Spidle Blog

The one thing my wife loves to hear me say, “it’s outdated” when it comes to technology.  I had the opportunity to use that phrase over the weekend when I was at the Apple store picking a new case for my 1st gen iPhone.  They had a whopping 3 cases for me to select from.  Where as the 3G model had at least a dozen or more.

It really amazes me how well Apple can position people to feel that they have yesterdays technology or model when it is perfectly fine.  My 1st gen iPhone works great.  It still makes calls, I still play games and download apps to it.  But when you walk into the Apple store and see the next generation of your widget you instantly have the feeling of how old and outdated your current model is.

Good job Apple keep up the good work.  Too bad I still won’t be getting a new iPhone anytime soon though. 

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That is the cost of taking a family of 5 out to a movie.  This is going pretty cheap too.  We went to Jordan Creek Century to see Bedtime Stories, which is a very good movie. 

So before we picked up 4 slices of cheese pizza and a couple drinks at the food court.  Then bought the movie tickets, then popcorn and 2 drinks.

I guess I could have titled this blog “I remember when…”, see I remember when movies cost under $5 to get into etc.

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It has been a year since our youngest went to the eye doctor.  He was only 4 then, and we knew then he would probably need to get glasses.  The doctor wanted us to wait a year and see if his sight improved on its own.

Unfortunately his sight got worse.  We knew this back in November when we had his conference for preschool.  He was not doing well at all.  He already had an appointment for January for the eye doctor so we waited until then.  The appointment was a week ago and yes he needed to get glasses.  So here he is with his new glasses.  Hopefully his sight will get better now that he has these.

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My big present for the year was this http://tinyurl.com/7xmthl a double-bass drum pedal for our drumset at home.  Lately I’ve been playing the drum set at church around once a week, just playing around, and really liked the double-bass pedal setup.  I’ve never learned to play double-bass and thought that would be something fun to have.

So that is what the family bought me for Christmas.  The pedal and a book to learn how to play it.  It is actually really fun and is a pretty good leg work out.  One of these days I’ll do some recording and put it up here.

Overall we had a very good Christmas.  It seems that our boys got everything they asked for.  It wasn’t too hectic seeing relatives, and it was spread out over 4 days.  My brother came back from Denver and it was good to see him too.  

Since I only had the 25th and 26th off my break was short but it was just long enough for me.  Now I’m ready for the new year.

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I threw this little script together this morning so we can display various network and server monitoring pages in Safari on a (lamp) iMac. It was kind of fun getting back into Applescript again.

================================
– Author name: mspidle
– Creation date: 10/10/2008
–
– Description: This script launches Safari and opens specified URLs in separate
–                tabs.  Then once open it will cycle through the tabs after the
–                specified wait time.  This was created for our NOC computer, to
–                show pretty graphs on a big screen.
–
–

– Enter each URL you want to load in a separate tab
set urlList to {”http://techcomm/mrtg/bd.html”, “http://techcomm/cacti/graph_view.php?action=tree&tree_id=3″, “http://techcomm/NetworkStatistics/”}
set numURLs to (count urlList)

tell application “Safari”
    activate
    set cWindow to first item of windows
    global seconds_to_delay
    –Specify how many seconds to display each tab
    set seconds_to_delay to 5
    set the URL of tab 1 of cWindow to (item 1 of urlList)
   
    repeat with i from 2 to (numURLs)
        tell cWindow to make new tab
        set the URL of tab i of cWindow to (item i of urlList)
    end repeat
   
   
   
    tell application “Safari”
        repeat
            repeat with i from 1 to the count of tabs of cWindow
                tell cWindow to set current tab to tab i
                delay seconds_to_delay
            end repeat
        end repeat
    end tell
end tell
====================================

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So last night while watching the news I thought I saw somebody walk by our bedroom door, then I heard the person sneeze, which startled me.  I still wasn’t sure if I saw someone walking but then heard loud footsteps and I knew someone was up so I got up to investigate.

I checked the bathroom, no one there, so I checked the boys rooms.  All there except our middle child.  ??? I go back to the bathroom, no, still no one in there.  So slight panic creeps in a little bit.  I tell Debbie I can’t find him so she goes to the bathroom and no, still no one in there.  As she goes to his bedroom I take off down the stairs to check the rest of the house.

Once downstairs I call his name but no answer.  I then see that the door to the garage is open and the garage light is on.  OK a little more panic takes over.  I call his name again and he walks into the house.  I asked him what he was doing, and he mumbles something unintelligible, like sleeping/sweeping/swiffering ???  I say “OK, go back to bed.” at which he takes off up the stairs back to his bed.

Debbie met him part way and I tell her, he is sleepwalking.  Once he is back in bed, he starts laughing.  Debbie tells him goodnight and covers him up.  We then blockade his door with a hamper so we’ll at least hear him move this if he gets up again.

Let’s just say it took me a while to go to sleep after that.  Of course Debbie blames me for this, I’ve had numerous sleepwalking episodes in my life and a few when I was his age, grade school.  The most memorable ones I’m told are of me trying to get out the front door of the house, and another time opening the freezer door which thawed everything in there.

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In 9 weeks or around 45 working days we’ve accomplished a ton of work and projects. Here are the highlights.

• Gathered and sent off 280 computers to the refurb company.
• Received and inventoried 300 + new computers.
• Removed everything from 2 of our 3 racks and installed a replacement rack (this was done in a 10 hour period).
• Created a new Leopard image for all district Macs.
• Created a new Leopard server image for our building servers.
• Received 9 new Intel Xserves and installed.
• Cascaded 8 G5 Xserves to building servers.
• Figured out how to deploy a dual boot lab of 20″ iMacs. Booting Mac OS X and Windows XP., then deployed the images.
• Created a fresh Windows XP image to be deployed on 6 building Mac minis for food service checkin, then deployed these.
• Deployed the 08-09 Leopard image to 1600 Macs in the district.
• Cleaned all district computers.
• Updated our FileMaker server from version 7 to version 9.
• Upgraded our TechTools Pro installation.
• Upgraded our MySQL server from version 4.x to 5.x
• and lots more things I can’t remember at the moment…

This was all done while working in the middle of a new high school that is being constructed around us. We had to change parking lots 3 times, paths to get to our office at least 3 times. Contend with, construction dust, chemical smells, water pipes leaking, floors being finished, torrential rain flooding, floors being waxed, fire alarm testing, and much much more.

I’ll be glad when school starts and we can take a rest. (ha, like that will happen) Then the real fun starts, End User Support.

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http://www.joyoftech.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1130.html

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I think it was the iPhone app for Facebook. Once I downloaded this and played with it a little and tried the update status feature, I was hooked. It seems all of the kids that are working for me this summer also have Facebook pages as well as a lot of people I know from church.

So this week I’ve been changing my Facebook profile and sending invitations to people, replying to invitations. This social networking stuff can be real work, especially when you get into Twitter. I’m not there yet but have been lurking.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Mark_Spidle/838134151

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Last week was one of the most exhausting weeks of the year for me and my family. It was VBS (Vacation Bible School) at our church. Debbie was the director of the whole show and has been working on it pretty much night and day for the last three months.

It all culminates in one week, 5 nights from 6:30 to 8:30. So the stats were, 508 individual kids, anywhere between 353 to 381 kids per night, 112 kids accepting Christ as their savior and leader, and around 320 volunteers.

This year I worked in Registration/Administration and as a Runner. This was my most enjoyable year, working. I got to walk around and see what was going on. In previous years I worked as the director of the theater, so I was running, video/Keynote/Pro Presenter for the nightly drama. The drama is run 3 times per night so I was pretty much stuck there all night.

Here are a couple photos:

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