Bagpipers on Parade Susan and I went to the Stone Mountain Highland Games last Saturday. We had been told that it was “huge”, but we thought that it wasn’t that much bigger than the Alabama Highland Games, which we’ve attended the past few years. There were a few more clan and vendor tents, and there were more people attending, but I’d say that the Alabama Highland Games stands up well in comparison. Drum Major 1 … Continue reading
I weighed in today at 256 pounds, which is 4.5 pounds lighter than last Monday, but 2 pounds higher than my low point of 254. It’s really amazing how much one weekend of carefree enjoyment of food can affect your body, and how long it takes to recover from it. But, I’m still down more than 15 pounds from when I started, and I can feel the difference in my clothes. I’m back to wearing … Continue reading
I’m getting hammered by a comment spammer again. It started yesterday afternoon, and according to my logs, it’s still going on this morning. The spams are coming from several different IP numbers (which all now blocked by my Spammer TarPit plugin), and the hosts appear to be different types. All of them appear to be running open HTTP proxies, and some appear to be infected with BackOrifice and/or NetBus. Of course, none of the spams … Continue reading
Here at home, we have a wireless network, necessitated by the fact that the house we’re renting is not wired for networking. The problem we have is that we’ve got computers upstairs and downstairs that all need to be on the network. At the moment, the wireless router is upstairs in the master bedroom, which is about as far away from our downstairs “office” computers as it can be. As a result, the connectivity can … Continue reading
Shelley Powers is organizing a fun experiment in collaboration, called the IT Kitchen (in addition to the wiki, there is also an IT Kitchen Blog). The basic idea is that volunteers will sign up to write about certain topics on certain days, all based around the idea of creating a resource for learning more about blogging. At the end of two weeks, the result should be a detailed set of essays and resources. I’m hoping … Continue reading
Things I consumed this weekend that aren’t on my diet plan: Beer Hot dogs Hamburgers* Potato salad Baked beans Sauerkraut Diet soda (ha!) Sausage bread Pumpkin bread Chips Dip Chocolate cake Ice cream Weight I gained as a result: 6 pounds Number of kids under age 10 sleeping in our living room on Saturday night: 6 The reason for all of the above: Happy 9th birthday, Mary! * Technically, a hamburger patty with no bun … Continue reading
37signals has yet another excellent article out. This one is called An Introduction to Using Patterns in Web Design. Some of it might seem obvious, or even instinctive, if you’ve been doing programming and/or web design for a while. But it’s a really good breakdown of a design process. (found via sidesh0w) One of these days, I’ll get around to redesigning this site again. I’ve felt for a while now that my sidebar is too … Continue reading
Last week, some reports came out about security bugs in WordPress. The development team has been working to clean these up, and a WordPress 1.2.1 release was announced today. Obviously, these fixes have also gone into the 1.3-alpha version which is currently under development. We appreciate the WordPress community’s patience while we fixed the problems. If you are running WP 1.2 or older, and can’t upgrade immediately for some reason, you can protect yourself very … Continue reading
I got busy and forgot to post last Monday. But that’s okay because I didn’t have much progress to report. We were having a hectic period, and wound up eating out a lot. Then Susan put together the smoker she got last Christmas, and we’ve smoked some chicken breasts and a turkey since then (and when I say “we” did it, I really mean that Susan did it). Mmm… Home smoked poultry rocks! Anyhow, my … Continue reading
Remember that telephone interview I had, and how I was hoping to get a call back for a second interview? I had just about given up hope of hearing back from them. But I had voicemail earlier today letting me know that they would like to meet with me for a second interview. Woot! It’s scheduled for the middle of next week. They’ve asked me to provide all sorts of examples of my work (flowcharts, … Continue reading