Well, Mortal Kombat Online is facing an extended downtime. Apparently we are suffering from such a catastrophic hardware failure, so to speak, that it’s going to take a few days and a LOT of work to get everything back up and running the way it was. I’ve left the standard disclaimer on the site itself, but I figured I would use this post on my own site to give an in-depth explanation as to what happened and allow others to give feedback if necessary.

Read more “An explanation for Mortal Kombat Online’s downtime…”

Before going into this story, I have to admit that I have a low opinion of our local NBC affiliate to begin with. I tended to call them the “Shiny Things News Broadcast”, because of their emphasis on bright shiny graphics and little actual journalism content. In any event, I simply avoid them whenever possible. This afternoon, though, they managed to cause my opinion of them to drop even lower.

I got called into the administrative assistant’s office, to take a look at her screen. I walked in, and saw a popup from a site advertising something called DriveCleaner. She had tried to go to Channel 2’s website, and the popup had come up. She tried to click it closed, but we clicked the wrong part of the window and it tried to run a false drive scan. We closed it, and it attempted to force a download of the DriveCleaner installer. Fortunately, our proxy server blocked the download and all was finished.

Still, I was rather annoyed at what happened. Having spy/malware distributors as advertisers only lowers your reputation, and even I’m surprised a reputable station like Channel 2 would allow that. Ah, well. The problem is solved for now; I’ve blocked both the DriveCleaner and Channel 2 websites on the company proxy server, so hopefully we won’t have to deal with that crap now.

Of course, I’ll have to deal with coworkers asking why it’s blocked now, but I can handle that. :-)

EDIT – 8:35 PM – What the hell? The Houston Chronicle site did it to me too! Damnit, it looks like I’m going to have to write a couple of nasty emails to these sites…

Well, I finally took the PowerBook in to the Apple Store at the Galleria this evening. The final prognosis was that the keyboard itself was damaged; they had noticed a crack in it, and it had seen so much use that the left and right “nubs” under the spacebar were worn down completely. They looked to see if they had a replacement from a broken PowerBook, to no avail. They wanted $120 for a brand new one, but the guy behind the counter suggested I check eBay. Lo and behold, I found a company is selling them for $23 there. I’ll probably order one in the next day or two.

I know the thought from some might be that I should replace the PowerBook, especially as it’s nearing four years old. The truth is, though, that I can’t justify buying a MacBook. The PowerBook is still working great for me, other than the keyboard issue. I figure replacing the keyboard for less than $30 and being able to use it for another year or two would make more sense right now than buying a MacBook for $1500 or more. This PowerBook is easily the best laptop I’ve ever owned, and I’m loath to give it up just yet. Ah, well… we’ll see where things go from here, but at least it looks like it’ll be an easy and inexpensive repair job.

I’ve come to a decision. It’s one I’ve not made entirely lightly, but it’s made all the same.

Up until now, all of the PCs I’ve built for myself have been gaming-quality PCs. They typically last about three years or so, and when I upgrade it tends to be a large upgrade consisting of CPU, memory, motherboard, hard disk, and video card. That kind of upgrade isn’t really cheap. However, more and more, I’ve been finding myself playing my Xbox 360 far more than I have my PC. Gaming on my PC is becoming much less of a priority, to the point where I think the next machine I buy will probably be a Mac Mini or something similar, and the two 320 GB hard drives I have in my main PC now will just be put in enclosures and used as external USB 2.0 drives.

As for why I’m migrating to the Xbox 360… well, the fact that it has more games I want to play like Mortal Kombat: Armageddon and Gears of War is certainly a factor. There are a couple of other factors as well. For one thing, unless I want to run long cables, the 360 has a better display/sound setup. My PC has a 19″ LCD monitor and a four speaker/one subwoofer system. The 360 is in my entertainment center, and as such is hooked up to my 27″ LCD HDTV and my Dolby Digital 5.1 home theater receiver. Also, the 360 itself cost far less than a gaming-quality PC, and has a longer shelf-life, so to speak. Finally… with the 360, I don’t have to futz with installing into Windows and dealing with system requirements and the like.

So, what games am I looking forward to for the 360? Well, the three that come to mind right now are Command & Conquer 3, Unreal Tournament 3, and John Woo’s Stranglehold. I’ll probably pick up a few games on Xbox Live Arcade when the time comes. For now, though, I’m going to stick with the games I’ve got, especially with online Gears of War. I’m having fun, and that’s really all that matters. :-)

All right, I had a rather… spooky bit of weirdness with my cell phone late yesterday afternoon.

As I was driving to meet Louie for drinks last night, my cell phone rang. I answered it via my Bluetooth earpiece (as the phone itself was folded closed and in my shirt pocket), and I heard a male automated voice say, “Connecting.” Then I heard the phone ring twice, and the automated attendant at my office answered. I raised an eyebrow, and hung up, thinking that someone must have messed up trying to transfer a call to me.

A few minutes later, my phone rang again. I didn’t recognize the number, but I answered it. I heard the phone ring twice, and then someone said, “Thank you for calling the Cheesecake Factory of Houston. How may I help you?” Shocked, I mumbled something about maybe having a wrong number and hung up. A few minutes later it happened AGAIN while I was on the phone with the network admin at work about it; this time it also had the voice saying, “Connecting.”

I ended up calling Cingular, but they were about as baffled as I was. Fortunately it didn’t happen again.

What caused this to go from just weird to goddamned weird was what happened later in the night. After returning home, I was doing a brief check of mail and chat before going to bed. I looked in #mortalkombat, and a regular with the nick GuiltyByDesign was telling everyone that the same thing that had happened to me earlier in the day had happened to her as well. As for what could have been in common between us… beats me. She’s in South Dakota and I’m in Houston, and she uses Verizon while I use Cingular.

I need to take a look around on the net later to see if anyone else has had that issue. Still, it’s damned odd, and I wish I knew what the hell happened. I don’t need this kind of spookiness in my life… heh.

Well, on Monday, my new laptop finally arrived. It’s a Dell Latitude D620 laptop, which is more or less the standard model of laptop we get at the office. I know I posted why I got the company laptop earlier; I posted a bit more detailed explanation of why and what I used before on a Slashdot comment, responding to a story asking about getting UNIX workstations at work.

Up until about a week ago, I used a self-provided PowerBook G4 as my work machine.

Not too long after starting at where I work, I was given the task of overseeing my employer’s Linux boxes. Seeing as most users did their Office et al work via Windows terminal server, I loaded Linux onto my laptop and used rdesktop for the terminal servers. It was… okay, but the power management and various interface issues annoyed me. I ended up buying a PowerBook G4 for both work and personal use, and it worked beautifully for the most part. (Though, MS’s Remote Desktop Connection for Mac software was crap, and for the most part I still used rdesktop on X11.)

However, I finally ended up switching back to a Windows laptop last week. I’m doing more and more remote site implementations, and I found that not only was getting my USB-to-RS232 adapter working with minicom something of a chore (for programming switches, routers, and the like), there were a couple of programs that I would need in Windows that ran dog slow in VirtualPC. Also, I couldn’t justify the cost of a new MacBook when the old one still worked well for personal use, and I knew the company wouldn’t buy me one.

So, for work purposes, I now run a Dell Latitude D620 with XP Pro. If I need to administrate the Linux boxes, I use PuTTY and Xming, and if I need to do some local testing I have VMWare Workstation installed locally. I still keep the PowerBook for personal use.

A couple of other things I didn’t mention were that the D620 I requested came with a docking station and a Cingular 3G broadband card. While I could have gotten a BookEndz docking station for a MacBook Pro, I don’t know of any 3G support for Mac OS X. Also, from a corporate perspective, Dell Gold tech support is faster than AppleCare should I have a problem.

So, how is the laptop so far? Besides myself, I’m impressed. It’s worked fine, other than an issue with my laptop having sync issues with the domain controller, but I suspect the VMware network adapters were responsible for that. Otherwise, since I’ve loaded my work software on it, it’s worked fine for me. I’ve also got a USB stick with my personal apps like Thunderbird and Gaim installed on it for when I travel, so it’s ready on that front. All in all, it’s a decent machine. And despite my worrying about not asking for a case, it turned out one was ordered for it anyway by accident.

As for the PowerBook, it’ll be my personal machine, and travel with me on personal trips and Mortal Kombat Online related trips. It’s still a workhorse, and will serve my purposes. I just need to bring it in to an Apple Store to have them look at the spacebar and figure out why it’s not working properly.

Ah, well. I think I’ll be good on the laptop front. We’ll just see how it goes. :-)