Someone told someone who told TJIC who told me about this. Now I'm telling you. 
From The Lord of the Rings… well not really.
One does not simply walk into Mortor
Dinner at Cambaz
VC and I went to Cambaz tonight… It’s a new Turkish restaurant downtown. Who knew you could have fun in Hackettstown? Now I’m not talking about one of the fine sports-bars in the nearby metropoli of Independance or Great Meadows (home to Bobalou’s Famous Steaks & Sports Bar and Stumpy’s Sports Pub respectfully). I’m talking right in the heart of Hackettstown, practically within sight of the famous Hackettstown Trading Post lion statues!
The atmosphere was welcoming. The owner’s sister came out and chatted with us about the table decorations (last time, the owner himself forced us to try some specials for free… the 5-hr baked lamb was good). The food was great, with a definitely authentic provincal tang to it. And the belly dancer was really good!
And of course, sharing the experience made it so much better! Heck, I probably wouldn’t have gone out to dinner if it weren’t for VC. And of course, a final thank you to my mom for getting me a gift certificate for the place for christmas!
Hurray for good eats!
My Western Trip
The Burning Man experience has convinced me that I should look into moving west. I’m looking for a place that’s sunnier, a bit slower, a bit more hip and quite a bit hippier. From Feb 22nd til March 2nd, I’m going to be traveling in the areas between San Jose, San Francisco and Grass Valley, looking for a nice place to live.
Revenge of George Lucas
From Boing Boing:
Here’s the text-crawl from the upcoming and final (?) Star Wars movie, Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, as leaked on the Star Wars official site.
General Grievous? Isn’t he a contemporary of Professor Chaos?
Separated at Birth?
Installed Random Image
VC said that my new blog lacked color. She missed the image at the top. So I’m putting a random image thingie at the top. :-)
Shortly you’ll be able to click on the thumbnails to see the full images. I might eventually get around to putting up some real gallery software.
Thanks to Photomatt for the script. Though I instantly noticed that this script doesn’t let me link to images from thumbnails, it just displays them.
update 5-10-05 See New Random Image.
Tradesports Weather Trading
TJIC mentioned that he made $250 betting that George W would win the election so I checked out the site. I’ve become fond of betting on the weather. It’s this nice mix of science, probability, and reading human reactions to the weather. And I’ve won some money.
Thinking of human reactions, I’m reminded of a chart I saw a long time ago about perceived dangers vs. actual dangers. There were tens of items on the chart but I can give you an example of typical reactions:
On a scale from 1 to 10, rank how afraid you are on a daily basis, of being killed by
- a traffic accident
- an airplane crash
- a nuclear power plant disaster
Most people put traffic accidents low on the list and put planes and nuclear disasters high on the list. But statistics show that you are FAR FAR FAR more likely to be killed in a traffic accident than the other two. It’s that incorrect response to stimuli that I’m playing on when I’m making my bets.
A while back I was looking at Tradesports for the first time and said to TJIC something like, “Why can’t people be dumb so I can steal their money?” Well, at the risk of huge humiliation and loss of all the money I’m betting, I’ll say that there are such people out there. And here I come.
1-26-05 update. Oh, who am I kidding. The weather market on tradesports is so small that I can’t ever make any real money at it. And the larger the market gets, the more that damn free market equalization thing will kick in.
Trip to California
I’ve booked a trip to San Fransisco.
I’ve been doing a lot of internal searching since Burning Man and I’m considering moving someplace sunnier, more culturally alive and… hippier. Next month I’ll be flying from NJ to San Fransisco for 8 days. I’m going to rent a car, drive around and try to find out if it’s the place for me.
The trip is Feb 22nd-March 2nd.
Current stops right now include San Francisco and surrounding areas, Grass Valley 2 1/2 hrs northeast of San Fran, Boulder Creek 1 1/2 hrs south of San Fran.
Nicer Stylesheet
I’m liking Wordpress a lot but the default stylesheet is far from ideal. Well, I guess it’s a matter of preference and customizations… Well, the new style sheet gives nice clean lines. I’m sure it’s a never ending project.
Mouseover DOM Inspector
I just found this gosh-darn useful Javascript tool. It’s good for helping to lay out your web page, or understand someone else’s page structure.
From Slayeroffice.com
This favelet allows you to view the properties of any HTML element on a page simply by mousing over the element. The element will be given a gray background, and a DIV element that trails the mouse cursor will contain the element type along with all of the specified attributes of the element.
Hit the “esc” key to turn the favelet off.
Right click on the following link and select “Add to Favorites” or “Bookmark this Link”, depending on your browser.
Mouseover DOM Inspector
Installed Google Ads
I’m such a sellout. But hey… I tried out Google Ads on my Hampsterdance page about a month ago and I’ve ALREADY MADE OVER $0.74 in clickthru advertising!! Hampsterdance is the most popular link on my whole site so I don’t expect to rake in quite so much from the rest of the site.. but hey.
The ads appear in the right column, below my links and such.
2-5-04 update: I removed them from my blog. It just doesn’t seem right.
Allow Generic Host Process to access the internet
If Zonealarm says, “Generic Host Process for Win32 Services is trying to access the internet”, “Validation: Not available in ZoneAlarm”, “Application:svchost.exe” you should Allow it to, and Remember this setting.
The Generic Host Process is a good program from Microsoft. Google for it to find out more.
I can’t tell but I think this switch sometimes flips to “Deny” on it’s own, which is a bad thing because then the computer will have no internet access. 2 clients have told me, “I don’t know, I don’t think I denyed it.” Comments?
This happened on Zonealarm 5.5.062.004
I’m sick
I think I got myself sick by not cooking these chicken patty things enough. :-( My stomach is unhappy, I’m dizzy and most unnerving, I’ve got general muscle weakness. It took me a while to figure out that last one because normally when I’m sick (a cold or something) I have joint pain. After getting up and flopping back into bed several times with this new weird feeling I spent the effort to figure out what the heck was wrong.
Blech.
And what the hell is with me. I’m over 30 and I still don’t know how to cook chicken safely? I’m so dumb.
And sick.
I feel better now than I did 3 hours ago so I’ll just let it run its course. I had to cancel a Computer Guy session because I didn’t feel well enough to drive. I kept envisioning myself driving along and throwing up on the windshield. Then I couldn’t see out the front and I’d crash and not feel up to actually getting out of the car. And then the car would catch fire and I’d burn up :-(. I guess my imagination hasn’t been dulled by this illness.
Blech.
1-21-05 Update: I’m feeling much better. It’s kind of weird to not eat for 24 hours and not feel the worse for it. Actually, it’s a bit refreshing.
Picasa 2: goodness
Picasa 2.0 kicks butt. I found the original Picasa a few years ago and loved it. I’ve only been playing with the latest version for an hour or so but it looks like they’ve cleaned up all the shortcomings of the original software and then some. And the best part is, it’s FREE! Google bought the Picasa company and is giving it all away. It looks like their strategy is to get ahead by being a part of the picture making process and being a preferred (but not required) vendor for some photo related services. Darn it, they hope to get ahead by being the best. And I think it might just work.
PS. I want to know who wrote the readme.htm. It is wonderfuly written. Uplifting, conversational, tremendously informative, witty without being smarmy, well laid out… The damn thing is a model of what a readme should be.
I include the readme after the cut.
Halflife 2
Halflife 2 is an AMAZING game.
First, the realism is just… unreal. I could gush about that for a long time. The physics are so realistic and the texturemaps and polygons and… [gush gush]
The gameplay is terrific too. I’m occationally a little miffed that the game designers push me “down the tube” in a linear fashion, but I forgive them for the plots they put me into. I’m put in the place of a reluctant hero, struggling to survive and occationally kicking some bad-guy butt.
I’ve tried a few times to write a story about my adventures… but they just don’t hold a candle to the experience of actually being there. Yow, I just said that I was “actually” in a place that doesn’t exist. Metaverse, here we come!
Cygwin + Rxvt
This works great. Stolen from here.
Cygwin + Rxvt
I’ve been playing around with Cygwin since I’m forced to run WinXP on my work laptop. Cygwin’s great, I’ve used it on and off since when it was GNU-Win32 by Cygnus, but there’s a lot of improvements to it in the last year or two.
One of the things that’s irritated me is that the default console uses the cmd.exe shell as a base - makes it hard to copy + paste with the mouse, among other things. After some effort, I found the right combination of tweaks to get Rxvt working as a decent console in Cygwin.
[You'll of course have to install Rxvt from your favorite Cygwin mirror. - Lee]
Step 1: Edit ~/.Xdefaults - the settings below create an 80×80 terminal window with a deep-blue-black background and yellow-white text (looks nice, easy on the eyes) and assign VIM-style color codes:
(see comment 6. A change might be needed to this code. I haven’t tested it yet but you might need it. Tell me if it works for you please)
! ~/.Xdefaults - X default resource settings
Rxvt*geometry: 80x80
Rxvt*background: #000020
Rxvt*foreground: #ffffbf
!Rxvt*borderColor: Blue
!Rxvt*scrollColor: Blue
!Rxvt*troughColor: Gray
Rxvt*scrollBar: True
Rxvt*scrollBar_right: True
Rxvt*font: Lucida Console-12
Rxvt*SaveLines: 2000
Rxvt*loginShell: True
! VIM-like colors
Rxvt*color0: #000000
Rxvt*color1: #FFFFFF
Rxvt*color2: #00A800
Rxvt*color3: #FFFF00
Rxvt*color4: #0000A8
Rxvt*color5: #A800A8
Rxvt*color6: #00A8A8
Rxvt*color7: #D8D8D8
Rxvt*color8: #000000
Rxvt*color9: #FFFFFF
Rxvt*color10: #00A800
Rxvt*color11: #FFFF00
Rxvt*color12: #0000A8
Rxvt*color13: #A800A8
Rxvt*color14: #00A8A8
Rxvt*color15: #D8D8D8
! eof
Step 2: Modify your c:cygwincygwin.bat to invoke your shiny new Rxvt instead of cmd.exe:
@echo off
C:
chdir C:cygwinbin
set EDITOR=vi
set VISUAL=vi
set CYGWIN=codepage:oem tty binmode title
rxvt -e bash --login -i
Today’s unnerving quote: Mohammed Atta
From IEEE Spectrum Magazine, January 2005
THEN THERE’S THE INTERNET’S utility for planning and coordination. There are any number of sophisticated tools for collaboration, plus the obvious ones of e-mail, instant messaging, and chat rooms. It’s easy to build a new, temporary identity and post entries from public Internet kiosks and cafes. There are plenty of ways to hide or encrypt messages, or terrorists can just speak obliquely.
Weimann says that Mohammed Atta’s final message to his fellow 9/11 terrorists was: “The semester begins in three more weeks. We’ve obtained 19 confirmations for studies in the faculty of law, the faculty of urban planning, the faculty of fine arts, and the faculty of engineering.” Weimann believes the talk of various “faculties” referred to specific facilities, such as the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Sifting the plans from the chatter is perhaps law enforcement’s greatest task.
Installed Bittorrent
I installed Bittorrent on my spenix.com account. I may be volunteering a little technical help in distributing this year’s Burning Man Screen Saver for The Burning Man Screen Saver Project.
I’m a bit excited since I submitted about 15 photos of my own to this year’s project. The Vault of Heaven screen saver is due out in April or so.
On a side note, if you have any large files you need distributed, I’m now your go-to guy!
4-10-05 update. The Screen Saver doesn’t need Bittorrent. Oh well.
Why I run my own blog: Livejournal outage
This is why: http://livejournal.com/
Temporarily Unavailable
LiveJournal is currently down due to a massive power failure at our data center. We’ll provide updates at /powerloss/ as they’re available.
