un chapeau sur ma tête

The trouble with trip computers is that they enable procrastinators.

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 23:57:40 GMT

The trouble with trip computers is that they enable procrastinators.
Originally uploaded by Paul Timmins.

New Message

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 02:04:45 GMT

New Message
Originally uploaded by Paul Timmins.

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 21:06:19 GMT

http://www.timmins.net/gallery2/v/will/21weeks/

More pics of the little one!

He's coming along quite well, things are going great!

How to get Exchange Active Sync working on the Palm Pre

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:04:46 GMT

If you do not have a SSL certificate, EAS won't work. It won't say "you can't use http as a protocol you have to use https" or anything sensible like that - so i beat my head on the wall alot about this, and ended up having to use ethereal to verify what's happening. So here's what you do.

First, create a certificate signing request for the IIS server - if you don't know how to do this, google is your friend. MAKE SURE THE COMMON NAME ON THE CERT IS A PUBLIC DNS NAME YOU CAN HIT WITH THE PRE!

Take the CSR, and either sign it with your own key, pay for a real certificate, or use CACert like I did.

If you paid for the certificate, take your new certificate to IIS, and be done with it. Good for you.

If you're cheap like me, and used CACert or your own OpenSSL CA, here's what you do, it's non obvious.

Set up a POP or imap account on your phone, and email yourself the CA certificates as .crt files.

Once this is done, open the .crt files on your pre (YOU CANNOT DO THIS VIA THE WEB BROWSER IT WILL NOT WORK) - open the .crt files by clicking once to download, then clicking again once the progress bar is full. You'll go to the certificate manager.

Click trust certificate, and make sure you can hit the EAS server with https in a web browser. If you can, now try it on the Pre, it should work.

\o/

Boy

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:30:00 GMT

More Pictures

Tue, 26 May 2009 04:39:25 GMT

I've been maintaining this data on Facebook but decided that now that it's complete, it'd be better put here where there's no funky limit on how long my data can be.

http://tinyurl.com/maytrip2009 (before tinyurl, that google maps URL was over 900 characters long)

Total Miles this 3 day weekend (estimated): 691 Miles
Total driving time (est): 11 hours, 32 minutes
10 out of michigan's 12 area codes were covered today:
231, 248, 313, 517, 586, 616, 734, 810, 947, 989
(We were about 30 minutes away from 269 but decided against trying to collect all 11 lower penninsula area codes)

We slept in our own bed each night.

We attended a memorial service, a birthday party, and did extensive yard work. We ate hamburgers every day. In fact, we consumed only two meals not comprising of hamburgers or hotdogs (our traditional Sunday brunch, and our dinner at mancinos in Clare).

Woooooo

Also: 17 weeks and counting on the little one. We'll find out what its sex is at 20 weeks. Can't wait!

Sun, 03 May 2009 03:20:55 GMT

14 weeks. Woo!

Everything i could possibly say about this is probably already going through your head

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:21:32 GMT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8001644.stm

So western digital decided to send me a customer satisfaction survey...

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 01:37:27 GMT

After my hard disk debacle, where I've been trying for about a week to get the failed drive replaced (read: even showing up as having a warranty on their website)

The following is the completed survey. I had to reformat it to show it here.

1. Please rate the representative with whom you interacted across the traits below in your last contact with WD.
Courtesy (Very Satisfied)
Knowledge (Satisfied)
Support (Very Dissatisfied)
Satisfaction (Very Dissatisfied)

Additional Comments (Please limit your comments within 2000 characters)

This process is assinine, and i'd rather bash myself in the face with a hammer than go through it again. I've wasted a week or more trying to get my product RMAed, and finally only because microcenter has good records do i have a valid warranty on my drive. The entire process seemed like pulling teeth, and inspired a great deal of doubt on my plan to buy a retail drive with a 3 year warranty when i have to waste considerable time and deal with an assinine trouble ticket system that forgets my email address every few hours.

And I have wisdom teeth coming in, and pulling those would be a welcome release from pain. I just want to be clear that when I am talking about pulling teeth, I mean good, healthy ones that cause no issue. I don't want to imply that when I'm done, there's a good feeling. After getting the warranty activated, the system would repeatedly malfunction trying to create an advanced RMA. I guess I'll be seeing my hard disk sometime next month at this rate.

The employee was useful, but the whole process was unnecessary. I have no idea why western digital wouldn't at least honor the drive's warranty based on its date of manufacture to speed things along, that would have been fine with me since it was only 1 month between its date of manufacture and date of sale.

2. How likely are you to recommend this product to your friends, colleagues, or family?
(Neutral)

3. How much effort did you personally have to put forth to handle your request?

(Very High)

Additional Comments (Please limit your comments within 2000 characters)

Your website was worthless in ascertaining the actual cause of the issue. Only a vague statement that implied that the data may be incorrect and I have the opportunity to correct it was the only clue that something could be done about the situation. If you're not going to honor warranties because someone didn't register the sale, then come out and say "no record of drive being sold, please contact us to confirm" or something like that. Don't simply say the drive can't be returned under warranty. I'm sure there's some attorney general around somewhere salivating at the thought of something that retarded and misleading.

4. If you had tried to resolve your question prior to speaking to a live agent or sending us an email, how easy or difficult was it to use the features below? Please select N/A if it's not applicable.

Support website (Very Difficult)

Additional Comments (Please limit your comments within 2000 characters)

Support website was useless, it mentioned various procedures but didn't imply that I actually had to undergo it for western digital to honor the warranty they sold it with and that this was a routine thing.

5. Did you attempt to handle your request through self-service (via our website) before contacting us directly?
(Yes)

6. Please rate the product you contacted us about based on the attributes below.
Ease of Use (Very Satisfied)
Reliability (Very Dissatisfied)
Documentation (Very Satisfied)
Design and Appearance (Very Satisfied)
Price (Very Satisfied)

Additional Comments (Please limit your comments within 2000 characters)

Damn thing died in a month of having it. What more can I say regarding reliability?

Otherwise, it's a great drive.

7. Would you like to be notified on news and updates related to WD products?
(No)

Additional Comments (Please limit your comments within 2000 characters)

Why this entire process took over a week is mystifying. You'd think the rep's first response would be something like "hey, we don't see any record of that drive being sold. Can you score us a reciept to confirm it? Thanks!" instead of some strange canned response telling me the same shit that's on the website.

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 03:41:54 GMT

Compact flash as a hard drive - it works acceptably, i plan on going back to the real hard disk though. The write speed is killer, causes lags sometimes. The reads are just peachy though.

With the help of friends, we swapped out my oil sensor, and on top of that i changed the oil in my van and finally replaced the old ass air filter. it's a completely new van, I swear. It doesn't light up the oil light when you're driving with a warm engine and slow down to an idle either.

Not a good sign when you pull the electrical connector off the oil sensor, and oil comes running out of the connector socket. That's not supposed to be there!?!?!?! Glad we got it fixed!

In related news, I want one of these: http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000655.php

I need to do something about my wisdom teeth. It's about that time.

update

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 07:52:34 GMT

So on the 7th my laptop's hard drive blew up, started having massive failures on various sectors. These days my laptop is basically the only computer I use, and all my small amounts of computer money I have to play with have been directed in its general direction, rather than any other computer that would otherwise be working if it weren't (I spend far less on computers than one might think).

So finally today I picked up a 6GB compact flash while I'm working through western digital's stupid red tape to get my 1.5 month old, purchased retail drive with a 3 year warranty replaced.

It works as a hard drive but sucks when doing heavy writing, like installing software. But the read times are good and I'm thinking if the battery benefits are high enough I may simply roll with this and put the big drive in an enclosure and carry it in my backpack of doom. I'll have to see how I adjust to this. I don't listen to mp3s on this machine, or watch movies, it's basically a web browser with terminals and an IRC client, so 6GB might be all I need when I'm not messing with my digital photos, which I can just whip out the external drive to do.

The kid's in good condition, we're both pretty pleased about that.

Some dickhead hit my cousin's future father in law with a car, and ran off like a coward and left him to die. He ended up bleeding out due to having his hip bone crushed. That's fucked up and angers me.

Work's awesome.

We're doing okay on the grief front w/r/t Becky's mom. Thanks to those who sent flowers, etc, and thanks to those who didn't (we only have room for a few vases, as we're busy taking in stuff from mom's and sorting through it). We appreciate the support we've received from everyone. Thanks!

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 04:20:07 GMT

On March 31, at 10:00pm exactly, Becky's Mom passed away. We spent the 26th to the 1st in West Michigan spending all our time at the Holland Hospice. I don't know if any of you have spent time watching family members die, but it's not the best process in the world, as one would expect. You get interesting materials that basically describe the exact step by step process that a person goes through while in the process of dying. It's kinda surreal. I'll have to post that stuff sometime.

Anyway, obviously it was a sad time. We're doing okay, generally having a week to prepare yourself for the moment makes it a lot easier to come to terms with and cope. It doesn't take away the pain but that's to be expected. We'll miss you, mom.

Okay, so not everything about this week is terrible.

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:44:41 GMT

Our little one is doing great. We've given him/her the placeholder name of "Bean" until it is old enough to have genitals.

	7 weeks (#1)
	7 weeks (#2)

It's been kinda un-kickass around lately

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 05:46:38 GMT

* Becky's mom has been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, she has days, maybe weeks (doubt it) to live. We got her into hospice and have started to make final arrangements.

* While on the way to the hospital, the UPS failed at work. No network disruption happened but the issue did affect a few colo customers, albeit for a short period of time. :(

* When I got to the hospital, I tore my pants wide open in the ass when I sat down next to becky's mom's bed.

* When I was working today, I upgraded a copy of Adobe Acrobat standard 9.0 (not the reader) on our provisioner's computer and the fucker started on fire, confined to a short puff of smoke coming out of the power supply, which was too hot to touch for several minutes afterward.

It's not been our finest weekend.... Hoping things look up from here.

it's been kinda kickass around lately

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 04:02:03 GMT

* 1+1=3 = Successfully in progress

* At work, we're going gangbusters. It's really a blessing to work somewhere where I know there's a job waiting for me in the morning every day. I wish I could hire all of you. :) (well, maybe not ALL of you, heh)

* My APRS IGate is running strong. I just got a bunch of copper pipe to make a jpole for the dedicated igate hardware so I can return my expensive ham radio to normal use rather than a really, really nice 2 meter radio. :)

* My car sucks but still works just fine. My TM-D700A is working great with the new power supply for the GPS that Dan M sent me last year and I finally hacked in the last month.

* I finally got the tiles i tore off the ceiling in the basement the day we moved in cleaned up. That was harder work than it looked, and required a respirator due to all the dust. It only took 2.5 years. Go me! Yay!

* I finally got the Tripplite RMA back. Thanks to Becky for finally shipping the goddamn thing out for me, after 6 months of me procrastinating. Thanks also to Tripplite for being pretty chill about the fact I RMAed a product, and took 6 months to ship the damn thing.

* It's been a great run recently. I'm hoping desperately it continues.

Summer's coming up guys - we should have a cookout or some shit. Am I right?

:(

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 05:35:01 GMT

http://smithfamilyfuneralhome.com/Visitations/View.php?id=955

Dankaye's dad passed away.

The Rev. Daniel M. “Dan” Kivel, 58 of Algonac, passed away unexpectedly on Wednesday, January 21, 2009 in Mt.Clemens Regional Medical Center. He was born to Ronald and Helen Kivel on August 12, 1950 in Port Huron, attended the Port Huron schools, and graduated from Port Huron High School in 1968. Dan then went on to receive his BA degree from Oakland University in 1978 and then his MA in Social Work from Wayne State University. He was a long-time adhesives chemist for Evans-St. Clair, also worked for C.T.I. Corp. in Detroit, and worked as a consultant on various other projects. He was a life-long spiritual seeker & teacher, and was a former President of the Autism Society of Michigan. Dan is survived by his wife, Margie; three children, Charon (Gaston) Nogues of Los Angeles, CA, Shelley (Eric) Schmidt of Madison Heights, and Brian Kivel of Clarkston; a grandson, Jude Nogues; ten brothers & sisters, Rhonda Kivel of Grand Rapids, Gary Kivel of Port Huron, Linda (Dwayne) Beem of Port Huron, Steven (Wendy) Kivel of St. Clair, Nancy (Michael) Pinkster of Kalamazoo, Brenda (Mark) Privette of Port Huron, Theresa Leneway of New Baltimore, David Kivel of FL, John (Frances) Kivel of Dexter, & Jeffrey Kivel of Port Huron; and several nieces & nephews. He was preceded in death by his parents and a son, Daniel M. Kivel II in May of 2007. The funeral service will be at 1:00 p.m. Tuesday, January 27, 2009 in Smith Family Funeral Home-South preceded by one hour of visitation. Contributions may be made in Dan’s memory to the Autism Society of Michigan. To send condolences, please visit smithfamilyfuneralhome.com A memorial service in Dan’s memory will take place in the future. For information regarding this service, please contact Debbie Aliya at 616/475-0059 or e-mail daaliya@aol.com

Tweets for Today

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 03:27:17 GMT

20:40 Jan 27 20:39:48 psyduck bgpd[19039]: 208.83.65.253 rcvd UPDATE w/ attr: nexthop 208.83.65.253, origin i, path 22438 26554 19024 2828 645 ... #
20:40 Jan 27 20:39:48 psyduck bgpd[19039]: 208.83.65.253 rcvd 123.21.96.0/21 #
20:40 Jan 27 20:39:48 psyduck bgpd[19039]: 208.83.65.253 rcvd 123.21.120.0/21 #
20:40 Jan 27 20:39:48 psyduck bgpd[19039]: 208.83.65.253 rcvd 123.21.104.0/21 #
20:40 Jan 27 20:39:48 psyduck bgpd[19039]: 208.83.65.253 rcvd 123.21.224.0/21 #
20:40 Jan 27 20:39:48 psyduck bgpd[19039]: 208.83.65.253 rcvd 123.21.136.0/21 #
20:40 Jan 27 20:39:48 psyduck bgpd[19039]: 208.83.65.253 rcvd 123.21.144.0/21 #
20:40 Jan 27 20:39:48 psyduck bgpd[19039]: 208.83.65.253 rcvd 123.21.236.0/22 #
20:40 Jan 27 20:39:48 psyduck bgpd[19039]: 208.83.65.253 rcvd 123.21.208.0/21 #
20:40 Jan 27 20:39:48 psyduck bgpd[19039]: 208.83.65.253 rcvd 123.21.128.0/21 #
20:40 Jan 27 20:39:48 psyduck bgpd[19039]: 208.83.65.253 rcvd 123.21.152.0/22 #
20:40 Jan 27 20:39:48 psyduck bgpd[19039]: 208.83.65.253 rcvd 123.21.240.0/21 #
20:40 Jan 27 20:39:48 psyduck bgpd[19039]: 208.83.65.253 rcvd 123.21.176.0/21 #
20:40 Jan 27 20:39:48 psyduck bgpd[19039]: 208.83.65.253 rcvd 123.21.200.0/21 #
20:40 Jan 27 20:39:48 psyduck bgpd[19039]: 208.83.65.253 rcvd 123.21.248.0/21 #
20:40 Jan 27 20:39:48 psyduck bgpd[19039]: 208.83.65.253 rcvd 123.21.112.0/21 #
20:40 Jan 27 20:39:48 psyduck bgpd[19039]: 208.83.65.253 rcvd 123.21.216.0/21 #
20:40 Jan 27 20:39:48 psyduck bgpd[19039]: 208.83.65.253 rcvd 123.21.192.0/22 #
20:40 Jan 27 20:39:48 psyduck bgpd[19039]: 208.83.65.253 rcvd 123.21.232.0/22 #
20:40 Jan 27 20:39:48 psyduck bgpd[19039]: 208.83.65.253 rcvd 123.21.88.0/21 #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 08:25:07 GMT

I declare victory on my project of installing a whole house humidifier i embarked on at 8pm today after finding out they sold them with kits that had all the necessary parts at home depot.

There's a few rough edges still, but it's working and you can feel the air getting more moist. Kickass.

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:31:49 GMT

http://net.gop.com/ThankYou/

Don't forget to sign President Bush's Thank You card. Wouldn't want him to not realize how much he's appreciated.

Lol

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 21:59:12 GMT

Lol
Originally uploaded by Paul Timmins.

HEY GUYS HERE'S A POST THAT IS NOT SOME RANDOM BULLSHIT FROM TWITTER

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 05:50:23 GMT

You know, these constant posts of worthless crap from twitter infesting my friends page as of late is some serious bullshit.

13:23 @randomperson: ya it's great isn't it
12:03 i just shat myself hardcore
93:21 #someotherdong: lolololol ya <3
23:19 dude i love twitter for whatever reason
00:39 man my iphone is awesome i want steve job's kids
02:23 i hate life and my job sucks wwwwwaaaaahhh
34:04 @otherperson: yea i like it in the butt you know other randomperson 
does too. DUDE I CAN MAKE THIS BULLCRAP APPEAR IN FACEBOOK NOW TOO YAY!
03:34 HALLO FACEBOOK I HOOKED UP MY TWITTER TO FB FOR MAX WIN

            Posted by LiveTwitter

That stuff is fucking irritating and worthless. I mean, a lot of shit on livejournal was just shit before, but it's like someone said "take the same worthless shit you'd bitch about on livejournal, and make it fit in 160 characters. Do this several times a day. It's how to be cool on the internet now."

Horseshit. Content or GTFO. You people are part of the reason I only read LJ like once a week now. (I'm also busy and stuff)

On that note, I got an Arduino board and I've been having some fun messing with it. I've made a 300 baud modem that my homeboy Brad and I are working on a demodulator for, and it's working rather well. If you are thinking "dude i know C and i would love to write some embedded shit" but are also thinking "DUDE requiring a $90 dongle to program shit and dealing with resistors and TTL serial is seriously shitty!" and also "fuck basicstamp it's an expensive toy" then Arduino is the board you've been waiting for. All you need is a USB port and random crap to hook to a microcontroller and you're in business. It powers itself on the USB port if you get the right model. The IDE is java and is so-so but the code you write is in fact compiled instead of tokenized like the basicstamp. It's like writing for the AVR but with convenient ways of getting your code on and off the chip. Epic win.

At work I got finished writing this fucking beautiful work of art that downloads files from AT&T's Z/OS MVS mainframe over dialup, does a bunch of comparisons to see if the file is different than the one I downloaded yesterday (see why?!!?!?!) and then try sending it to our intercarrier compensation billing company. If all that works, kick out an email telling everyone it worked. Otherwise, do nothing and let the humans figure out what went wrong. It worked today, the first time I left it unsupervised. Kickass.

I'm also writing an advanced tollfree routing system to build upon some neat features I've seen elsewhere, and give even more flexibility. Woo.

What's up, livejournal?

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 05:16:14 GMT

Becky,

Thanks for putting up with my ass for 10 years.

Love,

Paul

PictureMail

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 15:13:09 GMT

PictureMail
Originally uploaded by Paul Timmins.

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 22:06:38 GMT

Got my arm worked on again. There were two pockets of infection that hadn't worked their way out. They drained them with a scalpel and a syringe, and now I get darvocet and augmentin. Good times.

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 05:59:32 GMT

240 posts back and I'm giving up. It's starting to look familiar so I'm sure I've caught almost everything. If you were expecting a comment from me somewhere, let me know where.

Let's see, what has happened the last few weeks?

+ Becky bought her mom's car. We're a two car household now!

- I got a bad infection in my arm. I thought it was a bug bite, but the kind folks in the ER told me it was an infection of my hair follicle, leading to cellulitis. Google that term if you want some gross photos. If you want ones that are more representative, I've been tracking the changes with my camera, so if you want 7mp of infected arm goodness, I has it.

I had to be admitted to the hospital, and i spent the night in observation getting IV antibiotics every 6 hours. I took my 10 days of antibiotics afterwards, every 6 hours, faithfully. I run out tomorrow and it's not totally gone yet. I bet they're going to jab me with more needles. :(

- Taking vicodin and keflex does bad things to your bowels. Nothing medically relevant, thank God (at least so far, anyway) but that combo has left me in a mild bit of misery in ways that you can imagine if you read the side effects on each one. (See how I'm saving you the really gruesome detail I'd usually make sure to throw in? Consider it your Thanksgiving present!)

+ I finally got a working printer in the house. It's a nice brother laser printer and networked scanner. It was an excellent deal (under $300) and includes native IPv6 support. Very excellent. It sends scanned stuff over FTP to a selectable list of places. It emails me if it runs out of paper. It's awesome.

+ I upgraded the webserver to dual 500GB SATA II drives with 16GB cache from it's 250GB raid with one failed drive. This is of course a huge upgrade and has been made of win. What made it more win was the drives were on sale at Microcenter for $60-70 apiece.

+ An old friend from highschool has caught up with me on facebook. This is also made of win. I lost his email address and contact info in the raid a few years ago.

+ My satellite tracking software I wrote to track the international space station, and adjust my radio to compensate for the doppler shift of an object that's got a ground speed of over 3km/sec. It works!

- The problem is that the ISS wasn't on the air when I tried to call them. Doh! Hope to manage to score a contact with the space station this weekend.
PS: ICom's CI-V serial protocol sucks balls but can be used for this if you tweak things just right. I need to make a version for my kenwood in the car. (My car's ham radio is the same model used on the ISS)

I'm sure I forgot things. I've been busy at work as always, and social events were had, and good times were had. I love you guys!