October 27th, 2009 by 
Michael in Raleigh, NC
This has probably been the craziest two trips of my life over the past two weeks. I was first on the west coast attending a wedding for my Cali cousin Michelle at this amazing place in Healdsburg, California. We met with friends and family over this extended weekend and saw much of the Sonoma Country Wineries. It was great to attend such a great event with such good company even though the room Will and I shared had scary porcelain cats that where placed by the fireplace to glare at you. Getting back to the San Fran airport was even pretty cool since we took the Oakland bridge which gave a totally different prospective coming into the city rather than taking big red across the bay. As for my family getting back to North Carolina, it was pretty easy but as for me and Jen it would be a total different experience. Getting delayed at the SFO airport for almost 5 hours then arriving in Atlanta too late for a connection flight, Delta ended up paying for us to stay at a hotel to catch the first flight out the next morning.
Hoping to start off the next trip on a better note, we had arrived at the RDU airport (not a university as someone on the airplane asking me confusingly) not even 48 hours from the flight back in from San Fran. Our flight path would be to first depart Raleigh to Dulles to Frankfurt then into Basel. Frankfurt was a freaking huge airport, we had to get bused both arriving at the airport and debarking the airport. When we left during our long journey along the airport tarmac, an old man leaned over to me and stated that they might as well just drive down to Basel seeming how long its taking us to just get to the airplane.
Flying Lufthansa was very nice and clean although the small child in front of me was not feeling well. His mom placed a open barf bag next to him in the event he did, Jen at this point left me know too that she would do the same if he barfed…super. When we got to the Basel airport it was nice to know that things looked familiar. We walked outside the airport being careful once again not to walk out into the wrong country. Not a minute went by until we saw this frantic women running to us. It was Gina come to greet us into her hometown! I was again comforted by family in a foreign place but on the bigger picture this was Jen’s first time out of the country. Staying with the Colleluori’s would be the best break-in for her to get familiar with an foreign country.
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May 18th, 2009 by Michael in Greensboro, NC
My car as of last week is officially bobo’d (aka tainted).
With the car just turning 4 years of ownership and less than 6 months to pay off I get my first hit. While venturing off with Jen to feed our appetites at the local Ganache bakery, we barely made it in time to get a piece of my favorite black cow cake. Upon leaving the store I noticed Jen stalled from getting into the car. I hear a , “ummmm…. Michael, (you can tell it wasn’t good by the tone of her voice….) did someone hit your car???” I think at that time all this blood rushed to my head and a vein popped out. I said.. ” Doo wha(in so many words give or take)???” Yes, lo and behold someone hit my car and left no note. The best I can think of was it either happend the night before in my own parking lot or it happened in the cul de sac where I park it for the days I carpool. So no, my car I love so much wasn’t hit by an Elon student which so could have happened. Whoever it was…thanks for not fessing up.
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Tags: auto
February 17th, 2009 by Michael in Greensboro, NC
As strange as it sounds, this past week had temperatures up into the upper 60’s for the whole week!! I definitely took advantage of the weather by getting out and mountain biking. Before I headed out though I did some good ole cleaning for the start of the new season. I tore down the rear section of my bike and cleaned all the gears in the cassette. Getting the cassette off in the first place was the hard part but with a lending hand, a pair of bird gloves, a chain off an old Raleigh and some muscle it would eventually give way.
Simple Green also helped with getting the dirt out of all the crevices. I never knew how much fun it was to take apart bikes but I love to work on cars too.
Hopefully there will be more warm days in the future than cold…
Posted in Hobbies | 1 Comment »
Tags: mountain biking
January 20th, 2009 by Michael in Greensboro, NC
This New Year of 2009 started off with my first bike ride in the lower 40 degree weather. Biking hadn’t been something I’ve done in quite a while due to the short winter days, but it was way overdue. Matt and I headed out toward the woods at Hamilton Lakes in our multiple layers of warmth. I wore my balaclava which hasn’t been worn ever since I rode my motorcycle to work in 20 degree weather. Yeah, I can remember looking at the NOAA frostbite chart and seeing how quickly frostbite can occur in chilly 20 degree weather riding at 60mph. Never do that again….
So maybe this year will bring new challenges for me in my sporting life. Maybe a half marathon, or another 150 MS bike ride or maybe I’ll just learn to cook more exquisite foods. Yeah….I definitely could take up the sport of eating.
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Tags: mountain biking, new year
December 1st, 2008 by Michael in Greensboro, NC
Where I work, Apple computers is the standard for Communications majors. That being said, we’ve got a few labs with Mac Pro’s and 13 individual editing suites. The edit suites provide the students with a cubical shunned away from the world by a sliding glass door allowing their video creativity juices to flow. In the labs, there is a desktop at the front of the room dedicated for the teacher with wall-mounted speakers and a projector. Although all this hardware looks great on the outside, one issue that came up was audio. Since the change to Intel chips, the three audio sources (headphone, audio speaker and line-out) which if you remember, would auto-switch based on what was plugged in, has now changed to three independent sources. What this means is if a user wants to make any changes to how audio gets routed they must make the change manually. To add to this issue, my environment consists of users logging in individually every time they use a machine whether it’s in a classroom or in an editing suite. If the audio changes were a global change, I wouldn’t be having this issue; but because it has a default value (front speaker jack) for each person that logs in, I’m stuck with another problem. Which if you are thinking, I’m leaving all my grunts and complaints about OSX’s “features” in a lab environment for another blog post. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: 10.5, audio, classroom, command line, jack, leopard, line-out rear, mac pro
October 21st, 2008 by Michael in Greensboro, NC
I stumbled across this useful little tidbit of knowledge. Have you ever needed to log into several machines in a lab but hated going to each one and typing in your credentials. Well thanks to “David Kahn3″ and others for coming up with the following script,
osascript <<EOF
tell application “System Events”
keystroke tab
keystroke (ASCII character 8 )
keystroke tab
keystroke (ASCII character 8 )
keystroke return
delay 0.5
keystroke tab
keystroke “username”
keystroke tab
delay 0.5
keystroke “password”
delay 0.5
keystroke return
keystroke return
keystroke return
keystroke return
end tell
EOF
I was able to push this script out using Apple Remote Desktop (run as root not admin) to my macs while they were at the login screen window. Just a few changes for the account username/password fields and bam the computers logged in without me having to even touch them.Beautiful
Posted in Technology | 1 Comment »
Tags: 10.5, Apple, Apple Remote Desktop, ARD, command line, leopard, login
August 12th, 2008 by Michael in Greensboro, NC
With the never ending roadblocks I encounter at work, my task this year was to utilize the new 10.5 Leopard operating system (and then some) for a local private university. I’ve used Deep Freeze for many years and it has proved to be a great asset in keeping lab machines consistent. What the Macs haven’t utilized was a way for users to log-in with their username and password. Being a predominant PC campus, Active Directory (AD) will be the choice of Mac’s Directory Service. With all the bad rap Leopard got with Active Directory not working, I luckily was able to get 10.5.4 to bind fine with AD. Glancing into Directory Utility the light was green, all is good.
I then sent out the command through Remote Desktop to freeze the machines with Deep Freeze. Moving on to other labs I noticed after 10ish days people started reporting that they could no longer log into the computers that I had initially setup. Going into Directory Services it showed a red light with the message “This server is not responding.” Grrrrrr Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Technology | 10 Comments »
Tags: 10.5.4, active directory, deep freeze, dsconfigad, faronics, leopard
July 6th, 2008 by Michael in Greensboro, NC
This weekend was another fun weekend spent at my parents house down in tropic coastal Myrtle Beach. You may not see beautiful rainbows or smell exotic flowers but when you arrive, you can sure tell when life’s a beach. (okey so that tourist phrase is over done) This weekend was spent with the appearance of my sister as well as my parents, 4 other friends of my mom’s (all women…poor dad) and last but not least Jen my girlfriend. Traffic wasn’t so bad since years past, but that could be due to conserving tourists. The fireworks on the other hand, were in no means cut back. It also gave me an opportunity to shoot moving objects at night with my D80, which proved to be a bit of a challenge. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: auto, Myrtle Beach, traveling
July 1st, 2008 by Michael in
With so many different brands of toothpaste and different styles that they come in. I’ve always been drawn to the upright “less mess neat squeeze” dispenser. Although this avoids constantly curling up a tube, I’ve always wondered if there’s any toothpaste left once I’ve used all my might to squeeze the crap out of the crest “dispenser.” My main method of extracting every last bit of toothpaste was using the palm of my hand to press all my weight onto the toothpaste against corner of the sink. Enough prelude, on with the experiment.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Life | No Comments »
Tags: crest, photography
This has probably been the craziest two trips of my life over the past two weeks. I was first on the west coast attending a wedding for my Cali cousin Michelle at this amazing place in Healdsburg, California. We met with friends and family over this extended weekend and saw much of the Sonoma Country Wineries. It was great to attend such a great event with such good company even though the room Will and I shared had scary porcelain cats that where placed by the fireplace to glare at you. Getting back to the San Fran airport was even pretty cool since we took the Oakland bridge which gave a totally different prospective coming into the city rather than taking big red across the bay. As for my family getting back to North Carolina, it was pretty easy but as for me and Jen it would be a total different experience. Getting delayed at the SFO airport for almost 5 hours then arriving in Atlanta too late for a connection flight, Delta ended up paying for us to stay at a hotel to catch the first flight out the next morning.
