Mike's Thoughts

So you all know that I dabble with photography a bit. I bought myself a snazzy Nikon D40, and threw some of my decent shots up on my site. Well, for those of you who don’t know, my inspiration came from my roommate, who is a full on photo journalist major here at RIT. My photos can’t touch a candle to his work.

Mike Graae has been shooting photography for a few years now, and I can say that he is one heck of a photographer! He shoots with a Nikon D300, among other cameras, compared to my D40 (think his Porsche to my Honda Civic ).

While I will still continue to throw my favorite shots that I have taken up on my site, please take a moment to look at Mike G’s work over at his Picasa site. Send him your comments and thoughts!

Until next time…

So, my PS3 of not even 1 year, pooped out on me last week. I thought it was just a fluke, but when I went to watch my brand-new BluRay movie, my horrors were confirmed. For some reason, the system froze mid way through playing a game, and ever since restarting it, the system will not recognize any disk whatsoever: not BluRay, not DVD, not CD. I had just installed the 2.43 firmware, so I am leaning toward pointing fingers at that….

Matters only got worse after calling Sony. First of all, you have to sit through AN AD on your phone for some stupid game. Then, when you finally navigate through 90 menus, the system reads you the same crap you can get online. Uh, thanks, but no thanks. Finally, you are prompted to press 0 to talk to a rep. The rep was clueless, and was baffled as to why my contact information would show up in there system! Hmmm… maybe because I registered the stupid thing half a year ago! The rep was all over the place, and told me that I needed to find my receipt, otherwise I would need to do an “out of warranty repair,” though he never said what that was. He gave me a reference number, and I proceeded to hang up, furious. I called home, and discovered that I had scanned the receipt…it’s like I knew something like this was gonna happen. I then called Sony back, and got the most insulting rep ever. After giving him my reference number, he asked why I was calling… um, read the damn info! The rep was extremely rude, and was obviously upset that I, the sucker who bought the piece of junk, had to call in. He then read off some crap about another form I had to fill out online. Fine, thanks for that.

So now I wait… supposedly they’re gonna send me a box or something. I am shocked at this situation, and believe me, if my system doesn’t come back in impeccible shape, I’m gonna do a lot more than rant on my blog! Sony, you’re on notice:

PS. If you want to make your own On Notice board, check out: http://www.shipbrook.com/onnotice/

So, after doing a ton of searching on the RIT site for instructions on how to use RIT’s LDAP address book on my local machine, I finally came up with the settings.

If you, like me, use Mozilla Thunderbird (grab a free copy from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/), then you will most likely want to be able to search the RIT directory for fellow students and professors.

To configure Thunderbird:

1. Click on the Address Book icon in Thunderbird
2. Click Tools -> Options
3. Click Composition -> Addressing, then click “Edit Directories”
4. Click the Add button
5. Enter the following information:
Name: RIT Directory
Hostname: ldap.rit.edu
Base DN: ou=people,dc=rit,dc=edu
Port Number: 389
Bind DN: uid=<your RIT username>,ou=people,dc=rit,dc=edu
Ensure the SSL checkbox is UNCHECKED
6. Click OK
7. Click the Directory Service checkbox, then click RIT Directory in the drop down box
8. Click OK.
9. Close Address Book, and restart Thunderbird
10. Click Write
11. Start entering a student’s name (like Michael). You should be prompted to enter a password. Enter your RIT account password, and if you choose to, select the remember my password option
12. You should now be able to use the auto complete feature to query the global address book
13. You can also search someone by clicking Contacts in the new message window, then selecting RIT Directory from the drop down window

Just thought I’d point something out…

It doesn’t matter if you have dirty cloths up to the ceiling of your dorm room, or if you have more empty pizza boxes than shirts.

No, if you’ve got the right stuff in your room, you’re set.

As a “hero” of the Colbert Nation, I give you a perfect example