The Blog of Harald

Cold enough for you?

(I snapped the picture this morning at dawn, generally the coldest part of the day…)

I’m used to getting blank stares when I answer the question “What are you doing this weekend”? It’s often somthing obscure and geeky.

The answer today is no different; I’m building a trebuchet. But the response is different! Instead of blank stares, I’m getting “Oh ya, my son built one of those for his science fair last year!”. or “Interesting; I was going to build one at the cottage last year”. or “I saw one of those on Junkyard Wars”. Or even “I read about those on the Internet”.

Cool; people have actually heard of trebuchets…

I’m testing new processing for conditional gets for RSS feeds.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain…

No, I’m not dead. I’ve been busy “doing research”:http://wiki.the-gang.ca/ProposedTrebuchetDesign. Fun!

are re-enabled. I forgot to leave a note to myself to turn them back on; Irving had to remind me :)

With reference to “stop”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2004/12/31/stop/, I’m feeling a lot better now. After the chaos and stress of the week between Christmas and NYE, I got a day all to myself. I slept in, cleaned up the house (after the party), watched more Stargate, and generally recentered and regrounded.

Still not 100%, but at least functional again…

Space is showing all 22 episodes of “Stargate:SG1”:http://www.tvtome.com/StargateSG1/ “Season 6”:http://www.tvtome.com/StargateSG1/season6.html on Christmas night/Boxing Day.

With my “MythTV”:http://mythtv.org/ box, 22 hours is about 48Gb, which I should have free by then, since every other show will be in re-runs.

Of course, I’ll still have to find time to _watch_ them… :-)

_Update_: I made enough space by deleting old shows, and moving about eight hours of stuff to an old 20Gb harddrive. I’m exactly halfway through watching season six now. Season seven sure makes more sense when you’ve seen this stuff!

I could never have done this with the VCR, at least not without staying up all night to change tapes. Woo hoo!

What a fabulous idea! Works for airplane tickets and passports and similar items, too…

bq. So, you’re going to a ticketed event, like a concert or a ball game. It’s out of town. You’re carpooling with four other people. How do you ensure that everyone in the car has their ticket with them?

bq. The car doesn’t move until each person takes out their ticket and holds it to their forehead.

(quoted from 43 Folders: The Forehead Ticket Trick)

the world, I want to get off!

Wow, I’m impressed. A search for ‘panvore’ in “google”:http://www.google.com/?q=panvore returned no hits! We’ve been joking about Brian (the human garberator) for years. Most of us are omnivores (we eat anything); Brian is a panvore, because he eats *everything*.

_Update_: two days later, and I’ve been indexed; the search now returns this page…

It’s Christmas day, the spammers are out in force, and I don’t feel like babysitting. Comments are kaput, for now.

The Straight Dope: Why does the shower curtain blow up and in instead of down and out?

I always thought it was convection; hot air rising out the top of the shower stall sucks the curtain in. But it turns out that cold showers do the same thing, thanks to the Coanda effect.

You learn something new every day :-)

Apparently we’ve developed cochroach contraceptives:

The Straight Dope: Is it possible to control bugs by making them sterile?

The Straight Dope: What’s the difference between apple juice and apple cider?

Summary: the differences ranges from “none” to “extremely little”…

It began when I started driving to work; I lost 20-40 minutes per day of walking (not to mention an hour per day of reading :-).

It accelerated when my mother died; for a while there, I just didn’t care.

The result: I’ve mangaged to regain 35 of the 50 pounds I lost in 2002/2003. It’s time to get rid of them. I think I’ll get through the holidays first (although I’m going to try for _some_ restraint), and then get serious come January.

I was heading into the mall from the parking lot. A guy gets tired of waiting behind another car, and forcefully throws his car into the other lane and speeds towards us. Curmudgeon that I am, I yell at him to slow down. This guy stops his car (in the wrong lane!), _gets out of the car_, and yells back at me:

bq. Who are you to tell me what to do?

I gave him the obvious answer: I’m the guy with the two kids that you could have hit with your car!

He yells something else unprintable, but gets back into his car and speeds off.

Anyway, the real question is this: Where the hell does that attitude come from? He did something completely boneheaded, but other people aren’t allowed to call him on it unless they’re somehow an Authority? Sheesh!

I’ve experience the problems described here: The Daily Whim: MT Plus Comment Spam Equals Dead Site

Several times we’ve woken up to a dead cfrq.net server, and (ignoring one disk crash) it’s always been runaway Movable Type comment scripts causing the system to thrash, until some important process gets killed because of the resulting out-of-memory condition. It invariably happens on a Saturday, which means we all get to wait until Monday morning for the server to get manually rebooted.

I’ve installed countermeasures in the past:
* I’ve renamed the comments script
* I close comments automatically after two weeks
* “Comment SPAM interlocking”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2003/10/14/comments-spam-interlock/

And still, I see a constant, steady stream of comment spam that gets posted, even to postings that are closed to comments!

So far my WordPress blog is getting fewer hits, but it’s only a matter of time until the spammers find that one…

*sigh.

I saw it, I had to share:

Boing Boing: S’mores Nativity kit

Interesting read:

Why Nerds are Unpopular

bq. So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don’t really want to be popular.

I went to a school full of smart people, so I didn’t suffer this nearly as badly as some people I know, and people actually sought me out for help with their homework. Still, I can relate with the argument…

gumstix – waysmall options

Yet another source of very small computers. I wonder what interesting things I could do with a bunch of these…