Pray for my brother

My brother Matt was in a sever car accident early Friday morning. The accident happened some time around 3:15 AM about 5 miles from his home. Apparently he plowed into a semi which proceeded to tear the top of the cab off. After 1-3 hours (we don't know for sure how long it took) EMS was able to get him out of the truck and airlifted to the hospital. He has an open fracture on his left knee, bruised lungs, contusions on his liver and spleen, and a depressed skull on his left side. As of last night the doctors were slowly weaning him from the sedative and ventilators to get him to stabilize on his own. We are still in the 72 hour window for letting the brain heal from the massive trauma. After the 72 hours the doctors will work to see which motor skills were affected in the crash; movement, verbal, sight, etc. So if you're reading this, please pray for my brother. Like I said earlier, his name is Matt Kerr and he needs all the prayers that he can get. Thanks.

Laptop, I'm Sorry.

Well it seems that after I bashed my laptop the other day that I discovered some interesting information. It seems that Win Server 2003 has some of the worst driver support arround. So it's not entirely my laptop's fault that the BroadCom drivers won't work under anything but Win2KP/XP. So, Laptop. I'm sorry.

What the hell is that?

I have been checking out Atom API the last couple of days trying to dive into it as much as possible, and I thought to myself, lets check out my atom file. I go to http://foo-blah.blogspot.com/atom.xml and I had an error. Error parsing XML namespace ?! What the hell is that? Fortunately there was no real harm done. I log into Blogger, edit the entry, and republished. Still, I’d like to know what’s up with that.

Speaking of what’s up with that. Why does my profile still only show 63 posts, most recent is November ’04? If the post count is updated based on when ever Blogger updates their indices I could understand that, but you update your indices every time you publish a post. Am I missing something?

Bad laptop. Bad!

A little over a year ago my parents bought me a laptop for graduation. No not high school graduation, college graduation. While I could have used the laptop in college for obvious reasons, I was excited that I had a new computer. My folks bought me a Dell Inspiron 5100. It’s a nice little laptop with 20gig hard drive, DVD/CD-RW combo, 256Mb of DDR ram, ATI 7500 Mobile graphics card, and a 2.66 P4 processor. Like I said, it’s a nice little computer, designed for basic use, some programming, and/or a small server. So what’s the problem you ask? I’ll tell you. The Inspiron 5100 model laptops (and a few others) use the Broad COM 440x drivers that are only supported under Win2K and WinXP. This sucks big-time since I installed WinServer2003. Now I’m stuck with a server that can’t serve! In the past I had Gentoo Linux installed on it and it gave me some trouble. Looks like I’ll be installing it again. Hopefully the new Gentoo 2005.0 install process works just as well as my last install.

Da jokerr 

Cars

The other week I took a day off of work/studying to go down to the valley to attend a funeral. While traveling I called Steph after dinner. The first and only thing that I heard was, "Josh. I've been in an accident and I can't find a tow truck. ". After calling back numerous times, calling friends, and family to check up on her it turned out that she was three houses down from a friends house whom I called. Thank the Lord she was fine. She did manage to rip out the bottom part of the car though. The frame was bent, twisted, etc from the front of the car to the steering wheel. So, after taking it into the shop the insurance company deemed it as a total loss. While I was upset about the car I was happy when they told us that the blue book value was $5k. The car was a 2000 Chevy Cavalier that cost $13k. I was expecting $3k at the most, but I'll definitely take $5k. After doing some car shopping we are now the proud owners of a Pontiac G6. Nice car that gets some good gas mileage and has a decent size engine. So alas, we're now in even more debt :)

MCSD.NET

One of the requirements with my job is that I become MCSD.NET certified. The certification included 5 exams, one of them being an elective. I've taken the first exam and got an 840/1000. An 84 is not too bad. I did really well in all topics but one. Thankfully they told me the topic that I need improvement on. So if you'll pardon me, I'm off to review and study for my next exam.