It was a YouTube morning.
For all you nerds out there
In celebration of Jimmy Kimmel’s 5th year on the air, his girlfriend gave him this video
Jimmy returns the favor in
On the weird side and soccer related
And finally in the priceless but lacking taste (couldn’t use the single word for lacking taste) department
Authors on the Net don’t always consider their readership. For instance, consider the problem of puffy eyes or bags under the eyes. In the modern world what do we do? Google of course. Who is allowed to use Google? Everyone, including teenagers.
Take a moment to read the following excerpt found during my quest to answer the question, “What the hell was she thinking?”.
Here are some instructions to reduce eye puffiness:
The puffiness of the eyes can be reduced with a glass of ice water and
four stainless steel spoons.“Chill the spoons in the water and then place one over each eye. When
the spoons become warm, switch them with the others chilling in the
glass of water. Keep switching until you see improvement.”
Obviously, the author didn’t consider the improvisation and lack of forethought that is the hallmark of a teenage mind. For example the following questions should have probably been asked.
For instance, why bother with a glass out of the cabinet, filling it with ice, water, and worry about wet spoons, when you can simply drop them in the ice maker?
What could go wrong, it’s not moving now, how could the spoons cause a problem?
Imagine the dialog.
The funny thing is, the ice maker functioned for a very long time with spoons wrapped around in various places. Just as surprising is that an ice maker has enough torque to bend spoons and not just jam.
I discovered this “experiment” yesterday when we replaced our aging refrigerator with a one year old unit we bought from a friend. I took the ice bin outside and dumped it in the flower bed and was a little startled when I heard metallic clinking as the ice hit the ground.
So, to all your helpful Heloise’s out there, please consider that teenagers do roam the Net and their solution may just surprise you.
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I was touting the wonders of the iPod Touch to a friend, when he mentioned that he wouldn’t buy one due to the lack of a replaceable battery. I originally thought he was worried about the end of life issue. The real issue is what do you do with a small child when the video device runs out of power at 30,000 feet. Enter the external USB battery pack.
My current “go to solution” is the APC Mobile Power Pack, 10 Wh (UPB10) unit from APC. Surprisingly, it gets used for my phone much more than for my iPods.
Looking through APC’s Universal Mobile Device Batteries product list, I saw a AAA battery powered unit the APC USB Battery Extender (UPBX). This might be a good device to have around when you won’t have power for charging the UPB10.
I’ve always wondered why ActiveX controls continue to be written. There are cases where you need access to the local machine to provide a useful service, but most things don’t, at least not outside of a sandbox. There will always be security flaws in every type of software, but ActiveX controls seem to be the easiest target for the dark side. Most of my friends and I stopped using Internet Explorer years ago except for a few sites that either require IE (e.g. Outlook Web Mail) or other poorly written sites that won’t even display data unless you’re using IE.
Browsing through my email today I ran across an article on eWeek, ActiveX Under Seige: Facebook, MySpace Image Uploaders Vulnerable that once again highlights the problem. Here is a small excerpt:
“In tandem with the public release of this information, remote code-execution exploits targeting the Aurigma, Facebook, and Yahoo! issues were released. Each issue allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code in the context of the application using the ActiveX control (typically Internet Explorer),” Kamerling said.
In the absence of patches, Symantec recommends that IE users take “extreme caution” when browsing the Web and ensure that the browser is configured with the highest security settings.
The US-CERT goes a step further, recommending that IE users completely disable ActiveX scripting in the browser.
The article also points you to a helpful guide from US-CERT on Securing Your Web Browser.
I’ve worked at my "day job", CREDANT Technologies, Inc, for almost six years now. I happened to run across an article in the Dallas Business Journal and found out that Credant investors ante up $5M in ‘top-off’ funding round. Not completely surprised, but I definitely wasn’t expecting it.
I find the affect of clutter to be cyclical. Sometimes, when I know what I need to get done and I can be fully absorbed in the task, it has no affect. Other times, when I don’t have a clear picture on what needs to be done, it really bothers me.
There are a ton of tasks to be done this time every year: taxes, new development projects, school activities, etc. All of them seem to slowly suck the life out of me. Oh, and don’t forget winter is starting to lose it’s grasp, so yard work is about to start calling too. It’s enough to make you want to crawl back in bed and pull the covers up.
I wonder if hibernation would get us out of doing taxes and bookwork?
On the bright side, today was the first day of the year that it’s nice enough to put the top down on the car and let the sunshine help drive the winter blues away. Maybe a few more days of direct sunlight will allow the winter fog to lift and release the energy that I need to start knocking tasks off the list.
Update: Reading through my news feed I ran across this post A Guide to Cutting Back When You Feel Overwhelmed from Zen Habits.
I just received a notification email that the Ruport Book 1.0.0 has been released and is available on Lulu as "The Ruport Book".
I’m working on a project that needs to process various items and present them in xml and html. I spent several hours with the beta version of the book this last weekend and found it to be very helpful in getting up and running. The book makes it easier to understand Ruport and it’s a worthy addition to your bookshelf.
At the time of release, the PDF version of the book is listed for $8.50 and the paperback book is listed for $30.00. I’m looking forward to my physical copy arriving in a week or so. I purchased a bundle in advance to receive both items.
If you do any reporting you should really consider purchasing this book and supporting the project. That being said, they do provide a free version of the text at the ruby reports website.
Imagine my surprise when a slip of a google search turns up a town with my surname, Thorp, Wisconsin. My earlier years were spent in Sarcoxie, Missouri (pop 1280, back then). The population of Thorp is 1536, from the last census numbers. I’m guessing with a well timed Google street view, you might be able to see everyone in town.
Visiting the cities’ website (http://www.cityofthorp.com/) it looks to be a nice place with lots of civic activities and nice public facilities. Here is a brief history of the town which was founded in 1893.
Thanks Google for bringing me some fun information.
It took quite a while to get all the pieces put together, mostly because I couldn’t figure out how to disable the new canonical URL stuff in Wordpress. Once I located the section of code to comment out, it started coming together pretty rapidly. As part of the conversion process, I also had to upgrade Gallery to Gallery2.
The impetus for the rewrite was a desire to aggregate all of my flotsam and jetsam. I wanted to hopefully drive more traffic to the site so that I can generate a small amount of revenue from ads, books, etc. At a minimum, it’ll help offset the cost of my toys.
What I’ve discovered is that it’s pretty easy to start pulling in the bits and pieces from Twitter, Magnolia, LibraryThing, et al. to make a semi-coherent website using the best of breed tools sprinkled around the net.
I’m keeping www.donthorp.net - Version 1 up and running for the time being, as well as my blog on wordpress blog.donthorp.net.