The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for 2006
“It felt like a big truck drove by, only everything wobbled the wrong way.” Charlotte
There was a 3.7 in Berkeley that lasted just 1 second. Charlotte and I were having dinner. It was a bit unnerving being so short. It felt like we were waiting for the other shoe to fall for a minute or two.
Charlotte and I helped put the the Hed of the Angel of the Apocalypse on display in a yard at 354 5th St in SOMA. It was really fun getting together with the Girls. :-)
Tune in, drop out and go to these sites…
If you tried to submit a comment on the site recently and my spam filter said there was a problem, then I didn’t see your message. I know that I wrote “blah blah… don’t sweat it…” but feh, I missed it.
Sorry.
Sometimes I wonder where the time goes. So it’s good to write it down just to remind yourself that you’ve actually accomplished something. In the last week or so I (with Charlotte!)….
went to 2 of 3 bookkeeping classes (final one is next week)
went to “How to be a good speaker” class (sucked)
went to “what form of company should you have” (LLC, duh)
made mustard bread (yum!), oatmeal bread (yum!)
get quotes for FLG calendar to be sold shortly
Went to boxshop to paint lockers & fix welder
set up paypal thingie for FLG calendar
set up more shelves
put up some pictures
found and explored Mission Cliffs, an indoor rock climbing place
went to a great dinner at Universal Cafe (Thanks mom!!)
spent quality time with Charlotte
researched corporate structures
learned and implemented wiki stuff
helped my aunt get her computer fixed (a dead motherboard :-( )
went for some nice walks
surfed the darpanet
researched software backup products for the business
Took an ICS (Incident Command System) certificate class
bought christmas presents for family
researched stud finders (unsuccessfully, hurumph)
set up an email mailing list for FLG calendar group
set up FTP services for FLG
talked with Dorothy, Beaner, my sister, mom and dad
am going tango dancing in 15 min
I’ve been roaming around the interwebs looking for solid recommendations for a good stud finder. For every recommendation for a particular model, I read 2 recommendations against.
Other recommendations I’ve seen (via)
Mechanical Stud Finder from Garrett Wade
a magnet on a short string finds the nails
Metal detector like the Little Wizard metal detector
a magnet-thing in a case kind of like a compass finds the nails
ice pick – the hole is smaller than a nail hole
Since I want to avoid hammering into water pipes and electrical wiring while hitting wood or metal studs, maybe the best would be a metal detector and current sensor. I’m just amazed at how poorly the electronic stud finders are rated. Hurumph.
Charlotte and I are taking classes at the SBA. Today we took the first of three bookkeeping classes. At the end, we both concurred, “Brain full. Rest now.” The class is tremendously useful but phew!
In the evening, we took a class on public speaking. Argh, in 3 hours we got through 2 exercises. And the first one was “Speak into the mike telling us who you are and why you’re here.”
More classes tomorrow… “Financing Your Business” and “Legal Structures for Your Small Business”, bookkeeping classes Thursday and next week.
We have just barely gotten to putting The Serpent Mother away. Hopefully next week we will be able to put a tarp over all of her vertebrae so she does not corrode too badly while in storage. In the last few days, we got the head elevated into the top of the shop for storage. I am afraid that the serpent mother will not be coming out again for quite a while. There are many other projects that we are working on.
Upcoming, we have the ever present shop maintenance… I volunteered to fix a welder of ours… though I know nothing about fixing such things.. It won’t be too hard, I hope. Charlotte is going to be fixing up a cabinet at the shop. We’re going to be moving the head of the Angel of the Apocalypse to a spot in the city soon. We’re working on nabbing part of a large grant from Redwood City to build birdbaths. And we’ve got to start thinking about our Burning Man 2007 project. Grant Proposals are due February 15th! And during that time, several Lotus Girls will be in Australia on tour with the Hand of God at this travelling event called “Big Day Out”!
I’m still working on getting the business going with Charlotte. That’s going ok. :-)
I saw Lulacruza last night. The sound (which can be found on their site) put me in a really nice lucid trance state. I tried to work out some of my life’s issues in the state but it seems that life doesn’t suddenly get more perfect just because you’re in a trance. But it was fun anyway… a good getaway.
Last night, Charlotte and I completed our training as Neighborhood Emergency Response Team members!
This is one vital step in our multifaceted strategy to take over the world!
We have been studying disaster preparedness, fire safety, light search and rescue, triage, basic disaster medicine with the SF Fire Department. We even got to put out a real fire and make a mess in the parking lot with a 3A 40BC extinguisher (the kind of extinguisher that YOU should have in your home, car and workplace… you have one in each, right? If not, we’ll sell you one, at a very reasonable price…).
We got certificates. We’re NERTs!
We got gloves and super duper ity bity flashlights (I almost blinded Charlotte, oops. But the veins in our hands look really cool) submersible to 500ft and guaranteed against… let me read the manual, “Pelican Unconditional Lifetime Guarr… blah blah blah… defects in workmanship… blah blah blah…. THE ABOVE GUARANTEE DOES NOT COVER SHARKBITE, BEAR ATTACK OR CHILDREN UNDER 5.” Ha!
We were instructed never to walk into a building and shout “NERTS! We’re here to help!” People would just look at us funny. We’re supposed to say “Rescue Team!” Already our self esteem is being tested by the industrial firefighting complex. ;-)
This is an important part of our disaster preparedness business. Which, in all honesty, is looking pretty tenable.
Just like the last time, my vote in San Francisco counted for little.
Continue reading ‘How I voted’ »
Voltage Loss Tables: Calculate how many volts are eaten up over a given distance
voltage loss = amps * wire resistance * distance in feet * 2 wires (1 wire in each direction!)
Sources http://www.cirris.com/testing/resistance/wire.html http://www.paigewire.com/volt_loss_formulas.htm
If you have TestTrack Pro 4 from Seapine Software, you might find the following useful. Change the email notifications as such and the emails will be in a much more readable format.
Continue reading ‘TestTrack Pro 4’ »
VNC SingleClick is a program that lets a person run a small (166k) program in order to let another user see their computer screen and/or control their computer. It’s way useful.
Here are notes I took on how to set it up (these instructions were ripped from a doc I wrote for another purpose. Sorry if it’s slightly unintelligible)
update: I removed this plugin. I now just trust in Spam Karma
Spam Karma does a great job of managing my comment spam. But I’d like to do more to keep those 500 comment spams/day out of my database entirely. So I’ve installed the Challenge plugin. It’ll make you do math in order to leave a comment. Spammers hate math. It’s like their kryptonite. I hope you don’t hate math so much as to not leave a comment.
Update Feb 10, 2008: See this post where it is now successfully installed! W00t!
Update Nov 10, 2006: FastCGI isn’t stable. So I am disabling it. I’d sometimes see a 30 second timeout error right next to a 2 second load time. It just isn’t stable. :-( Sometimes it would crap out on an upload, sometimes on downloads…
The whole site should be much faster now that I’ve set up FastCGI on my Dreamhost account :-)
Here’s how I had configured it:Put the following at the beginning of the .htaccess file of the directory I wanted to run FastCGI on. IE: in ./lee.org for the whole site or in ./lee.org/blog for just the blog:
Options +ExecCGI
AddHandler php5-fastcgi .php
Action php5-fastcgi /php5-wrapper.fcgi
Create a file called php5-wrapper.fcgi and put it at ./lee.org. Make it executable by the user. Put the following in it:
#!/bin/sh
export PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=3
exec /usr/local/dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi
Click the checkbox in the Domain section of the Dreamhost Panel saying “FastCGI”.
That’s it.
Please note that comments left on my syndicated Gadlenblog account do not make it back to my normal Lee.org blog. Since I only read the Lee.org blog, I’ll never see your comments.
Please don’t leave comments on my syndicated blog, Gadlenblog.
If you are running Internet Explorer 6, click on this link and IE will crash..
I’ve posted this flyer around the interweb…
——————
You may have heard of us. We’re the Flaming Lotus Girls. We rocked the playa.
and we’re having a little shindig to celebrate!
(It’s also a bit of a fundraiser since we went just a teensy weensy bit
over-budget!)
Here’s a link to the FLG supperclub party flyer.
http://tinyurl.com/rnr4e
————————————————–
supperclub, Flaming Lotus Girls and Get YER Freak on!
Present
“Return of the Serpent Mother”
Friday Oct 20th, 11pm-3am
at supperclub – 657 Harrison St @ 3rd
in an evening of celebration for the Serpent Mother There will be a photo exhibit of FLG work with silent auction, FLG gear and if you’re lucky, the infamous Flaming Lotus “Kissing Booth”
Part of the Serpent Mother will be there to accompany us throughout the night.
La Salle Neige
M3- Green Gorilla Lounge
Majitope – Flaming Lotus Girls
Laird – LUSH/Get YER Freak on!
Goldilox – Brass Tax/LUSH
Ladies room
Hosted by Sister SF
Amber, Seraphim Delush
Forest Green, Samira
Audio Angel (live vox)
$10-20 donation http://www.flaminglotus.com
for dinner reservations, please call 415-348-0900 or visit http://www.supperclub.com
————————————————–
————–
images & video!
http://youtube.com/results?search_query=Serpent+Mother&search=Search
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=%22Serpent+Mother%22
http://lee.org/blog/2006/10/03/serpent-links/
http://www.madnomad.net/menu/index.php?iframe=film
————–
Do you know who Trogdor is? If you don’t, your life is worth nothing.
You can turn things around right now
http://homestarrunner.com/sbemail58.html
