These are my links for July 13th:

• Modified VNC client lets you VNC from your iPhone –

These are my links for July 11th:

• Xserve RAID: Power Consumption and Thermal Output (BTU) Information –
• Xserve (Late 2006): Power consumption and thermal output (BTU) information –
• PocketTweets: Twitter For Your iPhone –

These are my links for July 10th:

• Hark! The useful iPhone Web apps arrive: Word processor, app launcher, games – iPhone Atlas –

We went and watched the fireworks from the beach at Lake Ripley, which is in Litchfield, MN. There were awesome! This photo was taken with the camera mounted to a tripod and in shutter priority mode. I love the fact that you can see the barge in the light of the fireworks, along with the smoke from the charges.

–Pete

These are my links for June 29th:

• The Adventures of Systems Boy!: Publish iCal Calendars on the Internet for Free –
• Full Disclosure: 6 Month Vista Vuln Report, Debunked –

I recently attended the “Back to the 50s” car show at the Minnesota State Fair Grounds. It was an amazing show. I believe I heard someone say that there was over 11,000 cars there. I feel like we saw just a fraction of what was there. All these cool cars gave me an excuse to do some fun photography. This is a nice shot of the hood ornament on some kind of vintage Pontiac that looked really cool.

–Pete

I’ve been exploring Flickr a bit more over the last week and I have to admit, I’m absolutely fascinated by it. There seems to be a little bit of EVERYTHING there. I did a search for photos tagged with the word labrador and sorted them by “interestingness”, which is a term that the Flickr folks came up with to describe interesting photos. (A photo’s interestingness is a combination of a lot of factors, which they describe here.) The photos that came back were nothing short of amazing. I did another search for photos tagged with the word donkey and got another incredible set of photos to enjoy. My particular favorite was this one, which is of a woman in a bridal gown, holding a bunch of flowers, with a donkey trying to sniff/eat the flowers. I could totally picture my wife being the one in the photo. In fact, if we would have had donkeys at the time we were married, I would have bet that they would have participated in the wedding. As it was, we only had a dog at the time, and she did participate in the wedding. Not surprisingly, a few minutes before the ceremony she slipped outside and went swimming in the lake nearby. She returned just in time for the start of the ceremony so she could shake the water off of her body and onto all of us. You gotta love animals!

If you enjoy great photos and haven’t take the time to look at flickr, don’t wait any longer. Go explore.

–Pete

These are my links for June 28th:

• Apple – Support – iPhoto – Hot Tips –

These are my links for June 27th:

• Greg Kefalas’s Uninteresting Blog » Blog Archive » More on “Hackable” URLs and Safari – Try clicking on the title bar of a web page in Safari and it will let you drill down through the URL. Very Cool!

I haven’t seen a lot of need to join Flickr since I maintain my own photo gallery. This past week I decided I need to at least try it and see what all the fuss is all about. I have to admit, the interface is really nice. I download a copy of the Flickr to Aperture plugin, which made it a breeze to upload photos from Aperture. I also opted to upgrade right away to the Flickr Pro account. At $25, it is a bargain for a year. Go check it out my Flickr page and then let me know what you think of Flickr. Do you use it? Do you like it?

–Pete

This week’s photo of the week is a photo of a bunch of grapes from a Chardonnay grape vine at Savannah Chanelle vineyard near Saratoga, CA. I had an opportunity to visit there this past week and the grounds are absolutely beautiful. If you are ever in the San Jose area, I highly recommend a visit.

–Pete

These are my links for June 18th:

• Managed Client: Flush the cache when binding to a new directory server – This article has two different ways to flush the MCX (Managed Client) Cache.

Emmet has always loved water and in particular, swimming. He loves to swim in ponds, lakes, and rivers. If none of those are available he’ll even swim in a kiddie pool or the stock tank at the farm. He’s not particular. As long as it holds water and is big enough for him to climb in, he’ll try to swim in it. The only exception is a bathtub. If you put him in a bathtub, he acts like you are torturing him. Go figure.

This photo was taken of Emmet playing in a kiddie pool that we have out the farm. That same day, Emmet also did manage to take a swim in the stock tank as well.

–Pete

These are my links for June 16th:

• Final Cut Pro: Additional RAM may be recommended for High Definition video formats –
• Apple Remote Desktop 3: Which tasks are not encrypted? –

These are my links for June 14th:

• Mac OS X Server: Pointing non-managed clients to a specific Software Update server –

These are my links for June 13th:

• Mac OS X: Creating a login hook – How to set up a LoginHook

Something that I think we, as humans, all struggle with, is having the courage to forgive when we’ve been wronged in some way. This gets even harder when the person you need to forgive is someone you care about very deeply. Don Henley explored this in a song titled Heart of the Matter. Here’s an excerpt of the lyrics:

The trust and self-assurance that lead to happiness
They’re the very things – we kill I guess…
Oh pride and competition
Cannot fill these empty arms
And the work I put between us
you know it doesn’t keep me warm

There are people in your life who’ve come and gone
They let you down, you know they hurt your pride
You better put it all behind you baby; cause’ life goes on
If you keep carryin’ that anger, it’ll eat you up inside, baby

That last line is so true. Who do you need to forgive? What are you waiting for?

–Pete

I often get asked if I miss teaching. I do miss certain parts of it, but not all of it. I don’t miss grading papers. I hated that. It was always such boring, repetitive work. I also hated the process of calling in sick. You can’t just call in sick when you are a teacher. Whether you are sick or not, there is always a room full of kids waiting for you at the appointed time. If you needed to call in sick, you still needed to have something for the students to do. I always kept an emergency lesson plan in my top desk drawer so if I unexpecedly needed to miss one day, I was covered. If I needed to miss two days I was in trouble though. I remember at least once a year dragging my sorry, sick, self to school to put together a lesson plan for the students to do while I was out sick. On one occassion I had to bring a long a bucket in case I needed to throw up while I was there. Thankfully I didn’t need to use it.

So what do I miss? What I miss the most was interacting with the kids. Middle school kids are full of life. Things are always captivating when you have a room full of them.

By the way, I have a theory about middle school kids. My theory is that middle school kids get all of their energy by sucking it directly from all of the adults around them. That’s why the staff always looks exhausted at the end of the day.

–Pete

These two photos are the photos of the week not because they are awesome examples of my photographic skill. Instead they are here because what I’m photographing is bizarre, yet interesting. These two photos are of our large animal vet, Dr. John Froenig, of the Animal Medical Center in Hutchinson, MN, floating the teeth of Mariah, my friend Steve’s horse. I had never seen this done before and it was fascinating. The process starts by the vet giving your horse anesthesia, which in this case makes her sleepy, resistant to pain, and carefree. Surprisingly, she is still able to remain standing while under the anesthesia. Once he has given the medication, he literally supports her head by tying it to the beam above, and then putting a sinister looking metal bracket in her mouth to hold it open. Next he takes out a power float, which is an electric drill attached to a metal bar that is about 2 feet long and has a grinder at the end. He then proceeds to grind off the sharp points that will sometimes form on the cheek teeth of the horse.

Why is it called floating their teeth? I’m not sure, but this site has more info about the procedure in general.

Earlier that day I had gone to the dentist myself to get my teeth cleaned. I’m glad I did that first. If I had watched this first, I don’t know that I would have been able to stomach going to my own dentist later.

–Pete

You may not know that I began my working life after college as a science teacher. The first building I taught in was Frances M. Grass Middle School. That school no longer exists. It was torn down and replaced with a new building on the same piece of property. The new building is Heritage Middle School, in West St. Paul, MN. I taught 7th and 8th grade science at Heritage for two years in room 143, which is located in the middle “house”, on the first floor of the building.

Why am I telling you this? Because I had a chance to re-live it a little last week when I visited Heritage again for the first time in more than 7 years. Talk about a trip down memory lane. It was interesting to see what was the same and what had changed. One thing that was fun for me to see was that all the work I went through to make sure the classroom I taught in was left neatly organized was apparently appreciated. For the most part, the teacher that replaced me when I resigned left the stuff in the same place I left it, and all the labels I put on the cabinet doors are still there. Wow. That is pretty cool.

As a science teacher, there was a lot to like about that room. Let me try to paint a picture of it for you, since I never took a photograph of it. The room is rectangular, with the front of the room being on the long side of the rectangle. It was designed to seat 32 students at the 16 tables, with two students per table. The perimeter of the room was lined with counters with cabinets underneath, and the back of the room also had cabinets above the counters. We used the counters for lab work as well as a place to hold my various animal cages. At different points in time I had things like a guinea pig cage, a mouse cage, and a freshwater aquarium. On a side note, I also had had iguanas when I was teaching, but they lived in special enclosures that I kept out in the large common space right outside of my classroom. This room is also equipped with a private storage room that is lined with cabinets, and a small refrigerator. This is where I kept my beakers, graduated cylinders, hot plates, and all the other interesting scientific equipment we’d need for my classes.

Being a science room, it has the typical safety features you would want if you were a science teacher. It has a tile floor, which in this case was the typical institutional square vinyl tiles. That made it easy to clean up the inevitable spills when we did lab work. It has a demonstration table in the front of the room with a heat and chemical resistant top on it. On one end of that, was an emergency eye wash station, embedded in the top of table . On that same end there is also a slop sink with hot and cold running water, for easy cleanup after demonstrations. Also, at the front of the room is the fume hood, which came in handy when I was dealing with smelly stuff like petrie dishes with bacteria cultures in them. In the back corner of the room (on the left as you were facing the back of the room) was an emergency shower, which was fed by a 1 inch water pipe, so if you turned it on, the water flowed hard enough to knock you down if you weren’t prepared for it. Right underneath the emergency shower was another eye wash station. Amazingly, I never had a student pull the ring to activate the emergency shower. That corner also had a fire exit that led directly outside, which came in handy when I brought Emmet to school with me. There was also a fire blanket and a chemical fire extinguisher right near the classroom door.

Now that you have a picture of the room, picture this: Me at the front of the classrom saying, “OK class, let’s get out our lab journals.”

Scary, huh?

–Pete