Will you be my friend

Are there hordes of virtual friends banging down your facebook door?  Check out Public School Intelligentsia.

Posted on Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:39:10 -0800 in
Education • Personal
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Snow Day or Late Start?

We have been getting a little bit of snow around here.  By “little bit” I mean less than 3 inches.  But understand that 3 inches is a lot for Tacoma, WA.  I grew up in the Northeast where we got lots of snow and school was still not canceled.  In Seattle a few years back, we got 3 Inches, followed by some slight warming and then a freeze.  Shut the place down for nearly three days.  Diving was downright dangerous because they don’t clear roads around these parts.

Posted on Sun, 14 Dec 2008 23:19:00 -0800 in
AWS • Education • Tacoma
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WeatherBug BlueBugBox

We have had a WeatherBug weather station at my workplace since long before I arrived.  We were running an old Gateway E4200 running Win2K just to keep the station reporting data to WeatherBug.  Recently they came and switched out the station… we now have a BlueBugBox - a box roughly the size of two trade paperbacks stacked atop one another.  It’s blue (hence the name) and it replaces the PC that used to process the data and send it out to WeatherBug.

I can’t help but think that there must be a way to snatch that data and do something interesting with it….  Here is what I have come up with.

WeatherBug requires access tot he box on ports 80 tcp, and 9500 tcp.  However if you point your browser to http://x.x.x.x/ you get nothing.

Port 8080 seems to be serving up an XML file of the current data coming from the box.

I know that I have seen a login screen( when the installer was here) so there must be a web interface to this box somewhere… I just don’t know what port it is on.

I am sure I can do something interesting with the XML data.

Posted on Sat, 21 Jun 2008 19:11:00 -0700 in
Education • Geek • Technology
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Seeds of Compassion

Saturday was a “once in a lifetime” type of day.  It was beautiful, sunny, warm, and positively un-Pacific Northwest like, at least for April.  We headed up to Seattle for one of the Seeds of Compassion event - Compassion in Action.  I say it was a “once in a lifetime” type of day not because of the weather, but because I was able to see the His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama speak.  The man is brilliant!  The man is humble!  I will remember this experience for a long time.

Posted on Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:01:01 -0700 in
Education • Personal
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Backup Failure

Last week…  last Thursday in fact, our 4.5 year old Overland LTO 2 drive… failed.  That’s a big bummer.

We have no replacement.  But we are looking at some options.  Overland makes a 12 tape vault that can have an LTO2,3,or 4 drive inside.  I feel like it is way silly to go with the LTO 2 drive, when the LTO4 gives us 4x the storage as LTO 2…  but it will require a reinvestment in tape.

We are going to go with it.

Posted on Mon, 28 Jan 2008 14:26:00 -0800 in
AWS • Education • Network Administration • Technology • Microsoft • Windows • Server 2003
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