Lee.org

I went to the movies Wednesday night. I saw the first 35 minutes of “2 Fast 2 Furious“. It was 2 brainless 2 boring. The producer/mechanic forgot that they needed a script, forgot that a buddy film needs buddies, a cops and robbers film needs cops (and robbers), a good-guy bad-guy movie needs good guys AND bad guys. Either the movie was playing to a fantastically advanced moral and ethical subtext, or maybe it was just stupid. I can only watch a speedometer rev from 100 to 160 in Furious-vision so many times before my brain goes numb. (Do these guys -ever- decelerate?) I’d like to live in their world; No matter how fast you’re driving, or even if you’re not driving at all, all you have to do to underscore your point is is downshift forcefully.

I walked out of 2 Fast 2 Furious and in on Dumb and Dumberer. The title doesn’t disappoint. Except for some ridiculousness issues, it was moderately mindlessly funny. An example of ridiculousness: Harry smeared chocolate all over a bathroom and the owner thought it was poop. A few scenes later, the supposedly intelligent owner had cleaned it up but apparently not figured out that it wasn’t poop. But hey, it IS called “Dumb and Dumberer”…

I also snuck in on the last 10 minutes of Bruce Almighty. Sappy, stupid. And I saw the last 20 minutes of Finding Nemo. I couldn’t get a good read on the film from just the ending… Disneyesque?

Here is a great take on The Matrix Reloaded. From http://ter.air0day.com/index.php?script=matrixreloaded. Thanks to jwz for the pointer.

Last night I went to the New Pathways for Teaching information session. I was told in no uncertain terms from the head of the program that in order for me to get a teachers certificate in New Jersey with my low college GPA, I will first need to get a master’s degree.

I’m lost.

I refuse to spend $30,000 and 1 1/2 years taking classes to prove to do something that I am already completely qualified to do. It’s the most ludicrous application fee in history: $30k and a 18 months in jail. I think of it as jail because It’s time spent doing something I have absolutely no interest in doing right now.

I would be happy to test-out of any of these requirements. But as it stands, the best I could possibly do is to ace the GRE, Miller Analogy and Praxis II. This -might- get me into a grad school. The trouble I have with this is that if I -do- ace those tests, then it’s definitive proof that I -don’t- need to spend my time and money going to school. Catch 22.

I am very unhappy and lost.

OUCH! From YourZagi.com and http://www.wrightbrothersrc.com

The new spam filter is working out great. I couldn’t be happier. Well, I could be, but you know what I mean.

A couple months ago I saw Henry Rollins in concert. I took some notes about his show but never bothered to put them in my journal. Here you go:

“Ramones Fans can’t kill each other. Here’s what you do. Give the Israeli army the first two albums and let them groove to it for a while. Then give the Palestinians the second two albums and let ’em enjoy it. Then one day, they’ll be on the front and one of the Israelis will hear something on the other side. He’ll say, “Hey do you hear that? It sounds like the Ramones but it’s not any album that I’ve ever heard! I’m gonna go check it out. Here, hold my gun.””

[note: blowing a “P” into a microphone makes that cool “poof” noise that you hear in the Jack Flanders audiotapes. Jack Flanders and Ruby R000000000000L!!!]

He’s done 106 shows a year for the last 23 years. Wow.

[I’ve said this somewhere in my journal… it’s nice that Henry agrees] “Bush isn’t connected with his material. That smile that bunches up in the corner of his mouth…. he’s pretending to be human.” [He then went into a thing about his awful pacing as well :-) ]

You know, the more I stare at speed 400 brushless motors, the less I think I want one. It basically comes down to:brushed vs. brushless speed 400 motor

• Brushless is 20% more efficient (making for potentially 20% longer flights)
• Brushless is $200 ($100 motor, $100 ESC), brushed is $40 ($10 motor, $30 ESC)
• Brushless provides 2x the thrust per lb of motor (drawing about 1.6x the amperage…) (average 400 brushed motor is about 3 oz) giving me the opportunity to push the throttle such that I’ll use up the battery really darn quick.
• top level flight speed goes from about 50 mph to about 70 mph
• Brushless improves powered handling considerably

I’m not into electrics for super vertical performance. I’d switch to .90cc glow engines for that. So I’ve been looking around and I’ve got a lot of other options besides plunking down $200…   I could switch to a high performance speed 480 motor, an 8″ x 4.5″ prop and get 3/4 of the way toward a brushless for under $20. Hobby Lobby reference. Or a Rocket 400… or the new Zagi Speed 400 for $10. I’ve got a lot of options that cost a heck of a lot less than $200. Hey, $200 would get me a lot of Estes model rocket engines….

I’ve started ripping the old covering off the plane.

Here’s another weapon in the war against spam. In the last year I’ve started receiving a lot of spam that Spamkiller hasn’t been able to filter. These spams look like garbage when viewed in Spamkiller. I’ll see garbage like this in the body of the message: DQoNCjxNRVRBIEhUVFAtRVFVSVY9IkNvbnRlbnQtVHlwZSIgQ09OVEV…

Well, what the spammers are doing is encoding the messages in Base 64. Outlook knows how to decode Base 64 but Spamkiller doesn’t.

Here’s how I set up filters to stop this type of spam. I used this very helpful site to encode a couple bits of text into Base 64 and then I stuck those encoded bits into Spamkiller’s killfile.

More specifically, I encoded some very popular strings, like “a href=http://” and made those into Spamkiller filters. So, in this example, if the email isn’t in my don’t-kill file, it’s HTML based, encoded in Base 64, and has a hyperlink, Spamkiller will kill the message. This system is case-sensitive so I had to add a bunch more filters to cover other combinations of cases…

Regular Expression for a href=”http://
a href=”http:// converts to YSBocmVmPSJodHRwOi8v
href=”http: converts to IGhyZWY9Imh0dHA6L
href=”http:/ converts to aHJlZj0iaHR0cDovL

Regular Expression for A HREF=”http://
A HREF=”http:// converts to QSBIUkVGPSJodHRwOi8v
HREF=”http: converts to IEhSRUY9Imh0dHA6L
HREF=”http:/ converts to SFJFRj0iaHR0cDovL

Regular Expression for a href=http://
a href=http: converts to YSBocmVmPWh0dHA6L
href=http:/ converts to IGhyZWY9aHR0cDovL
href=http:// converts to aHJlZj1odHRwOi8v

Regular Expression for A HREF=http://
A HREF=http: converts to QSBIUkVGPWh0dHA6L
HREF=http:/ converts to IEhSRUY9aHR0cDovL
HREF=http:// converts to SFJFRj1odHRwOi8v

So, in case it’s not clear, I went into Spamkiller and, using the Advanced… button I created 12 Message Text Filters that look like this the photo on the right.

Of course, the war will continue to escalate. There are other obfuscation techniques that this technique doesn’t prevent.

I still believe that the best way to stop spam is to legislate it away. This worked with spam faxes and it can work with spam email.

Joy.

Trying to set up an scp server on my Windows 2000 machine is reminding me why I got out of using linux. People are ecstatic about writing supercharged, amazing tools that can help you conquer the world, but they don’t ever bother to tell you where the frigging “start” button is!!

My mom isn’t the best pilot. How do I know this? This is how I know:

Don’t let it be said that the Zagi flying wing is indestructible. I brought my mom, dad and niece out to the airfield yesterday. After a couple minutes of flight (they oo-ed and ahh-ed in all the right places), my mom wanted to try her hand at it. So I gave her a quick lesson, brought the plane up to 200 feet (what I thought to be “2 mistakes high”) and handed her the controls. She promptly pointed the nose down and gave it full throttle. Three seconds later, there was a 5″ deep hole in the ground. It was astounding. RIP Lee’s Zagi version 1.0

Dad and I have been having a good time joking about it. We’re saying that we should get her a purple heart. Or maybe she should have watched more of my dad’s war TV shows before taking to the air. She just keeps repeating how she’s so sorry and will never fly it again.. never ever ever. But I struck a deal with her. I’ll feel better about it if she learns how to fly and takes the controls just one more time. After all, we can’t have her grieving about some silly little plane forever. It also doesn’t hurt that she volunteered to pay for the damage. That last bit means I’ll be rebuilding the plane to version 1.1 :-). I was never happy with my Monocote job. So I’ll send away for new trays, maybe a new motor (brushless?? hmm? hmm?) and we’ll be back in the air in a month or two. Actually, speaking of indestructibility….. The only things I lost in the crash were the motor tray and canopy. The entire rest of the plane is still intact! wing, winglets, elevons… The motor, receiver, and servos are still good too. It’s the loss of the motor tray that “killed” the plane. That’s because I have to rip out a lot to fix it the motor tray. And if I’m going to rip out so much, then I want to do a total overhaul.

The Cosel K150A 12 volt, 13 amp power supply came in the mail today. I hooked up wires, plugged it in and it worked right out of the box. :-) I’m very happy to be rid of my Rube Goldberg battery charging contraption. It used to go:Car battery charger set on 2 amp manual charge
–> block of UPS batteries
–> Astro charger
–> nicads

The UPS batteries were there as a power sink/capacitor because they say that a car charger doesn’t have an even enough output to be trusted going straight into an electronics device (I believe them)

I’d have to watch the state of charge on the UPS batteries or badness would ensue. And when done, unplug the whole thing. To boot, the lead-acids were on their way out. I charged them individually last night and today 2 are at 6.39 volts, 2 at 6.29 volts. Maybe I’ll keep 2 of the lead-acids as field-chargers.

But now, when I’m home, I can “Set it, and forget it!”

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I -was- going to wish for An Astro 020 brushless motor with controller from Atlanta Hobby for Christmas but after looking into motor and prop efficiencies (see my Flying Tips page) I’m not exactly sure which motor I want. I’ll have to research it some more.

I’m a fan of funny/scary/weird/real-world stories. And if you throw in deviant sexual-social behavior, well I really enjoyed True Porn Clerk Stories. Here’s a local archive of those pages: one, two, three, four.

Update 6-23-11: At the request of the author, Ali Davis, I removed the text above. Ali has put the material in a new book, titled, curiously enough “True Porn Clerk Stories” available on Amazon. It’s terrific stuff, get the book!

I put a nice journal entry in my flying page today.

I’m quite happy with my recent post to the ARL list. To preface, there’s an upcoming override tax vote coming in a few days. They’re considering raising property taxes by about 5% for this year instead of the normal 2.5% or so. The repercussions of the rate increase are being hotly debated. Just about every line below is a happy perversion of something that someone’s said in the last two weeks on the list. Read on.

To:
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2003 02:31:14 -0400
Subject: [arlington] Override summary

So, to summarize from some of the recent posts…

If the override fails

I will leave Arlington out of disgust
The good teachers will be fired and the bad ones retained
The idea of “community” will be banished from Arlington forever
Arlington will burn to the ground
The tradition of educating our young will cease
Gangs will troll the streets
Potholes will swallow our vehicles whole
Our children will become fat and stupid
Books will cease to function
Art and music will be eliminated
The MCAS will kill our children
My grandfather will die of a heart attack before the EMTs arrive

Wow.

—————————————————
And If the override succeeds

I will leave Arlington because I can’t afford it anymore
Arlington school administrators will grow fat
The socialist party will have gained a significant strategic advantage
Short on funds, my summer block party will be cancelled
Arlington will still burn to the ground
Families with no children won’t be able to afford birth control, driving them into a vicious cycle
Gangs trolling the streets will be swallowed whole by potholes
The potholes will remain. I’ve seen the DPW try to fill a pothole, they’re friggin retarded.
Our children will grow and flourish, basking in the titanium-white bright light of art, wisdom and knowledge, they will respect and revere their elders, caring for them through to their old age with ceremony and ritual.
Every student will pass the MCAS
My car’s brakes will unexpectedly fail, killing a local pedestrian and injuring 3 others

All this is hinging on your vote and $60/year.
…
…

It’s a joke.
Laugh.

lee

No, I should correct myself, EVERY line is a take-off of something said on the list recently! :-)