Month: December 2007

New Year Clearing Out Random Link Dump

To ring in the New Year and to start anew, here are the links that I’ve just had sitting here for a long while in various places around my hard drive. These are totally random, some fun, some interesting, some funny, some just downright scary, but should keep you entertained for a bit.

(And before I post all these, I wanted to wish everybody a happy and safe new year. Welcome ot 2008, everybody, and feel free to share your resolutions below.)

Links below and videos after the jump.

Social Engineering Gone Wrong (I’ve had conversations like this).
8 Things You Don’t Really Have To Do.
Tim O’Reilly is thankful he’s not Bill O’Reilly (I would be, too).
The Biggest Data Disaster Ever.
Swearing at work increases company morale.
How to track down anybody online.
Find Free MP3s at BeeMP3.
Everybody who lives in Bend and is proud of our landmark butte needs this shirt.
How did Futurama’s Zoidberg get his name? From an Apple II game that Futurama creator David X Cohen created.
The problem with mainstream media today.
FOIA reform: Bloggers are journalists, too.
Laura Bush wishes she could stop s**ting blood.
Moron crook for the day manages to get featured on the front page of a newspaper cleaning up in front of his business as well as robbing a store.
One ridiculously expensive Starbucks drink.
Boise firefighters return to find firehouse on fire.
The 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2007.
On the Bulletin’s free music downloads.
Hot-or-Not-style Wedding Betting.
Fake Warrant Generator.
Mariah Carey’s Saudi Arabia Album Covers (yes, they’re legit).
What is your home’s Walk Score?
A bunch of Lifehacker top 10 lists with WiFI tweaks, body hacks, PDF tricks, iPhone apps, and more.

Videos after the jump.

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December 31, 2007

Geekdom Link Dump

In an attempt to start out the New Year fresh with an empty pending links folder (and hopefully a better committment to this blog which I haven’t spent nearly as much time with as I’d like), expect a few of these types of Link Dumps over the next 48-72 hours or so.

For my reference: a simple script to e-mail LayeredTech’s reboot request e-mail address.
Falling leaves wallpaper for Ubuntu (the leaves actually fall).
This Star Trek fan has probably never had a girlfriend before, nor has he ever brought one into his Star Trek-themed home theater.
Great source for high-res wallpaper (this one is my current Wallpaper).
Great little freeware Spy Hunter-esque game called Highway Pursuit.
Scene completion using millions of Photographs.
Supercharge your Scheduling with GCal.
VLC Media Player can use Winamp classic skins, if you so desire.
Installing SPF Records on a cPanel server.
Logo Rediscovered (oh come on, I know I’m not the only one that remembers the Turtle?).
Make Your XP Computer Look like OSX.
Virtual RAID 5 Internet Storage.
Turning an old hard drive into a storage case.
Lifehacker’s 2007 Guide to Free Software and Web Apps (their 2005 list is still relevant).
myFairTunes for removing DRM from iTunes-purchased tracks.
Twenty Best iPod utilities.
Post Blogger comments using your own domain (I really need to get OpenID setup on my site).
Power your home with a mini nuclear reactor.
Minimalist explorer breadcrumbs for XP.
Deskview for those of us who want more space on our Windows desktop (basically makes the icons smaller and lays out the icons differently).
Raiding the abandoned Sun Microsystems building.
Using a robot to push a reset button on a dead server.
How to see if Apache on cPanel is under a DOS attack.
MovableType scheduled tasks writeup.
The craziest Star-Wars tattoos (slightly NSFW).
Use a Wallet to Keep Passwords Safe.
DNS-o-Matic from the same guys that gave us OpenDNS.
Halo 3 Cheat Codes as explained by a neglected girlfriend of a Halo 3 gamer.
Removing filenames in Unix that start with strange characters.
What the Google Intranet looks like.
I wish I had one of these on my wall.
Creating disposable/template servers with VMWare.
If you use Gmail, you need the Better Gmail firefox extension.
What usually happens when I work geek projects at home.
A Hot-tub sized nuclear reactor could power a 25,000 home community for at least five years.
Detecting duplicating IP addresses with arping command under Linux.
Windows Vista Incapable stickers.
Open Source alternatives to commercial software (pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before, too lazy to look).
Ditch your Windows taskbar with an OSX-esque minimized thumbnails with miniMIZE.
Setup the Asterisk PBX in 30 Minutes with AsteriskNOW.
Make the mouse pointer stay away while your typing with MouseAway.
Don’t forget to lock your computer, otherwise folks might mess with it (as I know very well).

That got rid of a few links. More coming once I catch my breath.

December 30, 2007

Bored At Work?

Probably not as much as these guys:

(And apparently this is an old video, but it’s new to me, and it’s still funny.)

December 27, 2007

Obligatory Christmas Post

I’ve survived two days of family and holiday spirit, and it’s nice to get back home and just relax. Too bad I have to go back to work tomorrow.

All in all, it was busy but enjoyable holiday for everybody in the family. Among the gift highlights (from and for all the folks in the family):

Some Nintendo DS Games: The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga, and my daughter got a Hamster game for the DS (can’t remember off the top my head which one).
A Cuisinart Power 11 food processor.
A silver 4GB iPod Nano. I’ve finally joined the 21st century and gotten an MP3 player.
A Craftsman 2 gal. Wet-Dry vac.
A few Cranium games: Triple Triumph (I enjoy this one) and Hoopla (great party game) and the kids got a Carnival Clubhouse Super Fort (we already had the base Super Fort, so we can now build a fort through our entire house, if need be).
A Nikon Coolpix L11 digital camera (far better than our old and dated three megapixel Canon).
My daughter also got a Pink Polariod digital camera from grandma (which she bought on sale months ago). That’s probably her favorite gift, next to her newly madeover American Girl doll (we got a new head for it from the American Girl Hospital).
My youngest daughter’s favorite toy? Probably this little dinky drum that you can take in the bath. Nevermind all the other cool toys she got, this is the one she bangs on all the time.
Some much needed clothes (remember how when you were a kid and you hated getting clothes? Not so much anymore).
The kids got one of those wooden train table sets that you saw at Costco.
Got some gift certficates to Applebees, Costco, Lowes, and Netflix (1 year sub, which I’ve never done, so that’ll be cool).
Movies: A Mel Brooks movie collection (has all of his classics), Airplane, and Gremlins.
My annual tool from my brother in-law (this is always handy and appreciated). This time it was a set of nut drivers.
A set of Geek temporary tatoos (they look like this).
(Forgot this one) A new, big, stick bag to hold all my mallets and drum sticks that were overflowing my old stick bag.
And I’m sure I’m forgetting something, but that’s the bulk majority of what all of us and our girls got (the kids got a bunch more little things, but I can’t think of them off the top of my head).

All in all, a great Christmas was had by all (kids were spoiled rotten, as always), I just really wish i didn’t have to go back to work tomorrow (especially considering tomorrow’s a heavy tourism travel day and the roads are in bad shape).

So, what else did everybody get?

December 25, 2007

Have A Safe And Merry Christmas

I’d like to wish everybody a safe and happy holiday, be it Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, Festivus or whatever. We’ll be celebrating Christmas with my wife’s family tomorrow and with my family on Tuesday. I don’t intend on being online much (or at least blog much) over the next couple days, so everybody be safe and be sure to avoid the crazy “I don’t know how to drive in snow!” tourists that will be descending upon the area on the 26th.

And to get everybody in the festive spirit, here’s a picture I took of our tree at home.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

December 23, 2007

Happy Festivus

As one of the traditions of the holiday, it’s time to air your grievances. Anonymously or otherwise, contribute below. Or feel free to put your grievances to song:

December 23, 2007

Who Is This Woman On Yahoo Answers?

And why in the hell is she giving utterlyboring.com as an answer with pretty much every answer she gives at Yahoo Answers? I’m about to head out the door here (daughter’s x-mas show at her school) so I can’t really dig into this too much, but I noticed a bunch of traffic coming from Yahoo! Answers through these links — and I worry that it’s going to look like I’m link spamming when I’m not.

Anybody else run into this? Anybody at Yahoo! seen this before?

Anybody coming to this site because of those links is welcome to browse around, but I’m sure you won’t be able to find out what scaling is, how to find iTunes or where discovery/turbo is. Hopefully somebody’s not doing this maliciously, or there’s going to be a whoopin’ coming somebody’s way.

Update at 9:45PM: Let’s just ask the Yahoo! answer community, shall we? (Edit on 12/22: Removed question I was potentially violating Yahoo!’s usage policy with that question, and nobody was answering it, anyway.)

December 20, 2007

I Hate Winter

Actually, I don’t hate winter as much as I hate the way jackasses drive in this kind of ugly weather we’re having. We got five inches of snow at my office today. Needless to say, it was a very long drive home today, and during my entire 60 minute commute (usually 30 or so), I was just hoping I’d make it home alive. not because of my driving ability, but because of the way other morons were driving in the blizzard conditions that swallowed Highway 97 from Bend to Sunriver. It was dark and horrible, and the commute home tomorrow will probably be worse as it’s snowing hard in Sunriver right now.

While I like the folks I work with in Sunriver and I enjoy what I do out there, this time of year I really hate my job because of this. Driving in fear of your life because you’re surrounded by big ol’ SUVs that are driving far too fast and you’re driving a small, 20-year-old, sedan isn’t all that much fun.

But I rant about this every year, so I’ll quit. I need to reinstall Firefox before I go to bed as my profile borked itself.

December 19, 2007

New Book by Former County Commish Tom DeWolf

So what’s Tom Dewolf — former Deschutes County Commissioner and good friend of mine — been up to since leaving public office? He has written a book entitled Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History. Quoting the Amazon.com description:

A trailblazing memoir about one family’s quest to face its slave-trading past, and an urgent call for reconciliation
In 2001, at age forty-seven, Thomas DeWolf was horrified to discover that he was related to the most successful slave-trading family in United States history, responsible for transporting at least 10,000 Africans. His most infamous ancestor, U.S. senator James DeWolf of Bristol, Rhode Island, curried favor with Thomas Jefferson to continue in the trade after it was outlawed. When he died in 1837 he was reportedly the second-richest man in America.
When DeWolf’s cousin, Katrina Browne, learned about their family’s history, she was consumed with guilt. However, unlike others who might ignore their sordid legacy, she resolved to confront it head-on. Browne produced and directed a documentary feature film, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, in which she, Tom, and eight other family members retraced the steps of their ancestors and uncovered the hidden history of New England and the other northern states. Inheriting the Trade is Thomas DeWolf’s powerful and disarmingly honest memoir of their journey.

It sounds like a fascinating book, as does the companion documentary Traces of the Trade which will be debuting at the Sundance Film Festival in January. More information on the book is available here.

December 18, 2007

Random Link Dump

Still recovering from my aforementioned cold and totally bogged down in a backlog of links (Newsgator needs to implement the Feeddemon panic button in Newsgator Inbox). So here are some random links of all varieties that have been sitting here for a while.

What’s the best way to test nextgeneration IPv6 Internet networks like Internet2? Fill it full of porn.
Does anybody else find it interesting that the Conservapedia article on Homosexuality is nearly twice as long as the Wikipedia article on the same topic? I guess hatred is easy to rant about.
AT&T to buy Bend-based Edge wireless. No word if we’ll ever get AT&T cell phone coverage and the Jesus phone here.
The ultimate bedside table if you’re worried about somebody breaking in.
How to write a resume along with how not to write a resume (probably should go through mine again sometime — more tips here and here).
15-tips to leave your woman dazed and amazed after sex along with 10 tips to improve your sex life with your diet.
I really need to get one of these for my hamster.
Amazing map of the territory of the United States (pretty much everything at that site is awesome).
Best Ask.MeFi thread ever: What single book is the best introduction to your field (or specialization within your field) for laypeople?
The laws we are allowed to break and why.
A story by J. Robert Lennon using only words from The Cat In The Hat.
Fun zip code data tool.
Teenager allowed to take calming smoke breaks at school. Because she couldn’t possibly survive high school with out them.</sarcasm>
How to win at Monopoly (a game I loathe, by the way).
The hunt for the seven missing wonders of the world.
The last DC circuit in NYC has finally been shut down.
Diet Coke and Mentos have miraculous powers.
You can now edit locations in Google Maps and view terrian.
Absolute no-nos for freelance Web designers.
Stop dressing your daughter like a hooker (anybody with little girls at home like I do will appreciate this).

Cripes, that’s enough for now. I’m going to bed.

December 17, 2007

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