Random Bits & Bytes

Been a long time!

2010-09-09T08:38:00.007-04:00

Yea, it's been a long time.

Over a year now since this blog entry.

Why? I don't know. Apathy, I guess. And lots of use of Facebook - I guess I feel that I can get my thoughts out better to friends and family who might appreciate it more then the random stranger who might happen across this blog occasionally.

But a lot has happened in the last year. I continue to learn and grow - both in general personally as well as my technical skills. Also have learned a lot about art, photography, photographic manipulation, Photoshop, and combining them all. I find that I'm gravitating more toward the more artistic side of things then the technical sometimes, or often times.

For example, my favorite site nowadays is DeviantArt.com. I could spend hours there...

The economy has went up and down, and my hope for a Brand New World and New Attitudes with our new president have been pretty much dashed. Not so much with the president himself, but the whole attitude of the nation just really hasn't changed - I guess the Big Hope I saw and had was just a temporary thing.

We're back to racism, intolerance, and the inability to see other's point of view as well as political parties and ideas that are so split and opposite from each other that I have a fear that our country is worse off then ever before.

With the roller coaster economy I've went from being harried and too busy to having some more spare time again, to continue tutorials and lessons and learning when it comes to my field of work.

Personally I've had some ups and downs.

I'm a big animal lover, and my father's cat; Katie, passed away earlier this year. I spent many hours with her and with my mother gone she was a huge comfort and companion to my father, who is 92 now (I was a VERY late child). She was a great loss. And a great cat.

Then my brother, Earl, was in a bad car accident, that coincidentally happened right beside my father's driveway (lucky my father didn't have a heart attack himself when he went out and saw my brother like that).

The accident damaged my brother's spine and partially paralyzed him, and after a lot of pain and suffering and months of being stuck in a hospital (which must have been torture for him, who always was out and about) - he passed away.

And a short time ago we lost our beloved German Shepard, B'elanna. I'm going to cut n paste what I wrote on Facebook, as it's still too hard to re-write it again;

Here is one of the last pictures I took of B'elanna, minutes before she had her first seizure or whatever it was.

At least at the end she got to do one of her favorite things in the world - retrieve a toy from the water for us; something she would literally spend hours doing.

We're lost a number of pets, including dogs - but B'elanna was by far a once-in-a-lifetime kind of dog, and unusually intelligent and reasoning.

make cognitive leaps of reasoning.

It was amazing sometimes, that a dog could reason out things like she could.

She had a very high intelligence and the (many times scary) ability to reason and work out what we wanted her to do on her own.

I remember the time that Jenny told her to carefully pick up the remote control that we had dropped and hand it to her.

She pulled her lips back, lowered her head and slowly and carefully picked the remote up between her canines, holding her lips back and handing it to her. B'elanna had put together phrases that she knew - "pick up", "careful", and "hand it to me" and interpolated what we wanted and understood the whole phrase, and what was asked of her. She did this often, even picking up cellphones and handing them to us without a scratch.

I also remember vividly the first time I was checking out a camp or abandoned building I had found out in some woods. I told her to check it out, giving her a general hand signal to go, not expecting her to do anything much. I had never taught her to "check anything out" but she was able to figure out what I wanted from my motioning in that direction and the giving of a general command that she knew some words from, apparently. I was stunned when she knew exactly what I wanted and quickly and efficiently went through each of the rooms (I could see through the cracks in the rickety old place), sniffing around, looking, checking things out; and then she came back and stood by me, waiting expectantly.

She knew many words, phrases, and military- as well as custom-hand signals and non-vocal audio commands, and even if I caught her eyes and gave her a slight nod of my head in a certain direction to move in that direction - left or right, and a quick very slight downward nod of my head to tell her to sit.

Her personality was very similar to mine and we meshed well, she usually had a good idea of what I wanted, sometimes before I did.

I don't see us ever having another dog like her.

Yea, it's been quite a year. But at least I'm still here, my wife and I are healthy and we've been eating and getting healthier (I've lost over 30 pounds so far this year), and there's certainly a lot of people in this country in much worse shape.

I was just reading the blog of a girl who may occasionally read my blog here. I feel sorry for her, and hope her life can become better and that she can get past her problems.

It's especially harder when your younger I think.

When we get older we sometimes get jaded by tragedies and things that have been done to us.

Not always, but sometimes.

Wegman's Good Dog Park in Syracuse, Jamesville Park, Google Earth Overlays, Vacation Camping at Evangola State Park,

2009-08-10T07:53:00.016-04:00

Wegman's Good Dog Park in Syracuse & Jamesville Beach Park

So far we've made two trips to the Wegman's Good Dog Park in Syracuse (they also have a Yahoogroups mailing list here). Great place, nicely kept clean with running water, dog bowls for the water, toys, benches, a double gate, and an agility course for the dogs. Very very nice. and gets used a lot. And it's right inside the Onondaga Lake Park, which is nice on it's own with bathrooms, miles of trails, the old lock system, etc.

Still amazes me that the City of Watertown nixed the idea, despite the interest in it. I guess you can't expect too much of the people and government of Watertown and Jefferson County. I find myself more and more disgusted by the people of this area, despite my love for the region. We have a seemingly endless supply of redneck attitudes sometimes.

Anyway, the park was nice, and the local SPCA does have a pay dog area and Fort Drum has a dog park. Maybe someday, in the far future, we'll actually get one here. Though that would pre-suppose the local population actually embracing the present, which may never happen.

Also, south of Syracuse is Jamesville Beach State Park, which has an off-the-leash area as part of the park. Very little little trail system along the stream there, with a few places along the way for the dogs to go into the water.

Google Earth Overlays

They work great, and very easy to use. I took a screenshot off a local Jefferson County property info website, grabbed the latitude and longitude, and used the Google Earth overlay feature to superimpose it over my property so I could reference where the boundaries are. Amazing how easy and useful it is.

Camping Trip to Evangola State Park, Buffalo Area

Monday, we got an early start, between 9:30 and 10, for our trip. It was was safe and uneventful, which is the most important thing, but took longer then we expected it to. There was a large amount of construction on the Thruway, and slowed us considerably.

At one point we spent about half an hour crawling at a few miles per hour in two lanes. Come to find out, they were fixing a tiny strip in one lane, barely three or four feet wide. Seemed strange to delay hundreds of cars on a large highway for such a small thing in the middle of the day. But who can guess at the thoughts of New York State and the DOT?

Again, the Aztek's features came in handy. In a regular SUV the seats would likely have been folded down, and there would have been a heck of a lot less room, height-wise, in the back. As it was we had the cavernous (at least it seems so when you look into other SUV's) rear section. I was able to easily fold the front passenger seat back, and climb back into the rear while my wife continued to stay in line. I could then get the dog's water dish and water out of where we had it packed in the far-back, then sit down in the back and hold the water dish while they drank.

As usual we were carrying a number of things in the soft car-top carrier, which gave us even more room in the back, splitting up the rear between space for the dogs and storage space (using the handy versatile netting) to do so. I could then stow the stuff without bumping my head on anything, and climb back to the front relatively easier. The dogs were refreshed.

We had decided to stop somewhere and buy food rather then bringing it. My wife's Garmin Nuvi and my Garmin eTrex Legend HCx both use the same maps and similar software, so we were able to quickly access and cross reference the locations of a Wegman's as well as a PetCo within a relatively close area. So we wouldn't have to make a lot of detours. Unfortunately the Wegman's was no loner there and we found no sign of it. The hazards of using maps in general - paper or GPS. But at least with GPS maps changes can be quickly submitted and edited.

We did find a Topps, and we picked up a harness for Tucker (he has had some serious physical problems lately and the vet recommended using a harness instead of a collar for our trip). I experimented with the harness on him, and he seemed to adapt quickly to it.

Finally we headed toward the campground, noticing a place selling campfire wood along the way (you're not supposed to bring your own wood from one part of NY State to another, so as not to spread wood-born parasites and such). We checked in at the campground, having made a previous reservation of course, but the girl couldn't tell us whether that gave us a pass for other state parks,which it usually does. You'd think she'd know...

We found our site, which was a bit smaller then we figured it would be, but off to the side was plenty of space back toward the water.

Unfortunately there was a fence, and for a good reason. The waters of Lake Erie were right there, but at the foot of a fifty foot cliff (see photo). The lake was beautiful though, and we couldn't see the other side except for a distance projection. The shore curved outward to the left and right of us. To the right of us was the beach at the park.

We set our tent up, and got our stuff organized. At this point there were a number of others camping in the area, but not a whole lot. While putting up the tent an older couple with a van and RV pulled in, did a bit of loud talking and yelled directions back and forth while maneuvering the beast into their spot. It took them longer to park it then it took us to put our tent up. And we have a large, slightly complicated tent to assemble.

We then took a walk along the fence at the back of our site (there was an old bathroom/shower building that had been closed down back there too). The trail led along the fence and then to a "no trespassing" sign, and little gully. Across it was a wooden fence and camps or homes along the water.

We sneaked down the gully and out onto the small beach at the foot of the high overhanging cliffs. The dogs went into the water a bit, and I studied the various layers of stone above us. Fascinating stuff, unfortunately I did not get a pic, having forgotten to bring my camera along for our walk. The layers were amazing.

The lake seems to be never calm, as we sat a bit on a large stone and talked while we looked at it. After a bit we headed back, but took a different path and came out in the "recreational area", an old rec hall, broken down and closed, an overgrown tennis court and basketball court, and running water access nearby.

The whole campground seemed a bit run-down but still functional.

After getting back to our site we decided to drive around a bit, and try to find wood and some Geocaches. The Geocaches seemed to be along a river, and the only access was the river itself, as the land around it was posted no trespassing. We saw the Indian Reservation and gambling casino, found some fast food places in case of need, and drove back the way we came a short distance to find the camp wood. The park itself had camp wood, a small bundle for $5.

The lady selling the camp wood that we had passed was a bit in the bag, but nice enough, offering fifteen pieces of wood for $10, plus any scrap for free.

We got back, looked through some NY state booklets I had brought along, as well as referenced different parks and such on both of our GPS's for locations to go the next next day.

Then we had out dinner, some stuff we had bought at Topps.

Beside us another RV had came in, another beast and another older couple, with their grandkids. They spent most of the time inside with the air conditioning running, leaving their small dog outside to bark, but were out eating and running a fire while we were eating. As soon as they finished they let the fire run down and went back into the RV, not to be seen again. Is that really camping? Maybe that's what the people in the primitive camping section say about us with our electrical access, I don't know.

We started the fire after a bit, and after walking down to the bathrooms/showers (which were at the opposite end of our camping loop - not far but a bit inconvenient). Again, the bathrooms left something to be desired but at least everything worked. There was also water and garbage collection, as well as washers and a big sink for washing dishes.

Nearby the bathroom people were playing their music quite loud, a tiny worn out camper and lots of beer cans around. Quiet hours at 10!

We watched the sunset, took some pics and then I started the fire and had it going quite well. I'm a fine fire starter but as soon as I put our larger wood on it acted a bit strangely, and didn't want to start. After a bit it went out but I revived it (I pride myself on using only one match and zero starting fluid/gas/whatever - you shouldn't need to. Unless you like doing it that way of course!).

The larger pieces burned fitfully for the rest of the night as we sat around it, enjoying the peace. Well before quiet hours it settled down to be very quiet indeed. Nice, compared to last year's camping at Sampson Park in the Finger Lakes, when the bugs or frogs in the trees squawked or chirped all night, and there was the occasional bit of noise from people (though nothing bad).

We sat for quite awhile, not even getting out our marshmallows and s'mores for some reason, and then went to bed.

Unfortunately some clouds had come in and I debated about putting my large tarp over the tent. Inside it was sweltering, but the wind quickly picked up and I had to close the rain flaps despite the heat. The wind whipped the tent quite a bit, keeping me up for awhile while Jenny slept. It was really windy.

Finally the wind facing our direction calmed a bit, or changed directions and was blocked by the high Maple trees around us. And I could get to sleep, but woke up a few times to the breakers against the cliffs behind us. But those were soothing, versus the wind whipping the tent flaps, and I slept okay, only having to get up to go to the bathroom, taking the dogs with me to do their biz.

The morning was quiet when I woke up, I thought perhaps I had awoken way too early so I allowed myself to fall back to asleep a few times. When I did check the time it was just before eight, so I gathered my clothes as quietly as possible and got the dogs out to do their stuff, then put them back into the tent into their own little beds, and went to the shower.

It was so quiet yet. In the bathroom I found one of the two showers had no showerhead, and asked the middle-eastern gentlemen if his had one. He said it did and I decided to wait, shaving and wandering around. Finally I took my shower (again, not the nicest in there but okay) and complained about the bathroom and lack of showerhead about the state of government facilities along with another dude, who had come in waiting to shower also.

Later we put my tarp over the tent, just in case of rain, and headed out looking for some trails and parks. Unfortunately we wandered too close to Buffalo, and the parks were just that - parks with not much in the way of trails nor places for the dogs.

We went to a number of different ones, picked up some supplies. I remembered that while driving to our camp I noticed a high bridge over a tall gulf or gorge. When I had checked my handheld GPS I saw that we were passing over Eighteen Mile Creek and that there was a DEC wilderness area nearby. We navigated to it and found a lonely road with DOUBLE guard rails along the steep and very very high drop-offs. Finally we got to the end of the road and the DEC area. The trail itself was the continuation of the old original road, right along the very edge.

One the way we encountered a mother and a group of young girls in bathing suits who had apparently been swimming, so we knew that there would eventually be some sort of access down the cliff.

We finally found it, a very steep trail. At the bottom was a small stream, some pools of water, and the high cliffs of course. The dogs played for awhile (finally a place for them to go into the water!) and then we headed back up the steep trail.

Just now I check the wiki entry on the creek and found that at certain times of year raw sewage is diverted into the stream. Yuk. Good thing I don't fish!

Heading back to the campground we noticed that it had rained, but at the campground itself everything seemed dry, though we saw that others had draped their tents with tarps too.

We took a walk around the loops of the campground and did a little exploring, then had our dinner, made a few calls, and planned out our trip the next day.

That night I cut the wood into smaller chunks to get it to burn better, which it did.

We cooked out s-mores, gave the dogs some marshmallows, and sat and relaxed for the rest of the night with a good fire going. Later we decided to leave the tarp over everything but had to open the screens because of the heat inside the tent.

It was a good call to leave the tarp on. As I'm sure you know, tents are only waterproof to a certain extent.

That night it downpoured, and the temps dropped. The wind whipped, thunder hit, and Lake Erie slammed the cliffs behind us. But we were cozy and dry inside the tent.

Once the heavy rains died down the crashes of water against the cliffs lulled me to sleep.

The next morning things had dried outside somewhat, but we discovered a slight depression in front of the tent which we hadn't noticed, and it had filled with a bit of water and leaked a small amount into tent, but not bad.

I also discovered that we had forgotten to cover up the wood. It wasn't too important as we only needed it for breakfast but it was fairly wet, and combined with the crappiness of the wood in the first place - well, starting a fire would be problematic. Sure enough, anything of any size was too soaked and fire went out once I stoked it to the point of putting anything larger on it.

A bit of a disappointment to me as I like to pride myself on being able to get a fire going quite easily. Not in this case.

The family a few spaces down had been smart, and had put their wood inside their pop-up camper and had a good fire going for breakfast.

We packed up, and headed out after dropping off our garbage at the campground's dumpster.

We had plotted out the differences in taking the Thruway back versus going through Buffalo to the dog park there, and found little different in actual distance, just time.

The dog park there, in LaSalle Park, is quite nice. It's called the "BarkYard", and is quite nice. It's much larger then the Syracuse one, and also has a smaller dog section too as well as the double gates. It does not have an agility course not running water, though volunteers seem to have brought some water and other supplies. Quite nice, and we met some interesting people and dogs there.

As usual, B'ellana just wanted to stay around us and had no interest in the other dogs. Tucker, despite his health problems, did a little chasing of the other dogs.

I had never been actually through Buffalo itself, just the outskirts, and I found the part that I saw to be fairly interesting. Old baroque buildings, abandoned and partially-still-used machinery and power buildings, new and interesting buildings with some amazing architecture, lots of parks, lots of construction of new roads and street and buildings, wind turbines on the edge of the city, and more. Wish I had time to explore the city.

The rest of the trip back was much faster, but we did stop at the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge on the way back.

It took a chunk out of our return time because there are no close Thruway exits nor on-ramps, so we have to travel a distance to get there and back on the Thruway.

Unfortunately their were a lot of construction going on at the refuge, so we didn't see very much wildlife. Still, it was a good diversion.

The rest of the trip back was uneventful, the dogs as well as us were tired and despite the nice vacation camping trip; I think we were still happy to get home.

Four Dogs! Free Topo Contour Maps for GPS

2009-04-15T08:25:00.005-04:00

Ack! Due to coincidental circumstances we're dogsitting two extra dogs at once. And one's a LARGE puppy. Whoa. How'd I get roped into this?

But with the price of kennels and some of the scary problems people have had with some local kennels who wants to have them take care of your dog - you don't know the real circumstances of their care, no matter how well you check on them.

The puppy is, well, a puppy. And needs a LOT of training. I've already done a fair amount with her including getting a good start on heeling on a leash, not pulling a toy out of your hand or biting at it, sitting, staying, not jumping, and playing with humans without accidentally biting.

Here's a few pics. The oen above is a bit surprising since the puppy is a bit hard to get to sit in one place (she's the light colored one). The other two are of B'ellana and the puppy playing (B'ellana grudgingly playing with the toy). The puppy kept bringing the toy back to B'ellana afterwards to get her to play tug of war - but B'ellana's a bit of a loner.

Free Topo Contour Maps for GPS

Wow, free 24k+ topo contour maps for my GPS! http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/maps/view/111/

This is a nice site, you can find a number of other files (as well as topos for other states) here, as well as GPS software tools.

Artsy Fartsy Friends, Practical High Dynamic Range Use

2009-04-03T08:11:00.003-04:00

Friends are good. Not only to hang with, etc, but sometimes in other ways you may not expect. Like expanding your horizons.

And in these troubling times sometimes we need our horizons expanded, especially caught up in our 'normal' lives as they were.

I've been taking photos for a long time, but taking pictures and taking great pictures are two different things.

I have a couple friends who are real artists.

One is a photographer who has a great eye for framing a photo, and she also has a knack for catching a shot perfectly in a way pleasing to the eye.

My other friend (coincidentally both of them are Canadians, though one lives close-by while the other one still lives in Canada) is also a true artist. He can paint and draw, and even sculpt, and he also has a good eye for photography. And the interesting thing is that he's also a "computer person".

Such a popular misconception that people who are technically-minded can't be artistic.

I have another acquaintance who's also an artist of sorts. He's been a long-time customer of mine, and though his paintings and drawing and sometimes photography is of a, er, specialized nature - he too is a true artist.

I've never thought of myself as an artistic-sort of person, despite being a person who designs webpages and photography. My first priority is to get the information onto the page in an eye-pleasing way, easily organized and aesthetic - but I don't think of it as particularly artistic. Sometimes anything real inspired comes secondarily. And I find myself always struggling with the artistic part.

Sometimes I have to come back to an idea four or five times to generate something different and interesting, or I may go do something else for a day until I come up with a good design. Sometimes even longer.

But lately I've found, because of the influence of my more artistic friends; I've actually been able to improve my own creative process and look at things with an imaginative and quite different eye.

Instead of taking a photo with the object framed perfectly, light directly on it; now I take a few shots from different angles and maybe with different lighting behind it. And not always the object itself as the sole focus of the photo. Or maybe I take a photo that catches my eye now, when it wouldn't have before.

And I've found that the more I look at things with an artistic (yes, I have to use that word one more time) eye the more and easier I can see things in a new way that I wouldn't have before.

My mother was something of an artistic soul. She'd always been interested in painting and drawing, though her primary interest was sewing.

She could probably have benefited from more painting and drawing lessons but she never had as much time to put into it, having worked all her life as a seamstress.

Her real artistry was in sewing. Anything and everything and in any way a person asked, and she could always suggest a better and maybe more visually appealing way to do something.

That's what artistry is all about, right?

Another of my hobbies has paid off, at least in a small way.

If you're interested in photography you probably know what a High Dynamic Range photo is.

If not, here's my thumbnail explanation from my HDR website - "HDR photography consists of the same scene taken with differing exposures; commonly using the auto-bracketing exposure functions of most good digital cameras. These photos are combined with specialized software to get the best possible results and are then normally processed with exposure blending and tonal (tone) mapping functions."

Some old-time (and new-time) photographers don't like the photos created this way.

There's many different ways to go about it. You'll see a number of different examples on my small website. Some are very, very much processed; some not so much (like the two near the bottom, where it says "more conventional" and the one beside it). These just bring out the landscape under the trees which normally would be very much in shadow with a default or automatic exposure. The rest of the photos are much more and less realistically processed.

Basically you are bringing out the things that a photo taken with a film or digital camera aren't going to show you, due to their inability to do more then one exposure. Say you're standing outside a cave in the bright sunlight and taking a photo pointing toward the mouth of the cave. If you pick an exposure adjusted to the inside of the cave you can see into the interior of the cave in the photo, but everything else is washed out. If your exposure is set for the bright daylight, the mouth of the cave is dark as night.

With a few separate photos taken with various exposures you can use the HDR software to combine these into a photo that will show a pic which would allow you to see the entire scene.

It's an interesting hobby, and has many creative uses as well as more practical ones.

But up until now I hadn't had an opportunity to use one in my work. Recently a local judge running for re-election asked me to do a website for him, and I was able to incorporate one of the heavily processed photos into his website as the top of the banner on each page.

Nothing major, but it looks pretty good, maybe in a stylized way and better then the same photo (of Watertown from Thompson Park) in a more conventional form.

It's something to keep in mind as I continue to create websites and consider various forms of HDR's I can incorporate into them.

We Need Broadband

2009-03-12T09:15:00.002-04:00

We've had our share of companies trying to cover our area with Wimax or other wireless services, none seem to have come through on more then a small-scale.

One company, Ridgeviewtel (who also have some deployments here in Jefferson County), has set up a petition/info form to map the location of those who don't have access to broadband.

It's an idea that I have been playing around with, but only for the local area. I thought that perhaps it would be of interest to local companies if the stimulus package can be used.

The link is - here and the FAQ is here.

Unfortunately (and probably for privacy reasons) there is no public access to the locations, and it seems more geared toward info for their company. But the more power to them if they can bring broadband to those in Jefferson County without it.

So click the link above and sign the petition if you're in a rural area (anywhere in the US, not just here).

The Wii, Windows 7

2009-02-05T07:51:00.005-05:00

We have been looking at Wii's for quite awhile. But they aren't cheap, that's for sure.

I, personally, am not much of a game player and usually avoid sitting and playing games, as a bit of a waste of time. Though I can happily spend hours flying on a flight simulator; which many people may say is no different. ;)

Anyway, the whole Wii concept looks like a lot of fun and something completely different in the way of videogames.

And, well, the technology is amazing and has a lot of potential.

The prices, surprisingly, haven't really changed any.

So yesterday my wife, Jennifer, decided to pick one up at our local mall's Fye's. The deal was that you buy the Wii and get an extra controller with it, as well as a game that was included in the extra game controller package. Since we were going to get another controller anyway (the Wii game itself only comes with one controller and one Nunchuck) it was an okay deal. She also bought a used, repackaged game additionally.

It wasn't long before I had the power plugged into our Monster Cable power strip (don't get high quality home entertainment electronics without one!), as well as the rest of the cables; and had synced up the controllers.

A sensor bar attaches to the tv, or above or below it (the controllers use IR like your TV remote, as well as like my Air Hogs helicopter - mentioned in a previous blog entry. The idea of using IR instead of RF for something that needs moderate bandwidth is pretty interesting in itself. It's carrying a fair amount of information - velocity and motion and other senosr info, as well as button control and the sound that's transmitted to each controller).

First off I was a bit disappointed that the video and audio output is in analog, using a/v cables. Especially since the connector that goes into the machine itself obviously has a multitude of connections, yet the output itself is standard analog a/v cables. So it took one of our precious a/v inputs - the tv has plenty of HDMI inputs but only a few a/v inputs.

A quick look through the manual explains that there are component cables available (not bad) and it's capable of 480P. Not great, but it's not exactly known for it's super hi-rez graphics either. Though screenshots of some of the nicer games are very good.

The machine itself seems to be built slightly better then your standard piece of crappy electronics nowadays. It can take memory cards (damn, gotta scrounge one up) as well as Game Cube games and controllers, and USB devices like wireless and wired networking, USB keyboards, etc.

It can also be mounted horizontally or vertically, and has a stand for the vertical mounting (which we used, fit nicely).

The gameplay is amazing, and takes your experience to a new level. The graphics themselves of the games we have are smooth but cartoonish (at least on these games), and the gameplay is hard yet easy to master enough to have fun. Oh, and to work up a sweat too! The graphics, despite being a bit cartoonish on these particular games, are nice with vibrant colors and good resolution.

I really like the boxing, and got quite a sweaty workout from it. My punches did seem to be sometimes faster then my character was punching. I suspect this may be the way the game is set up for the boxing part; so you're not punching someone across the room or something. I can play the baseball game and swing the bat as fast as I possibly can, and it keeps up just fine.

The technology behind the whole thing is certainly interesting to contemplate. Velocity and motion sensors, rumble servos and IR technology that sends sound to the controllers, etc. And all in a fairly good quality package, unlike so many game machines (that are in comparable price ranges) as well as TV's and DVD players.

The game that comes with the machine also has a whole fitness section where; instead of playing the games against other people or the machine, you go through this whole fitness regimen using parts from each one. I started it - it's quite a workout! And maybe I'll give it a try everyday, it's sure more fun this my rowing machine and long walks in the cold.

On to Windows 7... I decided to go ahead and give it a try, despite my initial thought that I had neither the time nor the interest in trying it until at least a release candidate.

I'd tried it on customer's computers (one who was even running it as their main operating system for their business! Not smart).

The installation went very smoothly and it picked up nearly every device I had, including lots of older USB devices (and I got a lot of USB devices). The only thing it didn't install a driver for was the SM Bus (wonder if the driver for Vista would work? Probably) and a driver for the printer/copier/fax - though it did identify it correctly.

At first blush it's pretty nice. Much faster then Vista, even with Aero running! Lots of new features, lots of good features that Vista had, and it seems to be MUCH more compatible with more software. I even foudn myself anxious to get up the morning after I installed it. The last time that happened was whuen XP came out. Yea yea, that's a bit geeky...

Right away I had a bit of a SNAFU with one of my favorite programs - Rocketdock. This turned out to be somewhat my own fault. It's SUPPOSED to be easier transferred to a portable device using the option of saving the set up as a separate INI, which is what I have the option set as. That way I can easily transfer it over to other computers on my network.

Unfortunately this didn't work for whatever reason. Maybe it had to do with Windows 7, maybe not.

But it messed up it's entry in the registry to the point that even deleting and re-installing Rocketdock wouldn't work.

I went on to install Stardock's Objectdock instead, which also didn't want to load quite right the first few times. But after a reset all was well with it.

After going back and scanning through the registry (yes, the registry editor's exactly the same, it seems) and deleting the entries for Rocketdock and re-installing it; it worked perfectly. I've since switched back to Rocketdock though.

I then proceeded to load Win 7 down with lots of installations, here's a few of my initial ones:

Rocketdock
Objectdock
Webcam32
Paintshop Pro
Paintshop Pro upgrade
Metapad
Keynote
Netscape
Expression web
K-meleon
Flock
Quicktime
Openoffice
Firefox
Thunderbird
Gimp and a bunch of plugins, including Photoshop ones
Mozbackup
Mappoint
Goops
Filemenu Tools (amazingly this works fine - see a previous blog entry about this tool)
GPSBabelWrapper
Google Earth with GPS control wrapper
Google Sketchup Pro
Adobe reader
Adobe reader update
Foxit reader
Flash
Garmin trip and waypoint manager
Driver for Garmin Legend HCx GPS works fine
Driver for radiosonde receiver works fine
Driver for Powershot a570IS works fine (I don't like the camera connection wizard as well as XP's, may use Faststone's picture download as the autorun default)
Winzip 11
7-zip
Avira AntiVir
Wordweb
Weatherwatcher
Winweather
NOAA NWS Weather Spotter's Interface
uTorrent
USAPhotomaps
City Navigator 2009
Free Download Manager

NASA's World Wind didn't work. A bit of a disappointment to me, but I still have my Windows XP partition working fine so if I want to use it it's there for me.

I next installed the driver and software for the Logitech orbit webcam (though a generic driver was installed by Windows 7).

The controller that moves the camera on the servos was not available, and neither was the face-following option. A quick update from MS (using the handy Action Center) solved that problem.

I also updated the video driver but then my favorite resolution was not available. There was one very close, so that was no real problem.

MaxiVistaMirrorPro didn't work at all, no surprise.

Comodo firewall also didn't work, and neither did the newest version. Which seemed to work for some people.

Unfortunately at this point I tried to force it to install by using the compatibility tab under the install's properties.

Erp, bad choice. While this method may have worked for some people it crapped out for me. And worse of all after installing half of itself.

After resetting the computer Windows 7 would not start. A couple system rollbacks later and I was back in business, but not before a bunch of error-checking by the system and questionable messages.

To be fair - Windows 7 is a Beta and I was installing a low-level driver that shouldn't have been installed, plus I had installed a bunch of updates. Not a good combination.

After this incident I continued to use the system but with a couple crashes per day.

I went ahead and messed recklessly with a few things - knowing that I was going to start over from scratch anyway - and outside of the problems likely related to the bad firewall installation; it performed pretty well otherwise.

So eventually I wiped the partition and re-installed Windows 7.

This time it was much stabler, though I did have one crash right off the bat but I haven't had another though.

The built-in firewall is okay, and actually scored quite well with my own tests as well as Shields Up. But despite that I would rather have something with more control, and chances are companies like Comodo aren't going to release a version for Windows 7 until the actual full release of it is done. Would you release a security program for a buggy Beta, or even for a release candidate?

So I found the very good (and free) PC Tools Firewall Plus which seems to be very compatible with Windows 7, as well as scores just as good on my firewall tests. Rather have Comodo but this is a good choice also.

The taskbar's "combine with taskbar is full" is great, especially to us power users who have a crapload of programs open. XP's handling of this was negligible at best.

And the Action Center seems to have replaced the security center. But you do get more options. Maybe MS has done something right with this also. I like it, I have to say.

As I said - the whole system is quite fast. Though occasionally while using certain programs it can pause for an alarmingly long moment, or get overloaded a bit. Of course, I do my best to stress it way past the point of normal use, even by me.

The above could be the result of it being Beta, I'm sure there's going to be some memory management tweaks at the very least. It seems to take advantage of my full 4 gigs of memory anyway. Which is good compared to XP's only handling 3.1 gig of the 4.

And it could use some tweaking - I'm running with the default services still intact. Many of which can be turned off for more speed and stability.

I've yet to run any REAL tests, like rendering some heavy-duty graphics - and comparing it to XP and Vista.

I do have a few problems, which seem to be fairly common problems with others. My taskbar icons seem to randomly disappear. The programs are still running and I can access them by using ALT-TAB or the Task Manager, but they disappear from the taskbar itself. Sometimes while I'm using them (it doesn't affect the opened screen though, only the icon in the taskbar).

Also, I've noticed that if I'm restarting Windows 7 and I try to use the network or even access much of anything in those first few moments when the desktop pops up - sometimes things don't show up or work properly along the lines of the network or displaying notification icons. Giving it a few moments to start without touching anything and all is well.

The disappearing taskbar icons is the most annoying thing for me, and hopefully there's some sort of resolution for it at some point from MS. It's maddening in fact, and makes it almost unusable when it happens. No matter what taskbar option I've tried it still happens occasionally.

But, Windows 7 is still in Beta. So there's got to be some bugs at the very least. From what I have read there are many, yet it also has much potential.

I even though the login screen in the tv show "Heroes" last night.

Obama, Facebook, Ping.fm, Touchscreens

2009-01-21T09:26:00.007-05:00

Wow, it was quite a day yesterday. A new year, a new day. A new president, and a new hope (that sounds vaguely Star War-esque).

And I ended up watching the coverage for nearly the whole day while I was working.

I have to say; I've never been interested in attending an inauguration and frankly Washington, D.C. hasn't been a place I've particularly wanted to visit. Heck, we've even avoided going near it while traveling on a few vacations.

But this time I felt differently. I would have loved to be there, in amongst history being made. Despite what the outcome of Obama's presidency is going to ultimately turn out to be - good or bad.

But we've certainly made history.

Personally, I've found myself trying to be more tolerate and less biased against others since Obama was elected. I've always tried to be, I should say that, but I haven't always been so successful. But things 'feel' differently, like maybe we can all do better now. I know we probably won't - but we could.

Heck; when kids who had previously worn rapper t-shirts and watched their favorite "gangsta" videos on MTV and VH1 are switching to wearing Obama t-shirts and watching CNN - well, something good is happening, at least temporarily.

Despite all of this I am still continually surprised and deeply disappointed in the attitude of some of my friends, family members, acquaintances, and clients. Not to mention others in Jefferson County.

I've always loved this area - Jefferson County, but I find myself more and more disappointed by some of the people themselves, and their attitudes.

Facebook. I've been a member for quite some time. And a member of some of the other social networking sites also for quite some time.

But in the last few months I find myself using and really enjoying Facebook more and more.

I think it's the privacy of it.

The other social networking sites pretty much allow anyone to read your comments, your status, see your pics, and read your comments to others.

But with Facebook there's more of a sense of privacy ad community among friends.

I mean - you can't be stupid and post too many personal, private things or add friends you don't know. But at least with Facebook what you do post is among your friends, and you can tweak the privacy settings to your specifications.

Anyone can find you if you use your real name - they just can't see anything else about you unless you've made them a friend.

I'll say it again - I really like Facebook. I've found that I enjoy keeping up on my friends and family, and even with old school mates and friends from way back, many I've lost track of.

I even like the silly (and not-so-silly) games and "gifts" applications.

And the discussions on groups I've interested in.

There's a sense of a bit more maturity then sites like Myspace.

I find myself checking it every day to see what others on my friends list are doing, and updating my status update. I've really re-connected with a number of people.

I'm surprised that not everyone is a Facebook user!

And speaking of status updates - if you're a member of multiple social networking sites and want to update all of your status updates at the same time check out http://ping.fm You can set up multiple sites like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc. Then you can do one update and have it appear on all of your profile sites simultaneously without any further effort. Quite nice. Very useful.

Also, if you like to get one integrated feed of what your friends and family are doing from various sites check out http://friendfeed.com

Recently I got a chance to play around for for quite sometime with an iPhone. It was work-related, as it was the only Internet access I had to help troubleshoot a dead Internet connection.

The problem turned out to be a deteriorated cable connector or cable end - a quick trip to the nearest small hardware store was all it took; though technically it should have been fixed by the cable company and not me. But it was quicker for my customers to get back online by just having me do a bit of quick wire stripping and connector crimping then getting a Time-Warner guy out...

The iPhone is an incredible device, and the interface is very intuitive.

It occurred to me though; is the touchscreen concept on larger scale machines like desktops and laptops good for longterm use, despite new touchscreen computers and monitors coming out?

I suspect the repetitiveness of every day working with touchscreens on a large scale isn't going to be any healthier then using a mouse or keyboard, in the repetitive injury department. But that's just my informal observation. Your mileage may vary, and I'm sure we will see.

Taking a Break While Computing, Filemenu Tools, Air Hogs and R/C, Spyware

2008-12-31T14:45:00.004-05:00

So here we go, a new year is almost here. I'm not much for New Year Resolutions, but I could stand to loose a little weight - especially after all the great foods, desserts, and candies I've eaten this Xmas. Wow. But I figure if I only indulge myself a few times a year - well, what's life without that?

The thing is I don't agonize over it, with me it's not a matter of health, I've just got a few extra pounds here and there. I guess what bugs me the most is other people; especially the rude ones. Since when did it become polite or accepted to go up to people you know and tell them they're fat? I'd have to consider that a fundamental character flaw, and usually a sign of the person's own insecurity and whatnot. Sometimes I think people are getting ruder and less polite.

Ah well. You know, when I was young I could drop weight in no time, if I felt I needed to. But, as I'm sure anyone reading this knows, when you get older it's much harder.

Fortunately I have lots of space to walk and hike in, and I find that with some internet, computer, and design problems and mental blocks can be overcome by simply getting outside and doing something else. With me, it's a sure way to get past pretty much anything along those lines.

And I have this problem a lot. I don't think of myself as an 'artitistc' person, so when I sit down to design a webpage or a CMS design or a graphic or logo for someone; I sometimes have a hard time whipping up a completely new idea. And I'm really aware of trying to make sure the websites I do for people aren't similar to each other, or generically alike. It's good for troubleshooting problems too, nothing like a little fresh perspective. And heck, it sure applies to other problems too, not just computer-related.

So I find that getting out and doing something completely is integral to what I do, and with a house this old there's always something to do in the maintenance and repair side, at the very least. Plus, it's always good to get up and exercise a bit once in a while anyway, for the body as well as the eyes and the mind.

There's times when I find that hours have went by and I haven't moved anything but my two hands.

Occasionally I will set my reminder program (Kana Reminder - http://www.kanasolution.com, nice free program that not only pops up reminds but can run programs on schedule, one-time as well as recurring) to remind me to get up and walk around and do other things, take a rest.

Here's a good time-saver and addition to Windows XP, and one that's not memory-resident (okay, so I have a lot of memory and processor power at present - but who wants twenty different programs running ALL the time when you don't need to?).

FileMenu Tools, which can be found on the website - http://www.lopesoft.com/ This program lets you customize the context menu you get when you right-click a file or folder in Eplorer or a file dialog, etc. You can customize (or delete) context items for filetypes, folders, and devices as well as customize your 'Send To' menu.

Kinda handy, but there are a lot of programs that do that; you may be saying. Like Fast Explorer and Shexview.

The difference is this program can also add it's own built-in and pre-made additional right-click context commands for various programs, folders, etc. The things that MS left out.

You can mix and match too, and even create your own context items.

For example - how many times have you wanted to be able to quickly copy a file path, or a filename, or have a quick find and replace right there on your right-click, or a batch filename renamer, or wanted to delete a locked file, or run a program with parameters, or wanted a military-grade file shredder? More options then I can list here.

You can do all this and more with this program, definitely worth checking out if you're a tweaker or a file system power user. And it gets called only when you right-click, so it's not memory resident.

Great program - FileMenu Tools from http://www.lopesoft.com/ Possibly might work on Vista, but I haven't specifically tested it.

I've always been interested in flying, as you know if you have read this blog before.

For Xmas my wife got me one of those Air Hogs r/c helicopters. You know the ones - very small, hard to destroy. They're what you might consider an entry level to larger r/c models or a way for a person to cheaply learn some of the dynamics of flying. Plus they're great fun, and a good toy for kids and adults. You can't really hurt much with them.

There are a lot of principles of flight involved, even if you can only fly it for five minutes before recharging.

Inside, there seem to be a lot of miniaturized electronics that wouldn't have been possible on a commercial scale a short time ago. Basically everything is on a chip in the tiny helicopter, outside of the receiver LED and the battery, and it's all controlled by IR instead of RF, unusual for remote control devices. Another improved technology. Pretty amazing if you consider it.

My niece's boyfriend got one of these last year, an earlier model. He's a very exuberant guy, very intelligent and interested in a great many things. If he didn't live quite such a long distance away we'd probably be great friends.
Anyway, he too is interested in flying. After playing around with the Air Hog for a bit, he bought himself a medium-sized helicopter (see pic above), r/c of course. It's another incredible piece of electronics, with many more of the same principles of flying a helicopter then the tiny r/c Air Hogs.
He's even added a wireless camera to it (see above), and done some aerial footage with it even. Here's a Photobucket.com folder of images and video from both my tiny Air Hog and his larger helo. http://s53.photobucket.com/albums/g58/lectrichead/Helos/ (It was very windy so he didn't take his helicopter up very far.)

The technology is so impressive and the ideas behind it that the military even has or is experimenting with a backpack version of this with a terrain-following system.

Just like the space program; smaller and cheaper are the words of the day with unmanned units taking some of the place of humans. The possibilities are endless. Though there is no substitute for a real human, especially in space exploration...

I remember as a kid some of our ideas and schemes for adding cameras and video to flying objects, most specifically model rockets. There was a black and white (later color) nosecone that could be added to most standard-sized rocket tubes.

When I say 'we' - I meant my friend Pete. We've been literally friends since we were tiny kids. And both of us have had the same interests - technology, flying, airplanes, computers, science fiction. And that included attaching crap to something we could fly around, even better if it was a camera!

He has his pilot's license now, and we've went flying a number of times. There's nothing like flying in a small plane, versus a large one. And two dudes who have always been interested in flying, riding around in an airplane - nothing better.

I hope someday to be able to afford flying lessons. I'd have to say it is my first and one true love, over all my other interests. But it's a very expensive hobby, both flying in person as well as r/c.

I always figure the customer's always right.

No, wait - that's not true.

I make sure the customer gets what they want, even if I believe they are wrong. But I do gently let them know if I think they're wrong.

Like recently, a customer had a bad spyware problem. Many times with these hardy and tenacious pieces of spyware it may take a few passes, and the newer ones are getting much much worse.

But the person didn't want to wait or take any more time. Someone; friends, family, neighbor, whomever, suggested wiping the whole computer. The computer had no restore partition, so I was forced to start installing Windows XP from scratch and finding the appropriate drivers. Fortunately, in this case; Dell 's website allowed me to put in a number off the computer and find the specific devices that specific computer has, and download the drivers for it.

Dell's not one of my fav companies, that's for sure, but this sure is a nice feature and made the process much easier. Still, it was time-consuming to set everything back up.

And the worse thing is - without finding the initial problem and fixing it, and making sure it wasn't via a website they used, or a piece of software (that they probably will install again), or coming from another computer on their network - it might be all for nothing and the computer might be re-infected tomorrow

In an electronics class I took the teacher, a Mr. Docteur, a wily highly intelligent dude - always stressed that troubleshooting and finding the problem allows you to not only fix it, but prevent the same problem in the future, as well as learn from it.

Starting over, like re-installing Windows from a re-formatted harddrive, is the last resort in any situation. Especially when people aren't likely to keep backups and there may be another easier resolution to the problem.

Anyway, I've always tried to live by the troubleshooting idea rather then the "start from scratch" and I've found that it's always better to go in the direction, and keep the latter for the last resort. And there are plenty of times when "start from scratch" is the only way to do it.

But, as I said - the customer is always right. At least they think so until they lose something important...

Hope everyone reading this has a safe and happy New Year's. Don't drink and drive.

New Monitor, Simple Solutions when Troubleshooting DVD Players and Other Complex Systems, Hiding Your E-mail Address On Your Website, Interesting Website Usage Stats

2008-12-02T09:08:00.004-05:00

Argh, been remiss here in posting, way too busy. Hmmm, I feel that I've said this before...

New Monitor

I just acquired a new 22 inch LCD widescreen monitor (the one on the right in the pic above). Very nice unit, large and bright.

But I wasn't supposed to have it until Xmas.

My wife ordered it from Staples and, well, they didn't package it in anything but it's original padded box, with a picture of it on the outside. Word to the wise; make sure it's gift packaged if it doesn't come re-packaged or if you're not sure.

Which meant the UPS guy handed it to me, and well - I knew what I was getting for Xmas at that point.

It's a great monitor, and after some custom resolution settings for my video card (so things aren't stretched - the video driver itself had no setting for this directly, though it's control panel also had a custom resolution setting) I was having a ball. But from looking at other people's stuff too many people have bought widescreen monitors (when their computers didn't come with them) and everything is super-stretched on the screen, but they don't notice it or don't care or can't figure out how to adjust it. Same with TV's...

I have now moved my 19 inch CRT to the side as the second monitor, replacing a 17 inch CRT. The 19 inch CRT looks huge, like a tank compared to a Porsche. And I need to take the base off the CRT to even both of them up vertically (the CRT's base has always been a bit high).

If you haven't tried a dual monitor set up give it a try. And you don't need two video cards either.

In the following pic is a bit of a comparison between the CRT (on the left) and the LCD (on the right). Much better color, much brighter more vibrant pics on the LCD. And this is after twenty minutes of tweaking of the CRT to try and make it comparable to the LCD display.

To be fair though - the trusty old 19 inch CRT spent a good portion of it's life in Korea (where it was made, BTW).

On a side note - the "STICKY" text was something a friend of mine was working on, and made a good comparison for simple colors.

Simple Solutions when Troubleshooting DVD Players, and Other Complex Systems

Sometimes, even in something complex and uber-complicated as computers and electronics; the simplest solution is the answer. And I think that's something a lot of us forget.

A good example.

We have a very nice LG DVD player; it upconverts for our HD TV, has lots of options, and even reads memory cards (which we've never used, like that USB port on our TV).

One day a crossed-out menu item started appearing in the top right corner of the screen. It was very intermittent and sometimes we could watch an entire movie and not see it appear. Other times it showed up all of the time, blinking on and off, popping up and disappearing.

Our first thought was that a button on a remote was being pressed, maybe by a remote buried under a magazine or book (after all, we have a large number of remotes).

Having eliminated that my second thought was a stuck button on the DVD. But it's not that old, and we never use the buttons on top of it. That can't possibly be it, we thought!

But it was the most logical assumption.

I tried a number of things, including cleaning the DVD, different connections (maybe a bad HDMI cable as it seemed to be related to the resolution), etc.

We even called the manufacturer's help line, tried a bunch of things.

Predictably one of the things seemed to work while we were on the phone, we thanked the Indian girl and not more then twenty seconds after hanging up the crossed-out menu item showed up again.

Of course, both my wife and I assumed that that was the end. Throw-away equipment nowadays.

A little further investigation using various menus showed that what seemed to be 'sticking' was something to do with the resolution switching, as previously suspected. While on the set up menu it would cycle through the available resolutions endlessly.

We checked the remote once again - nothing holding the button down, not even pointed at it, I dropped the batteries just to make sure.

Of course, there's a duplicate resolution-switching button on the top. But we had never actually touched it. I fiddled with it, thinking if it was sticking that bouncing it up and down might make it stop or at least point to it being the culprit. It didn't seem to make any difference.

Again - no, it can't be just a bad button, it has to be in the electronics. We started looking around for new DVD players, possibly a Blueray (still expensive!).

But coming from an electronics background - I decided that it was at least worth a try to mess with the button itself, mechanically and electrically. I held out near-zero hope that this was it.

Half an hour later, after disassembling the offending device, I had disconnected the suspect button using a soldering iron and desoldering tool carefully threaded between the electronics.

With the button hanging by one connection I half-assembled the player and gave it a try.

No crossed-out item in the corner. A couple DVD's later and still no problem. I desoldered the last connection on the resolution button, buttoned everything back up and tried yet another DVD. Still no problems.

So now it works fine, sans the resolution-switching button on the top. Not visible as I left actual the plastic cover that was on top of the button inside, and if I wanted to I could get another button to replace it but - again - we never use those buttons.

I'm sure that most people aren't going to have the resources nor the knowledge of soldering that I did in this case.

But it is a good demonstration that sometimes the simplest and most common sense explanation, even in extremely complex systems, shouldn't be discounted like we initially did.

Hiding Your E-mail Address On Your Website

One of the most important things nowadays when setting up and running a website is hiding your e-mail address from spammers, yet still allowing people to contact you. And hiding it both from automated harvesters as well as those in third-world countries who are hired to manually grab e-mail addresses off websites.

The latter is a method where a moderately motivated person can get your e-mail even if it's encrypted with a piece of JavaScript or similar method. Which previously was one of the best ways to hide your e-mail.

So nowadays it's much harder. The best way is to use a form for feedback, I think.

And let's face it - some visitors don't even have e-mail set up on your computers. They use web-based e-mail so when they click that "old-fashioned" e-mail link that normally opens a new e-mail message in your e-mail program - nothing happens or it opens an e-mail program that isn't even set up.

With forms your e-mail never appears anywhere readily accessible, and you can add additional fields, if needed, according to the uses of your website.

Works great, and highly recommended.

But, a real enterprising spammer might look at the source code of your form and get your e-mail off that. Very few of course, but it's still a possibility.

There's ways around this too, using CGI or PHP forms. But again, a quick look through the source code to find the PHP it's calling, and maybe a specialized program, will reveal your e-mail in it also. And again, there's more ways around that, but that's a subject for a different time maybe.

But a real simple way is to use a free form mail service instead of messing with it yourself.

Like this site - Email Me Form. It's easy and free, and works quite well. It also archives every form you get (and also can archive any spammer attacks, or mistakes by dumb users), has CAPTCHA as an option, and best of all even a spammer looking through the source code of the form page won't reveal your e-mail address, because it's not stored there. In fact, it's not stored anywhere on your site and can't be accessed through the emailform site.

The forms are nicely customizable and you don't even need to supply a page for your form if you don't want to - let them do it.

You can see a use of it at my Old Abandoned Buildings of Northern NY website, this one uses the form hosted at my site and processed through the Email Me Form site. Another example is the contact form that can be accessed at the bottom of my HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photo site - with the form hosted directly (a bit simple; this one) on the Email Me Form site and processed through there.

Great site, and if you don't like that one there's many more sites that will allow you to do this for free, or you can similarly keep it on your own site using various pieces of software and yet still hide your address.

Interesting Website Usage Stats

A stat counter is great for both seeing who is visiting your site, as well as targeting traffic via search engines and links.

I use the site StatCounter.com primarily, as they do an excellent job, though there are many nice free and paid services out there, as well as some great stuff you can host directly on your own site to do the same. Some will even show you real-time stats i.e. who's on your site right at that moment.

With this you can track individual IP's, where they are located, how long they stay on each page, what site they were on before your's and what site they go to afterwards, what OS and browser and resolution they are using, what keywords they used to find your site if they found it via a search engine, which search engine they used, the path they took through your site, and analyze keyword and site usage statistics as well as other points of data.

Invaluable for bumping your site up the search engines and tweaking Meta tags and keywords on your site.

Here's some interesting OS, browser, and resolution stats from one of my websites - my Jefferson County History site - during a certain time period. Just a side-note, not sure how visitors to my historical site compare to average visitors elsewhere.

270 54.00% MSIE 7.0 117 23.40% MSIE 6.0 70 14.00% Firefox 3.0.4 13 2.60% Firefox 2.0.0 8 1.60% Safari 1.2 8 1.60% Mozilla 5.0 5 1.00% 4 0.80% Firefox 3.0.3 2 0.40% MSIE 8.0 2 0.40% Chrome 0.2 1 0.20% MSIE 5.5

As you can see the various versions of IE still have the lion's share of visitors. No surprise here. The blank one is likely search spiders.

327 65.40 Windows XP 131 26.20 Windows Vista 16 3.20 Windows 2000 14 2.80 Unknown 8 1.60 Linux 2 0.40 Mac OS X 1 0.20 Windows 2003 1 0.20 Windows NT4.0

Nor surprising, I don't believe. XP continues to dominate even with new computers having Vista installed by default, for the most part.

212 43.89% 1024x768 139 28.78% 1280x1024 70 14.49% Unknown 29 6.00% 800x600 28 5.80% 1152x864 5 1.04% 1600x1200

A good 28 percent are using 1280x1024. Large screen monitors? Widescreen monitors? Do they like it that way or just never changed the default resolution?

483 Enabled 17 Disabled

This one shows number of people who have JavaScript enabled and disabled. For security reasons some disable it, but so many websites use JavaScript for menus and other interactive pieces. I guess I'm surprised that even this small number of people have it disabled. It's a good example of why you should always provide alternative means of navigating your site.

Obama Wins

2008-11-05T10:26:00.000-05:00

     My idea has been that Obama was the only choice, more a lesser of two evils. As the election went on and I got to know Obama better, at least his public persona, my attitude changed.

   I also noticed some other things that I had never been aware of before.

   Personally, I've always prided myself on having friends and close acquaintances of various political attitudes (and differing ideas in general) even if I didn't believe in them. Many times I wasn't even aware of some of my friend's political persuasions, believe it or not. Sometimes you just can tell when certain subjects are to be avoided or aren't something you have in common.

   But with this election I became much more aware of differences in some of my friend's attitudes towards things. It shouldn't matter and never has before, but during this last election sometimes it gave me some pause - even among some of my oldest friends.

   It was somewhat eye-opening.

   Anyway, for many years I've felt that America has been taking steps backwards. More and larger splits between and among political divisions, more biases between people of different attitudes, religion, even in some cases people resorting to racism and bias that previously we had made inroads into. Frankly, this "redneck" attitude and embracing of it that a candidate like Palin has brought out, has been coming to a head for a long time.

   There's nothing wrong with being a "redneck" I guess; until it starts involving the 'celebration' of racism, lack of education, intolerance, and pushing religion. That's when you see the steps our country has made, and in fact what created and made this country great - go out the door.

   This certainly came up often with Palin (again, why did McCain pick her?) and the embracing of a certain attitude. Like I said, this kinda brought it to a head in my mind; this backslide our country has started on, and this embracing of this attitude.

   I don't necessarily think that having an all Democratic Party government is a good idea either. As someone said over and over, it's good to have checks and balances.

   But look what happened when we had a majority on the Repub side... Gah.

   Well, anyway, when I saw Obama get elected, when so many people of all colors and ages and politics were hugging and congratulating each other - strangers most of them - I felt myself heartened.

   Maybe, just maybe, we can get back on track. Not only with the economy, but with human evolution and improving the human condition.

   I kept thinking back to when many years ago. There have been times in my life when I've made rude comments about certain peoples or ideas, unfairly, or laughed at other's jokes. I haven't been the most tolerate person.

   But when it comes right down to it I like to think that I've always tried to be fair when it came to people one-on-one.

   I've had a few black and Hispanic friends, and stood up to certain of my friends who didn't like that and befriended or helped some people in the minority in certain situations; sometimes against and among people who I considered friends.

   I'm not the most liberal person, but fair is fair. Some of my friends have had problems with me associating with people of various colors, or if a person was a GI, or was poor, or whatever. Sometimes I've lost friends over it.

   Last night I also kept thinking about a person who's an acquaintance. He's of the generation who are in there 50's now, and I remember one incident during one of the first times I met the guy.

   He ranted against those with ear rings, long hair, and tattoos. Basically, he said that every one of THEM were pot smokers or would be perceived in that way no matter what.   He considered them lowlifes and druggies and didn't want anything to do with them, wouldn't hire one if they came to him for a job or anyway associate with them.

   It was basically one of the most backward, most biased things I'd personally witnessed. He's not the sort of person I would normally be acquainted with or be around in general because of these attitudes and others, but because of circumstances I was and still occasionally am.

   And you can't argue with people like this, the ones who are way out there. After all - with people like that why argue with them; you can't change their mind about anything when they have that much ignorance. I whispered to my wife that I just wanted to stand up and pop him a good one, of course this accomplishes nothing.

   Believe me - I gave up hitting people because of conflicts many years ago. Bad temper on my part and a very bad incident involving my temper taught me that more damage is done then is solved this way.

   Back to the subject, I kept thinking back to this particular person and this incident many times last night. There's other ways...

   This wasn't a matter of racism that was involved, but it was a certain biased attitude that goes hand-in-hand with racism. Or even by itself.

   After the election and what I saw, I kept thinking that maybe there's hope for the US, for the world and humankind - that if someone part-black could be overwhelmingly elected president of this country of racists and biased people maybe some things can change.

   That maybe the afore-mentioned person is a dinosaur and one day he and others like him will go the way of the dinosaur - dead and extinct, and that their offspring will shake their heads and not take the same attitude.

   I woke up this morning actually feeling good about the US, for the first time in many years. It's not going to be a bed of roses, Obama and his staff and the Democrats are going to make a lot of mistakes. Some things they may even make worse for awhile.

   But there's hope when there's someone trying to make some progress.

Chris Pirillo's Geeks! Site, Ning.com, The Obama Projector, Major Worm Patch, Forcing Drivers in XP

2008-10-27T11:33:00.000-04:00

Chris Pirillo's Geeks! Site, Ning.com

If you have anything to do with computers you probably at least know of Chris Pirillo. He's run a technical mailing list and site for many years now.

If you're a geek or would like to be one and want to share info on a social network specifically by a group of self-proclaimed geeks check out Chris Pirillo's "Geeks!" social network website. The whole thing is built using Ning.com's social network-building.

Great site itself, and so is Chris' use of it - he's got a massive number of subscribers now. And it's all free. Embrace your geekdom.

Ning.com is worth checking out itself. You can set up webboards, photo and video sharing, chatrooms, widgets of all kinds, etc.

I like the site, occasionally post there. But I'm not a big fan of calling people (or myself) a geek - I like to think of myself as fairly well-rounded with many (sometimes too many) interests.

The Obama Projector

We have this holiday projector thing we got at a local super-store.

It's just basically a metal cylinder mounted on a swiveling spiked leg to stick it into the ground. Inside the back is a strong halogen light and inside the front is a set-up to hold a round slide, with a lens at the front. The whole front part can be slid up and down to focus the projection and make it larger/smaller.

It came with all sorts of holiday-themed slides, which are round and inside a pair of cardboard frames. As mentioned above they fit into the bottom part of the top section and springed legs hold them in place.

It works nice, projecting holiday figures onto any surface. We haul it out once in a while and project a holiday slide onto the side of the garage.

I got it out last night with the idea of putting the Halloween slides into it, as Halloween is my favorite season.

But ever since we bought the machine I've been thinking that maybe I could make my own slides. I could not only have my own custom holiday or special event slides but as an added bonus I could piss off neighbors by making a "Happy Xmas" slide instead of "Merry Christmas", etc. You know how some people get so damned upset about using "Happy Holidays" instead of "Christmas"...

As usual I never had the time to experiment with making my own slides. But last night I got the projector out, wanting to put in a Halloween slide.

Instead I decided to get a projector plastic flimsy out that can be printed on with a bubble jet printer. Various of my customers and friends do it all the time, but I've never had much of a reason to do so before.

I found an Obama graphic from a blog I read, and edited it a bit and printed it. It printed very nicely. See above. The shot shows the original graphics, with a few mods. The slides that came with the machine, and the slide I printed.

I cut the slide and at first made cardboard frames something like the original slides. When I stuck it in the projector and gave it a try, projecting it on a wall in the house with the lights off to see what it looked like; I was amazed at how well it came out.

Eventually, after some tinkering, I took the cardboard frame off so that more of the picture would show through. Which also worked well.

You'll notice the slides in the pic that came with the machine are very similar to slides from old-school slide projectors. I'm sure anyone who was an adult in the 70's, or even 80's, has a bunch of these lying. As a side-note, you can have slides printed or scanned, or buy your own set up to do it with dedicated equipment or using your existing scanner. A down-and-dirty but surprisingly-good way is to just haul our your old slide projector and fire it up, and take pics with your digital camera. Some messing around with your camera's setting should yield you some pretty god results. And some post-editing helps too. Of course, it's no substitute for doing it in a more 'professional' manner if needed.

Anyway, back to my outdoor slide projector project...

I set the device up outside and projected it on the side of our garage. Wow, surprising how well it works. A quick walk down the road confirmed that it could be seen for quite a distance. I then moved it to the front of the garage, as the peak afforded a large projection surface. This too worked, but couldn't be seen very well due to the angle of the garage versus the road. See pics below.

In the first photo above I allowed the flash to go off to show it in proportion to the garage, in the second is just the slide itself on the garage siding.

Firstly, as you can probably see - the slide needs to be repositioned in the device. An eyeballing problem, as the position in the device has to be guessed at since I didn't use a frame for the slide.

Secondly, it could be brighter. Last year the original bulb blew and I have yet to find another 100 watt bulb, what is in it is a 50 watt which seems to be common. The 100 watt - not so much. Still looking.

I'm not a super big fan of Obama but, well, the alternative is laughable. I really don't want to live in a four-year SNL sketch... Not that we haven't for the last eight years already, and look where it's gotten us.

I'm sure my next slide will be "Congratulations President Obama".

Anyway... Now that I know I can do it, and got a few of the techniques down I can print any custom one that I want.

Like I said - maybe an Xmas one. Maybe celebrate some obscure holidays. Or maybe celebrate a few "extinct" holidays like the Druid "Mabon" or "Gwyl Awst". Or maybe for a few days project an "It's a boy" sign, then a few days later "It's a girl". There's endless possibilities. Something to make the neighbors scratch their heads.

Major Worm Patch

No, I haven't taken up fishing... As you probably (should know) MS has shipped a special out-of-season (my phrase) patch for the Windows' systems. Sheez... Major anti-worm patch that stops a worm from exploiting a hole in the security system to execute code. You can see the bulletin here.

My download worked fine for XP on all the computers here, but the Vista version of the download caused an error message on two computers running Vista. Not sure why so far but likely having to do with the filename extension and disabled services.

Also, new GIMP out and, well, they actually listened to us users. Isn't Open Source great? It's kinda like the free market system, but no one gets rich off it. Or something like that.

Forcing Drivers in XP

People occasionally ask me to install XP on their new computers that came with Vista.

Many times I convince them to stick with Vista unless they have a specific problem they can't solve and doesn't work in Vista. Which, frankly, is increasing once again with the prevalence of Vista 64.

Sometimes it's a bugger to get some of the older or even current XP drivers to install in conjunction with other drivers previously installed.

Many times everything works fine, but once in a while I run across the problem where no matter how many things are uninstalled and no matter what order things are re-installed something doesn't take. Sometimes going in and deleted the driver and registry entry, even both have been uninstalled; doesn't work.

In which case sometimes you just have to force it to install the driver even if Windows thinks it's not the correct one. You know the routine - HAVE DISK, etc. As long as you're absolutely sure it's the right one give it a try as a last resort.

I find that even if the person wants ONLY XP on their computer it's best to partition it, install XP on the second partition, and make sure you have all the drivers you need first before deleting Vista.

That way you can go back to Vista to check on the exact spec of a piece of hardware, or it's IRQ and other parameters if needed; and other comparisons. Then once you have it all set up then you can reformat the harddrive and install XP as the primary.

Global Handwashing Day, Clipart Sites, Obama/McCain, Tweaks for Vista

2008-10-16T08:44:00.002-04:00

As you may or may not have noticed my blog entries are getting further and further apart. Sorry.

I find myself busier and busier but having less time, it seems without really gaining on much of anything. Isn't that the way it is with everyone? ;)

Global Handwashing Day

Today is Global Handwashing Day. The U.N. says that a simple act of a kid washing their hands more often could save more then 3.5 children's lives in the world. Okay, not such a big thing here in the US but I think most people don't do it often enough, let alone kids.

After I return from Watertown I always wash my hands thoroughly, as well as from customer's places. Some people "dip", but a good hand-washing is more involved then that.

And how about those times when you see someone use the bathroom and not wash. Gah, disgusting. Hard to believe it still happens.

Keyboards and mice and remote controls are terribly dirty, same with your steering wheel. A little scrub once in a while with some alcohol or the little hand-cleaning lotion you can buy is all that's needed. Same with the faceplate and buttons on your phone (don't get it actually wet).

Obama/McCain

I like this the above thumb came out, some interesting juxtaposing color-wise, don't you think?

Anyway...I find myself very much disliking McCain after watching him very closely during the debates.

He seems always on edge, and on the very brink of losing his temper. It seems to be consistent and continual.

Do we want someone who some Republicans had said was unwinnable during a previous run, because of his temper?

He's twitchy, yet frozen, on edge and I find myself not believing his sincerity.

McCain's like a number of people I know who project an air of holier-then-thou mentality, an air of I'm-older-then-you-so-I-know-better. I don't like people like that because, frankly, they usually are the last people you want giving you advice or ideas and are somewhat distasteful to be around, let alone someone you want to be the prez.

McCain - I'd probably smile and nod if he told me the sky was blue and, at the earliest opportunity, go outside to make sure it still was...

Obama on the other hand is much more likable in my eyes. Sure, he's still a politician but take away the politicking and I think I'd like the guy. He's smart, open-minded, and he's learning in both his demeanor and knowledge in general.

I feel much better about our choices as time goes on - not that I still don't have a LOT of concern in general.

HDTV is great, especially with a big screen. You can sit close to the TV and get a real feel for the demeanor of a candidate. Every twitch, every glance, every eye flick is there for your interpretation.

Maybe it's just me, but with Obama's double-digit lead I think the issue will very soon be very moot.

Enough of my aimless wanderings about the candidates, especially when I didn't even mention the issues themselves. But, I believe, character is very much important in any power position. And what could be more powerful then president of the greatest country in the world?

Stock Photo Sites

It's always nice to have sock photos for websites, blog, etc. Hey, don't just grab stuff off Google - that's stealing and copyright infringement. Use a free clipart or stock photo site. Like Cyclo.ps.

Cyclo.ps is an open source search engine for stock photo sites. Of course, some aren't free or require a membership to download, but many area. It's always good to check for copyrights or Creative Commons licensing info on any photos you use, especially if you're making money off putting it on a website .

Great resource.

I still like http://www.picapp.com/ and http://www.wpclipart.com/ myself.

Tweaks for Vista

MzUltimate Tweaker is an excellent free tweaking program, with lots of support programs. Give it a try, you won't be disappointed.

Thoosje Vista Tweaker is a bit more limited but still very good, and also free.

Another good one which is pay is here, from a company called Yamicsoft. You can get a shareware version from the site.

You'll also find many others, like Vispa. A bit less user-friendly but still does a great job.

As always, be careful with these and don't even give them a try if you don't know what you are doing.

Vista Quick Image Resizer

Some of us have gotten used to many of the tweaks in XP. They're old hat and used all of the time. You know the things, like MS Powertoy's Image Resizer. Right-click on and image and you can quickly resize it to whatever you want to. How many times have you received a 6 meg photo of something that someone should have resized on the other end with this program.

MS's tech employees haven't released or come up with any powertoys yet for Vista, but others have.

You can find a clone of the quick photo resizer for Vista here - http://www.powerhourgame.com/windows_vista_image_resizer_powertoy_prish_image_resizer.htm and another one here - http://www.vso-software.fr/products/image_resizer/download-image-resizer.php

The latter one does have an annoying pop-up but works well otherwise. The first is my choice. There are others also.

Replacing Notepad in Vista

It's very similar to the process in XP.

Get your favorite notepad replacement program, rename it to "NOTEPAD.EXE", search for all instances of Notepad in the Windows dir and sub-dirs and set the owner rights on them to admin, then copy your new NOTEPAD.EXE and replace the existing Windows ones (you may want to rename your old notepad to OLDNOTEPAD.EXE or something like that).

Depending on your flavor of Vista there may be a number of instances of Notepad in various places. Do them all.

Make sure you are signed in on an admin account when you do this, and if you find that you can't change the rights on all of the notepad versions reboot and go into SAFE mode (press F8 when the computer is booting and select SAFE MODE), then change the owner rights from safe mode.

Of course, you can always just associate textfiles and other documents with a notepad or word processor. But it's much better "coverage" of textfiles when just replacing it. Also, if you are using something that has it's own install dir it may be much harder to just replace the existing one, as it must reside in the Windows dirs and sub-dirs.

I recommend Metapad for replacing Notepad, with Metapad set up to allow you to do more heavy-duty editing in Open Office's Writer and the freeware PSPad (with Metapad if you have loaded a file into it and want to do more advanced editing you use the Launch menu to open the existing file in your favorite heavier-duty editor).

Vista
I find myself having a love/hate relationship with Vista.

I love some of the new features; the history for the file management and open dialog, the built-in immediate search (with indexing turned off of course), and the speed of everyday use (with Aero and unnecessary services disabled), etc.

Sometimes when I got back to XP I think - "Wow, how primitive!".

Yet, the architecture of Vista is bloated and way too patched. It's stable, but still very breakable. And not always so good on some systems. With the 4 gigs of mem it's very fast and stable. Same with my laptop, despite the smaller memory but there's definitely more disk using on the laptop with the smaller amount of memory and a very slow shut-down and hibernate on the laptop. Not so on the desktop. So I normally still use XP on the laptop. Maybe grab myself some more memory at some point.

And some common problems (one of which I ran into and finally solved) have never been addressed by MS nor resolved in Vista.

After partitioning and installing XP (and then re-installing Vista's boot and adding XP's boot entry) I could compare the speed of the two OS's. Under normal use it seems to be the same.

But once you do things like rendering large high res photorealistic landscapes you start seeing some speed differences, in XP's favor.

For example - using Bryce 3D I rendered a small moderately complex model. The differences between XP and Vista were consistently a half seconds difference, in XP's favor. Larger renderings of the same model at higher rez started increasing this by a few seconds.

Not a lot of difference but a measurable amount, and incremental.

Watertown Dog Park, Firefox Memory Leaks, Google Chrome, Vista & HP

2008-09-25T08:59:00.001-04:00

Congratulations to my niece and her husband for their new baby boy (and sympathy for the long hours of labor), named after my Dad.

Watertown Dog Park

A good example of why Jefferson County stays the same. Some of the people of Watertown and Jefferson County were almost up in arms when a group of citizens wanted a dog park in Watertown.

I love this area; the land and landscape, the history, and most of the time the people. But the ignorance and backwardness of some is disheartening, especially those who we rely on to govern and see further ahead then their own wallets.

A moderator on a local webboard even closed the topic about the dog park at one point, after the city council refused to take it any further. So further discussions were ended abruptly there on that webboard.

Fortunately there are those who are a bit more with the times and can see benefits beyond themselves. Fort Drum now has a dog park for military people, as well as the SPCA (though only for members).

The old rednecks and staunch Old Guard/Good Old Boys of the local government always wonder why the young people leave here. A dog park may be a small thing, but it's a reminder and maybe even a symbol of larger problems we have here.

Firefox Still Has Memory Leaks? No!

What did you expect - they fixed Firefox up but third parties who make the addons that most of us use are under no obligation to do so. Many of the addons hemorrhage memory like there's no limit, and sometimes the interactions between them are only making it worse. If you find your memory consumption high in Firefox 3 try alternative addons.

Google Chrome

I've yet to be as impressed about Google Chrome as some people are. It doesn't seem to be that significant in features or speed. And Google's terms of use are scary at worse, questionable at best. The German government even told people not to use it! Not that that means a whole lot.

Sure, I know - the argument is that if you're not doing anything wrong with it why do you care if they know what you're surfing. Same with their e-mail, online applications, etc.

Many down through history have thought similar. And fervently regretted giving up their privacy.

Google is a bit scary in general. They've far surpassed Microsoft in terms of the niggling feeling at the edge of my thoughts that whisper "World Domination" ;)

Vista and HP Computers

My new HP computer with Vista continues to perform well and impress me. The occasional older program doesn't work in Vista of course, I guess I've run across four or five so far.

And some of the features they did away with is perplexing.

Sound recorder is nearly useless. I normally use Cool Edit for heavy duty sound projects but there's still a need for a simple sounded editor. Fortunately you can just copy the old one out of XP and it works fine.

You can do this with some other XP programs too, though if you are actually replacing a Windows Vista program instead of adding one, you will need administrator privileges. Like for Notepad.

But the number-crunching ability of the computer, the 64-bit dual-core processor is impressive. Rendering photorealistic objects is blazing and working with multiple graphics programs and websites is smooth and fun now.

I ran into a bit of an issue yesterday.

One of the reasons I got this computer was the ability to make a recovery disk(s) from the recovery partition. If the hard drive goes flooey two days after the year long warranty runs out I have an option; outside of buying a new copy of Vista or going back to XP.

So I went to the HP Recovery Disk Creator, only to find that it won't let me create a disk now. It only allows one creation (easily hacked) but I hadn't even made one as yet!

Why? Well, apparently you can't add a partition or mess around with the hard drive too much, as it detects size changes, etc. And won't let you make the recovery copy. I even tried setting the partitions back (overwriting my XP partition), no luck. I tried hacking the config for it, making the sizes line up again. No luck.

After doing some checking online it seems to be a common problem (a few years back HP got into some trouble for problems along these lines, if you remember).

The only alternative is to back up everything, and use the recovery partition to set everything on the computer back to stock, build the recovery DVD's, and then restore everything again. A huge PITA. But I see no other way.

Though I bet there's a way to hack the recovery disk creator to ignore the changes. Ugh.

A few good links - if you miss the "Copy to" and "Move to" here's how to add them to Vista.

New Computer

2008-09-15T14:50:00.002-04:00

New Computer

I haven't actually bought a new, non-laptop computer in many years.

I usually make my computers out of a combination of parts I have, parts from current computers, and new parts.

But this time I wanted to just go out and buy one; a damn good one, and not screw around with it very much.

Of course, as things go - especially in the computer and Windows world - there's still a lot of screwing around to do. At least for a perfectionist and power user like I.

The computer I found is an HP. A good company, and pretty much always has been. They sell a good range of computers falling under any price and level of features that you want to pay for.

I didn't want any crappy Gateway's or Dell's, no factory-built jobbers (I'd just build it myself), no refurbs, no cheapos (like eMachines - though they're a perfectly fine computer).

I perused online, then headed out to the great megacity of Watertown. After trying to work through the semi-knowledge some of the guys at various computer stores have about the specific computers they sell (though the guy in Best Buy that I talked to knew a lot about computers and hardware/software - he wasn't familiar with any of the computers enough to tell me their specs without looking on the side of the box; which is of negligible help and that I could do myself). I found a couple good ones at Best Buy, comparable in price and features to what I found online. I wrote the models down and headed home to look up the exact specs, and compare prices.

Only a few days later I'd settled on this one articular computer over all the others. Best Buy had the best price for it too, surprisingly.

I also had to update my multiple USB 1.1 distribution boxes to 2.0. And I threw in a new power strip while I was at it.

The little cutie who helped me out the second time around didn't maybe know that much about the computers but she was very very helpful and happy to do so.

That is; once I stopped staring at all of her fascinating piercings - and sure; I may have wondered a few times where else she may have had piercings... But for the most part I kept my mind on the computers.

And yea - maybe at the end of it all she may have had a hard time actually getting the money out of my hands (a la the typical sitcom joke). After all, I'm a cheap bastard and I was paying cash - nothing like seeing that much money leave my fingertips after holding and cuddling it lovingly in my sweaty, shaking hands. Heh heh.

Better to give it to Best Buy and get something out of it rather then having Uncle Bush and his cronies get their greedy oil-stained mitts on it.

Anyway, it is 2.4 Ghz, 4 gig of RAM, dual-core, real Intel, Nvidia card with separate memory (if you want to do graphics applications, video editing, or heavy duty games make sure your video card isn't sharing mem with the computer - blah), Dolby Surround Sound card, lots of Firewire and USB and audio (front and back) and digital video ports, SATA drives (the specs mention it's IDE - strange), DVD writer with Lightscribe, lots of ports, expansion front and back, super quiet (compared to the relatively high decibels of my 'industrial fanned' bastard computer - a good computer and fairly fast and resource-filled but a bit slow when doing some of the work I've been doing), etc etc etc. I won't bore you with any more specs.

Suffice to say it's a pretty nice medium-range computer.

The hardest parts are 1) installing/copying stuff over from my old computer and backups and 2) figuring out which operating system I want to use.

The latter was the hardest.

On the one hand XP is well-established and frankly, I'm extremely familiar with it. It runs everything I want it to run. But XP can't usually take advantage of even 4 gigs of RAM (this particular system combined with XP only uses 3.12 Gig of the available 4), and the availability of drivers can be extremely problematic; to say the least. Sometimes a particular XP driver can't even be found for a newer system, or if it can it's severely out of date. Or doesn't support all of the features.

A good tip for finding drivers is to look at the manufacturer's website for other countries where XP hasn't been pushed out.

On the other hand Vista has come a long way with SP1 and the tweaks people have come up with. It's modern, and does have some nice features. And it o course takes advantage of newer software and hardware. Plus the drivers are already there and installed. Downsides - it's can still be annoying, lagged, and questionable. It's big, bloated (like all Windows software). And a few programs here and there won't run, older stuff.

I would either have to A) re-install a new OS and find sometimes-nearly-impossible-to-find drivers to work with it, THEN re-install all my stuff or B) optimize and hack Vista to make it work the way I want to.

I went back and forth for a few days. As I knew would happen ; finding drivers for this brand new system running XP was hard-to-impossible for some of the devices. I never did find one for the network card or SM Bus Controller.

At some point you have to re-evaluate things and how much time is going to be invovled and, indeed, whether you can do something and still have a few strands of hair left afterward (and I can't spare any).

I use Vista occasionally, for myself as well as customers; enough to know it annoys me. But never have I used it exclusively and for long periods of time.

Despite previous efforts to force myself to use it and tweak it and learn everything about it I never could stomach it long enough.

This time (through what I believe is an extreme force of will ;) I sat down and started seriously using it (without the thought at the back of my mind that I really was going to go back to XP at some point).

As I said - SP1 has made it much better. Combining a few simple things like turning off UAC, Indexing, and various other miscellanea makes living with it much easier. Not to mention faster. Turning off the Aero theme is even better, even though this computer ran very fast with everything mentioned above turned on. I in fact turned off themes completely, not just switched to the classic theme.

I uninstalled and/or disabled a number of other things including a bunch of media desktop stuff, media sharing, little tray icons for this and that that manufacturers install, dumped Norton (actually this was the very first thing I did), put on my own anti-virus, anti-spyware, and firewall software. And did a little registry hacking.

I continued (and continue) to dive into optimizing the system, getting rid of things that aren't needed (like the many services).

Now the Vista system is (mind-blowingly surprising to me) very fast and compares very favorably to the speeds of Windows XP. Things blaze, the graphics are fast and smooth (Flight Simulator 2004 is beautiful, gorgeous and realistic - in fact I find myself getting motion sick while flying occasionally).

It came with an HP keyboard and mouse (optical, but slightly cheap-feeling - the Logitech I've had for years is discolored from many years of finger-rubbing and button-clicking but it's solid and I can easily solder on new button switches when I [inevitably] wear one out once a year).

I'm not a big fan of multimedia keyboards (nor wireless keyboards and mice - though they are great for presentations). I tend to not use them, and people in general tend to not use the extra buttons after the initial fun of having them wears off. But I find myself actually using some of the functions on this one.

So far this has been a good computer and I've put it through it's paces. We'll see how it goes.

Finger Lakes Vacation Trip

2008-09-01T08:55:00.007-04:00

We've been throwing around a few ideas vacation-wise for quite awhile. I haven't, personally, went on a 'vacation' since our honeymoon a few years ago, and neither has Jenny (though she's taken some pretty nice biz trips).

We've taken weekends, sure. And a day or two here and there, or maybe a few days to relax at home. But nothing longer.

So we decided to do a camping trip to the Finger Lakes region. The "Land of Gorges" I think is the what they call that area, or some such. The Finger Lakes were created by glaciers that gouged out the large lakes during the Ice Age and. The area where we are going, around Seneca Lake and Cayuga Lake, certainly have a number of parks and areas with popular waterfalls and gorges. One is higher then Niagara Falls, even. And we haven't been camping in many years. It's also "Wine Country" but that particular attraction isn't something we're interested in.

The last time we went camping was a large get-together for a car rally (for the versatile and much-maligned Pontiac Aztek - we use the thing for everything and you can't find many SUV's that have seats that actually come out anymore. See pic above from the rally.), and we used the Aztek's tent and air mattress. Very comfortable, and we had a great time. The last 'real' vacation we took was out honeymoon to Ocean City (see pic below).

This time around we'll have the dogs with us (German Shepard and Boxer) so we're using our 12x8 tent, large enough for a queen-sized air mattress with lots of room left over for our stuff and the dogs too.

And we decided that, even though the Aztek has lots of room in it, we'd get one of those rooftop carriers so we can store some supplies in there and have more room in the back for the dogs.

I found a hardshell one on a local Watertown Freecycle mailing list. It was fine, though needed some new padding and hinge pins. We decided maybe we'd just go ahead and get a soft one; easier to put on and take off, less trouble, etc.

Except the later Azteks didn't come with the roofrails - which is kinda needed for the car-top carriers. The things you slide them into are on the vehicle, sure; but not the rails themselves.

The local dealership, Davidson's, would charge an arm and a leg for them. Over $270 for a pair of them! Any that come into the junkyards get snapped up at all the junkyards as soon as they come in.

Coincidentally, on our Aztek Yahoogroup (some of the same people we all went to a rally with a few years back) a person was GIVING away an Aztek because of a blown engine. A couple decided to drive down to Binghamton and tow it back to their place near Syracuse and part it out, for free.

So we asked for the roofrails, met them halfway, and gave them $25 for their troubles and gas. Good deal.

Now we have the roofrails, and the softshell carrier and we're ready to go. We set up the tent and got a new queen-size air mattress (the old one had some holes in it - too many to patch), and started gathering our stuff together for the trip. We're really looking forward to it.

Oh, and you may notice that this entry is posted after we got back. I know, maybe this is a bit paranoid but I'd prefer not to let anyone know we'll be gone beforehand. Ya never know...

After getting the updated and routable maps for my GPS (and a bit of messing around to get everything to work), I'm looking forward to trying out the various routing and waypoint functions. And having access to how far away the nearest McDonald's is, how long it will take to get there, and what time, etc. is going to make everything much smoother and easier.

Tuesday.

We started out fairly early, but there’s always the occasional snufa and forgotten item. This time around I had been working on and tweaking the list of items we would need, for a few weeks time ahead of time. I also have a list of common camping and trip items that I cross-referenced what we needed against. And I don’t think we passed over or missed anything.

On the way down the Aztek’s stereo started going fruity, changing stations by itself. What a headache, as we’re music people. And I didn't want it to ruin Jenny's vacation. I figured when we got back I'd unhook the battery for a bit, sometimes that can reset the computer in the stereo.

It wasn’t until we were most of the way down there that Jen started wondering if something was pressing against the duplicate radio controls in the rear. That was it, I knew right away. Earlier I had reclined the seat and climbed into the back for a water bottle. But getting back into my seat, crawling over the dogs and the stuff - isn't exactly easy. So we decided to wait until our next stop to check it.

The GPS had helped immensely already, there’s just no question of getting lost or finding the nearest Wegman’s or Pizza Hut with the GPS and it's search functions. After a short time of comparing routes the GPS calculates and those from a paper map I gave up re-checking it. Give in, trust technology blindly... ;)

We found a nice little city park in Geneva, with doggie poop bags, boat docks and accessible shores (for us to take the dogs down to), a visitor's center, and picnic tables.

While we had our pizza I moved some things away from the duplicate radio controls in the rear. Sure enough that was the problem. The radio worked fine.

Back on the way to the Sampson Campground we went through the wine country; large grape fields and wineries interspersed with large crops of very healthy corn. The growing season here seems to be later, due to the warm climate between the two lakes (Seneca and Cayuga).

Almost there – we went by a long fenced-in area, with high fence topped with barbed wire and warning signs. This was the retired Seneca Army Depot that was right on the other side of the Sampson military base.

The fence ran for miles and at one point we saw a pure white deer. At first we both thought it was a goat. And then I remembered something I had read quite awhile back.

There was a retired military base in NY where a number of white deer had gotten inside the fence when the base was being built and had bred.

I need to find more info on this, I’m assuming it’s the same one that I had read about before but, as I write this; I have no access to the Internet and can't remember if it was indeed the Seneca Army depot grounds where the white deer are. (Later addendum - yes, it was the Seneca Army Depot that the white deer bred on - a link. These are NOT albinos. The 24-mile fenced-in area keep the deer in and most people don't even know they exist. We were lucky to see them. Apparently the base commander liked the white deer and ordered that they not be hunted so they continued to breed, while the normal brown deer were hunted and culled. Possibly the only place in the world with that many white deer when most people don't even know there is such a thing; but now they want to develop the area which seems to be a big controversy there. Others want to make it a wilderness area).

No WIFI at this campground – way too large to cover I guess. In fact, there aren't many real villages nearby and not much chance of grabbing a signal anywhere.

So we got to the Sampson Campground, a former military base-turned-park. A very nice place, lots of land, a military museum, and a very friendly (and a bit silly from too many long hours) desk clerk. We were able to check in and set up our site earlier then the normal 3:00 PM check-in time. Again, the GPS even led us directly to our own camp site itself (I had waypointed it before hand, using the camp’s site maps so I knew exactly where on the campground we would be).

Our site has lots of space, and in fact it was a special extra $4 for it (because of the water access). We have access to the water, electricity, and a good big space with some elbow room away from neighbors. We took the dogs into the water (not sure if we were supposed to be swimming as there is a beach on the grounds but we went in too).

And now we sit and relax. Nice day so far.

Later, we walked quite some distance down one of the abandoned roads which were originally part of the military base and which are now walking trails. This one continued all the way to Willard, the next town (and where a large drug treatment facility is – which is an alternative to prison for qualified candidates. Like a boot camp sort of situation I guess).

We didn’t walk all the way to Willard as we didn't really know how far it would be (I left the GPS in the car).

We also checked out the military museum on the Sampson campground/park. It was closed but had a lot of interesting naval and air force equipment outside.

I also got in touch with my father back home, who is taking care of the cats, ferret, and keeping an eye on the house. He mentioned that my uncle, Vern, had been stationed here at the Sampson Naval base when he was in World War II.

While brushing my teeth at the bathrooms/showers a guy and his son were cleaning a large lake trout. Gigantic thing.

Last night

It was a little cool in the tent last night, I ended up letting all the rainflaps down to seal the mesh. Why didn’t the tent instructions say you could do that? It made a hell of a lot of difference, no draft and a bit warmer.

But the worse thing for me was some sort of tree frog or something. What kind of evolution would make an animal want to croak, squeak, or make noise all night with little pause? What possible reason?

I finally got smart and dug out my ear plugs.

Wednesday

I got into the showers before anyone else, since our shower area only has two men’s shower stalls. Each section or “loop” of camping has one bathroom/shower area and there's also a main section.

We headed out early.

We had noticed on the entire trip that there were a lot of bicyclists, they seemed to be either traveling in groups or together. On some tour perhaps?

As we were leaving the park a couple RV trailers were also heading out and a small group of bicyclists were following right on their rear's.

As we turned onto the main road a couple of the bikes continued to stay directly behind one RV trailer. As our speeds increased one dropped back but the other continued for perhaps a mile. I was stunned, he was reaching speeds of nearly 50 MPH and at times wasn't even pedaling.

Just like NASCAR cars and other racing; the bicyclist must have been using the relatively low pressure air behind the rear of the boxy RV trailer. Amazing how fast he was traveling. As the hill increased in pitch he went from occasionally not even pedalling to fast and even cranking, then gradually fell back and finally stopped on the side of the road, waving at the people in the truck pulling the RV trailer as it pulled away. He was breathing fairly heavily as he waited for his companions to catch up, but not overly so. Pretty impressive.

We headed out toward the Taughannock Falls area. At this point we were fully trusting the GPS to give us correct and quick instructions, and we barely looked at our paper maps for the rest of the trip.

The park and gorge and falls were absolutely amazing. The waterfall has an upper and a lower viewing area, and is 215 feet from top to bottom. There's also an upper falls and a lower falls.

Some of the gorge walls are 400 feet tall or more. We took the lower trail, which goes along the bottom of the gorge. We could even walk out on the flat stones where, during flood season, flood waters flow. In fact, there’s been incidents where the trail bridges and pavilion have been washed out, once right after some campers left. But that's during spring time of course.

After doing lots of exploring and pics (and having tourists stop to pet and talk to the dogs) we then headed to Ithaca, thinking we could see some of the gorges and waterfalls right in the city of Ithaca. We hadn’t realized how hilly it is and hard to find these falls in an unfamiliar and maze-like city and campus.

After we tried to find some of the trails to the falls according to the directions I had printed out, and not being successful (without getting out and walking around to find them), we decided to head out to the next park. The campus and area is a maze and many of the falls are on small seemingly unmarked walking trails and shortcuts. Again, the GPS came in very handy getting us out of the city and also finding us a McDonald’s.

At Buttermilk Falls State Park we decided against walking on the tall, steep, and hard to walk trail around the area. With a rambunctious dog it wasn’t a good idea. We decided to go to the other part of the park, the upper part, and walk those trails.

But on the way another gorge area I had waypointed on the GPS showed up and we tried that. It was very treacherous, and some of the trails precariously wound along very tall drops. This was called Sweedler Preserve and was on DEC land. Until a short time back the falls were almost unknown by even the natives to that area, and there wasn't even info on how far down the gorge went. It was very scary though, especially since you're walking along a dirt trail along the very edge, and I kept thinking back to those overhangs on the Taughannock Falls Park. On those trails they kept them far, far away from the overhanging edges.

We went on quite a section of it but turned back after a bit and went to the upper Buttermilk Falls part, went around for a drive along this park (one part has the road going through the running stream that goes into the gorge), and then we headed back.

The trip back to the campground was uneventful. The dogs slept most of the way.

Back at the campground the tent that the young couple who had been camping to the left of us had put up was now on the site to the right of us, and a van was at their previous prime spot. They must not have reserved it for that day.

The new people were a guy, his wife, and a kid. They looked awfully friendly, too friendly in fact. And kept looking over hopefully at us.

I made sure I looked as uninviting as possible and they left us alone. Some people go camping to get away (like us), and some go to meet new people and schmooze.

Many of the spots near us were vacated at this point. That night we started a larger fire and when we came back from the bathrooms while getting ready for bed; a big RV trailer being pulled by a dually was trying to get into a space parallel across from us. And having quite a time, eliciting lots of complaints from others.

Th wife was backing it up while the asshole husband swore at her and paced back and forth with his flashlight, trying to get her to back it in the way he wanted. This went on for quite some time.

The campground itself has a number of security vehicles which drive around every few hours, and we saw some local cops take trips through the park at various times.

But this time, unfortunately, there was no one around. Finally they seemed to get the trailer in the way they wanted and things settled down.

Thursday morning

I slept much better, with my earplugs in. The tree-dwelling animals screeched both nights but this night I was smart enough to put the plugs in earlier, so I didn't hear much of anything.

As I headed to the shower, hoping I would get lucky once again and get it at least mostly to myself; the RV trailer and truck were sitting across from us, no sign of life. Fine with me.

I made a quick fire, cooked our eggs and toast and we started packing up. I'm pretty good at making camp fires, BTW, all it takes it a bit of logic and basic knowledge of thermodynamics to make yourself the perfect fire.

Anyway, the young couple to the left of us didn't emerge until we were just about ready to leave. Earlier in the morning the family to the right of us had returned from where ever they had went well before I had gotten up at a leisurely 7:30. Damn early risers - don't trust anyone who goes on vacation and gets up earlier then everyone else and is damn happy and bubbly about it.

We packed our car-top carrier and the dogs and took a quick look around for anything we'd missed, then headed down the park driveways.

On the way, I had my GPS do a search for Geocaches (I had used Garmin's Geocache section to mass-download Geocaches for the area directly to my GPS - a corporate site that actually has something that works well and efficiently - yep!) and sure enough there were four nearby.

After a short walk down one of the old original base's roads we came to the location of the Geocache; this one called "Poppa Bear" - don't ask me why.

After searching for a bit I was about to give up.

Because the military and government limit the accuracy of commercial GPS's I figured I could be 15 feet off, or more on this overcast day. Sure enough, I found the Geocache - another ammo box - in a broken concrete pipe, half covered with twigs and bark and about 15 feet from the waypoint location.

We looked briefly through all the log entries (a family had found it the previous day, in fact) and then we signed it and headed over to the military museum (didn't feel like looking for any more Geocaches at that point).

The museum is manned by veterans and is situated in the old brig building, with a few real planes and boats outside. One side of the museum is for the Naval Base, one side for the Air Force.

The naval side was much larger as it had been a naval base much longer, and had almost every conceivable items from everyday life on the base as well as from those who were stationed there and moved on. There was even a real periscope, on loan from the military, that you could look through and see 360 degrees around the park from the roof of the museum. It was quite interesting and they even had notebooks filled with names and pics of those who had been stationed there. There didn't seem to be an index so I didn't look up my uncle. The museum is very well done, on both sides.

Next we headed up to the Montezuma Wildlife Preserve. This is a large wetlands preserve, with walking trails as well as a driving trail (also, the Seneca-Cayuga Canal System goes right past it). We saw a few birds and wildlife here and there, stopping at the observation tower and walking one of the trails in addition to the driving trail. It also had a nice visitor center with stuffed animals of all sorts that might be in the preserve, and lots of info and helpful people.

We spent quite some time there but finally felt it was time to head back. Unfortunately the Thruway doesn't have as many entries and exits as Route 81 so we had to go all the way to Weedsport to get back on (not all that far).

Again, the GPS made the whole thing a breeze - instead of looking through maps and missing shortcuts they were all right there. Of course, the GPS is only as good as the maps that are loaded on it and the person using it.

On the way from the Preserve to Weedsport we passed by and over the Erie Canal System, and one of the still-functioning locks. A boat was making it's way toward it. I would have liked to stop to watch but I was ready to head home without delay at this point.

Here's more pics from our trip.

Vacations are nice, but it's just as nice to get home too. And there's always a lot to catch up on.

My Dad's 90th Birthday, Faststone Maxview, More Stabs at HDR Creation, Fred Langa's Journey

2008-08-11T08:27:00.003-04:00

My Dad's 90th Birthday

I was a late child - an 'accident' as my wife likes to tease me about.

While growing up, most of my friends and peers had parents the age that my sister and brother were, with grandparents the age my parents were.

It usually didn't make much of a difference either way to me, for the most part. But let's just say I didn't do things like bring home the eccentric, sometimes strange, sometimes wild girlfriends I preferred at the time.

In later years I found myself doing some extra caring for them as they got older, more and more. They were always self-sufficient but as we all know sometimes we need an extra hand when we get older.

Before my mother passed away I made every day trips to check on them, sometimes more then once a day, and help them out with whatever they needed. I sometimes took them places and made sure things went smoothly, lending a hand as much as needed. In these later years I probably saw them more then I had seen them later when I lived at home and before I moved out.

After my mother passed away I took extra care to continue being there and making sure I was available to help my dad when needed, doing the at-least-once daily visit with him and helping him with what was needed - though he's still very much self-sufficient.

Last week he celebrated his 90th birthday and last weekend we had a little BBQ/birthday party for him, organized by my wife and I and my sister. I think he enjoyed it, and below is a quick pic I took of him with his birthday cake.

As everyone who knows him says - he's in great shape for his age. And especially after working all his life in a fairly dangerous profession - farming.

Faststone Maxview

I'm always on the look-out for the fastest image display program. Something for those times when you just want to take a peek at a bunch of photos or pics, maybe do some simple rotations or contrast changes, or look at the f.stop info for that pic, or something along those lines - faster and better then the built-in XP one (which I haven't used in years) but for those times when you don't need to load a pic into something as heavy-duty as a full-blown image editor, or even a simple one.

For awhile I had switched to the commercial program ACDC, then Irfanview (crappy but fast), then XNview, and a few other minor ones.

Finally I ran across something something called VJPEG - a frameless picture/photo display program. It had some nice features; like frameless photo display and like being able to resize the displayed photo by grabbing it and bumping the edges of the screen.

But it was a bit simplistic and basic, plus if any other windows covered the displayed VJPEG windows it wouldn't show up on the task bar.

Previously I had tried out Faststone Image Viewer - very similar to XNview and earlier versions of ACDC.

It was a toss-up between Faststone and XNview but I finally settled on XNview due to a slight speed advantage.

So after messing with VJPEG I had a taste for something like it, something to replace the very nice but still feature-heavy XNview.

I came back to the Faststone site and found something I hadn't previously tried, even though it was right before my eyes when I tried the Faststone Image Viewer - something called Faststone Maxview.

A quick download and I had it plugged into my system. Very shortly I had changed my associations for graphics to this one.

It was fast, quick to display, and frameless until you bump the top. You could resize it and pick various options for displaying part of all of a pic.

Maxview also showed up in the taskbar, allowed multiple instances and was moveable, and when you bumped the top you got a menu with some more options; like a lossless rotate, brightness control, sharpness, and a bunch of other basic options. Right-clicking brings up more, including the ability to send/edit the photo in any number of external programs. Bumping the bottom of the displayed pic gives you zooming, smoothing, SAVE AS (for converting to other formats), slideshow, next or previous pic, etc as well as an overview window (for when you have it zoomed).

Fullscreen mode works beautifully, with an additionally option of giving your camera/photo properties when you bump the right side of the screen.

The program also lets you open your graphic or pic in the more fully-featured Faststone Image Viewer using the Edit With External Programs Options (which you can also additionally set up to allow a photo to be sent to Adobe Photoshop or any other programs, and any number of them).

Many, many other nice options I haven't mentioned here. A definite must-see if you need something like this.

More Stabs at HDR Creation

If you've read my previous blog entries and/or are into photography you probably have heard of HDR - High Dynamic Range photos. It's a way to fit more picture information into one photo, a way for a photo to display more then a camera will normally capture; by using multiple shots with various contrasts.

Here's my latest creation (see above pic), the best of a few. Not bad, getting there. Click to see a larger version.

I've also been experimenting with the long exposure settings on my Canon Powershot A570 IS. Great camera, see previous blog entries. I'm continually impressed with the many features this camera has, rivaling much more expensive ones yet with automatic modes easy enough for the casual photographer to use.

The below photo was done the same way as the above. It's okay, not great when talking about HDR's. But what's interesting to me and my continually efforts in improving my photography skills is that this was done in near-darkness. The bright spot is the moon, not the sun. Notice the illuminated clouds near the moon. Love the long exposures. Good stuff.

Fred Langa's Journey

If you're a 'computer person' then you probably know Fred's name. He published the Langalist for years until he retired (it's still running, under new management) and has his post-list blog. He sure knew/knows his stuff.

Mr. Langa had decided to take a long motorcycle trip with his wife after he retired, and photo blog (via a motorcycle enthusiast's site) the whole thing as he made the trip.

But circumstances changed and he had to make the journey by himself. His roadtrip went from a simple vacation to an experience of acceptance of his situation.

And, of course, a great number of incredible pictures and personal experiences. Take some time and check it out.

I wish Mr. Langa very well.

New Quote System For My Blog

Nothing major - just tweaked my quote system for the blog. It now isn't graphically-based but inserts the text directly, making it look a bit nicer. I inserted the code reference directly into the HTML code of the template itself, of course; for better integration.

Free Maps of the Whole US for your Garmin, Customized Engraving Company - Warning Blatant Advertisement

2008-07-23T09:16:00.000-04:00

Free Maps of the Whole US for your Garmin

If you buy a Garmin eTrex GPS you know that the basemap for roads is, er, a bit questionable in the amount of data department. Of course - you're not buying the thing for the roadmaps; are you?

Well, I want it all so I had a friend (a big thanks to G, always a good guy) download the 1 gig+ IbycusUSA US maps, due to my crippling broadband problem ('crippling' as in the local cable company bites). They're free and so I didn't expect a whole lot, despite people raving about how good they are.

I was wrong and they seem to cover everything I've been trying to do (I spend many hours learning the process and making maps, heh heh; but now I can concentrate on creating topo maps - a much harder process). They even include ponds, streams, lakes, and rivers as well as parks, POI's, etc. They even have the small dirt road tracks that I am used to including in my maps.

Pretty damn good, and they seem to be from the same sources I'm using, the pretty good government-sourced Tigermaps (proof that something sanctioned by the gov't actually can work). BTW, I believe these are due to be updated this year? Every 10 years? Correct me if I'm wrong.

I HIGHLY recommend the IbycusUSA US maps, just download and install and you can access every individual county in the US via your regular Mapsource software (some people on some of the mapping groups I'm a member of say not to download the newest version, as it's 'breaking' the ability of the software to access some third-party maps. Deliberate by Garmin, or accidental?).

You can also upload these to other Garmin products, including the road navigator Nüvi - from what I have read; to update the existing US maps on it. I assume the transparency setting for the IbycusUSA US maps is set.

Also, a P.S. and BTW here - another nice mapping website; ACME Mapper 2.0 if you're a mapping nut. It has links for other sites from the coordinates you enter and you can get Google Maps, Google sat, Google hybrid, topo maps, NEXRAD, and DOQ (Terraserver) and lots of other stuff.

Customized Engraving Company - Warning Blatant Advertisement

I agreed to give these guys a plug in exchange for sending me a very nice (free) nameplate for my desk.

They did a beautiful job of it for my plaque so here's their website and company - Customized Engraving, check 'em out if you're in the market for these. You can get plaques, nameplates, photo plaques, signs, etc. And good prices too, you can order right through their website.

Power Crisis, Wind Power, Updated Garmin Maps, Fort Drum Air Show

2008-07-08T08:35:00.001-04:00

Power Crisis, Wind Power

Interesting. For quite sometime I've been saying that we're all dumb.

Everyone in the US should have learned from the oil problems of the 70's (whether we were alive during this time or not), and we should have seen this coming. We should have been pushing our lawmakers and manufacturers and scientists and everyone else to start looking at alternatives before this high-priced energy problem got so bad. We shouldn't have been making a bunch of people rich on our backs, especially people who have no like for us or our way of life in the first place.

We knew it was coming, or we should have. All of us.

Now all the ways to fix the problems will be decades in the making.

And finally someone of high profile has said it, billionaire T. Boone Pickens. I like this guy, despite his redneck, backwoods-sounding name.

Mostly because he parallels my exact ideas. That we should have all known better, starting right in the 70's, and should have tried to change things and decrease our reliance on oil.

In addition his idea is to use wind power for the long-term solution, propane for the short-term. A lot of sense there since even propane is going to eventually run low, if we overwhelmingly start using that in our cars and furnaces. I'm not so sold on the whole propane thing, but definitely wind power is going to be a major boon to the US electrical and power need.

Yea, we have a major problem here, and we're going to have to start doing something about it.

My father's idea is to cut back, more and more, and that's what we're all starting to do. But is that really what we should be doing? Do we want to keep taking steps backwards?

We may have to in the short-term, until we can get away from the sometimes-Republicanesque attitude of head-in-the-sand turning-a-blind-eye to a problem or using stopgap measures or just plain throwing money in the wrong directions.

Take, for example, hybrid cars. There's many small cars that get better mileage then even cars like the Prius hybrid.

And the number of resources going into making that car, and then recycling it at the end of it's life - is certainly high right now. Maybe more then justifies making the car as a hybrid in the first place. The naysayers are quick to point out all of these short-comings.

But guess what? That's the way everything works. Once people start using a product a manufacturer improves the entire process, as well as science and engineering - from production to product-death, it's stream-lined and the whole operation is bettered.

Look at the first Model-T's. They were pricey by the standards of the day, and broke down often. The driver had to be the mechanic too, if he wanted to keep it going.

Once Ford's came along with his assembly line and improvements were made in both the car itself as well as the standardization of parts and consistency of them - the whole thing took off. Prices dropped, for the consumer and the car maker. Garages cropped up, more bodies and options were added; and we had a revolution that caused the country (and the world) to go from horse carriages to moderately cheap over-powered machines that could take you anywhere in a short time, and even a teenager could afford a used one.

But what would have happened if people hadn't taken a chance on them in the first place? And paid a little more, or took some extra trouble to fix a cranky engine?

We need the same general attitude with hybrids, hydrogen cars, electric cars, propane cars, alternative power for cars and homes and businesses in general. Even if there may be an initial high price for it, both in money itself as well as maintenance and recycling.

Once we get the demand up there and improve the whole mess we'll start looking to be in much better shape, decades from here very likely (unless we can have a computer-like revolution in energy production).

On a related note - one of the most weirdest things I've seen was local anti-wind power nuts saying they'd rather have a nuke power plant beside them then a wind tower! Whoa.

Okay, I can understand why some people might think a wind tower is ugly (I personally don't) but who would rather have nukes right beside them then clean wind?

Some of the stuff these people come up with is laughable - the motion of the turbine causing health problems according to an obscure study, decades old, from a quack who was shunned by his peers.

The anti-wind power group seems to have developed a cult following around here, beyond all reason.

On the level of some of the anti-pro-choice nuts and such (and though I'm an animals rights believer I can throw in some of the animal rights groups to the nut category, same with the gun nuts. Again, I'm a longtime gun rights advocate also, but some of these people are crazy as hell).

What would happen with these anti-wind tower people if their power starting going out on a random basis? Or their electricity prices sky-rocketed beyond all reason?

Updated Garmin Maps

These are yet more updated, cleaned up maps for this area.

There's two sets - one with all the major and minor streams, rivers, ponds, and lakes in the area; and one without.

These of course should work on many of the Garmin GPS units, and can be converted to other formats.

Here's the directory. Disclaimer - use at your own risk, I make no guarantees about accuracy.

You should be able to make a directory for which ever file you download (upperny.zip is just the roads, water.zip is roads and the water - both are transparent so they let the basemap show through), and then unzip the .zip into it, then click the .reg file. This will add the map to your registry and allow Mapsource to access it.

Fort Drum Air Show

Fort Drum had it's centennial celebration complete with a large air show.

Dumb of me - I didn't go! Despite my life-long interest in flying and airplanes!

My wife and my father weren't interested, and frankly with the high gas prices I don't do much that's unnecessary in the way of driving.

But none of those were a good excuse for me not wanting to go to something I was extremely interested in. I can't explain it.

Ah well. Here's some pics, courtesy of my niece Heidi.

New Editor/Dashboard Look in Blogger, Google Maps with GPS, Flash Earth, Drop.io, Jott.com Now Has RSS Feeds, No WAAS on New iPhone 3G?, Converting Raster to Vector

2008-06-27T08:00:00.000-04:00

New Editor/Dashboard Look in Blogger

I like it; it's bigger, brighter, and more "Web 2.0" (despite my somewhat-dislike for this misnomer that has become such an established "format"). Or maybe this is just a function of the Blogger-in-Draft that I'm using? Nonetheless, it works well.

I continue to try various stand-alone as well as hosted blogging solutions but Blogger always beats them all hands down.

The only thing I haven't liked about it so far is that it doesn't open a new window for image uploads. With the previous you could still work on the blog while the photo was uploading, but with the relatively small photos and graphics I use on the blog it's a minor thing. And it's made up for by the photos actually being inserted at the cursor instead of the top of the screen, as well as an easier drag'n'drop for them when repositioning.

Kudos to Blogger as always.

Google Maps with GPS

Here's an interesting application - Google Maps with GPS. Basically it's a little program that connects to your GPS and loads up Google Maps (not Google Earth). I couldn't get it to work with USB but it did work by using another program to emulate a serial port for USB.

It's very basic but does it's job, with logging and the ability to zoom and use all the regular features of Google Maps (for the most part).

Flash Earth

Here's a nice resource for sat/aerial/mapping, all in one spot. This site, using Flash, allows you to access NASA, Open Layers, Microsoft Virtual Earth (both with and without labeling), Yahoo Maps (ever wonder how many hits Yahoo gets through Google searches?), and Ask.com Maps.

There's no specific function for saving them (like most sites) but the good ol' press-PRINT-SCREEN-key-and-paste-into-a-graphics app method works fine.

This site also has some other stuff like a Planetarium.

Drop.io

Drop.io - very cool site. You can store pretty much anything at this site, privately and non-searchable.

You basically can give people the private address an no one else has access to it, though you can password it too if you like. Upload photos, videos, etc.

And, one of the coolest things about it - you can send or receive your drops via the web, e-mail, voice, or even a fax. You can even zip everything up in your drop and grab it in one piece.

Highly recommended.

Jott.com Now Has RSS Feeds

If you've ever used Jott - the free service that allows you to call it and say voice notes which are then converted to text and which you can text and/or e-mail to others (or yourself) - then you know how useful it can be and how well their voice-to-text recognition works.

Now they have added the ability to get any RSS feed via text-to speech.

Sure, you can use your Internet-capable phone to read RSS feeds but it's nice to be able to hear them while you're doing something else, driving, using the computer, or whatever. Works good if you don't use text messaging or the Internet via phone too - as it's free.

You can even use it as a substitute for text messaging and such, there's a lot of potential.

All you do is call the Jott number, it recognizes your originating number and you say "Jott Feeds". Once the voice menu is ready you tell it the name of the feed you previously set up through their website. After a brief moment it starts reading the RSS feed off to you.

I use it for quick weather forecasts, racing scores, world news, and even local news via the local news website's RSS feeds. Very slick.

No WAAS on New iPhone 3G?

I've yet to get a straight answer. Is the new iPhone;s GPS chip capable of WAAS? And if not, why not?

I'm assuming since I can't find the info on it that it doesn't. If not, it's a shame and would be hard to believe.

It was developed by the FAA to help in increasing the accuracy of GPS for aviation navigation but now is on pretty much all GPS receivers.

The system consists of a number of ground-bases stations which broadcasts timing and location signals to a pair of sats, these are picked up by the WAAS-capable GPS along with the regular GPS satellite network and provides a hellofagood accuracy compared to without it.

Converting Raster to Vector

I've been playing around with various programs for converting raster graphics to vector. It's interesting, not only for my original purpose - converting aerial, photo, and topographic maps for use on my GPS - but also for the graphics-side of my business.

For use with GPS'es and GPSMapEdit for conversion I'm playing around with the command line BMAP2MP. There's a few shareware or pay programs that work quite well but this one is free, but complicated to get a good result using the command line. Still looking for the ultimate solution.

The best description of the process can be found here. Though it doesn't go into the command line process, unfortunately. Not for the casual user, or those used to GUI's...

It's hard for a computer to do it accurately in some cases. If you have a background in electronics I might say it's somewhat similar to an analog-to-digital converter; but on a large scale.

Meanwhile I continue to improve my personal map system for my GPS. I'm working on adding a water layer, which can be turned on and off in the GPS. Not sure how the overlays will handle it though.

Askablogr.com

2008-06-13T13:16:00.004-04:00

Wow, two blog entries in one day, huh? Rollin' dirty today, that's for sure. Anyway, enough with my perusing the "Urban Dictionary"...

If you look off to the right you'll see a new applet. It's an applet from a website called Askablogr.com.

Interesting concept. Ever wanted to contact a blogger but didn't want to leave a comment? Or want to give your visitors and readers a better way to respond? Or maybe a bit more privacy to respond? And much more.

Should work fine on a regular website also, and some of the social networking services.

Yea, take a look at the beta of this applet, give it a try. I think we're going to see some pretty good stuff being added and right now it's quite useful as-is.

Good stuff there, super Geekalicious.

Internet Rumors, Upper NY Modified Garmin Maps, Scheduled Blog Entries, Mobiola Web Camera 3 - Use Your Cameraphone as a Webcam

2008-06-13T08:04:00.012-04:00

Internet Rumors

Ever play that game in elementary school where the teacher tells one kid something and that kid tells someone else, and it goes around the room until each student has told someone else?

It's an exercise to show how rumors and fact can be readily distorted, at least it's supposed to be. Whether it gets through the little minds of an elementary student is debatable. But it did with me.

When I went to elementary school the "Internet" wasn't called the Internet and your average everyday person didn't even have a computer. Such a short time and we've come so far from those primitive times that were only a short time ago.

And we've come to far with the rumor mongering and the distortion of fact. Something that would have taken take weeks, months, or years to circulate a few decades ago can now be spread within hours. And it can become established as a "fact" in the same amount of time.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from a relative. It was one that has been circulating for quite some time and purports to show a sunset and a moon crescent at the North Pole. The moon is gigantic; and the crescent itself even has a bit of a pixel mismatch. The angular degree of the sun and moon are incorrect also. The scene is, to me, obviously a photorealistic rendering.

Yet, it's been spread around the Internet as real. It's been forwarded, copied, re-copied and even shown on news programs, and worse yet on astronomy websites. Not to mention many photography and art and graphic-oriented sites, and such.

Despite a Snopes reference to it and the artist's own explanation of what the picture was created to be, as well as his attempts to get the word out that it was his and just an art piece - it still continues to spread and pop-up.

It's viral because it's so good, even though it's not real. There's no stopping it, and it will probably be spread around as real for years to come.

Same thing happened this winter with some photos from south of us. These photos were of the tremendous snowfall south of here, and some of the photos even seemed to be from years ago. The person who posted them posted them on a blog as being from Watertown. As in 'look at how much snow Watertown has gotten'. We didn't get as much snow as was shown, even near that much - obviously the pictures weren't from here.

It wasn't long before this was picked up by other bloggers, websites, even news websites. It was presented as fact with comments like "Look how much snow we get in Watertown" (even though that person might really be in Watertown and knew we didn't get that much).

For awhile there I saw it everywhere.

The same thing is happening with Obama. I'm no big fan of the guy (though he's better then the alternative, gah), but a large numbers of things are being distorted and spread as fact - which is wrong. And of course a number of the things are deliberately being done by his detractors.

I know from first-hand experience how easy it is for someone who has an ax to grind with you to spread crap, cultivate it, let it grow and expand to ruin your reputation, even encompassing people who know you well.

In other words - it's easy to stain someone's reputation or cause anything you wish to be accepted as fact if you put some work into it, but it's very hard to reverse it. And humans being the way they are; wired for first impressions - it's sometimes impossible.

Upper NY Modified Garmin Maps

I've finally started to upload some of my modified maps for Garmin eTrex series GPS's (and maybe other Garmins).

These are MUCH better then the ones that come on the unit. Though they are far from complete right now.

These have detailed road maps for Jefferson County, Lowville, Syracuse, Ogdensburg, Gouverneur, Fulton, and the city of Oswego. And surroundign area. The cities and areas are searchable. If you want routable ones you will find the .img file included int eh zip, which you can re-compile to be routable, I believe.

I will be updating them with GPS POI's and maybe even topography. But for now - here's the file. It's called 'upperny.zip' and should contain all the files needed. Of course, standard disclaimers apply - use at your own risk, no guarantees, pay attention to your driving if using in a car, etc.

To use create a directory in your Garmin directory called 'upperny", unzip this file into it, and click the 'upperny.reg' file. Allow it to update your registry.

Once you have done this load Mapsource and you shoul dbe able to access the new Upper NY map.

I'm pretty new to map-making in general, map-converting, and creating custom maps that are uploadable to GPS'es, so please let me know if it works (I've tried installing the map on a few other computers and it seems to work fine - once it's in Mapsource you're fine, just upload it normally to your GPS).

New Blogger Feature out of Draft Now - Scheduled Blog Entries

Now you can write blog entries and schedule them to be posted at a certain time in Blogger.com. Real nice, there's been a few times when I've wanted to do that.

- Use Your Cameraphone as a Webcam

Guess it had to happen. There's software for using your camcorder, digital camera, and other photo devices as a webcam. Now Mobiola lets you use your cameraphone as a webcam.

It works through Bluetooth, WIFI, or USB (depending on what your phone is equipped with, of course). Could be good potential for use in the poor man's spy equipment chest...

Maytag Front-Loading Washer/Dryer, Addition/Old House, Another Watertown WIFI Spot, Some Free Blog (or Website) Graphics, Cat Pics

2008-05-29T07:53:00.017-04:00

Maytag Front-Loading Washer/Dryer, Old Section of House, New Section of House

We bought our old conventional washer and dryer (Frigidaire) about ten years ago. For most of that period we had to use them in the cellar as there was no room in any other part of the original stone house for them. Heck, there wasn't much room for anything in the original stone section of the house. Consequently they got a small amount of rust, dust, and crap in them. Also, the washer would sometimes freeze in the winter, only once or maybe twice during the cold months, due to the location they had to be (where the hook-ups were). But I don't imagine this was too good for it, even though we'd immediately shut it off and defrost it.

When we put the addition on the house, doubling the space we had, we then had a nice laundry slash pet room (with all the custom hook-ups just where we wanted them for the washer/dryer).

We brought the washer and dryer up and have been using them there for the last three years. They weren't and aren't in too bad of shape, but lately the dryer has been making a loud terribly bad squeaking noise and the efficiency of the heat itself has dropped.

So we've been playing around with the idea of getting one of the new front-loading super-energy/water efficient models.

We've looked at them, studied them, talked to people and salespeople about them, and went back and forth on when to get them. They're expensive after all, and our existing units were working okay.

With the tax rebate and such, and some great rebates from Lowes; we decided to go for it.

We got a lot of money back in multiple rebates, plus our delivery (and set up) for free after the rebate. And we could still sell our old ones as they were still working okay. The guys who came out and delivered them did a good job of bringing them in fairly carefully and setting them up for us (a slight confusion came up but it was quickly worked out - I'd prepared for it).

We went with Maytag, apparently bought out by GE (the guys who delivered them came out in a GE truck). They had good reviews and such, as well as the company.

Good quality, lots of features. The washer has it's own water heater for the sanitizing cycle (which we have yet to use) and many many other options. Tones, timers, custom cycles, etc. Same with the dryer.

These things use MUCH less water and electricity. I guess despite all the stats I was still a bit skeptical. THAT MUCH LESS WATER? We're on a well and while we've never ran out of water (the well was even re-drilled a short time after we bought the house) I'm always concerned with these extremely dry summers we've had in the last few years. And with the weather being intermittent and the overwhelming number of droughts due to our weather being unpredictable in the whole Global Warming condition - well, we're looking toward the future.

Watching the washer just once convinced me. It showed how much "smarter" it is, both in the washing itself as well as the use of water. It squirts some in, moves the clothes slowly around in one direction, then in the other, then spins it, lets it soak, does the whole thing over again. At the end it spins it incredibly fast, enough to give a subtle vibration to the floor of the whole new section of the house. Wow, it spins fast.

The dryer does a much quicker job also.

The clothes smell slightly different. You know that "freshly washed" smell of clothes? These don't really have that. It seems that that "freshly washed" smell is actually particles of your clothing which have been stripped out when it's washed and dried, and which floats around in the air. These are much more gentle and use more gentle but efficient methods. Clothes are supposed to last longer too.

Sure, these things are expensive. But we needed a new set anyway, and we might as well do our part for both our own resources as well as in general. Plus they do a much better job then conventional ones. And they're pretty cool.

We even bought the stacking kit (not much money) even though we really didn't need the room.

Despite it being pretty convenient to have the dryer right on top without having to bend over, it also gave us some space to move around some of our pet stuff.

Like I said - we didn't really need to the room but it's nice to have it.

It's pretty amazing, in fact, to be able to say we "don't need the room". Expanding our house by a hundred percent sure helped but can you ever have TOO much space (at least when you're relatively young and can expend the energy to clean that extra space)?

For so long we'd been stuffed into small spaces.

My wife lived in a relatively medium-sized house growing up. And though I lived in a large house growing up; most of the house wasn't used (especially in the winter) and in fact my own room wasn't heated (I used it only to sleep in so my only real space was my computer station downstairs, a cramped little space that everyone would stick their nose into since it was in the kitchen - bla).

When we got this house it was just a small stone building with an even smaller wooden part. It had been remodeled a few times, but long ago and it hadn't been kept up. The two bedrooms are barely large enough to stand up in (and only in the middle where the peak of the house is). The rest of the rooms were relatively good-size but there wasn't enough of them.

So when we built the large addition it was like a sigh of relief.

We could stretch - our stuff, ourselves, and our minds; we could afford to have some empty spaces and empty wall space and bigger nicer things and just room in general.

Our decorating style DEFINITELY does not lean toward the "Granny" category of overwhelming crap and nick-knacks on every wall - we like just a few tasteful things here and there, except in our computer room. Our computer room, which used to be our living room. Now it's a computer room/library/entry area. Works good for my business, but it's got a lot of stuff in it. We could use a larger computer room/library/entry area. My books cover one entire wall in fact.

I often think though - that sometimes we would have been better off just building a new house. Or, if it was possible and/or practical just razing the stone section. Lot of people in the family would have hated that, but I think in the long run we would have been happily. I don't think it would be very practical though - the stones that make it up are gigantic. Anyway...

The old part of the house is a constant source of work for me - upkeep, maintenance, and worry. The roof on that section needs to be completely ripped off and replaced with a roof, right down to the beams. Every room in the old section has a sagging ceiling and sagging floors and unsquare walls. I of course have replaced beams, added beams and braces, buttressed everything in the cellar so nothing can get worse then it is. But as to fixing the sags - a lot of work in most cases. In some aspects it would take jacking up the whole wooden interior of the house to make it work - which likely would break more beams or take a long time. We've of course remodeled every room in the old section now (and one needs to be done again, after I had to rip it up to get into the ceiling - long story) but the sagging ceilings are still a bit of an embarrassment to me.

But we enjoy our new addition, and make the best of the old section.

P.S. Already sold our old washer and dryer set for $100. Not bad.

Another Watertown Free WIFI Spot

Here's another one. The former car wash-turned-carwash/laundromat on Coleman Avenue (near the Burger King and the plaza with Tractor Supply and the furniture place) has free WIFI. I haven't tried it yet, either inside or from outside.
Some Free Blog (or Website) Graphics

Check out this site - PicApp. You can directly embed their images, free of charge, into your blog; or use their graphics on your own website and such. Make sure you check out the advanced search too. Great for fill-ins and incidental graphics and other generic needs for your blog entries.

I've been using various free clipart sites or royalty-free ones for years now. This is another pretty good one, and you'll find many more sites like out there.

And Some Cat Pics

Why not some cat pics? Above is Crusher, our oldest cat. He's the one I found as a tiny kitten, in a box beside the road. I'd love to get my hands on the ass who threw him away like that, it makes me sick that a person could do that to any living thing.

He's been a great cat, and loves us so much. He sleeps curled up under the covers with me every night, his forehead touching my chin. When he gets too warm he crawls up on top of the pillow above my head and curls up there. He's a beautiful cat.

This is Hoshi. She's probably the least affectionate of our cats and a bit flaky. But still a good cat in general. I think I surprised her a bit with this pic.

This is Miles. One of our "kittens". I guess I probably haven't posted any pics of them in a while. He and his brother are bigger then most of our other cats. Not sure why he was curled up like this, and no in the patch of sun right beside him. Another beautiful cat, and he is unusual. Even though he looks very similar to his brother his tail is much fluffier, almost amusingly so sometimes. And sometimes he holds it directly over his back, the tip touching the top of his head. Never seen a cat do quite that sort of thing before.

His sister, who is small, is still larger then Hoshi and Ezri.

My Birthday, Snowfall Totals, (Old) WRT54G Routers Long Distance Test, Avira Anti-Virus, Old Buildings

2008-05-16T13:57:00.013-04:00

My Birthday

It was my birthday Wednesday.

It's weird. I didn't do a bit of work, no work on websites nor computers, I didn't worry about having to do something or that I wasn't doing something I should have been doing. I didn't do anything for myself, for the house, didn't have to clean up after any animals except for cat litter cleaning, didn't do any maintenance on the house or anything else, didn't do anything to the lawn or any housework, didn't answer any technical questions except for one quick one (then turned the cellphone off), and I even have my General Brown Alumni webboard turned off because some idiots are fighting on there - and I didn't even feel guilty about it being turned off so no one can post.

I drank three cups of my own special blend of iced coffee/cocoa/Cinnamon with lots of sugar and didn't feel guilty about it.

I drove a long distance just for the fun of it (to take these pics for one of my personal websites - click link for pics and also see some below) - like I used to do and didn't feel guilty about it.

Jenny took me to pick out something in Lowes and to pick up a pizza.

In short, I didn't do crap but what I wanted to; on my birthday.

This must be what a real vacation would be like. It's hard to remember what it is not to have some sort of stress or worry or decision to make.

All in all, a pretty good birthday.

Snowfall Totals

I'm a weather spotter for the National Weather Service and keep track of snowfall totals. Again, the snowfall totals are lower overall then twenty years ago, yet up slightly this year. It was a very intermittent year, with warmer temps and not much snowfall except for certain high amounts during short periods; which pushed the totals up.

Around a 100 to 110 inches here. It's always a challenge to get real totals here on top of the hill. The wind's always blowing here, sometimes dropping more then other places and sometimes scrubbing my measurement areas clean.

(Old) WRT54G Routers Long Distance Test

I found a map photo diagramming a route test I did. Click it above to see a larger version. I used two WRT54G's in repeater mode to connect to a laptop out in the field with a webcam. Worked well, and after awhile I tried it with just one, which worked just as well.

This was, well, a year ago or more. One of the routers was using a power inverter and car battery, the other a battery pack. Both worked fine for powering them, though the power inverter needed a good amount of filtering. Both router had some omnidirectional antennas that I had built.

Avira Anti-Virus

I'm always playing around with various anti-virus programs, especially open source ones. Along with Avast and AVG Avira and Clamshell are a pair of excellent ones that rival the Big Boys.

I wanted something simple but with a good record for anti-virus finds, something low-resource but good protection. AVG has updated their version to 8, which kinda sucks. Not only are there some bug issues with it but it's much larger then version 7.5 and much worse on the computer's resources. When it works well, it works real well.

So I installed Avira on the laptop. Works very nicely, especially with this fast unit.

I probably am going to dump AVG off all of my computers and go with Avast or even Avira on some.

Old Buildings

On my recent birthday trip, I indulged in a hobby of mine - photographing old abandoned buildings. My site's gotten pretty popular and as it gets more popular people send me suggestions (and sometimes pictures to add).

My site is called "Old Abandoned Buildings of Northern New York". Sometimes the submitters do forget that exact wording and send me interesting pictures or directions to buildings which are still in use, or being remodeled. I don't mind, but I do have a strict idea of what I want on the site.

I took a number of suggestions and picked a route to find and photograph some of the suggestions I accumulated over the last few years. But there's plenty more in my list!

I photographed a massive old building hidden in Calcium. I drive by that area once in a while when taking the dogs for a walk, and never saw the place. Probably because it was down a little hidden road. Giant of a building.

Also found an old abandoned and closed bridge on a place called Donnattburg (there is no "burg" there now, no buildings very close by in fact).

But the most interested thing I ran across was an old abandoned crypt and could go inside it. Creepy. For more pics of all of the above go to my site here.

Dr. Blair Harff, Another Free Local Hotspot, Show or Hide Maps on eTrex Venture HC, Lockie Road/Scotch Settlement House Video

2008-04-28T13:17:00.007-04:00

Dr. Blair Harff, Local Vet
Unfortunately we lost a great local person, Dr. Blair Harff. He was a kind and gentle and very knowledgeable local vet, cut down in middle age by an accident on his farm. He also helped local kids see their potential by working with them in a local hockey league, and he and his wife Nina ran a successful, caring veterinary clinic - The Animal Doctors.

Another Free Local Hotspot

I forgot an important one - the Flower Memorial Library. You have to ask the librarians for set up info, but this one's free also.

Show or Hide Maps on eTrex Venture HC

While in Setup go into the Map setup screens and press the MENU button (bottom button on the side, left).

From here you can select which maps to display or not display. Pretty useful if you have overlaps.

Lockie Road/Scotch Settlement House

Some great old ruins in St. Lawrence County, off the Lockie Road in the Pleasant Lake Wildlife Area. Quite a find, and I spent a fair amount of time going over this old building and the surrounding area.

As you may or may not know I have a pretty popular site called 'Old Abandoned Buildings of Northern NY'. Urban Exploration, Vadding, Reality Hacking, Psychogeography, whatever you want to call it - is a big concept now.

Personally, I'm not into the whole trespassing thing - I take the photos from public property or get permission from the owner if I take closer or interior shots.

Anyway, I got a bunch of great shots on my page for this building here. Even took lots of video. I plan on uploading my video to my storage site when I get the chance but for now here's a video (great example of why not to use YouTube if you want good quality videos - the original is a nice quality and this is crap, once it's uploaded to YouTube):

USB to Virtual Serial Ports for GPS's, Garmin GPS Screen Capture, My Own Successful Map Upload

2008-04-16T11:08:00.002-04:00

USB to Virtual Serial Ports for GPS'es

Really enjoying this Garmin eTrex Venture HC, and with nicer weather on it's way it's time to get back into GPS'ing and mapping with it.

Good little unit, of course if you are looking for something for road navigating it can be used for that, sure; but it is more geared toward your outdoor activities.

Yesterday I used the road navigation features, both out in the boonies as well as in the village of Gouverneur. Worked quite nicely.

Right now, I'm still just learning the in's and out's of the device, and learning a lot more about mapping and vector maps and converting everything to Garmin format.

I did discover that there are a number of mapping programs that assume the GPS that is connected to the computer uses a serial port, instead of a more 'modern' USB.

Throw in Google Earth and other programs that SHOULD have GPS interfaces but don't (Google Earth Plus does, but not regular free Google Earth)...

Fortunately there's ways around that for both.

For example - Franson GPSgate. This is a shareware program with a 14 day expiration date that creates virtual serial ports from USB connections.

But there must be a freeware or Opensource driver or program that does the same somewhere - something that takes a USB port and makes some virtual serial ports for other programs to use? If anyone knows of one drop me a line so I can post the link, and try it out.

I gave a free program from Garmin called Spanner a try, which is supposed to do the same thing. It's made for particular models of Garmin GPS'es but the rumor was that it worked with many other Garmin GPS'es also. No luck with mine, stuck with GPSGate for now.

GPSGate seemed to work fine on everything I tried it on - including an older version of MS Streets & Trips as well as the excellent radio mapping program RMWDLX.

A few good helper programs are the free Earth Bridge and the free version of GooPS (there's also a pay version with more options). Both are good as a sort of go-between between GPSGate and your serial-only GPS application, though the GPSGate seems to work for this fine by itself. These programs just make it easier.

Of course, ideally the GPS mapping and waypoint programs themselves would be upgraded so that the regular Garmin USB driver would work, instead of relying on using serial ports; but that's not always the case.

So far the free EasyGPS (freeware), Topofusion (shareware), Quakemap (shareware), MS Streets & Maps 2002, ExpertGPS (shareware), Google Earth, & USAPhotoMaps (highly recommended freeware) all work fine. I haven't found one thing that doesn't work. I've yet to try Netstumbler though, but I assume it will also (if it doesn't already have a USB option).

With ExpertGPS I did discover there was a trick to using this program with the built-in USB option instead of serial - you have to pick the "C" version of your particular Garmin GPS. So the virtual serial port wasn't needed for it after all, though it worked fine.

And in USAPhotoMaps it actually works better with the virtual serial port then the native built-in USAPhotoMaps Garmin USB setup, at least for me.

Also, GPSGate has to be shut down before you can use any program that will use the Garmin USB drivers themselves. In other words - you can't use the Garmin Mapsource program while GPSGate is running. Though I found that you could get around this by making Mapsource use a serial port instead, but why would you want to?

Another program I want to try is the new GPSBabelGUI which now interfaces directly with GPS receivers and can output any kind of file, including KML files that Google Earth uses.

I imagine using the live waypoint files from the GPSBabel program would allow programs like WorldWind to work with a GPS too, in real-time? I could be wrong, but is on my list of things to try.

Google Earth is amazing when using the above programs. Here's a screenshot:

Garmin GPS Screen Capture

Cool little program from Garmin called 'ximage'. This basically lets you do a screen capture from your Garmin GPS. See the examples under the next heading.

You can also upload screens. Supposedly you could change the startup screen, etc.

But the other interesting thing is that you can also download and upload the POI icons, individually. So I assume you could make your own custom icons and put them on the GPS. Another thing for me to try at some point. Some of the GPS programs I listed above also let you do this.

Why isn't there an icon for water? I'll have to make my own.

My Own First Map Upload

First success of creating (from downloads) my own maps and uploading them to the GPS. Above in these screen captures (taken with the ximage program mentioned above) you can see my improved Watertown road maps (improved over the basemap that came on the GPS).

On the left is the street map level zoom. I did just Watertown at first, but then added various other parts of Jefferson County and then parts of St. Lawrence County that I needed more detail on. See more about stitching maps below.

In the pics above; if you're not familiar with the GC#### designators and the little boxes - those are Geocaches. You'll also see some Benchmarks that I have added too, as well as congruences.

The whole process of converting the maps is kinda complicated, and takes about four different programs to complete the whole process but it is well worth it. But now that I have gotten used to doing it, I can grab and convert a map in no time.

And I need to start uploading some of my maps to some of the free Garmin map sites that don't have improved coverage for my area yet. And at some point I also need to upload these all to my blog here for other's to use.

Next I want to put on some topographical maps too.

Here's some great help from Leszek Pawlowicz on how to do the above. Indispensable, as the instructions I had read before were much worse, and there were more steps and calibration (gah) involved.

http://freegeographytools.com/2007/converting-openstreetmap-data-into-gpx-or-garmin-img-format

http://freegeographytools.com/2007/adding-garmin-img-files-to-mapsource

Using the JAVA application JOSM made it ten times easier then using the assorted other programs that would need to be used, and you can even just pick a section of a map using one of JOSM's plug-ins, latitudes and longitudes in a square, or use OpenStreepMap.org to find and zoom in on a location and then select OSM maps.

Once it's in JOSM you just save it as an .OSM file in a new directory (best under the Garmin program's root), use mkgmap (or the nice GUI interface Mr. Pawlowicz created - I found that you need the .JAR file as well as the GUI in the same dir as the map you are converting), then use MapSetTool to add it to Mapsource for upload.

The only problem is the JOSM program won't download real large areas due to server limitations. For a larger area I used the free version of GPSMapEdit (as per Mr. Pawlowicz's instructions) to stitch together maps, instead of overlaying them in Mapsource (of which I didn't have much luck with).

For example - I downloaded the Watertown street map (MUCH better then the stock basemap of course) from OpenStreetMap.org using JOSM, then a part of Jefferson County with a little overlap. Then I did the whole conversion deal, and stitched the maps together, had the GPSMapEdit check for problems (which there were - overlaps, duplicates, etc), fixed them, and then re-created the a new map and uploaded it to the Garmin. Worked great.

Heston & Gun Control, OLED TV's, Free Local WIFI Hotspots, Garmin eTrex Venture HC, Draft.blogger.com

2008-04-07T07:41:00.004-04:00

Heston & Gun Control

I've always tried to be a supporter of the rights of America. Gun rights included. I've pretty much always owned guns, not for hunting (no, never ever for hunting) or anything like that but as the last line of defense in protecting myself, others close to me, and my stuff.

But I've never had any illusion about the average American's ability to handle the responsibility of a gun.

Heck, the average guy on the street can barely use his car responsibly - neither in the ability to just plain drive it around normally nor to restrain himself from using it as a weapon when something pisses him off.

We're an angry people, angry about what - I don't think most of us know. But give an angry person a gun and any shred of residual reason goes out the window. Give a person a license to shoot things with it and a good number of people are going to abuse that. Believe me.

Sure, there's plenty of responsible hunters out there, and gun owners. Probably the majority, and I'd never want to take away that freedom even if a heck of a lot of people are dumb about it.

I've chased off so many hunters, even with No Trespassing signs up some redneck with a bunch of dogs, dirty clothes, a rusty car, and missing teeth will wonder onto the land and then give every excuse and lie that he can that he should be there. Again, I wouldn't take their right away but an intelligence and empathy test for hunters wouldn't help either...

Anyway, this isn't about hunters and I'm drifting from the subject at hand.

A good portion of humankind can't even handle free speech, like we have on the Internet, and have to abuse and take advantage of it. Let alone having the freedom to own a gun.

Not to say I think our freedoms to own a gun or anything else should be taken away, as I said and I want to say again (still I will receive nasty e-mails I'm sure). But, like so many things, there has to be a happy, fair middle ground and sometimes that ground moves with evolution, technology, and the current condition of humankind.

Despite what some think - our governing ancestors knew this and didn't expect the ideas they set up wouldn't evolve also.

Charlton Heston just died, which brought me to this entry.

He was a great actor, no doubt about it. And in his younger days he was a fighter for liberal freedoms and damn good at it, and damn vocal about it as well as committed.

But in his later years he went more conservative. Some people's personalities don't change over time, some change somewhat over time, and some people's change a LOT.

It's one thing to fight for a freedom or cause, it's another to become fanatical about it. I don't think fanaticism helps any cause.

Firstly it makes you look like a loon, secondly it alienates many of the average people who might be drawn to your cause normally; but won't be or will be totally turned off from it if you act like a nutcase. Thirdly fanaticism slows or stops you from organizing and accomplishing what you need to do.

Again - moderation, keeping your head about you and rational presentation of your ideas and facts accomplishes much more, and policing your own personality with self-awareness. Whether it is gun rights, the NRA, PETA (another group that has crossed over into that realm in many people's minds and is inadvertently doing just the opposite of what it should be sometimes), tree-hugging, Global Warming, religion, or getting pissed off because someone cut you off in traffic, etc. Fanatics and fanaticism only hurts a cause and losing your head only makes a situation worse.

OLED TV's

Even I have a hard time keeping up on technology sometimes, and learning about what I already have!

The newest television technology that will probably one day be replacing plasma is OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode).

All the reviewers and tech people who have seen it claim that it is by far better then even the best plasma tv's. But there's some limitations - the organic material tends to, er fade over time. If the technology is so much better I imagine that this will be overcome, as well as the price for it at this time (wow).

The good thing is that since it's a light emitting diode no back light is needed, less power usage and power drain (like for laptops).

Free Local WIFI Hotspots

If you're in the Jefferson County area of New York state you can find some free (and legal to use) hotspots for your wireless laptop.

*Wendy's on State Street has a good coverage, including into the parking lot. A friend of mine set up the wireless for this particular Wendy's and the one that used to be on Arsenal Street (due to some sort of strange rigmarole with leasing the property - that Wendy's is now gone).

*Arby's on Arsenal Street has indoor coverage, not so much out in the parking lot.

*Panera Bread on Towne Center Drive off Arsenal Street probably has the best and fastest broadband connection and coverage. Great inside, great out in the parking lot.

*JRECK Subs in Black River also does, from what I have been told (I haven't tried this one).

*The Black River Brewing Company in the Paddock Arcade also had free WIFI but I believe this business in not running any longer, anyone confirm?

Of course, you can just drive around until you pick up an individual's or business' WIFI that isn't encrypted. But this would be illegal (what, you didn't know that?).

McDonald's also has WIFI but you have to sign up and pay for it from them.

You can also try Holiday Inn, Econolodge, they will likely have WIFI. As well as some other hotels. But you really need to be a patron to use it.

Same goes for the above fast food places - it's just polite to buy a burger or a side salad once in a while if you're going to use their WIFI, even if you're just sitting out in the parking lot and checking your e-mail.

Check out the WIFI finder links over in my right column, BTW.

Garmin eTrex Venture HC

I got my new GPS receiver, a Garmin eTrex Venture HC.

First, I want to point you toward TheNerds.net which is where I got it from. I've ordered some stuff from this company in the past so I had no problem doing so again, especially since they were one of the cheapest to get it from. Surprisingly Walmart sells the same one for twice the price as most places on the Internet.

The shipping was fast, even though I had selected the cheapest they had.

Awesome little piece of equipment. It's even smaller then my eXplorist 100, and the color screen is incredible.

The basemaps are a bit lacking but once I figure out how to vectorize and transfer my own I plan on sticking on a bunch of terrain and road maps.

The rest of the features are great, the joystick works well, many buttons are multiple functions, transfer to and from the computer is fast, and the electronic compass works much better then the eXplorist. The Geocaching functions are nice too, as well as the calendar and such. The calculator works as expected, something most people may not use but for us map junkies it's great for figuring square area, etc.

Start up is real fast, and puts the eXplorist to shame. I even get most sats from inside our house - through solid limestone over a foot thick! Wow.

The software that comes with it works well, but is fairly simple but does the job. I prefer to use USAPhotoMaps instead for heavy-duty mapping and map retrieval and waypoint management, and GPSBabelGui to convert the USAPhotoMaps data back and forth (I don't like to use USAPhotoMaps itself for data transfer as I lose the nice little icons for various waypoints).

I also found that this fits well in my BucketBoss cellphone holster. Basically, this is a padded, Carhart-looking heavy-duty cellphone holster I bought at Sears (I hate Sears and their third-world produced products, not that they are specifically different then Walmart in that aspect). When I got a new cellphone (Motorola Razr V3xxx) it wouldn't fit and I started putting my GPS in it, this Venture fits in it even better.

I have to get working, otherwise I'd ramble on about this unit. The features are numerous.

I can't wait for the weather to get even better so I can do some biking and hiking with it, and mapping too.

Yesterday we sat out in shorts and t-shirts it was so nice. Today a bit cooler but still looking real good. I'm no big fan of summer temps, but it's been a long winter nonetheless.

Draft.Blogger.com

If you blog on Blogger.com and don't mind playing around with Beta functions check out their http://draft.blogger.com

You can try out upcoming functions. Check out the top of the right column - a nice searcher I've added from draft.blogger.com. You can search my blog, search the blog and comments, and even search external links that I have referenced in my blog. Real nice.

Take Action: Save the Internet

2008-04-03T12:41:00.001-04:00

A little something from the petition website:

"A new bill has been introduced in U.S. House that would stop Comcast, Verizon and AT&T from controlling what you do, and where you go online.

In 2006, 1.6 million people stopped mighty phone and cable companies from gutting Net Neutrality. In 2007, more than a quarter-million people sent comments to the FCC and opened up cell-phone networks to user choice and innovation.

This year, we're going to stop Internet blocking and censorship once and for all. When you fill out the information below and push submit, we will automatically send it to your members of Congress."

Link to sign it here. Help keep the Internet free, as in 'freedom'.

April Fool's Day, Craigslist Missing Son Ad, Best Thing Anyone's Said To Me All Year, High Dynamic Range (HDR), eTrex Venture HC GPS Receiver

2008-04-02T07:49:00.006-04:00

April Fool's Day

Yea, it's always good to take a break on April 1st if you're blogging or writing any sort of article on the Internet; just to make sure someone doesn't take what you say as an April Fool's Day joke. Believe me, heh heh.

On a webboard I started up and ran for many years (and no longer do) we used to have a heck of a lot of fun on April Fool's Day. We discovered that the 'bad word' filter could also be used to substitute pretty much any word or phrase for any other word or phrase. You can just imagine the chaos that follows something like that, especially with a moderately high-traffic discussion system.

The funniest people were always those who cried that their free speech was being violated, their messages were being edited because someone had something against them, or those who were just too damn 'dumb' to realize what day it was (and there were many, many many many).

I always advocated (tongue-in-cheek of course) kicking the latter people off. Survival of the fittest sort of thing. I've always said that you should never overestimate people nor underestimate them - especially their potential for mind-blowing ditsyness.

We'd also change the graphics, or have the same graphics but with little flashes of amusing things going on in those graphics - just so you saw it out of the corner of your eye. Sometimes change people's handles, etc. What a great time.

Craigslist Missing Son Ad

Did you see the local Craigslist entry where the mother posted a want ad looking for her missing son? It's was an amusingly-worded, cutesy-yet-underlying-seriously-toned message. Well, amazingly it worked. Someone spotted the kid and they found him, except he apparently stole something from his mom and he got popped for that.

Some thought the whole ad things was funny, some not so much. As my wifey said - "She's going to be sorry if they find him dead somewhere." Lots of discussion on the Craigslist site about it.

A couple only-slightly-related thoughts on the above.

Firstly, likely this entry will be gone soon. Some sites have permalinks but most don't so. So it's something to consider whether you are blogging or just referencing something on a website or discussion area, or even mail. Especially when the link is from a news site, classifieds site, or what-have-you. Give it a good description in case the link is gone next year, next month, next week, or tomorrow.

Of course you could just copy the info or text, but most sites have some sort of copyright or implied copyright (unless it has a specific copyright that allows sharing the data from the site with an attribution, like Wikipedia does). So be careful of that of course.

Secondly; Craigslist is a good example of a very simple website design succeeding. And you can't get much simpler then the format of Craigslist.

I always tell my customers - I can build you a graphics-heavy monstrously eye-catching site with all the bells and whistles and video and music and sound and animation; but if it has no substance, or nothing anyone is interested in; then it will die.

Here's a good example of the most basic website; visually and bells-and-whistles-wise, there can be. And it is successful. Of course,

I certainly wouldn't advocate you setting up a website quite as plain but it is a good example.

Best Thing Anyone's Said To Me All Year

If you need a little mood enhancement and motivation in your day check out Mary's Motivational Blog.

One of my good friends lives in Canada. We daily discuss this or that - computers, cameras, video, websites, politics, etc. Great guy, one of those smart, artistic dudes that the world needs lots more of.

I mentioned that I am getting into experimenting with High Dynamic Range photos. It's an incredible new technique in photography (and some cameras are coming out with it built-in). More about this later...

Part of a day went by and then I received a short message from my Canadian bud. A message that not only made my day but also my whole year. Best thing anyone's said to me this year, I'd say (and I hope he doesn't mind me relaying it here):

"I hate you 
You force me to try and think - and learn new stuff."

High Dynamic Range (HDR)

Now, about HDR itself...

Say you are taking a picture with your camera, doesn't matter whether it is a film or digital. Say the scene is an outdoor scene at dusk. You're taking a shot of a an open field, facing away from the sun with a gaping cave mouth off to one side. How do you adjust your exposure or how does your camera's automatic settings interpret the scene?

Some part of the scene is going to be too dark and if you spot-adjust for the dark parts the rest will be over-exposed.

With High Dynamic Range photos you take a number of pictures of the same scene, adjusting your exposure at each one; from under-exposed to over-exposed. The software (in my case the excellent Qtpfsgui, there are also other programs like Photomax Free and Photomax Pro and the newer Adobe Photoshops, which have a simplistic version in them) takes those pictures and adds them all together so that hopefully (and it does require manual tweaking) everything can be seen at a good exposure. I'm simplifying it here for those who aren't into photography.

So EVERYTHING can be seen; the field, the inside of the cave, the hill the cave is on, etc.

But probably the best way to see it's effects is to go to this Flickr group.

Pretty amazing stuff. Some are overdone in my opinion and look more like bad special effects.

But most are very good to mind-blowing. They look almost like computer-rendered, painted, or computer-painted scenes. There are no dark underexposed areas - you can see every nook, cranny, and normally shadowed spot in the photo.

Some the photographer's have used the HDR and tonal software to go beyond the realistic for various special effects.

Here's my first efforts.

Interesting, but I have a long way to go of course. I think one of the major things is; like most photography, finding a suitable scene or subject. These were quick shots without much in the way of contrasting areas.

eTrex Venture HC GPS Receiver

I rarely buy casual stuff for myself that doesn't directly involve my computer business or something necessary in general, at least for myself.

But, as you might know from my previous entries, I've enjoyed using my GPS receiver (and even made a few bucks from using it once). But it is an el cheapo one - a Magellan eXplorist 100. Basic but with some good features. The ones it was lacking though were hard to live without once I got into using it more and more.

Like the lack of a computer interface (you can only transfer so many latitudes and longitudes to and from the GPS and computer by hand before it gets real old-hat). A company in another country is selling an interface for it but I felt this was a bit iffy. There seemed to be some dispute among those who bought them as to the use of it, and some people didn't have any luck getting the interface to work in the first place. Plus, you had to take the batteries out to use the interface, necessitating using an external power source. Awkward.

Also, the GPS didn't have any maps nor ability (and not much extra memory) to put them on. No road maps, no terrain maps, nottin'. Apparently, using the computer interface it was possible to put some simplistic ones on, again 'iffy'.

There were a number of other minor things too. But it was a good unit to get my feet wet with, and I got it in exchange from a job I did.

So I set out to buy an upgraded one. At first I wanted to go up to the eXplorist 200 but most of the sites had, well, negligible reviews for this and most of the eXplorist series. I never had any trouble with my 100 and felt that it was built well. But others didn't agree (the 200 is basically the same case and model with the interface and memory added, from the looks of it).

I'd always heard about the eTrex models and saw many of them in local stores. Always seemed strange that there were no eXplorists. After looking at the reviews for the eTrex models it seemed that the reviews were great across the board. Also, lots of good reviews from Geocachers themselves. They may be geeky but they know what they're talking about.

Now, I don't necessarily go with other's opinions, but this seemed pretty overwhelming.

I found that the Garmin Trex Venture HC was the best fit for me. A good price yet a heck of a lot of features. I think it is lacking the electronic compass (there are a few different models of the HC, which is conusing), not to be confused with a magnetic compass. My eXplorist had the electronic compass based on the GPS reception - which was nearly useless. I relied on the magnetic compass on my survival watch instead.

Anyway, this has lots of extra memory, comes with an interface cord and map software (which is almost as exciting for me to get my hands onto as the device itself), and has it's own basemaps and can have more uploaded to it. It also can calculate square area, has special Geocacher's (Geocaching is got to be the most geeky sport ever, it's fun but only in small doses, for me at least) and fisherman's and hunter's functions (the latter two I won't be using), color screen, GPS games, a 1000 waypoints and lots of highway/route/track functions, WAAS for more accurate location, and a crapload of other stuff. Can't wait to get it (already downloaded the manual and read through it a few times!).

So if you're in the market for a Magellan eXplorist 100 let me know, I'll give you a good price and show you my new eTrex Venture (when it gets here).

Spammers Defeat Gmail CAPTCHA, Recording Off an HD Tuner, A Flickr Pic

2008-03-28T11:57:00.014-04:00

Another Google Trick

Another small Google trick (again, you can find lots of sites with these or figure them out using the Advanced search options in Google itself). Find all pages with a certain URL in the search. Example: inurl:view/index.shtml - searches only for pages with "view/index.shtml" in them.

Spammers Defeat Gmail CAPTCHA

It was bound to happen. After all, there's some pretty advanced OCR software out there, so it was about time someone created something that could recognize text through any background. I think you'll see this showing up to crack other CAPTHCHA registrations. Damn spammers.

Recording Off an HD Tuner

Surprisingly what they say is true - even if you record an HD program off an HD tuner onto a regular old-school analog VCR the picture is better. Of course, it's not HD but it is better then off an analog tuner. Quite a bit in fact.

We haven't quite decided what to do about recording things. But for now, probably until the Big Diital Switchover (cue the fanfare); we'll probably stay with a VCR. We don't want to pay every month for TIVO or the similar brand, or go through the trouble of setting up a computer with an HD tuner just to record HD. Why doesn't someone make a standalone HD-capable digital recorder? Oh, yea, the whole digital copyright thing. Yea.

A Flickr Pic

The Internet is great, isn't it? Especially blogs. If you don't like what I'm saying you don't have to read it. Or maybe you're so fascinated or disgusted you can't look away no matter what. Anyway, blogs are great, I can give you my totally amateur thoughts on a picture like the below.

Anyway...I still love Flickr.com, even though I don't have a full account there now. But I can still upload lots of pics and look at other's. In fact, I have two accounts - one for general pics and one to correspond to my OABONNY site. You can see my OABONNY pages here at Flickr. Also, if you do, check out my favs there.

Some great stuff on Flickr, some talented people have shared their photos.

Here's one of my new favs (among many at both Flickr accounts). Have to share this, click it to see it larger:

You And I Fly A Ship Seeking The Warm Unending Sky
Originally uploaded by Eric Rolph

Firstly, the title caught me. At first I wasn't sure if it completely fits the photo but I now believe that it does.

The second thing that caught my mind's eye was something that made me think of that commercial, you've probably seen it but not thought anything of it. I'm not sure what it's advertising - maybe an allergy medicine or something like that. Hiking girl, top of a hill, looking out over the distance, the perspective turning 360 as your view swings around. Somehow, even though the are somewhat different, it reminds me of this shot.

Lastly, I think it's an inspiring shot. Potential spread out before you, but with the occasional hardships along the way seen on the horizon.

You could even call it post-apocalyptic if you wanted to interpret it that way, no civilization as far as the eye can see.

Or maybe I'm just getting anxious for the summer.

Subscribing to Blog, Acer Drivers, Google Tips, Kira, SPCA, Zootoo, Watertown Dog Park

2008-03-17T08:42:00.010-04:00

Subscribing Links/Feedburner.com

Firstly, you might notice over on the right a couple new things. There's both a "Subscribe to Random Bits & Bytes by Email" link as well as a "Subscribe in a reader" link. Eventually I need to add some little icons for everything in that block but I haven't had time.

Anyway, they do pretty much what they sound like.

The first takes you to a page where you can enter your e-mail address and (after also doing the visual verification) receive new blog entries from here as I create them.

The second lets you subscribe via a newsreader. If you're using Firefox or comparable you'll get the RSS icon anyway in the URL field too.

Both of these are easy to set up via Feedburner.com, in case you want to do one for your own blog.

MS's Skydrive and Acer 5520 Driver Storage

I've begun to upload some drivers for the Acer 5520 for XP at Windows Live's Skydrive storage, which works quite nicely. You can even embed a folder in a page or blog (like with Box.net which I reviewed in an earlier entry but has less storage space for the free account). I'll upload some of the larger ones at a later date.

Some Google Tricks & Tips

There's a lot of things you can do with Google that the normal searcher probably doesn't know about. Some can make your searching much more spot-on or quicker. Some good ones from a Lockergnome entry:

*Quotes. Using quotes around a phrase makes sure you get the EXACT phrase, not searches for all the words in the phrase.

*'intitle:' It will search for the keywords only in the webpages titles. If you supply multiple keywords it will come back with an OR condition - any pages matching either keyword will show up. To search for a phrase enclose it in quotes. A couple examples:

intitle: abandoned This comes up with any webpage with "abandoned" in the title only.
intitle: abandoned building This will display any website with abandoned OR building in the title.
intitle: "abandoned building" Will display anything with the phrase "abandoned building" in the title.

*The period. When searching use the period instead of a space between two words, or the period instead of a space between two words that you would normally enclose in quotes. You can get more results because it will search for the string of words. Instead of using You can also add this to the 'intitle' search too. This takes some playing around with to get used to it.

*Good old + and -. Plus makes sure the items in your search are included, - makes sure they are not. An example:
"abandoned buildings" -ghost Notice the quotes. This will search for any website with "abandoned buildings" mentioned in it (the phrase), but none that have the word "ghost" in the page.

*() For those who know a little about Boolean operators you can use the parentheses. If you're not a boolean-sort of person skip this one, but those who do programming with probably be able to figure this out. Pretty useful, if needed.

Don't forget to click that "Advanced search" link in Google too, it lets you do the same as above but using a form that you fill out.

Thanks to Lockergnome of the above.

Kira, Cat Toys, Bonito Flakes, Zootoo and Jefferson County SPCA, Watertown Dog Park

We lost Kira, our female ferret a few nights ago. She had a common disease that ferrets get, our

first male ferret - Odo - died with the same thing. It was a very hard night that night.

Saturday we were at the Super-Walmart near Fort Drum and picked up some cat toys on sale. Included in the package was something called "Dried Bonito Flakes", which is apparently used something like Tuna Fish in certain other countries, both for humans and as a treat for animals.

Unfortunately most of our cats were very much not thrilled with it. Despite the very fishy smell only a couple tried it.

It looks like shredded wood to me, or something that comes out of a pencil sharpener. And frankly smells much, much worse - a combination of strange old fish and a few other things I can't pinpoint. I can see why the cats don't like it, though a few scarfed it down - likr Crusher (he'll eat pretty much anything).

About hanging cat toys - we normally don't have them around or if we do the cats are supervised while using them, because it's too easy for a cat to get the toy down and get wound up in it. Same with other cat toys with strings and things they can get tied up in. For example, I found Ezri once with a cat toy wrapped around her hip, almost unable to move. It wouldn't have been long before some sort of damage would have been done to her from trying to get out of it and pulling it tighter and tighter. Bad, very bad.

If you want to use those toys make sure you keep an eye on them and don't let them have access to them when you are not around, and keep the hanging ones as high as possible (both to keep them from getting would up in them and to keep the toy intact, as they can't get to the string part of chew it off or swallow it).

If you have old cat scratching toys that have been scratched to pieces, like the ones with Sisal rope around them - you can easily replace it yourself by finding some of the Sisal rope into a hardware store or Walmart and rewrapping it yourself. Let's face it; larger cat toys aren't cheap and you can never have too many cat-scratching posts.

In an earlier blog you might have seen the large cat play toy thing I made, incorporating sisal rope scratching on the columns.

We're still hoping our local Jefferson County SPCA can win the million make-over from Zootoo.com. Here's the Zootoo link for the Jefferson County SPCA. Join Zootoo, and then add the local SPCA to your account and they will receive points for it, if they get enough they will win the make-over. So help 'em out - join, review some pet toys or anything, and help them with the points.

Some determined people are still trying to get a dog park in Watertown. Here's his message on Craig's List:

It's still in limbo, but it will happen...with your help. City Counsel does not want to throw their support behind it because they don't want to pay for it. The problem is, them not supporting it, makes it all the harder to get the donations that would make it happen. Who wants to donate to something that may or may not happen? Quite the catch 22! Were NOT looking for the $700,000 plan the City Came up with!! A Dog Park is just some Fence, Bag dispensers, trash cans, Benches and a water source Come on people WE CAN DO THIS!!!!

I have been asking EVERYONE who wants a Dog Park in Watertown to send ANY donation to

WATERTOWN CITY COMPTROLLER
MIA'S DOG PARK PROJECT
245 WASHINGTON ST.
WATERTOWN NY 13601

It does not matter if its $1 (more would be nice) it just shows support!!! Make sure to "Earmark" your check "Dog Park" so they don't use it to fill potholes! If the 2000 licensed dog owners of the city sent $20 each that would be $40,000 right there. It is Tax deductible too!!! Ask all your Family/friends to do this, Ask your Boss or anyone with a love for Dogs. If we get enough response they will have no Choice.

In Addition I have two Fund Raisers in the work for April/May. Will post details as soon as they are firmed up. Thanks SG + Mia

You can find a little more info at http://www.myspace.com/miabumblebee

I hope we can get this in Watertown - a great addition to the area. But we have the "old school", "Good ol' Boy" mentality - 'if it's something new and different and we didn't come up with it ourselves we won't consider it'. Good example of it here; trying to kill it by putting a ridiculous price tag on it....

I love Jefferson County and it's people, for the most part; don't get me wrong. But there is some severe ignorance on the part of those who run the city and the county. It's why Fort Drum is one of the few things keeping the area from being the worse place, economically and socially, in NY state. I'm no big fan of the military nor Fort Drum but without it I'd hate to live here.

Unfortunately the area is held back by those very people who should be improving it and thinking toward it's future.

HDTV, DLP LED TV's, 32 Sats in GPS, Benefits of the Space Program, Windows Live Writer

2008-03-03T13:47:00.001-05:00

Been getting over one of the worse flu's I've ever had, still recovering but here's a few blog entries to read.

HDTV, DLP LED TV's

An engineer from one of our local tv stations (WWNY) has been posting a small blog about their station's transition to HDTV, a good little reference if you're looking for one. Link.

He too, seems frustrated that there us so much misunderstanding among the citizens of the US when it comes to the whole HDTV and Digital TV thing. See my previous blog entry for a general explanation if you need one.

We recently upgraded from a very nice HD-compatible rear projection tv to a pretty good DLP LED tv with an HD tuner. The quality of the HD signal is excellent, and we have not had any drop-outs from weather or anything else. We may not, as the signal strength for the local signal is nearly pegged.

The tv itself was a bit of a compromise. Of course, if money were no option we would have gotten a plasma. But they are not only more expensive, by a lot, but WILL fade eventually.

This DLP is slightly smaller then our old one, which is a great disappointment to me but it was the largest DLP LED we could find. And we definitely did not want to go with the DLP that used the lamp instead of the LED (who wants to replace that lamp every few years, despite the display's slight increase in response time with the lamp).

We have no experienced any of the rainbow effects that a small number of people seem to be able to see with DLP's, though the LED may slightly decrease this chance.

I also haven't the pixelization during heavy action/high quality audio that some people notice and that I noticed on my wife's mother's tv (similar model but smaller). That television had some bad pixelization. Then again, it was strictly being used through the local cable systems - neglible quality at best through the Time-Warner system, so that doesn't mean much.

We haven't seen it through the six or seven local HD stations we receive, nor the DVD (upconverted DVD player) nor through our digital satellite service.

I like the HD, but I wish everything were in the full rez 1080 as this doesn't seem to be consistent.

You can even see Obama's muscle twitch when a question stumps him. Now that's good TV!

Thirty-Two GPS Sats

I believe that we have a full 31 or 32 GPS satellites opened up the civilian GPS nav system now. Combined with WAAS we have the ability for some fairly accurate positional measurements with the GPS'es sold now. Our local TV station (WWNY) even did a little story on Geocaching.

Benefits of the Space Program

We're all ignorant about some things, no matter how well-informed we think we are as Americans. But there's some things that some of us should at least be marginally more aware of, at least basically.
Like the basic principles of how some of our everyday items work so that we can better use them - electronics, phones, cars, tv's, etc. Do most of us have the smallest inkling of the principles behind them. Do you know why your phone fades out in certain areas or why your car's oil needs changing?
Probably not, and likely it won't hurt you not to know. I'd like to go into this in a later blog with an idea I have. But right now; talking about the average American's ignorance - the Space Program.
I think an overwhelming opinion is that it's a waste of money, a boondoggle, there's not going to be any benefit from it, etc - have your pick.
Fortunately this is far from true, and a little quick research on the Internet allows any person to make their own INFORMED conclusion versus an UNINFORMED opinion. There's way too many uninformed opinions going around as it is.
Basically, any high technology - no matter how small - usually brings benefits to humankind. Sometimes directly, many times indirectly, and sometimes with unintentional or side-benefits not envisioned initially.
Take the war in Iraq, for example. No matter how much we may detest it in general there are many technological, science, medical, offensive and defensive, safety and protection, etc benefits coming out of it.
Anything that pushes technology, scientific principles, medical advances and hundreds or thousands of other corresponding and related and sometimes unrelated and unintentional - will at least have some good side benefits.
And the Space Program sure does all of the above. The aspects that go into getting people into space cover a wide, wide spectrum of science and technology. And our subsequent direct and indirect benefits are immeasurable. There's not one person who's reading this who hasn't gotten some benefits from one of the technologies that were direct or indirect spin-offs or by-products of the space program.

Windows Live Writer

What, did Microsoft actually create a piece of free software that is damn usable? Like Windows Live Writer?

Yes, I would say so. Basically, it's a standalone blog editor that supports any of the standard blogging formats, including Google's Blogger.

It's kinda what I've been looking for (and how did I not run across it before). Forget Scribefire and Flock, or blogger's sometimes-awkward online editor.

Give Windows Live Writer a try, it's a snap to download and set up and should work with most any blogger (but not all). Spell checker, formatting, draft saving; the same stuff you'll find elsewhere but implemented in one package that works well.

RIP My Friend Ernie

2008-02-20T12:03:00.003-05:00

I lost an old friend this week, and today I just came back from a very large memorial service for my friend. All three of the sitting rooms in the funeral home were filled and more chairs had to be brought in.

Ernie was one of my oldest friends in fact. Both in age as well as in the length that I knew him.

I've always been proud that my friends have come in all different packages. I have tried to make sure it has never mattered to me how young or old, male or female, fat or thin or anything in between, what their education or lack thereof was, how little or how much money they've had or make, what their disabilities are, what their nationality or color was, or their interests. Sometimes I've had to get past my own biases, sometimes I've been able to and sometimes ultimately I have not been able to. But I think usually I could.

There's been some (unforgettable) times when one of my friends has met another friend - only for one to look down on another. That's just not right. My friend is your friend, your friend is my friend - at least that's the way it should be. It's surprising sometimes how little you know people. And on the other hand it's surprising sometimes when you find out how well you CAN know someone, and how good people turn out to be; despite my cynical look upon the general population.

My friend Ernest Jeican was 77 years old; he had heart problems, bad diabetes, could barely see, and had lost a leg. But he still lived alone and even with his health problems held out hope for solutions and improvements and worked at improving himself every day.

I met Ernie at a Commodore User's Group meeting back in the 80's. At that time Commodore computers were all the rage, back before the Internet was called the Internet and the average person neither could nor would use it, when BBS's (Bulletin Board Systems - the precursor to the modern webboard or chat room) were big. The dinosaur days in computing terms, in other words.

We all shared software, techniques, bought and sold hardware and generally had a great time.

I've been a member of a number of clubs in my life, and never really developed a taste for the whole group/camaraderie thing.

But the exception to this was the Commodore club. I met a number of good people there, some became close friends and I've lost track of those people for the most part, except for Ernie.

We always kept in touch here and there and after he retired we'd get together and trade software and such. When we both got into PC's we did the same and I'd stop in once every few weeks or even once a week. After awhile my visits included fixing and helping him with things that his failing eyesight caused him trouble with. I also met a number of his family and friends and lots of people from his amateur radio club - which was a major interest of his.

Last week I stopped in and dropped off a DVD that I copied for him and checked out a piece of software I had recommended to him. Unfortunately he had been out with his daughter getting groceries so I didn't get a chance to see him that one last time - if I'd known it would have been the last chance I would have stopped over later in the day. Funny how you regret the things that you really can't blame yourself for, yet still do.

I called him later and we talked a bit. The last thing he said to me was to offer to lend me a movie he thought I might like. I told him I'd stop over this week and pick it up and show him how to use the software I had recommended to him a bit more.

Now, instead of stopping over on the day I probably would have to see him - I went to his memorial service instead.

Despite him being 77 and me 41 we had a lot in common. It's one of the greatest things in the world to be able to have a friend no matter their age deference. It's one of the few fundamental things about human nature that gives me hope for humankind - that there's some of us who can get past differences and become longtime friends.

As I said, we had a lot in common. Our interest in computers of course, but also electronics and airplanes and music and some other basic philosophies on life that span age and other dissimilarities.

There were a lot of older songs that he liked that we sometimes would listen to to try out a set of speaker or a conversion program or something, but one more modern song that I remember him liking was Prince's "When Doves Cry". A song I like fine too. A good example of how music can bridge the gap in ages. I'll forever associate this song with Ernie, in a sad way of course. But I am also going to try to think of it as a tribute to him and our friendship over the years.

Ernie; like anyone his age, had a lot of hardships and tragedies in his life; like when his wife died. He was a long-time engineer on the railroad as well as any number of other jobs that would have been whole careers to most people. He served in the military, learned another language, and even how to fly.

Hee was always a happy guy and always happy to see me and quick to welcome me into his home. He was the consummate gentleman, always offering me anything he had. There's a phrase - "A Scholar and a Gentleman" and this is probably the best description I could give to describe Ernie.

I don't have any religion to rely on for the whole "gone to a better place" concept and comfort, so sometimes I think it's harder for us Atheists. The memorial service was heavy with prayer and such, but the deacon who did the service knew Ernie for over forty years so he was able to lend the personal touch that sometimes is lacking in funerals with religious services. Afterward, a couple who manufacture musical instruments got up and played one of the beautifully handcrafted little string instruments and sung a song in tribute to him. It was touching, and a good ending to the memorial service as, like I said above; Ernie was a big music fan. He would have liked it.

I have beside me my electric guitar. I barely can bang on the thing, I'm not that good and the only way for me to read music is to use a converter program to make it shows the chords on the computer screen while I follow along. But I'm okay at listening to music and being able to copy it on the guitar after a bunch of tries. So I'm going to queue up "When Doves Cry" and do a goodbye of my own to Ernie. RIP Ernie.

Miscellaneous, Acer Drivers Extracting, WGA, Flock Blog Editor, Firefox Beta, Gimp, Jefferson County Wiki, Snow and the "Billy Bob Contractor"

2008-02-17T07:22:00.003-05:00

Miscellaneous

Ummmm! We decided it was time to break out the home-made applesauce from last summer! Nothing quite like it.

A little tweaking on the blog template. I've got it to expand to fill your browser screen, no matter what size it is - though if you're using 800X600 it may be a bit squashed. Some of the graphic background need re-sizing or re-positioning, but the one that overlaps this text is kinda cool where it is, I think.

Acer Drivers Extracting, WGA

I continue to get feedback from people wanting help installing drivers for their Acer 5520-5334. Remember - if the install program for the driver doesn't work (like if it says it's for Vista and won't run) you can sometimes load up your trusty Winzip (or clone) and drag'n'drop the driver install program right into Winzip. If it's a compressed install file (I believe the ones I listed in previous blog entries are; the video one is for sure) you will see all of the raw parts of the drivers. So if nothing else works do the above, then extract all the files to a temporary directory, after that go into your Device Manager and DELETE or UNINSTALL the devices in error. Then click ACTION on Device Manager and "Scan for Hardware Changes". When a Windows' dialog box pops up click "Install from a list or specific location" and browse to where you extracted the files from the installer.

You might have to go through this process a couple times until you find the right errored device but likely it will work if you can't install it any other way.

We got it good though (relatively), compared to some of the cheaper models of Acer laptop. No having to mess with BIOS or harddrive settings.

If you're looking for a good fan/CPU temp monitoring program check out Notebook Hardware Control. It works pretty good, and I like it better then Speedfan and some others I've tried, I think. Shows remaining battery, lets you do power management better then the E-power program from Acer. Very configurable. Check it out.

And, of course, occasionally you may have problems with Windows Genuine Advantage and it's gang of programs - even if you have a legitimate copy. MuBlinder is the answer in that case, or if you just don't want all those WGA programs and quasi-spyware running.

Number one problem with installing MuBlinder on a brand new legitimate copy of XP? Not having .Net framework installed; at least version 2.0. (link here)

There seems to be some problems with the newer versions even with even with the .Net 2.0 installed. Sometimes it can be solved be using the .Net install program's repair function, sometimes you need to uninstall it completely and re-install it, sometimes you need to delete MuBlinder and it's corresponding KRX directory in \Documents and Settings\[username]\Local Settings\Application Data to get it to work. Or you may need to do a re-install of Windows even (usually it repairs whatever is wrong by just re-installing XP right over top of your old installation, thus negating you having to set everything up again).
Flock Blog Editor, Firefox Beta, GIMP 2.4.4 Install Problem

I really like this blog editor built into the Flock browser. The browser itself doesn't overmuch thrill me (being just Firefox in a wrapper), though if you're looking for a social networking-oriented browser it's probably for you. But the editor is nice, lets you save drafts even when offline, and uses the spell-checking of the browser. I think I like it better then the ScribeFire addon for Firefox.

"Share the wealth." Well, when it comes to my money I'm not sharing it with anyone; especially the crooked government. But I will share this with you - the new Firefox V3 Beta is looking pretty good. When I say "looking", well, it's not like MS's bells and whistles when a new browser or piece of software comes out. It's more under the hood. The Mozilla guys have really done some good stuff with resource- and leak-management, it seems. And comparing it to resources that V2 uses on the same computer gives you a real good idea of some of the changes they've made. Though a few of the options slowed it down, like the automatic scanning of your bookmarks when entering a website URL.

Sure, there's going to be some people disappointed when the new Firefox doesn't look like a Ipod or something, but those who use it everyday are going to notice a difference.

I have to say I didn't do any extensive testing, just some preliminary tests. I did hack some of the addons that wouldn't work with the newest Beta version .

But if you are playing around with V3 betas then you can try making the extension work, like I did. I won't go into it here as there are many sites on the Internet to tell you how to do it. Basically, you need to extract the XPI file and crank up the highest version number the RDF file will tell the addon it can run on (but that's not any guarantee that the addon will work past that point, of course. Tab Mix Plus didn't work at all, even though it installed).

Weird problem with the new version of GIMP. (need link). After installing the newest version (2.4.4) I found that a bunch of the stock plugins and scripts as well as some I installed and modded didn't show up. Lots of installing, un-installing, and hacking around in the registry didn't help. A few quick checks online and I was starting to get an idea of the problem - apparently some of the earlier installs kept things in the GIMP sub-dir in Program Files while later ones kept them in an entry under Documents and Settings. I tried a few different ways; like doing a fresh install, installing an older one then a newer one, and going into GIMP and changing the preference settings that points to the scrip and plugins directory (they were correct but still wouldn't work right). So I moved the scripts and plugins to the location in Documents and Settings and out of their location in the GIMP dir in Program Files.

This doesn't seem to happen with very many people, but if you have this problem this is the solution that worked for me. At least until they fix this particular not-very-common bug.

If you need a nice (but slightly complex) graphics editor this is the one for you. Don't support Photoshop and it's evil familial spawns. ;)
Jefferson County Wiki

The Jefferson County Wiki is back up ! Yea, crappy, crappy server that we tried it on originally - cost me many weeks of (unpaid) work - fortunately I'm good at multi-tasking other things at the same time. But we went back to Wikispaces.com, and I found a bunch of hacks and codes for sprucing it up a lot. Looks quite nice. But I miss the Tikiwiki software. Gradually pages are being added to the wiki and we're all doing a little publicizing here and there. I also set up a photo album on the server to cover some of the features we lost by having to go to a hosted wiki. Oh well.

We still have a lot of hope that this will become THE resource for Jefferson County. A lot of people have been working on it, but we hope many more will get involved.
Snow and the "Billy Bob Contractor"

I'm a weather spotter for NOAA weather (no, not one of those geeks that go out an stick their finger in the snow for the local radio stations - I take it a bit more serious then that).

The last few months we've actually gotten a bit more snow then the last few Global Warming years. Remember - with Global Warming weather's going to be pretty random, as most of us probably know by now.

Anyway, I was out checking the snow and looking at the roofs. It's interesting how the wind patterns affect how much snow builds up. We live on top of a hill with lots of wind, almost always, blowing across the valley and open fields around us.

Your local "Billy Bob Contractor" is probably going to tell you that you need a certain pitch of roof for this area and while that's the case for most conditions; for people like us a flatter slope is much, much better. In fact, it's pretty easy to see how the snow usually builds up more against the roofs that have a higher pitch then our addition that has a much lower one. The wind sweeps it right off the lower pitch but packs it up, over, and on top of the roof with a more conventional pitch that's common for this area.

Just goes to show - it doesn't matter how much of a professional someone tells you they are, or how much they have told you they have done or learned or how much experience they may brag about - it doesn't mean they know everything there is about a particular field, especially when it comes to your own stuff.

Kinda like what I mentioned previously; there's always someone who thinks they're more of an "expert" on your pets, kids, house, finances, etc and you-name-it; then you are yourself.

No substitute for using your own head, even when someone who thinks they're "in the know" or is an "Expert" tells you the complete opposite. More people should live by this.

Blog Format Changes, More Acer 5520-5334 XP Drivers, Flock, Freecyle Addon, Netscape, The Artwork of David Edwards, Shout-Out/Get-Well To Jon

2008-02-08T14:17:00.001-05:00

My Blog
I've messed with the table of contents a bit, you may or may not notice. Well, a lot.

I liked having them off on the right column but over time there have gotten to be way too many.

I experimented a bit with using some HTML and JavaScript to create a drop-down box with all of them in it, but the titles were too long to fit.

So I just moved the whole thing to the bottom of the page so it could take up the whole width. And then I created an anchor link in place of the old table of contents (right under my contact link) so clicking that link shoots you down to the bottom of the page. QED.

I also took off my Flickr slideshow script (which will speed up the blogger pages a bit on dial-up and slow computers). My free trial ran out anyway. Flickr's a great site, but I don't want to pay to host my pics there when I can do it myself. You can still find a bunch of my pictures there.

Next, I need to tweak the template so that it automatically expands to fit the visitor's browser window, whatever size they have their screen/browser set at. This also will make my quote hack look better. I also need to add an easy SUBSCRIBE button and RSS feed button somewhere - not that either will get much use but I like to be thorough. Maybe a better or additional search too; people always miss the blog search because it's at the top of the page above the title logo.

More Acer 5520-5334 XP Drivers
A few notes. I found a few more drivers. Uhm, I wish I had kept the webpage address I got them off from now... I've went through so many sites since I've installed XP.

One I found is the correct driver for the wired Ethernet card (Nvidia Nforce networking controller), the other was some drivers for a few more of the internal chipset devices, like for the SMU and SMBus. I had to re-install the Atheros Wireless adapter driver after I installed the former two things. One of them (probably the Ethernet device) screwed the wireless driver up. Install order again.

And remember: the wrong install order (especially if it has to do with the video driver, can really screw things up. You may even need to use Safe mode to recover, or manually change settings or use a LINUX utilities disk, or even re-install Windows at the extreme if you happen upon the incorrect catastrophe order when installing drivers).

So, there's a few more things down. The laptop works great, but there are a few more minor drivers I need; nothing major just a few system devices.

At some point I'm going to post these all somewhere so people can download them. Unfortunately I did so much experimenting and re-installing I can't list the exact order that things should be installed in; but see my previous blog entry for a general idea.

I found out my Box.net account doesn't allow a file as large as the Nvidia driver is (they packaged a whole group of drivers together to cover their whole line in that series, so the file is 36+ meg).

It occurred to me also - if you have some devices that aren't showing up as anything but errors in your Device Manager, or are showing up as what they're supposed to be but with errors try getting online and doing a driver update through the Device Manager.

If that still doesn't work try going to Windows Update - I'm talking through Internet Explorer, not the little taskbar icon - and selecting Custom and then going to the devices to see if any drivers show up there that you can't find or can't install manually. Worth a try, I think.

BTW, a common problem with some computers - hibernate not working. Had this happen with laptop I was working on right after it happened to my Acer. No rhyme or reason, it seems (there's an MS bulletin on this but I didn't bother to read it, blah). Go to a Command Prompt window (make sure you have admin access) and type "powercfg -h on".

Flock, Freecyle Addon, Netscape
Flock. Maybe you've heard of it, maybe not, or maybe you're using it right now.

Basically, it's the Gecko rendering engine (the same one Firefox and Netscape use) wrapped in a social networking-oriented browser. It's got account setups that let you stay logged into popular sites like Flickr, Twitter, Blogger, Youtube, Photobucket, Wordpress, Xanga, del.icio.us, etc. There's a photo uploader, blog editor, multimedia bar, a better feed reader then Firefox, a people sidebar that lets you see who's online various services, etc.

In fact, just for fun - I'm writing this on the blog editor. Nothing special, maybe no better or no worse then the Scribefire Blog editor one for Firefox (search my previous entries for more info on Scribefire).

It also does everything but take you by the hand and push buttons for you when you first run it or try something new, with popup info and help at the top of the screen.

If you're looking for this sort of browser and you do a lot with social networking/community sort of sites; then this might be for you.

You can find addons for Firefox that do similar things, but of course they are not integrated into one browser, nor are they set up for the beginner or casual user like this is.

BTW, I mentioned Netscape above. If you like Netscape get your last version before the site is shut down (maybe it is by now, I haven't checked lately and forget the shutdown date). Netscape's certainly become an under-rated browser for all of the stuff it can do and has integrated into it, and it has the ability to use the addons for Firefox.

Leave it to AOL to run it into the ground…

And speaking of Firefox. If you run or help to run a Freecycle group check out the addon a British Freecycle group made to help moderating Freecycle groups. It may not interest most people but it is pretty amazing what this plugin, er, addon, does. It can access your Yahoogroups member database and tell you how many "OFFERS" people have made, how many "WANTED" they've posted, etc., as well as do a query to see if they belong to any other Freecycle groups (I don't care myself; as we have many people who do belong to many groups and I have no problem with that - but the idea is to catch spammers who join a bunch of unrelated Freecycle groups). It does a bunch of other things, like adding colors to the types of messages and alerting you to improper formats, etc.

It goes to show what an addon can do. Most of your addons barely scratch the potential of what can be done.

BTW, if you're looking for a Freecycle group in your area go to Freecycle.org. Our local Jefferson County/Watertown one is at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FreecycleWatertownNY From Freecycle's main site: "The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,235 groups with 4,456,000 members across the globe. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them's good people). Membership is free."

Great idea, and we have around 1700 members here in Jefferson County on my group. Rich, poor, and everyone in between are members.

The Artwork of David Edwards
Some of the artwork, even great artwork, that has been considered the pentacle of human achievement sometimes makes me say "Oh, that's okay", or just "bla." Or even - "WTF". I won't give examples; I'll get hate mail.

Anyway, here's some stuff that's just incredible. At least to me.

David Edwards is the author's name. He uses Photoshop and rotoscoping and rendering programs and a bunch of other software to make some matte artistry (like what many movies use for realistic backgrounds, etc) that just makes me go "wow".

I won't post any thumbnails here, so as not to violate anyone's copyright, but I really want to. If you like artwork - both stills and rendered video - definitely check out this guy's site and his demo stills and demo vid. Even if you don't particularly appreciate art or care much for it, I think you'll appreciate his works. David Edward's CaptureFX Studio.

My favorites: "Sky Castle" and "Fallen Beauty". "Lost City" and "Rescue" come in next.

I could study these pics for hours. I could probably write a novel around each, a couple in fact. Each one can tell a number of stories; many different ones to many different people. At least those with imagination, I suppose.

Every time I look at them for any period of time I see more. I wish I had more time to ponder them, I guess.

Works like "Fallen Beauty" make you feel as if you could walk right in to it and set out exploring it for a month or so. "Sky Castle" - maybe the ultimate get-away spot, heh?

When I was young I used to love to go to the second hand store and get those "coffee table art" books that had science fiction sort of paintings, fanciful (but not fantasy) perspectives of interesting planets and science fiction-inspired locations. Some were artist's conceptions and visualizations of scenes from various famous science fiction stories like Larry Niven's Future History series (one of my favorite authors, among many).

Good stuff, and these remind me of those books (I still have those science fiction oriented "coffee table" art books).

Shout-Out/Get-Well To Jon B.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds any eye-related problems to be scary indeed. We rely so much on sight. I had an acquaintance who was blind and I have an old friend who is very visually handicapped, and working with some older people in my biz I get to see how hard it is to lose even partial sight.

So just a quick mention and get-well wish to Jon, who's had a scary eye-related medical problem and is still recovering. Hope all goes well, and that he has a full recovery.

Anyway, I'm sure everything will work out for Jon and I wish him well and a good recovery.

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