Testing the radom.php code that picks a photo from all photos contained in the same directory.
http://mac.fiveforks.com/rotatethumbs/jeb/rotate.php
Nicki was wondering what would happen if you had it displays three times. The random generator uses the current time, so you get the same random choice all three times.
Random 1
Random 2
Random 3
So no go.
Jane called me from Facebook today at work. [I’m changing her name, and you’ll see why. Her real name is also common and also has only four letters.] I assumed it was a cold call. She wanted to talk to me about advertising on Facebook and asked me if I had time to talk. Remember that.
It so happens I have a project that may involve Facebook advertising. I told her I wanted to talk, but I needed to schedule a time. She said she was west coast, so we agreed to talk 4pm eastern, my time. She said she would call me then. I scheduled: “Jane Facebook 4pm.”
Now I didn’t really think she was with Facebook. I get a lot of cold calls. I figured she was a contract sales person or with a company that does lead qualification. Our company actually sells such a service. I’m sympathetic to cold calls. Still, I wanted to talk to her about advertising on Facebook. I’ve done some work with Google sales, made some small purchases, and it is all fascinating.
Update 6/4/2012: Don’t buy this product. See comments.
I bought my first household LED bulb today. I have tried a series of bulbs for the back basement patio light which I leave on 24 hours because days can go by without us going into the basement. I want to keep mischief makers away from our basement.
I’ve had 25 watt and 15 watt incandescents that will last 6 months or so. I most recently tried a 5 watt (25 watt equivalent) micro-spiral made by Sylvania (picture to right.) This is the smallest compact fluorescent (CFL) I’ve ever bought. Really small. It should have lasted a year, but it only lasted 3 months. Short lived. I think it was not happy being ballast-side up inside an outdoor glass globe.
At Wal-Mart I found a small LED frosted bulb that is a 2W / 25W equivalent generating 150 lumens made by FEIT Electric. It was $6.97 and promised to last 18 years with 3 hours per day use. I’m not sure we’ll be in the house more than two years. But, since I leave the bulb on 24 x 7, I did the math and translated the 20,000 hours into 2.2 years.The LED bulb says it is soft white at 3000 Kelvin, but it is a bit whiter than the incandescents and the micro compact fluorescent (2700 Kelvin) but not harsh white. The prices of LEDs are coming down and the color and brightness are getting better.
Thus the LED experiment begins. I may move this one up to the back screen porch, which gets turned off by day. There is a same size / price model that is 1W / 13W equivalent for 75 lumens, so half the brightness and power that I could put in the lower back patio. Hope to not have to comment for 2.2 years…
Note: We all need to become accustom to talking lumens because the 5 watt / 25 watt equivalent will make less and less sense over time.
Working in the yard, I got a ladder out to remove an old squirrel nest from high up in a our backyard hedge. As I went to pull it out, I noticed two bumblebees land on the nest and climb inside.
I pulled the squirrel nest to the ground and opened it up to see what was inside. I found an orange, waxy mass that turned out to be bumblebee larvae. There was one bee “working” on them.
Meanwhile about five or six bumblebees were flying around the hedge looking for the nest. I put the nest on a lower bush. A few hours later, Kelly and I went to see that the bees had found the nest and were cleaning and feeding the larvae. By evening, the bees had covered up the larvae by moving nesting material around. I’ve never seen a bumble bee nest before.
Fiveforks.com has been experiencing increasing outages at JustHost.com based on the website monitoring tools I use at AreMySitesUp.com and SiteUpTime.com. I decided to file a complaint, but I wanted to make sure the problem was with the JustHost server.
There was a reported big outage on March 12th. So I went into the raw logs that record every visit to Fiveforks.com whether by a person or a search robot (like the GoogleBot.) In this copy paste from the logs there is a really big gap of “silence” indicated in [RED] by my note.
I don’t have these kinds of outages with BlueHost.com where SJNLilburn.com is hosted. Pay a bit more there, but you get what you pay for?
222.77.227.81 – – [12/Mar/2012:16:45:13 -0500] “GET /ted/2011/10/stanza_and_epub/ HTTP/1.0” 200 23222 “http://fiveforks.com/ted/2011/10/stanza_and_epub/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.02 Bork-edition [en]”
222.77.227.81 – – [12/Mar/2012:16:45:15 -0500] “POST /ted/wp-comments-post.php HTTP/1.0” 302 – “http://fiveforks.com/ted/2011/10/stanza_and_epub/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.02 Bork-edition [en]”
222.77.227.81 – – [12/Mar/2012:16:45:38 -0500] “GET /ted/2011/10/stanza_and_epub/ HTTP/1.0” 200 23204 “http://fiveforks.com/ted/2011/10/stanza_and_epub/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.02 Bork-edition [en]”
109.230.217.46 – – [12/Mar/2012:16:45:41 -0500] “GET /ted/2008/09/domain_registration/ HTTP/1.0” 200 16313 “http://fiveforks.com/ted/2008/09/domain_registration/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Powermarks/3.5; Windows 95/98/2000/NT)”
[16:45 = 4:45 pm above. Next visit below at 1 minute past midnight. So 7+ hour outage.]
180.76.5.58 – – [13/Mar/2012:00:01:17 -0500] “GET /ted/2011/01/snow_day/ HTTP/1.1” 500 252 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html)”
146.0.74.234 – – [13/Mar/2012:00:03:05 -0500] “GET /wp-login.php HTTP/1.1” 200 2195 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 GTB5”
46.251.228.99 – – [13/Mar/2012:00:13:15 -0500] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 2441 “http://fiveforks.com/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)”
46.251.228.99 – – [13/Mar/2012:00:12:39 -0500] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 2523 “http://fiveforks.com/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)”
Our screen porch always gets a good dusting of pollen, and then spring showers do not wash it away. So we have to hose everything down.
The dogwoods and azaleas are all in bloom, and the zoysia in the back greened up enough this past week that we’re getting that Masters golf course look. The fescue we had prior always looked great this time of year, but it didn’t hold up through the hot summer. Zoysia loves heat.
Comcast sent us a letter saying our TVs will stop working unless we have a Comcast box or get a free DTA (Digital Transport Adapter.) They are going all digital and all customers will need digital controls that allow for things like on-demand movies and even more and more channels.
We don’t want either, but our basic TV package would quit working unless we at least order the DTA. The first three are free, so I ordered one for each TV.
Three giant boxes came in the mail and one is pictured below. I think six Apple TV packages would have fit in one Comcast DTA package. Inside the box are:
And that’s just one set. Multiply the photo times three.
It took me hours to get all of this junk set up and activated. Our Sony TV went smoothly, but the Philips with VCR was a mess because of cable complexities. And after much trial and error and Google research, the best we have with the kitchen Magnivox is the mute button on the remote will turn the power on/off and the volume down button will make the volume go up. If we want the volume to go down, we have to use the TV’s native remote. Ugh….
Apple TV much simpler.
Our TVs and VCR are all now “stupid” because all tuning and programming has been taken away from them and moved to the Comcast DTAs. I believe these “free” hockey pucks are Comcast’s attempt to grab the digital brains of our TVs before Apple comes in and takes over. I really hope Apple is successful at simplifying both the technology and pricing of TV and drives Comcast out of business. I’ll pay extra just to avoid all of this mess!
PS – We use our Apple TV (hockey puck) all the time. It was so simple to set up and uses our AT&T internet connection, so I hope some day we can just turn off Comcast.
Ted came over for Christmas. We recreated his virtual family Christmas card which was derived from his pool side photo. (See his Merry Christmas comment.)
Everyone is really in this photo, dogs included!
Two people were digitally added to this one…
Migrating from Movable Type to WordPress.
Testing location of files.
The first shot was taken with my lowly BlackBerry and my lowly composition skills. The second was taken by Nicki, our design director, who has superior composition skills and, most recently, a superior camera phone. The iPhone 4S does amazing close ups, with realistic colors, and sharp detail. That being said, my shot wasn’t too bad. (The third shot below was taken with Laura’s Android. Shows how small our little “post flower” was.)
