I'm doing an experiment. When I post on Slashdot, I have a signature that says "Boycott shampoo, demand REAL poo". The signature includes a link that goes to my website. I just changed the signature to read "If tits were wings it'd be flying around." I'm going to see what effect this has on the number of people clicking my signature link.
Wednesday, 26 February, 2003. 01:14:53 AM
There is so much ice at the bottom of our stairs that the dogs can't get out of their dog run. I have to help then get up the little hill every time they go outside.
Tuesday, 25 February, 2003. 06:23:24 PM
The definition of the word google from the WordSpy site: "To use an Internet search engine such as google.com to look for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend." It can also be to use an Internet search engine for any query at all.
Tuesday, 25 February, 2003. 11:14:56 AM
We had a big ice storm last night and now I can't go to work. The police have asked everyone to stay off the roads until noon. Can't do anything anyway, since my account at the client was turned off, and I don't know when it will be turned on again.
Tuesday, 25 February, 2003. 02:17:31 AM
GW Bush's war plans are all tied up in politics now. He agreed to get a second resolution from the UN as a favor to his buddy Tony Blair, and because of that schedule, I think the war won't take place until at least the second week of March.
Tuesday, 25 February, 2003. 01:27:12 AM
My Firstflex TLR and my Kodak Duaflex IV both have film in them for the first time in many years. I also unloaded my Duaflex II and will take that roll to Precision Camera this weekend.
Monday, 24 February, 2003. 02:29:30 PM
On Sunday I bought a Princeton 17 inch flat panel monitor. It sure is a nice display. My old Digital 17 inch CRT finally started flaking out on me after 8 years of use. I had some trouble getting my NVidia Geforce2 MX 400 card to get into 1280x1024 resolution, which is the optimum for that monitor. It turned out that the information returned by the monitor is incorrect, and the frequency probing should be disabled. I included the line 'Option "IgnoreEDID" "1"' in the nvidia device section in my XF86Config-4 file, and from that point on it respected the Horizonal Sync frequency of 31.5-90 that I manually specified. Since I'm at work, I can't see the display, but I started X and looked at the logs. The maximum that it wanted to do before was 1280x960, which looks like crap. Anything other than the optimal mode looks like crap. The logs confirmed that when X started, it went into 1280x1024 resolution, so I'm all set now.
Monday, 24 February, 2003. 04:39:41 AM
Yesterday I picked up my Firstflex TLR from the repair shop. It works perfectly now. I'm going to be running a roll of film through it soon.
Friday, 21 February, 2003. 12:51:42 PM
I noticed today that there are a couple thousand special forces and Marines that are going to the Phillipines for anti-terrorism duty.
Thursday, 20 February, 2003. 12:23:40 PM
I'm going to New York City again next week.
Wednesday, 19 February, 2003. 10:55:44 PM
I can't stop myself. I bid on a nice little Yashica-D today.
Wednesday, 19 February, 2003. 02:14:59 PM
Yesterday I got my first unsolicited e-mail regarding the contents of this log. It turned out to be a disappointment from someone who was pro-war, and had made a lot of assumptions about my actual position. The assumptions were that I am closed minded, and that I didn't agree with the facts that he presented to me. The actual e-mail itself was a rambling, nearly incoherent mess of illogic combined with irrational fear. And he used Fox News as a reference.
Tuesday, 18 February, 2003. 01:22:37 PM
I got a call yesterday from Precision Camera. My FirstFlex TLR is ready to pick up. I don't know for sure if that means that they were successful in their lubrication and tune-up, but for now I'm assuming that it's a working camera. Soon I'm going to tear apart my Argus C3 35mm camera and get that working too. Neither of these cameras have exposure meters, so I'm looking on E-Bay for meters. All of them are very expensive except for the old Soviet Leningrad series of meters and their copies. A Leningrad 8 made in the Soviet Union in the 1980's runs about 10 bucks. For black and white film with a wide exposure latitude, this might be just about all I need to take reasonable shots.
Monday, 17 February, 2003. 06:22:20 PM
Millions of people showed up for anti-war marches this weekend, and it appears to have had quite an impact on the British government, though I don't know if it'll be enough to change anything. I am quite sure that GW Bush is going to completely ignore the marches. His push for a war has hit some rocky ground in the past week. I think the assertion by Powell that Bin Ladin's statements indicated that the Iraquis supported Al Quaida were over the top and insulting to many people. Most people are smart enough to pick up on a non-sequitur as large as that one. I predicted that the war would start at the end of February, or just slightly before. Now, it looks like that schedule might slip to the first week of March because of political reasons. Our fearless leader is on a mission from god, and he's not going to let anything stop him from destroying America's reputation as an even-handed country. France is taking a lot of abuse from the American press, but that country seems to be the only thing that can curb our madness. We rescued France twice in the last century, and now I hope France can rescue us.
Monday, 17 February, 2003. 02:33:56 PM
Amazon.com has this customer review attached to the 20 volume "Oxford English Dictionary".
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Avg. Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
20 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
1 out of 5 stars an epic work that has trouble holding the interest, December 5, 2002
Reviewer: A reader from Peterborough, NH
I'm at the ABs, and I still can't get a grip on the plot. Characters enter, are introduced in exhausting detail -- and then disappear again! Very frustrating. The only time an old character shows up again is in another's history! A lot like _A Dance to the Music of Time_, I suppose.
Perhaps things will become clearer when we meet Oxford, English or Dictionary -- clearly three key figures. Some kind of menage a trois?
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Monday, 17 February, 2003. 12:46:58 AM
I've identified a couple enhancements to my weblog software that I need to find time to implement. First, I need another level on my photo album. Right now, all the URL's have the format .../photo_album/{name}. Since Sara was born, Beth has been sending me a lot of pictures, many of which are currently unfiled. I expect this situation will last for about 18 years or so. There's a limit to my creativity in coming up with filenames, as well as how long I want the list of photo albums to be. So, I'm going to add another level in there that indicates what month and year the pictures were added to the website. The second improvement that I have to do is to reactivate my spam counter. I'm using SpamProbe to filter out my spam and it's doing a really nice job of it. Since my webserver has a lot of spare CPU cycles available, I've decided to hold the spam statistics in a PostgreSQL database, accessed by CGI scripts written in Python. This will give me a lot of flexibility in counting my stats and making pretty graphs out of them. And I'll be able to keep many years worth of data to show how my spam load grows over time.
Friday, 14 February, 2003. 03:54:20 PM
I just signed up Darwin for a direct mailer kit from Zairmail. I wonder how long his name takes to get around. I wonder how many credit card offers he will get. I wrote his business name down as "Boston Terrier".
Wednesday, 12 February, 2003. 10:20:26 PM
Funniest...cartoon...ever...
Wednesday, 12 February, 2003. 12:57:25 AM
It's been a while since Zen entered these pages:
The Emperor asked Master Gudo, "What happens to a man of enlightenment after death?"
"How should I know?" replied Gudo.
"Because you are a master," answered the Emperor.
"Yes sir," said Gudo, "but not a dead one."
Tuesday, 11 February, 2003. 11:08:28 PM
I have OpenGL selection working. The problem was that I was calling glSelectBuffer () after I called glRenderMode (GL_SELECT). The glSelectBuffer () call has to be done before the selection render mode is set.
Monday, 10 February, 2003. 02:09:39 AM
The basic OpenGL routines are in place on the latest restart of my game. The texture gamma is working fine. Next thing to take care of is some phasers.
Friday, 07 February, 2003. 03:20:43 PM
The 101st airborne was ordered to deploy this week, so I'd expect the invasion of Iraq to happen in roughly 3 weeks, though 2 weeks would not surprise me. And now, North Korea is threatening a first strike against the US, which could be nuclear in nature. They have 2 or 3 bomb at this moment. It looks like GW Bush is going to have all the war he could ever have asked for very shortly. It'll be an interesting couple of months.
Thursday, 06 February, 2003. 01:29:05 PM
While I was in New York I received another Firstflex camera from a seller on E-bay. I paid $64 for it, with shipping, and I took it to the camera shop for cleaning and adjustment. That cleaning costs $175, and hopefully there's nothing wrong with the camera. I think that I'll get a light meter next, since I now have several manual cameras with no meter. These are surprisingly expensive, with even older Soviet light meters going for at least $50.
Wednesday, 05 February, 2003. 02:58:25 AM
This article from Time magazine was also written by Greg Easterbrook about the shuttle. He seems to have been a critic of the shuttle for a long time. I don't agree with all his criticisms. I think that the shuttle main computers are just fine, and I really like the advanced hydrogen engines. But overall, I agree with him. The shuttle has never lived up to it's promises, is too expensive and dangerous, and relies on antiquated technology and materials. We can do better by building a new vehicle, which relies on staging. SSTO can come later, and we don't need to give up much. Staged vehicles don't need to be throwaway rockets.
Wednesday, 05 February, 2003. 02:06:19 AM
This article was written in 1980, before the first Space Shuttle launch.
Sunday, 02 February, 2003. 03:08:08 AM
Sunday, 02 February, 2003. 01:28:59 AM
I forwarded my photographs and a written description of what I saw to the e-mail address set up by the accident investigation team.
Saturday, 01 February, 2003. 05:34:25 PM
There's a mirror of my photos at this site
Saturday, 01 February, 2003. 11:07:32 AM
Maybe I shouldn't have put my photos on the website. In a little over an hour I've gotten 18000 hits, and I have about 1000 tcp connections on my webserver right now. On the other hand, my Celeron 300A isn't even showing a significant load, because all my pages are static.
Saturday, 01 February, 2003. 10:03:00 AM
I put an article on Slashdot about my photos and I slashdotted myself. My poor DSL can't take it.
Saturday, 01 February, 2003. 09:38:08 AM
I have my photographs of Columbia on my website here.
Saturday, 01 February, 2003. 09:35:39 AM
It's confirmed, the photos that I have are of the shuttle breaking up just south of Dallas, near Palestine Texas.
Saturday, 01 February, 2003. 09:30:10 AM
I didn't see the shuttle until it was at the zenith because there was apparently an explosion on board that made it visible at that time. All the photographs that I have are of the exploding shuttle. I'm uploading them now.
Saturday, 01 February, 2003. 09:20:16 AM
Columbia is lost, nothing else is known.
Saturday, 01 February, 2003. 09:15:11 AM
Oh no, something is wrong with Columbia. No tracking data or communications have occurred as expected. I hope nothing is wrong.
Saturday, 01 February, 2003. 09:07:16 AM
The shuttle is supposed to touch down in a couple minutes, but controllers haven't established communications with Columbia yet.
Saturday, 01 February, 2003. 09:01:31 AM
I just watched the space shuttle reentry. It wasn't as visible in the daylight as it was at night, and I didn't spot it until it was at maximum elevation. I did get a couple photos on my digital camera though.