The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for November 2009
I just installed the WP Ajax Edit Comments Wordpress plugin. Mainly what I was looking for in this plugin was a way for commenters to edit their posts after writing their comments. But it has a lot of other nice bells and whistles too.
My friend Laura owns an apartment in New York City at about 185th st. It was severely damaged by bad plumbing work from an upstairs neighbor to the tune of $90,000+. The insurance companies are bickering and not fixing her home. She needs her place repaired and doesn’t have $90k to fix it now and sort it out later.
Can you help Laura find a real estate insurance lawyer near 185th st in New York City?
If so, please comment or email me and I’ll hook you all up.
Here is an excerpt of her plea
As you may have heard, much of my home, which we call Hanna Manor because there have been so many house guests over the last eight years, has been destroyed by water damage caused by my upstairs neighbor doing illegal plumbing Oct 24th. I’ve attached a few pictures so you get that is truly is destroyed, not just a couple of wet spots. The electric system also blew out so there is no power in most rooms.
Her insurance company, State Farm, for the last month has told me that they would cover it all, and house me until it is rebuilt. This afternoon, as a Thanksgiving surprise, they’ve informed me they won’t, as they believe it should all be taken care of under my homeowners’ co-op policy. Of course, the co-op does not agree. So I’m still in a hotel, which they will only cover through December, and everyone is saying it’s not their responsibility. I need help. I need a good attorney who will fight for me to save my home. Please, spare a few moments when you are at some Thanksgiving gathering this weekend, and ask who knows someone who might know someone, who might know someone.
I went away for Thanksgiving. When I came back, my iPhone wouldn’t complete a sync with iTunes. This is what would happen:
And one time when I tried syncing, I got a message on my computer:
Attempting to copy to the disk “iphone” failed. The disk could not be read from or written to.
Here is how I fixed it:
I went into iTunes on my PC and deleted the video podcasts I had recently watched and subsequently deleted on my iPhone. It was several items from the “Best of Youtube” video podcast. I then synced the iPhone again, this time successfully. Hurray!
I’m not sure if this had anything to do with it but I also did the following:
When I was travelling, I had updated several iPhone apps directly on my iPhone. I went and updated the apps on iTunes and then synced. I’m pretty sure the fix I mentioned in the previous paragraph was what did it, but if not, try updating the iPhone apps on your computer.
Feel free to comment and tell me if this works for you!
If you are signing up for AT&T Service, I will split the referral fee that AT&T pays me. That’s 1/2 of $50 for each of several services!
This is part of the AT&T Rewards for Referrals Program.
Step 1: First, go to this page and give me your name and email address.
Step 2: In 1-2 days I will send you a letter saying that I’m a participant in the AT&T Rewards for Referrals program and I think you might like to sign up for some AT&T goodies. Go ahead and sign up for the service you were going to sign up for!
Step 3: After you sign up, be sure to email me the account number of the new service.
That’s it! In about 3 months I’ll send you 1/2 of the referral fee I receive from AT&T. So you’ll receive 1/2 of these rewards:
If I don’t get back to you within 4 months, please go ahead and bug me about it. My email is Lee at Lee dat org.
_____________________________________________
I had run a similar, very successful AT&T Referral Code program starting in 2007. Find it here. AT&T changed the program rules on September 21, 2009 so I started this new page.
I’m just about ready for Thanksgiving with the family. Hopefully my caps will go over well!
I’ve been using Mozy to backup my computer for a couple years now and I’m quite happy with the service. It’s easy to set up, easy to use, and it has saved me and my data more than once! Living in San Francisco, I have this maybe-not-so-irrational-fear that the city (and my computer) might burn to the ground come the next earthquake.
If you are going to sign up for Mozy anyway, use my affiliate code and I’ll split the referral check they give me.
Depending on the service you sign up for, I’ll pay you:
Signing up and getting the referral money is super easy!
Step 1. Sign up for Mozy Backup by clicking on this link (it has my referral code built into it)
Use the “Sign Up” link at the top of the Mozy homepage
Step 2. Answer a few basic questions about your subscription so I know how to pay you. Click here.
That’s it!
It takes a few months for me to get credited and then me to get the money to you. If you don’t hear from me in 4 months, feel free to nudge me at Lee at Lee dat org.
_____________________________________________
You’re welcome to become an affiliate just like I am. I’ve made a couple hundred dollars a year doing this referral thing. Just sign up to be a Mozy affiliate with this link. When you use that like, I get like a 5% bonus or something. Never fear, that doesn’t come out of what you get paid! If you sign up for this, send me a note via the signup link.
KOIT switched to Christmas programming today. I bumped and jammed to Bob Seger’s Little Drummer Boy, Frank Sinatra’s Santa Claus is Coming to Town, and Sarah McLachlan’s Happy Xmas for about 2 hours.
Ok, I’m done.
Bring on the Arbor Day music.
Holding Flame was at Burning Man 2009 and I missed it.
wow. Built by Poetic Kinetics.
Oo OO! Look!
They built those giant flowers too!
check out their photo gallery on their site. They’re amazing, ten times so in person!
Julie Bernstein took many photos of lasertag this weekend. She’s a really good professional photographer.
Here’s the whole set of lasertag photos set.
Update 11-16-09: Be sure to read the comments before assuming this post has all the info you need.
from the CDC on their page Key Facts About Seasonal Influenza (Flu)
Every year in the United States, on average:
- 5% to 20% of the population gets the flu;
- more than 200,000 people are hospitalized from flu-related complications; and
- about 36,000 people die from flu-related causes.
From the Associated Press and The Discover Channel
SWINE FLU COUNT: 4,000 DEAD, 22 MILLION ILL
The fall flu season has only just begun and already thousands have died from the H1N1 virus.
Estimates of deaths caused by the swine flu have grown to nearly 4,000 since April, roughly quadrupling previous estimates
To borrow from TJIC’s (and the creator of the ONOZ OMG avatar)
But wait. How deadly is the Swine flu really? Let’s see…. four thousand divided by twenty two million is…
4,000 / 22,000,000 = 0.000181
Swine flu AKA H1N1 is 0.018% fatal
Ok, so how deadly is the average flu?
From the CDC stats above, roughly 10% of the US population gets the flu each year… that’s 30,400,000 people. And 36,000 people die from it…
36,000 / 30,400,000 = 0.00118
The average flu is 0.11% fatal
Comparing the two…
0.0011 * n = 0.00018
n = 6.1
The average flu is 6.1 times more deadly than swine / H1N1 flu.
WHAT????
You’re kidding, right???
Someone is making a lot of money by causing an unwarranted panic. I’m betting it’s the maker of the influenza vaccine and influenza test.
Since I installed NoSpamNX, I get far fewer comment spams in my Akismet spam box… like 5 per day and they are all from the one spammer who has so far figured his way around the plugin. The plugin blocks about 100 comment spams per day.
Now there are so few spams in my comment spam box that it’s possible for me to review them by hand weekly. Today I found a false positive in the Akismet comment spam pile. This would have been impossible without NoSpamNX.
If you have a Wordpress blog, you should install NoSpamNX. No, wait. If everyone does it, then the spammers will all write smarter bots that get around this defense. So… umm, everyone use a different method! Don’t use NoSpamNX. This one will be used only on my site!
I liked it a lot.
I was blindsided with the surprise ending. Don’t learn the spoiler before you see the movie. It’s kind of Fearless meets The Crying Game. No it’s not. I liked it anyway.
Last week I got to attend “From The ‘Hood to the House”. This year, the Glide Church annual holiday festival was held at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House on the 12th. It was quite an affair with Maya Angelou, a huge church ensemble singing, dancers, musicians and Cecil Williams celebrating his 45th anniversary running Glide Church.
I have to thank Cindy for inviting Charlotte and I to volunteer for the event. We got to help folks (I helped Cindy in the office much of the day), see most of the show and try a zillion tasty foods. :-)
Saturday I played lasertag with Ziggy and 30 friends in Junipero Serra Park in San Bruno. It was great fun!
I love that expression. I used it at Maker Faire… check the last 10 seconds of the video I made. But I got it wrong, sticking the “and” in there. It’s actually:
“Fly! Be Free!
[Mork tosses the egg in the air. It makes a quick and unfortunate decent to the counter top, smashing]
Well I guess we’ll have to have a quick burial at sea then.”
You can find it 38:18 minutes:seconds into the pilot episode of Mork and Mindy. This is hopefully still a link to the pilot episode of Mork and Mindy.
It’s amazing how individual moments get captured and amplified. I last saw that episode like 20+ years ago.
Last month Charlotte and I saw Robert Cameron’s photo show at the Metreon. It was pretty fantastic.
Yesterday Charlotte told me that he died. That’s the bad news. The good news is that… well, let me grab snippets from his obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle:
Three months ago, Robert Cameron was hanging out of a helicopter taking pictures of Lombard Street.
…
He was 98 and in the midst of his last show – “Environmental Journey: Robert Cameron’s Aerial Photography of our Pacific Rim,” which is on display at the Metreon in downtown San Francisco.
…
Over four decades, Mr. Cameron produced 15 coffee table books in the “Above” series, with 3 million copies in print.
…
Mr. Cameron, who was by then married to his high school sweetheart,
…
In lieu of services, the family would like people to attend “Environmental Journey,” Mr. Cameron’s show at the Metreon, scheduled to be up until the end of the month. It includes 59 giant photo murals highlighting green practices and environmental themes from across the Pacific Rim. The window display on Fourth Street is his last photo of Lombard Street, colorfully made over for an anniversary celebration of the board game Candy Land.“He regarded that show as his legacy,” Tony Cameron said. “He wanted to be able to show at the end of his life the kind of work that he did.”
Go to the show.
Live life.
Why is iTunes so awfully slow? If I weren’t locked into iTunes to sync my iPhone, it would be in the trash right now.
And for what it does, iTunes sucks 9 different ways. I could go into it but why bother? The tasks it is required to do are really very simple. Why did they make it so hard?
Oh, forget it… Calgon, take me away.
I like machine art, fire art, machine art with fire on it, discussions and actions that try to improve the world, and burritos. I really like burritos! More about me...
