Last night on the way home from the in-laws, in the rain, I only had three people try to remove the front corners of my car by diving in front of me. As usual, there was lots of space _behind_ the car.
Since I was driving the other car, it’s not my car that has the “Kick Me!” sign. It’s me.
My car has a “Kick Me!” sign on the back; I’m convinced of this. Or maybe it has glasses with tape across the bridge…
My _fourth_ interaction with an idiot driver who insisted that he go in front of me, despite the vast, prarie-like expanse of empty road behind my car, almost ended in an accident.
Picture me following close behind the Jeep Cherokee in front of me. In fact, I’m technically tailgating, since there is less than a car-length between him and me. Picture at least 150′ of empty lane behind me. Picture the guy who, completing a right turn beside my car, first accelerates, and then starts “aggressively drifting” across the lines into my lane (without signalling, of course).
I honked at him, to remind him that there was actually a _car_ already occupying the space he was trying to claim. Apparently he is deaf as well as blind, because he proceeded to try to _force_ his way into the gap that was too small for his car!! Fortunately the lane to _my_ left was empty.. several more horn blasts were required before he gave up.
At which point he accellerated again and jumped in front of the Jeep.
My “new favourite show”:http://www.tv.com/eureka/show/58448/summary.html has a products page!
I want a laptop transporter :-)
TheStar.com – Cape Breton joins space race
They’re building a private launch facility in Cape Breton, launches planned by 2009 or 2010.
I wonder if they need any network security people? :-)
Kung Fu Monkey- “Wait, Aren’t You Scared?”
bq. Errr, no. And if you are, you frankly should be a little goddam embarrassed.
bq. marvel as cool, well-trained, ruthless law-enforcement professionals — who spent decades honing their craft chasing my IRA cousins — execute their job magnificently.
“…I’m sending angry Welshmen to burn your country from the Rhine to the Polish border.” OK, *now* I’m scared ;-)
Schneier on Security- Last Week’s Terrorism Arrests
bq. None of the airplane security measures implemented because of 9/11 — no-fly lists, secondary screening, prohibitions against pocket knives and corkscrews — had anything to do with last week’s arrests. And they wouldn’t have prevented the planned attacks, had the terrorists not been arrested. A national ID card wouldn’t have made a difference, either.
bq. Instead, the arrests are a victory for old-fashioned intelligence and investigation.
Schneier can be a bit heavy-handed with his analyses, but I don’t think he’s wrong…
globeandmail.com – The $2-million comma
bq. This agreement shall be effective from the date it is made and shall continue in force for a period of five (5) years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five (5) year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.
From a contract between Rogers Communications Inc. and Aliant Inc. for the placement of cable lines in Eastern Canada. Aliant cancelled the initial 5 year term in 2005 after only 3 years. The cancellation will force Rogers to pay an extra $2.13 million to use utility poles. The placement of the second comma in the sentence above permitted the contract’s cancellation, to the surprise of Rogers.
(via the “Quotation of the Day”:http://ca.geocities.com/quotationoftheday/index.html mailing list)
I love thunderstorms…
| Date & Hour | Conditions | Temp (°C) | Humidity (%) | Dew Point (°C) | Wind (km/h) | Pressure (kPa) | Vis (km) | Humidex |
| 2 Aug 2006 22:00 EDT | Thunderstorm with Rain | 22 | 90 | 20 | W 30 gust 55 | 100.8 | 24 | 30 |
| 2 Aug 2006 21:00 EDT | Cloudy | 30 | 71 | 24 | WSW 30 gust 39 | 100.6 | 24 | 41 |
In case anyone is wondering, my brain has left for vacation in Greenland, or Iceland, or somewhere else not-as-damned-hot-as-Toronto.
It turns out that we didn’t _quite_ set a temperature record yesterday; we missed by 1/10th of a degree. But as they’ve been commenting on the news, we may have set a new record for the highest low temperature; on Monday night the temperature dropped to 27°C at about midnight and then stayed there until morning, never dropping further. Last night we had the same thing; the low temperature was 27°C, but again it stayed that temperature most of the night.
It was ~30°C in the house. We all slept (fitfully) in the basement last night.
I’ll be one of the many happy people when the cold front comes through tonight/tomorrow (update: now? the temperature just dropped 4°C between 3PM and 4PM…).
I was asked for my title links plugin (See “wordpress filter”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2006/06/10/wordpress-filter/), so here it is:
“title-links-1.0.zip”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/title-links-1-0.zip
Updated with a brute-force fix for a conflict with the “pretty quotes” functionality in Textile:
“title-links-1.1.zip”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/title-links-1-1.zip
This plugin will create links between WordPress posts whenever the title of the target post appears in the text of another.
You can specify alternate link keywords for a post by creating a Custom Field named ‘link_names’, containing a set of alternate phrases surrounded by square brackets. e.g. if the ‘link_names’ field for the post titled “Lady Danielle de Barbarac” contains
[Lady Danielle] [Danielle]
Than any occurence of the either phrase in another wordpress post will create a link to the Lady Danielle article.
You can see this plugin in action on “The Queen’s Guard”:http://www.the-gang.ca/roleplay/queensguard/ and “Five Rivers”:http://www.the-gang.ca/roleplay/fiverivers/ game log sites.
What I want to do on my blog, is every few hours take the oldest post and move it to the
front of the queue, all automatically. Anyone know if there is a plugin that can do this or
a simple way to set up another plugin to do this (use my own feed perhaps)?
Thanks.
[…] It’s published: Title Links Plugin) 87 words posted at 9:37 am on Saturday, June 10, 2006 in Personal, Site News, Programming […]
Forget the fake crap that passes for Reality TV these days! “I am Moving to Japan”:http://dogbonesbackyard.blogspot.com/2006/07/i-am-moving-to-japan.html links to a Japanese show presenting a game show done right; make a mistake, get hit in the nuts!
(Ya, ok, it’s not real. it’s actually a comedy team, but the idea is sound. And the inner conflict between cringing in sympathy and laughing ’til you pee is good, too!)
“Reid”:http://rae.tnir.org/ bugged me about documenting the tools I use for photo processing and publishing:
“Irfanview”:http://www.irfanview.com/ Thumbnails – autorotate. Irfanview is a very good image viewer for Windows. I’ve always used the lossless jpeg rotator in the package. Recent versions have been shipping with Irfanview Thumbnails, which lets me do bulk autorate of my photos, based on the EXIF orientation flag which is set by an orientation sensor in both of our cameras.
“Picasa”:http://picasa.google.com/ – photo management. I discovered Picasa when Google first bought it; I love both the photo browsing interface and the builtin “simple” photo editing tools, which do a surprisingly good job of basic edits (light balance, crops, etc.). One thing I like is that Picasa always keeps your original photo; any edits can be undone, even months later.
“Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/chkoch/, “Gallery”:http://gallery.menalto.com/, “Picasa Web”:http://picasaweb.google.com/harald.koch, Rogers Photos – publishing. I use each for different things. Flickr has the advantage of social networking; my friends see my pictures because they have friended me. Gallery runs on my server, and I use it for blog images (including for the “rpg blogs”:http://www.cfrq.net/~rolemaster/). Picasa Web is new from Picasa/Google; not sure if I like it yet, but it does make publishing from Picasa trivial. And Rogers Photos I use because of the “unlimited” storage for bulk pictures, like those from kite flying events.
“Unison”:http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ – sync/backup to the main fileserver. Unison is a bidirectional file synchronization program, like rsync but it moves files in both directions, resolving conflicts appropriately. I use it so that the photo collection can be stored and edited on all four computers around here, without (too many) conflicts.
“Nero”:http://www.nero.com/ – backup to CD / DVD. Mentioned for completeness, and because the Roxio package that comes with the Compaq’s -sucks- doesn’t work for me (Nero came with both of my DVD writers).
“Ubuntu Dapper”:http://www.ubuntu.com/ – fileserver. Also mentioned for completeness :-). The fileserver currently has 200Gb of disk, but it’s filling up again; I have a pair of 320GB drives on order, with plans to RAID-1 them together.
HP PhotoSmart 7960 – printing :-). I love this printer, even though it’s not available anymore (the new Vivera-based HP PhotoSmart printers like the 8250 are even better, from what I’ve seen). The output quality is awesome. I also have an HP LaserJet 1020 for day-to-day printing; saves wear-and-tear (and ink!).
With rogers.com blocking SMTP in both directions, I needed an offsite backup for persephone.cfrq.net and related e-mail.
I’ve opened a tektonic.net “Virtual Private Server” account. $8/month gets me 128M of memory and 5Gb of disk space. It’s a very strange measurement, though, because the server hosts (running “Virtuozzo”:http://www.swsoft.com/en/products/virtuozzo/) do all sorts of dynamic stuff that reduces my usage. For example, the OS binaries all appear to be linked to “master” copies outside of my VPS, so they don’t count against my quota. Memory management is also strange. The data reported by “top” doesn’t match “free”; my current guess is that virtual memory is handled by the host OS, and any pages in my processes that are swapped out don’t count against my quota.
Anyway, the net result is that I’m currently running a backup mailserver in about 500Mb of disk and 16Mb of “memory”, for $8USD/month. Nifty!
There were a couple of problems with reliability the first few days; apparently these were caused by the host server I was assigned to. After they migrated everyone off that machine to a new host, my virtual server has been solid. It’s running Debian Stable, and while I’d prefer Ubuntu Dapper, I’m not going to upgrade just yet; I’m still working on upgrading persephone, after all :-)
has everything:
“Monty Python’s Camelot on the Starship Enterprise”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ptx98LTGyfE
It is gone from there and is now here:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=75YM4xeEq3w
Damn that’s the funniest Youtube video I have seen yet!
Though the Chad Vader clips here are pretty funny too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mFBUil8-Z0
Bored?
“http://n.nfshost.com/”:http://n.nfshost.com/
They gradually get harder. This may eat up your day. Enjoy!
(via “Catspaw”:http://insanecats.com/cgi-bin/single.py?month=jul06&msg=14).
*Update:* I’m stuck going from 25 to 26.
Last Monday night Charlotte said “I’m never going to learn to steer my bike!”. By the end of the week we were riding all the way around the block without stopping. So it’s official; “Never” has arrived. It’s time to do all of those things you were never going to get to :-).
Hm, your Picasa pics links don’t work. But the links on the pics do work, so I got to see your shots. I didn’t realize Google was going after Flickr! Wow. And Charlotte looks gorgeous in those first communion shots.
Are all your pics visible to the public? Or am I on a friends list of yours?
I’m going to have to check out Picasa more carefully now. I signed up for an account (which I got instantaneously, despite the “we are handing them out slowly”-style warning) and I seem to have 250 MB of space.
You should do a posting about the tools/websites you use. I keep finding out about cool stuff only from your use of it!
Better still, create an account on Tech Tok and post there. I will upgrade your privs a.s.a.p. if you create one.
Hm, maybe this should have been in email. Oh well!
Reid
A belated Happy Summer! I was watching the groundhog babies frolicking on the deck outside my cabin last Wednesday, nowhere near Internet access… :-)
bq. “The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.”
– George Bernard Shaw
(via “Quotation of the Day List”:http://ca.geocities.com/quotationoftheday/index.html)
I just wrote a simple wordpress filter that automatically creates links to a post if the title of that post (or other ‘link names’ in the post’s metadata) appear in text. I wrote it for the “Queen’s Guard”:http://www.the-gang.ca/roleplay/queensguard/ game log. It gives us a little bit of wiki-ness without having to use a full-blown wiki; I haven’t found any wiki software that I like enough to foist on my non-technical gaming buddies.
If anyone’s interested I can clean it up and post it somewhere.
(Update: It’s published: “Title Links Plugin”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2006/08/02/title-links-plugin/)
I know the textile URL format is appealing but you should be warned that a) it doesn’t transfer across into the RSS feed (at least not as you have it configured now) and if you ever find yourself transferring your blog to another server (as I have done) you may find (as happened to me) that you have loads of old archived material whose links don’t work because the new server doesn’t parse them and translate them. You probably could write a script to translate them on your server of course…
P.S. When you first mentioned the Queen’s Guard I thought you had joined the Canadian army – some reserve regiment I never heard of. Seemed unlikely of course but…
This appears to only be a problem with the old (rss1.0) feed, which nobody should use anymore. For now I’m redirecting it to the RSS2 feed (which most clients should handle); eventually I’ll disable it altogether.
I am setting up yet another political blog and I am very interested in the plug-in you’ve described for automatically linking between posts and from posts to a bibliography.
Can I get a copy?
[…] was asked for my title links plugin (See wordpress filter), so here it […]
I’ve been tooling around various cities with my GPS recently. Detroit, Salt Lake City, Buffalo, Toronto, Niagara Falls (ON), and I am just finishing up a week in Montreal, and heading to New York City tomorrow. Toronto and environs has uniquely bad drivers in it. I seem to fit in Montreal, but the GPS is so efficient I get to where I want quickly in Montreal, and I do spend more time near Toronto. This year I’ve personally witnessed (as it happens) and old-kook side swipe a car at 7 & Weston, A roll-over with passenger ejection at hwy 48 & Duclos Pt. Road, and a 60km/h T-bone collision in Richmond Hill and a Truck-on-truck rear-ender on the 404 at Finch. I have also seen quite a few people run red lights without actually getting wiped-out (who appear to be looking down the street to the next set of lights, not the ones that are of immediate concern to them). I humbly think this is because I am observant.