Carry on…nothing to see here.

I have lofty running goals for this year. A goal is not goal however, until it is written down. Therefore:

1. I will run a 5k in under 20 minutes
2. I will run a 10k in under 45 minutes
3. I will run the Top of Utah Marathon
4. I will get my wife to run with me in at least 3 races
5. I will compete in the following events
   • Red Cross Run For Red 5k (Mar 8 )
   • Provo City 5k (Apr 5)
   • Salt Lake City 1/2 Marathon (Apr 19) [tentative]
   • Orem Firefighter’s 5k (Jun 14)
   • Wasatch Back Relay (If I can find a team) (Jun 20-21)
   • Run Through the Lavendar (Jun 28)
   • Freedom Festival 10k (Jul 4)
   • Deseret Morning News 5 or 10k (Jul 24)
   • Top of Utah 1/2 Marathon or Hobble Creek 1/2 Marathon (Aug 23)
   • Top of Utah Marathon (Sept 20)
   • BYU Cougar Run (Oct 2008 TBA)
   • Thanksgiving 4mi (Nov 27)

Bring on the Icy Hot.

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

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

1. Set camera on low ISO setting
2. Take action shots
3. ???
4. Profit!

Apparently cameras have this thing called ISO…and all this time I thought ISO was a disk image on your hard drive…how silly of me. My lack of photog skills has produced a fantastic flickr photo set documenting (blurrily) my latest trip to the Utah Jazz game. Rather than enjoying the game from my usual lofty perch, I was lucky enough to be seated on row B (thanks Pop!) right behind the Jazz bench.

More about the game tomorrow. For now you can browse the photos on flickr (remove eye-glasses before viewing…you won’t notice the difference).

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… (more…)

Seriously folks, this show is hilarious…and I’m not talking Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura Pet Detective-type funny, it’s actually intelligent humor!  If you’re looking for a good way to blow 40-45 minutes of your Monday, subscribe to this podcast!

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.

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).

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.