Texas Creasons

the old site intro

What is this boring page?
That's what you are thinking... It is horrible, it is boring. But...tt is relatively easy to update with VI (the world's smallest text editor) or StarOffice. But that's not saying much. I will come up with something better when I run out of better things to do. And that will happen- oh, never. So simplicity it is.

On coffee Roasting

Been playing with the coffee roaster this week. What fun! Finally got a really good roast out of it by putting a box over it to recirulate some of that hot air. Got a good city/vienna roast down from 20 minutes (and not really that dark) to 7. It was good too-- Angela even drank some black which is a shock. But what happened? Had friends over for breakfast and got greedy and showy-offy and was making them all a batch to take home and I over heated the little unit and now the heater core is dead. :-(
It's a little depressing. It was so much fun.
At least is was only $10 from a resale shop instead of $60 like they go for on ebay... thanks to my friend from work who saw it at the shop. Now... if I can just find a heater element. But, then, there are new ones that even let you see the beans so you know when to stop it instead of pulling the chaff lid off and getting chaff in the eyes.

Math and Puzzles

I made a Sudoku puzzle generator. Two print out to a page just perfect. Loads of fun, and experts say helps prevent dementia in your old age. ;) That's a reference to an inside joke, ask me sometime to explain it to you. What is Sudoku and how do you solve it?

Delorean togetherness

Got the Delorean back together with the painted fascias and new mirror.

What now?

Argh! You fix 10 things and break something really important! I get printing working and the webserver starts failing with some really obscure errors. But it is all back up finally....

Updating the server

I updated my workstation... I was running out of admin space and there were several improvements to be grabbed by updating. But what A Royal Pain! I backed all the important stuff up to DVD-- my docs, scripts, programs and music, only to find there were some issues with the DVD's. Some files are useless, some are read better by Winders PC and copied to a thumb drive-- like the configuration for NUT (Network UPS Tool) that I use to monitor the power at my place.

I'm going to document some of those things in my Unix pages so that I don't lose them-- things like getting my Palm Treo 600 to sync with Evolution, SMF scripts for NUT, MRTG, etc. Plus some stuff I wasn't doing before-- like whole network filtering with Squid and Dansguardian, instead of We-Blocker on individual PC's. We-Blocker hasn't been too stable since the upgrade to XP.

I need to go camping. I need to go visit Grandma & Dad...

Behind the 8-ball, in front of a Mac Truck...

I'm so far behind in email that I hate it now. It's not efficient enough. And by efficient, I mean quick. I have to wait for that page to load and hit archive or delete or decide if I need to respond. Do I look like I have time for that? This is the first update in two months. Before that it was like two years.
I don't even work on the car anymore...
But while I was glancing I checked out Googlism in a link because I like Google. It was the Delorean list, naturally... I just delete Apache and PHP emails, and the antique restoration group is pretty slow. That was amusing for a few minutes while I waited for Angela to get to her stuff done so we could go to bed.
I googlised "kevin creason" and there was nothing, so I just did creason. It was interesting, amusing. After I googlised, or googlismed is probably more appropriate-- after I googlismed vaden, I went and just googled creason and read for a bit. Some interesting folks. I like Josh he seems nice. Steve has some nice music. I don't know much about the French Connection. I looked at contacts and did not see any people with the name Creason. My French is really rusty (was it ever nice steel to start with?). I do like their pronounciation though... very French. :-)
I finally found a link about me on the second page. I'm not disappointed, but wow, there were several professors and other notable people, that's fine, but the unnotables, the court cases, why do they have to be before me? :-P
How snooty is that? Too snooty... I need to work on that. It was my ARES Snoopy link, BTW. See the pics in the gallery and read my side of the story. While I'm bragging on myself, several members of my team (and me) received another prestigious award, a One NASA award. It was for the work we did (systems side) that enabled several applications to join themselves at the hip and share data expeditiously via the ISS SSO product that we maintain.

Big News, Big Move

The biggest news of the year is that we have moved down just a few miles from Houston/Clear Lake to the city of League City. It's still the Houston Bay Area, and still part of the zone sometimes referred to as the Clear Lake Recreational area. The whole building process wasn't as bad as I expected it to be... it did take a long time and things aren't perfect but frankly we live in a fallen world so what do you expect? We've got Pictures documenting the whole thing in probably what will be excruciating detail for you. But I enjoy having these in-process photos and they have already been helpful (now where was that pipe? how many studs are in this wall?) and in fact a few more would have been helpful. You see we (Angela took most of these for me since I could not get away from the office as much and she was by the site twice a day to take the kids to their new school) doubted the usefulness for a bit. At least I did... but now I know.

The garage is huge! I can barely wait to get it set up... but unfortunately there are other more important projects like sandy unfinished backyard turned into something useful, or Angela's craftroom finished. Still need to get those doors sanded and stained.