Archived News starting from 07-02-2005 and earlier
BlogComing back from
Disc Golf we drove past a Kroger with
6 Mini Coopers done up in Dr. Pepper decals. We immediately did a U-turn to see what was going on and each got a free Dr. Pepper for stopping by. Apparently Dr. Pepper was putting on a marketing campaign and paid these 6 kids to drive Mini Coopers around the country and then give the cars away after it was done. I talked with them for awhile and found out they had just driven from Iowa to Michigan in 12 hrs getting in lastnight at 11:00pm and arriving in the parking lot at 10:45am. They agreed the drive gets long, and it's not always entertaining (the parking lot was dead except for us) but I thought it's a great way to see the country (did I mention for free). It reminded me of the recent mass meets in New York where a bunch of people agree to meet somewhere online at a certain time and then mob that place for 5 minutes only to disband shortly after. The unexpectedness makes it memorable, and since there were no radio ads or media about this Dr. Pepper thing it made me think they were trying to cash in on it. They also get alot of advertisement on the highway (the guy told me people honked their horns, held up Dr. Pepper bottles and tried to talk to them) between locations, and nuts like me overanalyzing a simple marketing campaign. At any rate, it was a much more creative approach than typical TV/Radio commercials and something I think would be cool to try sometime (did I mention they see the country for free?)
Yes, I know it's probably an obvious thing but I never thought to research it thoroughly. HTTP Compression is supported in both
HTTP 1.0 and
HTTP 1.1 protocols. Almost every browser on the planet (except maybe my palm pilot) supports one or both of these protocols which means they all support compression. The obvious advantage being less bandwidth usage with a tradeoff of CPU usage (I have plenty to spare). I'm sure 90% of the websites in the world use compression but I never knew how easy it was to enable it. In IIS, you right-click on your "Web Sites" folder in IIS, click PROPERTIES, then click the Service tab and
voila! Now this page you are looking at only requires a transfer of 63,123 bytes instead of the 86,216 to get to you. In my case I get a 20k savings because I spew out untold amounts of HTML on this page to limit how many image files I need to send. You won't be nearly as cool as me (never as cool) if your site is primarily large images. You need a fancier compression tool than what comes with IIS if you want that level of bandwidth stinginess.
Here's an
informative blog on the topic.
Today was the
downriver cruise, a smaller version of the
Woodward Dream Cruise which is more of a parking lot than a cruise.
1998 is the last time I remember being able to drive above 1MPH at the Woodward cruise so I make an effort to stay away from it every year. Fortunately the downriver version is fairly free flowing and has a good amount of interesting cars. We were invited to a BBQ/Pool party prior to the cruise, and then did our
lap around the event.
With the
downfall of my old WM-918 weather station I decided to order it's replacement, the
WMR968 (
Froogle has more sane pricing). The new station connects to the outdoor sensors wirelessly so static buildup no longer has a direct route to my computer. It also has really cool solar battery packs to transmit to the base station. I finished installing it today which means Tim can once again rest assured the
desktop weather app and
weather page are accurately reporting the weather around my house.
Coming home tonight at the last bend before my street I was greeted by a wall of yellow caution tape and a county worker truck. It took a good 5 seconds for me to process that the road was physically blocked and I was not able to go through. I pulled to the side and started talking to the county worker who was waiting for a tree removal truck. He said the tree fell from wind or some forest fairy and he was getting a laugh from people like me who had a moment of disbelief before turning around. To best him, I took a
few photos, punched him in the face, and left.
You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it. You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations; there are no peoples. There are no regions; there are no Arabs. There is no third world; there is no west. There is only one holistic system of systems; one vast interwoven, interactive multivariant multinational dominion of dollars, petrodollars, electrodollars Reich marks, rands, roubles, pounds and shekels. It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things. You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone! You howl about America. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, ITT, AT &T, and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies. The world is a college of corporations inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company for which all men will work to serve a common purpose and in which all men will own a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxiety tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you to preach this evangel.
This server now has the
MS.NET 2.0 Beta 2 Framework installed. If you have an account on this server you no longer have any reason not to download the
Visual Studio Express Beta and start developing. If you do not have an account now is the perfect time to take advantage of my
connection vulnerability or any unknown vulnerability that exists in the beta framework and create one (or just format c:). Whatever you decide I'll credit the new framework and hopefully get a few apps of my own for you to hammer away at.
I spent all day today at a Visual Studio 2005
developer conference. I did not win the Xbox or portable media center as hoped, but I did get some free stuff and learned alot about the new features in VS2005. I'll
again point to the free
Visual Studio 2005 Express Beta and suggest you take a look. They even have a version for Linux and OS X now. At the conference, I met someone who is programming an interface in C# for aircraft sensors. Things like fuel gauges and airspeed sensors would reside on a common bus and report to a single computer. This would reduce the overall cost of repairing and operating aircraft. The project is funded by NASA so I immediately attached myself to this person until security removed me and the restraining order was issued. Free stuff and free food, along with lots of geek talk got me all fired up about the 2.0 framework. I'm consequently installing the framework after this post so if your computer burst into flames unexpectedly it's most likely a short. However, that short may be caused by your visit to this .net 2.0 enabled server. Something to keep in mind while you're downloading
Visual Studio 2005 Express Beta.
My quasi-annual trip to
Niagara Falls was this weekend which involves
sightseeing the first day and a
Cougar meet the second. This year Missy,
Ron, Jen,
Pierre and Dale made up the tour group. Unfortunately the whole weekend was in the 90's for both temperature and humidity. Nevertheless we went
behind the falls and visited the mini-vegas of
Clifton Hill. Later, we stopped at the park before the falls and took
photos of the
abandoned scow stuck in place since 1918. The highlight of the trip was definately my
spare tire burnout performed for the sake of entertainment. Hooray!
Today at
3:25pm the
GnomeCam captured what looks like hail falling in my yard. Shortly afterwards, the server went down. I came home to find my
WGU624 Router with only the power and wireless link lights on (no LAN/WAN). I cycled the power and wound up with the exact same problem. Next I cycled the power on every computer component and noticed the router, cable modem and weather station were all extremely hot. I discovered the WAN port on the cable modem, LAN ports on the router and server, and the COM port on the weather station were all dead. The only thing I can think of that would cause this is a power surge of some type either from the
SmartUPS backup or through the
weather station anemometer (mounted on my roof). The UPS passed all diagnostics so my working theory is a static buildup above my roof discharged through my anemometer. From there it travelled to the weather station, through the COM port on my server, and out the LAN port to kill the router and cable modem. There is no evidence it was strong enough to melt or short circuit anything so evidently none of these ports take kindly to even a moderate power spike. Ironically there is an RJ45 power suppressor on the power strip I use for the server. The incoming weather station cable is an RJ45 jack so if I had run the incoming cable through this suppressor none of this would have happened. I thought a 75 minute UPS backup made my server impenetrable to power surges and didn't realize I have a lightning rod connected to the COM port on my server. Fortunatley the cable modem has a USB connection as well as the Ethernet port so the server is currently serving this page via USB. Consequently there is a direct connection between the cable modem and my server so take note hackers (
Steve), now is the time to make your strike
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