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By Dave, April 20, 2008 9:20 pm

Make your own Steampunk mouse | Features | Custom PC

A most unusual steampunk mouse. Nicely done!

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By Dave, April 20, 2008 9:09 pm

myIPneighbors.com Reverse IP Domain Check DNS Tool

Cool tool!

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By Dave, April 20, 2008 9:05 pm

HOWTO divide a freezer-bag into individual servings before freezing – Boing Boing

As one of the commenter’s said, “Head slapping simple!”. I love it!

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By Dave, April 20, 2008 8:46 pm

Google Book Search Book Viewability API – Google Code

Cleaning out tabs… Another one I can’t remember if I have posted a link to. This one is mainly for my reference.

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By Dave, April 20, 2008 8:42 pm

Main Page – NovaRoma
Nova Roma is dedicated to the study and restoration of ancient Roman culture. From its founding to 330 CE, when it ceased to be the center of Imperial authority, Rome laid the foundation for our modern Western civilization. Founded 2,750 years after the Eternal City itself, Nova Roma seeks to bring back those golden times, not through the sword and the legions, however, but through the spread of knowledge and through our own virtuous example.

Not sure if I have posted a link to this site before or not. Either way, it’s worth a look for anyone interested in ancient cultures.

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By Dave, April 20, 2008 8:28 pm

Found the valve cover gasket I bought right after we got the pickup truck several years ago and then never installed. Rounded up the tools and started removing the valve cover a little before ten this morning. What with a dropped bolt that never made it to the ground, a loose EGR pipe connection with frozen fitting and after all was said and soundly cursed an alternator that no longer worked, it was after 2 when I finally got it done. The bolt was behind the lower radiator hose. The EGR pipe connection now has high temp RTV on, around and in it. And the alternator will get a new connector should it give any more trouble.

As far as I can tell without putting much millage on it the oil leak is fixed. Now just need to fix the power steering pump front seal, and get the tires balanced and it will be road worthy again.

Put the camper shell back on, put the tool box in the back, along with an ice chest (empty but clean inside), and a couple of chairs, so we are somewhat ready to go somewhere, sometime. Soon.

After the time I have spent without doing much was totally worn out after that little bit of work so came in and took it easy for a while. Went out around 4 and got some fuel for the truck and that was when we decided to get the tires balanced. Also going to let some air out of the back ones. Had them at 35 psi for hauling heavy loads but they are way too bouncy at that pressure. Got back and ate and lay down for a bit.

About dark went over to the Yard Sale Trailer to check on some stuff and when coming back I noticed that the boat was missing. Came back over here and called Bill to see if he had moved it but he hadn’t. So looks like some low life stole it. The gate on that side is now locked and will stay that way unless we are over there. I’ll get the barbed wire and redo the fence on that side too. Not that the boat is any great loss. I was going to use it for a tomato bed this year since we had had such good luck selling it last year but it still pisses me off that someone would just pull up and steal it. And am LMAO at the amount of work they will have to go through to get it water worthy again. 😈 Sucker had either come loose from the trailer at highway speeds or hit something really hard in the water, cause it had been folded in half (fiberglass) just in front of the middle seat. Hope the arsehats have fun…

Guess I will close for the night. The fingers and the brain are not working together right now and the corrections are driving me nuts. 🙄 Till tomorrow… 😉

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By Dave, April 20, 2008 8:50 am

Dilbert on Yahoo!

For those going to the new (really pain in the arse to navigate, flash laden, blinky, crappy, badly designed, most likely by (as one of the commenter’s said) Morlock and the Pointy Haired Boss) and HATING it, take heart! The strip is also available on Yahoo in a plain unadorned version! Above link takes you there. I’m resetting my bookmark now… Enjoy!

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By Dave, April 20, 2008 8:10 am

Suspension of disbelief applies to networking (Scripting News)

Another post by Dave Winer about Comcast’s ridiculous views (and limits) on (what they consider) excessive internet usage.

After reading his piece (He has an interesting take on having big brother looking over your shoulder while browsing btw) I went and read their FAQ on excessive usage and it looks like if I were one of their customers, I too, would be targeted for disconnection. They (somehow) figure that 2GB a month or more constitutes excessive usage on a hi-speed connection. 😯 Now I don’t send a lot of email or watch a bunch of movie trailers but I DO download a fair number of Linux distor’s and other software and I DO look at a fair number of pictures and read a lot of blogs and feeds, as well as listen to a bit of music and a few podcasts, and there have been DAYS that I’ve used that kind of bandwidth. 🙄

Guess I’m not one of their “normal” internet users either, Dave. And I’m REALLY glad I don’t depend on Comcast for my service and I pity those that have to.

One other thing that really gets me is that from what I am getting from his posts is they are charging him around $180.00 a month for this absurdly small amount of bandwidth. I had assumed from the previous post and the amount it cost him that he had a business connection or T1 but the FAQ he points to is for residential customers. I know prices are high in San Fransisco but if that’s a normal residential high speed internet bill there I’m sure glad I live in Alabama! 😯

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By Dave, April 19, 2008 9:44 pm

Like parts of this one. Parts of it just pissed me off and then there were a couple of minutes here and there that were kind of okay.

My monitor has been getting worse and worse for a while now but money is not so I’ve been putting up with it and using the laptop mostly (like now). But I’ve got this site to build for money and one of the things I set as a requirement to do it is a new monitor. Got on line last night and looked at what was available. Wally world had the best prices on a 20″ lcd and the one in Gadsden showed to have it in stock. Since I needed to go that way this morning to get the Ribose anyway I checked the bank balance and decided we could afford to get it now as long as the money was gonna come in from the job fairly quickly and it’s supposed to. Checked again this morning and the online wally world is still showing iit in stock there so away we go. Get there and get some MSM in the pharmacy section and also look to see if they carry Ribose. Don’t see any so ask at the pharmacy window and am told that if they have it it will be on the shelf. No offer to look it up and see if they can get it. I thank her for her non assistance and walk away. I’m in the damn store and that alone pisses me off and her attitude and gum smacking was over the edge. Should have just left right then but wanted the monitor. Go back to electronics and look. Everywhere. They have a few but the ones they have out are all priced 30 to 40 bucks over what I saw online. Finally ask a guy if they have this model, which I had written down. He says they may have it in the back and goes to check. Comes back with it in hand and it too is 40 bucks over what they have it for on line. I tell him as much. He’s polite and explains that they have higher prices than online but that I can order online and have it shipped to the store for free in most cases and they will call when it comes in. I think him and get the hell out of the store. Something in all of their stores drives my blood pressure through the roof. Not sure if it is the Chinese air or what but it does it to me every time I go in one. By the time I leave I am ready and wanting to hit someone for anything or even nothing. 👿

Went to Goodwill and got some books 🙄 then to Apple A Day and got the Ribose. By then I needed to eat so we stopped and got stuff for sandwiches and after a non blogged period of time, went and sat by the river and fended off ducks while we ate. I told them that if they got much closer I would have duck for dinner and meant it. One was so brazen I had to kick his tail feathers to make him move so I could get stuff cleaned up so we could leave, and we were in a parking lot sitting in the back of the van. Cat got pictures of the not so little beggars and I’ll try to remember to post them when she gets them off the camera.

Went from there to the Gadsden Salvation Army which was quite disappointing. Cat got a few books but there was nothing I was interested in. From there came back home, I took a dose of the Ribose and then took a nap. Woke up feeling a lot better but still not too good. Been reading mostly since.

I did spend some time looking for lcd monitors online but found none that are any cheaper than the one from wally world. Guess if I want one it’ll have to be ordered. May go and look around a bit tomorrow at some of the stores and see if anyone has something on sale though I doubt its gonna be even close size, resolution and/or price wise.

Gonna read a bit longer then call it a night. Till tomorrow…

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By Dave, April 18, 2008 10:51 pm

Got a fair amount done today. Nothing much finished but with website building that never seems to happen very fast. Bought another domain name for our e-commerce site. Will post the links as soon as I get more of it built. Built the new domain and linked the name to it. Installed WordPress 2.5 as the front end/home page and general information/content management program. Installed OSCommerce as the e-commerce program as it used to be able to import large amounts of formatted data and I have worked with it several times in the past so am at least somewhat familiar with how badly it’s guts are designed and just how hard it is to make it look the way I want it to.

Have a new site to design and build for a customer also. Got the info that was supposed to allow us to move the domain to our control but something is not working and the guy is out of town till monday at the earliest. I did get the old site files downloaded and on the hard drive here but can’t create the new domain till the transfer of the name is made. So waiting is on this one for now.

Then spent the afternoon and most of the evening trying to get header graphics somewhat the way I want them for our site. Then trying too get the text in the positions I want it. Then throwing it all away and starting over again from scratch. Again. And again. Got them close and I know a LOT more about the way both programs handle certain things now. Which will be handy for the work coming up with this other site so I’m marking it all off to experience and moving on to the next problem.

They got the DNS problem fixed by this morning. Still have no idea what it was but it all works now which is the important thing but I’d still like to know. Second time in a little over 2 years it has happened with the same domain names in the same way with the same hosting service.

Tis late and I ran out of Ribose yesterday so am out of energy tonight. Got to go to Gadsden tomorrow morning and get some more. Gonna call it a night and start again tomorrow. Till then…. 😉

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By Dave, April 18, 2008 2:53 pm

Sydney Dowse – Telegraph

Sydney Dowse, who died on Thursday aged 89, was one of the principal constructors of the tunnel used in the Great Escape; he was among those who got away, and was at large for 14 days before being recaptured and sent to the “death camp” at Sachsenhausen, where he dug another tunnel to gain a few more days of freedom.

Quite a remarkable man who lead one hell of a charmed life!

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By Dave, April 17, 2008 11:01 pm

Been a day of going in circles. Started out with chasing a self playing file that wasn’t 😉 and went downhill from there. Have been having database trouble and after finally getting signed up and logged into the forums at my hosting service it looks like it may be a malformed htaccess file or a bad php.ini file instead. But then I get to the point of backing up some databases and the file manager program tells me the database is not working correctly and to tell the hosting company. Talk about circles.

Then I get an email telling me that one of our clients sites that has two parked domains on it is down. Turns out that the main site is still okay but the two parked domains are pointing to never-never land on someone else’s server. By now it’s dark and I still haven’t gotten past the looking at the e-commerce programs but I stop and spend another couple of hours trying to find where they are pointing and why. Remove them and reinstall from two different control panels and still no joy. So I submit a trouble ticket to the hosting company (another one than the one my sites are on). Get an email back in a little while that says it all looks fine on their end and just wait a few hours for things to propagate across the DNS system. I check and it all looks the same which I tell them and point out that we had not changed anything and why were they pointing elsewhere in the first place. Haven’t checked my mail since so ??? who knows where that is.

Then start on getting problems straightened out with our sales domain. Had two different ones and lost one but kept the other. Trouble was the one we lost was the one the databases were pointed to. So spent a while with phpMyAdmin poking and prodding data and getting all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed. Finally got the blog back up. Now to install the updates… 🙄 Got Cat a ftp account on the site and made a redirect to the blog. Still haven’t gotten the database backed up. Or submitted a trouble ticket on it. Or started on installing the e-commerce program. Or working on the van. But I did manage to pinch a nerve in my back by turning around while walking across the living room this morning. Still feels real good… 🙁 Will check the sites one more time for DNS propagation and then am gonna call it a night and start chasing my tail again in the morning… Till tomorrow… 😉

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By Dave, April 17, 2008 11:40 am

Curious Expeditions » Blog Archive » The Geyser Riders
If you were walking along the shore of the east river on March 27th 1905, you would have seen an entirely singular spectacle. A geyser some forty feet tall shot from the east river, and atop that geyser, like a cowboy on a bucking bull, rode Dick Creedon.

Now THAT would have one hell of a ride!

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By Dave, April 17, 2008 8:18 am

A new reason to hate Comcast (Scripting News)

Intimidation, the better business model, NOT. In the last few years it seems that this type of corporate behavior is becoming the standard. Could it have something to do with the way the government has gone from being “by the people, of the people, for the people”, (or however that goes) to “we is teh government and we will do whatever we wants to”. Don’t know, just a thought that flitted across the minds eye. What I do know is that I vote with my money and a business that gave me the attitude that Comcast has given Dave on this wouldn’t get another cent out of me. Here he is paying $180.00 a month to have them as a backup, tries them out as his main connection as he hears good things about them and they talk to him really bad for using their bandwidth. Not a good way of doing business in my book. Give them hell, Dave!

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By Dave, April 16, 2008 10:48 pm

Got the last of the covers scanned and posts cleaned up early tonight and have been installing the new theme and getting it configured since then. Built a new header graphic and put up new wallpaper too. As I said over there I’ve got most of the cobwebs cleaned out and am polishing the last of the door knobs now. 😉 However you look at it the basic upgrade work is DONE! Now I get to start on the pile of additional Nero Wolfe books that I have gotten in the last couple of years and not scanned and put up yet.

However have got another little project that I’m gonna get on first. Been putting off getting our E-commerce site set up till I got to where I could wrap my head around it again and after the last few days working on this stuff I seem to be back in shape to do it, so am gonna start on it tomorrow. Then I get to start putting all the other books in it that we have been collecting. At a guess I’d say we have between 12,000 and 16,000 that we need to get online. Cat has got somewhere over 4000 already in a database that I need to figure out how to import, which has been one of my holdups in doing the site. None of the programs I have looked at make it real easy to get data into them except by their own web based interface, which is fine if you are keying the data in one piece at a time. But if you have an existing inventory tis not quite so easy. Oh well, will worry about that tomorrow, look at them all again and make the final decision on which one to go with and start modifying for our purposes.

And on that note, boys and girls, I am gonna call it a night. It’s a night… 🙄 😆 Till tomorrow… 😉

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By Dave, April 15, 2008 8:56 pm

Had high hopes of getting the Wolfe site update finished today but kept getting bogged down in the details. Still got right at 40 more posts to update and I don’t think I am gonna do much if any more on i today/night. Figure I will start again in the morning and do what I can as long as I can. Think I am gonna call it an early night. Till tomorrow…

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By Dave, April 15, 2008 12:13 am

If you have a carriage return in one of your terms database Name fields it can cause “Suggested Tags From” as well as “Display Click Tags” to quit working. Just spent several hours trying to find why it quit working and ended up looking at the database since removing and reinstalling didn’t do anything. Updating to a later version did nothing. Finally went into the database and found where WordPress stored the tags data (in what they call the terms field) and started looking for something that didn’t look right. Found a couple of things that looked weird but then found one field that was twice the size of any other and noted it looked like a carriage return was in the middle of the field. Edited the field and removed the return then refreshed the page I was working on and everything worked correctly again. You have to go in and edit the database fields with phpMyAdmin or something along those lines directly to fix this problem but it does the trick. Now to make sure it doesn’t happen again…

And as it is tomorrow and have solved that really irritating problem and can now sleep, I am going to bed… 😉

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By Dave, April 14, 2008 11:15 pm

But not quite there yet. Got about 60 more posts to go so I’ve managed to update nearly a hundred a day in the last two days. Of course at least a fair number of that last batch are gonna be the ones that have to have the books rescanned but I’ve got that down to around 10 minutes a book for scanning resizing and other assorted text cleanup on the post so not too bad.

Once I get the last ones done then I can change the theme and start working on customizing it to look and work the way I want it. 😎

Simple Tags went weird on the Wolfe site while ago and I haven’t gotten it back working right yet. Not sure what happened other than it’s eaten up an hour or so of my evening. 🙁 Guess I will do the uninstall bit and see if it will work when I reinstall it. Have already removed it and reuploaded it from the computer but from things on the site it leaves stuff in the database so guess I will have to remove those bits too with the uninstaller. Still working on this site fine. Damn software… 👿

Found a site that still linked to an old domain name I had lost years ago and clicked on it to see who now had it and it went nowhere. Checked it in the whois and was not taken! So went to GoDaddy and bought it for a couple of years and pointed it to the nero-wolfe.us site for now. New one is http://www.nero-wolfe.org so now those old links out there have come home again. 😉 Now if the folks that got my .net will just let it lapse… 🙄

Gonna go and try one more time to get the simple tabs working and then hit the sack for the night. Till tomorrow… 😎

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By Dave, April 13, 2008 10:14 pm

Nero Wolfe Cover Scans Site

Been rebuilding ALL of the posts over there. I had hard coded database code in the template to get the scans to show up in the posts a LONG time ago before WordPress was built to handle pictures the way it does now. So now that it will and does and makes it easy I am having to remove the links from the database and upload the pictures and put them in the proper places in the text. And clean up a lot of old hard formatting that I left in when I moved the site from hard coded to WordPress in the first place. And add tags to each and every post. And rescan a lot of the covers that I never got around to way back when I started the migration. Am almost a quarter of the way through, I think. But I may not be due to I haven’t gotten to the section where I am gonna have to rescan the covers. Have done 60+ posts today so far and am about done in. It’s taking a LONG time to get it all done and make sure I haven’t forgotten something in each and every one of the blasted things. One of those things I have been meaning to do for years now and would work on for a bit and then get off on other things and not get back to till something broke and… So am gonna try to get this sucker finished and to the point that I can move on to other things on that site that I have been meaning to get done also and putting off till I got this done. I think I am procrastinating with this ramble so I don’t have to do any more of that mind numbing stuff over there. 🙄

But I need to get back and do at least a bit more before the night is over. So will close for the nonce and see how far I can get before the siren call of sleep gets too alluring. Till tomorrow… 😉

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By Dave, April 13, 2008 6:08 pm

*** Natural wood glaze, esprit cabane, eco-friendly DIY and decorative arts

Interesting article on making your own wood stain with pigment and beer. Cool stuff! 😎