The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for February 2008
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:
Here is an excellent site to print out whatever graph paper you need. Incompetech graph paper. He’s got ALL kinds of graphpaper there. Regular, mult-width (Engineering), dots, hex, semi-bisected trapezoid, iso-dots, octagonal, hexagonal, variable triangle… yowza!
This is what I created out for sketching out solar installations. To the right is a png of it.
My very good friend Travis has been running a few independent businesses very successfully for the last 4 years or so. He’s been growing at a tremendous but consistent pace. He started with Smartflix.com. It’s now the world’s largest how-to video rental store. He then expanded to Heavyink.com which is poised to become the Amazon.com of comic books (and then some). Both of these companies are functioning and doing well. At last count, I think he’s got 8 employees or so. HeavyInk is new. He’d like to expand it. To do this, he needs to add stock and man-power to get it rolling. He’s looking to borrow money. I personally think this is an excellent opportunity. I’ve been wanting to invest in this business for a while and I’m going to try now. I’ll let him tell you about it:
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Speaking of growth: we’d love to borrow somewhere between $100,000 and $500,000. We pay a nice interest rate. If you or someone you know is interested in loaning us funds (min amount is probably $20k or so; minimum term is probably 2+ years), get in touch. References, spreadsheets, accountant-verified books, etc. would, of course, be displayed.
If you’re not interested in loaning funds, but are looking to invest, that’s not our first choice, but we can talk. Minimum amount is probably $100-200k.
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Email me directly at for more information.
Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennet – I swear, I’ll never get through this book
The New How Things Work by David Macaulay – Fun bedtime reading
Farm Show Magazine – I love it!
Listening to lots of podcasts… The Sound of Young America from PRI is surprisingly good. It took a little bit to get past the knee-jerk reaction that it’s trying too hard to be the sound of young America.
A 2 ton 45 foot animatronic humpback whale
update: it’s not really for sale, just a prank :-(
While FastCGI has been running, calls to WordPress have gone from about 4 seconds to 2 seconds. Calls to Mediawiki have gone from 8 seconds to 5 seconds. :-)
I installed PHP_FastCGI on the blog and the (private) Flaming Lotus Girls wiki. I had tried installing it a year ago but it proved unstable. New instructions were put on the Dreamhost wiki and it’s been running well for the last few days. Here’s how I installed it:
in my root WordPress folder, I created a file called php5-wrapper.fcgi. In it, I wrote:
#!/bin/sh
export PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=2
exec /usr/local/dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi
and then set the file to be executable like so
chmod u+x php5-wrapper.fcgi
Then I added the following to the .htaccess file:
AddHandler fastcgi-script fcg fcgi fpl
AddHandler php5-fastcgi .php
Action php5-fastcgi /php5-wrapper.fcgi
Done!
Now 3 PHP sessions stays active, waiting for people to call on my server instead of PHP starting up every time I get a hit. When I run ‘ps aux’, I see the processes just sitting there, waiting. Sometimes there’s up to 6 processes temporarily.
I just got an HP Color Laserjet 2605dn printer. Wow, the color images come out like photographs. HP is selling them on their website for $250 after a rebate.
As I was recommending to my sister recently…
Don’t buy an inkjet printer, the cost of the ink will kill you over time.
HP has the guts to tell us how expensive it really is.
With the good HP 99 ink, they says you’ll get 130 4″x6″ photos out of a $25 cartridge. That’s $0.20 per photo for the ink. Multiply that by 4 if you’re printing 8 1/2″ x 11″ = $0.80 per sheet.
For the laser printer, I recently printed 400 8 1/2″x11″ full-color brochures and the toner monitor tells me I’ve used up 20% of the capacity… IE I’ll get 2,000 full-size-full-color copies out of my $250 in color cartridges. That’s $0.12 per sheet.
But wait, there’s more! I can refill my color toner twice before the drum wears out for $80 per refill (I’ve refilled toner before and it takes < 15 minutes) That makes the cost per page for 6,000 full-size-full color pages $0.07 per page.
And if you’re not into refilling cartridges, then listen to this: the HP 2605dn comes with full toner cartridges… That means you get $0.12/sheet color printing out of the box. when the toner is empty, throw the whole printer away and get a new one for the price of toner cartridges. (that isn’t very ecologically minded, is it? No!)
More benefits to color laser printing:
Oh and did I mention that the HP 2605dn has automatic duplex printing (IE, double sided printing)? Oh and it has ethernet built in too if you wanted a network printer.
Go buy a color laser printer. Tell ’em I sent you.
