Since it has already been hilarious to look back at the things I thought
were cool in the past, I wanted to write up something about all the
tools I find most useful today.
What is LaunchBar?
It’s kind of like trying to describe how the Internet works. It’s both
simple and complex at the same time, yet all encompassing. Launchbar is
an app launcher - simple. And then their blurb:
This is one of those OMG why didn’t I know this before moments. Been
developing python for how many years?
Was slapping some doctests into an ancient library written years ago and
searched for… I don’t even remember. But ran across this little gem
about %doctest_mode in iPython
http://renesd.blogspot.com/2009/08/ipython-and-doc-tests-cutting-and.html
Outrageously cool. Game changing. Life altering. Okay, at least
outrageously cool.
For my couple of friends writing in python it’s totally worth checking
out.
This is almost too terrible for words. Any Star Wars enthusiast should
enjoy though snicker. How often do you get to see Princess Leia sing a
soft and lovely ballad?
Happy Life Day on
Youtube
I’ve tried to make it through the whole thing twice and failed. May the
force be with you.
Lately Sam has taken to the old digital camera. Canon
super-pure-ultra-shot something or the other. What I find interesting is
seeing the outcome of all the snapping. The perspective is truly unique.
_
_
_
Once every ten years or so I archive some mail and ran across this gem.
Like most email funnies I have no idea of the source. Received from an
old cow-orker circa 1998.
Things I’ve Learned from My Children (Honest and No Kidding) – an
anonymous mother
- There is no such thing as child-proofing your house.
- If you spray hair spray on dust bunnies and run over them with
roller blades, they can ignite.
- A 4 year-old’s voice is louder than 200 adults in a
crowded restaurant.
- If you hook a dog leash over a ceiling fan, the motor is not strong
enough to rotate a 42 pound boy wearing pound puppy underwear and a
superman cape.
- It is strong enough however to spread paint on all four walls of a
20 by 20 foot room.
- Baseballs make marks on ceilings.
- You should not throw baseballs up when the ceiling fan is on.
- When using the ceiling fan as a bat you have to throw the ball up a
few times before you get a hit.
- A ceiling fan can hit a baseball a long way.
- The glass in windows (even double pane) doesn’t stop a baseball hit
by a ceiling fan.
- When you hear the toilet flush and the words Uh-oh, it’s already
too late.
- Brake fluid mixed with Clorox makes smoke, and lots of it.
- A six year old can start a fire with a flint rock even though a 36
year old man says they can only do it in the movies.
- A magnifying glass can start a fire even on an overcast day.
- If you use a waterbed as home plate while wearing baseball shoes it
does not leak-it explodes.
- A king size waterbed holds enough water to fill a 2000 sq foot house
4 inches deep.
- Legos will pass through the digestive tract of a four year old.
- Duplos will not.
- Play Dough and Microwave should never be used in the same sentence.
- Super glue is forever.
- McGyver can teach us many things we don’t want to know.
- Ditto Tarzan.
- No matter how much Jell-O you put in a swimming pool you still can’t
walk on water.
- Pool filters do not like Jell-O.
- VCR’s do not eject PB&J sandwiches even though TV commercials show
they do.
- Garbage bags do not make good parachutes.
- Marbles in gas tanks make lots of noise when driving.
- You probably do not want to know what that odor is.
- Always look in the oven before you turn it on.
- Plastic toys do not like ovens.
- The fire department in San Diego has at least a 5 minute
response time.
- The spin cycle on the washing machine does not make Earth
worms dizzy.
- It will however make cats dizzy.
- Cats throw up twice their body weight when dizzy.
In order to verify the functionality of my web log I would like to
document the following:
Kate snapped a great picture of Nora and me the other day in the park.
Had to share because it turned out so cute. Our little
Fremen with her blue eyes just
cracks me up. Hope it makes everyone smile.
Often I find myself sending PDF documents around that have been
generated from OS X using its print to PDF functionality or scanned in
from the old HP all-in-one. Handy! Works great! Except for the fact that
the files generated tend to be on the largish side.
To get around this I found some helpful commands for
Ghostscript that can shrink said
largish PDF down to a more reasonable size. To be honest I’m not sure of
any negative side effects, but this has saved me on several occasions.
Once upon a time this web site had comments. Most likely when it was
cobbled together in the form of a bunch of C++ cgi scripts. Those were
the days! I ran across the code in one of my archives a few months ago
and couldn’t begin to comprehend what I had written.
I have to admit it is hilarious
to go back and read about all the frameworks and languages I’ve tried over the years <http://www.thesergents.net/WebLog/2002/11/07/01/ReWrite/>
(2002 Really?!?). I’ve migrated so many times I’m honestly not sure what
happened to any of the old comments. Probably ended up in some archive
with the picture database I had created years before
flickr and
picasa were around. Do I sound old or
what?
I absolutely love the hair.
It cracks me up, so I had to share.
Too many children’s books these days,
Must get my mind out of this haze.
Mmmm.. Risotto.
Saturday was a crazy day. There was Will's birthday party, umm…
Okay, truth be told that was all there was. By myself on daddy duty it
was about all I could handle trying to get everyone up from naps and out
the door only 15 minutes late.
Third birthday parties are hilarious in my opinion. In this instance
Spiderman was attending. Most of the other kids we a bit weary of him,
but not Sam. He monopolized the poor guy's time. Following him
around, telling him Sam stories, giving him high fives, webbing out (as
seen in photo). After Spidey was allowed to leave the benign clutches of
Sinister Sam we had some cake and headed for the home front.
And it?s about time Spring decided to show its face. Sam needed to
splash around in some puddles. Very necessary. Those poor frog boots
might be dry next week some time. Shouldn't prevent more puddle
slogging though.
Time for all of us Minnesotans to head out of our caves and see each
other again. Was good to actually talk to our neighbors for the first
time in months.
Next up… Summer! And mosquitos.
Because there is so much free time I’ll save the babbling word stuff for
later. Pictures are worth more anyhow, right?
Looks like we’re having a girl! Exciting times indeed! Here’s her first
photo! She’s already a looker.
Dad, I’m going to need my old double barrel 20 gauge back if you don’t
mind. Thanks.
Not a lot of time to post antics and musings lately, so pictures will
have to do. The darn phone cameras really aren’t so bad so long as you
hold them really steady. This is from my afternoon walk with Zoe under
77 in one of our numerous Minnesota state parks.
Hunting pheasants with GPS (Grandpa Sergent).
Mowing the lawn with Sam.
Further evidence located on my flickr photo
page
Good news in the Sergent household (Minneapolis division). Sam is
going to have some company! He’s got something to say about it.
http://www.youtube.com/v/1TmqoEPOj8Y
The Minneapolis chapter of the Sergents is all present and accounted
for. Immediate family and friends are all okay too. Thanks for all the
phone calls! It’s great to hear from everyone. Sad it’s surrounding such
an event.
Most of us in this neck of the woods drive over that bridge at least
once a week. Many people daily. Not much else to say.
In 17 minutes I was able to post an ad on craig’s list, send out a W9,
take 2 phone calls, and put this little Sam clip together. It
demonstrates the various stages of the being known as Sam all taking
place within several minutes of each other. I’m a terrible editor when
it comes to video of the little guy. Should probably be a lot shorter
than 2 minutes, but I can’t seem to cut out any more. You’ll just have
to suffer.
After many hours of hand wringing and tooth gnashing I finally managed
to cobble together some form of a working mail server. It should be
mostly working now. Receiving messages should most definitely be
working. Sending might be a little hairy and scary right now.
The problem all started yesterday morning while trying to upgrade the
spam filtering system on our Virtual Private
Server. It was already a bit of a
hack - qmail, spamhaus
rbl, and
spamassassin. Somewhere along the way
stopping spam stopped stopping, so I had the bright idea “Hey, just
upgrade everything” as if that would fix it all. bzzzzzzt wrong
answer. Ended up making things way worse. So bad in fact qmail would no
longer give any helpful error messages. Since being on the VPS I haven’t
been a huge fan of qmail. Too many pieces. Too many things to break. Too
hard to track down. So I ended up installing my old standby
Postfix. There’s something to that name.
Something happened while I was attempting to fix the spam filtering. I’m
working feverishly trying to get it back up and running again. Sorry to
everyone for which I host mail. Hang in there..
I forgot how much I don’t like Internet Explorer. In fact, I dislike it
so much I rarely even test my own site with IE. So, as many of you
probably know - and I just found out, IE7 doesn’t really care for what
I’ve done with my YUI menus and all the javascript.
Have to give credit to the engineers at Microsoft for the great and
descriptive Internet Explorer cannot open site operation aborted error
message. That really helps a person figure things out. Thanks!
Just a quick Sam update. Mostly because we have the technology. I am a
geek after all.
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-7831430916487436123&hl=en
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=1987019111366460401&hl=en
With the growing archives of video we have I thought I would try this
experiment today. I have uploaded a movie containing some clips of Sam
and Mom early on - then Sam and Zoe later on. Will see how this handles
on the web site. Too much video and not enough storage or bandwidth it
seems. The little guy is too funny.
It’s rule 3471 in Dana’s handbook of life. Do something you enjoy
every day.
Yesterday was full of things I enjoy. First and foremost Kate and Sam
returned from visiting Nana in Cedar Rapids. Hanging out with the
beautiful Kate and Sam I am is always top on my list of things I enjoy.
I would like it here or there. I would like it anywhere! Yes.. more new
pictures…
I know everyone loves the post that says *Sorry, haven’t blogged forever
- been busy*. I won’t put you through that. I’ll only apologize because
things have been hectic.
And without further ado! Sam pictures. He’s such a little boy now. Kate
and I can hardly believe it! Go on over to our Flickr
page to see all of them.
Now back to our regularly scheduled non-web related activities. If there
is such a thing these days.
Been a bit since we took new pictures of the Sam man. He’s a few steps
away from walking. Always on the move lately, so it’s hard. Managed to
capture a few here. Sticking with my flickr photo
page for now. Been enjoying the
service enough. Might have to get a pro account if we keep it up. Still
so many choices out there between Picasa and .Mac I’m still not sure
where we’ll end up.
A few years back this video was all the rage. For some reason we’ve
played it quite often in the office over the last year or so. If you’ve
never heard the Numa Numa song or seen the video now you can to both
in one shot. This was one of those poor souls like the lightsaber kid
who become famous for fairly innocuous pieces of video. Still, the song
is catchy. And if you hear me singing it you’ll at least know where it
comes from.
About once a year I take the time to troll through my applications
looking for things I’m not using in hopes that I can bring myself to
delete them. Once in a rare while I run across a gem of a program I had
no idea was even there. This is just an occasion. Not the biggest waste
of time there has ever been, that honor still belongs to Line
Rider,
but a time waste nonetheless. This silly creation took about 5 minutes.
The program is called Comic Life and was
one of the rotating stable of little bonus programs
Apple installs on all their new computers. This
could be the start of something silly.
Kurt, you send me some weird stuff sometimes. (like
EPIC or the
nintendo game theme
medley) This one
was pretty kick ass.
A powerful commentary/presentation by Professor Wesch from Kansas State
University on Web 2.0. Very definitely worth the watch even if you
don’t think you know anything about “the Web”. You probably know more
than you think you do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE&eurl=
I think Amazon’s recommendation engine has
finally lost its marbles. I’ve become accustomed to the targeted
advertising for sterling silver earrings and little pretty trinkets. I
mean every guy needs a hint now and again for gifts. I had myself
convinced it’s because I look at classical music and books on saving
space in houses… and heavy metal.. and electronics… There goes that
theory. Lately it’s gone too far. Red hand bags - Womens jackets -
Stockings. It must be time for me to recognize that Amazon.com thinks I
am a woman. Soon, like much of the junk mail I’ve received in my life,
it will probably say Welcome Ms. Sergent when I log in. Great. So much
for collaborative filtering.
Jeremy sent me this over instant messenger just moments ago. No, he’s
working very hard! He was just thinking of a friend in need of a smile.
Now I’m doing the same. No! I’m still working very hard.
It’s not quite a fun Friday fact, but should be treated as one.
The Douche
Card
CityRag has an interesting page about the
20 greatest guitar
solos. It’s
not that interesting of a list in itself. It’s been done many times
before. What is interesting is that they have links to the youtube
videos. You can go watch the guitar solos. That’s pretty cool. But
Stairway to Heaven as the #1 guitar solo? Really? And Guns ’n Roses
November Rain is on the list but Sweet Child o Mine not even listed?
Shouldn’t that be the other way around? There are some great ones on the
list however. Go have a look and listen. Blame me for the waste of time
later.
My
Snoball
USB Microphone came in last week. Have only had the chance to do a
couple of recording sessions with it. Have to say for a home studio it’s
the bomb. The sound is surprisingly clear. I thought there would be some
strange hum or odd buzz I’d just have to live with. Not the case. And it
beats the heck out of going from old junky microphone to the mixer
through a bunch of odd connections into the computer. Just the mic -
right into the computer. Garageband recognizes it right away. Set some
levels. Start recording.
Some helpful tips on safe storage and time limits by the U.S. Food and
Drug administration - Refrigerator storage
chart
Commercial mayonaise only 2 months after opening? Jeeze.. I think we’ve
used it after years. Maybe that’s why didn’t feel well during 2003.
Experiments on multiple levels. Our favorite family photographer had us
bring some accessories for the one year photo update. They turned out
great. Makes me laugh.
The other end of the experiment is using Flickr to post photos on the
web. I’m trying out their free account right now. I have to admit it’s
pretty slick. The reason I stayed away from all the services like this
before had to do with the fact you had to upload one image at a time.
Now there are bulk upload tools that make the whole process painless.
All sorts of neat organizational features are built in. Apparently we
can print pictures directly from the site now. Still trying to get this
figured out (along with the rest of my life), so I’ll make sure to
report back once I get it nailed down. Until then shoot on over to our
pictures - http://www.flickr.com/photos/tnegres/
Well, we had the first broomball game of the year last night. Wasn’t
such a good outing for the Wrecking Ballz. We lost the game and I
managed to sit, not so gracefully, on my ankle. Possible season ending
injury. Luckily I have lots of Advil and a nice black walnut branch to
help me get around.
Have to say it was really nice of the U.S. Pond Hockey
Championship people to hook me up with a
little first aid. They sure didn’t have to, but were happy to help.
Usually the championship is held on Lake Calhoun. This year, however,
the ice was not sufficiently frozen in time, so they moved it to Lake
Nokomis. Might have to take Sam down there to check out some of the
action. That is - if I can get my bum wheel rolling again.
I know - two youtubes in a week. Can’t help it though. This one is way
too funny. It’s a pretty right on impersonation. Don’t know that Steve
Jobs is necessarily the hardest guy to impersonate. The skit is a
hilarious take on the Macworld introduction of the iPhone.
Here’s the link to youtube
if the embedded object thing doesn’t work.
http://www.youtube.com/v/K4VieMjZYfI
I’m totally in love with Textmate. It is by far
the best text editor I have ever used. Going on about 6 months of
constant use now and I learn a better way to do something every day.
Today I installed a bundle that helps manage bundles and my life just
got that much better. Found a bunch I didn’t even know existed. A
Django template and
Python bundle? Rock.
This thing totally rocks. I think the GetBundle bundle is now part of
the standard release. Just hit the Bundles menu and pick the
GetBundle item. Install, find.. It’s really that easy.
Cool is…
http://www.designboom.com/contest/view.php?contest_pk=16&item_pk=11744&p=1
toasta
It’s a ceramic toaster. One piece at a time. It won first place at the
macef design content. Wonder if we’ll ever see them produced. In this
toast-lovers mind it would be a great thing.
Just took the accent quiz. Kind of a fun little non-scientific test of your accent. I think most of the people I talk with fall in this category, but would be interesting to see if it might pick up some of the Minnesota accent in people? Didn’t really see what might cause that score to jump.
- <table style=“width: 320px; border: 1px solid gray; font: normal 12px arial, verdana, sans-serif; background-color: white;">
-
- <tr>
-
- <td colspan=“2” style=“background: white; color: black; padding: 5px;">
-
<b style=“font: bold 20px ‘Times New Roman’, serif;
display: block; margin-bottom: 8px;">What American
accent do you have?</b>
After years of using a Logitech
trackball
I needed to change it up. Went to the local
Apple store
and picked up a Mighty Mouse
II.
I have to say, like most things Apple does, it’s
pretty slick. A few things take a little getting accustomed to - like
the touch sensitive shell. The mouse clicks by pushing the entire outer
shell down over the whole bottom. Like a car body floating over the
suspension. To ‘‘right click’’ I need to have none of my finger pieces
touching the outer shell where my index finger usually rests. It’s taken
me almost a week to train my hand. Old habits die hard. On top of it
all, my life is spent in a web browser, and for those that don’t know -
if your hand is already on the mouse the fastest way to go back is to
right click and select back (usually the top most selection available).
With this mouse that little operation can be tricky to perform. Not
impossible, but definitely takes some getting used to.
iTunes gets a D-================
Having a helluva time trying to complete any requests on iTunes music
store tonight. Got a gift certificate for Christmas and this is now my
third time attempting to redeem it. Each time I’m able to perform a
couple of searches that end up taking minutes - then nothing. Can’t even
receive another answer. I understand how hard it can be to build a
system to do massive searches (just trust me on that one), but for a
company who is supposed to have their bread buttered in this arena it’s
a bit embarrassing. So, egg in your eye Apple. You’re not so peachy in
my melon any more.
Had a couple of really fun events this weekend. First was Knowledge
Front Friday mixed with the company holiday
party!
Not sure it gets any better than that. Everyone came over to the Sergent
compound for some ribs. It was sufficiently messy that Zoe had a hard
time keeping up with floor cleanup duty. She will survive I think.
Second was Sam’s first birthday
party!
Had a few family and friends over and it still seemed like a full house.
With kids ranging in age from 10 months to 6 years anything could happen
(could be argued the outer range was 33 years). It was actually pretty
calm. I missed getting pictures of the actual cake eating, but got it on
video. I think we’ve got about 1 hour of video to get off the camera.
That means about 5 hours of video processing time. Have to get that in
the schedule some time.
I don’t know if I’ve laughed this hard in quite some time. You don’t
need to be a guitar player to appreciate this parody.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX0bcZjnjaM YouTube - Yngwie Malmsteen
Parody
Update: Turns out Malmsteen Management didn’t like the parody so
much and had the video removed from youtube. Great to see people have a
good sense of humor. I bet you look hard enough it can still be found.
I nearly messed myself. Oh my…
Under Safari the menu to the left over there was not working out. Really
weird that it would randomly display, or not. Or sometimes would render,
but incorrectly. Couldn’t find any love on Google or any of the Yahoo!
groups or message boards. This made me red. I finally started deleting
references to CSS files and pulling out javascript at random. The
solution? The order of the CSS files matters. At least in my case. Heck,
it might even be documented somewhere, but I have to say I’ve read quite
a few YUI docs and have seen nothing
of the sort. So in the end I had to make sure that
container/assets/container.css was not before ??? - yet to figure that
one out. Maybe before the initialization of the menu javascript? At
least it seems to be working for now. Wait until I start doing some of
the windowing junk I want to do eventually. World of hurt.
While cleaning up the old blog entries I ended up with a bunch of
somewhat arbitrary links. A little window into my browsing habits, at
least when they are all munged together like this.
It’s been a couple of months since I moved The Sergents to Google’s
Hosted Apps, and I’m here to give both thumbs up. Currently we’re only
taking advantage of the email and calendaring, which works really well.
It can be a bit of a pain if switching entirely over off an old system.
There’s no importing of mail into Google’s mail. Sure, contacts, but not
the actual mail. I can imagine that would create a nightmare for support
personnel, but it sure would make it nice. The alternative seems to be
to exist in both the old realm and the new - simultaneously. As with
most technology there doesn’t seem to be an end game. Rather a long
series of blunders, rehashing, reloads, reboot, and reconfigurations.
Somewhere along the way it ends up being better. I think. Maybe it’s
more that it became so horrible and busted that any semblance of working
order is euphoric.
Record time indeed. I gave myself a 10 minute break during work to set
up an RSS feed for my site. I didn’t really think I could get it done,
but in fact I did! How’s that for some <a
href="http://www.djangoproject.com/">Django</a> power?!?
The feed is now located at http://www.thesergents.net/feeds/latest/. I
tested it in Google’s reader and it works just fine. Just tested it
under Safari as well - looks good. If you’re curious I followed these
simple setup directions
(http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/syndication/) almost
exactly. The only tricky thing I had to do was define a
get_absolute_url method for my Page class. If only everything were
that easy.
Still going through some gyrations configuring everything. Getting a
handle on how it might be better to layout all the content, fighting
with some javascript elements like the menu, and importing all the
mucked up blog entries from the old wiki. Figure if I do a couple of
imports everyday it will only take me until the end of the year to get
them all in. By that time I will want to redesign the whole thing again,
so it will work out perfectly.
It was sad to be at Grandma’s funeral, but good to see so many family
members. Got to visit with the majority of my eight trillion cousins. We
shared some good laughs. The line of the weekend had to be “I’m pretty
sure you can’t say that to a kid”.
You know what Steve, I think you’re right.
Had a mighty fine steak at Dude’s Steak
House. We managed to take up about
half the restaurant. If you’re ever in downtown Sidney - stop by and
check it out. Sam enjoyed from Fried macaroni and cheese nibblers. Who
would have thought?
Been trying to figure out the javascript weirdness for Safari. Had done
searches before without success. This time I came up with this from
Apple’s web
site.
Actually comes in handy. Didn’t help me solve my problem. Will require
much more brain power than I had at the time.
- How do I debug JavaScript in Safari?
Safari’s “Debug” menu allows you to turn on the logging of JavaScript
errors. To display the debug menu, open a Terminal window and type:
We had expected this for some time, yet it’s still unfortunate.
Grandma passed away January 3, 2007 at the age of 84. My cousin <a
href="http://www.seangomez.com/">Sean</a> has the details of
her rich life. To quote:
Margaret Elizabeth Deaver (Parker) was born in Randolph, Missouri to Harvey Parker and Gladys Elizabeth Parker on March 8, 1922. She was married to Donald James Deaver and had 10 children, almost countless grandchildren and great grandchildren, and even a couple great-great grandchildren.
Grandma flew out to Maryland to help take care of me after my auto
accident in high school. She was a very caring and special person in my
life. The countless summer days on the farm in Nebraska. I will always
remember her laugh and here great smile. Truly one of a kind.
Still having a hard time believing it. Our good friend Josh Green died
on 12/19/2006. We always had this joke of rating things by look and
smell. Looks good, smells good was obviously the ideal state, but others
were not necessarily bad. For example his old brown truck that took us
from Minnesota to Virginia Beach, VA to pick up his ‘68 mustang looked
bad and smelled bad (thanks to some mice that built a nest in the air
intake). Got us where we needed to go, and back again.
Hope everybody has had a great start to the new year! Another one under
the belt. Sam is going to be one in a couple of weeks. Almost impossible
to believe.
Still making a ton of changes. Footloose and fancy free. If you happen
to visit thesergents.net and it’s not immediately responding it’s
because I’ve broken something. I realize this is nothing new. And
looking through old posts I can see that I have written that statement
on several occasions. If I had search working I would prove it. Where’s
that list again?
More updating in progress. Changed the media menu so there will be no
need for so much of the drilling down. While I was at it I managed to
export some pictures from the previous weekend in Iowa. It was quite a
crowd. The more the merrier as they say!
The pictures are here -
http://media.thesergents.net/pictures/2006-Pictures/2006-12-Christmas2.html
It’s just come to my attention that
Safari hates my web site. More
specifically my menu. If you are one of the people using Safari - there
should be a menu on the left. You probably saw it blink on the screen
for about 0.3 seconds before the browser decided that it wasn’t
important enough to display.
Been using the Yahoo! UI Library for
most of these wizbang features. For the most part it’s been flawless,
but there are a few browser compatibility issues lurking about. I’m sure
for a javascript guru it’s elementary. For me it’s more of a chore to
hunt down what’s actually happening. Add it to the list.
All the old stuff is still around. The site index has a list of all
pages on the site. Someday I will get searching working - either through
Google or make something myself. I got really bored with trying to fix
up and split up the terrible markup than MoinMoin left behind. For the
time being the old web log stuff is all in a few pages.
- WebLogArchive/2002/ - Update - this has been imported
- WebLogArchive/2003/ - Update - this has been imported as well
- WebLogArchive/2004/ - Import complete
- WebLogArchive/2005/ - Import in progress
- WebLogArchive/2006/ - Import in progress
Ugly I know, but that’s the way it is while I get things figured out.
mod-python and apache are not getting along on top of things. Have some
stuff to figure out.
Using Django I was able to screw things
up in record time. And by that I mean rewrite my site yet again. In mere
minutes I went from a fully functioning site to this haphazardly thrown
together piece of emu manure. Like most things I do it is at least
functional if not ugly. RSS feeds and site maps are not yet available. I
went ahead and moved all my pictures off to their own space.
Sam got his hairs cut yesterday. Pictures available at First
Haircut.
We took the video camera, but haven’t had time for post production on
that bit. To hold everyone over I found an old movie of Sam clapping.
Funny to see him so small not that long ago.
But I can’t. I’ve found a two really cool and totally complete wastes of
time. First is the Line
Rider. A fun toy where
you draw lines, then a little guy on a sled tries to survive riding
them. Just by clicking on the link you can kiss 30 minutes goodbye.
Check out a few of the videos of some more the more complex ones here
(link removed). After that go take the tone
test and rate your musical skills.
Well, not really musical skills. It was originally designed as a test
for the music memory of <em>tone deaf</em> people. Turns out
their music memory works just fine. Weird, but fun. So that was about 36
minutes of your life you’ll never get back.
With much pain and gnashing of fingers we have completed the migration
of my old server to the new VPS. Still have a few wrinkles to work on
<em>(sorry Dave)</em> and for the most part everyone still
needs to get their mail reconfigured. Hint: look at NewMailSetup.
Hoping to have most of everything hopping by the end of the day. Here’s
to hopping!
The big switch over is going to be Sunday, November 12th. This is the
official unofficial announcement. I know it’s a little short on notice,
but I’m fairly confident we will be able to handle the change just fine.
There are only minor changes needed to settings in e-mail clients. I put
some directions up on the NewMailSetup page. Hopefully they are helpful.
There is also a little blurb about how web based e-mail will change. I
haven’t had a ton of time to test this. One of those things that is hard
to test until things actually change. I will move all existing the
mail over. It’s not really moving as much as copying, so no matter what
happens mail will have a backup. If things start to look really bad,
like the mid-term elections for Republicans, we have the option to put
everything back the way it was. Here’s hoping for a smooth run. The
SiteNavigation page has also been updated with some information for
those that are hosted on thesergents.net.
In efforts to reduce costs and become a little more hassle free I’ve
been investigating many different VPS (VirtualPrivateServer)
solutions. If you are reading this post it means DNS has propagated and
you are connected to the new server. Congratulations! To date the only
piece of the puzzle in place is this web site. All mail and other
goodies are still as they were. Need to get in touch with all the
friends I host and figure out how this is going to work going forward.
Still a bit of work to be completed on my part. Hopefully things will
change for the better. We will no longer have all the space in the world
to make a mess of things, so it will force us all to be tidy with our
workplace. Watch for updates!
Been traveling and working - not a lot of time for posting. Hope
everyone is having a great Halloween! Here’s a picture of Sam in his
lion outfit.
Couldn’t resist posting something today. It’s been a busy few weeks! I
have to admit I never really thought about
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/09/fish_used_to_detect_terror_att.php
using fish like miners used canaries once upon a time. It’s a clever way
to detect toxins in the water at much lower levels than would
potentially hurt humans. Get some computers involved to monitor the fish
and blam! Instant cheap and effective early warning system. No more
wondering if terrorists are poisoning water supplies. Good thinking.
Update – 2006-10-06 14:01:10
Catching up might be overstating the matter. Keeping up is more like it.
I have been extremely poor at taking pictures lately, and when I have
managed to snap off a few shots they have not appeared quickly on this
web site. Today we rectify the situation!
- Miscellaneous Sam pictures are sure to brighten the dullest of days.
- State Fair summary. Ice cream for little people - cheese curds for
the big ones.
- Professional pictures of Sam taken by Engler Images
Photography. He’s our favorite
family photographer. There are some super shots in there and some
blackmail material for when he’s older. If I’ve still got this web
site up in some fashion he might be in trouble. There is a good
chance of that, but by then I’ll probably be on some home spun
version of python 7.8 parsing XHTRVL. Man, that will be cool.
Just to keep a funny picture rolling on the front page here’s one of Sam
wearing his new winter hat.
It’s been a crazy week and I don’t have enough puissance to dig up my
own fun Friday fact, so I’ll rob one from Dave
via Jeremy. The Origin of the WOM - Write Only
Memory It’s good to
see there are companies out there that have at least some sense of
humor. It is unbelievable how fast this memory was for it’s day. You
could write bits to it with amazing speed! Always good for a Friday
laugh.
Has anyone else noticed the cell phones in movies lately? Even in recent
films it seems as if some of the cell phones are already out dated. Go
back to the mid 90’s or even late 90’s and the cell phones look like
bricks. Go back a little farther and they look like suitcases (see
Lethal Weapon 1987). It used to
be that I could tell when I movie was made by looking at the cars.
Sometimes even the everyday technologies like coffee makers and watches.
I’m sure there are those that can tell the exact season of the exact
year by looking at fashion, but that’s definitely not me. Not even
close. So take a look at those mobile phones. Especially those movies
that are supposed to occur in the future some time. Look at these
closely, they crack me up. Nice vision of the future - a machine that
can predict what’s going to happen, but they are still wearing goofy
little head sets and carrying around salami sized phones. Way to think
outside the box. Again, no point. Just noticing.
Check out Super typhoon
loke
out in the pacific. 150 mph sustained winds and 50 foot waves. Poor
little Wake Island is
only 21 feet above sea level at it’s highest point. The island was
evacuated, so no need to worry about the peoples. It’s hard to imagine
what it will look like when everyone gets back? Probably have to boat
back out there since there is no way to know what damage will have been
done to the runway. Might have to name the next album Submergible
Atolls.
Seems like about this time every year my internet connection develops
narcolepsy. For once it does not seem to be the fault of my cable modem,
but instead the Vonage phone
router/adapter/bridge/thing. My best guess is that something is
happening out on the internet to take that bad boy down (over and
over). Because it’s frozen when I get to it I can’t see the logs, so I
don’t know for sure. Frozen might not be the best term either. Lets just
say it’s inaccessible. What to do, what to do? Currently the hookup goes
cable modem -> phone -> bridge to server. Originally did it that
way because of some perceived quality of service I might be gaining.
At this point I’m more inclined to believe that’s bologna. Tonight I’ll
be putting the phone behind the server. Hopefully that will at least
keep the internet connection up for those needing mail and web services.
Or maybe it will at least reveal the real problem.
Kate and I went and picked up a fabulous Hamilton Beach BrewStation
Deluxe
from Kohls a couple of weeks ago. Our old
Krups finally gave out. This is a bit
of an experiment because there’s no carafe. Just stick a coffee cup
under the dispenser and out comes your fresh coffee! Bravo! The little
thing seems to make a pretty good tasting cup of joe. It even has a
timer! Cripes! Jumped right into the late 70’s with that one. So add
this to the recent product reviews. So far the Brewstation deluxe is a
winner.
Did you know about the devil’s interval? The Devil’s
Music article over at
the BBC definitely qualifies as a fun Friday fact. Just don’t go right
home to the piano and start banging some tritones! From the article: In
the Middle Ages when people were ignorant and scared - funny how those
two things always seem to go together.
Got some new specs this weekend. A little bit of an experiment. No,
nothing too
crazy. The
frames are almost identical to my old ones, maybe even more comfortable.
Time will tell. The big change is with the lenses.
Went with the Transitions lenses this
time. From their site
- Transitions Lenses are photochromic lenses that are clear until
dangerous UV rays are present. Outdoors, the brighter the sun, the
darker Transitions Lenses become. They turn as dark as sunglasses by
automatically adjusting their level of darkness based upon the
amount of UV radiation.
I wanted to get these the last time around, but people convinced me
otherwise. From the Optometrist to the person at Lens
Crafters, they all said “They won’t get
dark enough” “They won’t work in your car” “You won’t like them”. To my
thinking they are just trying to sell more glasses. Granted, having a
pair of sunglasses in the car is a good thing, but it still felt like I
was getting the runaround. This time I wasn’t having any of it. Who
knows. They may be right. If they were right it’s more than likely I’ll
post something about it down the road. However, no news is good news.
I live in terminal windows. All day, every day. Luckily for me OS
X comes with a built in terminal program
that is actually quite excellent. The only problem in my book is the
lack of tabs. The older I get the less tolerance I have for a cluttered
desktop. Enter iTerm. It has it all -
tabs, transparency (if you’re into that type of thing), pretty colors.
Makes rxvt look like a 5.25" floppy drive. What’s
better than a great Terminal? A great font in a great terminal. It’s a
never ending quest however. Right now I’m stuck on Bitstream Vera Sans
Mono. I can’t remember where I found it, but I’m pretty sure it’s one
of the free fonts packaged with some (all?) of the
Linux distributions. Nice fixed width font. Now
that I think about it - maybe it’s time for a change.
For those of us that live any where near this mess that is called
Highway 62 it might be fun to know that there is a Wikipedia entry for
the darn
thing. They
even have the latest news on when the reconstruction of the Crosstown
Commons is supposed to commence. Here’s a hint. Every summer since we
have lived here! 1998 Also, in a silly attempt to outwit everyone our
governor came up with a really cool plan - Have the construction
companies build the new highway first and in return the state would
promise to pay them later. Yeah, that was going to work really well
because everyone knows how good governments are at paying their bills.
Ask any small business person. And for the not-so-serieux; Have you ever
wondered what ear wax is made of?
Click on that and then you’ll know. Bleh! but interesting.
It’s that time of the year again. Every day seems to be packed with
activities. It’s a lot of fun to see family and friends, so I can’t
complain too much. Maybe just a little though I managed to upload some
new pictures of Sam eating. He is such a smiley guy it’s hard not to
take pictures. I’m also attaching an experimental mobile phone picture.
- Using The GIMP I followed one of their
tutorials and made this little
picture that kind of looks like a painting or drawing. If I had a
lot more time and a little more patience I could have made look more
like a painting. That may be a project for a better picture
some day.
- Graphics programs are so powerful these days I shudder to think what
someone could do that actually has a clue.
I’m pretty lucky to have friends that find all the cool stuff for me.
And come to think of it, I must be super lucky because they send me
stuff I actually care about. Well, most of the
time. It’s like my own personal RSS feed
to the universe. Maybe I should be paying them? How about this - you
are all invited over for a beer at an unspecified date in the future.
Or rather, stop over whenever - I have beer. Even, I’ll pay you for
the beer you picked up on the way over. What was I talking about? Oh
yeah - Cool links people keep sending me.
This last weekend Dave, Olivia, and Max all blew into town from the
windy city. A grand time ensued. Some of it was captured in Pictures.
Dave had his own take on things which can be viewed on his website
located here dead link pruned. Quite an array of little guys running
around, or being carried around in one case. Fun times!
Fridays are a great time to discuss coffee. There’s just something about
coming to work on a day like today. Clear air. End of the week.
Anticipation of weekend activities. Sit back with a cup of joe and knock
out some work. Last week Jason posted an article on his blog
Strangeloop called -
Jonesin’ for a cup.
There are some intriguing links in there, but that’s maybe because I’m
very gullable open minded
All my years of geeking out and using PDA’s - lets see, I’ve had Palm I,
Palm III x 2, and an iPaq - I’ve never been able to go beyond using them
as electronic calendars. Probably my own deficiency. In the end I’ve
settled for the old fashioned Lab
Book.
They are going to have to work very hard in order to replace the feel
and effortlessness of pencil and paper. If you’re like me then you’ll
have to check out a lot of the tips and tricks for better organization
through our old analog devices. Here are a few of the better sites in
my bookmarks.
Ever since working on Apple’s OS X I’ve used
Firefox. The thing that killed me was
the tab focus never seemed to work right. You know - in web forms
hitting tab takes the focus to the next input field. In some situations
this seemed to work okay, but for others the focus would zoom off to the
location bar at the top. Poop! None of this I tell you! I depend on this
stuff every day, and I hate touching my mouse (actually trackball,
but who really cares)! I swear I had tried searching before or
Google before and failed. This time was
different however. I ran into this article on how to change the
tabfocus in
Firefox.
It’s only been a day, but what a lifesaver. The little things can make a
big difference sometimes. This is one of those times.
Can’t remember exactly where I saw this. On NPR’s
site somewhere I believe. Steven Colbert of the
Colbert
report
was the voice of Ace on the Saturday Night Live animated skits Ace &
Gary: The Ambiguously Gay Duo. It’s confirmed by his IMDB
posting. The guy cracks me up.
For the better part of the last 6 years I have been an extremely
satisfied and loyal user of the Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite 2. This
little keyboard has been with me through thick and thin. I can only
imagine the number of lines I’ve coded with the little guy. On Tuesday
the Control key (which you’ll note is in the correct position - where
most people think the caps lock should go) began to stick. And worse -
the stick happens not on the way up, but on the way down. Nothing more
infuriating than a key that refuses to be pressed. So little keyboard, I
give you retirement. You shall be placed in The Sergents data center on
the console of the server where you shall remain the rest of your days.
You were with me when I learned Python. You followed me in my struggles
with php. You endured my heavy handed attempts at Java. You sat
patiently as I cursed XML. Windows, Linux, or OS X - it didn’t matter to
this little keyboard. Rest well.
Tom and Marlo popped over last night for a most excellent evening. Some
good chops on the grill, a great salad by Kate. The dining highlight of
the evening was easily the two new flavors of Ben and Jerry’s. My
favorite of the two (and possible new all time favorite) was <a
href="http://www.benjerry.com/our_products/flavor_details.cfm?product_id=186">Vermonty
Python</a>. <em>Coffee liqueur ice cream with a chocolate
cookie crumb swirl & fudge cows</em>. Ouch! The other flavor was
called <a
href="http://www.benjerry.com/our_products/flavor_details.cfm?product_id=183">Neopolitan
Dynamite</a> and contains Cherry Garcia® and Chocolate Fudge
Brownie ice creams, side by side. Good, but not quite on the same level
as the Vermonty Python. Not sure I’ve ever tried a Ben and Jerry’s
flavor I didn’t like.
A little endurance paid off. I finally managed to get all my photos
uploaded in one fashion or another. Check out the
Pictures page for all the
chaos. It’s a little like going through old photo albums. A couple of
the miscellaneous pages get a little carried away and take quite a while
to load. That’s life. On my list of things to do some winter day is the
great scanning project. Take a bunch of our old vacation pictures and
some of the bigger life events and scan them in. Maybe I’ll have Sam
work on that one.
Feels like home again. I’m in the process of completely breaking the
other theme I had running. Figure I’ll turn this one back one for the
duration. Funny thing is, when I enabled this theme again it kind of
struck me as simply cool. Simple. Cool. I like that. We’ll see what
happens. What I really need is to get on a workstation with Internet
Exploder of all things. It really does some strange things with
cascading style sheets that I cannot seem to get my head around. Here’s
to giving it the old college try at least.
And thus begins the second week. For those that don’t know I left the
giant corporate world of Thomson for the excitement and fast paced
challenges of Knowledge Front. Having a
ton of fun getting back into getting things done. This is going to be a
blast! Typical, I just took a peek at the version of my resume I have
posted here. Hasn’t been updated in about 7 years. Add that to the list
of things to do…
Sometime way back in the old days - around 2001 or so - I started
writing the Python Picture Database. It was a really fun little project
and it taught me a lot about web programming, python, and databases. I
had grand plans for the little program, but alas, life has different
ideas for my time usage. This is the official announcement for the end
of life for the never released picture database. As it stands Dave is
the only remaining user. Fear not! I’ll help you export all the pictures
and funny captions to import into a system of your choice. My database
had over 430 pictures dating back to 2000. The process of going through
them has been rather enjoyable. Kind of like pulling out old photo
albums and strolling down memory lane. If you’re curious we’ll be using
Gallery2 parser on this site. Go to
Pictures and check it out. I’ll continue
adding the old pictures as I have time. It’s not too difficult, but
figuring out how to split them into groupings is a bit of a challenge. A
fun challenge. As usual there will more than likely be some bugs to work
out. The way things are with computers. Should be used to it by now.
This morning was Sam’s big baptism! He got smeared with some oil and
splashed with some water. He took it all very well. Actually he smiled
the whole time. He’s a pretty funny little guy. A lot of family was in
attendance. Check out the pictures for some good laughs. There’s some
keepers in there.
Here’s a good one for a middle-of-the-week laugh. Some great new
annotations to the governments new warning
signage. Some of the
stop and think ones are my favorite.
Was just going through and cleaning out some old notes on the computer.
Ran across some stuff dealing with the Sedition Act of
1798. Must have been
really mad about the latest PATRIOT
Act shenanigans because, in
my mind, they appear to be very similar. In that regard I’m not sure if
it’s really sad we have not learned any thing in 200 years or happy to
know it will be thrown out in a few years time if history is to repeat
itself. Here’s a nice excerpt from the Sedition Act: That if any person
shall write, print, utter. Or publish, or shall cause or procure to be
written, printed, uttered or published, or shall knowingly and willingly
assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false,
scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of
the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States,
or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said
government … blah blah … shall be punished by a fine not exceeding
two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years.
ps - I posted some new
Pictures
I can’t leave well enough alone. I have to keep messing with stuff. Yes.
This is true. Eventually I will settle on a look for this whole deal.
I’m liking this theme better, and with a little tweaking it will be
perfect. Sorry for all the mix-ups. Hopefully everyone can embrace
change.
Posted some stuff on Minneapolis Craig’s
list. I seem to remember somebody
telling me there were all sorts of rules for things you could and
couldn’t do, but for the life of me I didn’t read any such thing on
their site. It could have just been a sesame chicken induced dream. If
that was you please drop me a note.
The title says it all and the article can be read on the Star Tribune
site here. The number
one experience? That’s right! Schells Boch
Fest. There are quite a few pictures of
that event lurking on this web site. Need to hit some of those other
events. Excellent stuff for the todo list of life.
Brother Tom pointed this one out at dinner the other right. This
Greenskeepers video is set to scenes from The Silence of the
Lambs.
It’s pretty weird and spooky at the same time. Made me laugh. Can get
stuck in your head too. Check it out by either going to this
underground film
link or by
hitting this Google
search
Being addicted to wiki’s I have been using a personal set up of MoinMoin to track many of the things I do on a daily basis. While it is excellent for my organization, it can quickly get out of hand. For example: I’ve been saving links of things I mean to go back and research with great vigor. However, as we all know life usually has other plans for us. Those links then sit there - forever. They are search-able. I could find them again. But it makes for a few really ugly pages of Web Wanderings and Research Items. Instead of plunking them all on one page, I’m thinking of making a daily entry like the one below. Extant Wanderings meaning not lost or destroyed. My thinking is this - if I do ever go back and want to look at any of this stuff there will be a possibility the context will help me out. It’s also fun to share what we are all into at any given time. Most of the things I end up looking at are the result of friends and family sending me links. Several times over in fact. Now that I think about it - if anyone sends me the Dr. Phil test again I will come over to your house and beat you with Jeremy’s sack of doorknobs.
> <li><a
> href="">Joel on
> Software write up on the usage of unicode in writing
> programs</a>. Some excellent background as well.</li>
> <li><a href=
> ""></a>
> - Appears to be an excellent luthier. A few interesting writings on
> his page.</li> <li><a href=
> ""></a>
> carries <a href=
> ""></a>
> guitars which look to be very interesting. I would love to try one out
> whenever I get back to Maryland again. Love his site and some of the
> information on guitar building he provides. Kirk Patrick guitar is not
> that far away from <a href=
> "">Cryogas, Inc.</a> world
> headquarters! Should be easy to visit whenever we get back that way
> again.</li> <li><a href=
> ""></a>
> - cool idea. Don't like someone else holding all my data. Super
> impressive what JavaScript can do these days.</li>
> <li><a href=
> "">Fast
> food ice dirtier than toilet water</a>. Is that disgusting or
> what?</li> </ul>
In case you didn’t know it is now a federal crime to annoy people anonymously using the Internet. Supposedly this includes mail, so would that include all that spam I get? It sure annoys me. Luckily I don’t run this site anonymously. I’m sure it is annoying for quite a few people.
Secondary DNS can be a tricky service to maintain in this day and age. At least for an individual user. What’s that? You don’t know what DNS is? Well it’s time to educate yourself. Head over to SBC’s Internet terms page and have a read. Actually, it has a good little this is the Internet section followed by a glossary with a size-able section on Domain Name Service. Good stuff everyone should at least have a working knowledge of - that is if you’re using the Internet. Good, now you are probably wondering who is running your secondary DNS Dana? That’s a great question. Usually us geeks band together and help each other out. Josh has kindly been my secondary for years. The past few months it’s become hard. We’re jostling Internet Service Providers and replacing hardware. It gets tough to keep things rolling right. In comes XName.Org to save the day. For free they provide secondary DNS. Or in my case tertiary DNS. Three times the fun! For commercial entities they ask for a donation, but nothing required. I’m still not sure why all the big registrars don’t offer this as a service, or provide it free for customers? Seems like it would be super easy and would put one of the majors ahead in the game. What a weird business model - being a domain registrar. Don’t know much about that.
Guess what I’m trying to say is that XName.Org is pretty sweet. Nice of them to provide such a service.
We all kind of imagined it was happening, but for some reason I didn’t think it was actually happening. Turns out that Netflix does throttle users that are considered high traffic. According to [this Wired article] that means you’ll need to watch and send back more than 11 or 12 movies a month. So they went from saying No throttling taking place to saying it would bankrupt us. I don’t really mind that they slow down shipments to high traffic customers - it costs $0.78 in postage per DVD - I wish they hadn’t originally advertised it as Unlimited. That seems pretty slimy.
Looks like they enabled the Google Talk interface on my Gmail account. It’s pretty darn slick what they can do with web applications these days. In my book not running an extra application just for instant messaging is a big bonus. Don’t need to worry about having software installed, simply need access to the Internets and a web browser - all is well with the world. Look at contact Dana for my Gmail information if you want to chat. See you online!
Christmas this year brought some excellent tunage - Tuners! My old tuner was a BOSS-OLDMODEL I’ve had since I was in college. That would be the early nineties for those keeping track. Holding it together with duct tape for the last few years was getting really old. Due to my own lack of manual dexterity and the hardness of our aptly named hardwood floors the old tuner was on it’s last legs. Being that I am one of the luckiest people in the world I received not one, but two tuners as gifts for Christmas. The first is the ultra cool Intellitouch tuner. This tuner does not use a microphone. Instead it clamps on the head of the guitar in order to detect the vibration. Perfect for classical guitar, and it works incredibly well detecting even the slightest of vibrations. The display has a back-light and is very clear making it simple to read. It is easy to understand why this tuner would be perfect for live performance situations. No need to worry about ambient noise while tuning up. The other tuner is the super sleek Korg CA30. It is a more traditional microphone based tuner. I guess my exposure to tuners has been limited, or at least dated, because the microphone in this tuner is superb. Great for a super quick tune-up. The digital needle display gives the feel of looking at a real needle without any worry of parallax. The only real feature lacking in this tuner is a back light. No biggie, the display is so clear that it is easy to read in almost any light. Both are great tuners - and I now have one for each guitar. Or perhaps for upstairs and the main floor? Tough decisions to be made.
Wired has an article about Western Union sending it’s last telegram. Pretty crazy to think about. They say that form of communication is gone, but I disagree. If we really think about it the internet as we know it just a series of signals being carried around by wires. It was just way ahead of it’s time, and a little slower. I wonder how fast the fastest Morse coder could tap out a message in bits per second? So if a fast Morse coder could knock out about 4 bleeps per second would that be about 4 bits per second? And the line on which my server resides kicks out about 800,000 bps? We’ve come quite a ways.
Couldn’t leave things alone. Always have to break things. I found this
theme on the main MoinMoin site and couldn’t resist giving it a try. The
change is definitely not permanent. (changes rarely are) The only
problem is that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is a giant pile of poop! I
get really tired of trying to figure out why IE will not follow
standards that all other browsers are able to handle just fine. Luckily
for me my site is opposite from what most people are likely to
experience in terms of which browsers are most likely to be viewing this
page - Firefox normally dominates. So, if you’re not using a browser
other than Internet Explorer here’s your chance to step out of the box.
Here are a couple of free browsers that rule. Give them a shot and stop
endangering your own computer by using Internet Exploder.
Just wanted to say thanks for all the comments! It was really great to
hear from everbody. Kate and I have been having a blast getting to know
our little guy. I’m getting back to work, or trying my best to do so.
Pretty tough after having such a nice break. Grandma Sergent is here
helping for a while, but next week we’ll be flying solo. No license
required.
Because I’m so into work I found some interesting links for things that
have happened and folks that were born on January 13th.
After many months of waiting Kate and I finally have the chance to meet
Sam! He was born January 13th (Yes, Friday the 13th) at about 9:43am.
Mom and baby are doing awesome. Dad is still trying to figure out what
happened. I took a few pictures and put them here. I’m sure I’ll have
more to say once this all really sinks in.
MoinMoin 1.5 was released yestreday. I went ahead and blasted it out on
my server. A little hasty probably, but always fun. This release
includes many cool features including a GUI editor for page creation.
There will be a few problems I’m sure - I’ll get them worked out.
Eventually.
The only thing I’ve heard on the radio for the last week -
http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/news/local/13587759.htm
Snoopy is leaving the Mall of America! They lead the news with it, every
radio station is talking about it - Am I completely missing something?
Is that the reason some people travel to the Mega Mall? I won’t
believe it even if it’s true.
- Here’s the deal. They are going to rename Camp Snoopy because they
lost their lease on using Peanuts character likenesses. It still
doesn’t register. This is important? Do I live in the same world
with everyone else? Wait! - don’t answer that.
Something lighthearted for a Friday. In Defense of Geeks or Ten Reasons
Why You Should Date a
Geek
Some valid reasons.
It’s a very interesting topic. Since the days I worked at Net
Perceptions I have wondered what will the future hold for advertisers?
As we gain more control over what is put in front of us (1000’s of
cable/satellite channels, VCR/Tivo, the Internet) how will mass
marketing change? Will giant marketing agencies still be effective? Will
targeted campaigns become the norm? It will be curious to see how it
goes. In that vein The Economy of Unbundled
Advertising is a very
interesting read.
Do you like apples?
No Josh, I don’t like apples.
Instead check out some clementines. Perfect sweet goodness packed with
vitamin C. Here I sit with none, which is why I’m thinking about them.
Did we add that to the grocery list?
According to wikipedia we eat a type of California clementine that are
only good November through
January. So we’d all better
eat up while we can. Soon we’ll be back to oranges. The horror.
Emacs vs Vi? Old news. I still use both, but regularly use Emacs for my
programming and general compositions. It would rule if they could make
Emacs key bindings for Word or OpenOffice. It’s hard to even get around
in those programs! As usual I don’t really have a point. Sitting here
eating a yummy cinnamon roll and reading my RSS feeds. Ran across the
Artist module for Emacs. Looks
to be a really cool way to make text diagrams. Yet another “thing to
try”. Add it to the list!
Digging through some of my old bookmarks (figure I’d start off the year
right) I found an interview with David
Russell.
Really good read even if you’re not completely addicted to classical
guitar. I think this was one of the first places I read about memorizing
pieces starting with the end first. Interesting. Someday I’ll have to
try. Still working on getting the material down that I already know.
Good article an tone production on the classical guitar. Bottom line is
it doesn’t matter how fast you can play if it doesn’t sound good in the
first place. http://www.michaelchapdelaine.com/great_tone.html
So we’re all about the ups and downs again. If you’re reading this you
are very lucky. Seems to be about 1 hour of up to every 2 hours down
right now. On the phone with Time Warner trying to get this figured out.
We had a good run of a couple of months there. Now it seems that we are
in the crapper again. I’ll do my best to keep things up, but it appears
there is nobody working in the Minneapolis network center today. Been on
hold a few times waiting for the <em>escalation</em> as well
as a call back. Nada as of yet.
After years of looking for something that can safely clean LCD screens
Jason let me use his Klear Screen. POW!
ZAM! A clean screen is seen. Thanks Jason! There is even one called
iKlear that is specially formulated for Apples. Not sure if that is
bunk or if they just slap a new label on the same stuff? The regular
worked just fine on my iBook.
All the stuff came in the mail yesterday. The setup was quite easy. I
decided to put it out in front of the server, so if there is any
weirdness going on with mail or web services let me know. The only
problem I foresee thus far is my crappy cable modem dying on me. It has
a way of giving up when it’s taxed. Need to figure that one out. Might
be calling Time Warner a few times. Put some customer service reps to
the test.
How should I do this? Comments. Comments everywhere. Everyone has
comments. Guess I’ve been avoiding the inevitable. So here goes.
I’ve loaded up the Page Comment2 macro and this is going to be the
experiment. Going to leave it open for anonymous comments and
everything. Just remember you’re being tracked!
To be really cool you could sign up for an account. Just click the Login
button next to the search bar. There are many extra benefits to signing
up. People I know, love, and respect will have access to almost
everything. Those that I merely love and respect, but don’t know, will
have access to nearly everything. Persons I know and respect, but don’t
love - well, I probably had too much to drink that night, I apologize.
Need to get some things out there for a Monday. Some interesting stuff.
Reading some local news stories online today and ran across our snow
removal rules. Thought I would share with those of us in the area.
Taking a look over the vast amounts of stuff I’ve collected over the
years I’ve finally decided to let a bunch of it go. Time for new homes
for much of this great equipment. Ever since I started playing classical
guitar I have hardly touched any of my electric guitar equipment. So, it
time to sell it off. Giving people I know first crack at it. Make me an
offer, ask me questions, have at it!
So we can send a man to the moon, but we still can’t seem to manage a
full duplex speaker phone. Has anyone else noticed that they are still
terrible. As good as those little starfish looking things have come -
90% of the time I can barely understand what the other people are
saying. So my vote is that if we there absolutely has to be a conference
call maybe we should all be on our phones. Not four people in a giant
acoustically deviant conference room and 3 people on a speaker phone.
Instead lets see what happens if we all are on the conference line. Good
stuff huh? Think I could be an efficiency expert? Then you might say -
Why is he writing this blog post in the middle of the day instead of
working?. I can only answer by stating the obvious.. Goodyear Tires.
Here’s a couple of more local links I found whilst bouncing around the
Internet.
- http://www.nokomiseast.org/ is not exactly our neighborhood, but
it’s really close and they have a really good site. Our area should
take a cue. Good stuff for us local yocals. Our hood’s site is this
kind of sad piece - http://www.hpdl.org/ - hot, no?
If I were a teacher I would give all the commercial weather sites an
E, or a F, or maybe an unsatisfactory, or even does not meet
expectations. Seriously, they are terrible. Accuweather causes Firefox
to crash 6 out of 10 times. The weather channel’s site is packed with
advertisements and pop-ups, and where there hell can you find the
relative humidity on their site? Good luck I say.
So I was bitching to Dave about all this, ye who spends more time
outside than most outdoorsmen I know, and he suggested
http://www.noaa.gov/ and sure enough it’s about the best site for
weather I’ve seen. No counting for accuracy just yet. They will have to
earn my trust. It is, however, my tax dollar at work. I already pay for
this! Why shouldn’t I look at it!
Yes, we can read in Minneapolis, but
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2005-11-28-seattle-literate_x.htm
according to this USA Today article</a> we could read better than
Seattle last year. We’ve dropped to the second moster literate city! I’m
guessing they had a lot of time last year to get caught up in Seattle
because of all the rain and the fact that we didn’t have a bad winter.
At least interesting to tech types and possibly many friends of ours
because one of those friends is on the
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1895907,00.asp
Eolas won the judgment, Microsoft was going to vigorously defend, now
it looks like their giving up. Granted I hate software patents in
general, but it’s always good to see Microsoft get it handed to them.
Mostly because it happens so rarely.
The patent had to do with Active X - a good idea that was poorly
implemented - surprise!. Maybe they will grow a clue and dump it
altogether. Since the inception of Active X it’s been a security blight
on the Internet. And that’s how I feel about that.
Lucky for me I have quite a few friends (well, at least two) that send
me whacky stuff from all over. Keeps the mind moving at least. Here are
some of the recent items they have sent me.
http://www.flurl.com/uploaded/Fordje_blazen_10257.html Watch how
powerful jet engines really are
http://www.dexigner.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=3664http://www.dexigner.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=3664
Crazy new bike designs. I would like to try some of these out. Cool!
http://www.wired.com/news/autotech/0,2554,69529,00.html Hydrogen
Truckers - Might be good for Cryogas in more ways than one!
He’s actually had it for a while now, but thought I would point some of
my readers who may not know of Dave’s blog over there.
http://www.zeisler.org/blog/
Go check it out and leave some comments for him! It’s fun!
It’s motivated me to work on a comment solution for my own page. There
are a ton of cool macros people are writing for MoinMoin and I have
tested several. Hopefully get something to test soon.
Sorry to all those expecting the network to remain stable through the
storm yesterday. We had some pretty good ice and heavy snow. Everytime
that happens my internet connection goes wonky. My router is a good
little router, but when it looses signal it requires manual intervention
to help it back to life. Yesterday between noon and about 5:15pm
thesergents.net and all those we host would have been down. I’m going to
try and get in touch with everyone that cares to set up some alerting so
we all know that it’s down when it’s down and up when it’s up. Should be
even more fun - if that’s possible.
Here’s the article -
http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=3035336 So
it’s final. Decaf is bad for us. I always suspected it. I mean, it
tastes terrible, so how could it be good for you? Sounds like after
three months the LDL in the decaffeinated drinkers began to rise, along
with some wacky ApoB. Looks like more reading for Dana. Oh and this
quote:
The decaffeination process can extract flavonoids and ingredients that give coffee flavor.
Flavonoids. Cool.
Been experimenting with the Gallery macro that is available on the main
MoinMoin web site. It seems to work pretty well from my initial testing.
Hit CategoryPictures to see what I have put in there so far. For right
now I’m definitely going to keep the old
http://www.thesergents.net/cgi-bin/ppdb.cgi long defunct Picture
Database around. Like always I’m still trying to figure this out.
During guitar practice last night Gus decided to make a scene. I was
able to capture it on my little digital camera in movie form. While
waiting for the water meter reader personage this morning I got goofing
with iMovie. The creation is GusQuixote. iMovie is really slick stuff,
and the help files were actually helpful. Go figure. When you have some
really free time - check it out.
Jeremy just sent me this and it is pretty freaky.
http://www.patmedia.net/marklevinson/cool/cool_illusion.html">http://www.patmedia.net/marklevinson/cool/cool_illusion.html
Stare at the + in the center and watch the dots disappear. The mind is a
powerful thing to waste. err.. something like that.
So after eight million council meetings and four hundred planning
meetings and six or more years of actual work the Minneapolis Airport
finally opened a new runway. The good news? Increased capacity by about
25 percent. Should be able to handle a lot more traffic which is good
since Chicago’s O’hare airport is basically maxed out and they are years
from any type of expansion. It will allow Minneapolis to be a bigger hub
for the Midwest bringing business blah blah blah… The bad? Everyone
bitching about the noise. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big fan either.
We live right under the flight path. The problem I see is this - Nobody
wants the bad associated with the airport, but everyone wants the good.
Move the airport you say? Then all we’ll here is it’s too far away and
don’t ruin that land and not near my town. Bah! Can’t have it both
ways. At least for a little while Katie and I will have a little less
traffic over our house. Soon it will be maxed out again I’m sure, then
it will be back to our normal. If I come up with a better solution
I’ll be sure to let the powers-that-be know. Until then we’ll all just
have to take a man pill and drink a big cup of shut the f up. Oh,
here was the article that got me all fired up. Welcome to the 21st
century.
This ad is the source of what has to be some of the longest running
inside jokes ever. So this is me helping everyone out by passing along
this clue. Steve, you’re a great guy with great skills. You’re gonna do
great. Live it, love it…
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/nutrigrainad.html">http://www.ebaumsworld.com/nutrigrainad.html
This has to be one of the funniest commercials I have seen in a long
time. I know a lot of my friends have put up with me talking about it
quite a bit, so I finally was able to find it on the old Internet. It’s
a citibank commercial of some kind, not really important:
http://www.dhadm.com/index.php/dhadm/index/citibank_rewards_the_wizards
- Hopefully it will be there for a while. Lots of laughing is laudable
I’ll never understand why these darn weather people put themselves
through this stuff. Poor Al Roker this time. Luckily he just fell over
and nobody was hurt. What goes through the heads of these folks? You can
catch the video here
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/10/25.html#a5541">http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/10/25.html#a5541
Here are some friendly tips for our Wisconsin neighbors when visiting
lovely Minnesota.
On Ramps - These are generally considered speed up points that
allows one to gain speed when merging from a slower road or side
street onto a major thoroughfare. On these occasions the usual practice
in to press fairly hard on the right-most pedal known as the
accelerator.
Turn Signals - Us Minnesotans have not yet developed telepathy. It
is, therefore, imperative that we let each other know our intentions.
This is accomplished by using the turn signal. It’s the stick coming
out of the left side of the steering column. Drifting over slowly is not
sufficient warning. Please allow a few moments for your blinking light
to register with our busy brains.
More about cars! Jeremy sent me a pretty cool article on an Israeli
company that is coming up with a way to make hydrogen from water by
using a metal coil in the fuel tank. Sounds promising. Here’s the
article
http://www.physorg.com/news7499.html - The car that makes it’s own
fuel
Nope, the stork didn’t bring her. We picked her up from
<http://www.goldberry.net/pet.html Goldberry Yellow Labs>. It’s
awesome to look at all of Zoe’s relatives. They look so much alike it’s
scary. And really cute. I still believe we got the best of the best in
our Zoe bean.
What have I done? Messed it all up again for sure. Here’s the scoop. For
quite a while I’ve been into using MoinMoin as a personal notebook. Just
click on the link to find out more about MoinMoin. Well, I liked it so
much I decided to set up my notebook as the web site. There are
certainly going to be a few things that are still missing, or hard to
find. My rss feed is borked, the picture database is back to the
original configuration - no loss of content. Dave and I will be
working on sprucing the pic db up a bit. The eventual goal is.. Well, I
have no idea. Eventually I’d like to get comments working. Also, there
will be more content available to those who create accounts and even
more available for family members and friends that create accounts. Will
be setting up the WebLogArchive for easy viewing of the old entries.
Most of them made it over in the conversion with only a few major flubs
here or there. I will work on cleaning it up, but no promises.
Here is the link.
http://accordionguy.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2005/10/14/1299633.html
I was wondering why diesel prices continue rise while gasoline continues
to decline. Hit google with not much luck for once, so I went to
http://www.ask.com to bug Jeeves. Found an article from last year that
had a pretty good explanation. Darn free markets. For the curious the
article is -
http://www.detnews.com/2004/business/0409/18/business-277183.htm
Looks like www.cariboucoffee.com Caribou, our favorite coffee joint,
went public today. And didn’t do so well! Apparently us Minnesotans like
it much more than the rest of the country, at least according the the
Strib short for Start Tribune article
http://www.startribune.com/stories/535/5668215.html Caribou off to
bitter start
<http://www.identity20.com/media/OSCON2005/ Identity 2.0> is an
awesome presentation given by Dick Hardt about the next generation of
digital identity and all the hurdles surrounding it. Love the
presentation style. Even if you are not geek you might want to check it
out. While browsing through some RSS feeds on Google Reader I read a
pretty amusing anecdote called
<http://naeblis.cx/rtomayko/2005/04/02/insects-and-entropy Insects and Entropy>.
A little story of our tendency towards complexity, and how it’s not
always a good thing.
the unexpected! Unless of course your name is Katie in which case you
may indeed be expecting the unexpected. I trust none will expect to
object to a wrecked sect of neglect? How suspect! However, if you wish
to be correct - disconnect and detect a project with intellect. Barring
any of that go to the Picture Database and check out the new addition.
Addition? Well, you’ll have to petition for a position regarding the
early edition of Katie’s condition. Precarious position! Really it’s a
matter of tradition. A new acquisition that requires much nutrition.
Apparently I can’t stop. Better call a cop before I flop. oooo… too
late
Tangible sounds a lot like Mandible. That makes me happy.
Long time no update! Summer always seems to zip right by. Even when it’s
119,000 degrees outside! Makes me appreciate the new air conditioner.
Not much to report. Slapped some new strings on the Munich a bit ago -
Augustine’s again Red basses with Imperial trebles. Also took some
time to adjust the truss rod. I guess for a long time it was kind of a
no-no to consider putting a truss rod in a classical guitar, but Kenny
Hill decided that was crap and did it
anyways. That is totally cool with me because it made it mostly easy
to lower the action (distance from the fretboard to the strings). The
instructions are right on their web
site
and made it very simple. The only problem was getting my huge hand into
the sound hole. A little painful, but I’ll manage. Super awesome now,
really easy to play. There should be evenless excuses for my junky
technique. Back to work for me!
I’m on a roll. Was just cleaning out some old bookmark and I ran across
a few I had to share. You can thank me later for this complete waste
of time. Check out some words of wisdom from Bruce
Lee. Some zen stuff
going on there. Just be the web page… This is a great
medley of old nintendo game
themes. When they get to tetris it makes me so happy that I cry. Thanks
for that one Kurt… I think.. Here is a bookmark I should probably
not delete.
Procrastination.
I’ll write more about that later. Just like cleaning a closet. Spend
more time goofing with the stuff in the closet and not as much time with
the cleaning part.
Want to build your own guitar? I do... Here’s some stuff for you!
Luthiers Mercantile International has just about
all the stuff a person would need. It’s really cool to look at once in a
while and scheme and dream. Get the same feeling looking in Corvette
parts catalogs. Then if you need some amazing tuners on your classical
guitar check out Gilbert
Tuners. They are getting great
reviews from regular folks on the various forums out there. They look
cool and (for the time being) are pretty reasonably priced. One more.
Interesting reading on Double Top
Guitars. Using different
composites to form a layered guitar top. A lot of fun reading for the
dreamers and schemers among us.
Not much to report today… just blurbing.. iTunes music store is cool
except for the dumb
DRM that
the downloaded files have. Found a pretty nifty tool in
JHymn that will get rid of it all.
Worked really slick. iPod related…<br /> I listen to a lot of
classical music. The problem I have is that the levels some of the older
tracks were recorded with is very low. So low in fact that sometimes
when I’m in my car with the windows down I can turn my iPod up all the
way and still not here the music. In comes
http://volumebooster.tangerine-soft.de/ Volume Booster for the iPod].
I guess in Europe the iPod is crippled with even less volume capability,
so people had to hack their way around it to hear some loud tunage. It
works pretty well, but needs to re-sync all the songs every time a
change is made to the volume settings. This can be avoided with a simple
procedure they include. Works pretty well, but you’ll need to watch out
for the rocking tunes. They will be especially loud.
Some interesting tidbits for some downtime reading. Spent some time
reading forums of people arguing about the effects of aging on a guitar.
People often refer to a good old guitar as having been played in. To
most that would mean a sweeter nicer sound, and sometimes even louder.
Some people believe it’s all a crock and is just an idea planted in
people’s minds by aliens. As for me I lean towards the camp that
believes it is possible. Even after playing my spruce top for a few
months the sound has changed considerably. It could be argued that my
technique and/or playing ability has changed (some might say improved).
Since there are no mass of scientists around you’ll have to take my word
for it. In support of my claim here’s
http://www.acousticguitar.com/Gear/advice/vibration.shtml an article
where some nutty people have tried to artificially age guitars . Pretty
subjective in the end, but very interesting. Continuing down the path to
enlightenment..
Upgraded my iBook to http://www.apple.com/macosx/ OS X 10.4 Sunday
night. Went smooth as silk I’m happy to say. Haven’t had a chance to
mess around with http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/spotlight/
Spotlight yet, but am looking forward to it greatly. Also the new Mail
client seems to be pretty cool. Well, it lost all my filters. That
wasn’t cool. On another Apple note. During a lazy Saturday morning I
finally had the chance to play around with GarageBand. What a hoot.
Hooked a single mic into my mixer and then into the iBook. Couple of
clicks and it was recording. The sound quality was awesome, the
performer’s quality was not so good. Ended up not saving any of the
classical guitar pieces I played, but had a great time trying. Have to
say - recording yourself and then listening and then replaying is a
great learning technique. There were huge improvements in my playing
even doing this a few times with a single piece of music. Will keep
working on it and post some samples when I have time.
Croutons do make a mediocre salad incredible. They really do! so good.
Finally had a reason to look for an Office Suite type software
application for OS X. I actually didn’t even look very hard. Been using
OpenOffice for quite a few years on Linux and, while it’s slow, I have
always been happy with the results. Went out and about searching and
found NeoOffice/J for my little iBook. Works really well so far. Like
always it’s a bit sluggish, but it seems to be able to handle most of
the microsoft documents I’ve needed to view and edit. Not sure it could
handle some of those extreme spreadsheets that accountant types throw
together once in a while. Luckily I only have one dot in spreadsheet-fu
and rarely need to view such monstrosities. Hope to keep it that way.
Went up to Lutsen with some friends and had a great time. Put up a few
pictures on the picture database, so check it out. Want to know where
Lutsen is? You’ll have to look it up for yourself. Google Maps aren’t
quite cool enough yet (don’t have it listed even) and Mapquests’ ads are
so annoying I would rather not send any traffic their way. So pull out
the old trusty atlas and turn to page Minnesota and the look north. Way
north. If you are looking at Thuderbay then look south of that. Super
beautiful land up there. Still feels like “the old days”. Unless you are
in Grand Marais there are no signs of almost anything modern besides
snowmobiles and 4-wheelers. Good to get away from it all for a while.
When last you heard from this topic I was trying a bunch of strings.
Here’s a mini update for those who care. Back in March I put the La
Bella 2001 Series strings on my cedar guitar. I’m happy to say they are
still on there as of this writing. At first the bass sounded too splatty
for my taste. But as they settled in the splat was replaced by a nice
even pop. I have been really happy with these strings. The package said
they were the medium tension, but they feel incredibly light. I haven’t
really noticed any extra buzzing or other problems. So in all I would
have to say Yes it’s a good string. Still figuring out what to put on
the Ramirez next. Considering I don’t play it too often (maybe a couple
of times a week) it will be a while before I really need to consider it.
On the spruce side of life we left off with the Hannabach 815 hard
tension strings. After a few hours of practice with these puppies I
realized I was not in my pay grade. My hands were killing. Granted it
can be a good thing if you are into that, but I was wanting to make
music - not muscle. Off they came. On went a set of Augustine Regal Reds
. These are advertised, accurately I think, as medium/hard tension. The
basses for Augustine strings are denoted by the color and the trebles by
the line (Imperial/Regal with the Regals being a slightly harder string)
. These strings were awesome. Made me want to pick up my guitar over and
over. Great sweet sound with a brilliant bright tone. Does that even
make any sense? Hard to describe sounds. From there I installed a set of
Augustine Black basses. These are quite a bit lighter than the reds and
had that same splatty sound I had criticized earlier in the La Bella
2001 ’s. In the same light they have improved over the weeks, but still
lack the punch of the reds. You think I’m finished? Ha! Think again.
Embracing change, as I am want to do, I then opted to go from the Regal
trebles to Augustine making my overall string tension on the light side
of medium (at least in my book). This combination is extremely easy to
play and has a very bright tone, but still lacks that punch of the Regal
trebles. That is where things sit today. I ordered quite a few more and
varied sets of strings from http://www.stringsbymail.com Strings by
Mail and am looking forward to reporting those results. What a wonderful
experiment!
These type of web searches always crack me up. I was sitting there
staring at my own handwriting wondering how I can even read it? That
prompted me to go give a search for improving writing technique. Took a
few minutes to narrow down the search removing all the preschoolers from
view. I know how to write already! Albeit poorly. So up comes
http://www.paperpenalia.com/handwriting.html Handwriting tips and away
we go. Seems I am a finger writer which is improper form. Muscle
groups.. relaxing the right pieces of the upper body. Apparently I have
some work to do.
It’s fun to watch web stats. For example: Every month, here at
thesergets.net, get about 12-20 search requests through google for
things like master sergent or tech sergent or how much to sergents make.
I guess the only thing I can hope for is that google might some day have
a spell flag put on that will ask people if they meant SERGEANT . So
people looking for information on sergeants please go back and check
your spelling and try again. Now that I have totally messed up the
search engines it will be interesting to see what happens in the coming
months. Update to come. Thank you. That is all.
Great for a Friday smile.
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7929.html On Bullshit is a
book by a Princeton Philosophy Professor. In the words of Jeremy I
think I may have to buy it as a matter of principle.
No time for complaining about the lack of updates to the site! No time
for anything but being outside and enjoying the weather. This type of
thing seems to happen every year. Spring hits and it’s time for
corvettes and beers on the porch. It’s a good time of year. Check that -
Great time of year. Hope everyone enjoys it as much as I do. Be that as
it may I have still had some time to goof around with some tech stuff.
Been checking out http://www.modernmethod.com/sajax/ Sajax and all the
AJaX modules available out there. Lots of hype over something that’s
been around for a while. Widely know now because of gmail and some other
famous web applications. It’s all good I reckon. Also been looking at
quite a few wiki’s (wikii?). Kurt likes http://instiki.rubyforge.org/
Instiki , which is pretty darn cool. I’ve decided, just to be contrary,
to give http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/ MoinMoin a try. Lots of good
ideas to be had from these gems. See, I really didn’t have anything to
say.
This is pretty darn cool. Been on my to do list forever it seems like.
Finally one little thing complete, but so huge. My computer room/office
had been in the basement since we moved into this house back in 98. For
the last.. jeeze.. probably two years I have avoided being in the room.
It’s dark. There are no windows to the outside. In my younger days I
loved this type of environment for spending my hacking time. Toiling
away learning the latest programming language. Figuring stuff out.
Something has happened in recent years. Maybe all this computer time is
catching up with me. Maybe my vampire blood has been diluted. Either
way.. Got my computer desk all the way upstairs in the bedroom now. Two
windows! This is good. Been catching up on some long over due work today
and it’s totally groovy. One down.. 67 items to go!
In my recent endeavors to learn classical guitar I have been on the
supreme quest to find the perfect strings. Searching around the Internet
this story can be found in many places, but this is my story. The story
of the strings - The uncompleted task.
First off I’d like to plug our good friends over at Strings by
Mail. They are a small operation trying
to make good by selling mostly strings for acoustic guitars and some
odds and ends. The guy posts in a forum I read quite often and seems to
be a generally affable type. Just yesterday I received my first order
from them. Great prices and great service. I will be ordering from them
again in the future. This is not a paid advertisement.
Jumping right into the early 00’s finally. For trying to stay so cutting
edge I’ve sure managed to fall behind. My hatred for XML aside I have
always been intrigued by http://www.w3c.org/RDF/ RDF and all it has to
offer. So I’ve managed to cobble together an RSS feed for my site. If
you use Firefox the Live Bookmark thing should show up now when on the
main page. I’m still working on it, so I’m not going to be adding the
goofy little xml logo that is on so many sites these days. Maybe when I
finally understand what I’m doing, but that may never happen either - be
it with xml/rdf or otherwise. This might lead to a question I seem to
get quite often. Why don’t you just use a prefab web portal?. Honestly I
have nothing against them, and some are quite nice. Every couple of
years I give http://www.zope.org Zope and all it’s varied products a
try. I’ve even been know to blast down the latest versions of
http://www.postnuke.com/ PostNuke and the other PHP variants once in a
while. In the end I do it for myself and my own learning process. I seem
to get a lot out of breaking things and making them better. Forcing
myself to read the standards documents (a lot of websites could make
good on that one) and following the specs put forth therein. Cramming my
site through the html validator, which by the way is saying I’ve got
quite a bit of work in store. I’m not saying I will never change
everything over to some portal thingymabob of some type, but it’s not
going to happen in the near future. I’m still having way too much fun.
posting stuff about classical guitars? Apparently not If being on call
didn’t suck so bad I might have had the time to update the web log a
little more frequently. As it stands on call does suck a lot, so not as
many updates. Ranting about being on call, in fact, could be an entire
web site unto itself. That is a story for another time. Let the info
dump begin!! I’m lucky enough to own a nice travel guitar made by
Yamaha, but back in the day when I was looking around I stumbled across
this guy who has a little snippet on how he made his own called
http://cgblues.homestead.com/Travelguitar.html Retro Blue. I have to
say he did a super cool job on it. Gives a guy ideas that he could do
his own, but time and space.. always an issue. Next up we have an
http://bachplucked.com/lutenist/links.htm Australian Lutenist -
Michael Stitt who has been nice enough to put a ton of information about
J.S. Bach and his works for lute up on his site. Just took a look and it
appears they have already updated the site, which is great since it was
borked up the last time I was there. You think I’m finished! HA! Only a
master of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestration defenestration
could stop me now. Looking for rare sheet music? Don’t want to buy a
whole book just to get one piece? Want to have it on your computer so
you can print it out any time? Go check out http://www.everynote.com/
Every Note. They have a awesome selection of music for piano, classical
guitar, violin, flute, and even opera! Have my eye on a couple of Sor
pieces I have not seen elsewhere. Interesting to read the little write
up the have posted from the New York Times about how they acquire the
music. Pay for it by the kilo. Cracks me up. Think that’s enough for
now. More to come.. still catching up.
Been on the news a ton lately, but Jason let me know about it even
before then. If you go to Annual Credit Report you can request a credit
report from the 3 big credit companies for free once per year. It’s part
of the new credit disclosure thingy.. I’m sure resourceful people can
use that Internet thing to find out more about it. Just doing my part to
proliferate the publication.
Yeah yeah.. I finally added some pictures after almost a year. There’s
still a giant glut to get through, but this will have to do for now.
Added some pictures from New Years and the vacation Katie and I took to
Aruba which was way fun. Took my little
http://www.yamaha.co.jp/english/product/guitar/silent_guitar/ silent
guitar with me to Aruba. Was paranoid about taking it on the plane.
Leave it to the internet to have things like this out there -
http://timberens.com/essays/miscellaneoustips.htm Tips on traveling
with a guitar . Now granted this is not a full sized guitar, but it
never hurts to read some tips. In the end there were absolutely no
problems and it fit on top of other people’s stuff in the overhead
compartments. Was that off topic? Sure felt like it. Back on task.. I
updated a bunch of stuff in my style sheet. Most probably won’t notice
any differences, but if you are keen and observant you just might.
Started messing around with http://www.google.com/searchcode.html
Google Free. Pretty neat way to add google search to your own site.
Right now it’s all the way at the bottom of this main page. Hopefully
I’ll get it tweaked out and add it all over the darn place. Or
something. They have all sorts of Customize it Your Way and all this
kind of rhetoric. Going to give it a try when I have some more time.
Also going to cram out an RSS feed for fun’s sake. Again, when I have
time.
Big Bill hooked us up with a
http://www.eurekacamping.com/apexxta_03.asp new Eureka! tent. Super
awesome. Can’t wait to head out to the woods and give it a shot. 3
persons and dual vestibules! Plenty of room for little Zoe and all our
stuff. Thanks Dad!
I found this to be too funny. Sent it to a few friends already, so if
you are looking at this you can delete the email or simply refuse to
visit my site any more. Either way it’s all good and these are still
funny.
http://img77.exs.cx/img77/2888/catapult1id.gif The catapult idea
and
http://waxy.org/random/images/weblog/mortor.gif The Mortor argument.
Both are little animated gifs taken from The Fellowship of the Ring
movie. HA! Can you believe that was 2001? Derned.
Once again http://www.sandbenders.net/zope/strangeloop Jason shares
the wealth and directed me to http://www.audioscrobbler.com
Audioscrobbler which is a site that can track your music listening
habits, build a profile, and group you with people of similar taste.
That way you can see what others might be listening to and give you the
chance to discover some new music. They could still probably use a
really good collaborative filter a la NetP’s good old recommendation
engine. Ah, the uses for technology. You can check what I’ve been
listening to by hitting my http://www.audioscrobbler.com/user/TnegreS/
user page. Once they get the classical tagging worked out it will be
super great. That’s the fun of a community driven project though. Plenty
to argue about. Almost forgot that it even has support to grab the stats
from an iPod as well. Pretty slick trick. So even when you’re on the go
it will update when the iPod synchronizes. Love technology. Well,
sometimes anyways.
This is a very well done flash movie. Might sound like an outlandish
view of the furture computer and Internet landscape, but is does it
really sound that far off? When you have about 8 minutes check out
http://oak.psych.gatech.edu/~epic/ EPIC. Mad props to Kurt for
pointing me over there.
So I was just goofing around on the Internet like normal and decided to
take a look at http://www.netperceptions.com/ Net Perceptions web
page. Had some really great times at that company. Kind of sad to have
seen it go down the way it did. But check it out now. This is the line
that kills me “The Company is pursuing an opportunistic, value-focused
investment strategy and is not targeting any specific industries”.
Sound like corporate bull? Sure does to me. The only thing that would
have been better is if they had something about leveraging synergies.
They obviously need to go back to corporate wannabe school. Believe me,
I could teach them a thing or two. Clicking around a little it looks
like some of the old senior engineers started a little support company
for the old recommendation engine NetP 7 or whatever it was called
there at the end. They are at http://www.tornago.com/ Tornago Systems.
Hope they are doing awesome and still having fun.
So after blindly updating my iBook the latest OS X update ruined my
control key life. Searching around frantically I found that there were
others reporting the same thing. Ack! Without control where the
completely inane CAPS LOCK key is I’m lost. So off to
http://www.google.com/search?q=os+x+swap+caps+lock+control+key&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official
a big Google search it is. Third hit down yielded
http://doublecommand.sourceforge.net/ DoubleCommand. Bang! Back in
business and it seems a bit simpler than
http://gnufoo.org/ucontrol/ucontrol.html uControl. (which they have
since fixed by the way) In the end I don’t think I needed all the
functionality that uControl offered. All I wanted to do was swap a
couple of keys. Simpler is usually better in my book. Life is good
again.
This is a pretty good one Jeremy sent to me. It’s the story of how this
guy worked at Apple without really working there and had his program
included with every computer that shipped for years. So sit back and
read http://www.pacifict.com/Story/ The Graphing Calculator story.
Kate’s computer was giving me fits trying to get iTunes to work
properly. It went down like this. Insert CD-1, rip, insert CD-2,
nothing, nothing. After ripping one CD iTunes would not recognize any
more CD’s! p00p! So off to google we go.. Found this article -
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93647 Only First Audio
CD Recognized - on http://www.apple.com Apple’s site. Did the trick.
Amazing how handy google can be when I feel like throwing the computer
out the window. Made me grumpy. Windows is truly a crappy operating
system.
Stumbling through the Internet can be fun. I ran across
http://schrammguitars.com/ Dave Schramm’s web site a while back. He
has been generous enough to share some of his knowledge. Check out the
guitars in various stages of being built right on the front page! I was
first drawn to the page by the
http://schrammguitars.com/selectingguitar.html Selecting a Guitar
article. Then found the http://schrammguitars.com/intonation.html
Intonation and Fret Placement piece fascinating. Lots of good reading
material there. If you really want to get stuck for a while you can
follow the link over to http://onlineapprentice.com The Online
Apprentice. They’ll show you how to build your own guitar and what you
need to gitter done . Now I need to practice more to justify owning such
a grand instrument.
After running the http://www.twincitiesmarathon.org/ Twin Cities
Marathon we had to track down our good friend Dave who was running the
race. Turns out he was taken to the hospital with some shortness of
breath. So we found him got him safely home all good. The only thing
missing was his t-shirt from the race. In all the rush he missed out. So
does Dave take this lying down?!? Hell no! He contacts the Pioneer Press
and they totally hook him up and wrote an article about it! Way to go
Dave!
http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/sports/columnists/bruce_brothers/10434265.htm?1c
Here is the article.
Not sure where I stumbled across this one. I think I was trying to
figure out a cooler way to tie off the ends of my classical guitar
strings when I found this.
http://brmrg.med.virginia.edu/knots/knots.html Knot Review. Mostly
meant for climbing, but I thought it was pretty neat nonetheless.
Firefox config fun If you are not already using
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ Firefox instead of Internet
Exploder you should be. Then once you are you should check out
http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.phtml?title=Firefox_:_FAQs_:_About:config_Entries
About:config Entries. Some cool features that can be enabled/disabled
that are not available in the normal Preferences dialog box. Geek out!
As the weather goes, so goes my internet connection. It was raining
heavy last night which means my connection to the internet is hindered
and all that is hosted by thesergents.net was out for lunch. This damn
technology. They are coming Monday to look at line levels and all that
fun stuff. Again. Thinking about giving DSL a try again. Maybe after 6
years they can get it to my house. It all makes me grumpy.
NPR has a pretty funny story
http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3908786&sourceCode=RSS
about passing on sayings. The story teller is pretty good and has a
great Minnesota accent if you’ve never heard one, or if you haven’t
heard one for a long time and miss it, ya know.
This sort of cracked me up. It’s always about the almighty dollar right?
Well, not always. So the AP had this story called
http://apnews.myway.com//article/20040913/D852ETT81.html Bloggers Find
Clicks Don’t Mean Cash. ie. we don’t make money doing this blog stuff.
Someday there might be somebody out there who “gets it”. Doesn’t look
like anytime soon.
Looks like at least one court is not so fond of the DMCA (Digital
Millennium Copyright Act). Ars Technica has a nice little article titled
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20041026-4352.html DMCA dealt
serious blow by Sixth Circuit Appeals Court]. Has a little explanation
of what the DMCA is for the uninformed as well as Lexmark’s argument and
why the
http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/Lexmark_v_Static_Control/20041026_Ruling.pdf
US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit] decided it was bunk. Good to
see there are some in government that have common sense. Update: Found
another loser trying to enforce the lame DMCA. This time it was
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,61232,00.html Skylink
Technologies that came out on the short end of the stick.
Big storms last night. We were down from about noon to 7:30pm or so.
Looked like my router fried, but it magically came back while I was not
looking. The problem was caused by an electrical outage sometime around
11:48am. Wasn’t able to get home because of that darn thing we call
work. Got home. Reset router. Nothing. Had to open a ticket with Time
Warner. They were really cool and had someone at my door in about 1.5
hours at which time the router decided to work again. poof The saga
continues…
The only thing holding me back from supreme dominance on my iBook was
getting the Control key in the right spot. After too many years of using
http://www.sun.com/ Sun equipment and then using my
http://shop.store.yahoo.com/pfuca-store/ Happy Hacking keyboard the
Control key must be where normal keyboards put the CAPS LOCK key. Who
uses that anyways? Lame. So in comes http://www.gnufoo.org/ucontrol/
uControl to save my day. Now I can have the Control key the way I like.
Back to happy hacking.
Well, for those of us who have been using Miscrosoft’s instant messaging
protocol with alternative (read: non-Microsoft) clients are going to be
given the boot.
http://www.idg.com.sg/idgwww.nsf/unidlookup/10B2FC6553AB2D7148256D9100318F66?OpenDocument
According to this article they are going to start charging third parties
for access licenses. So in the end I believe this only hurts their
cause. I will no longer be using their IM network to communicate with
friends and family. Not sure what http://gaim.sf.net GAIM has set for
the future? At least we can’t say the industry is boring.
Jer Says: http://newlisp.org Kind of interesting. Probably will never
have time to play with it…
The truth hurts.
Internet Health
From the bookmark archive. http://www.internetpulse.net/ Internet
Health Report. It’s cool to see if “The Internet” is congested anywhere
along the line. Don’t look at it much these days, but in a geekier time
in an apartment not too far away it was one of the coolest things.
Today I wear a long sleeved shirt for the first time. Welcome Fall. That
is all.
So thanks to http://www.sandbenders.net/zope/strangeloop Jason I’ve
had a http://gmail.google.com GMail account for a couple of months
now. My address is dana.sergent of course @gmail.com . Pretty slick
interface with a different idea for filing stuff. Basically they want
you to put all your mail in a giant pile (you start out with a 1 gig
quota, if that can be called a quota) and then use the search feature to
find mail later. Seems to work pretty darn well. And fast. Speaking of
fast - I was extremely wary of all the javascript at first, which is the
whole thing, but have had no problems with any browser I use
(http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ Firefox and
http://www.apple.com/safari/ Safari) You are probably saying “How do I
get one of these accounts?”. Looks like have finally unleashed the
floodgates because I keep getting new invitations as fast as I can give
them away. That’s right - Invite Only. Once again that is a pretty good
idea for ramping up a service like this. Those Google guys and gals!
After many years (many years) of playing electric guitar I’ve
rediscovered the classical guitar and have found some interesting
tidbits to share. Gotta love that Internet thing. To begin with, when
picking up music again, it’s always helpful to have a
http://www.musictheory.net Music Theory site handy. Pretty good job
and fun for free. Just something to check out. Watch an incredible
performance by http://www.anavidovic.com Ana Vidovic from the
http://www.kennedy-center.org/ Kennedy Center. Most amazing. Here is
the performance stream. I almost forgot. Classical guitar construction
is quite an elaborate and time honored tradition. There are so many
different techniques that go into building a great guitar. Some people
have some http://www.newmillguitar.com/newguits.html different ideas
about how to go about it. Really an interesting read about how to get
all those pieces of wood to sound beautiful. Some of my other favorite
sites include: http://www.worldguitarist.com/index.html World
Guitarist - lots of links about classical guitar.
http://www.guitarsalon.com/ Guitar Salon - Great site with good
articles (the one on http://www.guitarsalon.com/index.phpsite_url=68
rapid tuning was quite interesting) and of course goodies everywhere.
For fun look at the
http://www.guitarsalon.com/store.php?it=GUCLHAUJUB-02890 Hermann
Hauser III. Price? Like the saying goes If you have to ask…
Having some problems keeping the router on the wire. For those of you
who depend on my server being up please know that I do receive alerts on
my cell phone when it goes down courtesy of http://www.mailive.com/
Mailive!. It may take me a few hours in order to get home and reset the
router, so please understand that I am on it. The most annoying part
about these problems is it seems to happen about this time every year.
Last year when this was happening I had Time Warner come out and take a
look. They said I was getting intermittent signal interruption. The
cause? Weak signal. So the engineer installed an unbalanced splitter to
increase the signal going to the router (decreasing the signal to the
tv. The sacrifices we make!). I thought this had done the trick because
we haven’t had many problems since then. This month, however, has put me
in my place. Keeping an eye on the situation…
Couple of items I found to be funny.
First in the http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/top/solos/ The Top 50 Worst
Guitar Solos of the Millennium. Pretty hilarious and no punches pulled.
Hell, http://www.rush.com/ Rush is even listed! No one is safe! Will
probably at least spawn some good coversations (arguments). Next - not
as much funny as interesting. So funny in an odd kind of way. It’s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randompage Wikipedia’s Random
Page. Try it out. It’s addictive. Fun way to start the morning and learn
something new.
There was a lot I didn’t know about oil before http://www.greenz.net/
Josh sent me this link.
http://www.boss302.com/oil.htm All you ever wanted to know about oil
for your BOSS 302 (and your daily driver). Granted it is a little
focused on older cars, but there is so much good information from
somebody who is extremely knowledgable on the subject. Much to learn.
Might have to come back later and read it again. Some of the points
might be a little over my head at this point. Check it out!
Hey.. it’s true.
Katie and I went to see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0316654/
Spider-Man 2 last night. I have to say it was totally awesome. Even if
comic book flicks weren’t my thing seeing
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000600/ Sam Raimi’s directing was an
absolute treat. A joy in fact. Go back and watch
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106308/ Evil Dead 3 Army of Darkness a
few times (or 40 or 50) and then go see Spidey 2. It’s too good. And
of course there was an appearance by one of my favorite actors of all
time http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0132257/ Bruce Campbell. All in all a
great movie.
Finally got some of the better pictures up from the car show last
weekend. I didn’t realize I had taken so many pictures. It’s all fun
right? They are up in the picture database filed under link removed
Events. Too many cars to choose from. A good problem.
Jeremy pointed me to a very well written piece by Joel called
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html How Microsoft Lost
the API War. It’s not nearly as drastic as it seems, but does contain
quite a few common themes which have been floating around since the
creation of The Web as we know it today. Mainly that fat (as in phat)
applications are doomed because of the web and it’s platform agnostic
ways (which of course Microsoft hates). I have always agreed with this
point but disagreed with the timeline many have put down. Will I stick
my neck out and predict one myself? Hell no! think decades, not years.
The article also contains a bunch of good stuff about development and
where Microsoft is taking you today. One of my favorite quotes is:
http://www.dairyqueen.com Dairy Queen has a new blizzard called The
French Silk blizzard. If I could indulge in haiku for just a moment
calories enter
ecstasy ensues within
no frog taste found here
Was having problems with innacurate temperature display on the old girl.
Picked up a new temperature sending unit at Napa and looks like it will
work after only minor fussing. Need to get the correct connector and
should be good to go on that end of things.
Was able to complete the first oil change. Need to get a real jack
someday soon.
Josh and Jeremy met me at the
http://www.autoswalk.com/jun222428anm1.html Back to the Fifties car
show sponsered by http://www.msra.com Minnesota Street Rod
Association. It was well into the cool factor on the giant scale of
neat. There must have been about 10,000 cars there. We were lucky to
catch half, probably less. I tried to take a picture of every Corvette I
saw, but there were even way too many of those. It was definitely a
great time. Just needed more of it. Time that is. Took a ton of
pictures. Will get them posted on the site someday.
After two months my wheels finally arrived. Threw some rubber on there
and away I went. A little rough but Josh totally helped me out. Now the
real work can begin. Posted pictures in the database as usual. Thinking
about setting up a special Vette page just for all that related
material. Still pondering.
http://www.zeisler.org Dave sent me this link for
http://www.lac-sergent.com Lac Sergent in Quebec. For some reason it
hit a chord in my funny bone and totally cracked me up. I think it’s
mostly the goofy picture on the front page. On a side note I wonder how
much this screws with search engines having Sergent’s link to Sergent’s
that are not really related.
With all the hullabaloo about illegal music downloading I was pleasantly
surprised to find out about http://www.magnatune.com Magnatune. Their
slogan reads We’re a record label. But we’re not evil. They have high
quality streaming audio of every artist and every song they offer. Half
of anything you pay for goes directly to the artist. Downloads of the
music are offered in multiple formats and you can download as many of
those formats as you wish for the same price. That’s the bulk of the
cool stuff. Now you won’t find Britney or whoever on this record label
(thank the powers), but there is a lot of interesting music. I
particularly like the material in the
http://magnatune.com/genres/jazz/ Jazz and Blues section. Purchased
Cypress Grove Blues by http://magnatune.com/artists/jag Jag and have
been listening to it while programming all day. Great music in my
opinion. Good info all over the sight about why the founder decided to
do what he did. Good stuff and well worth supporting in my opinion. Goes
back to the broken business model of the recording industry as it stands
today. Here is somebody with a new plan. I like the plan. I also like
the music.
Finally had the chance to see the acclaimed Mystic River last night.
Excellent acting and direction. The plot was so cliche and transparent
it was almost unbearable. I felt very much akin to Servo and Crow from
the old MST3K days. Poking fun at the film as it plodded along.
Found an awesome MXC site on Yahoo! groups.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MXC/ The MXC Yahoo! Group has some great
quotes and the “move” database which is my favorite. I will start
laughing at the mere mention of a Full Willing Participant. If you have
not seen MXC on Spike! yet you will have to check it out. Completely
mindless entertainment is sometimes the best.
http://www.onlamp.com OnLamp has a cool
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2004/ article on Python Server
Pages (psp). I had not even heard of this and I’m supposed to be a
Python guy! Guess I need to crawl out from under my rock once in a
while. Looks like it has some really neat features that would make
templating a web site very easy. Not enough of a cool factor to rewrite
this site quite yet, but I could probably be pursuaded.
A little http://apnews.myway.com//article/20040224/D80TMUMO0.html AP
news blurb decribes how http://www.microsoft.com/ Microsoft and
http://www.rsasecurity.com RSA are teaming up to increase security on
Windows by requiring the use of a SecurID token to log into a machine.
It makes me think of putting a titanium lock on a cardboard box and
calling it secure.
http://www.wired.com Wired has an interesting article on the state of
IP laws in the US. We are approaching an interesting time in the
computer industry where we must carefully weigh the rights of large
corporations to intellectual properties against the stagnation of the
industry as a whole. The article is called
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/start.html?pg=2?tw=wn_tophead_5
The Eagle Is Grounded
We managed to all get on the short bus and head out to Bock Fest again
this year. Plenty of pictures in my picture database . The
http://www.schellsbrewery.com Schell Brewery once again put on a great
event.
This one goes straight out to my Dad! There is an article over at
http://www.popsci.com Popular Science titled
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/hometech/article/0,12543,458641,00.html
Microcystalline in 30 Seconds. It talks about how they whipped up some
ice cream in about 30 seconds with a little LN2. Sounds tasty to me!
It’s been a while since anything was updated on this site. I was finally
able to get my act together long enough to load up some new pictures as
well as some new music. The pictures are from Halloween and the
semi-annual Pimps and Ho’s party. Still need to get the ones from the
holidays up there, but first I need to get them off the camera. The
music is from Jeremy and Dana again. Some jams from September and the
other from the beginning of December. Good stuff.
If you didn’t know - Microsoft’s <em>Windows 98</em> has
come to the end of it’s life cycle. You can verify this by checking out
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/desktop_LevelOne.aspx
Windows Desktop Support Life-Cycle Wizard A good question would have to
be which is better:
- 5 years of commercial support, then you’re out in the cold - or
- A lifetime of community support ?? Good riddance Windows 98..
Here was a little piece of Christmas cheer a week or so late. It’s the
classic http://www.enbanc.org/archives/000435.html Twas the Night
before Christmas except it’s written in legalese. Totally cracked me up.
Aaron sent me this link. Thought I would share with the rest of the
world - http://www.kersbergen.com/temp/worstalbumcovers.html World’s
worst album covers. If the pictures didn’t look so real I would have to
believe they were made up. Not so. Too funny.
In an effort to stay completely geeky I have written almost the entire
site without using any tables. Thanks to http://www.csszengarden.com/
The Zen Garden, http://www.w3c.org/ the World Wide Web Consortium and
many others for help in this tediously frustrating effort. What a pain.
The price we pay for being geeks me thinks. Some things are still
broken. This upgrade really wasn’t very planned. In a bleary delirium I
accidentally copied my development version right over top of the running
“production” version. Should keep me on my toes for a bit whilst I work
things out. Hang in there and don’t be grumpy about it!
It’s just one of those things I found funny.
http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/idaho_does_not_exist.html The True Story
of Idaho.
Read it for a giggle and ask yourself honestly. Do you really know
anyone from Idaho? No offense to any Idahonianers.
Big news in our little circles. The other day Novell purchased Linux
distributor SuSE. This is a huge deal considering the recent
announcements from RedHat concerning the termination of their personal
edition and a new focus on their enterprise line. This young market
landscape is sure changing. There could be very exciting developments
with Novell’s interest in Linux taken to the next level. There is some
good reading over at News Forge called Putting Novell’s SuSE purchase
into perspective While I understand RedHat’s decision from a financial
standpoint I believe they have irrevocably damaged their credibility
with the geek masses. RedHat will be supporting a new community endeavor
called Fedora Linux, but I’m not very confident in it’s future. Time
will tell. Many have asked which direction I’m going. Honestly, at this
point, I have no idea. RedHat will continue support through April I
believe. My support contract is up in March. Possibly that will be
enough time to let the dust settle and see which direction Novell is
going to take SuSE and if Fedora can break out. If nothing else it will
be back from whence I came. Debian ran my servers for years and will do
so again if necessary.
Well, this last weekend I finally did it. The Sergents is now running on
a dual Pentium III. I have no more workstation at home, but that is a
small price to pay to have a reliable server. The old Dell Optiplex that
had been running the site for the past 3 years was showing signs of
wear. After achieving running times of over a year the processor and/or
motherboard were giving out. Eventually staying up for two weeks was
becoming an accomplishment. Hopefully this new/old hardware will prove
to be more robust. This will also mean there will be more of my
ramblings on the web log now that I have a working server again.
I haven’t posted much of the computer news that intrests me, but maybe I
should start. So here we go. I was reading this article and it combines
the best of many worlds. Get this - http://www.ernieball.com/ Ernie
Ball, best known for their guitar strings and a few guitars, has dumped
Microsoft in favor of Linux.
http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html?tag=lh The article can be
found on C-Net. So we have a guitar manufacturer ditching Microsoft in
favor of Linux! Put a smile on my face first thing in the morning. The
article is an interview with their CEO Sterling Ball, he sounds like a
pretty grounded guy who merely wanted to be treated with respect as a
customer.
After a few months of delay I have finally posted the most recent of the
Jeremy and Dana jams. They can be found in
http://www.thesergents.net/jams/ the normal spot . Of note is the Sand
in My Shorts which I feel is probably the coolest thing we’ve done to
date. Well, at least that I can remember.
http://www.greenz.net/ Josh and Thira had a baby on Wednesday (July
23rd) morning! Little baby Addie has joined the Green family! I’m late
posting this because things have been a little crazy, but even so, I did
get up there to hold her. She is gorgeous! You can check out pix on
their web site http://www.greenz.net/ Congrats to Mom and Dad
Hey! We’re there. Finally we have surpassed the one year mark for
uptime. Behold!
bash$ uptime
08:33:30 up 365 days, 21:40, 6 users
One year is a long time to go without rebooting a computer. The last
time it was rebooted was to add a new hard drive. A whole 8GB!! We’re
still cranking. Maybe we’ll make 2 years? Here’s hoping.
Jason pointed me to
http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html this site that
has a perl module called Mail::RFC822::Address that will validate
internet addresses. But take a look! Seriously!
To quote the site Implementing validation with regular expressions
somewhat pushes the limits of what it is sensible to do with regular
expressions Add to that the classic Jason quote: Visual Basic may make
you stupid, but Perl apparently drives you insane Good stuff
Here are the results of my most recent OS Personality Quiz. If you take
it let me know what you are too. DaveZ is Amiga also.
http://bbspot.com/News/2003/01/os_quiz.php
Which OS are You?
http://www.windowmaker.org Window Maker has been my window
manager/desktop environment of choice for over 2 years now. Possibly
even longer. http://www.icewm.org/ IceWM to
http://blackboxwm.sourceforge.net/ BlackBox back to Window Maker, I’ve
been all over the place, but always found myself searching for more.
That is what prompted me to take my old http://www.debian.org/ Debian
workstation and install the two big Linux desktop environments from
source. I know it sounds like an ambitious undertaking, but trust me -
in some bizarre way it is relaxing for me. Well, somewhat relaxing.
Installing Gnome
I can’t honestly remember who we played, but it was a barn burner. After
falling behind by 9 runs we came back with a 14 run inning! The bats
were on fire! Cedar Inn - 22 Somebody - 21 Next week Cedar Inn plays
Somebody Else. I promise I’ll get the schedule out of my car and update
this someday
This memorial weekend Kate and I voyaged to the http://www.bwcaw.org/
BWCA. That’s the Boundary Waters Canoe Area for those of you not from
these parts. There was a lot of time spent in the canoe and a little
backpacking, but not enough to even notice. I had the chance to see four
moose including a cow and her baby! My camera was conspicuously absent
during all this, so no pictures I’m afraid. We had a great time and it
was good to get away from civilization for a few days. A really great
experience.
I’m not a huge one for linking to other people’s web logs, but this is
pretty good stuff. http://torrez.org/ Andres Torrez writes a pretty
funny blog and this one is about the
http://torrez.org/archives/000553.php things he’s learned in 30 years.
All I could do was read and nod in agreement. Oh, and laugh.
We had our first loss of the season. Pizza Luce came back to beat us in
the final innings. It was a heartbreaker for sure. We were up 8-2 at one
point. That is just the way it goes sometimes. Pizza Luce - 9 Cedar Inn
- 8 Next week Cedar Inn plays The Animals.
Went and saw X-Men 2 this weekend with Jeremy. It was better than the
first. I highly recommend it to anyone who was a fan of the comics, or
anyone that just enjoys a good action flick. My favorite was the job
they did with Nightcrawler. I always wondered what BAMF would really
sound like. Now I know.
This just in! Hot off the presses! Dave and Olivia are expecting a BOY!!
How cool is that? I’ll tell you how cool it is! It’s
super-duper-ultra-great-neato-marvelous-terrific-breathtaking cool. Put
that in your hat and wear it!
Our softball team won it’s season opener! How do ya like them apples?!?
After a disapointing season at the end of last year (I won’t mention the
record) we have come from the offseason in great shape. We need a little
work on the offensive side, but the defense was looking spectacular!
Cedar Inn - 6 Local 63 - 3
Next week Cedar Inn plays Pizza Luce
A little Thai.. yum. A little Jammage.. Rock! A little Kung-Fu..
Shaolin Executioner
Could you imagine a more complete night? The jams are in their new link
removed usual place.
Enjoy!
The following is a translation of the previous web log which can also be
viewed on this blog somewhere.. need to find the link again.
I went to http://babelfish.altavista.com babelfish and translated it
from english to german, then from german to french, then from french
back into english. It’s about as good a laugh as one can get. I highly
recommend this to anyone who needs a smile put on their face. My
favorite line is - It is really equal! Here goes:
Still trying to spruce things up a bit here at The Sergents. I took
sometime Saturday morning and rewrote some of the web site to work with
http://www.modpython.org/ Mod_Python’s Publisher interface. It’s
really slick. I remember looking at it before, but for some reason
decided not to use it at the time. Maybe I had enough on my plate with
the mod_python upgrade alone. So, what’s new you ask? Here’s a little
list to get us going New logo Spiffy eh? New link addresses not many
will notice, but it’s nice for me Minute layout changes not many will
notice this either.. Web Log Archive you can now view all the old web
logs entries. You can either click the Web Log link to the left or click
on the name of a category to view all previous entries. That’s really
about all I can think that actually changed. There were lots of little
cleanups and html fixes here and there, but nothing to write home about.
The last time I checked my pages all validated just fine according to
the http://validator.w3.org/ W3C Validator
As usual I have no idea how I ended up there, but it is very
interesting. If you have a spare moment check out the
http://foia.fbi.gov/ FBI’a Freedom of Information Act site. They even
have a section for famous people.
It is all in PDF format so you’ll need Adobe’s Acrobat to read them.
Just go to http://www.acrobat.com/ to download it.
On Friday March 28th, 2003 Jason and I embarked on a journey to
hydration. It was a simple contest to see who could drink the most water
in a given day (business hours only). Pictures can be found
http://www.thesergents.net/imagedb/brows here . Here were the results
on the white board from the picutre:
Dana Jason Time Quantity
9:08 1000ml 9:20 946ml
9:40 1000ml 10:27 946ml
10:28 1000ml 11:39 946ml
13:31 1000ml 13:59 946ml
14:36 1000ml 14:23 946ml
14:55 1000ml 16:20 946ml
16:20 1000ml 16:55 500ml
16:39 1000ml - 0ml
Total Total
8000ml 6176ml
I think it is clearly an advantage to have a larger container in this
type of situation. Over the long haul it really adds up. And no . We did
not measure output. :-P
This is one someone else’s blog. It’s a very interesting and informed
take entitled
http://www.w-uh.com/articles/030308-tyranny_of_email.html The Tyranny
of E-mail. It is definitely worth a read. It’s a good take on trying to
keep focused in this crazy instant access world we have going right now.
On a side note I have to post this from the same site:
http://www.w-uh.com/articles/030101-w-uh.html equation of life. Seems
to apply not only to programming, but to most things in life. Makes me
smile.
If you hadn’t heard already Dave and Olivia are expecting! Dave has
posted some early renderings of
http://www.zeisler.org/baby/bambino.html Baby Z! So cute.. 8^)
Have you ever honestly searched for yourself? Only to discover that no
search engines seem to know or care about your existence? If I do not
exist in a search engine do I exist at all? Well, maybe.. Maybe not..
But you still have to check this out. Doing a search on Google for
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=dana+sergent&btnG=Google+Search
Dana Sergent yields this site as the top result. I have finally made it.
Sorry about the third person reference in the title.
Last weekend some friends managed to rent a bus for the
http://www.schellsbrewery.com/news_bockfest.php Bock Fest in New Ulm,
MN. It is sponsered by the “http://www.schellsbrewery.com/ Schell
Brewery. It was a total blast, but I swear if I hear Ring of Fire by
Johnny Cash anytime soon I may go insane. As usual I will be posting the
very few pictures I managed to take in the Image Database.
Last night Marty and Jason blew up from the south to attend a book
reading/signing by William Gibson. It was exteremly cool, both to see
them again and to see the genius that is Gibson. If you haven’t read any
of his books you should totally check them out! His site:
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/ My favorite:
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/books/zero.asp
If you have a moment it is fun to read his
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/archive.asp blog. Props out
to Jeremy who got stuck on the phone with work trouble shooting a
printing issue of some sort. We still managed to get his book signed. On
a side note - Jason brought his Dell pocket pc which was very very cool.
The screens have come so far it’s hard to believe. That gets the blood
flowing again. Have to keep an eye on the Linux handhelds like the
http://www.sharpusa.com/products/TypeLanding/0,1056,116,00.html Zaurus
So I finally found my ounce of motivation had hidden away. The two tapes
of jams have been processed at last. They are in the /jams normal
location
No, it’s not cats and dogs sleeping together. It is possibly worse… So
Dave and I were having a normal IM conversation when the following
occurred..
(13:40:14) TnegreS: hold it
(13:40:18) TnegreS: wait..
(13:40:21) DaveZeisler: negative negative....
(13:40:22) TnegreS: jeeze..
(13:40:28) DaveZeisler: just impacted on the surface.....
(13:40:28) TnegreS: just impacted on the surface
I’d like you to notice that on exactly the same second Dave and I
converged on precisely the same thought. If you don’t know where the
reference is from I might tell you if you ask nice and humble like. (or
if you convince me you’ve been living under a rock since 1978) So watch
out. There might be stranger things happening, but I doubt it.
Surprise, surprise. It’s January in Minnesota and it is cold. High today
expected to reach a scalding 4(F)!!!!!!! Our hot water to the sink
upstairs is not currently running (read frozen). Makes washing the face
a short, if not memorable, experience.
