kenwendland.com

I scored one for the war on drunk drivers tonight. Hooper called me earlier and told me that he did not have a headset for our two way radios for our huge game tomarrow. I went out to help him find one. We ended up at Staples over my Home Depot. I said all that to set up where I was.

When I left I went straight up Old Fort Park to turn right on Broad St. When I turned I noticed a Burgandy Camaro, somewhere around a 93 to 98 or so. I wasn’t real sure at first, but it seemed to swerve a lot. He seemed to have problems staying in the center of his lane. I was half way between Mercury Blvd and Middle Tennessee Blvd when I called the Police dispatch to ask what I should do if I suspected a drunk driver. The dispatcher asked me if I could give a discription of the car. I told her, “Yes, I’m right behind him”. So I told her the make model and license plate number. She asked me then if I was still following him, I said that I could follow him as long as it took to get the officers to him.

I followed him about three miles past Rutherford Blvd where I think he caught on that I was following him. He decided to turn around. I told the dispatcher that I had to lay the phone down to turn around. I did and was attempting to catch up with the guy when I saw some officers going the other way. I told the lady that, and she had them turn back. They then pulled me over instead. When the officer got out I told him that I was the guy that called in, and that the Camaro was headed back into town up ahead and pointed at its tail lights. He said ok, but my car does look like a Camaro too. I said that I understood and they got back in and went to catch the guy. By the time I caught up with them, they had the guy pulled over on Rutherford Blvd right across the road from Black Fox Elementary. He had pulled his car so far on to the shoulder that I thought he was going to fall in.

I know that this is a small step in fighting drunk drivers, but I feel that I did my part. I reported to the police what I felt was a suspicious driver. I just called back to see if the guy was indead under the influence. They told me that he was, and that he was arrested. Score one for me.

Well, I’ve beat my head against the wall about this for months now. I tried everything I knew how to do to get that stupid Netgear Router to email the access logs to me. It just would not work. I was trying to get it to send the logs through the gmail smtp server. I found out they use a nonstandard port and the router didn’t support useing a nonstandard port. I contacted the Netgear online tech support to no avail. They were not helpfull at all. I told one guy three times that I had already installed the latest firmware.

I decided to abandon the router for a traditional linux firewall. I ordered some hardware, put it together and installed IPCop on it. I like the IPCop package. It is well written, well documented, and has great features. One of the problems I ran into was the proxy server slowed down browsing. That’s why I built the firewall with an oversized proc and way to much ram. It still slowed it down. I also installed a plugin for it called Copfilter. It was supposed to be able to send the logs out in emails. I ran into problems there as well.

Ok, onto the solution. I ended up making this workaround. I installed an email server on my fileserver (Jake) called Surgemail. After playing with it for a few minutes I figured out how to set it up. It was a lot easier that setting up Postfix or Sendmail. Once I got Evolution to send a test message through it, I knew it was working. Then I went to work on the router again. I knew that I had a working mail server so all I had to do was make the router use it. About twenty minutes later I finally got the router to send me a log email.

Now I have an interesting situation. I have an extra computer that I don’ t know what to do with. Here are the stats. I didn’t buy a hard drive because I had one here, but now what do I do with this computer. It’s an interesting problem. I will take suggestions. I have thought about making it my linux desktop and useing my other machine as my windows desktop. We shall see.

• APEX X-115 Black Steel Mid Tower Case
• MSI K8MM-V Socket 754 Micro ATX Motherboard
• AMD Sempron 64 2600+ Palermo Socket 754 Processor - 1.6Ghz
  
• Rosewill 1GB 2 x 512MB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 PC 3200

It’s always good to go spend time with family. I had a great trip and I hope to go visit again soon. Everyone knows that it is also good to be home. I got in yesterday around 3pm. I havn’t quite settled in yet, but that’s ok. I’ll work on that over the next day or two.

Over the last few months I have been thinking about what I’ve been doing with my life in general. I’m working a job that I like, but I’ll never make much more than I am now doing upholestry. Unless I start my own shop, I’ve hit the top. I had my own shop before. I don’t want to do that again. So over the next year I want to start moving towards something that I can raise my income with. I’ve considered trying to get some certifications in something so I can do some kind of work in computers. I havn’t really decided what yet. We’ll see where that leads.

I’ve noticed that I seem very busy all the time yet I am not really getting anything done. For the short term I’m going to try to free up a few things so I can have the time I need to work on the career stuff. I’m not exactly sure how I’m going to accomplish that, but I’ll figure it out.