HerdingChaos

Discovery HD ran a documentary on Christmas called One Six Right. I tivo’ed it and finally found time to watch it tonight. It is a great film and if you are a pilot or a fan of aviation then you should check it out. Discovery will be replaying the documentary. Also you can get it on DVD from the One Six Right website. The soundtrack is also quite good and can also be found on the website.

I have a head cold and feel pretty awful. I came home from work a little early and tried to lay down. Laying down made things worse. So I got up and started cleaning a bit. We hired someone to help with cleaning and they are doing the first cleaning tomorrow.

Most people have a junk drawer. It is usually in the kitchen and holds all of your foreign change, broken pencils, rubber bands, etc.. We have one of these in our kitchen.

We also have a junk room. We call it the media room since the majority of the junk is all of the books, CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes, 8-tracks, and old forgotten computer media. It also happens to be a great place to stick things when you want them out of the way and you are not quite sure what to do with them.

Well the room was exploding out into the foyer. Something needed to be done. I started cleaning. It is like trying to eat the entire never-ending salad at Olive Garden. No matter how much I chip at this thing it still looks like a complete mess.

But none of that is very blog worthy. I just wanted to let you all know that I have found 4 years worth of unopened and untouched white pages and yellow pages from the phone company. We’re talking around 50 lbs. of useless paper. The good news is that all that paper is out in the recycle bin right now. The bad news is that I am not sure I remember ever doing anything with any of the other 4 years of white and yellow pages that have been delivered to this house. Does this mean I am only half way done with cleaning the junk media room??!?

Watching the 3 month old kitten chase the laser pointer?

or

Watching the 23 month old baby chase the laser pointer?

I think I have figured something out about spammers. If you setup a catchall rule in the virtual map table for a domain such that *@mydomain.com will always get delivered to someone, then the spammers will figure it out. And when they do they will send a ton of spam spoofed to be from various usernames at your domain.

This has three major problems:

• You get emails from idiots that do not read mail headers telling you not to spam them anymore.
• You get email from auto-spam rejection bots (that IMHO add to the spam)
• You get a ton of postmasters sending failure to deliver errors.

All three of these added up was equal to about 2500 spam/spam-bounce/postmaster-return emails per day for one of my domains. Today I killed the *@domain mapping and I had one email make it through my normal spam filter. And the total email sent to me dropped several orders.

So the lesson to learn here: Do not use *@domain maps.

Andrew walked up to me yesterday and said, “Dad, can you teach me how to program a computer?” I was both excited and nervous at the same time. He is showing an interest in doing something that I do but at a very early age. I want to help him learn programming but more importantly I want/hope it is as fun for him as it is for me. That got me thinking about when I first started “programming” a computer and what exactly did I do?

It started back in the fourth grade. When our class had library time there were a few of us that got computer time. Myself and two others names were up for “computer time”. We shared an Apple II. It had LOGO.

I remembered telling that little triangle (that everyone else kept calling a turtle) to make squares, circles, and triangles.

A little Google-foo later and I had several good LOGO sites. He now has a LOGO interpretor loaded up and running on his computer. He and I worked on the basic commands for a while. He picked everything up pretty quick and it was not too long before he was thinking up cool names like loopy_circle for his procedures. Now he keeps running into the room and saying, “Dad, come look at what I did!”

Ketchup!

I have not posted in quite a while mostly because I have been very busy and the blog is lower on the priority list than all the stuff that I have been doing.

Since my last post:

We all dressed up for Halloween. The kids were super cute. We had a soldier, a princess, and Raggedy Ann. Mom and Dad were super geeks and dressed up as Battlestar Galactica officers. We had a fall fest at work, Andrew and Tracy had a Halloween party at Taekwando’s school, the whole family went to a big party at a friends house and of course walked around the ‘hood getting the sugar fix.

Had a scary time with Andrew at the ER in early November. He was having trouble breathing. He is fine now and everything is good but it was a late night for Dad and Andrew.

Andrew joined Cub Scouts this year and he had the Bobcat ceremony on the 15th right before his 7th birthday. I am sure this is only going to get worse, but I feel really old when I think about the fact that I have a son that is 7.

We also celebrated Tracy’s birthday in November even though her birthday is in late October. She went to build a bear with some friends and had a great time.

Andrew wanted to go to Sea World for his birthday so we all packed up on Sat 18th of November and had a great time at Sea World. By the time we left, the kids were very pooped. The all fell asleep after about 5 minutes into the drive home.

For Thanksgiving we had a great Thanksgiving meal at my mom’s house and then headed out in the RV for some camping over the break. The camping was one of the best trips we have ever taken and was really relaxing and quite a recharge.

That is the very abridged version of the last month. So now you are all caught up!

This game has some of the best graphics I have ever seen. It looks very close to what you would see out of a plane. I have flown places in the simulator that I have flown in real life and was actually able to find an airport based on the landmarks in the city. Not big landmarks like you would find in a major city. I mean the little landmarks that I know where they are because I grew up here. It was creepy.

However, all that beautifulliness is not a word and not easy I guess. I have a pretty fast machine. X2 4400+ with a Nivida 7900GT. I can run most games out now at full settings and still get 40 fps. I did that with FSX and got 1.3 fps. I have dialed a ton of crap down and I now am getting around 16 fps. I would prefer 20 or 25, but at 16 most of the really cool looking stuff still looks really cool. I just hope they release a patch with something in the readme that says “Oops, anyone with an AMD and Nivida system was getting one third the performance they should have. We have it fixed now.” But somehow I doubt that will happen.

One of the few things that Microsoft does really well is their Flight Simulator. I have been playing MS FlightSim since I had an old TI Portable Professional Computer. The TIPPC was the first PC at the time to have something close to what we now call VGA graphics. So flight sim always looked better on my TIPPC vs. friend’s IBMs or clones. Or if you are not all geeknerd like me, it happened in the mid to late 80’s.

Well, this Tuesday they are releasing Flight Simulator X. Tonight I downloaded the demo and dusted off my old CH Pro yoke and pedals. The demo is pretty impressive and I am sure I will pick up the game as soon as it hits the shelves. It will give my PC something to do now that I spend most all of my time on this mac.

Perian — Watch most anything in quicktime.

iusethis — cool site for finding new apps on osx.

MS office v.X was not playing nice with some of the documents and the mail server from work. Then I found out that we have a site license for MS office 2004 for Mac. So I upgraded office and all of my document problems are resolved.

Apple released the new 1.5 version of Aperture couple of days ago. I upgraded Aperture and the biggest feature I noticed is a much better caching of thumbnails. Now even when I am working in a library folder with 8000 photos the scroll through the thumbnails is quick and clean. It did take about 8 hours for the new version to update all the photo libraries and sync to my backup vault.