Super clever idea

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Google will eat itself. That’s the premise behind gwei.org, where they’re using the money they make from google’s adsense program to purchase google shares, with a goal of ultimately owning the company. I laughed when I realized what they’re up to. However, at the present rate it’s going to take 200,000,000 years to achieve that goal. Let’s hope their adsense network is growing at some exponential rate to compensate for this.

Even if the concept doesn’t interest you the site’s worth checking out just for the trippy background patterns. Just stay away from the bright tie-dye colored one, I have a hunch it would cause seizures if you stare at it too long.

A good laugh courtesy of Soolin

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They say owning a dog’s good for your soul, and today I have a perfect example of why. Most afternoons, weather permitting, Soolin and I head out to the farmland behind my house and play fetch. I have one of those ‘chuckit’ sticks that look kind of like an atlatl that enables me to throw the ball 50 yards or more. Usually I have Soolin sit until I throw it, at which point she tears off after it. It’s her favorite thing on earth. Every now and then I let her run off without throwing the ball, and wait till she is 50 or more yards away, then issue a command like ‘sit’ or ‘down’ as a way to reinforce her training. She wants the ball so badly that she’ll do anything I ask in return for me tossing it.

So yesterday we head back to the field and after a few tosses I release her before throwing, wait till she is far away, then toss it as high as I can in the air. It was very windy and I had noticed the wind was carrying the ball so I figured I would toss it high to get it to go further than normal. Soolin loses sight of the ball and amazingly, it comes down right on her forhead, giving her a good soft bonk before bouncing away. This disorients her, and she barks once then proceeds to spin in circles trying to figure out what it was that bonked her. Or maybe she knew it was the ball and was just indignant, but either way I laughed for at least 5 minutes. I had to apologize to her when she finally came back with the ball. This little episode basically made my day.

How I manage to watch so many movies

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For whatever reason a couple folks emailed me about this recently. Maybe because I just updated the movie review section, who knows (it’s on the right in the links section). Anyway, it’s not a huge secret – basically since I’m single and have a lot of free time, I get to see a lot of movies. I also do a lot of ‘watch movie while working on laptop on the couch,’ and a lot of the movies I see are when I’m in this mode, especially the mediocre to crappy movies, which I tend to watch when I know I’ll only half pay attention whilst I’m working on something else. Lastly, I eat dinner in front of the tv, and generally watch at least half of a movie every night over dinner.

I stopped posting the movie reviews to the weblog because most of the time I only have a sentence or two to say about any given movie, and because if I posted to the weblog for every movie I watched, the reviews would quickly drown out everything else. The use of the wiki is sort of an experiment – so far it’s working ok, though I might end up folding the content back into the site, we’ll see how it goes.

And yes, I know I’m behind on the book reviews section, I’ll get to it when I can.

Check out gotapi

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This is a pretty slick web 2.0’ish site that has full api documentation for a collection of programming and markup languages. Next time you’re struggling to remember to, say, set a background color in CSS, try gotapi. It’s not doing anything you couldn’t easily find elsewhere, and in fact many of the api docs for these languages I already have installed thanks to tools like devboi, but they’re all in one place and stitched together with a decent interface.

Friday fun – Advance Wars by Web

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Advance Wars is a little strategy game available for the Nintendo GBA and the Nintendo DS. If you played Strategic Conquest back in the day, you’ll have the general idea, though Nintendo has expanded greatly on the concept and added a lot of character to it. The basic premise is you control units with a set of characteristics – how far they can move, how far they can shoot, the kinds of shots they can make (vs air units and ground units, for example) and a how much damage they can take. You use your units to take control of cities and manufacturing centers on maps, which provide income and the means to produce more units. There’s now a free version which is basically a clone of the Nintendo games available online via Advanced Wars By Web which allows web-based online play against other players. Well worth a look if the game style appeals to you. As usual I’ll offer to beat any comers – just issue the challenge and I’m in.

Enjoy.

My first Amherst project goes online

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So this is pretty silly, but still it’s the first thing that’s come online here at Amherst that I’ve had a direct hand in – a webcam we’ve setup to show the reconstruction of a collection of fossilized remains the college owns which will be on display in the new Earth Sciences building. We’re also capturing 4 frames per second so that we can build a time lapse movie of the reconstruction once they’ve finished. I’ll post a link to that once it’s finished. The reconstruction itself is only going to take 3-4 days, and in their first day there’s already a good bit of progress.

Motorcycle lovers may proceed with the feelings of jealousy

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This post is for my friends who love bikes. My brother just bought his heart’s desire after talking about it off and on for what seems like forever. I won’t spoil the surprise by saying what it was he got aside from noting that it’s an excellent motorcycle, though I will warn Andrew – you’d best not click through the link to the photos since you might burst into tears, lamenting your long lost love.

Anyway check out my brother looking like a motorcycle geek on his site – warning, he’s using flash.

Soolin has Lyme’s disease

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So I’m majorly majorly bummed to find out that my dog Soolin has Lyme’s disease, and in fact has likely had it since January or so. I completely misread the signs and feel like an awful dog-dad for missing it. She started experiencing joint pain in January of this year but I chalked it up to this spectacular wipeout she had on ice one day which led her to be unable to rise off of her haunches unassisted for several days, and to off and on bouts of pain in her hips.

I’m fortunate in that the disease could have chosen to attack something aside from her joints, which could have quickly killed her. There’s still some concern that permanent damage might have been done that won’t evince itself immediately, but on the positive side she hasn’t shown any indications of other maladies so there’s also hope that the antibiotics she’s on now will be the only issue she has to deal with.

For now it’s a month on antibiotics and a hope that all will end well.

I’ve become an outsourced tech support provider for Blizzard

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Blizzard makes the incredibly successful game World of Warcraft. The game has bugs, like any game. One of them causes folks with certain ethernet cards and settings to get disconnected when they turn in quests in the game. It’s super annoying. What’s worse is Blizzard hasn’t documented the issue very well, and since I did, and wrote about it here (after struggling to resolve the issue), google now sees me as the source of the solution to the problem. You can test this yourself by searching google for ‘disconnect turning in quests’ and look what you get, by way of example. It’s not the only combination of terms which gets you here.

I continue to get comments and email about the pieceI initially made about this which provided the fix, and it’s been the number one hit on my website now for several months. Today I finally emailed Blizzard using their tech support form, we’ll see if they do anything about it. I’ve copied my original email below.

I’m tempted to use Digg and similar sites to try and embarrass Blizzard into finally taking care of this, at the least by giving their users better documentation. We’ll see where the support email gets me and I’ll go from there.

The original support request I sent them is below.

Hey,

Heads up for you folks regarding the constant disconnects when turning in quests bug – my website’s post on this issue is the #1 search result in google for the solution to the problem for a lot of your customers, and they’re coming to me instead of to you because your site doesn’t have adequate information. Please consider updating the information about the quest disconnect bug and adjusting ethernet driver settings such that it’s accurate and my site stops being the source of the solution.

(or just fix the bug 😉

(or pay me for the bandwidth I’m saving you 🙂

Kidding aside, lots of folks would be happier if you would spend some time at least documenting the issue and the solution better.

the post that folks are using:

http://www.metamusing.net/weblog/2006/01/03/how-to-fix-constant-disconnects-when-turning-in-quests-in-world-of-warcraft/

Thanks,

She slimed me!

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I told the story recently of the passing of my Grandmother and it occurred to me afterwords that while I’ve done a pretty good job of honoring my promise to my Grandmother Fisher to tell the stories of my Grandfather’s life (and subsequently of her life) to my friends over the years, I’ve not recorded them here. So here’s one of my favorites about my Grandmother Fisher. A mischievous sense of humor tends to run in my family, to some extent on both sides but especially on the Fisher side, and this is an example of that.

For many years over the course of my childhood my sister Kirsten and I would travel to Ohio for a week or two each summer to spend time with our grandparents and extended family. Both sides of the Family, Hamilton and Fisher, had their roots in Ohio – the Fishers in Akron and the Hamiltons in Wooster. We’d divide time between the families.

One year when we went out, when I was around 11 or 12, the Fishers picked us up at the airport and brought us back to their house. When we got to the house my Grandmother began to complain that she wasn’t feeling well and disappeared into another room while my Grandfather brought us into the den and settled us into easy chairs. As we chatted my Grandmother came in. Suddenly she clutched her hand to her chest and exclaimed something about really not feeling well, then leaned over and upchucked into my lap.

!!!

I looked down to find this large glistening mass of putrid green… stuff. It looked more like snot than anything else. I nearly leapt out of my chair, but meanwhile I noticed both my Grandparents were cracking up, exclaiming about the look on my face and how they’d pulled one over on me and so on. I prodded the stuff in my lap and discovered it was cool to the touch and concluded that whatever it was it wasn’t harmful.

Long story short, it was a kids toy that I had never heard of. I think it was called Slime, though I can’t recall. I do remember that it came in a small trash can, and that the following school year it was all the rage and ended up being banned from our classroom because of all the hi-jinks folks were pulling with it.

My Grandparents Fisher were fond of pranks of this nature. This is my second favorite of all the ones they ever pulled, and the best one my Grandmother pulled.