Gale Force

So I don’t blog much anymore.  When I do, I’ll probably do it over at The Last Word.

Carry on…nothing to see here.

<Redacted>

Sufficeth to say, I work for Omniture and I’m enjoying it very much

My wife did a nice writeup of the new digs….

In honor of the holiday season, and in true i-have-nothing-original-to-blog-about-so-i’ll-do-a-top-X-list-post style, here are my favorite internet memes from days yonder. From my tubes to yours (there’s a joke about an surrogate motherhood in there somewhere), enjoy:

5. The Rick-Roll (a family favorite). Have you ever been tricked into clicking a link that led to a video clip of the Rick Astley video “Never Gonna Give You Up”? If so, then you’ve been Rick Roll’d! Why anyone would ever be annoyed by this is beyond me…I love Rick Astley and that song is an anthem to my youth.

More after the jump… Read the rest of this entry »

For better or worse, I have an active brain. I was starkly reminded of this when I received an email this morning:

These rocket scientists are concreting solid steel pillars to stop vehicles from parking on the pavement outside a sports bar downtown Bugtustle, KY. They are cleaning up at the end of the day.
How long do you think it will be before they realize where THEIR vehicle is parked?

First of all, this is email spam hilarity at it’s finest! Most people would read the witty comment, look at the picture and have a nice chuckle whilst they merrily carry on with their morning. Not me!

First I wondered if this picture was real and I immediately set out on snopes.com to do some sleuthing. Not finding anything there I started looking for signs of Photoshopping…do the shadows look right, are there any off-colored pixels? Convinced that the photo was probably real, I began to wonder about the construction and installation of the pillars. Maybe they were removable or maybe they were on hydraulics and could retract into the ground (I saw that in a really cool movie once).

In the end, I decided to do what any self-respecting geek would do, fire up Photoshop, move the van, see if it would fit between the 2 pillars in the foreground. Sure enough:

They may have to pull their side mirrors in, but they’re far from helplessly trapped.

UPDATE (which really makes things worse): I failed to account for the viewing angle in my original analysis. Because I am viewing the image in perspective, I need to account for the difference in size between objects in the background and objects in the foreground. With that said, I measured the width of a sidewalk tile at the front of the van and one at the back of the van. I averaged the two and came up with my van position base scale (VPBS). I then measured the width of a sidewalk tile between the 2 pillars. The foreground tiles were 119% the size of the VPBS tiles so I increased the width of the van proportionally and came up with this:

Now we’re talking about a seriously tight squeeze, but I still believe the van was able to escape without incident.

In the end, the joke seemed less funny. Maybe I should have glanced at it, chuckled and went on about my business like everyone else did.

According to Wikipedia (and we know it’s true if it’s on Wikipedia):

The creator of the original ASCII emoticons : ) and :(, with a specific suggestion that they be used to express emotion, was Scott Fahlman; the text of his original proposal, posted to the Carnegie Mellon University computer science general board on 19 September 1982 (11:44) …

Well, after a tip from my crack investigative team (thanks Atticus), I found this reference in the New Testament:

More specifically, the reference is from the KJV Bible and can be found in Acts 10:36

I argue that this is the earliest use of the smiley emoticon and was indeed used as an expression of emotion — in this case: Glory, Hallelujah, Praise the Lord type of emotion. It is generally believed that this text was written between 60 and 80 A.D. which precedes Mr. Fahlman’s post by about 1900 years. There is some debate as to who authored the Acts but evidence suggests that the author was Luke the Physician. Therefore, let us attribute the modern day smiley emoticon to Luke rather than Mr. Fahlman (sorry Scott).

Did you?

I run Apache on my local machine so I can develop web applications in a self-contained environment.  I encountered a strange problem the other day when tried to start the Apache service:

First of all, what an incredibly un-helpful message.  The details also proved less-than-enlightening:

Mmmkay.  Thanks for that.  I know exactly what the problem is now and I can easily go about fixing it…NOT.  msvcr71.dll is the C++ runtime library so it’s not like that narrows down my problem at all.  I do know however…that it has something to do with the C++ code.  Gee thanks.

Well if anyone is experiencing the same problem, let me save you the hours of fruitless Googling that I had to endure and just tell you what the problem was.  I had a VirtualHost whose DocumentRoot pointed to a networked drive that was not currently connected.  All I had to do was re-connect the network drive and bingo! Apache started up without a complaint.

A plea to application developers everywhere: Please, for the love of Blaise Pascal, write more informative error messages!  How hard would it have been to say: “Hey idiot, you’re trying to use a network drive that isn’t currently connected!”.  Instead I get all sorts of useless (but awesome) information about ModVer’s, AppVer’s and Offsets!  I love geeky error dumps as much as the next guy…but for crying out loud…toss me at least one piece of useful debugging information along the way.

Nerf warlocks! Buff retribution! Prot warriors are worthless in PvP! Karazhan destroys guilds! Daily quests are full of loss! Oh wait…I don’t care anymore!

That’s right folks…after 3 years and more /played time then I’m willing to admit, I have broken up with Blizzard. I was paying for two accounts and I just didn’t feel like I was getting $30 worth of entertainment out of it each month. I had no interest in raiding after BC came out, questing and grinding was a bore and level 70 PvP was tedium at best. The only thing that has held my interest over the past several monthas was twinked PvP.

Meet Jerrenn. There’s something very fulfilling about taking a lower level character and gearing him up to the absolute max and then unleashing him on unsuspecting victims in Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch. My good friend got in on the action and created a 49 warrior, Descartes, who completed the “dynamic duo” of 40-49 PvP. DPS Warrior + Holy Paladin = wtfpwn. Oh the battles we fought….matches single-handedly won for the Alliance, faces melted, HKs galore, nodes captures, flags returned. These were good times.

Like every good thing though…it had to come to an end. Descartes went into retirement feeling like WoW had become Unreal Tournament - only not free. I soon followed and the dynamic duo is no more. Maybe we’ll make a WotLK comeback…I haven’t completely ruled out the possibility. But for now, good luck Alliance 40-49 PvP in the Cyclone battle group…you’ll need it.

So, faithful readers, my first and last WoW post you’ll ever read. Hope you enjoyed.

OK, I can’t make this stuff up. Here are the campaign signs for the local City Council race:

Now I’m no political analyst or anything but based on the candidates names alone, I don’t think it would be too difficult to predict a winner. At least Mr. Whimpey recognized his uphill battle and chose a slogan of: “A STRONG voice for the people”. Too bad Mr. McDonald didn’t do the same: “Tired of the clowns running our city?” or “Now trans-fat free” or “Supersize your vote!” or “Would you like ‘lies’ with that?” (ok that one was weak).

Good luck gentlemen…may the best (named) man win.

UPDATE:  Results Are In (OK, they’ve been in for a while but I’m a slacker)

Well apparently blogging was like so many other things I tried to do faithfully. Among those: practicing piano, writing in a journal, showering, eating 1 square of dark chocolate each night (the problem here was NOT the faithful part…it was the 1 square part), writing to my pen pals and a few others I’ve conveniently forgotten about.

Any-ol-hoo…I’m just gonna pick up right where I left off and carry on like nothing every happened…la lee lo…never mind the many month absence of quality JG blog posts….lo de do. Carry on people…nothing to see here…recently…but there will be…in the future time.

Wow…I’m rusty…this post really stinks. Look at all the ellipses I’ve had to use to keep things flowing. Oh well, maybe a nice shower tonight followed by some piano playing and journal writing will inspire me for tomorrow.

Peace…out.