Lee.org

I was in Altamont Pass last week talking to a rancher about solar.

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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. Continue reading ‘Click Here October 2003: Protect Your Computer’ »

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.