"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
My Boog Pages
Friday, March 8
Half Is Half
So, I was down in Houston earlier this week, and I picked up a copy of the Houston Press. It's a tabloid-sized weekly alternative paper, a lot Creative Loafing in Atlanta or the Dallas Observer. Anyway, I'm looking it over while I eat dinner, and in among the escort-service and phone-sex ads on the back is an ad that really caught my eye: a bookstore called 1/4 Price Books. When I lived in Dallas, I used to frequent a chain of huge used bookstores called Half Priced Books, so I though, "One quarter! Twice as good!"
Sadly, it was only half as good. After driving up and down South Shepherd for an hour, I finally located the store. Like most used bookstores it's a little hole-in-the-wall place, and the books were mostly not 75% off. Plus their selection of mystery books was horrible. So I hung around for awhile and bought a copy of Robert Crais'The Monkey's Raincoat. Still haven't had a chance to read it, although I also picked up The Man With The Getaway Face by Richard Stark, which was totally bad ass.
The best used bookstore I know is down in Galveston, just off the Strand (main drag). Unfortunately, I didn't get to go down there, because I absolutely worked my ASS off the whole time I was in Houston. I was down there to hook up Internet access and a Virtual Private Network for one of our partners (see this post), and ran into almost as many problems as last time. I called before I went down there and got the static IP addresses they'd assigned, but when I plugged them in to the router - no Internet. So I called, and the guy I talked to said, "Oh, you upgraded to Enhanced service. You need a router!" Just when my head was about to explode I finally talked to someone who knew what he was talking about, and he got me squared away. The poor guy worked in Plano, just outside of Dallas; he'd been transferred there from San Francisco. Not exactly an upgrade.
After that, setting up the VPN and making the local server a domain controller was a snap. It was when I tried setting up DNS and WINS I ran into a problem. I was trying to make a local copy of the main name servers at the home office, and it just wouldn't do it. The problem: multihoming, and I don't mean a vacation cottage in the Hamptons. Windows just doesn't like computers with more than one IP address. It's tough to predict what address it will use to access the information, and if you supply the wrong one, you're screwed. Anyway, finally got that working, then buzzed over to Brammer's Houston office for some work, and finally arrived back here last night, tired but happy.
