Lee.org

This was my first article for The Panther, published October 2003. It’s pretty boring stuff, but a start to my writing. This didn’t have the “Click Here” title yet.

Protect Your Computer
By Lee C. Sonko

Every few months there is another front-page news article about a computer virus that has cost untold damages to people, companies, and the machines they work on. The truth is, the internet is a dangerous place. People are always trying to break into other people’s computers. Some of these break-ins are disgruntled employees bent on sabotage, some are kids seeing how much of a ruckus they can raise, and some are modern cat burglars trying to steal people’s credit cards. In any case, everyone here in the Valley wants to distance ourselves as much as possible from these shenanigans. (more…)

I set this up mostly because Spam Karma leaves giant overhead in my Wordpress MySQL database. But it can’t hurt running it on the rest of my databases.

My cron job, which runs at 6:05am every first of the month looks a bit like this
#!/bin/sh
# Optimize all of my popular databases. This is run from a cron job monthly or so.
echo -n "Started database optimization at ";/bin/date; echo -e "\n\n";
/usr/bin/mysqlcheck -o -v -u user -ppassword -h mysql.lee.org blogdatabase;
echo -e "Finished blogdatabase\n\n";
/usr/bin/mysqlcheck -o -v -u otheruser -potherpw -h mysql.lee.org otherdatabase;
echo -e "Finished gallerydatabase\n\n";
echo -n "Finished database optimization at ";/bin/date; echo -e "\n\n";

I get a monthly email with the output that I can look over.

The interface on my end for the new FLV-Embed is prettier than the older FLV-Embed. Users won’t notice a difference. Well, it uses the newer FLV Player 3.12. Is that any better? Who knows. Maybe The Shadow knows.

The nation’s accountant and head of the Government Accountability Office, David Walker gave a speech at the National Press Club December 17th, 2007. It’s a very good speech. His news isn’t good. Here is the speech. Listen to the whole thing.

Here is the text of this speech.

I had found this speech via a Word for Word podcast. I see that David Walker and the GAO has a large archive of speeches. I’ll get to listening to them!

In the coming weeks, I will republish articles I wrote under the title “Click Here”. You can find them all under the Click Here Articles category in this blog.

From 2002 to 2005, I worked with two publications, The Panther and Around The Greens. Actually, I helped quite a bit with them in addition to writing articles.

The Panther is the official publication of The Panther Valley Property Owners Association. I was a member of the Communications Committee, helping to get the newsletter out and helping with various initiatives in the Valley.

Around The Greens is the official publication of the Forsgate Community Association. My aunt Ernestine McCarren ran the publication from 2003 to 2004. I wore many hats, technical advisor, graphic design and writer. I was instrumental in helping to put together the proof. We used Microsoft Publisher 2003. I did most of the ads. I’d get a laugh every time an advertiser would give us an old crinkled newspaper ad with their logo on it and say, “Here you go. Use this logo but make it a half-page ad instead of side-bar. Oh and our hours and location have changed.” They had no idea that in order to make that work, I’d usually have to rebuild the entire ad from scratch. But with the crinkled sheet, the best I could do for them was… not as good as they should care about their business!

During this time I was promoting my business, “The Computer Guy”. My tagline was “I go to people’s homes and small businesses, fix their computers and show them how they work.” To promote myself as an expert in the field, I wrote a series of articles with the title of “Click Here”. Over the next few weeks, I will republish those articles here. Computers being what they are, some of the content is out of date but much of it is still useful. In any case, it’s interesting reading (at least I think so).

It was an enjoyable challenge to write for print. You are always watching your word-count; I would write the first draft of my 450 word article, do a word-count and find out that I was over by 600 words. Taking an axe to my own articles showed me that I could write very concisely when I had to and not lose the intention of the work.

The best taqueria in San Francisco has reopened.

It looked like El Toro was gone… it had been boarded up for several months. I spoke to the owner (who also owns Pancho Villa and the building that El Toro is in) the night before they reopened… last Sunday night if I recall correctly. He said they had to do some structural work and it took longer than they anticipated.

I went in a few days after they opened. The owner said they kept 6 employees from the old El Toro… they had been shuttled around to the other restaurant to keep them working. The woman serving me was cutely shy… she didn’t speak English well and I figured out that she was making her very first enchilada. The chef and 2 others on the line were experienced so it wasn’t a terrible experience but it’ll be a while before they’re running smoothly.

I am very fond of the WP Lightbox plugin I have on my blog. I’ve always wanted it to automatically scale images that were too large for the page. that way, I could happily upload full resolution images without worrying that my viewers would only get to see a tiny corner of the full image. I’ve found some new Lightbox-like plugins that do what I’m looking for, Shutter Reloaded and Lightbox JS. I want to like Lightbox 2.5 but it doesn’t have the auto-scaling and it takes forever (read: almost 2 seconds) for each image to finally appear on the screen given all it’s fancy window slides. :-(

What I want in a lightbox plugin:

• Opens image box smoothly (a quick fade would be nice
• Auto-scaling if the image is larger than the screen
• Very light footprint on my Wordpress code… IE, don’t add code to each image tag in the database. Can be uninstalled seamlessly
• Multi-image gallery possible but not required
• When showing gallery images, the “next” and “previous” buttons don’t move when you hit the first or last image (IE, when the icons change from “[close] [next]” to “[previous] [close] [next]“

My very good friend Travis has been running a few independent businesses very successfully for the last 4 years or so. He’s been growing at a tremendous but consistent pace. He started with Smartflix.com. It’s now the world’s largest how-to video rental store. He then expanded to Heavyink.com which is poised to become the Amazon.com of comic books (and then some). Both of these companies are functioning and doing well. At last count, I think he’s got 8 employees or so. HeavyInk is new. He’d like to expand it. To do this, he needs to add stock and man-power to get it rolling. He’s looking to borrow money. I personally think this is an excellent opportunity. I’ve been wanting to invest in this business for a while and I’m going to try now. I’ll let him tell you about it:

—- Start of Snippet —-
Speaking of growth: we’d love to borrow somewhere between $100,000 and $500,000. We pay a nice interest rate. If you or someone you know is interested in loaning us funds (min amount is probably $20k or so; minimum term is probably 2+ years), get in touch. References, spreadsheets, accountant-verified books, etc. would, of course, be displayed.

If you’re not interested in loaning funds, but are looking to invest, that’s not our first choice, but we can talk. Minimum amount is probably $100-200k.
—- End of Snippet —-

Email me directly at for more information.

A 2 ton 45 foot animatronic humpback whale

update: it’s not really for sale, just a prank :-(

I just got an HP Color Laserjet 2605dn printer. Wow, the color images come out like photographs. HP is selling them on their website for $250 after a rebate.

As I was recommending to my sister recently…

Don’t buy an inkjet printer, the cost of the ink will kill you over time.

HP has the guts to tell us how expensive it really is.

With the good HP 99 ink, they says you’ll get 130 4″x6″ photos out of a $25 cartridge. That’s $0.20 per photo for the ink. Multiply that by 4 if you’re printing 8 1/2″ x 11″ = $0.80 per sheet.

For the laser printer, I recently printed 400 8 1/2″x11″ full-color brochures and the toner monitor tells me I’ve used up 20% of the capacity… IE I’ll get 2,000 full-size-full-color copies out of my $250 in color cartridges. That’s $0.12 per sheet.

But wait, there’s more! I can refill my color toner twice before the drum wears out for $80 per refill (I’ve refilled toner before and it takes < 15 minutes) That makes the cost per page for 6,000 full-size-full color pages $0.07 per page.

And if you’re not into refilling cartridges, then listen to this: the HP 2605dn comes with full toner cartridges… That means you get $0.12/sheet color printing out of the box. when the toner is empty, throw the whole printer away and get a new one for the price of toner cartridges. (that isn’t very ecologically minded, is it? No!)

More benefits to color laser printing:

• Laser toner doesn’t dry out on you like inkjet does. If you don’t use your inkjet printer for a few months, it’ll dry out and you need a new cartridge. It’s happened to me :-(
• Laser color usually looks better than color ink
• You can use more types of paper in a laser printer
• Laser printers tend to jam much less

Oh and did I mention that the HP 2605dn has automatic duplex printing (IE, double sided printing)? Oh and it has ethernet built in too if you wanted a network printer.

Go buy a color laser printer. Tell ‘em I sent you.