…is about eating the good parts of the cookie. But you still gotta finish the whole thing!

What a pain in the arse!

I was installing Microsoft’s SharePoint Portal Server 2003 for the good majority of today and kept running into a problem with the Central Administration website - it wouldn’t start! When trying to start it, I would only receive the error “The parameter is incorrect”.

As it turns out, the required application pool wasn’t getting created for some unknown reason. It took a little bit of digging, but I did find the reason at the usual place. Apparently you need to use the form server_name\user_account instead of simply user_account - the install isn’t smart enough to resolve the name without explicitly defining the server name. That seems a little ridiculous to me. You would think the install would do some sort of verification during the install. Guess not!

Monad is the new shell that will be included in Windows Longhorn, and it looks like it’s going to be awesome! A beta test is available for your pleasure!

I just signed up for it - I can’t wait to get the download information. I love my command line interfaces.

via Matt Hawley:

You might be a geek if…
…you go to a fancy resturaunt and tell them your name is “Lan” in hopes that when they call your name they say “Lan party of 3″.

I’m definitely going to have to try this sometime.

I’ve been building some XP images for our lab at work and figured I would throw the release candidate of Service Pack 2 onto them.

As one might expect, the networking components are severely disrupted, resulting in nmap syn scans coming back as all filtered. TCP connect scans come back fine, however. I tried to figure it out using different versions of winpcap (but later versions require an unreleased version of nmap to work) and digging into some of the firewall options on sp2. It’s not just the firewall, though, as I can disable it completely and still have nmap not work.

For now, I guess I have to drop back to SP1. Too bad, I kind of liked the firewall in sp2…much more configurable!

It took two years, but I finally pimped out the bimmer! The best part of that upgrade is the Pirelli Pzero Nero tires I put on - those suckers stick to the road like glue, it is amazing! They’re also much quieter than my previous all-seasons.

Why must Illinois have such a lack of twisty roads!?

Sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day.

Did I mention we got a pool table at our place? I’ve always wanted one…life is good.

I volunteered for the Chicago Cares Serve-a-thon last weekend. It turned out to be a really fun event. We went to a school where they needed some classrooms, lunchrooms, and lockers painted. My group was lucky enough to work on the lockers, which actually proved to be somewhat difficult, given the requirement to tape the locks and numbers so they don’t get painted over.

It was a great day, though. The best part was when the vice principal walked into the room where the volunteers were congregated and was simply overwhelmed by the number of people that had showed up.

The AC happened to go out in the hall we were painting in, but as long as one stood by the door it was still somewhat cool. Halfway through the day, they also put some tunes on over the loudspeaker and when one certain song came on…there was some dancing going on, that’s for sure!

I was amazed how sore I was the next day, mostly from all the squatting and brush strokes…it was a good hurt, though, and I topped it off with a good bike ride.

Oops –>

I turned on the water in my tub the other night to clean it out as it doesn’t get much use. Silverfish have been known to show up if I don’t flush the jets occasionally. Unfortunately, I forgot about it. Thanks to some engineer for drains at the top of tops, or else it would have been a bad night!