This is kinda scary, but it’s happening in all sorts of places. Seems to be the latest gang “thing”. It’s usually 3-5 members in a team, with one older one hanging back from the younger ones. While the target is paying attention to the youths, the older member slips behind the mark and goes for their money and/or valuables.
Here’s a photo of this in action:
A long time ago, I wrote an open source plugin for Eggdrop IRC bots. It was a hack, wrapping the functions for talking in channel around an “artificial intelligence” program. I named it after the original program, MegaHAL, and released it with no warranty, no support.. just a “hey, works for me, enjoy.” Until my email account at my former university was finally closed, I still would get emails from people, now 7 or so years later, asking for help getting it to compile. Others have taken up the torch in keeping it current (and I run one on irc.srhuston.net too).
Seems I’m not the only one that deals with this kind of support nightmare – though in Steve Brown‘s case, he’s even a few more steps removed from the “problem”. Either way, this makes for good reading. And a note to all the users of programs and services out there: Read the documentation (henceforth known as “RTFM”) before emailing people for support. The documentation is there for a reason. You might even learn something – like how to go about finding a solution to your problem, or that a web based IMAP client has nothing to do with your ISP’s quotas.
I’ve mentioned Akismet a few times before – it’s the plugin I installed here which looks at comments for spam, and automatically flags them as such (and deletes them after 15 days) for me. I mentioned a couple times how it’s doing, and today is another landmark. As of right now it’s caught 1001 spams for me. Yay, no more going through comments one by one to get rid of the junk!
I’ll probably not mention this again (at least until I hit 10,000). Just figured the first 100 and first 1000 were pretty good milestones.
I’ve had some conversations with other hams recently, and decided that now is the time to get fully involved in APRS. On Sunday evening I ordered a new Yaesu FT-2800 2m radio as well as the TNC-X kit with the USB option. The TNC-X comes as a kit which you assemble, though you can also purchase an assembled and tested unit from John. Since I used to love building electronics kits from Heathkit “back in the day,” I decided I’d save the cash and put it together myself. The radio should arrive tomorrow, and the TNC-X is sitting on my desk at work right now – I’m debating taking up some space in one of the labs downstairs to start putting it together tonight :>
Once assembled, and combined with the radio and an old magmount antenna I already have, I hope to have a full time APRS station running at home. Which will be nice, since right now half of my TS-2000 is being used for APRS, so not only can I free that up for other uses but I can shut it off at night when I’m done with it. Probably sometime in the spring I’ll look at either getting a better antenna for APRS, or just a better mount for the antenna I already have (the magmount will have to come off of the grill some time…)
Heard a bit of sad news today. Denny Doherty, 1/4 of the Mamas and the Papas, passed away on Friday. His voice was the one most prominently heard on their recordings (not John Phillips, the primary songwriter, as most assumed). And while that bit of news was a downer, what followed in all the postings that I saw about it.. well, that’s what pissed me off the most. And what was that? This line, which I read over and over in various places (from the Associated Press):
The members re-formed in 1971 for the album “People Like Us,” but all hope for a reunion ended in 1974 when the 30-year-old Elliot choked and suffered a fatal heart attack while eating a sandwich in London.
Now, if you go look at the story on their site, which will only be available for a few days before you’ll have to pay to access it, you’ll see this line. Or will you? When I first loaded their site this evening looking for the original source (I’d read it from somewhere else, but saw the dateline was AP), that line read “Elliot suffered a fatal heart attack in London.” Now I go back, and it’s back to the sandwich. Half the news sites say there was a sandwich involved in Mama Cass’s death, the other half just say the heart attack. Now, I’m no expert, but when so many other places say the sandwich was just there and had nothing to do with her death, I have to wonder what moron does their fact checking, since this has been a known fact for quite some time now.
On a related note, since John died in 2001, that leaves Michelle Phillips as the only member of the group still alive.
You ever wonder what happened to people you “used to know?” Every now and then I do. I thought I’d summarize a few of them, for the hell of it. Not necessarily because they’ll read this, but maybe they’ll do a little egosurfing and find their name here, then leave a comment and say, “Hey, this is what happened to me.” Might be fun. As a side note, when I started reading this off to my wife, I discovered that it sounds more humorous if read with an “Andy Rooney” voice. Try it. Now, in no particular order:
So there you have it. A few people I wonder about now and then. If you know them (or are them), feel free to chime in. And if you’re someone who knew me some time ago, and your name isn’t there, fear not – it doesn’t mean I don’t wonder about you necessarily. Just that in the span of time I started writing this, I ran out of names to put down. Or ran out of energy to put them down. Or ran out of caffeine to remember them. Or all three. So leave a comment anyway.
New WordPress updates available, so it’s time to upgrade again. Nice thing is that Dreamhost knows there’s a lot of people that use it, so they tend to patch up their “one click installer” to upgrade the software within a few days – sure enough, I got the message today that they’d patched it up, and the new release was only a few days ago. The down side is that I’m using one of the themes that they package with your install, so every time I upgrade, all the little changes to the theme that I made disappear (I get “Link buttons” on the top by the search bar, the photo disappears, and posts lose their author & timestamp information).
So finally this time, I did the upgrade, then made a backup copy. This way, when I finished re-applying my finishing touches to the theme, I could run ‘diff’ on the two trees and generate a patch I can use in the future. Since they’re fairly simple changes, and don’t affect a lot of the meat of the program, I’d imagine that patch will hold up for quite a few releases. At least until the next major revision, which supposedly isn’t far away. 😛
Finished another step this evening, that being getting the electric run to the workbench. Got plenty of outlets on there now, but at some point I’ll add more on the back wall – this way, power tools can be plugged into the front outlets, while the back ones can be used for more “permanent” things like battery chargers and other tools that aren’t hand-held. Also took down the old light and installed two new ones; now I just have to replace the one set of tubes, since they’re a different color temperature and the wattage is a little different from the others. As usual, there’s photographs as well.
So, as I mentioned, I received quite a few power tools for Christmas. And my first order of business was to put them to use in building something where I could work on stuff – a workbench. For one, there wasn’t nearly enough tool storage and work areas in the basement, and two.. well, I needed a project. And a place to complete future projects. So I built one. Not as difficult as I’d thought – but then again, the last time I built anything with wood, was a spice rack; and I couldn’t tell you when the last time was I built anything significant (I’m not sure I ever really did). So I was quite pleased with the end result. Details below, if you care to read them.
I guess trying to post daily during a holiday break, when I sometimes wasn’t near the computer all day, was a bad idea. Oh well, not the end of the world. On the bright side, I did get my workbench almost finished – I’ve got a couple more things to do, then I’ll post photos for all to see.
Power tools are a wonderful thing :>