Lee.org

Today’s weirdness: The air freshener was recently patented. U.S. Patent : #6,254,836

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Here’s a good one… I borrowed Microsoft Streets & Trips from Dave B. Today I wrote him this letter.

Hey, is there an update available for Microsoft Streets and Trips? This copy is a bit out of date. Hackettstown is listed as “Helm’s Mills”. It hasn’t been called that since at least 1780… maybe earlier. !!!!

It’s weird, If you search for “Hackettstown, NJ” in MS Streets & Trips, it works fine. But when I downloaded a map into Pocket Streets on my Pocket PC, the name “Helm’s Mills” was in the place of where I know Hackettstown to be, and it claimed to not know where “Hackettstown” was! So I looked online and found some historical info mentioning that Hackettstown was, in fact called Helm’s Mills at some time in it’s distant past!

You can verify this by searching for Helm’s Mills NJ in MS Streets and Maps. Up will pop downtown Hackettstown!

Wacked!

I’ll find out more about the history of Helm’s Mills and then write to Mr. Gates about his error…

On Monday I joined the US Chess Federation and the Hackettstown Chess Club. I had a very nice tournament game against Jeff from the HCC… of course losing, but it was a blast! I was thinking so hard, it hurt!

I joined the East Coast Indoor Modelers in February. They… we… fly ultralight slowflyer model airplanes inside the huge hangar at the Lakehurst Naval Base. The hangar was built for dirigibles in the 1920’s. I’ll be taking my dad there this summer. I’m sure he’s going to get a huge thrill because the last time he was there was with his father, sometime in the ’50’s or ’60’s. The hanger is big. The photo at the right is of the American Los Angeles/German LZ-126, an airship 650 feet long! Click on it to get an idea of the scale.

After thinking about it for a couple years, I’ve decided to actually try my hand at making music. Liner notes on my first multi-platinum record might read in part, “Lee’s wide ranging influences include Crystal Method, Chemical Brothers, African mbira music, number theory, the natural world, his own insights into the boundary between the real and imagined worlds of the mind.” Yea, whatever.

I’ll shortly be joining RAMAC, the Roxbury Area Model Airplane Club so I have a place to fly my just finished Zagi 400X model airplane! I’d show you a picture but I can’t find the battery charger to my digital camera! It’s been missing now for weeks… I’m going to have to really go rummaging for that charger!! I’m pretty happy with the plane. It took a lot longer to finish than I thought. The devil is in the details. (or, as Daniel Dennett might say, god is in the details… but that’s a story for another time). I’m still waiting for the charger for the plane. It’ll be here in a few days.

TJIC had recommended I see Dark Star. Oh my! It’s hilarious! It’s astounding! It’s better than cats, I’ll see it again and again! My sides hurt for hours after seeing this movie. See this movie. This was John Carpenter’s first film, done originally as a student project in 1970 and finished up as a professional film in 1974. 1 Part Rocky Horror, 2 Parts 2001: A Space Odyssey, a dash of Snow Crash, gently blend in 2 cups Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, bake at 350 until tender.

Currently reading:

• Total Keyboard by Terry Burrows
• Future Music Magazine, February 2003
• The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (audiobook in the car)
• In Code

Recently Finished

• Wired Magazine, April 2003
• Baseline Magazine, March 2003

I got Snorcomments running!

Most of this time, I’ve been trying to get Symbio working. But I ran into a huge host of problems. At one point, I tried to apply what I had learned in my Symbio hunt to the slightly simpler Snorcomments and BOOM, it worked right out of the box. Here’s what I learned this summer:

* Many Perl Tutorials on the web and programmers in general confuse single quotes with double quotes. I had found SEVERAL examples of how to do a “use lib” command and all of them looked like this: use lib ‘/home/files’ But as Perldoc finally showed me, it SHOULD be: use lib “/home/files” Big difference! Moral: buy a good Perl book, forget online tutorials.
* Earthlink tech support can be LESS THAN useless. They’ve usually been helpful for me, but in the past few days, the guys I got gave me more incorrect answers than correct ones, right down to the phone extension Noel C. tried to refer me to.
* I still don’t know why I can’t run CGI::Cookie;. I need that to run Symbio comments. I’ve gotten as close as being able to tell that it doesn’t like modules with double-colons in it. Maybe that concept came after 5.004_04? Earthlink is running that version and nothing more recent. That’s like 4 years out of date. :-(
* The Snorcomments “Generate Code” sample script is missing some quotes. More with the quotes! Geez. SHOULD read
* Snorcomment BlogItemNumbers can ONLY be numbers.

I also installed Spambot well poisoner… Spam^Bot^Poison. You can get the source here or see it in action here. The idea is that Spambots will fetch the bad addresses on this page and it’ll slow their spamming down a little. Hey, every bit counts. These kinds of things make me feel all warm and fuzzy.

I got the formatting on Snorcomments just right. Done.

2pm

AGHGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

AUTO ASCII MODE!

I DIDN’T HAVE FTP VOYAGER IN AUTO ASCII MODE!!!!!!

I WAS UPLOADING MY .PL FILES IN BINARY FORMAT, NOT ASCII!!!

With a little luck (and no more hangups) I’ll have comments working shortly.

5pm

More notes:

• Symbio ships all it’s files in DOS format… IE: with CRs and LFs. So you have to convert all of them to Unix, with just a LF. What the heck is a Sourceforge project (with many Unixisms in it) doing being native to Windows??
• In Earthlink, if you set permissions on a script to be World Writable, it will mysteriously crap out on you. Fuck you too, Earthlink.
• It looks like Earthlink doesn’t have the freaking Cookies Module installed! “CGI::Cookie;” is crapping out my test scripts! That’s like Ford Motor company not offering automatic transmissions on their 2004 cars.

It still doesn’t work. That Cookie thing will need a call to Earthlink.

I -will- get this to work.

Check out this style sheet junkie. Go to Brown Pau’s site. Now reload his site… and again. Each time it loads with different style sheets and has an entirely different look. Nifty. :-)

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I’m still on my all-pastrami diet from Saturday night’s food adventure. Yow.

Dude, telemarketing is reaching new heights every day. I just got a call from a machine saying [paraphrased], “Hello. Legislation in NJ is going to make you pay for television that you don’t want! Legislation is going to force every cable subscriber to pay for the YES network (The Yankee’s baseball network) whether they want it or not. Press 1 now and we’ll connect you with your state representative. Tell them that you would like them to vote ‘No’ on the YES Network bill.”

So I pressed 1 and it connected me to the NJ state senate! I didn’t leave a message because I don’t like making decisions like this so quickly… But in the time I’ve taken to write this, I’ve weighed the issue and, yea, I think I’ll write a letter to my state senator opposing this ridiculousness. What the hell is the state doing getting so involved in cable TV? If people want to watch the Yankees, then they can Pay-Per-View it.. or pay for an extra tier of cable service or something. Sports isn’t a universal pastime. And even if it was, then pretty soon I’ll be paying $100/month for cable for the Rangers Network, the Jersey Devils Network, the Giants Network, etc… And if the cable TV network can’t handle so many tiers or pay-per-views or whatever, then maybe it’s time to invest in a better cable TV system.

Done. I sent three letters today.

I’m just a little mad at myself that I didn’t send those letters sooner. But then I didn’t have Cablevision before…

My good friend TJIC has recently started a business in mail-order technical video rentals.

From his page:

Technical Video Rental is a service that rents video tapes - just like your corner video store…but we rent the kind of tapes that you can’t find on every street corner. Videos on running lathes, casting aluminum, and bending sheet metal… cool videos!

TVR carries titles like “Basic Milling Machine Operation” and “Greensand Casting Techniques (Volume II)”. I think this is an excellent idea. You can watch the video, learn how to use your shop tools more effectively and safely without busting your bank on expensive videos that you probably don’t really need to keep in your library.

I don’t have a shop but, heck I might rent a few videos just because the titles sound so cool. What red-blooded American tool fanatic doesn’t want to get the guys together to watch “Advanced Aspects of Milling Machine Operation”?! It’s the epitome of guy-ness.

TVR has just started out, go easy if the interface is still a little rough around the edges.

I am now officially tired of winter.

Due to the bad weather, I was late to my job application test. MAYBE I’ll be able to get another retest date. Then again, maybe not. I gave myself 1 1/2 hours to get to my destination, even though it’s only a 45 minute trip. But of course, it took me 2 hours to get there.

I get home at 11:30… more than 4 hours after I left in the morning, with nothing to show except a nervous stomach from being late and 4 hours of dangerous driving. Actually, before I got home, I almost got in an accident. I had stopped at a gas station near my home and filled up. Then I pulled up this 200 yard uphill road to get back on the main road. My car (for the first time in my experience) couldn’t make it up the hill! I slipped and slid. I tried going at 5 MPH and that worked for about 100 feet. But then there I sat, another 100 feet to the main road. Rather than try to make 1 MPH on this slushpile, I decided to back down the hill with my blinkers on. Everything was going fine. A Fedex van passed by me going down the hill. Then some cars came up behind me trying to make it up the hill. First in line was a big SUV. He slowed down and then stopped for me, seeing that I was pointing the tail of my car toward the gas station’s entrance. Another car pulled around the SUV into the oncoming lane. Upon seeing me, he stopped as well. “Thanks!”, I thought. Now that both lanes were safely blocked, I I started making my cut toward the gas station in earnest. Just then, a tiny sedan zipped past both the SUV and the other car in the oncoming lane’s shoulder! He was doing about 35, apparently intent on using his momentum to go through me and up the hill. He very nearly rammed my backside! As he sped by me, I noticed a flash of red, white and blue on his license plate; I’m pretty sure it was a Washington DC plate. This being further evidence that people from non-snowy places have no concept as how to drive safely in snowy conditions.

Remember I told you that I had two -other- tests today? Well school was cancelled as well. GRRRHHEHRFFRIGGINGRIG!

Today’s reality check:

(click to enlarge) Yes, these are real resin models for sale at The Catholic Shopper. Thanks to Jay for the reference.

Yes, I’m aware that these are supposed to just be allegorical, and some folks might “get it”, but…. Check please!

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More (completely unrelated!) reality check:

Megan’s Law would not have saved Megan. Megan’s murderer, Jesse Timmandequas’ prior criminal history would not have put him on any public sexual predator lists.