I have temporarily removed the post I made on February 29th titled “gowithabc.com is likely a scam”. I have been communicating with the president of the company, Jim Tracy and it so far seems that my impression was founded on the inappropriate actions of just one employee.
I will keep you, dear reader informed as to the outcome of our discussion.
This could have been done better. I mean, the placebo effect DOES work. Trouble is… (via ABCNews)
…
the investigation revealed that Airborne’s clinical trial was conducted by just two people in the absence of a clinic or scientists.
They are settling a lawsuit for $23 million. Monies to be distributed for those stupid enough to that believe this is a preventative and cure for colds.
Now the following took 3 seconds of investigative reporting. Look at the image I snapped of their website today. It says “The famous original formula - created by a school teacher - contains 17 herbs and nutrients…”
The ingredients list:
If I’ve got my math right, only one of those “other ingredients” isn’t a “nutrient”. Do you think it’s the mineral oil or the orange flavor? Yeah, right.
In 1989 I was a DJ at WMFO, Tufts radio station. I found a cart
(image via) in the music library called “Stairway to Gilligan’s Island”. I fell in love with it.
Last year, I came to mentioning the song to a guy in a tiki bar in Alameda (I was there with some friends from my Improv class) because the song had been floating around in my brain. Amazingly, he said that he knew the guy who made the song and he lived nearby. (small world, eh?).
I really should look him up. Here it is, Stairway to Gilligan’s Island by Roger and the Goosebumps:
I’ll likely be going to a mashup event Saturday night at the DNA Lounge, BootieSF.
Update: This promo has passed, look for more recent discount info on my blog here.
These coupon codes will get you 10% off your annual or bi-annual subscription to Mozy. They’re only good this month. So here’s what to do:
Mozy says they are expanding their “Mozy Pro” services for businesses. I’m a big fan of their non-commercial product. If you’ve got a small or medium sized business, Mozy might be just the thing to run your company’s entire backup strategy.
That code is only good this month. If you found this link and it’s not currently March 2008, look on my blog for a more current Mozy discount code.
I’ve
noticed that Google Ads sometimes serves up ads into my blog that I think are offensive (and bizarre). I’m trying to get rid of them by putting them in my “competitive ad filter” in Google Adsense. We’ll see how it goes. (grumble grumble)
I also just started using Google Adsense section targeting. I now put my post content inside these tags. Google should now be able to parse my posts easier.
<!– google_ad_section_start –>
My content blah blah blah.
<!– google_ad_section_end –>
Update 3-5-08
Ah ha. I figured out why my site has started seeing lots of penis related Google Ads. The title of the photo on my peni[nospam]s patch page is peni[nospam]s-patch.jpg. My site is apparently the most popular image site on the internet related to peni[nospam]s patches. You’ll notice that the second most popular “peni[nospam]s-patch” photo is the photo I use in the upper right corner of my blog header. Apparently, the two photos had their google-juice comingled (eiw!). And while I enjoy being a being a peni[nospam]s patch magnate, I think I’ll change the name of that file so all my Google ads aren’t so…. patchy.
Update 3-13-08: Over the last 7 days, the hit count for the peni[nospam]s patch image has fallen from 230/day to less than 25/day.
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…)
Links to blog entries used to look like this:
http://lee.org/blog/archives/2008/02/28/new-wordpress-permalink-structure/
I just changed it to the more common:
http://lee.org/blog/2008/02/28/new-wordpress-permalink-structure/
I’m using the Permalink Redirect plugin by Scott Yang so that old links still work; they do a 301 redirect to the new page. It’ll take months for the search engines to notice fully and years until I can remove the old permalink structure but I’m happy with it.
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.
Admin Drop Down Menu: You know how it always takes a few seconds to click around the Wordpress Admin Menu… first you click on “Write”… wait… then click on “Write Post”. This makes the Admin menu all snazzy fast. :-)
I wish I had found this plugin a long time ago.
Thanks to technicaltricks.blogspot.com for pointing it out to me.
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.
RSS-Footer sticks a little footer in my RSS feed that points viewers back to my blog. It helps redirect people back to the site (which is prettier than a boring RSS feed) and might help deter website scrapers somewhat. Scrapers steal web content and put it on their own spammy sites to try and generate ad revenue.
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!
I was just looking through some old email addresses I had. I recalled Bob Charmoy and his wife Diana. When I was The Computer Guy, I had gone to their house a few times to fix their computers. Bob was recovering from pancreatic cancer, no mean feat owing to the difficulty of treating it. He had gone to the Block Center for treatment. When I spoke to him, he told me how he was put on a very strict diet with no sugar at all… and a few other restrictions. I remember speaking to him in his kitchen. He had been swimming in the pool and he stood there, hairless from the chemo treatments and looking like his skin was hanging off him a little loosely… but he had a smile on his face and his strong muscles were evident. After speaking with me about the computer, he was going back to the pool to play with his young relatives who were still splashing about.
On previous nights, he showed me his restored Wurlitzer jukebox collection, 3 or 4 of them scattered through his large home. Each had original vinyl records that very played well for their 50+ years of use.
They had asked me to put in an outdoor sound system. I tried to figure out exactly how but got stuck on the thought of drilling through an exterior wall into wiring or plumbing. I took longer than I should have to get back to them with an answer but eventually I referred them to someone who could do it in Hackettstown. After that, they didn’t return my phone calls. Phoey.
But none of that really matters. I googled his name today and found a story on page 6 of the Camphill 2005-06 Annual Report with this at the end.
This is dedicated with appreciation to Dr. Bob Charmoy,
DDS, who lost his battle with cancer on May 25, 2005
I googled a bit more and found this vignette on a couple wedding sites
ON CLOUD NINE
Bob and I were sitting in first class on the way to Seattle, Washington, to meet my family. During the flight, a voice came on over the intercom and said, “This is your pilot speaking. I would like to acknowledge some people in first class.” I looked around for some celebrities. The pilot went on. “They’re sitting in seats 1E and 1F.” I looked at Bob and said, “We’re in seats 1E and 1F.” The pilot continued, “As we’re approaching Niagara Falls, I feel that it’s appropriate to say ‘Diana, Bob has a question for you.’ ” Bob smiled, handed me a box, and asked me to marry him.
Diana Charmoy
Allamuchy, New Jersey
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.
If you have seen this steel raven, please contact me. It belongs to Haideen Anderson. Tom Kennedy’s container was broken in to at the Box Shop in San Francisco in January of 2008. Many tools were stolen but this is the most important item. This metal bird is far more valuable to Haideen than it will ever be to anyone else in the world.
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.
Apparently there is a new (September 2007) California law that says when a document is translated for a court case, the translator must be either a certified interpreter or a member of the American Translators Association.
That sounds well and good except that very few translators are certified interpreters. Translators do printed words, interpreters do spoken words. Maybe legislators confused the two professions? That leaves us with ATA membership. The trouble is, ATA membership doesn’t bestow skills upon their members via osmosis. Why should translators have to pay the ATA $145/year membership fee and companies the $300/year fee in order to continue to do the job they’ve been doing perfectly adequately for the last hundred years? I think I know the answer: pork.
A local translation company is working to fight this ill-conceived law. They’re looking at going to the Institute for Justice, a legal group that fights for economic liberties.
If you are concerned about this issue as well, contact me directly at 
.
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:
