Today I’ve gotten lots of hits from someone, or some people, on the amazon.com network.  They’re all at the same IP address, but that’s likely a firewall IP; the hits are from multiple different user agents (different browsers and operating systems), so I tend to think it really is a few different people.  Most of them show up as direct hits, but some are from wiki.amazon.com (which appears to be a private host) with a query string about Red Hat Linux and mouse wheels.  Anyone from amazon care to say hey and shed some light on my confusion?

So New York City is without power.  One time, in how many years?  Boo-hiss, boo-hiss.  I have just one thing to say to you big babies: move to Kilbertsville, then talk to me about power outages.  Twice a month is the minimum -- the bare minimum -- that power goes out here.

But on the serious tip, this is actually a big deal because it’s not just NYC; it’s a half-dozen states plus some of Canada.  Word so far is that a single point of failure between upstate NY and Canada is to blame.  Exactly how one failure could take portions of so many states offline is hard to imagine.  It’ll be interesting to learn the details.

Last night on Marketplace, there was a commentator talking about a federal law mandating 4 weeks of paid vacation for all American workers.  He presented it as an idea that the 2004 presidential hopefuls should espouse.  His exact words were, if a candidate runs with this as a campaign promise, "you’ll be elected in a flash."

I’ll take it.

In another story on the program, the mob a union of Verizon workers threatened to encourage Verizon customers to switch to AT&T unless they get their way.  Now there’s a brilliant move... your company is hurting, and you’re unhappy with some aspect(s) of your employment situation.  The solution: drive business away from your company.  Yeah, that’s sure to improve your job situation.  It’s just one more example of how unions are one of the most backwards, corrupt, and mentally-challenged institutions in America.

I was at someone’s house last night trying to show them your web site but I couldn’t find it.  I searched for what I thought would be key words (anthony, truth, linux).  Do you put meta tags in to make your site easy to search for in google, yahoo, etc?

I have the link to your site on my work computer, but I couldn’t remember the URL.

The mailinglist script is finally done, and it’s available for download / installation / use along with my login script, blogger script, and dnsupdate script.  You can get them all at the top of the software page.

They’re all pretty full-featured, all have complete installation and usage instructions, and all have been tested by me, right here on my own site.  They are the partial culmination of countless hours of perl coding.

There are 2 big projects that are still in the works: making my visitorlog/stats script portable and freely available, and writing a guide for how to run a website on your own computer.  The main purpose of the guide will be to allow people to easily make webpages from their digital photo sets; I’ve set up my mom’s computer to do just that, and her and my younger brother are using the scripts that I wrote for it.  As I was developing that system, I realized that it too should be written portably, and documented, so that I can redeploy it for other family/friends and so that I can make the documentation available to anyone else who wants to do the same thing.

You can listen to the entire new Dashboard Confessional album on mtv.com.  (The album isn’t actually being released until next week.)  It’s sad, in a way, to see someone who is one of the biggest indie rock heroes being endorsed/distributed by the biggest pop media outlet there is.  But Chris is an amazing musician, and he’ll reach a huge audience and achieve lots of monetary success this way, and for that I’m certainly glad.

Of course, the emo/indie "scene kids" will throw their hissy-fits and call Chris a sellout because he’s successful, and because they’re bitter that they have to share him with other people now.  That mentality is so childish and ridiculous, it’s barely worth addressing... but then again, so is the very act of achieving personal identity by being part of a "scene."

The new album is good.  Really good.  The stylistic progression from The Drowning EP, through the 2 full-length releases, and then the Summers’ Kiss and So Impossible EPs, is clear.  The scenesters will deny that, because they’re upset that he didn’t make another album that’s just like The Places, just like they were upset that The Get Up Kids didn’t make another album identical to Something to Write Home About.

But those people don’t matter.  The music matters.  A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar is good music.

Yesterday, there were two strange new stories about dogs, and today there was a third.

In a park in New York City, a chihuahua was snatched up by a hawk, who apparently mistook it for a rat.  (The city had brought in 5 brown hawks in order to help control the sprawling rat population.)  But the tiny dog was on a leash, and it’s owner was able to get it back from the bird.  How embarrassing.  The moral of the story: get a real dog.  As in, one that grows to be bigger than a rat.  And that can defend itself against birds.

Then, in St. Louis, an animal center was euthanizing a few unwanted/unclaimed dogs, as they do every day.  They put them into a gas chamber and fill it with carbon monoxide.  But when they opened the door afterwards, one dog stood with its tail wagging amongst the bodies of the other dogs who’d given up.

Finally, this morning on Fox News, there was a story about a dog who got hit by a car, and then walked to the vet.  I haven’t yet found a link to that one.

Man, I’ve been getting some good MOTDs on my Slackware system lately... here’s one I just got:

People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them that Benjamin Franklin said it first.

I just read this on prayer at a devotional a friend referred me to:

We must press on in prayer. God hears our prayers, but sometimes it seems He His long in answering them. Sometimes He doesn’t answer them as we would like, but this is no excuse not to pray. As Christians we pray. It is what we do and the blessings that are ours through prayer we probably will not know until glory.

by Tim@cfdevotionals.org
8/4/03

I just killed 62 flies.  In my house.  It took nearly an hour.  The flies (and mosquitoes) are out of control this summer; I think that’s because it rained almost every day for 3 straight months from April to June.  There aren’t usually many in the house, but yesterday there were little kids over here who kept leaving the door open.  Today they were driving me crazy, so I had to take care of them.

It’s my job to have something to say.

They pay me to provide words that help make sense of that which troubles the American soul. But in this moment of airless shock when hot tears sting disbelieving eyes, the only thing I can find to say, the only words that seem to fit, must be addressed to the unknown author of this suffering.

You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard.

What lesson did you hope to teach us by your coward’s attack on our World Trade Center, our Pentagon, us? What was it you hoped we would learn? Whatever it was, please know that you failed.

Did you want us to respect your cause? You just damned your cause.

Did you want to make us fear? You just steeled our resolve.

Did you want to tear us apart? You just brought us together.

Let me tell you about my people. We are a vast and quarrelsome family, a family rent by racial, social, political and class division, but a family nonetheless. We’re frivolous, yes, capable of expending tremendous emotional energy on pop cultural minutiae - a singer’s revealing dress, a ball team’s misfortune, a cartoon mouse. We’re wealthy, too, spoiled by the ready availability of trinkets and material goods, and maybe because of that, we walk through life with a certain sense of blithe entitlement. We are fundamentally decent, though - peace-loving and compassionate. We struggle to know the right thing and to do it. And we are, the overwhelming majority of us, people of faith, believers in a just and loving God.

Some people - you, perhaps - think that any or all of this makes us weak. You’re mistaken. We are not weak. Indeed, we are strong in ways that cannot be measured by arsenals.

IN PAIN

Yes, we’re in pain now. We are in mourning and we are in shock. We’re still grappling with the unreality of the awful thing you did, still working to make ourselves understand that this isn’t a special effect from some Hollywood blockbuster, isn’t the plot development from a Tom Clancy novel. Both in terms of the awful scope of their ambition and the probable final death toll, your attacks are likely to go down as the worst acts of terrorism in the history of the United States and, probably, the history of the world. You’ve bloodied us as we have never been bloodied before.

But there’s a gulf of difference between making us bloody and making us fall. This is the lesson Japan was taught to its bitter sorrow the last time anyone hit us this hard, the last time anyone brought us such abrupt and monumental pain. When roused, we are righteous in our outrage, terrible in our force. When provoked by this level of barbarism, we will bear any suffering, pay any cost, go to any length, in the pursuit of justice.

I tell you this without fear of contradiction. I know my people, as you, I think, do not. What I know reassures me. It also causes me to tremble with dread of the future.

In the days to come, there will be recrimination and accusation, fingers pointing to determine whose failure allowed this to happen and what can be done to prevent it from happening again. There will be heightened security, misguided talk of revoking basic freedoms. We’ll go forward from this moment sobered, chastened, sad. But determined, too. Unimaginably determined.

THE STEEL IN US

You see, the steel in us is not always readily apparent. That aspect of our character is seldom understood by people who don’t know us well. On this day, the family’s bickering is put on hold.

As Americans we will weep, as Americans we will mourn, and as Americans, we will rise in defense of all that we cherish.

So I ask again: What was it you hoped to teach us? It occurs to me that maybe you just wanted us to know the depths of your hatred. If that’s the case, consider the message received. And take this message in exchange: You don’t know my people. You don’t know what we’re capable of. You don’t know what you just started.

But you’re about to learn.

-Leonard Pitts Jr.
"September 12, 2001: We’ll Go Forward From This Moment"
The Miami Herald

Help me out, please?

I’m having a little problem with people on Xanga stealing bandwidth from my servers.  They’re using my photos and music streams in their blogs, by direct-linking them from my server.  The result is that people viewing their blogs think that the photo/music is actually a part of their blog, when in fact it’s coming directly from my server.

To combat this, I’ve set up some access restrictions on my photos and MP3 downloads, and I’ve taken all mp3 streams offline -- hopefully only temporarily.  But I want to make sure that people who are actually on my website can still access my content.

So if you would:

1) Go to the music page and scroll down to either the Christian bands section, or the Non-Christian bands section, and click on a few of the download links.  Once they download, play them to make sure you got them OK.

2) Go to the photos page and click on one of the photo sets; once it loads, click on a few of the thumbnails and make sure that the larger images show up for you.  Finally, click on one of the larger images, to get the full-size (really huge) image, to make sure that loads ok (though it’ll be really slow).

If you’ve got a few minutes to try those things, post a reply here and let me know if they worked for you.  Thanks a bunch.

(PS - for the curious, if you’re using Apache (and you ought to be ashamed if you’re using any other web server), it’s easy to set up access restrictions for a single website.  Just put this into an htaccess file in your webserver’s root directory:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mysite.com/.*$
RewriteRule .* not-so-fast.htm

Then just make sure that you have either Options FollowSymLinks or Options SymLinksIfOwnerMatch inside the <Directory /serverroot></Directory> section in your httpd.conf file.  This will detect any requests for pages coming from somewhere other than mysite.com, and redirect such requests to not-so-fast.htm, in which you can explain the deal.)

Here’s my good idea of the day:

I sit at a desk for 8 hours a day at work.  (Well, except for meetings and stuff, but most of the time I’m here.)  Why do I do that?  It’s because I use a computer to do my work, and a computer needs a desk.

Since technology has advanced to the point where notebook computers and wireless networking are cheap and commonplace, I submit that we should all have the option to work outside if we’d like to.  That’s the kind of thing that would improve employee morale and loyalty by about 1000%, especially if you currently work in the center of a giant building with no windows, so you don’t see the light of day at all.

Just when I think I’m going to have a night where I get some stuff done, I come across something like this.  A guy built his own custom-designed non-traditional airplane -- with his wife, no less -- and flew it across the country.  That is so cool on so many levels.  Reading his log of the trip was really interesting and exciting.  (I found the site through Bill Whittle’s page.)

That’s the little bugger that woke me up at some obscene hour this morning.  It’s the tiny piezo speaker from the UPS that powers my computers when the electricity goes out.  Unfortunately, when that happens, it makes an obnoxious beeping noise to tell you that the electricity is out.  So around 1:30am, that’s what happened.

Not anymore.  I desoldered that punk from the circuit board inside the UPS.  So next time the power goes out for 4 or 6 or 8 hours (which will be any day now, I’ve no doubt), the UPS can die a nice, silent death.

Soon I’m just gonna build one of these guys for all my energy needs.  Two megawatts of free and tasty solar power.  Projects like that are so exciting.  There is so much free energy hitting the earth every second from the sun, it’s ridiculous, and bunches more free energy just blowing around in the wind.  I’m not anything like an environmentalist, it’s just that all this other energy is free, all around us, and it’s frustrating to know that the technology isn’t yet there to utilize it to its full potential.

So today my car was in the shop for regularly scheduled maintenance.  The 60,000 mile one, to be exact, except I forgot about it before and Golfy now has 69,000 miles on him.  So I suppose it’s my fault that my brake rotors needed replacing, though I can’t say I’m entirely convinced that before those 9000 miles, only the pads were wearing.  In any case, it cost me $700 for parts and labor for all 4 wheels.  Which is a little steep, since it’s a Porsche/Audi/VW dealer and not just a regular old body shop, but I asked around and most people were saying that $500-$600 is normal for new brakes on all 4 wheels.  And everyone seems to agree that it’s amazing that I got 69,000 miles out of a single set of pads/rotors.  (And my office mate suggested that I ask if they can grind the rotors down, instead of replacing them, but the VW repair guy told me that on most new cars, they make the pads very thin -- "just over spec," so that once they’re worn, they’re too thin to grind down because there just isn’t enough material left, and they also start to warp because they heat up more when they’re that thin.  He said they actually don’t even have a machine to do that anymore.)

Let me just say that VW design engineers are amazing, but VW repair guys are as incompetent as most auto repair guys seem to be.  The last time I took my car in for maintenance, they broke my stereo, and this time, as my mom was driving it home from the dealer (my mom took it in, so I didn’t have to take a day off of work), the "check engine" light came on!  Ridiculous.

So I drove my mom’s Chevy Impala today.  It’s a pretty nice car.  With a sunroof.  But I can’t stand driving a car without tight steering and without ~sports suspension.  The Impala drives a lot like the Lincoln Town Car we used to have -- it drives like a "luxury car."  It feels like you’re floating when you drive it.  It’s like the interface between the gas pedal and the engine, and the interface between the wheels and the chassis, are made of Jello.  You know there’s some sort of interface there, but you can’t quite figure it out; it’s not anything like real-time nor direct.  You feel completely isolated from the road, and have very little sense of control.

Oh, and it’s an automatic.  It was all I could do to stay awake while driving it.  It’s just so boring.  Fortunately, if you actually press the gas pedal hard, the car goes into a brief convulsion as the engine downshifts, and you get jolted around in your seat as you nearly swerve off the road... so that kept me mostly awake.

I just watched 25th hour last night, and just read your recent post about it.  I think the last ten minutes was Monty imagining how his life could turn out, as his dad was describing it.  Monty never gave his dad the word to turn west, so I got the impression that the last scene was them still on their way to prison.

If God wanted us to use the metric system, Jesus would have had only ten apostles.

I spoke too soon.  Although the power goes out at least a few times a month here, it’s usually only for a few minutes.  Today, however, it was out for over 8 hours.  My trusty Linux server’s uptime was killed at 72 days.  Sigh.

On top of that, Crapcast Comcast has been particularly crappy the past few days; we’ve had a handful of multiple-hour interruptions in our internet access.  I’ve been trying to get my login and mailinglist scripts finished and online, but every time I try, something just gets in the way.  Tonight, however, is looking promising.

As an aside, the other day at work I realized that Fritos are amazing.  They’re not my favorite snack of all time or anything.  But they are really good, and what’s amazing about them is that they manage to be really good with only these ingredients:

corn
corn oil
salt

Just 3 ingredients, and 2 of them are the same thing.  That is spectacular.  You rarely if ever see that kind of thing nowadays, especially on snack foods like that.

There is a new Dashboard album coming out soon.  I can’t wait.  But there’s a new version of the song "Hands Down" on it, which you can hear by clicking a link on the news page... and it’s awful.  The original version on the So Impossible EP is 9000 times better.  Still, I can’t wait to hear the actual NEW new stuff.

There is also a new Thrice album that just came out, and it’s less than $10 at Best Buy.  I am all over that one day after work this week.  Thrice even did a split with Thursday, who also has a new album coming out (but not for a couple months yet), which is super cool.  Thrice are amazing, and Thursday is just about my favorite band ever.

I have songs by all three of these bands on my music page, too, so check them out.  Thrice == hard punk / metal, Thursday == hard emocore, Dashboard Confessional == super emo 9000 of prettiness acoustic love.

A lot of people have this notion that leasing a car is just A Bad Idea, because at the end of the lease, you "have nothing" since you give the car back.  They seem to have been programmed to believe this, without ever having actually thought about whether it’s true.  It’s not true.

Lease payments are much lower than finance payments; leasing is sometimes referred to as "paying for only what you use" of the car, whereas when you make finance payments, you’re paying for the entire price of the car.

It only takes 3 seconds to explain why it’s a lie that the leaser "has nothing" at the end of the lease.  Watch.

Two people each have $20,000 and have their eye on the same $20,000 car.  The first guy leases the car for 4 years, and the sum of the lease payments and the down-payment is $12,000.  The second guy finances the car for 4 years, and the sum of the finance payments and down-payment is $20,000 -- the full price of the car.

What do they each have at the end of 4 years?  The first guy has $8000 in cash, and the second guy has a car that he hopes will be worth $8000 (but in practice it’s rarely ever worth that full amount).

Not only does the leaser have much more than "nothing," he usually has more than the guy who actually bought the car, because the vast majority of cars don’t hold their value very well over time.

When I first moved to college 3 years ago, my younger brother (well, only 2 years younger) moved into my room at home.  Which was really stinky, because I spend the summers at home, and because his room is tiny -- literally half the size of mine.  So for the past 2 summers, and now this summer, I’ve been in his room, and I have way more stuff than he does... computers, electronics, tools, bike stuff, books, camping/hiking gear, photo and camera gear, not to mention clothes and shoes and boots... so that tiny room is way over-packed.

Well, my brother recently got an apartment a few miles away, in town, near the skate shop he owns.  So this weekend, I reclaimed my room.  It feels so much better to actually have a little bit of space to move around, and plus his room is just really depressing.  Also, his room gets ridiculously hot in the summer (and we don’t have air conditioning), but my room doesn’t, because it’s in the back of the house and is shaded by trees.

So, I didn’t get done any of the 2 or 3 programming projects that I planned to, but that’s OK.  The next ~7 weeks of the summer will be way better being in my room again.  But I do hope to get one of those projects done in the next couple days, because someone is waiting for it.

Also, last Thursday I biked a 6.4 mile loop from my house, onto some back-roads, and back a different way to my house.  I plan on doing it every day, so I get into a little better shape, so that when I go mountain biking I’m not so easily worn out.  In the 4 days I’ve done it, I’ve gone from 30 minutes down to 28 minutes, or about 12.5 MPH to about 13.8 MPH average.  I hope to bring it down to 20 minutes / 18 MPH.

This is one of the most interesting lyrics I’ve heard in a long time:

Again last night I had that strange dream,
where everything was exactly how it seemed...
No concerns about the world getting warmer,
people thought that they were just being rewarded,
For treating others as they’d like to be treated...
for obeying stop signs and curing diseases...
for mailing letters with the address of the sender...
Now we can swim any day in November.

- The Postal Service, "Sleeping In"

Notice anything interesting about that photo?  Ok, besides the fact that the computer is really dusty, and the carpet is a sick brown/puke-green type color?

The computer is on, but it’s unplugged.  Well... unplugged from the wall, anyway.  The black box is a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) -- a "battery backup."  It’s basically a big battery with enough juice to power a computer for 20 or 30 minutes.  A simple idea, really, but it’s so super neato.  Power outages (short ones, anyway) are so fun when I’ve got this guy on my side.

Anyway, that little box is my Shuttle SV25 computer.  He’s been up for 69 days without a reboot (I don’t suppose I need to mention that it runs Linux and not Windows), and I didn’t want to shut him off just because I’m moving him into a different room.  So... I didn’t  : )

The SV25 is my webserver, among other things.  He’s where all my music is served from, and my photos (but only the full-size ones) too.  So when you’re downloading music or any of those giant photos, you’re connecting right to him.  Say hello!

Today at work, there were two rather fantastic statements that are quoteworthy:

"These things are so good for you."
- Mark, before biting into one of the Krispy Kreme doughnuts that got passed into our meeting

"Physics is back!"
- Clay, in response to the fact that silicon microprocessor technology is becoming increasingly sensitive to gamma rays and sun spots

Some other random fun stuff... I’m #1 on Google for 1 farad capacitor +fun with.  It’s seriously scary that someone out there is searching for stuff like that.

Finally, Desperately Seeking Scandal over at Cox and Forkum... hilarious, but sadly, completely true.

Last night at the grocery store, I saw and heard some Russian people speaking Russian.  All of a sudden, I really missed Konst and Dima and our fantastic house at Penn State.  In some ways, I really can’t wait to go back to school.

In other news, this morning I saw what is quite possibly the dumbest bumper sticker of all time.  It said, "Listen to the Earth."