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(The following is a letter emailed to RC Willey Customer Service on February 27, 2010) To Whom it May Concern, I have been an RC Willey customer for many years. Since buying a six-bedroom vacation home in Utah a few years ago, I have purchased over (X) dollars in furniture and […]

Customer Feedback Regarding RC Willey Furniture Delivery

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Don’t get too excited… it’s not as awesome as God Mode in DOOM, but it is a fun little easier egg for uber-geeks hiding under the hood of Windows 7. Windows 7 God Mode allows you to tinker with all of the the operating system’s control panel items from within a single […]

Activate Windows 7 God Mode

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If you’re an “ultimate” geek running an “Ultimate” edition of Windows (such as Windows Vista Ultimate or Windows 7 Ultimate), but you want to upgrade or downgrade to Windows 7 Professional, Windows 7 Home Premium, or Windows 7 Home Basic, you’ve got a problem: the Windows 7 installer won’t allow […]

Upgrade (or Downgrade) Windows 7 Ultimate or Vista Ultimate to ...

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Evening Magazine, a local show here in Seattle on NBC-affiliate KING5, did a segment on “over the top” home theaters. They tracked me down on the Internet (not really that hard to do) and talked me into allowing a film crew into the house (which also wasn’t that hard to do), […]

Look, Ma! I’m on TV!

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This is a video of my presentation as part of the BYU Business School’s Entrepreneur Lecture Series on January 11, 2010. Normally, I’d wear a tie, bring PowerPoint slides, and try to inspire the kids into being entrepreneurs. This time, I took a slightly different approach. 🙂

BYU Entrepreneur Lecture Series Video – January 11, 2010

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To stay connected while I’m out of the office or travelling, I use a VPN connection from my laptop to a Windows Server. And while the benefit of being able to quickly and securely access my documents and other files on the server over any Internet connection is nice, the drawback is that all […]

Using the Local Default Gateway with a Windows VPN Connection

I’ve got a Dell Studio 1737 laptop, on which I dual-boot Windows 7 and Fedora 12. But with the default  graphics drivers installed by FC12, I’d receive an Accelerated Graphics Not Available error message if I tried to enable System > Preferences > Desktop Effects. The solution was to do: […]

Enabling Desktop Effects on Fedora 12 with ATI Radeon HD ...

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This post is mostly for my own reference, just in case I need to rebuild a server and want to save myself the Googling. These links helped: Nagios Core 3.x Docs – The quick-start guide was great. I recommend compiling yourself instead of using yum so that your paths match […]

Helpful Links For Setting Up Nagios and NRPE on RHEL ...

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I recently noticed that my /boot partition was at 95% full, so I investigated to see what was causing it. Apparently, it was filling up with older versions of the linux kernel as a result of upgrades. Because my system has been very stable, I decided to keep only the […]

Removing Old Kernels on Fedora, RHEL, or CentOS with Yum

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For about a year now, we’ve been happily running two Dell PowerEdge 2950s with quad procs, 4GB of RAM (or so we thought), and RHEL5. Running a high-traffic website can be memory intensive, so we recently decided to upgrade the memory, and bought 8 more GB of RAM for each […]

Running more than 4GB RAM on Fedora, RHEL, & CentOS

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In a cabinet in a top secret location somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, I’ve got two Dell PowerEdge 2950s, each with four 2GB DIMMs installed. I purchased four additional 4GB DIMMs to upgrade the memory in both to a total of 16GB, and installed them in the servers last night, so […]

Dell Warning: The current memory configuration is not optimal.

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A few months ago, I installed two software upgrades in my 2007 Maserati Quattroporte GT Sport: an enhancement module for the drive-by-wire system, and an ECM peformance chip, both developed and manufactured by Formula Dynamics. They both made huge differences to the car’s performance. Until recently, neither unit had produced […]

Got New OBDII Code Scanner to Clear Check Engine Light ...

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After successfully setting up a dual boot of Windows 7 (64-bit) and Fedora 12 on my new Dell Studio laptop, I wanted to record some of the tricks that were necessary to get it done. The laptop is a Dell Studio 1737 (why didn’t they call it 1337?) which came […]

Dual Boot Windows 7 and Fedora 12 Linux with Dell ...

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Because of the consulting work I do for the Department of Defense and the CIA, the security of my personal data is a big deal. So when my benevolent benefactors in Virginia sent me an 8GB Ironkey a little over a year ago as part of their new civilian contractor security […]

I wonder if Ironman uses an Ironkey…

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My black belt test is scheduled for Memorial Day Weekend 2010. I’ve been working toward it since late 2001. Yesterday, with 180 days to go, I decided to increase the intensity of my workouts. In fact, I’m typing this from my elliptical in my basement gym. I’m making a public […]

179 days to go

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UPDATE 10/18/2010: Since writing this post, I have upgraded to CentOS 5.5 and have switched to using OpenDKIM to sign outgoing mail. It will also work great with CentOS 5.4. An updated blog post with step-by-step instructions is here.

DKIM Proxy Install on CentOS 5.4

I found this post from darkness very helpful when I moved from an older RHEL to CentOS 5.4 on a Dell PowerEdge 2650 server: http://darkness.codefu.org/wordpress/2006/09/22/247 Adding: i8042.dumbkbd=1 to the kernel command line (it’s in /boot/grub/grub.conf) worked exactly as advertised. Apart from the keyboard input being a bit slow, and not […]

Remote Access of a Dell PowerEdge 2650 and DRAC III ...

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Those who truly know me know that I’m extremely “handy” with tools and DIY projects. My Dad grew up on farms and ranches, so he knows how to fix pretty much anything. I grew up going to Parkrose Hardware with him every Saturday, wandering around the aisles until we found […]

You Can Wash and Dry It. We Can Help.

Even though Halloween is barely over and Thanksgiving isn’t here yet, I brought in a decorator to help put the Utah house in the Christmas spirit. Whoa… my bad. When I said “a decorator,” I meant “THE decorator.” Lana Christensen designed the everyday interior of our Utah house from top-to-bottom, […]

It’s Christmas-time in Hollis, Queens!

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I did it – I upgraded my primary desktop to Windows 7. And yes, when I say “upgrade,” I mean I actually chose the “upgrade” option, because I was already running Vista. So far, so good. I probably wouldn’t have adopted so early (especially on my primary desktop, on which […]

Windows 7 In Effect

I’ve decided that, as part of my goal to take my black belt test in May 2010, I want to get in the best shape of my life. My karate workouts on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are consistent, and I’m pushing harder in class than ever before. But I want […]

If you want a different result, you need different ingredients.

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Got an iPhone? Wanna freak out and impress your iPhone-toting friends? Then you should enable Emoji and send them some Japanese love! What’s Emoji? They’re cool little Japanese icons that Japanese people in Japan use on Japanese mobile phones to express their Japanese emotions to other Japanese people with Japanese […]

My iPhone is BIG in Japan, thanks to Emoji!