I just saw something in my referrers that made me wonder.

Google search term:
matt redman mp3

The IP address resolved to something that included the word warner.

Hmmmm…

Could be a worship music fan from Oklahoma, of course.

Just thought it was kind of funny. All he/she got was a recommendation for fodder for an MP3 player!

I’ve written a story about cleaning your hard drive. Like I’ve noted here before, computers will almost grind to a halt if they’re running out of space.

I’ve written an article on some simple steps you can take to make your computer run faster. This one is probably especially useful for the many of you still using an older laptop. They usually came with tiny hard drives, and Windows 98.

Enjoy!

Disk cleanup

And if you’ve got smart additions to the article, corrections or comments, please feel free to comment here.

I got an e-mail today that this account has used 100 % of it’s space. I thought that was odd. I shouldn’t have used that much.

So I used the Disk Usage Viewer to try and figure out where something had gobbled up a lot of space.

Turns out it was the guestbook directories. That thing is creating backups over and over until it eats up your space. The last few days the backups had increased exponentially in size. There’s a lot of almost empty space in there. I don’t have any idea how that happened.

Anyway, the moral is that automated scripts may gobble up a lot of space without you realizing, so keep an eye on things.

And if you’ve got Advanced Guestbook installed, it may suddenly start gobbling up space, even if it didn’t before. Weird…

Second update: Oh no, the guestbook ate itself totally! 53604 pages of nonsense!

UPDATE: And then I find out that my old e-mail address that I’d used a challenge response system on, has been piling up on the server, instead of being fetched by that system. I’m downloading 2135 messages now. The majority of which will be junk. But that should free up a lot of space, at least!

My father made a crack comment that I thought was very profound:

She has trouble juggling her roles.

I won’t go into why he said it, it’s not that kind of blog.

But his point was very well taken.

When you have different roles in life, different behavior may be expected depending on who you are interacting with.

When interacting with a coworker, your boss or your employees, different types of behavior - roles, will be expected.

A father and mother at home will have one role relating to the children, and another relating to each other.

They say power corrupts, and I think those who have a lot of power in their work role are those who are most likely to misuse that power in their personal lives. They expect a certain efficiency and they expect being deferred to. When that isn’t afforded, they might react like a boss. That could go very wrong. A family member is unlikely to put up with that kind of crap. Unless it’s a very young and pliable wife/boytoy. Hmm, bad idea, come to think of it…

Think about celebrities who start believing in their own hype? Same thing. I know a lot of celebrities (most of them minor or niche). I’ve seen situations where a celebrity behaves badly towards the people around them, especially the fans. Lack of respect. I’ve also seen some of the sweetest, most down to earth people who have ‘made it’. It all depends on how they tackle their role, and how they behave towards other people.

Some of these celebrities are friends, and some I’ve only talked to in passing. What I’ve found, is that the older they are, the more likely it is that they have come to terms with being a celebrity. The more secure they are in their role and as persons, the more they give of themselves to others. I’m not saying all younger celebrities are stuck up, though, because that’s definitely not true.

But this little missive is to all of us.

Our behavior towards people around us will have to be determined by our respective roles - in that situation.

Eh, after I’ve said all that, just so nobody misunderstands:

If you are a celebrity, you’ll get a lot more service and long term popularity if you don’t go all diva. Try to retain a down to earth attitude, and show gratitude and respect towards people you meet. Don’t throw tantrums if you don’t get what you want and deserve. You’ll look like a spoiled brat. And no matter how popular you are at the moment, there are people who have a long memory and who will wait until the press has been oversaturated. Then they will tear you down.

Just basic horse sense, dressed up in fancy words, eh?

My cat is a little moody. Mostly it’s just being a cat.

But sometimes I wonder.

Some days he REALLY loves me. Today is one of those days. Which makes me wonder - why does he love me so much more today?

He SMILES at me, with those adoring eyes…

Maybe he’s had a quarrel with Boots? Or something’s been scary outside?

Anyway, I don’t have to worry he will leave me. He truly feels like this is the home for him!

My router can be tricky sometimes.

It’s blacklisted the IP behind this website twice.

This has happened only since the last firmware update.

So if you have persistent problems with a website (especially your own), and pings from other locations on the net reach it fine, and the traceroute stops at THAT particular IP number. Then try clearing the automatic blacklist on your router…

That blacklisting is of course wonderful, when it blacklists attackers. But not quite as wonderful when it blacklists your website’s IP number in the middle of an FTP session, which is what happened today. Over a hundred small files were to be FTP’d home, and my router blacklists the IP number in the middle of the session…

I’ve been toying with this idea of asking people what they listen to for a few years. But to get it going, I’ll have to start myself.

I don’t know if you remember the line of albums called Artist’s choice?

Some well known singers were asked to put together an album of music that had meant a lot to them.

Well, the list I’m about to unleash on the world isn’t that profound. It’s quite simply my shortlist that I keep on my MP3 player at all times. I’ll probably get tired of some of them and remove them at some time, though. A collection such as this is likely to see some movement over time.

Secular songs:
Amy Grant: House of Love
Celine Dion: River Deep
Joshua Kadison: Jessie
Vince Gill: Go Rest High On That Mountain

CCM:
Bob Carlisle: Baby Baby
Bob Carlisle: The Truth
Imperials: Change The World
Margaret Becker: Oh Lord, You’re Beautiful (P)
Mary Mary: Hold On
Rachael Lampa: It’s About You
Rachael Lampa: Savior Song

Praise and Worship:
Brian Doerksen: The River
David Ruis: Break Dividing Walls (P)
Harvest: The Warrior
Glory (this one’s a theme song from a festival. No special artist. Download)
Mal Pope: This Is Your Land
Matt Redman: Nothing But The Blood (P)
Richard Smallwood: Total Praise (P)
Victory Chant (not sure of the artist)
And I’ve been meaning to put this one on:
Michael W. Smith: Let it Rain (P)

In addition to this I’ll normally have some more songs that fall under the “power” category. What I mean by that is that when I hear them, I feel as though God is present. That presence feels powerful, and can be a real help in situations where I feel out of my center. For me, getting centered is easiest done by getting the guitar out and playing and singing worship songs for a while. And having some of those songs on a small music player that can fit in my pocket sure is an improvement on earlier times. It takes a lot to get me off center, but even so, it’s nice to have. I’ve marked those songs on my list that I’d consider for this category with this mark: (P)

These are the artists/albums I usually listen to in the Power category:
David Ruis
Michael W. Smith: Worship
Matt Redman: Facedown
Passion

Not everybody will like this style of music. It’s geared towards gutsier music (more rock) than the old fashioned praise music.

Some of the songs on those albums are a bit tedious to listen intently to, the way you do on an MP3 player. Some albums are better as background music over a long time. So if you put songs on there from one of these albums, pick out the best ones.

So… I’ll have plenty of space on my new 256 Megabyte player, as opposed to the old 128 Megabyte one. I guess my list is likely to grow over time, so I’ll load it up with at least one whole album at a time, and see if any of the songs stick before I get tired of the album and load another one on the player.

Google offer a lot of language choices.

But I didn’t expect Elmer Fudd to be one of the choices!

I wonder who came up with that one?

OMG, they DO have a sense of humor. How about Hacker?

Maybe this is why?

My cat was seen snacking on a mouse yesterday.

Today I was gone most of the day, and Pusur didn’t get as many hours outside as he thinks he deserves. He’s very perturbed, and very insistent that he wants to go outside again.

I see a definite shift in his psyche, towards being a predator.

I swept a toy on an elastic string along the floor (about the size as a big stripey mouse), and his attacks on it were very predatorial, and also acrobatic.

He’s doing backflips as high as his slightly corpulent body can manage. This from the homebody who could hardly be bothered to chase a feather a few weeks ago.

Spring fever is here…

This is an actual case.

A guy had an older laptop with about a 6 gigabyte hard drive.

He phoned me and complained that his machine had crashed, and as it was rebooting, it checked the hard drive and found errors in the File Allocation Table. I guided him through that.

Then he told me that he couldn’t open mails in Outlook Express.

Since it had crashed while he’d tried, I played it safe and told him to close the computer and NOT use it anymore until I could have a look. Just in case the computer had locked up on one of the OE files. You see, he hadn’t done a backup in five years…

You know, he WANTED to install adaware, and thought that was why his computer was so slow…

So he asked me if he could do a backup to another laptop, this one with a slightly larger hard drive. I told him to forget about it, he’d have the same problem with that one (if not right away, then surely after a while).

I told him a laptop has a finite life. The first to go is usually the hard drive. Because of the mechanical jolts a laptop will experience throughout its lifespan, the hard drive WILL stop working at some time. And recussitating it is not an option if the heads go out of alignment, which happened on a few I’ve seen. It’s way too expensive.

During all this, he mentioned that he’d downloaded pictures from his digital camera unto the laptop (turns out it was about a gigabyte worth of pictures), and I was pretty sure of what was causing his immediate problems: Not enough space on the hard drive.

I must have mentioned the possibility of using a separate hard drive. He’d never thought of that, but a local electronics chain had one of those with a discount, so he went there to buy one, happily. You see, this meant he could extend the life of the computer.

By this time he didn’t trust himself, so I did the honors. By that time he’d deleted the cache and tmp files (in c:\windows\temp), so he was up from 40 megabytes to about 60 megabytes of free space.

And the mailbox he could list but not open mails in, weighed in at 407 megabytes.

So tell me, you expect a mailbox measuring over 400 megabytes to work on a machine with 40 megabytes free space?

Pfffft!

Rule of thumb: For a windows 98 machine, you need at least 500 megabytes free space on the main hard drive, otherwise it will grind to a stop and crash frequently.

No buts about it.

You know, his USB CD-burner had stopped working, you’d think that would have tipped him off? It requires much more than 500 megabytes free space to work properly.

So if you’re in the same situation, think about getting a separate USB hard drive to load some of your pictures and whatnot on to, then deleting them off the hard drive.

You’ll see the speed of the computer will perk right up!

The reason I’m writing this out, instead of not saying anything, is that I expect this story to be VERY common. I think a lot of people don’t understand why their machines are crashing and unreliable and slow. Yes, spyware can have a lot to do with it, but NOTHING helps if your machine doesn’t have enough free space. It NEEDS that space, especially since older machines (especially laptops) frequently don’t have enough internal memory to avoid swapping to disk.