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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.vintage-instruments.com/ - A crazy little site I had never seen before selling vintage guitars http://www.housesofminneapolis.com/ - Great start to a site that has a ton of information about houses in Minneapolis. All sorts of fun to read about.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> <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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Need to get some things out there for a Monday. Some interesting stuff.
http://www.lise.jp/honyaku/noguchi.html Noguchi Filing System is a very interesting read. Always good to see different ways to think about doing simple everyday tasks. http://www.moleskineus.com/ Moleskine notebooks rule. I have one and would definitely like some more. Unfortunately for me I managed to hoard a ton of those old school lab books with hard covers. Will have to burn through those first.
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.
http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/snow/snow-shoveling-rules.asp Minneapolis Rules http://www.stpaul.gov/depts/citynews/snowshovel.html St. Paul’s rules And in Minneapolis you can stop by and get http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/snow/freesidewalksand.asp free sand from any of the sand stations 24 hours a day. Keep it cool…
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.