Archived News starting from 08-04-2005 and earlier
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After creating the new
Cougarfest Archive, which generates photo thumbnails on the fly, I've noticed the CPU on this server spiking to 100% quite often. The 933Mhz machine has been just dandy up until now, but the .NET imaging library has a hunger for power that cannot be satisfied by a 4 year old machine. My options are to switch back to Linux, or buy new hardware. Since I'm all about the work/earn/buy programming of society, the choice is obvious for me. I'm currently on the lookout for cheap 64-bit barebone systems under $500. I plan to finally make the move to 64-bit on my desktop, and transplant my current motherboard/CPU to the server. The whole operation is complicated, time consuming, and expensive which is exactly the way I like it. All implied references are correct. Oh and Missy's first Cougarfest was last week and she had a blast, and I'm happy she came, and I'm happy she came (not a typo).
I again have monitors for sale, but this time I also snagged some laptop cases and docking stations. The laptop cases fit most any laptop, and the docking stations are for Dell Latitude laptops. Shoot me an email if interested in any of the above.
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Cougarfest, the yearly event I started for 1999-2002 Mercury Cougars ended yesterday. I decided to
tow my Cougar down to the event in case I ran into any transmission problems and made it all the way down safely only to rip my bumper off when backing off the trailer. Fortunatley I had a team of fellow Cougar owners with drills and zip-ties repairing it before I even got out of the car, a bonus of Cougarfest when in need of automotive repair. The rest of the weekend consisted of racing at
IRP, showing our cars in the hotel parking lot, and a general invasion of the city of Indianapolis by day. By night we retreated into an alcoholic haze of comradery around our cars, eventually flowing into various hotel rooms consuming varieties of alcohol until daytime. This was repeated for four days, with one hour of sleep resulting in complete exhaustion with a heavy dose of Post Cougarfest Depression (PCD). On the ride back I participated in some
construction slalom and picked up my new donated bumper from
EternalOne. After suffering a
tire blowout one hour from home my Cougar had enough, and I was ready to sleep for three days. I started the event because I liked my Cougar, but now I feel it's become more of an extended family reunion where family members all happen to drive the same car.
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Caravan Pics |
Indy Zoo Trip 
...Can fit in a 2004 Ranger? That age-old question was finally
answered today when I crammed a total of 8 into the bed of my truck. If you're in the market for one, shoot me an email and we'll make a deal. Unless of course you work where I work, which is practically giving them away while the flat panel replacment squad is updating everyone to LCD monitors. Until I sell them I plan to display a picture of myself sitting in the middle of 8 monitors on each of them while I sit in the middle of 8 monitors.
Well my truck did. If you ever have the need to put a hitch on a truck I recommend doing it yourself. He drilled 4 holes in my frame, put in 4 bolts and it was done. Less than 10 minutes (
3:40pm-3:50pm) of his time cost me $180. I felt better after a quick
froogle search revealed the hitch was the majority of that price, but you just can't help feeling useless when somebody does a previously mysterious job that quickly.
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When
Gmail first came out, it was a geek status symbol to have an email address that ended with "@gmail.com". It's invite only while in beta (probably forever), and having one meant somewhere down the line you were invited by an original Gmail programmer. But that was in the before time, back in those days when invitations were rare and some fetched $100 or more on
eBay. I came in when the invites were easier to come by, but for awhile I had a minor geek status of my own. When I started getting the "already have one" responses to my offers of an invite I knew my
elite club was gone. Nevertheless, I decided to consolidate my 4 addresses at the time into my single gmail address (if you can't guess mine don't email me). After all, google is infallable so their email system HAS to be awesome. Fast forward to today, 6 months later and the transition is complete. All my accounts now reference my new @gmail account. Unfortunately, in the last few weeks I get the image above more often than I prefer, and other oddities keep cropping up. Yes, I know it's still beta, and yes I know there are tons more people using it now, and YES I KNOW THEIR STOCK IS KILLER IT DEFINATELY DID NOT TAKE A DIVE AFTER IPO but lately it just seems to be approaching a suck factor. Granted, my expectations of totally free, feature packed email services has gone up a few notches with gmail, but I feel they continue to best themselves in every other area they have their hands in, so why should email be an exception? I'll even give up some of the 2GB plus storage if they can make it work 95% of the time instead of 80%. Yes I know, it's way overdue. I'm stepping down now. </rant>
After hearing
this song anyone should be motiviated to be a
Skywarn Spotter. Decide if you are a
basic spotter or an
advanced spotter and be ready to
report nasty weather. I dare you to listen to the song all day on repeat.
I thought
this was pretty funny. An Astrologer in Russia is suing NASA for the
Deep Impact mission that successfully blasted a portion of a comet into space to determine it's composition. Given her profession, I'll give her a 3% probability she's genuinely upset about the mission with the remaining 97% assigned to desire for the money and exposure from the news coverage. Meanwhile, my lawsuit against NASA concerning the promised and so far non-existant moon base I was going to relocate to continues to search for an accepting court.
Coming 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.
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