a blog on technology in the real world

How’d I do with my goals for the break? From the list in my last post, here’s what I got done:

I beat StarCraft II on normal mode, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I haven’t tried multiplayer yet, but I have gone a few rounds against the AI. It’s a very fun game.

I went back to Windows 7 64-bit on my desktop (after beating SCII), though I’m probably going to rant about the drivers for my PCTV USB HD Tuner at some point.

I started work on the web project I was thinking about. It’s a license management system that I’m using to keep track of the various license keys that I have all in one place. It’s still pretty basic, but it’s working for what I need it to do right now. I’d like to add some import features and maybe I’ll put the source out if it’s not too embarrassingly bad.

I did not wipe my Macbook Pro because I couldn’t find my Snow Leopard disk. I was able to get a new disc free through Pitt’s software licensing people because students get a copy free, but haven’t had a chance to reinstall yet. I did some major cleanup and also deleted my boot camp partition so we’ll see how it runs for a while.

I also didn’t do anything with iaconhub.com. I really need to see if anyone in the hub wants to take over the web stuff because I don’t have the time to do it, especially with classes starting up again.

I also got a new job during the break, and I started this week. I guess I’ll count this as one of the more successful breaks I’ve had. Not that I did much other than play a game and reinstall Windows, which I probably would have done anyways.

Let me get it out of the way at the beginning of this post. Monoprice rocks. I’ve used them for years for various cables, usually ethernet and HDMI and have always been impressed with the high quality of their cables and surprised by their low prices. A couple weeks ago I was listening to the Real Deal podcast from Cnet.com and heard about a cable that really fit a need in my life. A caller was asking about ways to get their iPod into their car stereo and one of the hosts suggested a cable from Monoprice that connected via the iPod dock connector and had USB and stereo audio out on the other end. This cable was the answer to my frustrating car audio problems.

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This is another post documenting something I used to fix a problem at work so I don’t forget about it. We were pushing out Firefox to all our systems yesterday via SCCM. It’s pushed out using a batch file to configure various things, and I noticed that although the batch file was being called from the dozen or so distribution points we have, the script was calling back to the main server. I’ve seen this before but never looked into a solution. I started searching for a variable or a way to get the path the script is run from and found this article posted in 2008 on myITforum.com. It is addressing the exact situation I was encountering.

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