Results for category "Blog"

Bad Smokers

If you smoke, there’s not much I can do about it. You should quit, but its hard to do.

What I don’t understand is why all (?) smokers believe that the world is their ash tray?!?!??!?!? While driving in their car they think its perfectly fine to dispose of their cigarette butts out the window.

While driving home from my dad’s house, the same car managed to flick 2 of them at me, and a total of 5 butts hit my car on the way home.

While crossing Woodward Ave at Catalpa (aka 11.5 mile) I was standing on the sidewalk on the median/boulivard and there was a TON of cigarette butts in the grass (as people threw them out while they were waiting at the red light).

I don’t know how biodegrable cigarette butts are but I kind of doubt they disappear very quickly.

Vote for Me

If Arnold can do it, why can’t I?

www.wannabegov.com has a Sign Generator you can use to make your own image, or buy a sign for your lawn or for your friend(s).

New Car

Finally some good pictures of the new car, Mazda RX8

New Car

Yeah! My new car finally arrived! Mazda Rx8, “Xmen 2 Blue”.

They had to get it from Ohio because I wanted blue and they only had black and gray here in Michigan. I’ll post pictures when I get a chance, work has been very busy this week.

I joked with my wife that it was just a very expensive garage door opener (has one built in) with a navigation system and 250 horses.

Its a little smaller on the inside than I’m used too, but it does have a back seat. The interior lights are red at night which I’m not super fond of, but it is pretty easy on the eyes. The number of cool features is just amazing.

Bye to the Vette

Today I had to say bye to my Corvette. My lease ran up today so I National City took it back. I had it for 3 years, though 6 months of that I was in Brazil.

It was a great car, so much power! The ride was a little bumpy and noisy but that expected from a sports car.

I put way under the miles I had available. It had around 29,000 on it, but I was allowed to drive 45,000. I was very tempted to keep it for that reason, but looking at kbb.com and ebay.com the car was not selling for a high price compared to what National City wanted for it.

I should be posting about getting my new car, but yet again there is a delay so I won’t have it until tomorrow. The cause: Paperwork! I can’t believe that this day in age we are held back by paper work!

Another Success

Erica successfully imported her comments into her MovableType blog.

She informed me that HaloScan was going to charge $10 for her to export her comments. Glad I could help.

Zack had a suggestion: He (and Erica) were confused by the way the email addresses looked in the database. HaloScan has them “encoded” on purpose to try to avoid spammers. I wrote code to undo that, but did not execute it because my wife (and I) thought it was a good idea to keep them encoded. However, after Zack’s email, I thought it would be cool to add a radio button the import comments page allowing you to keep them the way they are, or to unencode them. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to make that change.

Import Comments Success

Well, I’m happy to report that at least one user has been able to use the Import Comments feature I added to Movable Type (no thanks to my sorry excuse for documentation/instructions and blindness to emails).

Zack was able to import his comments, blogged about my “plug-in” and sent me a nice email.

BBS

That’s right, a Bulletin Board System. I have been going to ISCA BBS for around 7-8 years. I have logged in nearly 10,000 times. It has make topics you can read about and members from all over the world that you can “eXpress message” with.

As it is purely text based it is low bandwidth (which is rare in these days), but it obviously doesn’t have the graphic appeal or “coolness” of IMs.

You can telnet there and login as a Guest to look around: telnet://bbs.isca.uiowa.edu:23

You can get a client to enhance the experience at http://www.bbsclient.net/. (I hope to make my own client sometime soon, whenever I get some more free time).

Sparklers

The 4th of July is a pretty cool time because I like fireworks. Though usually sparklers are not that cool, when you take pictures in low light, the exposer is long enough to capture the sparkler in motion. Here are some cool pictures we took last night.

It is very difficult to get anything in focus with a long exposer and motion, so I’m not surprised they are a little blurry. As always there’s more pictures at my wife’s web site.

Backup

Well I successfully made a backup of all the files on our web sites onto my other server. I did that so I could add another hard drive to the existing server and not have the site be down. Although I did not install Movable Type on the backup server (yet) so the comments and dynamic pieces did not work, the static files where still there which served the majority of the purpose.

Samba was a little annoying to setup (its no where near complete) but I got it working (had to copy the files to my user directory, then copy them to the web server home). Had to edit the server to accept default.htm as a document to consider instead of just index.html. It was fairly easy except for a slight confusion about “editing the default” and editing the “default virtual host”.

Next I’ll get movabletype installed, but copying the database seems far from trivial.