What a BuzzKill

In their infinite wisdom, the FCC has decreed that all VoIP providers must terminate service to customers that haven’t responded with their acknowledgement of the inherent limitations of making 911 calls through their VoIP phone service.

To put it simply: Due to how VoIP works, it’s difficult to connect customers to local 911 call centers. So in an emergency, 911 might not be as quick and easy (or at all) as it is with standard phone service. The FCC wants to make sure that all customers understand this issue. So if customers do not acknowledge that they understand this, the VoIP provider must terminate their service.

How is this supposed to make sense? What happens if one of these customers needs to call the police or the fire department? Not only will they not be able to dial (a limited) 911, but they won’t be able to call anybody else! This just seems like government policy stepping on it’s own toes to me.

So far, I’ve been staring at this thing for 7 minutes, but drawing a total blank. Maybe it’s because I’m hungry.

Today I missed lunch due to a 30 minute training class (that I held) going for 45 minutes. I was supposed to go out to Souplantation with some of the guys from the office, but I was delayed just enough time to miss the boat. Not having a car sucks. My only remaining options are:

1. Walk 1/2 mile to the nearest sandwich shop
2. Purchase a pack of Ramen noodles from the break room vending machine

I don’t mind walking, which is probably what I’ll end up doing. It’s been so muggy lately that I hope I don’t work up a sweat going there and back. I just don’t want to stink up the office.

Alright, all is well and groovy in my world now. Shannon and I are back together, as we were before. We’re just going to take things as they come and do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done. I think that’s about as generic as I can make it. We talked and talked and realized that we had similar worries and concerns, but that we really enjoyed spending time together and thought it dumb to throw that away. It’s good to have her back.

So, yeah… I’m glad that’s over with. Now I can go back to being my usual dorky self!

Remember last week when I had trouble with hooking up a DV Camera to my computer at work? Well the good news (I failed to report last week) is that I was finally able to get it working. It took the purchase of a $200 device (that includes some very nice video editing software), but by Judas it works! I was able to capture all the video from the camera and put it on my hard drive… all 8 GB of it!

Raw AVI files sure do take up a lot of room. It’s no wonder there’s so much action going on with video codecs (MPG, MOV, WMV, DivX, XviD, etc) these days. Everybody is trying to figure out how to get movie files compressed enough so that they retain enough quality to be watchable, yet don’t gobble up your bandwidth and/or drive space.

There are a lot of projects at work that take priority above producing a fun little video of our staff bowling – like solving the erroneous errors on our backup server, possibly setting up a PHPBB so we can have online discussions with volunteers and partner organizations, moving away from Novell to a completely Windows 2003 AD network, etc. Now that I have it ready to be played around with, I’m anxious to try my hand at some more advanced video editing!

Friends with potential

That’s what Shannon and I have agreed to be. It is because of this that I feel a lot better about the whole thing, though it’s still painful to do (even more for her, the poor girl). We’re both still shell-shocked from it all, so we aren’t communicating very much right now. I’m hoping that once a little time has passed, we’ll be able to start hanging out together again – enjoying the things that made us friends in the first place.

It’s been only 3 days and I already miss her company.

Eat. My. Shorts.

I went and saw The Breakfast Club at a flashback showing last night. Jennie and her boy-toy, Karl (whom I’ve officially nicknamed “B.T.K.” last night) joined me. It’s amazing how different it feels to watch an old familiar movie on the big screen with 500 other people. It had been such a long time since I had last seen the movie in its original uncut format (in other words, not on TV) that the language and “objectionable content” felt fresh again. That movie still holds true, despite the out-dated style of clothes, music, and dancing in it.

This parting, or at least the agreement of such, was surreal, heart-wrenching, and miserable. To be fair to both of our needs, we opted for not continuing our relationship. How that will manifest itself, I’m still not entirely sure. I still feel that she’s my best friend, which makes me very sad that things turned out this way. At this point it still just seems like a strange and horrible dream.

In my usual don’t-spill-too-much-about-your-feelings manner, that’s all I’m going to say about the whole thing.

In other news…

My buddy Tim just called, as I was writing the above. He’s got Angels tickets and wants me to go with him to the game tonight. I could use a change of pace, so I gladly accepted.

Tim and his wife recently had a baby, so understandably we haven’t been able to spend much time together. He’s hysterical to be around, since we share a very similar sense of humor. Good timing, Tim.

What the hell is wrong with me? What is it that holds me back from just feeling love and enjoying life? Why is it that when something – someone – so good comes around I can’t open up? I’m not stupid, I’m not uncaring, I’m not oblivious – yet I seem to be unable to let go of “what if?”.

• What if it’s still too soon?
• What if things don’t work out?
• What if I meet somebody else and fall for them?
• What if I’m not sure I’m ready for this yet?
• What if I get involved too deeply and then have a change of heart?
• What if I hadn’t said “I love you”?
• What if I had just shut the hell up and not press for answers?
• What if I had just left well enough alone and just fallen asleep?
• What if I’m risking the loss of the best thing that’s ever going to happen to me?

People dream of having an almost effortless relationship with somebody that is positive and uplifting. A relationship where both people want the best for the other and offer support to one another. Two people that are attracted to each other and are able to enjoy sharing that attraction. I have that with Shannon, or at least had it until last night.

This is a case of me looking something good in the face and saying that it isn’t good enough. How messed up is that? What is holding me back? I fear that I’ve broken Shannon’s heart with my honesty; She openly gave it to me and I carelessly broke it.

I need to think long and hard about things. Rece is away at camp for the week, which provides me with plenty of time to reflect and think things through. Where’s the “easy” button when you need it? Bah!

Work, damn it! WORK!

We recently purchased a new digital video camera at the office. The idea being that we can take the raw footage and make videos for a variety of uses (training, recording meetings, staff outtings, etc.). The camera is easy enough to use and does a good job of recording, plus it has a digital photo feature that allows you to also take still shots – albeit at just “good enough” quality. The only problem seems to be with trying to get the video off-loaded and onto a computer!

Wasting 2-1/2 hours trying to get the darn camera to connect to a workstation is not my idea of fun. I’m a computer guy, so hooking up a device to a computer shouldn’t be a problem. I tried to connect it to a Mac, but it didn’t seem to like that, so then I tried connecting it to my computer (a Windows PC) and still no dice. Trying to find info on Canon’s website wasn’t easy, and still did not get me any closer to making it work.

It looks like I’ll be wasting more of my time dealing with this thing than my boss would like. Lucky for me, he totally understands that it isn’t an issue with my skills and is being patient enough to let me work it through. I might have a new video for you to watch soon, if I can get this P.O.S. to cooperate. Wish me luck!

In other news, it seems that many of my co-workers have registered a profile at www.myspace.com. I’ve spent a little bit of time on my account there, lately, adding some content so I don’t look like a total fool. Mostly it just directs people to come here and read my blog or visit my web site. I basically had an account there because other friends wanted me to check out their profiles, so now I have one and now a lot more people that I know do as well. I guess it’s one of the cool things to be part of these days… whatever.

Anyhow, if you haven’t already had enough of me, you can check out my profile at:

Nothing to say

I just realized that I haven’t posted anything here all week. I don’t have much to say, I guess. The Mighty Quinn made a funny little thing from my dancing video. You can check it out at:

Buzzy Hill – Internet Explorer Version

Buzzy Hill – FireFox Version

This week turned out to be pretty good. I caught up with an old friend, which was very nice. Spent time with Shannon, which is always a lot fun. In fact, last weekend Shannon and I spent a good portion of it cooking food that neither of us had cooked before. Lots of very yummy stuff: spicy grilled shrimp with chipotle salsa made from scratch, salmon cakes with a curry sauce, raspberry endive salad, lentils & rice with cucumber yogurt sauce. The leftovers were incredible, too!

Rece is spending the week up in Santa Maria with my dad, so it seems a little strange at home.

Tomorrow the staff at work are going out for bowling. It was originally supposed to be a day at the beach, but was changed to bowling. Oh well.

Last night I danced. Well, I don’t know if you could consider it dancing, but I sure as hell did flail around my arms and stomped ferociously about! I was hanging out at work afterhours so I could install an upgrade to the backup software on a server at work (you remember I’m a computer guy, right?). I was also supposed to replace a bad hard drive and create a mirrored set for redundancy, in case one of the drives dies on us.

The backup software upgrade went without a hitch and I was able to get the nightly backup job running again only 2.5 hours later than it would have ordinarily run. The hard drive mirror business didn’t go quite as planned, but it wasn’t that big of a deal – I’ll just do it another night next week.

Additionally, I had to upgrade the anti-virus software on the database (MS SQL 2000) server and the email (MS Exchange 2003) server. I also needed to visually verify the amount of physical RAM installed on our newest server, since it was only reporting that 3 GB of it was installed when we had ordered 4 GB (which it did have, so now I need to figure out why it’s not all showing up in Windows). To make a long story short; much of my night was spent rebooting servers.

Servers aren’t like your standard home or work computers – these things can take between 5 and 15 minutes to restart. This became rather boring after awhile so I decided to have fun with my boss. I ended up performing an impromptu interpretive dance, in perfect view of the video camera we have set up in the server room at the office. What it turned into was something more than I had originally anticipated.

My boss has access to all the security cameras on our network. The security setup is all digital and connects into our office network. I don’t know how long it stores data, but I know that it can go back at least 2-3 days. He can also save any portion of the video as an AVI video file on his computer, which means that it can be edited in any number of ways.

This morning I came in late, due to me sleeping in after staying at the office until 11:30 pm. When I got there, I was anxious to show him my little skit. It took a few minutes for him to find it, but when he did, he nearly choked to death from laughter. After we showed the raw footage to a few other people and seeing their reactions to it, I insisted that my boss save the video so I could polish it up a bit.

It took me some time to find the right music, but I think the video came out rather well. If you’d like to check it out, you can find it on my web site in the “Oddities” section, under the title “Bored at Work” or you can simply click here to view it. Enjoy!