Brian's Blog

Well, the Christmas holiday has passed and the family has had a few days to recover. My wife is still recovering since she is the one primarily in charge of entertainment and took care of most of the other holiday preparations. As always the kids had the most fun and got the lion's share of the toys. Between my wife and I we received a good many practical gifts which getting older has caused me to appreciate more. Among the practical gifts were things like cloths for us and the kids and a food processor which we've wished we had before but never actually ran and bought. I got my wife a turn table for her records. She's practically been begging for a new one since her old one broke.

Personally I received a nice LED flashlight that doesn't take batteries and will run for about an hour on one minute of cranking the handle. Which seems like a good thing since whenever the power goes out you can never find a flashlight that actually works. Also among my loot were a few books with the highlight being Beowulf which I'm ashamed to admit I've never read but I'll rectify that soon enough. Also, I got a much needed new chair for the computer table. My old one has been fixed and rigged countless times. One of the less practical, but one of the cooler gifts I got from my mother and sister is my name hand written in oriental calligraphy on parchment that they had done and framed when they went to New York City.

Christmas day was a nice day that started out with my oldest daughter actually sleeping in instead of the expected 5AM session of jumping up and down on my back until I woke up to open presents. We had a nice fire in the fireplace all day long. A fire makes such a nice warmth compared to any other heat source. The only problem is the central thermostat is in the living room with the fireplace which causes the rest of the house to get cold since the heat never turns on. Even so, the warmth in the living room and the visual of a fire was welcome.

After gifts with the kids my family came over for a dinner that consisted of a hole chicken with home make stuffing, candied yams, salad, green beans, and apple muffins followed by my wife's incredible chocolate cookies, pumpkin pie, and ice cream. My wife sure can cook and I'll have to run on the treadmill for about 1 week nonstop to work off all that I ate but wow was it good. We ended the day drinking and eating even more at the in-laws house where they always have a large gathering of family every Christmas night. My father-in-law had his traditionally large platform of trains that is always well done.

I'd have pictures of much of the days activities in the gallery already but I've managed to leave my camera at a relatives house and probably won't get it back until the weekend.

As a side note I updated from Nanoblogger 3.0 to 3.1 for some bug fixes. I thought it would be a pain to update but I just followed the upgrade method in the docs and then used vimdiff to find my customizations in the templates and I was done. The main fixes I upgraded for was to prevent the arbitrary execution of code in blog entries and a new cache that speeds up the blog generation process.

I just thought I'd take a moment to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. Enjoy your holiday and may your loot be plentiful!

Good grief do I have cabin fever. So, here I am 2 days post surgery and just lounging about. I feel fine for the most part but I start to notice when I walk around a bit. And for some odd reason today the swelling that is so common actually happened to me two days after the fact. I'd think swelling would become evident sooner.

Anyway, I've been taking the time to read about Exchange for work a little but that isn't of terrible interest to me since it's something I have to do for work. And the Apache 2 book is getting dull. Not so much because it's written bad, but because I've learned all that I've set out to do with Apache. For the moment the remaining chapters hold little interest. Part of it could just be the chapter I'm in which is mostly just a list of all the possible Apache 2 modules and an explanation of each one. Not much to actually do but read. The next few chapters are on PHP, mod_perl, and Tomcat. At this point I know nothing about PHP, Perl and Java so what's the point of reading them? I think I'll start reading more about HTML and XHTML even though I should probably just get this dumb Exchange thing out of the way.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll be OK enough to get out a bit. Funny, when I'm at work I want to be at home and do nothing, now that I'm at home doing nothing I want to be somewhere other than home. Well, away from home for a couple of hours or so anyway.

Whelp, time for another 20 mins of the ice pack.

Well, just about everyone I associate with knows I was scheduled for Vasectomy surgery today. I know not everyone cares to hear about this but I thought I'd write my thoughts on the experience so far. I had some good references on the procedure and resources on how it's done here so I won't repeat them.

Anyway, my appointment was at 2pm today so I spent a good part of the morning doing this that would keep my mind off of it. Lets face it, no matter what anyone says, us guys are psycho in our over protective nature of the area in question. My Urologist seems to greatly understand this mental hang up we have and prescribed a dose of Valium. This understanding was the main reason I chose him. Also, I kind of gave him a short interview during the consultation visit and found out that he's very experienced in the procedure having done 100-150 of them a year for several years.

Anyway, I popped the 15MG of Valium at 1:30PM and my wife took me to face my doom. Now, I've never taken a Valium in my life, and I must say, I don't think it really did anything physical to me. By that I mean it seems to get you relaxed by affecting you mentally. As in, make the brain not feel anxiety and the body will follow. All in all I'm a pretty calm fellow and the Valium really did the trick to make me extra relaxed.

So anyway, I get called into the office and we go into the operating room. You obviously have to undress form the waist down since they haven't perfected a way to do these things through cloths yet. The nurse gets all the stuff together and leaves. So I get to hang around with my own thoughts for about 10 minutes before the Dr. came in. This time is when I really knew the Valium was working because I know would have freaked otherwise.

Well, he comes in and while chatting a bit gets right down to the business at hand. Now, the worst part is getting numbed. Unless you live somewhere that is on the cutting edge of medical technology and uses No Needle Anesthesia they will use a syringe to deliver the numbing agent. I must say that he was super quick about this part. Basically there was a little bit of pinch for the skin numbing and a dull ache for the numbing of each Vas. The only other things I felt was a slight pinch once and an extremely light tug on the one side, then nothing at all after that.

So, from the time that I was numbed to the time that I was walking out of the door to be taken home was about 15 minutes as I can recall (I was drugged after all).

So, here I am 7 hours after wards and not feeling any pain. Tylenol is more than enough to control what little there would be. And I'm following the directions from the Dr to the T.

It wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Not at all.

I just overheard on the radio this morning on the way into work that telemarketers are going to be allowed to call cell phone numbers starting January 1st. That's really a crappy thing since most people pay for their minutes. At the very least telemarketing calls will chew up your free minutes which will end up cost you anyway.

They said that we can get on the National Do Not Call list to stop the annoyance but the deadline is Dec 15Th. I just called and registered my number, it took about 2 minutes and supposedly you'll be on the do not call list for 5 years.

I called their number (1-888-382-1222) but they have a website too at donotcall.gov.

I'm back from hunting and none of us bagged a deer. I could only get out for one day and all I saw was one deer all day in the morning at about 9AM. If I took my Dad's advice and got an antler-less license I could have shot it and been back at camp warming by a fire before noon time. Instead I got to sit around and not see anything else but a squirrel. Even so, I think I'd rather be out in the woods on a band hunting day than have a good day at work.

Not much really happened my one day, not really any stories to tell. Unlike last time I went hunting where it was so cold all our water froze, we had to chop up the meat to cook on the fire with a hatchet, and the deer I got froze solid while hanging from the tree before we had a chance to finish cutting it up.

So, I came come then to my main system here not working, my mostly new AMD 3000+ system. Only a few short months ago I bought mostly new parts, including memory, CPU, motherboard and power supply. Every so often it would just shut off. No warning, and never when I was actually looking, but I'd leave the room and come back an hour later and the darn thing was off. fsck would run on boot showing that it wasn't cleanly shutdown. I ran memtest86 on it and found one of my memory modules was bad. So now I'm down to half my memory while I wait for an RMA from Newegg.

Anyway, I stuck a few pics of the hunting day in the gallery if you'd like to see.

Time for bed, hopefully my system will still be running in the AM.

Today was kind of quiet. Not much going on, just messing around and starting to get ready for deer hunting on Sat with my Dad. It's one of the few times I actually spend time with him, and it's nice just sitting in the woods away from the everyday world for just a little. With a little luck maybe I'll have some extra meet to go on the table.

Sunbird has been pretty nice so far. With WebDAV setup it works fairly nice for having my calendar on my work system and my home system. It would be nice to see the ability to remember your password built in if I so choose. As it stands now I've have to type my username and password for most every change I make, even so it's still pretty darn slick considering it's still very much under development. I would also be nice to see other things like color coding of categories/events and maybe bold the days in the mini-calendar if something is scheduled. I don't think it's ready for business use yet, but it's good enough for me.

I also found a nice utility called Suntray that is nice for my work laptop which I'm forced to run Windows on. It runs Sunbird in the system tray and keeps it out of they way, allowing for reminder pop-ups but not taking up to much screen.

On a more personal note, I finally found a Dr that isn't a total quack for getting a vasectomy. Basically there's two way it can be done, the conventional way and the No Scalpel way (NSV). The first guy I saw was talking about 4cm or so of incision or 1.6 inches for the metrically challenged. Youch! Anyway, NSV only involved a puncture wound. It's amazing anyone still would be willing to get it done the old way.

I did mega research on the subject and found the most useful info at these places:

• No-Scalpel Vasectomy: An Illustrated Guide for Surgeons, Third Edition - Basically a technical manual, with plenty of illustrations.
• Vasectomy Medical - A movie of the procedure beginning to end. It also demonstrates No Needle Anesthetic. Not for the faint of heart.
• http://www.beavercleaver.net and http://www.my-vasectomy.com - The sites of two wackos who had their surgery photographed and published on the net. The nice thing is though, it's not sugar coated like some Doctors do. Once again, not for the faint of heart.

Don't worry, I'll have no such pictures on the net! Of course, these sites are for "informational purposes only" I made sure to talk to my Dr for the final word, but they were pretty close.

Time to go add the Date of Doom to Sunbird.

I've been up to a bunch-o-stuff recently and thought I'd mention them quick.

First off, I've finally installed Skype only about 3 months after everyone I know has stopped raving about it. I haven't really had time or the opportunity to check out how it works but I've been told it's about the best that there is. You can even sign up for SkypeOut which let's you call to regular phones. I didn't do a comparison but other say the cost of SkypeOut is cheaper than normal long distance. BTW, I thought I was in for a long night getting sound recording to work in Linux but was pleasantly surprised. It sort of just worked after I turned up the proper things in the mixer.

Something else I've tried out much after everyone else has signed up is Bloglines. Previously I had been using Snownews as my RSS aggregater but Bloglines is way to nice. Don't get me wrong, I still like Snownews, but what really sold me on Bloglines was the ability to use the Blogroll Wizard to add my list of feeds as a Blogroll here. Now when I add or remove a feed to or from Bloglines my Blogroll updates itself. Good stuff.

Something else that I just did last night was to setup my own search for the site. Some how I don't think this is going to be popular enough to warrant a search engine but I did it for the experience. I replaced the Google search that comes with Nanoblogger with a cgi script called Perlfect Search . It was pretty easy to setup following the instructions on their site and seems pretty darn configurable. The only thing that isn't mentioned how to get the indexer to update the index every now and then. I just setup a cron job to do the job. If not, I'd have to run the indexer manually and that's a pain.

Another script I've been playing with is Reblogger for allowing comments. You can either sign up for the service on Reblogger's site or download it and run it on your local server. I was considering using Haloscan but found references on their forums of comments being lost. You can pay to upgrade your account to one where that won't happen but why pay when you can run it yourself and have full control? I've been using Haloscan for the trackback feature only just because I think it's a nice thing and I haven't been able to find something that I could run locally that would do the same thing.

On a side note, the City of Bethlehem finally took the mountain of leaves that have been piled up in front of my house. I'd like to say it took them long enough but honestly this is probably the only disposal thing the City does right. Garbage removal should be just as simple as sticking what you want on the curb at night and it just "goes away" the next morning. I miss living in Whitehall where that used to happen and still does.

On the agenda for tonight if I have time is trying to get Webdav working so I can start using Sunbird to access a central calendar. Wish me luck.

Yesterday we went over to my wife's Aunt and Uncle's for more of a Thanksgiving lunch. Dinner was at noon since they were traveling later to distant relatives. We all stuffed ourselves silly and my wife even made her famous (at least among the family) chocolate chip cookies.

I was hoping to have more pictures of the holiday but for some reason there were next to no photo-ops. Usually I like to get a picture of the impressive spread of food but it never happened. But, I did manage to get a pic of the cookies just before I stole a few.

We even got to see my grandmother, the one we nearly never see. I made sure to get a picture of her with Angie and Ellie. I don't remember much of my Great Grandparents except for what I'm shown in old pictures. At the very least my children will know what their's looked like. The few pics I have of the holiday are in the Photo gallery.

Today my wife has the kids off at the grandparents where they are all working on setting up the trains for Christmas giving me a quiet day at home. Grand-dad is into model trains in a major way and always has an impressive setup each year. After Christmas I'll have pics of his work in the gallery.

I hope everyone had an excellent holiday.

Today I found a couple articles that made me think a little. Here they are and what I thought.

The SOX Act

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act

Basically, this Act is to prevent the corporate people from getting away with the kinds of things they have in the past. Think Enron and Worldcom. Anyway, while reading this my brain was saying to me, Why do we really need this? Do the leaders in major companies have any integrity? Have they every had any integrity? I mean, this stuff just seemed to never happen 20+ years go, then again, I didn't pay attention to these things that long ago.

All in all, it seems to be a good thing but if the scandals of the recent past didn't happen this Act probably wouldn't have either. And it looks like it will be yet another burden on corporations.

But really, why do we need this? Corporate leaders should feel some responsibility to something other than to their own personal coffers. And I'm sure there are plenty that are actual leaders. But I guess there are enough bad eggs to warrant a specific law to combat this kind of fraud. Oh, and it's not just the big companies. My former employer had a fair amount of creative accounting going on and they were small.

Big Brother Alert!

Gunshot Detection Technology

This technology looks interesting, gunshot detection. One of the other articles I ready (sorry, can't find the link) mentioned that it can call the police and triangulate to within about 25ft the location of the gunshot. There was even mention of a remote camera that can me pointed in the direction of the gunshot for monitoring purposes until the police arrive. Don't get me wrong, quick detection of gunshots is a good thing, especially if it saves lives. But this quote from the article linked above disturbed me a little.

Proxity said the technology could also be used to monitor movements and sounds around railways, ports and national borders, "since every sound, including walking, movement through water or vibrations on the ground, could be programmed into the GDS detection system."

So, they can use it for good stuff. Great! But can we trust them to not use it in bad ways? What else can they program these things to do? Maybe pick up the spoken word since that is just sound too?

On a Lighter Note

Use an NSLU2 as an iTunes Server

This looks like an interesting hack from hackaday.com. Well, if you like iTunes it's interesting.

This evening at my friend Chris's house I took the opportunity to show off the pictures in my photo gallery of my children. In this there were a couple of pictures where my oldest daughter had a loose shirt on that fell off her shoulder showing part of her chest. When they saw this they told me they had similar pictures on their own site and were told by their provider to remove them because they were considered child pornography.

It's a sad world in which we have to be afraid to show innocent pictures of our children. Apparently, it's become illegal to be a proud parent. Or at least you must be proud with caution. Therefore, I have scoured the "filth" from my gallery. Both to protect myself from being falsely labeled and to protect my daughter from any psychos using these innocent images inappropriately.

Wait, there's still a picture exposing her left elbow. I better remove that one too.

Warning, short consumer rant below.

Most everyone has heard of Lands' End clothing and about how high quality they are. My wife loves there products and really the do sell some nice looking stuff. The problem is, when washed according to the care label the tend to shrink. At least that's what has happened to me twice now. I bought over $100 of shirts on one occasion and all of them shrank to a noticeable degree. The arms of one shrank by about 4 inches. Recently, I spent $80 two pair of pants, one of them is fine, but the other has shrank to the point of being high waters.

My point is, for the price they sell these things for why do they shrink when washed and dried according to label? I've owned many Docker clothes and have had no problems.

I think the reason my wife has no troubles with Lands' End is she insists on hang drying all her nice clothes. And, if the label said so, then I'd hang them and be happy. As I see it, Lands' End is overpriced for what you get and the fact that the care instructions are inaccurate makes it even worse.

I'm taking a trip back to Sears tomorrow to get my $80 back and then going to put that money into some Dockers.

End rant.