So Who is This “Urda” Guy?
Welcome to Urda’s Tech Tips! My name is Peter Urda, and I’ll be your host for the ride! Most friends call me Urda, but Peter or Peter Urda works for me too. This personal blog of mine will be a place of technology tips and tricks, insights to the world of Computers and Computer Science, and many other things to come.
So a little background on myself makes perfect sense at this point, just in case you were wondering who I am, what I do, and how all of this has lead me here…
I am a native of Louisville, Kentucky, and I have always worked and played with computers ever since I can remember. The first computer I tinkered with was an Apple IIe during my Kindergarten year. Mostly I just played games on it, but for one reason or another I was so fascinated by the machine.
Fast forward to about the second grade, this is when my family got their first “Personal Computer” and this is where I began my personal education on computers and computer science. This first computer that I could call my own was a Gateway P133, it was loaded with the latest technology of the time. It had a Intel Pentium 133mHz processor, a 4x CD-ROM, and a Western Digital Caviar Hard Drive with a whopping 2 gigabytes of storage as some of the bleeding edge technology. It was packaged with a copy of Windows 95, and had a Microsoft Sidewinder joystick to enjoy some of the flight games that came from Gateway.
After my family got the Gateway, we finally had it hooked up to the internet about a year or so after purchase. My parents went with the popular choice at the time, AOL Dial Up version 3.0. Keywords and chat rooms and really, really slow downloads was the extent of my knowledge of the internet at this time. It was not for a few months later that I came across websites such as expages and geocities, where I got my first experience tinkering and playing with HTML and all the joys of Web 1.0.
Of course at my Grade School we moved from Windows 95 to 98, and this is where I was constantly exposed to the Microsoft world. In a time before Google and search engines were king, fixes for common problems on a PC had to be discovered by yourself. With early versions of Windows Blue Screens of Death and software compatibility issues plagued many. It was through the amazing amounts of free time I would have each day that I could troubleshoot and discover the inner workings of a computer, and how to fix and locate problems. It was an exciting and educating experience to track down these issues, I was naturally drawn to them always wanting to know more.
Return back to my home front, my family had that P133 for the longest of time, and it was not until the 5th grade that my family upgraded to another new PC. This time it was a HP Pavilion with a 700mHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and an amazing 20 gigabyte hard drive. It was at this time we went from a Windows 95 environment to a Windows Millennium (ME) environment. This was a very dark age, just ask anyone that has worked with computers heavily from that time. Windows ME was plagued, just plagued, with so many problems. It was supposed to be a refresh to Windows 98, but it felt like really bad practical Joke from Microsoft. You couldn’t even be inside Windows for more than ten minutes before it crashed on you of froze. So many issues with ME, most tech enthusiasts just want to forget that era. Thankfully Windows XP was right around the corner, and that is when I upgraded our HP computer to XP, and so began a golden era of computing for myself.
XP ran great for years, and still does on that HP. I use it as a mini media server at the home, and as a great private proxy server too. But it was in 2004 that I finally had the know how, resources, and will to put together my own machine. It had a 3.2 gHz Pentium 4 processor, 2 gigabytes of RAM, an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, and a 320 gigabyte Western Digital hard drive. It ran Windows XP for its life as a desktop, and now actually hosts a few game servers for my gaming clan as a Windows 2003 server.
While we are on the topic of games, this is when I really got into PC gaming. It just wasn’t a good opportunity, it was a natural progression to PC gaming for myself. Since I had tinkered with computers, I had enjoyed playing video games of all types. My first experience with a home console was a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) at my neighbors home. Later on for Christmas my parents would get me a Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), and I played that for years and years. Later on I would use a variety of Game Boys, and a N64. PC gaming was a natural step towards, with my “gateway drug” being a copy of Starcraft for the PC. From here I got hooked on First Person Shooter Games (FPS) which is now my favorite type of game. It was also from here that a group of my very good friends go together and formed a small gaming community called International Anarchy which you can find more information about by just following the link.
My personal desktop that I had built, Urda’s Gaming Machine (UGM), kept me going through all of high school, and I attended many LAN Parties and events held by Lanwar in Louisville, Kentucky. Eventually, the technology in UGM became outdated and it was difficult to run all the new games that are always coming out, this prompted me to build yet another machine. UGM2 or Urda’s Gaming Machine 2.0 came about. UGM2 is my current desktop machine, and has an Intel Core 2 Quad 2.5 gHz processor, 4 gigabytes of DDR3 RAM, a RAID 1 of 640 gigabytes, an EVGA GTX 280 video card, all running Windows Vista Ultimate. This machine was built right after I got out of my high school in 2008, and has done a great job of running all the latest games and graphics so far. UGM was not just set aside, it became a Source Dedicated Server host, and a place for more tinkering and education of servers and server software for myself.
Well that’s enough about my personal life, but I have not even gotten into my background schools and current education. I attended a variety of grade schools, not one seemed to ever be a great fit for myself, all except Walden School in Louisville, Kentucky. At Walden is where I learned even more about technology and computers, and it is even where I got a head start on my Track & Field activities (which is another story for another day). From here I attended Saint Xavier High School, also in Louisville, where I took all the available upper level Computer Science courses including AP Computer Science.
The next natural step was to go to college, but not just any college, a School for Engineering! I am currently a student at the University of Louisville: Speed School of Engineering studying, you guessed it, Computer Engineering and Computer Science in my second year of education.I have studied various topics of Engineering including: math all the way up to, and including, differential equations, courses in C and C++, information structures, and other engineering general education requirements.
Speed School is a year-round, 5 year course for a Master’s in your Engineering discipline. It is year-round so students can get their Master’s sooner, but the major selling point of Speed School is the integrated year of cooperative education. Starting in the spring of the second year of education, Engineering Students will work with an Engineering group for an entire semester, every other semester, until 3 co-op’s are completed. For example most students start in the spring, will then have class the following summer, return to work fall, go back to class in the spring after that, and finally have their third co-op position that second summer.
While I am still in the interviewing process for my co-op employer, I will have a selection here in a week or two for my co-op, which of course I will post here and a little bit about the company I have selected.
…So you have made it this far in my first post! Thank you for reading, and please watch this space for my personal tech tips and tricks to make your daily computer use better and more enjoyable. Of course there may be a few ramblings a long the way, but I think you’ll enjoy my writings. See you next time!
Hi Urda!!!
I´ve been searching for an issue such as a few time ago you experience with a Windows Server 2003, which Suddenly Drops Connections to everything but PING and port 80 (webserver).
You post in the serverfault.cpm page that the issue down to a botched Windows Update.
So i have the issue and i wondering if could help me with these, maybe you tell me the Windows Update information to troubleshoot my server.
I have Apache running on this, and sometimes after a certain ammount of time the server freeze the port and only listen in the 80 port.
My email : jonathan_gmj@hotmail.com
I apologize for my english, because migth be better, i´m a costarican person, so i hope you could excuse me for that.
Thanks for your attention.
I responded on ServerFault, but the fix I had was removing the latest sets of Windows Updates at that time and re-adding them one by one until the problem resurfaced. Which updates caused it I cannot remember, but after I had worked out the automatic updates until it stopped misbehaving.
This is probably way off topic for you…but…Thank you for posting this note about Jon Yarden in 2008. I knew Jon years ago through a close friend. I moved away from Louisville over a decade ago and then moved back in 2007, and I was trying to catch up with Jon. I was shocked to read about his death online through the C-J obits page. But I didn’t have any context to history about how or why he died and our mutual friend long ago moved away from Louisville. So, the entry in your blog was so, so helpful to me and also so very sad. Jon was a friendly, funny and smart guy. Thank you so much for posting this.
I’ll take the time and port it over my current blog. Thank you for those kind words :)
I have imported my original post into this website for long term storage: http://www.peter-urda.com/2010/07/jon-yarden