There's no place like home 127.0.0.1

It seems only yesterday I was a senior in high school, hoping to be able to work at Sun for a few months to be able to work with extraordinary people, and to be able to interact with top-of-the-line equipment, some of which hasn't even made it out to the market yet. Some three months later, I ask the question: is it over already? In such a short time, I've been able to do weeks of testing and benchmarking products, deploying Sun Ray in the cloud on top a currently unsupported platform, helped with several other small projects, meet a ton of great people, receive invaluable work experience, and much, much more. I consider myself extremely lucky to have been able to get this opportunity at such a young age, and will be taking with me all that I have learned here at Sun this summer. Good luck to everyone sticking around until the Oracle acquisition is finished (or not, there's still a possibility), and thanks for everything that you've helped me with.

 I will attempt to keep blogging at my personal website, http://srepetsk.net, although I can't guarantee that this will happen often :)

A friend of mine (William) was playing with Google one of the other days, and managed to find a partially-used jewel of mine. It appears that in 10th grade I attempted to start a blog, which I subsequently failed to update after two posts. Check it out here (if you dare). While I use this blog provided by Sun, I'll probaly switch back to the Blogspot one, at least until I find something better or more professional looking. It's possible I'll just abandon it and instead use my website, but we'll decided that when it gets to that point.

Well the transition to Digital TV is setting at the Repetski household now. I got a chance to surf the channels today after the men’s Wimbledon championships, and I found myself somewhat confused. For some background knowledge, we don’t have have a set-top box; the coax cable from the wall goes directly into our TV, unlike most Cox customers. We really don’t watch TV enough to care about getting some of the higher channels, only the expanded basic – which is still about 200 channels, according to our TV. It detected 78 analog stations and 99 digital ones.

So when I was surfing the channels, I noticed decimal places in many of the TV stations. For me, I still remember our old TV predating widely-used remotes with the dial that had a total of 32-some channels, so this was quite a change.

So now I have to re-do the TV station guide I made for my family – my brother really likes lists and my parents find it more convenient in that form – which sets me up to watch plenty of TV. Because of course it would be too convenient for Cox to publish the TV listings for those without set-top boxes. So here I go, publishing them for myself and for others who may find themselves in the same situation. It’s far from being complete at this point, but I’ll update it as I get more of the information.

Cox Communications – Fairfax, Virginia – TV Channel Listings

Channel    Station
2        Telefutura
3        Jewelry TV
4        Home Shopping Network (HSN)
4.1        NBC HD
4.2        NBC
4.3        NBC - Universal Sports
5.1        FOX
7.1        WJLA
7.2        WJLA - WTOP
7.3        WJLA - RTV
8        ABC News
9.1        WUSA - CBS
9.2        WUSA - CBS
12       
14        Telemundo
15        WPXW - Ion Television
15.1        WPXW - Ion Television
16       
17        TBS
18        GMU - TV
19        NVCC - TV
20        My 20
20.1        My 20
21
22.1        WMPT - PBS
26.3        WETA - Kids
31        WGN
32.1        WHUT
34        NBC
35        FOX
37        WJLA
39        CBS
41        C-SPAN
42.1       
42.810   
42.830
42.837    WEBR - Fairfax Radio
43       
57

I seem to be too young to remember it, but CompuServe, a dial-up internet service provider, is closing this week.

http://paperpc.blogspot.com/2009/06/compuserve-classic-so-long-old-friend.html’

‘No, your monitor won't blank out, your Internet connection won't stall and your PC won't crash, but a major event is about to ripple across the Internet today: CompuServe Classic is closing.

After 30 years the plug will be pulled on what was once the finest online service on the globe. (CompuServe 2000, a newer iteration of CompuServe will continue.)

And the saddest part is that it ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. Ask anyone about CompuServe today and the response will probably be "Are they still around?"’

There seem to be many comments about this on Slashdot, from many perspectives. I personally had no experience with them, but it’s always sad to hear an early Internet company closing it’s doors, whether their service was wanted or not.

Well I’ll be celebrating the 4th of July with some friends tomorrow.  I’ve noticed that as time gets closer to the holiday, as well as it being the end of the quarter/FY, fewer and fewer people are in the office. It’s actually really nice, because it’s very quiet these days – less people to distract you :)

Also, installed a 10gig fiber switch today, extracted a few SAS cards from one server and put them in another for some testing. Overall a quiet day, but good for the “to-do” list.

Good news (in my opinion) for driving in Virginia – texting and reading email is now illegal for all drivers, not just us under 18. Frankly I wish they’d make talking on a cell phone illegal – it’s just another distraction that can lead to a crash. A total of 879 laws were enacted in the Virginia General Assembly’s 45-day meeting, most of which come into effect today.

Here’s the Washington Post article detailing the subject:

Prohibition On Texting By Drivers Starts in Va.

Getting Windows Live Writer to work with Sun blogs (or Roller in general) is less configuration than just inserting your credentials. The whole process takes less than 2 minutes, with the longest part being the time it takes you to type your password, email and URL.

Before you try to configure WLW, make sure you’ve already created your blog, and that it’s web-accessible.

1. Open up Windows Live Writer; if you’ve never used it before, it should prompt you to set up a new account. If not, click “Blogs”, and select “Add blog account”
2. Select "Other Blog Service, and press Next.
3. On this screen, it'll ask for the information about your personal blog. Use http://blogs.sun.com/<extension> as the Web address of your blog; your username and passwords are the ones you chose on the web interface of the blog.
4. At this point, the program will automatically detect your blog and set everything up.
5. Happy blogging!