I went snow boarding today. It was really fun to get back out on the slopes again. We went to Sugar Bowl in CA. Jane's cousin Amanda was with us. We had a blast in the snow park. I got to ride the half pipe for, really, the first time. I've rode them before, but not really like I did this time. I actually got some air in it. Jane did very well in it also, even got some air of her own.

There are two half pipes there. One is small and easy to ride. The other is huge and crazy. We road both. The small one first. We learned a bunch in there. Then the big one. I did a really cool lip slide in it. It was at least 15 foot deep. Crazy.

Anyway, I'm totally wasted right now. Only lasted until 4PM. I guess sitting on my butt all day doesn't help. Next time I'll be better.

Welp, bed time for me.

My office is orange! It's crazy. I'll be moving back in by friday, I hope. First I have to get the new floor in. I'm thinking about doing that on Wed. I hope. Anyway, enjoy the photo of the orange room.

I have just received the latest OmniWeb 5 closed beta from The OmniGroup. I just have to say that the OmniGroup "Just Gets It"(tm). They really understand what people want from a browser. This new version will top all other browsers that I've see. Real browser innovation here. I can't really talk about the features yet, but I can say that they are blowing me away.

Now, for the bad. The browser still has all the same bugs and missing features that the previous version had. But this is a pre-beta beta release, so I'm hoping they get fixed. One of the most annoying things right now is that the textarea widgets don't use the Apple HIG for input. Meaning, I can't go to the start and the end of the line using the Apple defined key commands (Command+Left Arrow, Command+Right Arrow). The entry box still has the screen drawing problems. But I'm sure that they will get all the problems fixed this time around. I'm cheering for them.

This browser alone is worth buying a Mac for.

Why is it that the worse web browser is the most popular web browser?... Oh yeah, because MS forces everyone to use it. Forgot.

MSIE does not handle JPEGs, PNGs, or CSS correctly. Why use it? It allows tons or pop-ups, it runs malicious code to install viruses and take over your computer.

AND MS WON'T FIX IT!

It came today. My new The Mouse from MacMice.com. It's a three button wheel mouse that looks just like the Apple Pro Mouse.

When I first took it out of the box I was thinking that this is a great looking mouse. It looks just like the Apple mouse except that it has a split down the middle where the two buttons are.

Next was the mouse cable. I noticed that it was not very long and I am worried if it's long enough to make it to the USB port on my monitor. I wanted to plug it in there because with my old mouse I kept hitting the USB plug with the mouse. See I use the mouse on the left side of the keyboard and the ports are on the right side. Anyway, I plugged it in and it had plenty of cable. Not too much mind you. Just right.

After plugging it in, that's when things changed. It has very fast tracking. Way too fast for me. So I went into the preferences panel and lowered that. Then I had a problem with the buttons. I'm a left handed mouse user so I need to swap the buttons. The Mouse does not come with software in the box and Mac OS X does not have support for swapping the buttons. I went to their web site and downloaded their drivers. I had to reboot the system for them to be loaded into the Kernel. When the system booted up, the mouse was in over drive. Super fast. I think Jane would like that. She says that her mouse is too slow. Anyway, I change the preferences and now the tracking speed and buttons are fine. All set.

Next problem. The mouse feels funny. I'm not used to the two buttons any more. When I click, I end up clicking both of them. It's easy to do with this mouse. The top of the mouse is loose also. Seems like it's going to fall off. I solved this with pushing the top down against the base and it smooshed together. Now it feels fine.

This mouse is a lot lighter than the Apple mouse. Feels like there is nothing there. I kinda like a heaver mouse myself, but I guess I'll get used to it soon. The other thing is I still keep pressing both buttons at once. I guess with a bit more training I'll get used to that also.

I'll give it a few weeks to see if I like it. I do like that it has the three buttons and a wheel. I like the wheel, especially when surfing web sites. The right button (left in my case) is great for pulling up menus without having to use the keyboard.

Anyway, my score currently is a 5 out of 10. Check back next week.

You may have noticed that my web cam has been off. This is because my office is getting a new paint job and a few other modifications. It should be finished up by next week and I'll be moving back in. Right now I'm half way between the kitchen and dinning room. I'll get a photo when it's finished.

Now I've got my other servers up and running. What a pain. All I did was an apt-get update and it blew everything up and five different servers. That will teach me. Do not update for no reason. When I switch to FreeBSD, I won't have that problem any more. I'll only update what I need to update.

Ahh, finally. Got my billing system back up and running. It's running on FreeBSD now. I think I'm going to swap everything from WWW1 to this new web server. Then it will be my first step to converting over to FreeBSD. Fun...!

I'm not sure if someone hacked into my web server, or if it was a worm/virus that crashed it this morning. I'm looking at the log files and see lots of attacks going on. Apache had an error loading a module when it was restarted this morning. I think it restarts when it rolls the logs.

I see a lot of requests for barspin.com/black and barspin.com/admin$. I'm not sure what that means. I see a lot of requests for the old default.ida also. It looks like a new worm running around the net and maybe my web server just crashed for no reason. Or maybe I'm losing another hard drive. I'm not sure. But it sucks.

I'll be moved to FreeBSD soon. Then I'll have a more secure installation. It's just a matter of time.

My ISP Billing software quit working today. I went over to the members section of Modern Bill to see if there is an upgrade or what not and my support contact is expired. So I can't even update it. It's time to write my own billing software now. Uhg.