Archived News starting from 07-20-2005 and earlier
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...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.
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.
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