We took a drive up to Mirror Lake last week while my good friend and his family were in town for a wedding.

Words can’t begin to describe, so here are a couple of pictures instead.

Picked up this game from Steam this afternoon for $5.   It’s kinda cheesy in the animation, almost the same style as the Lego video games.

Foreign Legion

It’s a single player only game, I think it’d have some great potential if it had some multiplayer capability.

The goal is to prevent the insurgents from blowing up the building that the civilians are holed up in during the allotted time.

When you cause your enemies to explode, it fills the “buckets” with blood.  Kinda cheesy, but it’s entertaining even at $5.

Just sayin’

More stuff later.

As I have a mix of XP and Vista desktops, and my file server is Debian using Samba for the sharing aspect, I recently ran into an issue where trying to manage files over the network share, I’d get the error ‘You need permission to perform this action’. I have full administrative rights on my account, matched to the credentials on the smb server.

A quick google search reports that if UAC is enabled, this isn’t a problem. I disable UAC however because it’s annoying.

The problem is that Samba is obeying the DOS attribute flag, and not allowing Vista to manage the files.

All that is needed to fix this, is tell samba to not store the DOS attribute flag in your smb.conf.

store dos attributes = no

restart samba, and now you can manage your files again without being told you need permission to perform this action.

My wife is participating in this years MS Walk in Salt Lake City.

As she is afflicted with MS, she wants to give back what she can.

Her donation page is here for those interested in helping her reach her donation goal.

Sadly, I won’t be participating as it’s about a 3 mile walk, and having recent knee surgery it would be too much while it’s healing.

Ok, not really about food, but I needed to get the md5 from a Cisco type 5 password to attempt a remote password recovery.

sed -n ’s/[ :]/_/g; s/^\(.\{1,\}\)_5_\($1$[$./0-9A-Za-z]\{27,31\}\)_*$/\1:\2/p’ < cisco-device-config > passwd

this little snippet will at least extract the password into a format that john or C&A can then attempt to retrieve.

2008 was an eventful year this year.

My sister got married.  Congrats Lissa and Travis.

Assisted with the first Gaming and Electronics Expo in Salt Lake City.  Protocol 42 was invited to put on a LAN Party and PC gaming tournaments.  I administered the tournaments and gaming servers.

We actually took a vacation.  We visited some of Niki’s family that lives in Vermont.  Very nice folks.

Lissa and Travis bought their first house.  Congrats again!

I attended the Utah Open Source Conference, and setup the network for the vendor booths.

I switched employment vendors (again).  2009 will be a new adventure into the job market.

I finally broke down and had knee surgery.   Complete replacement.  It’s still healing as of this posting.

There’s probably more, but I can’t remember them now.

I’ve spent the better portion of the last month updating and replacing various items in our house which is now 30 years old.

I’ve updated the hardware on our kitchen cabinets.  The seller had them painted gloss white, and only removed the handles.  As a result, the hinges were gloss white as well.  Tacky.  I’ve replaced them with a brushed nickel hinge, as well as the new handles to match the finish.  I’ll have to pull everything off and fix the paint where it was bonded to the old hinge and has now peeled back slightly.

The door knobs were the next item to be replaced.  Their was a mix and match of antique brass, polished brass for these.  They’re all now a clean brushed nickel.

The next area that received a face lift, was the main bathroom.  The sink and faucet were the original (both had date casting of 1978).  As a result, they were in a serious state of wear and tear.  The faucet is brushed nickel (imagine that).  The towel rack and toilet paper holder also got an update in a brushed nickel finish as well.  With that, Niki has wanted a hand towel rack near the sink for ease of reach and use.  So one of those was installed at the same time.

The lighting in this bathroom was updated as well to a nice brushed nickel fixture.  I also managed to track down new handles and trim for the tub fixtures.  I’m still battling the diverter valve not functioning correctly, which in my research appears to be a common problem with the brand that is installed.  I would like to replace the underlying hardware, but that’s for another day.

Niki has a better write up with pictures over on her blog.

Next up on the list was replacing the outdated pendant lighting in the entry way.  Again, the sellers half assed this and painted over a good portion of it.  One of the mounting screws wasn’t even tightened properly.

We now have a much nicer and more up to date brushed nickel pendant lighting, which uses three bulbs instead of one.  Much better lighting now.

Today was the last venture to the big box hardware store, where we picked up some sheetrock, mud, tape, etc.  This is to repair the ceiling around the swamp cooler vent.  Last summer, the old cooler rusted out, and leaked water down which damaged the sheetrock.  It’s one of those projects that I’ve put off because of the amount of time and labor that will take to repair.  Now that I have the materials, I just need to find the time.

Also in today’s venture was to procure some new floor lamps for the living room.  After much searching, we finally found some that compliment the pendant lighting in the entry way.  The next few items were minor, new hinges for some of the doors upstairs, as well as a new door stopper for the pantry door in the kitchen.

The last update was replacing the porch light.  It’s now a brushed nickel motion sensing fixture.

It looks like this

Except it only has one bulb.  Haven’t had a chance to get a picture of it installed yet.

Now to finish adjusting it to our liking for sensitivy, time, etc.

I’m sure Bob Vila would be proud of the progress made.

finally got around to upgrading my wordpress install.  it was outdated by a few versions.

mmm. cookies.