Category: tech

Talk about software, hardware, electronics, and a myriad of other sex-repellent topics.

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a firm belief in entropy


Happy Sunday night Sunday night people; Happy Monday morning Monday morning people.

Sitting around now drinking some better-drink-it-tonight wine before it goes to vinegar, listening to the iPod shuffle up some tunes, and helping Sharaun decide what to make for dinner by suggesting my all-time go-to, spaghetti. “Why is it always spaghetti?,” she asks rhetorically. “It’s my secret punishment for you not having dinner planned,” I think in my brain while I say, “Because I like spaghetti,” out loud (neither is less true than the other). Long blog tonight, words just came. I resisted the urge to split-and-save, and just plonked it all down in as best a logical order as I could find. Enjoy.

Today I had decided that, after church, I wanted to get out into the yard and do some work. Yesterday I was out and mowing the lawn early enough that the puffs of my exhaled breath hung like small clouds in front of my face, trying to beat forecasted rain that never did show up. Today, I had plans to finish up the fence and maybe plant some new plants. Of course, per my standard work ethic, I got slightly less than that done. I did manage to finish up edging in the backyard (the stupid rechargeable edger ran out of juice with just under half to go, I swear I’m buying a gas one), tend to some plants, do some weeding, and actually do as much as I could on the fence without making the final trip to the hardware store for the pieces I needed (I was slightly less motivated than needed for a trip to the store).

While I was out laboring under the cloudless sunny sky, Keaton joined me, following me around and offering her “help” whenever she could. Unsurprisingly, I eventually broke down and ended up laying in the grass with her blowing bubbles from a bottle and wand she found somewhere. That was so fun, I decided to go ahead and taunt the weather Gods by breaking out the hammock and Summertime patio-set cushions and umbrella (I had uncovered the barbecue a week ago, and have cooked on it twice already in these infantile days of Summer). Keaton helped me fasten the cushions onto the chairs with their little Velcro loops, and immediately wanted to “fwing” in the hammock (which is the real reason I broke the thing out to begin with).

I figure, if I had to tally it all on a timesheet for a foreman, I’d have about one and a half solid hours of work, and an equal amount of time spent blowing bubbles, swinging with Keaton in the hammock, and running around the yard togehter. It’s the kinda workday I man can get into, you know? If only one of those burrito trucks would’ve come buy hawking quesadillas and nachos midway through or something… it woulda been tops.

Nerd stuff ahead, fast-forward if you want:

Oh, and, not that you care (or notice, I’ll bet) I fixed a few particularly annoying (to me) stylesheet bugs here on the site this weekend. One, I got rid of the stupid green bullets Internet Explorer put next to the poll choices from Friday’s entry (Firefox rendered them fine, but I had to hack around IE’s stupidness, and IE still doesn’t do the dynamic AJAXy stuff right like Firefox does). Two, I also finally fixed the fact that IE rendered the “recent comments” section of the sidebar with absolutely no gap between the comments (Firefox, of course, handled this perfectly and as intended). So, because it’s an inelegant fix, the gap in Firefox is now slightly larger than I’d like, while the IE gap is slightly smaller. Hey, it’s the best I could do without getting too fancy. Hope it enhances your experience (yeah, sure).

Nerd stuff over.

Let me tell you folks, I’m a firm believer in the concept of entropy. Defined as, “Inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society,” I’m so convinced in the concept because I see it happening before my eyes all the time: Before I leave for work, I clear off my tiny third of the dresser-top (Sharaun gets two-thirds, I get the rest, this is just how it goes); when I return from work, the same surface which was just hours ago neat and tidy is now littered with washed and folded clothes, keys, stray earrings and other jewelry, receipts, and all other manner of crap. Entropy.

One day, upon returning home from work, I notice that our game of Balderdash was, for some reason, sitting on the floor in the garage between our two cars. Over the next few days, Balderdash was joined by some large bag bulging with Lord knows what. Soon, there are clothes atop the pile, what looks like trash, toys and shoes. I have no idea where the pile is coming from, but it’s not me. It’s growing by the week, and shows no signs of stopping. The other day I swear I saw a couple Fraggles asking advice from it. To make matters worse, it’s now spilling into the area where I walk, making the garage difficult to navigate. Entropy.

When I ask Sharaun about the slowly growing mound, she says, “Oh, that all came out of my car… I need to clean that up.” Folks, I honestly have no earthly idea how that substantial pile came from her car, especially since her car is still so piled with junk it’s hard to believe anything has ever been taken out of it. I guess, when the junk gets so high it spills out the open doors, she simply makes new piles. Now, let me say, I’m not trying to pick on her too much here… I mean I still love her and all. Entropy.

Then, tonight, Sharaun came home from an hour or so where I was home alone with Keaton, and came in the house to ask, “So… I guess you haven’t been in the garage lately, right?” “What do you mean,” I reply, “I was in and out of there all day today working outside.” “Well, the shelf above your workbench completely fell off the wall, everything’s all over the place,” she says. I walk into the garage to see for myself… and yes, everything has really fallen off the wall. Three of the four metal ‘L’ brackets that tie the shelving into the studs are still attached to the wall, although one is bent, and the fourth is gone, ripped out entirely. Everything, from our hiking packs, to boxes full of who-knows-what, to the receiver for my ghetto garage sound system… everything… is stacked in a sprawling pile at the front of my truck. I didn’t even stay in there long enough to contemplate the cleanup – I just sighed and moved on. Entropy.

Quick reminder that I’m running sounds familiar‘s first ever You Decide Friday poll, and for convenience I’ve reposted the voting right below for those who’ve yet to participate.

Thanks to those who’ve already voted, and thanks to the creative soul who mashed up the options to make their own… quite humorous. If you’ve not voted already, what are you waiting for?

Did I mention that Keaton’s stuttering is back? If not: Keaton’s stuttering is back. It’s strange, because while she and Sharaun were in Florida, her previous bout simply disappeared. It was completely gone up until about three days ago (I even wrote about being happy it had seemingly cleared itself up), when, all of the sudden, she just started doing it again. Like I said before, I’m still not overly concerned, especially now that it’s come and gone once already – it’s just strange. I’ll keep ya posted on the on-again-off-again-ness of it right here on the ol’ blog, OK? OK.

Well, that’s about it… goodnight people. Until tomorrow.

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keaton had a party


Hey guys, welcome to “workweek eleven,” as we call it at my sawmill. It’s gonna seem quite the ramble today, as I wrote it in snatches over the weekend. I tried to arrange things the best I could, and put stuff that could potentially be related together… hope that’s OK with you. The practical side of me thought I should split this up into two entries, guaranteeing Tuesday night in the process – but, I didn’t do it. Enjoy.

Saturday morning I headed over to Pat’s place bright and early to lend a hand with some manual labor (you know, as all good friends tend to do from time to time). After a good morning’s worth of work, I hopped into the Ford to head home. With the sunshine soaked into my bones from the work outside, I was feeling one of those good-weather highs and I rolled down the windows and opened the sunroof as I cranked the tunes. As I drove through the neighborhood, the early great weather we’ve been having prior to the “official” change of season was openly apparent in the populous: Men were out tending their keeps with lawnmowers and edgers and blowers, children were jumping rope and riding bikes in driveways, and the mechanically inclined were propped on elbows next to motorcycles or disappeared up to their ankles under vehicles. The buzz of two-stroke engines and the collective yelps of children swelled together with my music to make it a defining moment for me: My own personal arrival of Spring. I’m ready for summer and all its dry, hot, baking heat. I want to go camping, swimming, and on bring buckets of chicken to parks. I want to drink beer and eat meat. I want to sweat in the yard and fall asleep in the hammock. C’mon Summer… we’re waiting.

I know you guys hate it when I write about my iPod, but I just wanted to share real quick how my whole iPod use-model has changed. Ever since I got the new mega-size 160GB iPod Classic some time ago, I’ve slowly been working on assembling the “ultimate” collection of music on it – my personal musical canon (at this point in time), if you will. Now, previously, my iPod was always smaller than my collection – meaning what went on the iPod had to be a carefully chosen subset of of greater collection on hard disk. Now, however, it seems like I can just keep adding and adding tunes to this beast, and it’ll just continue to swallow them up like a black hole. This phenomenon is so pronounced, in fact, that I’m beginning to reach a critical transition in iPod use: the day when my iPod and my hard disk collection are one in the same (i.e. the iPod can contain everything I have). As a matter of fact, I’m close to this point already.

Lately I’ve been plugging in the iPod and just paging through my collection looking for music to add. With the humungous size of the thing, I often find myself thinking things like, “Every single Roxy Music album through Avalon?, sure, why the heck not?” I’ve picked over my collection so much, actually, that what’s going on the iPod is driving a general “cleanup” of music in the main collection. I mean, if it’s not good enough to put on the iPod, why do I even have it at all? I see this whole thing converging around a single, amazingly complete collection. And, since Apple seems to be increasing the size of the ‘Pods at a good clip – hopefully my iPod will grow as my collection does. OK, that’s enough music stuff.

Or… is it? I promise it’s different from the nerdy kinda music talk, it’s just setup.

A thought struck me the other night: I simply don’t have enough classic Motown records on my iPod. Now, Stax is fairly well represented, but the thought of going through Summer without those classic Gordy A-Sides shuffling up was enough to make me cry. I have one Motown Records “best of” from the classic “Hitsville USA” period in my collection, but even it seemed lacking – since the Detroit output at the time was like a pipeline of #1 records. So, I got online and went to may favorite 100% pay-for-music place and acquired a collection called 100 Motown Classics, which contains, well… one-hundred Motown classics. I dropped it on the iPod early Sunday morning and waited with anticipation for a good time to indulge.

So that’s how a Sunday evening found Keaton and I dancing around the living room to an endless run of Motown classics, like something you’d see in a one of those movies chicks dig so much. You know, that done and overdone ubiquitous scene where a bunch of women dance around to an old-time rock ‘n’ roll record? Yeah… you know the scene I’m talking about – it usually happens in a kitchen, and nine times out of ten words will be mouthed into a wooden spoon. ‘Cept we were in the living room, and there were no wooden-spoon ersatz microphones, and she doesn’t really know any of the words. Still, it was fun.

After we’d danced ourselves out, we played with the loot she got from her birthday party that same day. I know, her real birthday was weeks ago – but we had to cancel and reschedule her party because she got sick when she and Sharaun were in Florida. So, today we met a bunch of her (and our) friends up at the kid-gym place for an hour running around on mats, somersaulting, balance-beaming, and all sorts of other Dad’s-gonna-end-up-out-of-breath -ing verbs. We actually had a great time, owed in no small part to the brevity of the whole thing. Putting an hour-and-a-half limit on it really helped, in my opinion, to keep it short and sweet – without being overlong for grown-ups and kids. And, Keaton took home quite a haul.

I’m mostly looking forward to playing with some of the water toys she got once the weather warms up, and am particularly excited about the junior-gardener set she got – including yellow, red, and green polkadot-ladybug bucket, spade, claw, and little matching gloves. I mean, even though I’m like 100% bull-male, I do enjoy rooting around in the garden – and it’ll be fun to have her out there in the dirt with me. She also got a Mrs. Potato Head, which I think is awesome. Although, Mr. Potato Head didn’t bother showing up… likely out at the Root Cellar again, watching those slutty college spuds peel themselves to pay their way through college or something… Meanwhile Mrs. Potato Head has to make due on the government disability she gets for having an ear where her mouth should be and a tongue sticking out from the top of her head (she really is a sight). Sad toys, really.

Keeping with the Keaton theme today…

You guys may remember (or not, I won’t be offended) I posted a while back about a somewhat disturbing new development on the Keaton front – when she surprised us by coming down with a stuttering “thing” rather out of the blue. Well, turns out it must’ve been quite the transient phase, because no more than a week or two later it’s now almost completely gone. Strange, maybe it was just a kick she was on… maybe she liked the sound of it. Guess we’ll never know, although I will say I’m glad it worked itself out and I don’t have to be “worried” about it anymore – even if it was secretly hilarious. Her speech, in fact, continues to impress me.

She’s currently spending a lot of energy making sure she gets her pronouns right. Each time she goes to say “he” or “she” or “his” or “her” or “your” or “my” or “I,” you can actually see her brain work overtime in an effort to get it right. Honestly, she impresses the crap out of me with the way she seems to figure things out, even to the point of correcting herself on-the-fly. Oftentimes, she’ll say something like, “Here daddy, I’m bringing his phone to you,” and then immediately correct herself by adding, “I’m bringing your phone to you.” Sharaun, of course, thinks she’s the smartest baby in the world, but I like to think that, as the dad, I’m a little more reserved in gushing over her language abilities (but I do my fare share of fawning behind the scenes). She is my little prodigy though, I’ll admit that. /Gloating.

OK, OK, that’s enough. Sorry it was so varied. Goodnight.

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limiting tracks-per-artist in playlists


A middle-blog before my typical midnight post, dedicated to some tech content. Move along if that’s not your thing.

If you’ve read some of my banal iPod-related ramblings here before, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of using iTunes/iPod Smart Playlists to configure interesting musical selections. One of my favorite Smart Playlists I have on the ‘Pod is the “Unheard” list. A simple playlist that grabs all items where the “playcount” equals zero, and theoretically eases the task of making sure I’ve heard all those gems lurking in the back corners of my disk. The only problem with the playlist, and, in fact, with any shuffle-based playlist, is that it gets skewed heavy towards artists that are better represented on the iPod. Now look, I don’t need a lesson in statistics here, OK? I realize that, if out of 500 tracks on my iPod, 250 are the Grateful Dead, I’m going to see the Dead pop up pretty often in a true shuffle (as would be the case with my randomly-picked “unheard” list).

Problem is, I actually want to have every single Dead Dick’s Picks album on my iPod, just on the off chance that I can impress some Deadhead by saying “You bet I do” when they ask, passing the bong, “Hey man, do you have that ’75 Berkely gig, you know, the one where Donna Jean couldn’t hit the high notes in ‘Rain and Snow?'” And, I want each of the twenty-nine takes it took The Beatles to get “Hold Me Tight” right, not to mention all fifteen live versions of “Over the Hills and Far Away” Zeppelin performed on their ’73 US tour. I really do want to have all that on my iPod, all the time. I don’t want, however, the thousands and thousands of songs that pepper my iPod as a result of that fanaticism to “overpower” all the other stuff when shuffling. Here’s where you say, “Too bad Dave, you can’t have it both ways.”

Oh but I can! Here’s how I managed to limit the number of tracks per artist in a shuffled playlist.

First, make a smart playlist of all your music minus the overpopulated artists. I did this based on the catch-all criteria of track-time being greater than zero, and then filtered out the Grateful Dead, Beatles, and Led Zeppelin (my three most heavily populated artists). You could just as easily do it basing it off the iPod’s default “Music” playlist (which contains your entire library). However you do it, what you should end up with is a playlist containing your entire collection minus your most heavily represented artists.

Next, make a separate playlist for each of your overpopulated artists, limiting the number of songs to a reasonable number (I chose one hundred) chosen at random. Do this by using the “artist is” criteria along with the “limit to” filter. In my case, this means I have three playlists: Beatles, Zeppelin, and the Dead, each limited to one-hundred songs chosen at random from the thousands available for each artist.

Finally, create a new playlist that pulls music from the playlists you just made in the previous steps (you can use “in playlist” as a criteria for a playlist). You’ll need to make sure that you set the match criteria to “any” instead of “all” on that last one, or you’ll get a playlist with zero items. This newest playlist is essentially your entire collection, including your overpopulated artists, but limiting them to one-hundred (or a number of your choosing) tracks each. And, from now forward, instead of basing all your shuffle-themed playlists around the iPod’s default “Music” playlist, you can base them off of your new limited-representation list. Voila!

Postscript: If you do create sub-lists such as my one-hundred item random ones described above, you may notice that, over time, these playlists are not magically “refreshed” with new random tunes via iTunes. Despite the more-than-somewhat misleading name, “live updating” does not mean the playlist will choose a new batch of random songs, it means only that, when you add more songs to the iPod/iTunes that fit the smart playlist criteria, they’ll be accounted for and captured. If you’re looking to get some form of “auto refreshing” for your random tune selection (as I was, makes things more interesting), you’ll need to add some further elimination criteria to the playlist. I chose to add a criteria that “last played” is “not within the last” one week. This way, once a song is filtered into the playlist and you’ve heard it recently, it’s eliminated from the playlist and replaced with another (per the “limit to XX tracks” tickbox). Anyway, hope that helps.

You can likely think of all sorts of other limited-shuffle tricks you can do with playlist-combining, which makes using Smart Playlists a fun way to experience your music in different ways. Too bad Apple hasn’t added a way to “hide” certain Smart Playlists from showing on the iPod. It would be neat to be able to mask out the ones that are only “supporting” lists as building blocks to a final one (like the hundred-track ones required as interim input to create the final list above). Maybe with a new firmware, eh?

See ya!

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you’re all in my chest


Wednesday night kinda crept up on me this week. I’ll be honest up-front tonight and admit that I’m not really in much of a blogging mood. It’s the first night in a couple weeks that I hadn’t already picked and mentally half-written my next day’s topic before sitting down with the laptop. I guess that’s bad, because now I’m here writing about not knowing what to write again. But, I’ve got the house to myself (Keaton’s sleeping, Sharaun out) and the iPod is on shuffle… so maybe the words will come.

Speaking of the iPod, I have this new obsession with my “Unplayed” smart-playlist. That’s the playlist where any song that’s never been listened to (at least, not since have to reset all my play-counts to zero) goes. Right now, it’s sitting at eleven-thousand some-odd songs, and I listen to it every day to try and reduce the number. I want to get that sucker to zero unplayed tracks. Today, the thing played a trick on my by shuffling up the near thirty-minute version of “Dark Star” the Dead played at Woodstock in 1969. The Dead’s entire mega-historical Woodstock set has been around for along time on bootleg, I even bought one back in college, but the sources were always really poor audience tapes that sounded awful. So, when the actual soundboard-sourced recording leaked a few years back, I was totally excited. Thirty minutes per track, however, don’t make for quick work on zeroing that playlist…

Anyway, I won’t bore you with all that. I might as well get to what you’ve been waiting for anyway… the one-week update to my month-long Enzyte Challenge. First, before I get to the results (which you can probably already see on the screen below anyway), I wanted to document some of my initial impressions:

 

  1. These pills do nothing.

 

OK, that’s done. Let’s move onto the results:

(Learn how to interpret this chart here.)

Yeah, those little Daves are both exactly the same height (and width). I’m serious. Print it out and draw lines on it to prove it to yourself if you doubt me. That’s a one-week total change of zero in both dimensions, not even a single centimeter (which I’d have chalked up to noise anyway).

But folks, I’ve only been on the pills for nine days now, so it’s probably a little premature to be calling results already. In fact, when I made the call to Enzyte “nutraceuticals” headquarters the other day to ensure my free sample doesn’t conveniently auto-renew for another $60 month, they told me I was too early to cancel – that they wanted me to at least “experience the solution” for a couple weeks, and that my no-charge grace period actually lasts until such-and-such a date (I made a reminder on my phone so I’ll remember to call back).

As an aside, I’m fairly certain Enzyte-HQ call center (at least the “discontinue me” ward) is staffed by females only. It didn’t bother me, but I bet some men would have a hard time answering the “And may I ask why you’d like to discontinue use of the product, sir?” question with, “Uhhh… my wang is just as small as ever…” Good psychology Enzyte, bravo.

Anyway, I’m not gonna be too rough on this particular nutraceutical just yet. I’m willing to give it a fair thirty-day shake. So, stay tuned… and we’ll see. Hopefully this one-week update wasn’t too terribly anti-climactic.

Goodnight my friends, you’re all in my chest.

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you’ve been sacked


Hey hey Tuesday night. Glad you could join me again today for another installment her at sounds familiar. I seem to be on a roll as far as the posting-regularity goes this month, so here’s hoping I didn’t just jinx it by saying as much. Should be a chuckle of a blog today, if I did my job right. So let’s get right down to it then, shall we?

OK, before I do this next bit, I’m going to ask, dear readers, that you either cast your memory back a couple days, or go quickly read this post from Thursday last week.

Done reading and/or refreshing your memory? OK, good.

Now, if you weren’t lying when you responded in the affirmative to that last sentence, you’ll remember that, when I was sharing the “hotlink prevention” story with Ben, he suggested that I take screen-captures of all my “victims.” Well, bored the other night, I started paging through my referrer logs and doing just that. Turns out, it was a great time looking at all the surprised people out there who’d previously been “borrowing” bandwidth from my site when their intended image got “sacked” with my new script. I had such a good time, in fact, that I wanted to share with you some the various places my new “hotlink stopper” image is showing up in cyberspace.

For your convenience, I’ve pixelized the NSFW image in the screencaps below, but you can always take a peek at the real-deal right here if you’ve forgotten the hilarity/horror of it all.

Let’s start off with a relatively low-impact MySpace profile picture. Looks like “mumu” might want to update his-or-her profile…

A lot of people seem to link my pictures in forums, here are some examples. (That last guy was attempting to link to a picture of a middle-finger-salute from my site. Funny enough, I think the same sentiment is conveyed even with the image-swap):

 

 

 

A tad more embarrassing, some people even used hotlinked images from my server for their forum avatars. Sorry Soda Popinski:

Looks like that hotlink-replacement image transcends the barriers of language as well! Here are some Spanish and what I think might be Finnish forums where I got the drop on unsuspecting hotlinkers. (I especially like the English reply in the Finnish thread, “Mmmmm.. sexy….” Anyone read Spanish?):

 

Switching gears, a lot of MP3-blogs hotlink to my Question Mark & The Mysterians album covers to accompany their posts about the band’s classic 1960s output. Funny, I didn’t realize genitals were featured this prominently on a rock album cover before Lennon did it:

 

Sadly, most of the threads that get “sacked” with the image-swap are long-dead, and thus aren’t impacted much by the hotlink-hijinks. I saved the funniest bunch of screencaps for last, however. These are the ones where the “sacked” thread is still “alive” enough that people notice the image-swap. I love the response in the below thread:

My absolute favorite of them all, though, has got to be this very-much-alive thread over at the “306 GTi-6 & RALLYE Owners Club” forums, where the poster is off-topic and asking anyone if they’ve ever had their back waxed (the original hotlink was referencing the picture of an extremely hairy back which accompanies this post). As a bonus for this one, you can click that link above you here to read the actual thread, complete with hilarious responses and one stymied poster who eventually asks this:

Oh man… good times. Thanks for the suggestion Ben. Funny thing is, I steal 99% of my blog-accompanying images myself, I just have the decency to actually host the pilfered images on my own server with my own bandwidth. C’mon you other unscrupulous web-types, get some scruples…

And, before I go I should acknowledge that I bet some of you came here today looking for my week-one Enzyte Challenge update. Well, it’s coming, it was just a bit of rough night and I had this entry pretty much canned and good to go – so I left the thing on auto. You’ll get your update soon enough, don’t fret.

Oh hey Pat’s got some pictures up from their New Year’s Eve party, check ’em out.

And, with that, I’m gonna cut this thing loose. Have a good night folks, and, to those of you with difficult days ahead – we’re here for you. Love you all and goodnight.

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youthwise


Sunday, Sharaun’s out shopping and Keaton’s asleep. So far, naptime sans pacifier has proven more difficult than bedtime – Keaton not seeming to mind its absence at all at night, yet having a hard time missing it during her afternoon naps. Yesterday I couldn’t get her to go down at all, and eventually brought her back out into the living room having caught nary a wink. Today, however, I decided to get serious, and, when she was once again playing and talking to herself instead of napping, went in and rocked her for about fifteen minutes in the glider. Once her deep, ragged breathing convinced me she’d fallen asleep on my shoulder, I transferred her to the crib, where I’m happy to say she’s still slumbering peacefully. On the whole, I’d say operation pacifiers-be-gone is moving along quite well.

This weekend, I decided it was high time I worked a bit on all the more obscure BitTorrent downloads that’ve been piling up in my downloads directory, un-listened to and unloved. In line with my laziness, I often leave the “hardest” downloads for last. For my downloading habits, the “hardest” albums are the rare live stuff I love to collect, but hate to sit down and figure out the details on so I can properly organize it, tag it, and merge it into my general collection. It may sound easy, but tracking down the details of that live Jefferson Starship jam I grabbed one day because it looked interesting when the only thing I have to go on is a folder in my “unprocessed” directory called “starship73_SBD_matrix1” is sometimes hard to do. But, I persevered, and Saturday I used Keaton’s naptime to process I whopping ~15GB of rare live FLAC audio. In fact, I’ve snipped in the resulting anally-organized list is below for your perusal, because I know you value this stuff as much as I do, right?

I’m gonna do a general interest bit for nerds now, you can turn your head if you’d like to remain cool.

When I was a kid, I read with gusto a book called Big Secrets by William Poundstone. I’ve written about the book before here on sounds familiar, in the context of my youthwise obsession with backwards audio. The book, was filled with all sorts of cool stuff. One of the coolest, in fact, was the section on mysterious shortwave radio “number stations.” I think (dad, correct me if I’m wrong) that my pop used to mess around with shortwave, and I kind of remember this being partly why I was interested in that particular chapter.

Anyway, numbers stations are an “unexplained” global radio phenomenon, in which a string of random numbers and/or letters is broadcast on a given radio frequency with no explanation, the general consensus being that they are coded communiques intended for participants international espionage community. Some stations have been broadcasting these cryptic strings of numbers since back around the time of World War I. Enticed by the mystery, amateur hammers have, on occasion, turned armchair secret-agents and attempted to triangulate signals and hunt down the broadcast locations. Reading it all back then, I was fascinated. It was like some real-life Hardy Boys thing to me… and I dreamed about getting a radio, studying the signals, and breaking the code…

Anyway, if you’re interested in this type of “cloak and dagger” type stuff, Wikipedia has a great article on numbers stations here, and you can read about the “outing” of one of my favorites from Poundstone’s book, the “Russian Woodpecker,” right here (also via the great Wikipedia). For further reading, this page keeps a list of actively transmitting numbers stations (with sound samples), and even has some cool video of radio-nuts tracking down the transmitting antennas.

I’m sorry if that was boring, but I enjoyed writing it, so you, dear reader, can suck it.

Before I go, a tip of my babymakin’ hat to friends Erik and Kristi for the birth of their strapping young buck, Colton. Way to go guys, he and Keaton can be best friends until they’re around fourteen, then they’re forbidden from seeing each other until they’re twenty-three.

Goodnight.

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shepherd’s pie


Hey internet. How was your Wednesday? Mine was OK. I went to work, where things were, surprisingly, busy today. It was a nice change, as the slowness I’ve been working through lately had my apathy at record highs of late. I think I needed a little kick to get me ambulatory again. I also learned that Radiohead is definitely coming to the city for their In Rainbows tour. Wild horses couldn’t keep me away. It’ll be my third time seeing them… I’m so excited.

I hadn’t really planned on writing tonight. In fact, I was going to take the night off because 1) I had nothing to write about and wasn’t feeling guilty about it, and 2) I felt like not writing. But… then… as I often to, I became bored just sitting on the couch listening to music (Sharaun was out and about so I had the place to myself). I tried reading some from a book a buddy lent me, but I’m having the hardest time getting into it. So, to the internet I turned. And, after my standard ~20 page surfing cycle, I ended up back here in the old familiar WordPress post window… stringing words together for no reason at all. So, I decided I’ll just post a bunch of random, un-connected stuff I’ve been saving up for a while… sort of like a shephard’s pie of a blog. Here goes.

I had planned to write a blog about something I recently did, but I ended up chatting with Ben about it yesterday morning via IM, and the chat sums it up nicely and is a good break from my normal dry paragraph-style narrative. So, here’s there story, in the no-caps shorthand that is IM-speak:

Dave:
dude… i have to tell you what i did the other night.
so, i notice in my logs that a ton of my bandwidth is people hotlinking my blog-accompanying images and using them for forum avatars, myspace profile avatars, etc. so, i set out to eff the bandwidth-stealing hotlinkers.
the internet taught me how to put a mod-rewrite .htaccess that’ll swap any hotlinked image out for one of my choosing.
so…
now, when anyone hotlinks my blog-accompanying images, they get instead a picture of some dude’s nuts with a beach in the background. it’s outstanding

Ben:
HAHAHAH

Dave:
this pic is priceless

Ben:
OMG… that is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.

Dave:
here’s the actual image (warning, don’t open with people around). i should write about it… right?

Ben:
Yeah, you totally should. Hilarious.

Dave:
is that img classic, or what? pat was at my place while i was doing this… and we were giddy

Ben:
Outstanding.

Dave:
we actually went to a couple pages from my logs where people had been stealing and looked at their new nutsack avatars for a laugh.

Ben:
hahahahaha. Ohhh.. it’s sooo good.

Dave:
hehe, i thought so too

Ben:
you should screencap those

Dave:
steal my bandwidth, will ya? oh yeah i totally should.

Ben:
fantastic

Dave:
balls in profile w/the ocean behind.

Ben:
So excellent.

Well, that was fun.

Want to see something neat? Take a look at the I-got-a-new-iPod Christmas traffic spike my entry “new iPod & I want my old tunes!” Kinda neat to see the internet turning to my tiny blog in their time of holiday need… I wonder if anyone actually managed to get help from the entry?

ipod_post_stats550.jpg

Oh, what? That wasn’t neat at all? Oh my, I’m sorry. I’ll do better next time. But, next time is gonna have to be tomorrow or something, because I’m outta here tonight. Sorry I left you with such a stanky post. Better luck next time.

Goodnight and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.