brainwagon

Another small video of some interest: Bridging San Francisco Bay, an industrial film created by U.S. Steel Co. to crow about the construction of the Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco. The construction of a replacement span between Yerba Buena island and the Oakland shore is currently underway: it is interesting to see how […]

Ah, another “classic” movie has been released by archive.org: Hercules, starring Steve Reeves. Like so many of the feature films on archive.org, this one was also presented on MST3K. Enjoy!

I was out geocaching with Jeff and Marla yesterday, and we searched for one of their caches. In the second stage, we were required to do some arithmetic to generate the final coordinates, and trekked off along a path. When we arrived at the location, there was a fallen tree, and Jeff proclaimed “Hey, that’s […]

Tis a sad, sad day. My trusty Garmin GPS III was being carried by my wife down the stairs when she missed a step and tumbled down with a crash. Luckily, my wife is fine (most important) but my trusty GPS III did not fare so well, and now suffers a cracked LCD. It still […]

Slashdot reports about the new wide field camera at the UK Infrared Telescope. As part of their initial testing, they took some nice looking pictures of the Orion nebula (what I would take pictures of to commission one of my telescopes). Click through here to witness them in all their glory.

No links, just heart felt best wishes for the holiday season! I’ll probably get breakfast going for the family soon, which will probably include toasted English muffins, scrambled eggs and some smoked salmon. Then presents, then get dinner started, then relaxing. Happy Holidays!

Today I stopped by Cost Plus again, as they had 40% off their Christmas stuff. While wandering the aisles looking for last minute stocking stuffers, I saw the following description above the wine: Very ripe and round — almost like a Jolly Rancher candy. The plums, cherries and red berries jump out of the glass! […]

When I woke up this morning (well, after loafing in bed for a while) I did my usual scan of email and weblog posts, and then checked my link rank via pubsub and found to my shock that I have entered the top 100,000 weblogs, apparently because of link backs from Lisa Williams and Brian […]

Well, today marked another nice trip to the Oakland Zoo. As always, I brought my digital camera so I could snap some pictures of the animals, and I managed to catch a nice photo of these two giraffes. It was a good day for photos, I got some more nice photos of the meerkats, and […]

While exploring the depth of my ridiculous referer spam issue, I ran the following simple query: mysql> select count(*) as cnt , baseDomain from referer_visitlog where to_days(now()) – to_days(visitTime) = 0 group by baseDomain order by cnt desc limit 10 ; +—–+————————–+ | cnt | baseDomain | +—–+————————–+ | 682 | chikaliresortmalawi.com | | 682 […]

In the last couple of days, I’ve been targetted by referer spam bots. These dorks access pages on a weblog repeatedly in an attempt to get their referer tag listed on your home page. I’ve been trying to figure out how to combat this behavior, and can see two different ways of dealing with it: […]

This time, in Ruby and only six lines.

Well, as the holiday approaches, I’ve got all three cars in the shop virtually simultaneously: My Expedition, for shocks, two tires and alignment The Jeep, for body work, and The Cavalier, for one highly fu-barred transmission. To deflect some of my bad Karma, I decided to do something nice and selfless: I went out and […]

The classic It’s a Wonderful Life, directed by Frank Capra, but starring bunnies, and taking only 30 seconds. Caution: Didn’t work for me in Firefox.

My criticisms don’t just extend to others. Here’s my own attempt at self-flagellation today. I fired up my ipod this morning and was listening to my latest show as I came in. I like to do this on occasion, mainly to monitor the technical quality as well as whether I sound like a complete dolt. […]