It wasn’t an email letting me know she had been there.  It wasn’t from an IM, it was from a very pleasant set of post-it notes which she had written on and left on my desk.

This was by far the best message I had received all week.  Maybe even all month.

Next time you are at someone’s office and they are not there, leave a friendly message that you had been there, not a voice mail or IM or email, something truly special and unique.

This was a series of 4 post-it notes, which was just a small fraction of what I had placed on her wall at one time when I came into work on a weekend, and had lots of spare time while an email server was doing a database rebuild (check the last picture):

Each post-it note was unique with a different smiley face:

Here’s a picture from the post-it wall I had made. It was like wallpaper, only this post-it note prank took me hours:

First a little about HDMI.. HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) was created by a group of electronics manufacturers (Hitachi, Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic/National/Quasar), Philips, Sony, Thomson (RCA), Toshiba, and Silicon Image).  The HDMI standard is a set of guidelines for creating high-bandwidth connections between digital devices. With the right setup, HDMI can make a significant difference in systems where it is supported. The current standard can carry 1080p high-definition signals, and it supports eight channels of uncompressed audio, enough for a 7.1 surround-sound system. HDMI can cut down on the number of cables required to connect components, and it can even reduce the number of remote controls needed in some situations.

Now for those of you wanting the more technical aspect of HDMI, there’s a little table below with a breakdown of each HDMI connection pin.

So now that you know that HDMI is better than non-HDMI connections (take my word for it) I need to introduce you to the price of HDMI, which is significantly more expensive then other connection types.  Imagine a good quality coaxial cable of 10′ costing $9.99, now think of a good quality HDMI 10′ cable costing between $25-$100, depending on the quality that you get.  Of course, you don’t have to get great quality, but you might want to check into that later.

So the distance from the plasma TV in the front office to the video signal sending device (a.k.a. my computer) is approximately 15 feet when measured linearly (or straight, assuming no obstructions).  This is not going to be one of those perfect situations, so let me show you a picture first before giving you a chance to guess at the distance required.

(my office is on the right, semi-decorated for Halloween)

Now that you have seen the picture, what’s your guess on the distance required?  Wait, before you guess, let me tell you that this isn’t not a two story office and though there is a lot of obstructions in the ceiling area, that is the best (cleanest, easiest) way to run the cable.  Alright now, place your guess.  (It’s alright, I’ll wait)….

Nope, close but you were a little high (or low).  The distance required would be 65′.  That’s sixty-five feet.  Yep.  No joke, just ridiculous.  The reason is because of pipes and A/C venting and whatever animals are up in the ceiling area.

So I went to price a 65′ HDMI cable (custom made, as that’s a distance most places do not carry).  Online the pricing was from $119 to $250.  When I called a custom cable manufacturer down the street from where I work the price was $195 plus $20 for shipping and handling (even after I expressed my ability to drive 3 blocks to pick it up).

The reason for the cable is to deliver a presentation (made with Adobe Premier, ya, I geek like that too) that has quick movie sequences and doesn’t seem as clean over the current coaxial cable (colors are not as well produced, probably due to non-plenum grade cable that was installed by the electrician).  Going with RGB would give better color reproduction, but I don’t know about the ability compared to HDMI.  Plus, no reason not to be as technologically advanced as possible (well, except for my cell phone thing).

Now you know a little about HDMI.  If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

Pin 1	TMDS Data2+
Pin 2	TMDS Data2 Shield
Pin 3	TMDS Data2–
Pin 4	TMDS Data1+
Pin 5	TMDS Data1 Shield
Pin 6	TMDS Data1–
Pin 7	TMDS Data0+
Pin 8	TMDS Data0 Shield
Pin 9	TMDS Data0–
Pin 10	TMDS Clock+
Pin 11	TMDS Clock Shield
Pin 12	TMDS Clock–
Pin 13	CEC
Pin 14	Reserved (N.C. on device)
Pin 15	SCL
Pin 16	SDA
Pin 17	DDC/CEC Ground
Pin 18	+5 V Power
Pin 19	Hot Plug Detect

]]> http://iamdms.com/2007/10/24/hdmi-is-better-than-coaxial-or-rgb/feed/ 0 http://iamdms.com/2007/10/08/day-off-of-work/ http://iamdms.com/2007/10/08/day-off-of-work/#comments Mon, 08 Oct 2007 17:36:11 +0000 dms http://iamdms.com/2007/10/08/day-off-of-work/ I took today off of work.  There’s an appointment that I have in the city I live in, which is too far from my work for a quick drive back and forth during working hours (that’s over a 110 mile commute).  So instead of spending half the day at work, I decided to take a vacation day.  What do I do next?  I’m working remotely.

Workaholic, that’s probably the term most used to describe me (at least when I don’t have my daughter).  Workaholic is defined on Answers.com as: One who has a compulsive and unrelenting need to work.  I’m not sure if I am a workaholic but it does define me pretty well.

What do you do when you have a day off of work but no family around to spend the day with?  I logged into the servers at work (remotely) and checked log files, queues, backups, work email, and then started IMing with some people from work.  I’m not doing a lot of work, but I am working.

In the background I had my TV on and during the first few hours I listened to CNBC (Squawk Box, Squawk on the Street).  After those shows were boring and I finished my daily trading, I flipped through the stations until I found a movie that I haven’t watched in a long, long time.  Before I tell you the movie, I want to share something and ask you all something.

If you have a DVD of a movie, and that movie comes on a movie station (like HBO or Showtime or Cinemax), do you watch the movie on the station instead of putting in the DVD you have of that movie?
What if the movie started like 5 or 1o or 15 minutes before you started watching?

The reason that I ask is that I started watching Princess Bride (you can buy it at BestBuy for $14.99 or Buy.com for $13.99) this morning.  I didn’t watch from the beginning and actually only saw the last 15-20 minutes of the movie (right after Weslie is only kind of killed by Prince Humperdink), but instead of putting in my Princess Bride DVD which my sister bought for me years ago as a present, I just watched the last part of the movie and that was it.  Even now that I’m thinking about it, I’m wanting to put in the movie and watch it.

So why not just put the movie in and watch it?  I don’t know.  Immediately after the end of Princess Bride on HBO I switched to Independence Day on Encore.  It’s not even the high definition version.  Why am I watching it, in the non-high def version?  I don’t know.  Maybe someone can tell me.  Oh ya, and the TV watching thing I do, it’s a bad habit, but since I have the full compliment of stations on DirecTV I feel guilty if I don’t use them.

links: Princess Bride on BestBuy, Princess Bride on Buy.com, CNBC.

The first thing I did was get the error number of the NDR, in this case it was 5.1.0:
   Final-Recipient: rfc822;email@address.com
   Action: failed
   Status: 5.1.0

The next thing was for me to check the event logs on the server.  Unfortunately I have extensive logging enabled on the server and have only allocated 64MB per log file, which limits the event log to about 95,000 events.  That quantity of events would be good, except for that extensive logging which means I capture less than 24 hours of events.  I was informed about the NDR roughly 30 hours after it occurred, causing me to have no event logged.

Though I searched through the event log for other NDR events, but was unable to find any.  I looked online for the event ID and read some people claiming it was Event ID: 3010, but I was unable to find that number for comfirmation purposes.

Next I checked the account for SMTP delivery function via DOS, I connected via Telnet to the SMTP server to verify the address was valid for delivery.  No problem there.

I logged into the email account and noticed that emails were delivered throughout the morning and previous night, so I was now under the impression this random NDR was random, making this problem much more difficult to solve.

Requesting the original sender to email again seemed like a good step, she obliged.  The delivery was successful.  Now I’m looking at a random NDR that I can’t duplicate using the same account from and to.  Wondermous.

After doing much more investigation I was able to determine the Information Store that the recipient is in is corrupted (ya, that’s not really good news, but finding out what caused the NDR was good news). 

Since correction to the Information Store proved unsuccessful I will be exporting the email from the store and then importing it into a new store, probably for more corruption later.

If customer_code = “‘JD%’” Then
dcount = “SELECT COUNT(a.Orders) ” & _
“FROM ( ” & _
“SELECT SalesOrderNumber AS Orders ” & _
“FROM MAS90.dbo.SO_04SOHistoryDetail ” & _
“WHERE ItemNumber IN (SELECT item_number FROM johndeere_item_list) ” & _
“UNION ” & _
“SELECT SalesOrderNumber AS Orders ” & _
“FROM MAS90_TTA.dbo.SO_04SOHistoryDetail ” & _
“WHERE ItemNumber IN (SELECT item_number FROM johndeere_item_list) ” & _
“) ” & _
“AS a”
ElseIf customer_code <> “‘JD%’” Then
dcount = “SELECT COUNT(a.Orders) ” & _
“FROM ( ” & _
“SELECT SalesOrderNumber AS Orders ” & _
“FROM MAS90.dbo.SO_04SOHistoryDetail ” & _
“WHERE ItemNumber LIKE ” & customer_code & ” ” & _
“UNION ” & _
“SELECT SalesOrderNumber AS Orders ” & _
“FROM MAS90_TTA.dbo.SO_04SOHistoryDetail ” & _
“WHERE ItemNumber LIKE ” & customer_code & ” ” & _
“) ” & _
“AS a”
End If

Realizing that this was pretty hard to look at, and not knowing if the person would view the page in notepad or a browser window or just copy and paste it into their own Visual Basic editing program, I decided to be of some help since I was seeking their help. Below is the end result:

If customer_code = “‘JD%’” Then
   dcount = “SELECT COUNT(a.Orders) ” & _
                “FROM ( ” & _
                “SELECT SalesOrderNumber AS Orders ” & _
                “FROM MAS90.dbo.SO_04SOHistoryDetail ” & _
                “WHERE ItemNumber IN (SELECT item_number FROM johndeere_item_list) ” & _
                “UNION ” & _
                “SELECT SalesOrderNumber AS Orders ” & _
                “FROM MAS90_TTA.dbo.SO_04SOHistoryDetail ” & _
                “WHERE ItemNumber IN (SELECT item_number FROM johndeere_item_list) ” & _
                “) ” & _
                “AS a“
 ElseIf customer_code <> “‘JD%’” Then
  dcount = “SELECT COUNT(a.Orders) ” & _
                “FROM ( ” & _
                “SELECT SalesOrderNumber AS Orders ” & _
                “FROM MAS90.dbo.SO_04SOHistoryDetail ” & _
                “WHERE ItemNumber LIKE ” & customer_code & ” ” & _
                “UNION ” & _
                “SELECT SalesOrderNumber AS Orders ” & _
                “FROM MAS90_TTA.dbo.SO_04SOHistoryDetail ” & _
                “WHERE ItemNumber LIKE ” & customer_code & “ ” & _
                “) ” & _
                “AS a“
End If

As you can see, it could still be made nice, but taking a couple minutes to clean something up really makes a difference.

Bejeweled high score 348,320

PopCap Games

I’m a happy/loving drinker.  Not the aggressive kind.  I make lots of friends this way.  Well, not a lot of “friends” as much as I’m not sarcastic and people probably appreciate that about me (BTW: if I weren’t using the backspace key every three keystrokes this blog would have nearly 95 percent error rate).

For some reason I don’t know why beer affects me like this while harder alcohol doesn’t have the same affect.  I can drink 4+ Jack & Diet Cokes in an hour with less buzz.  I’m not sure why I’m writing this blog.  This is really odd.  I’m watching some TV show (not sure what, I’m only listening and not watching actually), but I’m sure that it doesn’t matter because I won’t remember it tomorrow.

Anyone ever drink to forget?
Drink to feel better?
Drink on a work night hoping that nobody at work asks for any work?

Pretty sure that I would hang this billboard the same way right now.

So when I get an error message the first thing I do is Google search for the number, in this case it was 0×80042112 and I only found one website with that error number indexed on Google.  Yahoo! was the same, just the one website.  Live.com (Microsoft’s search) gave me the same website.  Ask.com made my search into a mathematical equation.

Why then, am I on here giving you the error?  Good question!  The reason is that if someone else comes up with this error I hope that they can retrieve my posting and know how to fix the problem (I know you already knew that, you were just giving me a good lead-in).

In order to resolve the error I had to find out which email account was causing the problem:
remove that email account;
close Outlook:
re-open Outlook;
re-create the account;
close Outlook immediately (before the send/receive process commences);
start Outlook and everything should be fixed.

Are all those steps necessary you ask?  Yes.  I tried only removing an account then re-adding it, no success.  I tried all the steps leading up to the steps I listed, but only had success of not getting that message once I completed all the steps.