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AnnouncementsAt 11 p.m. ET Saturday, the center of the storm was about 45 miles southeast of Cape Fear, North Carolina, and about 170 miles southwest of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The National Hurricane Center said Cristobal was moving northeast at about 6 mph, with maximum sustained winds of about 45 mph and s some higher gusts.
"The center of the tropical storm is expected to move parallel and very close to the coast of North Carolina for the next day or so," the NHC said. It is expected to dump between three and five inches of rain along the Carolina coast this weekend, it said.
Just got done deploying the very first bit of my very first MVC asp.net application. I got tired of waiting for the @#$% official framework to be released, so I didn't use it. But this is going to be a BIG project*, so I needed something. "Self," I says to myself, "it's just a design pattern. How hard can it be?"
Famous last words. Took me several hours to get my head wrapped around the asp.net page cycle so that my controllers weren't sending my models into update la-la land and locking up my views. Get thee back, stack overflow!
But now I've delivered the first chunk, and not only does it work it seems to work really well. Much better and easier to work with than the way I did it on my last project, with standard ASP.NET coding practices. I can unit test all the way up to implementing the view, and while it's far from trivial to build and test said view**, the benefits of building it this way mean de-bugging the view is at least straightforward and comparatively pain-free.
Oh, and one of the reasons why this seems pretty straightforward to me is I've been building MVC-like applications for years. My CF apps never posted back to the originating page. They always posted to a processor page, which updated the database, and then sent the user back to the screen. Sound familiar? I knew it would.
Hey, it's my blog, I'll write what I want to.
WHEEE!!!!
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* Meeting management software for an annual convention with 2000+ attendees. Yeah, I know, there's dozens of them, but the only good ones are $$$, and even though you don't believe me this place really does have unique meeting requirements just not covered by anything else.
** One of the ways to tell you're doing it right, apparently, is testing the view becomes "trivial." To which I can only say, "WTF?!? Are you guys designing to 80-line monochrome?!? I got interaction, lots of it, to test!"
And let that be a lesson to you. Never, no matter what you think of your super-awesome sysadmin skillz, turn off a Vista computer before it shuts itself down. Otherwise you end up having to start all over from scratch. Just because you got away with it twice during your XP days...
Well, if nothing else, that nagging suspicion that I might've had some spyware snuck onto this thing is now well and truly laid to rest.
On a lighter note, kudos to Dell for putting a recovery partition on this thing big enough for me to "lifeboat" the vacation photos over just before the TitaniC: went down. The 40 GB of porn... well...
Let the updating begin!!!
George Carlin died yesterday, at the age of 71. While he's best known as a comedian, around our house we'll always remember him as the voice of dozens of animated characters scattered across the various movies Olivia loved to watch over and over again.
Fly away, Stanley. Be free!
As you can see we are on vacation. Hey everyone deserves on at least ONCE per year, and the site is being updated with photos for you all on just how dorky we really are!
We hope to resume normal activity this weekend once we return home Saturday evening.
This year, convention's in Orlando. Unlike last year, Ellen & Co. will fly out Sunday, thereby avoiding much drive-by kissing & staring at the walls. I, on the other hand, will have the joys of 12 hour days spent helping people hook LCDs to laptops. Whee!
Meh. Could be worse. This year I have my gaming laptop! Fragfest!!!
Oh, and if anyone has dining recommendations, leave 'em in the comments. Even if they're downtown or something, that's OK, because we'll have a car after Sunday.
Well, that's what you get when your internet service goes legs-up, causing the "whattabahgain" wireless router to do its own dead bug imitation in sympathy. Yeah, and there was much swearing. We're back now, so the fragfest should resume momentarily.
Thunderstorm cells crashing through the neighborhood does not a happy sysadmin make! Years ago, having the power blink a few times was equivalent to taking a sledgehammer to the network and whacking it a few times. Amusing things would come tumbling out the other side. Nowadays, things are much more robust, but old reflexes die hard. Now I gotta ride metro home. Whee!
"When under the pretext of fraternity, the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who gains from this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating." - Frédéric Bastiat
In other words... well, look at the masthead quote again. It's a thought that's occurred more than once. And, since human nature is what it is, will occur again. A++++, will libertarianate again!!! sort of thing.
When buying Valve video games, do not use the oh-so-convenient steam app to download and install them directly. Buy them from the store, just like everyone else. If, for whatever reason*, they decide your account has been used for cheating and de-activate it, it is much more difficult to get things back in order if you don't have a CD key. As in, effectively impossible.
And I was having such a good time re-playing Portal, too.
---
* I personally think it was some sort of bizarre interaction between Vista and the steam app, since my own troubles started just after a big honking Vista crash, and renewed after a steam update. I just don't have the time to play games online anymore, and have never seen the point of cheating even when I did.
Arthur C. Clarke died yesterday, at the age of 90. Missed it because of my class schedule. 90 is a damned good run, especially considering what he accomplished. He will be missed.
This week marks my triumphal return to Learning Tree's Reston facilities. This year, I'm emphasizing Javascript, Ajax, Expression Studio, and anything else that will release me from the agony that is Visual Studio's web GUI development space. Having now completed half a dozen projects in C# and asp.net, I'm nowhere near as apprehensive as I was last year. Hell I may even end up having fun.
More as it comes in...
One of chess's great characters died Thursday at the age of 64. Yeah, he was a crank, but he was an entertaining crank, so he'll be missed.
A good time was had by all, and we'd like to give thanks to the very generous (and various) Santas in New Yorkville! Pictures will (hopefully, with the correct amount of flogging) follow.
Congratulations to my alma mater Razorbacks for completely screwing up the BCS rankings. Far as I'm concerned, everyone wins here. McFadden starts to be taken seriously again as a Heisman candidate, Houston Nutt gets to keep his job, I finally got to watch the Razorbacks win an important game this season, and we freaking beat the #1 team in the nation! Like I said, everyone wins.
Well, except for LSU. Sorry dudes, nothing personal. It's just business.
SOOEY!!!
Congratulations to Space Shuttle Discovery on the successful completion of its mission to the ISS!
This time around the sonic booms didn't scare me as much, either because I was ready for them or the cheap headphones I'm using now couldn't play them properly. The HUD view is still damned impressive.
Paul Tibbets, pilot of the plane which dropped the first atomic bomb, died today at the age of 92. For obvious reasons, he'd occasionally show up at vintage air shows. Unfortunately never one I attended. Salute!
Took us ten years to go from 82,000 to the rollover, and by some weird coincidence I actually had the Nikon in the car with me when it happened...
Assuming no untimely encounters with SUVs or bits of landscape, our Spider will be going through a major (but not complete) overhaul very soon, perhaps as soon as next winter. Then the engine's time will match the odometer's, or nearly so! Been a fun ten years, it has. Let's hope for ten more, and eventually a second rollover!
We've had Ellen's brothers (13 & 9) for 2 nights now. Went downtown to Nat'ral History. Hence all the pix. Just saying, that's all...
Sign that fall has arrived, #5: made-from-scratch pepperoni bread, fresh from the oven. Local members of the peanut gallery will testify, and verily.
Pardon me while I sit here and burp for awhile.
And did I mention how much I ♥ my wife? Well, there ya go.
Marceau died Saturday in Paris, French media reported. Former assistant Emmanuel Vacca announced the death on France-Info radio, but gave no details about the cause.
Read article here....
Ok, I wil be totally honest. I could give a shit about Mimes. They are annoying, but still it's sad.
Having been informed that it is not, in fact, Friday, I have postponed everyone's favorite weekly feature to its actual day. A vacation spent shuttling one's mother from doctor appointment to doctor appointment tends to monkey with one's sense of time.
A reasonably well-configured comment spammer has been fluttering against our filters for about a month now. None of it gets through, of course, but his activity was filling our logs and distorting our stats. I culled out all the machines he's used in the past 24 hours (about 55) and "banninated" them. However, as is typical when I do these sorts of things, it's possible I've also banninated you. If you find you can't comment, just e-mail me, I'll try to figure it out.
And if anyone running a blog out there which still uses regexps to stop spam needs a really killer list of REs, let me know. About 2 dozen REs on our list stop 99% of our comment spam here.
But last week Alex, an African Grey parrot, died, apparently of natural causes, said Dr. Irene Pepperberg, a comparative psychologist at Brandeis University and Harvard who studied and worked with the parrot for most of its life and published reports of his progress in scientific journals. The parrot was 31.
Read article here.
Due to COX cable having internet issues, (Thanks for letting us all know. Hope you deduct 2 days of internet charges from everyone's bills) updates will be slow to none until this problem is fixed.
It's been a long, hard slog, but my first Asp.net web application is now "feature complete." I've still got some i's to dot and some t's to cross, mostly in the interface, and a few more alpha-level tests, and then I'll release it for production-level testing. Interestingly enough, I had to do some debugging and refactoring of the very last CF app I developed today. In spite of its head-crunchingly difficult differences, the way I do things now is patently better than the way I did things then.
Congratulations to NASA and Endeavor for the successful conclusion of the most recent space shuttle mission. Watched this one live (they literally just touched down, so no link for you!). The HUD view was way cool! No kidding, that thing runs one scary approach. I guess you get used to it. This was also the first landing I saw which provided a higher-fidelity transmission of the shuttle's sonic boom. Made me jump in my seat! Nice to not have ol' Wolf Blitzer chattering away in the background.
Scott's brother and sister-in-law (our family) lost both of their dogs in this past year, (wow and we lost both of our cats). At any rate, they have new members of their family!
WOOOOT!
After a long slog of five months, I'm actually creating production-level C# code. I've used the Adapter, Command, and N-tier patterns so far, and may very well end up using more. What I find absolutely striking is how I can re-factor (re-write to get the same functionality in a different way) big chunks of code, look at it, say to myself, "that should work," run the test, and it works! I hardly ever refactored in Cold Fusion because it never worked when I thought it should. Tons of extra debugging makes Scott an unhappy programmer!
The more familiar I get with it, the more I'm beginning to realize that I've been trying to code like this for ten or eleven years, ever since I completed my first "enterprise" CF app*. Unfortunately, while Cold Fusion is extremely elegant when it comes to hooking databases up to web pages, if you try to do anything else it gets very clunky very fast (IMO).
Which is not to say C# and the .Net "way" are perfect. Far from it. I've been tinkering enough now to find some definite weaknesses. But it's so much better than what I was doing before.
Hell I may end up making a living doing this. You never know.
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* Which, by the way, is still in use, 10 years later, with very happy users. Booya!
Brake'in ur comments.
Not sure what the hell is wrong right now. It's definitely not the old banning problem. I thought it was weird that all the comment spammers all of a sudden went away. At any rate, if you want to say something e-mail us. Will keep you posted.
Update: Found it. Had a line return stuck in the IP blacklist, effectively banning the world. Ah well, I thought the spammers suddenly giving up on us was too good to be true.
Messner died on Friday after a long battle with cancer, CNN said. CNN's Larry King, who interviewed Messner on his "Larry King Live" talk show on Thursday night, said her family had asked him to make the delayed announcement of her death."She died peacefully," King said on CNN's Web site.
Read article on Yahoo .
You can also check out her last interview with Larry King.
Everyone's favorite source of Bat Boy news is shutting down. I only read a few editions of Weekly World News in my time, but the headlines always were an amusing distraction while waiting in the checkout line of the grocery store. They will be missed!
We're semi-grounded due to the Cruiser's convincing imitation of a pot of pasta boiling over. We're pretty sure it's the cooling fans, but the thing won't be fixed until Thursday at the earliest. The Spider's been running well for quite some time, but has some obvious cargo limitations. Ah well, time to improvise!
Being in control of a primitive, somewhat tacky time machine, we are pleased to provide the following retrospective of our very own retrospective. So cue the music, dim the lights, and start the silly cross fades...
Year one:
Year two:
Year three
Year four:
So today is the first day of the last of my classes, .Net Enterprise Development. Already it seems this course will fill in the remaining (and critical) gaps in my programming knowledge, allowing me to finally create applications the "right" way without tearing my hair out or bugging Mike J. to death.
Which is not to say I won't do those things after Friday. I just hope to do much less of them.
At any rate, thanks to this and other various crises, posting may be quite light for awhile.
I've re-worked the comment filters, changing .*'s into .{0,20}'s. This should make the filter less likely to bite on false positives. I think. Regexp's have (obviously) never been my strong suit, so it's just as likely to have broken everything completely. Will keep you posted...
Time to design, develop, debug, and deploy my first .net widget: 3 weeks. Time to design, develop, debug, and deploy my second: 2 days.
Substantial (albeit painful) improvements in productivity are to be expected at this stage. After all, it's pretty easy to double your speed if you're only going 1 mph. Still, it's nice to see this stuff is actually sticking!
And, in alphabetical order, happy mothers day also to:
Cindy
Donna
Didi (Deedee?)
Janet
Judy
Pat
Ree
Suzanne
Wendi
Wendy
And everyone else! :)
Jeff gets a sad no-prize for bringing us news that Wally Schirra, one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, has died. At 84, a pretty good run, all things considered.
I have now officially created my very first ASP .Net web application. It don't do much, but it works. Onward and upward!
Toyota has officially passed GM as the largest auto maker in the world. This was a title GM held for what, sixty, seventy years? Change may come slowly, but it will eventually arrive.
Today marks the start of the last of my training classes. For those who're counting, that's three in six weeks! Oy, my head!
Posting will be intermittent, with scattered silliness throughout the afternoon.
Update Well, not the last, but the last in this sequence. I take a final web development class in June, and that'll complete my training cycle for this FY.
After a recent hardware survey of our equipment at work, I realized I was actually the proud owner of the oldest active system on the floor. This time, because Visual Studio uses up so much screen real estate, I spec'd out the largest monitor Dell sold that wasn't actually a TV screen. I now look out at the world through 32" 24" of 1900x1200 goodness. It's like I'm piloting a starship or something.
NASSAU, Bahamas (CNN) -- Former boyfriend Larry Birkhead was declared the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby Tuesday, and Howard K. Stern, listed as Dannielynn's father on the birth certificate, said he would not fight for custody.
Article and picture of the victory can be found here.
Just got off the phone with my Learning Tree contact. Scored an 85 on 419 (learning C#) and 87 on 511 (.net Design Patterns). I'm now officially 1/2 way to Official Certificationdom. Or something.
Which isn't helping in the actual utilization of the knowledge. I definitely feel like I just completed the training module on a new shooter, and now am taking live fire. Brain smoke is definitely filling the air.
Updates will be very slow this weekend! We are visiting family in NY for the holiday!
Make sure you check back daily to see new posts.
AMCG will resume normal activity on Monday.
The second of my four training courses starts today, this time Design Patterns and .Net Best Practices. Last time, they sent me to four days of learning the rules of football. This week I'm hoping to learn how to coach a team.
Update: Ok, not coaching a team, rather learning how to call a play. Graduating from the guy that holds one of the posts to the offensive coordinator. I'll take it.
Broward County Medical Examiner Joshua Perper said Smith died of "combined drug intoxication" with the sleeping medication chloral hydrate as the major factor.
Read the entire surprising article here.
Ok, not really. Today marks the start of the first of my nearly-week-long computer programming classes. Since the Philistines that run the place don't connect the classroom computers to the internet (attention? Distraction? Speak not of these things!) posting will be rather light. Hell they don't even have chairs in the "internet room!" This represents an innovation I will surely be exploring for the staff computer room come convention time. It may prevent the limpet-like behavior most of them exhibit when they're able to sit down in front of a computer.
Today's mysterious quiet has been brought to you by: Microsoft, who's decision to make the time zone patch a "roll-up" instead of a critical update resulted in none of my users getting the thing automatically sent to them last month. You see, in the Land of Microsoft critical updates are the best-tested, most-important updates. All others (including fruit security roll-ups) tend to have things like "new features" (bugs) or "new software" (beta tests) included in them, so I never bothered to select those categories for download, let alone automatic install.
Discovering why, exactly, the automated install hadn't actually automated or installed, when the auto update widget had been steaming along happily for the past 18 months, took about four hours. Implementing the fix took about 2 more, and now I'm chasing down the broken or somewhat schizoid computers which won't take the update at all.
This time I really do blame the Bush administration, along with busybody congress critters who quite clearly need to be kept much more busy than they are at present.
Next...
And the reason posts have been slow today is... I got my Linux boxen to authenticate users with our Active Directory! YEEE-HA!!! No more "one account common to the whole herd," no more worrying about changing the keys on six different locks if someone who knows that account walks away, no more consultants getting the vapors over two different login structures. It's all-for-one now baby! I even managed to restrict it based on windows groups.
The vital clue? A software widget called SADMS, which appears to be a configuration shell for the disparate things you need to get Samba 3.x to register the machine to AD and use it authenticate users.
Pardon me, I must now go and do a geeky little happy dance...
The very first server I ever spec'ed, purchased, configured, programmed, and managed end-to-end at work was retired for good today. Our original "real" web application server, a Dell poweredge 2300, was provisioned and installed in 1998. It soldiered on through good times and bad, never being re-tasked (a remarkable thing here... servers usually do 2-3 jobs before they're shut down). It was still on its original OS install! NT 4.0!
So raise a glass tonight (as if you needed an excuse) and toast old soldiers who's job is well done. I'll be giving it an affectionate pat as I stick a TRASH tag on it and place it in the hall on Monday for disposal.
Lunar eclipse coming this Saturday. During the last one we got some pretty interesting pictures, who knows what we'll get this time.
Ajax memorial has been configured, as I'm sure you've all now found out. We'll leave it up for awhile. Site updates will be slower, but we're all doing OK.
A placeholder until I get something more appropriate up. Please note the details may change once I get better information.
At about 4:30 today Ajax, the Emergency Backup Cat and easily the nicest cat almost everyone has ever met, had a stroke. He was paralyzed and in a great deal of pain, and so was euthanized approximately one hour later.
Only the good die young...
So trying to teach myself C# didn't work out so well. Fortunately, my workplace finally budgeted some real money for me to take training courses this year, so after ten years of trying, I'm going to get some professional instruction on software development. Gonna learn to do things the "right" way, instead of the (brittle, twisted) way I taught myself. C#, .Net 2.0, VS 2005, here I come!
Happy Valentine's Day to everyone, and happy birthday to my dad!
And thank you weathermen, for the deepest 1" of snow and ice I've ever seen (was more like 4).
(CNN) -- Anna Nicole Smith died Thursday at a South Florida hospital after being discovered unconscious in her hotel room.The reality TV star, Playboy Playmate and former Guess model was 39.
Read the developing story.
Weer in ur hehvunz, trashin up ur purly gatez.
Someone over at my workplace's ISP has blown our zone up. No connectivity for you! Just what I needed on a Thursday. Well, at least it happened in the morning instead of around 4:15 like it usually does. The worst part will be all the angst-ridden meetings this will trigger in the coming weeks. I guess if nothing else I can definitively say this one's not my fault. For once.
Hey, at least I managed to re-structure the network in such a way that this failure doesn't knock the office out as well. Two years ago, that's exactly what would've happened, idling more than 80 full-time positions. Can you say, "cha-ching?" I knew you could.
It definitely suggests some extra steps that need to be taken to protect us from ham-fisted techs and other equipment failures in the future. Spreading the zone out to two different, independent ISPs will most likely be the first step.
Yeah, I know I should've done it long ago, but I'm one guy directly supporting 100 local users and providing at least some support services to at least 3000. I can't think of it all.
Ah... here comes the first peasant with a lit torch...
Update, 10:45 am: Seems we're back up now. No word from the ISP just yet about what went wrong. I'm thinking it was most likely a typo or something in the file itself. Making things more efficient sometimes means you screw up faster.
Microsoft's latest iteration of Office, v2007, cannot be installed via a group policy object. It will not allow you to create the MST file necessary to script the install. This means you either buy their (clunky, awful) SMS server product and pay a per-user license, or you walk to each system and run the install, one at a time.
Which is why we're now in no damned hurry at all to deploy their latest n' greatest.
I am a very unhappy sysadmin right now. Put this up here in the hope that Google will "spread the word."
Feeling down today? It appears you're not alone:
If you are feeling a little down then you can take solace in the thought that things are unlikely to get any worse.Today, say experts, is the unhappiest day in the entire year.
Unpaid Christmas bills, nasty weather, and failed New Year's resolutions combine to make January 22 the gloomiest in the calendar.
Brought to you by the "Making Crap Up to Get a News Release Published" foundation with assistance from the "God it's a Slow News Day and I Have Four Column-inches to Fill" news network.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Sen. Hillary Clinton jumped into the fray as a 2008 presidential candidate with the words "I'm in" posted on her Web site."And I'm in to win," she added in a statement, announcing she has set up an exploratory committee that can gauge opinions and raise money for a presidential campaign.
Clinton's announcement comes on the same day that the next president will be inaugurated two years down the road: January 20, 2009.
Entire article can be found here
Denny Doherty, one-quarter of the 1960s folk-rock group the Mamas and the Papas, known for their soaring harmony on hits like "California Dreamin'" and "Monday, Monday," died Friday at 66.His sister Frances Arnold said the singer-songwriter died at his home in Mississauga, a city just west of Toronto, after a short illness. He had suffered kidney problems following surgery last month and had been put on dialysis, Arnold said.
Read entire article here
Yvonne De Carlo, the beautiful star who played Moses' wife in "The Ten Commandments" but achieved her greatest popularity on TV's "The Munsters," has died. She was 84.De Carlo died of natural causes Monday at the Motion Picture & Television facility in suburban Los Angeles, longtime friend and television producer Kevin Burns said Wednesday.
Read entire article here.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi dictator who spent his last years in captivity after his ruthless regime was toppled by the U.S.-led coalition in 2003, was hanged before dawn Saturday for crimes committed in a brutal crackdown during his reign.
Read entire CNN story here.
Keep an eye out. You know the FULL video will eventually leak out and we will be linking it.
I've put in place a new regular expression in an attempt to stop a persistent sophisticated comment spammer. In spite of lots of tests, there's a good chance it'll either not work, or snag your comment. In the case of the former, well, back to the drawing board. In the latter case, send me a note (and then I'll go back to the drawing board). Oh, and it's not personal, it's the machine.
Parents of toddlers the world over will most likely feel bittersweet at the announcement that Greg "Yellow Wiggle" Page is retiring. Bittersweet because the kids love them, but the shows are repeated so often parents are gradually reduced to a special sort of gibbering lunacy whenever they come on.
Via Siflay.
Microsoft Exchange's Intelligent Message Filter blows big meaty chunks. I'm sure it's bright enough, but it has essentially no management interface. Just a couple of registry hacks. And no site-wide whitelisting! WTF?
On the other hand, Symantec's Mail Security for Exchange (SMSE) seems damned nice indeed. I should've installed it much sooner, but other projects kept getting in the way. Not now. User-defined regexp filters! Woot!
However, I still [heart] MailScanner + ClamAV + SpamAssassin. With this combo, I was doing everything SMSE does four, five years ago, for free. In contrast, SMSE cost us north of eight grand. MailScanner in particular is probably the best open source project I've encountered to-date.
Hey, it's my site, I'll talk about what I want. :P
For the last 14 years, Pongo has been with me. As you can guess, that's a long time. Long enough for me (and later, Amber and I) to have 10+ addresses, get a degree, move through 5 states, and get married. But, today was the day we took our last walk. As of 4:09pm today, Pongo's out running around causing problems (like eating walls, entire brush piles, waking people up at 3am barking, peeing on things, etc.) with those who've gone before him.
"Mommy and Daddy love you and miss you, boy. Guard the house."
"Weather channel says it's clear up there now. Those 80 mph winds, they're long gone. No, really!"
"Ellen, it's eight o'clock."
"But it's clear. If we leave no--"
"We'll be there at four am. If we're lucky."
Long, thoughtful pause... Me, looking over with genuine alarm, "Wait a minute, you've been way too quiet---"
"If we head for Amber's house, we'll get there by midnight, arrive at mom's by seven!"
"What part of four gin and toni--"
"I'm driving! Olivia! Let's go!"
In the distance, upstairs, stage right, unannounced, "Mommay!!! Need binky!!!!"
Me: "Gggrrroaaannn"
So there we have it folks. Neither exercise, nor TV, nor absurd alcohol consumption, will stay these couriers from their mission. I shoulda been more suspicious that she was so completely on the wagon tonight.
Ayup. It's a weekend with The Inlaws. Including an encounter with A Gramma. Starting in about, oh, twelve hours. With someone who is cheerful at 3 am*. But this time, we're bringing pets to them. Two cats. In a car. For, like, six hours.
"No reward is worth this."
Lord help us all.
-----
* All names have been changed to protect Suzanne my mother in law the qween mutha an anonymous benefactor. Get it? Get it? Aiight?
Four years, who knows how many cats, at least one re-location, one homicidal Oscar, four or five valley-girl goldfish, two or three surfer dude snakes, and the occasional pissed-off turtle tortoise later, and here we are. Only appropriate that what seems like the subject of at least 1/3rd of the posts should ring in our 10,000th entry. Yes, that's right folks, there are ten thousand, count them ten thousand entries on the ol' blog now. Here's to manic energy and way too much time on our hands!
And, of course, to another 10k.
God we need a life...
Well, no, not really. Congrats to the left side of the peanut gallery for getting themselves put in charge of at least a part of the government. Personally, I think it'll be a re-run of Reagan's last two years in office (i.e. tons of investigations obscuring what is an otherwise paralyzed government), but I've been wrong about these things before.
Feels sorta like the dog who caught the car, eh?
This bizarre delay brought to you by... a morning's worth of unresponsive server and an hour spent cleaning out the most effective comment spammer I've seen in years. He keeps that up, we may finally upgrade this ancient thing just to stop it once and for all.
Fragfest to continue momentarily.
I'm having to guide a tech through the maze that is this place's network today. Posting will be very light until I'm done.
The great "mother-and-son" aerobatics squad is no more:
A Saturday afternoon airplane crash at Culpeper Regional Airport claimed the life of Nancy Lynn, 50, of Annapolis. A 30-year veteran of the aviation industry, Lynn was killed during a solo acrobatic performance at Culpeper Air Fest 2006.
We've featured several different photos of Nancy's flying in the past two years. She put on an amazing show, and will be missed next year.
Somehow in all the confusion I missed that Orianna Fallaci died last Friday. I guess she really wasn't too mean to die after all. Definitely my favorite Italian female. Well, except for the one I currently live with. Little surprise that reading Orianna's work was sort of like reading Ellen's mind.
Update: This article provides more background and a few links to her work.
Via Countercolumn.
So we both spent the 5-year 9/11 anniversary working our butts off. I came in to two mission critical servers down for completely weird reasons, and then lots of general chaos and commotion left over from our just-completed board meeting. I'm not sure what happened over at Ellen's work, but she was just as busy. So no bombastic essay, no mellifluous memorial. We still thought about it. We just kept motoring on with our lives, that's all.
In a funny sort of way, I think it's the best tribute we can make.
I've re-tuned the spam filters SLIGHTLY, hopefully comments with links will be more likely to get through. If you get snagged, send an e-mail to me and include the link, I should be able to figure out which rule is causing the problem and perhaps modify it.
While it died down noticeably early this year, by May the spambots had come roaring back. The filter stops about 1200 spam comments per day now, so it's not going anywhere.
Steve Irwin, the hugely popular Australian television personality and conservationist known as the "Crocodile Hunter," was killed Monday by a stingray while filming off the Great Barrier Reef. He was 44."He came on top of the stingray and the stingray's barb went up and into his chest and put a hole into his heart," said Stainton, who was on board Irwin's boat at the time.
Read entire article here.
"Being Good and Right doesn't make you Nice, and she isn't." -- Wikipedia article on Terry Pratchett's character, Granny Weatherwax.
There's a reason she's Ellen's favorite character. In a lot of ways, and for most of the same reasons, she's mine too.
We are stuck in the land of DIAL UP!!
Ron will be taking over for the next few days while we are unable to update.
~Enjoy!~
Testing... testing... phfftt phfft phfft... is this thing on? Ok...
Now broadcasting five-by-five from AMCGLTD-south, better known as Mom's house in the evergreen environs of North Little Rock. Using Ellen's laptop no less, which was a bit fiddly. Took me awhile to figure out what my brother set the wireless router's password to, then took me a little while more to figure out he'd set the router to only allow one computer to connect. Pretty sneaky, that guy.
Because of our new location in sunny Arkansas, updates may be sporadic. You may now return to your regular frag-fest.
Well, not exactly "held captive." More like, "am stuck in this @$#@$ hotel because I have to be downtown by 7 am every day from now until Saturday." Sort of thing. Did I mention the monsoon-like rain outside forcing me to eat hotel food?
Something tells me inveterate traveler Ron will have negative sympathy, but them's the breaks.
So right now I'm camped out in the "executive lounge." I got access because my roomie* is the convention manager's son. The broadband access is free but somewhat flakey, otherwise it's a decent enough place. Now if someone will just explain to me how an "honor bar" works?
------
* Yeah, roomie. Did I mention my employer is also cheap?
Scott is out of town for the week! Well, he is at a conference 40 minutes away from the house... but still, your regular daily updator will be too busy for AMCGLTD.
Please be patient, I will make sure I get updates in the evening for you all to read!
~Thanks Ellen
Not sure how this one got by us: Harriet the tortoise died last week of heart failure. At 175, she was the oldest living creature around.
And no Ellen, you still can't have one.
The short answer is, I don't know why people are suddenly getting 403 error messages when they try to view pictures and/or the whole site. It works for me at home and at work.
Service is commeasurate with pay, so it may be awhile before I get serious about figuring it out.
And, in alphabetical order, happy mothers day also to:
Cindy
Donna
Didi (Deedee?)
Janet
Judy
Pat
Ree
Suzanne
Wendi
Wendy
And everyone else! :)
Rich, don't forget that number 30 is going to come out of your body and 31 will go in. I hope it doesn't hurt much.
Remember to think where you want to go to dinner tonight! Love ya lots!
Since Google changed their ranking rules about nine months ago, comment spamming has dropped greatly in its variety and sophistication, presumably because it don't pay as well. Since essentially all our remaining comment spam is being caught by half a dozen regular expression rules, I've taken the plunge and greatly reduced our spamlist rules(from 2700+ to 150). You should see little effect (other than, if my luck holds, a great explosion in comment spam), but if you get blocked just do the ol' "paper bag over the mouth" trick to stay calm, send us an e-mail, and I'll fix whatever's blocking you.
Fingers-in-ears time folks, this could be a bumpy one...
Aka "pat", aka "momma smurf".
It's my blog, I'll do what I want with it. :)
Our blacklist had bulged up into bug-causing territory again, so I've culled it with regexp's. Again. If you suddenly find a comment banned because of "questionable content", calm down. It's nothing personal. It just means the regexp's need work. Send an e-mail and we'll fix it.
Yeah, I know. Upgrading will fix it all. Probably break as much as it fixes too. And since this is just maintenance and not actual breakage, "if it ain't..."
A giant aldabra tortoise thought to be around 250 years old has died in the Kolkata zoo of liver failure, Indian authorities said on Thursday.The tortoise had been the pet of Robert Clive, the famous British military officer in colonial India around the middle of the 18th century, a local minister in West Bengal state said.
We saw a blurb on this in the Post, but it didn't have much detail. 250 years is a pretty good run!
Geek admin time: a serious flaw has been discovered in all versions of Sendmail, the popular open source mail server. We've got a bunch of them, and it's so much fun to upgrade them. Gah.
A former TV game show host and his wife were killed Monday morning when their small plane crashed into Santa Monica Bay, authorities said. Rescue crews were searching for a third person also aboard the plane.
Read article here.
Ok this is just a damned shame:
Dana Reeve, who won worldwide admiration for her devotion to her "Superman" husband, Christopher Reeve, through his decade of near-total paralysis, has died of lung cancer at the age of 44.
Hopefully on the next turn things will become a bit less challenging!
Knotts died Friday night of pulmonary and respiratory complications at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills, said Paul Ward, a spokesman for the cable network TV Land, which airs "The Andy Griffith Show," and another Knotts hit, "Three's Company."
Read entire article here.
In spite of our airline's best efforts, we did eventually manage to arrive back in NY last night. We're heading for home home in the next half hour or so. Updates will, therefore, be unpredictable today.
And no, I didn't get alcohol poisoning. The big pink elephant sitting next to me in the picture made sure of that.
Now where's my wallet...
It's vacation time at Casa AMCG. We'll be travelling to NY today to deposit the Princess with her Queen "Muthah" and "greah-papa", and from there it'll be on to Las Vegas. Updates will therefore be unpredictable.
Network admins sometimes say "it's better to put your eggs in one basket, as long as you use a really good basket." Which is all well and good, until the network admin in question gets mixed up and turns that central/critical server off on purpose. During business hours. Because he thought it was a non-production server. Did I mention this particular server takes 20 minutes to reboot?
Oh stop it. Damned things look identical from the console and you know it. The stupid Exchange system takes forever to shut down and boot up. Not my fault!
Well, except for the "accidentally shutting it off on purpose" bit, I guess.
You know you're getting old when...
... you forget the anniversary of your own website.
At 4 years, we're definitely a member of the "Triassic" blogger generation. Some have failed, some have thrived, while we just go on about our loopy ways. Onward and upward!
Aunt Nina is down visiting from Boston! Updates will be slow!
Bored? Read the archives dammit!
What a dog. You will be missed.
The Rainbows Bridge Poem
Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge.
When an animal dies that has been especially close to someone here, that pet goes to Rainbow Bridge. There are meadows and hills for all of our special friends so they can run and play together. There is plenty of food, water and sunshine, and our friends are warm and comfortable.
All the animals who had been ill and old are restored to health and vigor. Those who were hurt or maimed are made whole and strong again, just as we remember them in our dreams of days and times gone by. The animals are happy and content, except for one small thing; they each miss someone very special to them, who had to be left behind.
They all run and play together, but the day comes when one suddenly stops and looks into the distance. His bright eyes are intent. His eager body quivers. Suddenly he begins to run from the group, flying over the green grass, his legs carrying him faster and faster.
You have been spotted, and when you and your special friend finally meet, you cling together in joyous reunion, never to be parted again. The happy kisses rain upon your face; your hands again caress the beloved head, and you look once more into the trusting eyes of your pet, so long gone from your life but never absent from your heart.
Then you cross Rainbow Bridge together....
Author unknown...
WHOOO! Big day for AMCGLTD with photos! We needed a huge update on all the critters in the menagarie.
Perhaps if I am up to it, I will take some photos of the primate later this week.
That's if she is not flinging poo. Potty training is such a bitch!
