AndrewReiter.com

I want to wish all 3? of you that visit my website a wonderful Thanksgiving!  This is probably one of the best holidays of the year.   It hasn’t been taken over by commercialism, or at least not as much as every other holiday.  It’s all about family and being thankful for what you have.  And on top of that, you get to stuff yourself full of turkey, stuffing, potatoes, pie, etc. without any remorse! … Maybe.

The LAN Party was a big success.  We had 19 or 20 people in the house playing Team Fortress 2, mainly.  We even had Garrett and Justin playing from home here and there.  It was a blast.  We mixed in some WAR and the Left 4 Dead demo when we had the chance.  I’m still looking for the owner of a jacket that was left, if it is one of you 3, let me know.

I have been working on a new project lately.  It is a website for my swim team.  It is coming along quite nicely.  I’m using an open source content management system, Joomla. For someone like me, that isn’t a web developer, it makes it VERY easy to setup a website.  There is a fairly large community that creates modules and plugins for the software as well.  That is really where open source shines.  I use an older version of Joomla for one of our websites at work, so I had a little bit of background with it going in.

November LAN 2008 is approaching!  The crew is coming to our house again this year.  The plan is to play the hell out of TF2, once again.  They will be in for a surprise when they see the basement, as it is under a serious construction project right now. I’m putting in a full bathroom and a bedroom/office.  There will also be a large “living room” area for kids playing, home theatre, etc.  It will be awesome when it is done… in 6 months.

We are getting closer and closer to the baby’s due date.  I have moved the bed from our guest bedroom upstairs into the office room.  I have some furniture to move still and then we can start getting the painting and such underway for the baby room.  We have a nice train-themed decoration set for the room.  We are looking forward to getting it all ready.

I recently had a problem with all internal links on my blog redirecting back to the index. I imagine it was some sort of php problem. I messed with quite a few things(even deleting the entire blog) before I found the solution. Well, more of a workaround. I simply changed the way the permalinks work and the issue disappeared. At least I was smart enough to backup my stuff before I started tinkering. Now that it is fixed, you can comment again. Yay!

Another thing that is hopefully getting fixed right now is my video card. This is the second time I have had to send it in for testing. Last time(January ‘07), they sent me a refurbished card back and I expect the same this time. I wouldn’t buy another Leadtek branded card, although their customer service has been great. I was technically a week past my original warranty went I sent in the RMA this time. I guess they took the previous RMA into account. Hopefully I can get it soon… looking forward to some more TF2 action.

Yeah, so I haven’t posted anything in a while. I have no real excuse, other than laziness. I hope all of you had a safe holiday… yeah it has been that long. My birthday ended up pretty nice. Coincidentally, work hooked me up with a new phone on my birthday(see screenshot). It can do just about everything. I have already wasted a bunch of time tweaking programs, registry, etc. If I wanted, I could make my phone look similar to an iPhone. But, HTC hasn’t release a proper 3D driver for the phone so it runs slow at times. Plus, I don’t really like the interface. I have it installed on my phone, but it is typically disabled. My only real beef with the phone is that it is a bit heavy. Oh, and Google needs to come up with an application for uploading my pictures to my Picasa web album, and maybe take the current GPS location and tag it to the photo. Then I’ll be set.

I have also made things a little easier on myself for blog entries and viewing. I installed this plugin to automatically detect mobile browser users and format the blog accordingly. I’ve tried other plugins for this but never had consistent results until using this one. I’ve also added a mobile admin tool so I can manage posts, comments, etc. from a mobile phone. Like I said, I’ve been wasting a bunch of time already.

Also, Rose has asked me to make people aware of his incident with Voire. When I first heard the story, I thought “you get what you pay for.” But, it is obvious Voire really failed when it came to supporting their product. Have a look and pass the story on!

Well, if you ever had any fun running around killing zombies in Diablo 2, then I have a game for you.  Hellgate: London has taken over quite a bit of my playing time lately.  It is created by the same group of developers that did the Diablo series.  They broke off from Blizzard and started their own development company.  It is an RPG game that has FPS style and 3rd person, depending on the type of character you are playing.  You can play the game online for free as long as you want, but you can also choose to pay $10/month to get additional classes, content, etc.  At this point, I haven’t been able to justify why anyone would pay the extra $10.  I figure I can let them add a bunch of content over the next year, then pay the $10 for 1 month and enjoy all that content.  The attention to detail on armor and weapons in this game is amazing.  Check out my Blademaster.  Every character looks different since all the armor and weapons are completely random, so you don’t end up with these cookie-cutter looking toons running around.  If you were a fan of the Diablo series, you have to check this game out.

Real guitarists don’t sit on the couch while they play. Well, at least that is what Guitar Hero 3 is trying to tell me, and I haven’t been listening. Nate came over last night and we jammed out for several hours in the Co-op Career mode. Matt got me interested in this when I’m over at his place playing GH2. I’m not a real guitarist, but I love this game. Katie tried it briefly, but she was booed off the stage.


Speaking of games, the 7th Annual November LAN Party is coming up in just a few weeks. We will be playing Quake Wars: Enemy Territory and Team Fortress 2. I have been playing TF2 quite a bit with Matt, Tristan, and some others. It is an awesome game, and much improved over Team Fortress Classic. I’m looking forward to playing it with everyone at the LAN.

Last night’s Family Guy episode was absolutely hysterical.  They did a complete parody of the 1st Star Wars film(yea I know, 4/6).  I don’t think I stopped laughing during the entire show.  Apparently this was done previously on Robot Chicken, which was even mentioned in the FG episode.  I never did see what Robot Chicken did with Star Wars, but I may have to check that out.  The two shows are similar and yet so very different.  I think this episode may have revived some of the Family Guy fans that were starting to die out(including myself).

 Also last night was the last home game for the Cardinals this season.  ESPN made a major mistake by choosing to broadcast a game that means absolutely nothing for their final game of the season.  Izzy gave us flashbacks to his 2006 form by giving up a go ahead homer in the 9th.  Well, that only made for more dramatics.  The man that used to dominate the Cardinals, Brad Lidge, came in to close the game for the Astros.  I will never forget what Pujols did to Lidge in the 2005 NLCS.  I don’t think Katie ever will either.  She attempted to go to sleep early that night, but it was all for naught when she was awakened by my hysteria.  Ever since then, the Cardinals have completely owned Lidge.  Well, last night was one of the best moments this year for the Cardinals.  Pujols came up to the plate with the same situation as he did in Game 5 of the 2005 NLCS, Cards down 2 with 2 runners on in the 9th inning.  Pujols hit a rocket that missed a home run by about 2 feet.   It drove in a run and put the tying run at third.  Then, after all he has dealt with, Ankiel gets a game winning triple off of Lidge to close out the season at home.  Poor Lidge didn’t even record an out.  Despite their rough season, I am still proud to be a Cardinal fan.

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I’ve been spending some time lately playing a newly released game, Bioshock. This is definitely one of the best shooter-style games I have ever played. You get thrown into this under water world, Rapture, that was created for people to get away from the controls of government and other regulatory bodies. Once the people discover the genetic power of “Adam”, they begin to mutate and destroy the city. Adam is gathered from corpses around Rapture by the “little sisters”. In order to survive in the game, you must find these little sisters. In order to get near them, you have to kill off their big daddy(see above), which is far from an easy task.

Once you finally take out the big daddy, you have to make a decision with the little sister. You can harvest her or save her. If you harvest, you receive more Adam from her than if you save. But, if you save her, you are promised to be rewarded in the end. I have played through just a couple of levels and I have been harvesting them so far. Yes, it sounds a bit cruel, but I wanted my Adam! I have really enjoyed the game play and immersion. Just ask Katie, she scared me a bit when she walked up behind me last night and simply put her hand on my shoulder.

I am now a certified ethical hacker!  I passed my test this morning.  It was actually very well done.  I finished it in 2 hours, and I thought I may not have done so well.  The questions were very thought provoking.  Some where multiple answer multiple choice questions where there were “up to 6″ answers, with 10 choices.  I thought for sure I screwed a few of those up, and I also need more brushing up on my Linux hacking.  I’m sure half the points I missed were Linux-based questions.  Either way, I got it done and I’m now on vacation.  I’ll have plenty to tell about and many pictures when I get back.

While I didn’t exactly collect the toys and lunch boxes growing up, I definitely spent plenty of time watching the Transformers cartoon. Over the weekend, I went with a couple brothers to see the newly released movie. The effects were awesome, storyline was credible(for scifi of course), and it was Autobots vs Decepticons… what more could you want? Any fan of the Transformers must see this movie, along with any action film fan out there. It is my movie of the year already and the year is barely half over.

I’m a couple days into the CEH training and so far it has been very interesting. Much like the transformers, people use their hacking powers for good or evil. This class is not as much of a “defensive techniques” class that I originally thought it would be. It really is hacking 101. Not only do you learn how to use hacking tools, they are provided for you with the course material. After all, they are all readily available on the net anyways. As a matter of fact, many of the tools were originally written for good purposes, but are also used for hacking. Now, don’t come to me asking for tips, as I’m not at liberty to share any of the information… I would recommend this class to anyone that is interested in network and system security.