscript, an apple event bridge for Ruby. It allows for applescript functionality within Ruby. Anyway, I came across This Mail.app Speedup “Hack” and decided to write a Ruby script to do it for me when called from the CLI. Here is the result. If you use it, I take no responsibility, I’m not a programmer. Ruby is pretty slick, I think I may actually try and use it and learn it a little better.

Yakov Smirnov -Last stand

Wow. This show was awesome.

Book tech support

Pretty funny…

iPhone pricing leaked.

Some stuff as leaked about the pricing of the iPhone from apple to be launched by Cingular/AT&T in the next few months. Surprisingly (to me at least) the prices were $200 lower than was expected. I’m still ion the fence about switching to Cingular and gettin an iPhone. I like the idea of Rollover, and I love the idea of having a SIM in my phone. On the other hand, I have been relatively happy with Verizon for a few years and I don’t think I can give up the calendar or functions my Treo offers. We all should have such problems…..

Sweep the leg

This was brought to my attention by my cousin, Tony, and is probably one of the greatest things I’ve seen in a looooooooong time. I believe it has pretty much all the original characters from The Karate Kid. I had to watch it twice in a row. Enjoy:

An iPod vending machine?

In the airport in Minneapolis, MN there were at LEAST 2 vending machines (in the American Airlines terminal) for iPods. I literally did a double take, then wished I would have come up with the idea. Put your credit card in and get any model of ipod, from shuffle to 80gig video. They also had accessories, chargers, and prepaid cingular mobile phones. Put in your credit card and get an ipod, it was actually pretty slick.

Gallery

I finally got my photos moved over to a Gallery Install and stored in a nice postgres database…. iPhoto is the bomb, there are so many plugins that make it useful. iphoto2gallery is a marvelous tool. Kudos to the author, it’s very useful. There are also shutterfly exports, picasaweb export plugins, the list goes on and on. I guess I’m just spoiled by the fact that I never have to use a windows box. I figured I’d use the fact that Rebecca got me a Canon EOS Rebel XTI for xmas as a driving factor…(and WOW does it take nice images!), not to mention the fact that we’ve got a new friend in the house.

Ice sucks.

Check out how slick this road is! Crazy. It looks like a game of bumper cars and seems to go on forever:

Speaking of crummy weather, my less-than-a-year-old subaru had a branch fall on it this weekend and literally shatter out the hatchback window due to high winds. Very uncool, very inconvenient. It had to be a freak thing, the place it hit was right above the body, which basically took out the entire back window. Not fun. At least there was very minimal body damage.

iphone wow

If only it were available from Verizon…..I don’t know if I can switch.

Check out some of the features!

hilarious..

phenomenal…

New Chad Vader episodes.

I don’t know why but I happen to love these….

“Episode 4”

New hosting

This site (and all my others) have moved to a better, stronger, newer, faster host at a new facility. Things should be pretty zippy now!

Lenny Buraglio, February 2000 – December 11, 2006

December 11, 2006 was quite possibly the worst day I’ve ever had. Not only did we lose a best friend to an unnecessary, insidious form of cancer, but he was taken from us after less than 7 years. Although no amount of time would ever have been enough, 6 and a half years was far, far too short. Lenny became a quick part of our family because of his sweet disposition and laid back attitude. He was a positive constant in our lives almost from the time we got married. We will always remember the good times we had going to the park, goofing around or just laying on the couch. He will never be forgotten and can certainly never be replaced. His departure leaves a gaping hole that can never be filled. I like to think that I learned a lot about myself and am a better person for having had him in my life.

Fox news .wow

It’s a widely accepted opinion that Fox news seems to be a little biased. I really don’t watch the news so I had only others speculation to draw upon. Then I saw this. It certainly gives a compelling argument in favor of that opinion. Thankfully, I get most of my news from the net.

And WOW…..

The Doctor

I’ve been watching a lot of Doctor Who lately. I always enjoyed it as a kid (the Tom Baker Doctor). I think it was my grandpa and his love of british humor that introduced me to “The Doctor”. …So, on a whim, I went out and got the new (9th and 10th Doctor) Doctor Who seasons (2005-2006) and watched them. WOW. The storied were always great, funny and interesting, yet serious and entertaining at the same time. The sets left a little to be desired. Apparently in the old days there was only around $18 to make the sets and effects. What a pleasant surprise to see that the new seasons has all the same draw as the old but now also had some pretty nice effects. If you’re a fan of Sci-Fi, you need to watch these. They’ve even spawned a spin-off show Torchwood (an anagram for Doctor Who), I began watching that tonight and so far, so good.

::sigh::

I’ve been super busy. …maybe post more later.

weod and hilarius

This is freakin’ great. Titled “Spring break mishap”.

Stripes

Stripes is a great movie. I bought the extended edition a while ago. While I believe Stripes is a “must own movie”, I was sorely dissapointed in the deleted scenes. For some reason I was thinking about Sgt. Hulka today, one quote in particular: Soldier, I’ve noticed you’re always last” Winger replies with “I’m pacing myself Sargeant”. Genius.

More futurama stuff

I just came across this (I know, it’s old).

I was/am a huge futurama fan, so news of the dvd movies and possible return with 13 new episodes was very nice. This nice little clip for the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” was also good (since I happen to subscribe to a great deal of what the movie says).

Kuato Lives!

I happen to love t-shirts. I’d be so bold as to say that I collect them, especially shirts that remind me of growing up. A group of us were talking about Total Recall, Kuato specifically, and I thought it would be cool to have a Kuato Lives shirt. Low and behold, someone else has already done it! You can get the shirt from Cafe Press. I think I may order one.

CU Across the Prairie

A few friends and I did the CU Across the prairie ride yesterday. The weather pretty much sucked, raining on us the majority of the ride. Sice the weather was so bad we opted to do the 47 mile route as opposed to the Metric century like last year. I must say, this year the ride was much less of a “Scenic” route than last year, and I, overall, was a little disapointed. Last year it seemed really well run with more SAG vehicles (that I saw at least), more stops and MUCH better directional markings . On more than one occasion we saw cyclists going the wrong way. The markings were in very inconsistent places making is fairly difficult to navigate given higher speeds and/or rain in your eyes. Maybe I was just less tolerant because of the weather, but the widely ranging placement of the markings was very annoying to me. A few of the roads were freshly graveled which also made for a very unpleasant stretch. High pressure tires and gravel roads don’t mix well. Obviously the planners have no control over when which roads get resurfaced, nevertheless it was still not a fun few miles of road. Overall it was still a really fun ride, I plan to do it again next year and would never recommend against it. Hopefully weather will be a little more cooperative.

Tux Shirt (not linux)

I cannot believe I waited 31 years to get one of these. I got it from http://www.tuxshirt.com/. Totally worth it.

SHARK!

Rebecca and I spent the weekend in downtown chicago to “get away” for a bit. It really was quite relaxing, even with my aggrivated back. We got the hookup and got into the Shed Aquarium for free, and circumvented the hour-long line. Quite cool. We enjoyed Shark Week, something I’ve done for a long time and were looking forward to seeing the sharks there. We certainly weren’t disapointed. I forgot the camera but managed to snap some crappy pics with my treo. They can be found here

Reno, NV and the Dilly Willy (or Willy Dilly)

I went to a SCinet meeting last week in Reno, NV to which I’d never been. I’ve also never been to Las Vegas, but Rebecca told me basically waht it was like, something that isn’t really my style. I don’t smoke and I don’t gamble, both of which are abundant in Reno. The hotel/casino we stayed in and had our meetings in reminded me of the movie Casino, everyone looking out of style and place. Most were almost Zombie-ish. I did manage to gamble a grand total of $2 in the 3 days I was there; I don’t see the draw. Since supercomputing will be there in 2007 we figured we should find at least *something* to do. We happpened across a _nice_ brewpub. By nice I mean that they had a fairly comprehensive selection of beers that they make there. I managed to sample almost alll of the varieties, including the porter, stout, IPA and several of the what beers. All were very good, highly recommended in fact. The name of the place is the Great Basin Brewing Company, and so far it’s the best thing I’ve seen in Reno. They also had a fried dill pickly, which we managed to try. It was ……interesting. Not too bad actually. I’d eat one again.

Champaign Park District Mini-Tri 2006

I did the “24th annual” Champaign Park District mini-triathlon again this year. It’s a very short sprint triathlon that the Champaign Park District puts on every year, it’s usually pretty fun, being very short and very close to my house. I had originally planned on training for this at least a little, but alas, I didn’t. Overall I did ok, placing 83rd overall out of 350 with a final time of 48 minutes and 01 seconds. Not terrible I guess for not having trained anything but cycling since the sullivan triathlon. Total results can be found here. The swim was a bit different this year. They had us start in the lazy river, which was, in my opinion, too shallow. I would estimate that 80% of the participants just walked though that part. After that, swimmers had to exit the water, run to the pool and finish in there. It was very odd and I think many didn’t like it. Personally, I didn’t care since thats my least favorite part anyway. We’ll see if they do it that way next year, I suspect that they’ll get rid of the lazy river leg of the swim.

Chad Vader

Someone emailed this to me and I found it quite amusing. “Chad” Vader as a day manager of a supermarket. A little weird but entertaining nontheless. There are 2 “episodes” that I have seen so far:

“Episode 1”

and “Episode 2”

HAM Sexy

Well, I am officially a “nerd” according to most of my friends. I set a goal for myself to get my HAM radio license, for a few reasons. The first being that I am goinf to be in Tampa, FL at the tail end of hurricane season adn want a way to contact people not via net or phone if need be. The second being that I have a severe lack of electronics knowledge and thought this would be a good way to get introduced. I sat for the Tech ticket last Sunday and passed it and was issued KC9JVU as my callsign as of yesterday. I applied for a vanity callsign today so we’ll see how long that takes. I have been playing with echomac and the IRLP stuff, it’s pretty slick; right up my alley with the VoIP stuff. Now I can legally have a scanner in my car, too. Now to re-learn morse code……

Joint Techs

I went to Joint Techs in Madison, Wi this week. Overall it was pretty good, I learned a lot of stuff and experienced a lot of the dynamics of some major networking initiatives. Madison is a great city, I’d never been there and Rebecca had been saying it was really funa nd beautiful. She was right. Pics from the event can be found here. They were all taken with my treo so they’re not the greatest. I had Blatz on tap and even brought home a 12 pack of it. I also had some of the best fish I’ve had in a while, overall it was a good trip.

Strangers With Candy Movie

One of the greatesst shows of all times is coming to the bug screen! I’ve been waiting for this for a LONG time. Strangers with Candy, one of the least PC and smartest shows to come out of Comedy Central is coming to theaters this month. I have a feeling that I’ll have to wait for it to make it to Champaign, IL but hopefully it’ll be worth it. I absolutely loved this show, as did many of my friends, but alas, many did not (or don’t) appreciate it’s humor much like many of the shows I enjoy[ed]. Anyway, supposedly the “new” show “It’s always sunny in Philadelphia” is just as, if not more crass. I’ve been looking for the first season and just set up a season pass on my tivo for this season. We’ll see if it can live up to my expectations.

American Hardcore

I just read on a message board that I sometimes look at about a movie coming out based on the 2001 book American Hardcore by Steven Blush. It looks pretty good as far as documentaries go, although there was talk of how the book was somewhat incorrect. Of course, it is based on one guy’s experience as far as I know. I ordered the book today so I’ll hopefully get that read before the film is out, if not I’ll probably have to wait to see it. These are probably some of my favorite bands and types of music, although I came in after most of it was over in the late 80’s, partially due to the fact that I was born in 1975 and partially because I lived in a small midwestern town of about 7000 people with no real ties to anywhere that anything groundbreaking was happening. More info can be found here. Trailer for the movie via youtube.com:

The H is O!

This was phenominal…..I saw it on SNL when it aired and we were talking about it today. Gotta love Youtube.

Messin' with Sasquatch..

These are some of the funniest commercials I’ve seen in a while. Hikers play pranks on an unsuspecting but easily angered bigfoot. I’ve only seen them on spiketv but I hope to see them on others stations soon since they’re so simpe yet so entertaining.

There are links to more of them here

Giant Ballloon in my backyard

Tonight while walking our dogs Rebecca and I saw the giant Garcias pizza balloon flying really, really, really low around our neighborhood. It came within a few feet of our house and the house across the street. It was kinda surreal to watch so I recorded it and took several pics with my Treo. Video can be found here and here.

I knew Joey Ramone was alive!

I had to do a double take at a lunch with Juniper networks yesterday. I could have sworn that the person sitting across from me at a nearby table was the late, great Joey Ramone. But alas, I believe I was mistaken….

Done and recovered (mostly) fromt he ms150

Some of Team Remarkable: Well, the MS150 is done. Day 2 started pretty crummy. Rain, cold and general lack of enthusiasm on the general rider population was obvious. I was trying to be pretty upbeat, but it’s my belief that many riders (with the exception of team remarkable) just didn’t go out. We started a little late, around 0730 or so, about 15 minutes in the rain cleared and it dried up, but it stayed overcast mahing for a really nice ride. We opted for the 75 miles on day 2 as well, there wasn’t much wind at all and the 75 mile route had sparsly placed riders. Many that ride opted for the 35 mile route. Rebecca did the 35 mile route as well and I think she sprinted through it because she was done in a really quick time. When we stopped in Rollo, I decided that I would partake in the “famous” burgers with a fried egg on top. WOW! I don’t eat a lot of red meat but that burger with an egg was GREAT. I took a pic of it. The ride laster a little longer since we all had ridden the day before. One mile before the finish, SAG came by and told us that because of lightning that had been sighted (dark clouds had rolled in) that we had to be SAG’d in. My cousing Jeff tolf the guy that we only had 1 mile left and we were going to ride it. He said “I can’t force you” so we all rode right around him and into the finish as it started to rain. It was a great experience and I plan to raise money and ride as long as I am able. Special thanks to all who donated!

75 miles down.75 to go.

the first day was beautiful. Weatherwas great, no wind and low humidity. All of the volunteers did a bang up job. One can really teL how much they care about supporting those raising money to help cure MS. Rebecca had a tire blow out in the first 3 miles but got it fixed and finished the 35 with no problem. I did the 75 as did Jeff, Scott, Vic and Jeff’s friend. John did the full century, everyone else did the 35. Now we’re off for dinner and sleep and do it all again tomorrow.

Ready to Ride

Well, after my whirlwind trip to Tampa for a SCinet meeting and several hours of delays in the airport, including a delay that should-have-but-somehow-didn’t cost me my connecting flight back to C-U, I’m rested and ready to ride the MS150. My back is still a little stiff and crooked from the muscle I pulled like 2 weeks ago, but I did a few 35 mile training rides and everything seems to be ok. I’m curious about staying in the NIU dorms, I never lived in a dorm in college (thankfully) and neither did Rebecca. we’ll see how well that works out. Weather is looking fairly good for DeKalb for the weekend, with cooler temperatures and a slight chance for a shower on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. All systems are a go, I just need to give the bikes a “once-over”, get a new pair of cycling gloves and pack everything into the vehicle. All systems are a go. More to come as the weekend shakes out.

tampa in june

I have not been to florida in june in several years. It’s certainly as hot as I remember. It’s no qonder that the baseball game SCinet took us to was in an enclosed, air conditioned stadium. I never knew that baseball could be like that! Traveling for 2 days, returning just in time to drive to the ms150 in DeKalb, IL. It’s (been) a busy week.

coffee counteracts alcohol effects on liver?

Sweet! I love beer. I also love coffee. Hopefully it’s true! This article claims “Coffee may counteract alcohol’s poisonous effects on the liver and help prevent cirrhosis, researchers say.” The article also claims: “The same study found coffee drinkers had healthier results on blood tests used to measure liver function, whether or not they were heavy alcohol users. Coffee’s effect on reducing liver enzymes in the blood was more apparent among the heavy drinkers in the study.” I was always afraid I drank too much coffee, even though I drink a ton of water. I won’t worry quite as much now.

Robot Chicken Star Wars spoof..

Overall, Robot Chicken is a pretty funny show. When it’s on, it’s REALLY funny. When it’s off, it sucks HARD. I complertely missed this episide, but here is a clip of a pretty funny Star Wars spoof.

To play to your full potential

….everyone needs a dual processor g5 with a 30″ cinema display…

An enjoyable ride

I snapped this pic with my treo on a nice little ride I took over about 15 miles east of my house. It was a calm day, not too much wind and not too hot. A very enjoyable ride. If only every day could be like that, now that it’s >90 degrees. What happened too all the 70 degree days?

Moorehouse black cat

A very tasty english black ale, the Moorehouse Black Cat is a dark malty ale. Full flavored with a little hoppy after taste. It is surprisingly refreshing, not overly filling, not overly hoppy. I don’t know the alcohol content, it’s not terribly strong, i’d estimate mayby a 6 or 7%. I picked this up at the local friar tuck for $3.99. I’d recommend this for anyone that likes dark brews.

Sergio's in Clinton

We went down to Clinton tonight to see some family and take care of some stuff. We decided to make an evening of it and wanted to head back to Sergio’s for dinner. This place is one of the best kept secrets of my home town of Clinton, IL. Sergio’s mexican restaraunt has the absolutely undisputed best burritos i’ve ever had. Their $4.85 burrito is the size of a labamba super and their $9 burrito….well it needs it’s own zip code. I’d seriously be surprised if it weighed less than 5lbs. Plan on eating it for more than one meal. If you ever get the chance, stop by there. you won’t regret it. They’re open 10am to 10pm tues – sat. Above is a pic I snapped with my treo, it’s of the regular ($4.85) chicken burrito. I had a hard time finishing it. I’ve only seen a $9 on one occasion, it was frighteningly heavy and a huge burrito.

MS 150 2006 is creeping up!

I’m doing the MS150 bike ride again this year. It’s creeping up and I have not done any training other than short rides since my triathlon in Sullivan on May 6th. Weather has been crummy, and my new steed has been sitting in the garage begging to go for a decent ride. But thats really not what the MS150 is about. Along with Team Remarkable we hope to raise some good money for MS research. Rebecca and I are both riding along with many other family members. We ride for my cousin Mark Buraglio, who was diagnosed with MS in 1995. All donations are tax deductable and they all go to a great cause.

Import from blogger

Well, as you can see if you actually read this thing, I got the entire blog imported from blogger. It really was a pretty easy task. There is a lot of documentation on doing it. I started with this but it wasn’t as helpful as I’d hoped. I then googled for this and found pretty much everything I could have imagined regarding the process. Anyone looking to do the same should check out this article. It tell you stem by step pretty much everything you need to do. Everything is now in a nice sql database for easy backups and I have control over the whole process. It’s also nice that I can publish images directly from my treo.

A change in the works

I decided to move to a content management system that I have a little more control over. As of tonight, I have migrated to a Movable Type setup. All the previous articles have been archived at http://buraglio.com/archive/ I hope to get them imported into MT but have yet to be successful in doing so. Hopefully this will make for more frequent updates since I can update it more easily from my Treo 650.

A neat concept

Bianchi Veloce; Italian Steel

I did the Sullivan, IL

I also bought a new car last week (it’s been a busy week). The old Beretta that I inherited from Rebecca was having some fairly serious problems so we decided to get me a new car. I was on the fence regarding what exactly to buy, I knew I wanted a subaru but didn’t know which one. I wanted something with room to haul stuff but the forester seemed just a little too big and the Outback seemed too much like a wagon. The Imprezia was attractive but a little too small so I drove an imprezia outback sport and it was perfect. Small, good gas mileage, but lots of room. Pics can be found here.

Well, I sold and shipped

Time for a break!

Well, I listed the bulk

So I've had basically the

The first app I loaded was callfilter . This is a _MUST_ have app if you get a lot of calls and or txt messages. It’s like a firewall for you phone, or an electronic receptionist. There are so many useful features in this app that I get excited just thinking about it. Buy it, it’s worth every penny. I then loaded simpe profile manager which is FREE and integrates right with callfilter. Both apps together are an unstoppable juggernaut. Powerrun came next. It allows for the easy and clean use of apps from the SD card. TCPMP is also a MUST have app. How else will I watch episides of scrubs that I pull off the tivo and compress? After the rest was installed (pssh, Toccer, BackupBuddy). Overall I have 18mb free now where I used to have 4. Everything works great. This was _long_ overdue.

Treo a conversation piece?This week

This week I went to our office in Arlington, VA to help test some fiber for 10g deployment and noticed something interesting. As I sit in the airport waiting for my flight back a guy sitting next to me asked about my treo. Now, this wouldn’t really be that interesting except for the fact that since I landed here just over 24 hours ago he is the 3rd person to strike up a conversation with me based on my treo 650. it’s almost like an exclusive club that many are either in (by having a treo) or are interested in bein in. So many people realize that the treo is a handy, useful tool and are just bursting at the seams to talk about what they, and you, do with it. However nerdy and dorky it sounds, the treo is the exclusive conversation piece of the day.

Stovepipe Porter

I happen to LOVE

Since I know there has to be at least a few others that appreciate the humor that I do I thought I’d post a link to some good spicoli stuff. The ironic thing is that this page was originally created and hosted at my current workplace.

I just got a

I just got a helix face in belt clip holster and I must say it’s pretty nice. It does not protect the treo like a cover or a sleeve but it is “face in” which is pretty nice for someone that bumps their phone on a lot of stuff. It comes with 2 clips that can be interchanged. It’s a cheap alternative to the Seidio case, the only differences I can find other than the clips are the seidio has a felt type inside and the Helix uses very soft, supple plastic. I believe the helix may have a little better hold on the bottom of the device but I don’t have a Seidio to compare to. One BIG plus of this case, like the Seidio, it is very compact. It holds the device very close to the body, not hanging out where it can be easily bumped and hit. The helix also comes with a changeable clip, one lower profile (the one I prefer) and one that it detachable. A nice little spin on a pretty good case. It allows access to all the botom ports and all the top ports if you like to leave your treo in a case when not wearing it. The only cons that I have found are that, on occasion, when I receive a call and pull out the phone it will be answered. I believe this is due to me or the case bumping a button and it doesn’t happen all the time. The Helix is cheaper than the Seidio (especially if you get it from ebay like I did) and I think just as good if not better. I’d give it a thumbs up.

A few years ago I

Founders Black Rye Dark Ale

I don't know about you,

With all the talk of the CTA machines being vulnerable and other MTA machines crashing or being problematic I got to thinking about how many mission critical or sensitive systems are vulnerable, rooted, 0wn3d or whatever. Most Cash machines used to be OS/2 but that’s been changing lately and I know for sure some are moving to windows. Lets just hope all these systems are well maintained or more secured than they probably are…..probably wishful thikning..

A few days ago

I saw an interesting

I saw an interesting license plate on a porche the other night coming out of my favorite local Thai place. I’m not sure who owned the car but the plate was nerdy and cool at the same time.

hofbrau maibock I'd never had

I’d never had (or heard of) a Maibock before I saw this. Billed as “munich’s first maibock”, this was a sweet carmel tasting beer, historically enjoyed in the springtime in germany. A decent punch but I’m not sure of the alc. content in this $2.99 pint bottle. I’d not had any food when I enjoyed it and was left with a little buzz. A dark carmel color with very little head, it was a good drink. I’d recommend trying one if presented with the opportunity.

Today, 02/09/2006, marks the

Aldaris Porteris Brewed by the

Brewed by the Alderis Brewery in Riga, Latvia, this 6.8 percent alc. porter was not too heavy and not too sweet. A quick, carmel aftertast, it was a pleasant surprise of a porter for $2.49 at friar tuck. I love a good porter, it’s a fact. Dark and sweet ( but not too sweet ) I would recommend this delicious drink for any porter lover. A little heavy but VERY good.

One of the things that

Info Download

The directory assistant app is also very handy. Both work on the Treo 600 and Treo 650 and are both _free_!

Sierra Nevada Porter I

Sierra Nevada Porter

I saw this and couldn’t resist trying it. I must admit that I didn’t know that the Sierra Nevada Brewery made a porter. I was skeptical but went ahead and paid the $7.99 for a six pack. 5.6 percent alc. per 12oz bottle, it had a thin, light head when first poured. A much more bitter porter than I anticipated, I was a little disapointed to be truthful. It had a strong but quick bitter aftertaste and was not nearly as sweet as any of the other porters I wrote about here. I don’t know that I’d recommend this beer as a “must try” but I wouldn’t go out of my way to get one.

Okocim porter "Traditional polish

Okocim porter

“Traditional polish taste” it says on the bottle. A dark, thicker, quickly sweet porter. Malty and strong, sharp and quicker flavor than many porters I’ve had. 8.3 percent alc. in this one pint bottle that I picked up at Friar Tuck for $2.99. This was a little different in a way I really couldn’t put my finger on. I’d probably buy this again, but I wouldn’t drink more than one.

I discovered a nice little

The things i had some issues with:

I had a weird problems where my phone rang continuously and I had to reset it to get out of the “loop”. I don’t know if it was callfilter related or not.

I couldn’t really test it’s full capabilities since I was limited to 5 rules (and 10 days)

I was unable to make the “reply with sms” work when call was set to “phone call was ignored + From a contact”.

I am rough on stuff.

1. I like to keep stuff in my pockets, the case has a friction to it that pretty much disallows this when I’m wearing jeans. No big deal I can just clip the case to my pocket or belt.

2. The way the clip works is not conducive to using an SD card. The clip pushes out my SD card every time I put the treo in it. Very annoying to say the least.

I've never been an early

I'm a mac user, I

Jan 12 07:43:57 Mackie diskarbitrationd[37]: unable to mount /dev/disk1s2 (status code 0x00000047). 2006-01-12 07:44:24.161 iPod Updater Extreme[500] Can’t read checkpoint data 2006-01-12 07:44:31.198 iPod Updater Extreme[500] Can’t read checkpoint data 2006-01-12 07:44:34.811 iPod Updater Extreme[500] Can’t read checkpoint data 2006-01-12 07:44:38.326 iPod Updater Extreme[500] Can’t read checkpoint data 2006-01-12 07:44:41.870 iPod Updater Extreme[500] Can’t read checkpoint data 2006-01-12 07:44:45.443 iPod Updater Extreme[500] Can’t read checkpoint data

After my last post regarding

In my apparently never ending

More up to date “Must have Software” list from Howard forums A nice thread on keeping your Treo 650 up and running with minimal crashes. I’ve found that my treo 650 is pretty stable but not quite as rock solid as my 600 was, which had less than 1 crash a month. The upside to this is that I’m almost 100% certain that any stability issues I’ve seen have *not* been the Treo. Instead, they all appear to be the result of 3rd party apps, both normal and system-patching. I like to try a LOT of apps out. Pretty much anything interesting that has a demo version ir is under $10 I’ll give a try. One thing is annoying though, I have yet to find an economical (

This SNL skit is an

Wow. The 650 is much

I have had to re-learn a lot of the subtleties of the treo platform. Below is a list of some of the problems I ran into:

1. My Treo would not sync with my powerbook using the default palm conduits. This was a huge problem for me as I normally use my treo as the master and just do a sync to back it up. I purchased The Missing Sync to try and rectify this problem. I was planning on getting anyway so I could use the cool SD Card mounting feature.

Wow, the treo 650 is

I added a seperate sub

I made my request for

Plantronics Voyager 510 headset: $52.24

Spare Battery TRE650BAT $29.99 Car Charger TRE650VPC $22.49 Spec Skintight Holster $34.95 Screen protectors $15.95

These were heavily influenced by stuff I’ve seen other people with as well as reviews on Treonauts I find this device, while a little large for my tastes, to be invaluable. I hate having a lot of crap with me but I need the functions of an organizer and the fact that there is decent speed internet access (1xRTT; roughly 144k) and a wealth of net apps that take advante of the net and even more that are just plain useful make it a “must consider” device for someone that needs help organizing themselves or just someone that likes gadgets. Here are some useful apps to wet your palet:

What is it about

Straight off of the pfw

I enjoy beer. I

I enjoy beer. I don’t drink as much of it as I used to, but on occasion I like to down a few good ones (I’ll also down a few bad ones if that is all there is). I wouldn’t say I’m a “Beer Snob” as I’ve been known to drink anything from PBR, Natural Lite and Stag to a $12 imported porter. I’m not normally a big fan of the lighter stuff but I came across this ale, Smithwick’s. It’s just the right blend if what I like. A little bite but smooth at the end. From Realbeer.com: “Made by Guinness in Ireland, Smithwick’s is inspired by John Smithwick’s original recipe, which was first brewed at St. Francis Abbey in Kilkenny, Ireland. St. Francis Abbey has been in operation since 1710, making it one of Ireland’s oldest breweries.” I’d recommend trying this if you can find it (which has been my problem as of late). It’s smooth enough that a casual light beer drinker would probably enjoy it but flavorful enough that even a beer snob probably wouldn’t snicker. I’d really like to find some more of it, I had a 6 pack given to me and I just finished off the last one. I’ve tried looking online as well as every local place in Champaign-Urbana, Bloomington and other surrounding Central Illinois towns with no success. I hear tale that it’s found primarily in larger cities, St. Louis, Chicago, etc., but last time I looked in STL it I couldn’t find it there either (granted I didn’t look that hard). If anyone knows somewhere in Central IL (or online) that I can order this please let me know. I’d love to get my hands on some more.

training againSo I started training

So I started training again after a month and a half of on-again off-again training and boy does it go quickly as you get older. The submission wrestling and cycling cardio are quick to slip away. Having been wrestling now for about 2 weeks (at 2 times a week, I’m not yet up to 4 again) I thought the cardio was a little better, but alas, as I hit the cycle at the gym this morning I was rudely awakened by tired legs and sucking wind. I’d really like to get a training rig and some mats for my basement but have not had the time or motivation to properly research it.

first wireless post!I just configured

I just configured u*blog on my treo 600, an awesome device (although I’d rather have a 650). anyway, this is being posted wirelessly. maybe now I’ll actually update this thing.

The breakup of the blog

Something else announced, Force10 networkshas acquired a pretty cool little company; Meta Networks. For those that don’t know, Meta Networks makes a very cool IDS card that can do 10gig with minimal overhead to the host OS. At SC|05 they announced the purchase and gave a little talk regarding the product. Livio Ricciulli, the founder of Meta Networks was there to help with the product, which was used by SCinet to help secure the very high performance network. VERY cool stuff indeed. I like the idea of the programmable card (that can do a LOT of cool stuff) a little more than the way that Endace cards operate, although the endace 10gig cards are very nice as well.

I'm such a spaz.

Ahhh, many things have happened

I started trying to make

I came across this deal

I did the CU across

The other day I

I did a little mini-triathlon

My back is feeling

Well, too many years of

I finished the ms150, although

I signed up for a

On a completely unrelated note, I started playing with EvoCam today as a way to piddle with my iSight. It seems pretty cool, you can force it to do some pretty neat stuff like only record when there is motion. It can also upload via sftp, which is very, very cool. I recommend checking it out if you’re looking to do more with you iSight

EvoCam can also send images as an email, save them to folders, even record video. It also has it’s own web server that supports authentication.

MacOS Tiger had/has some issues

Both are fairly simple, the first one requires that your sudoers file be set up to not require a password to execute sudo. It will simply kill the vpnclient, reload the kext and restart the vpn client. The second one does the same thing but will open terminal.app and require you to authenticate. It then delays for 10 seconds (to give you time to type your pass) and restarts the vpn client. They are available here.

In the time that I've

I’d love to see an independent PF based add-on project like the l7 filter. Unfortunately, I’m nowhere near at the programming level to even think about attempting it myself. If you know of one, please email me.

I know, I can want in one hand and take a dump in the other and see which one fills up first..

It's a pretty well known

I'm participating in the ms150

ahhhh the blog, ever changing

ahhhh the blog, ever changing