Mark Headrick’s Blog

The refrigerator in my apartment started leaking on the inside. It would drip from the top of refrigerator portion (freezer is on top) and hit the bottom. I placed a towel on the bottom and kind of let it go for awhile since my fridge is not exactly full of stuff. It had mostly cokes, a gallon of milk, some chip dip, and some other items.

However, after putting a pizza box on the next to bottom shelf and coming back later to a soggy pizza (gross!) I figured it was time to get it fixed. So, while I was at the apartment office paying my rent on my day off, I told them about it. They said no problem and would have someone out there.

A few hours later the maintenance guy arrived and went straight to work. It was rather apparent he knew exactly how to fix it and had done so numerous times. He turned the fridge off, removed the bottom shelf of the freezer and some other panels, and then removed all the ice that had accumulated in the bottom part of the freezer (apparently a grape soda bottle or maybe a grape popsicle melted in there as some of the ice had a purplish appearance). I assisted as I could by mainly aiming my flash light where he was working so he could see better.

After all the ice had been removed, he then brandished a turkey baster, yes, a turkey baster, filled it with warm water and stuck it into a clogged drain hole in the back of the freezer and alternated squeezing and sucking the water back out and repeated this until the warm water had melted all the ice in the line and was able to drain freely. Afterwards, he put the freezer back together. Problem solved! For those curious, it is a GE Hotpoint Model CTX14CYSDRAD.

This episode reminded me again of why it pays to rent an apartment. If something breaks, I don’t have to fix it and I don’t have to pay for it to get fixed or replaced.

I have been thinking of adding some PHP programming content (full blown scripts to achieve this or that to modifications of other scripts to achieve something) to my website and I am trying to decide where I should put it. I can either add them within the context of my Programming page, which is in a current state of extreme lameness, or as a WordPress article or page.

I think the thing to do is to put the main content within the context of my Programming page and then write a blog post about it that links to it. Yeah, that’s the ticket!

Now, when will all this happen? I have no idea. One of the problems with placing things like this online is the expectation that you will provide support for it when people try it and have problems. I do tech support all day at work and when I get home, I’m generally not in the mood. I think the fact that I won the “Coder” award in Surpass Hosting’s Surmunity forum has inspired me to do this. I had no idea I had won until I was asked about the prize. LOL. So, stay tuned for this!

Time as a dimension and our perception of it is a weird thing. The other day I was thinking to myself how slowly these past four months seem to have gone by as compared to the prior ten months. A pretty good explanation would be that it was four months ago that I started my new job here in Oklahoma City while at the same time dealing with the whole moving process, which to some degree is still going on. I think it’s the same as watching paint dry or waiting for a pot of water to boil. I seem to be waiting for certain things to happen and times to arrive. For example, I get to work and I wait for my break to arrive, then I wait for lunch, wait for my next break, and then wait to get off work. I’m waiting for the weekend to get here, and so on. I am much more consciously aware of time and its passage. The prior ten months while I was not working, there really wasn’t much of anything I was “waiting” for and as such wasn’t really consciously aware of its passage and the weeks perceptively flew by. Guess that lays credence to the phrase “time flies when you’re having fun”. Hmmm.. I wonder what that says about work. To be fair, the weeks do seem to be going by faster now than they have in the past.

I think this is why I’ve always thought of time as being a function of consciousness. Time goes by really fast when you are asleep. Actually, time doesn’t really exist during then as there is no perception of its passage. Yes, I know, Time as a dimension still exists… the universe does not implode while you are asleep, well at least not relative to everyone else who is awake.

This post has been sitting in draft for a few days and I happened to watch two episodes of Time on the Science Channel that went into some of this yesterday (1/24/2008) concerning our perception of time even as it relates to our age. As a kid, I remember things seemed like they took forever to happen. Now it seems like there’s never enough time in the day to get things done.

Time as a dimension.. like any dimension can you travel back and forth in it? Theoretically, yes, maybe. According to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the faster an object moves, the slower its time passes relative to others; however, to them a minute still seems like a minute and their clock will confirm that only a minute has passed. For example, they have run experiments on the Space Shuttle with Atomic Clocks that before launch have the exact same time; however, upon return, the clock on the space shuttle has recorded less time as having past. Now granted, the amount of time is only a few nano seconds where a nano second is 1 billionth of a second. In fact, the GPS satellites whizzing above us have to correct their internal time clocks every so often in order to keep the same time relative to those of us here on Earth.

Now here’s a thought, if you send a guy up in a clear space ship that orbits the Earth at a super fast speed, such that at the end of his time in space his clock is now a few hours behind everyone else’s on Earth, how is that he never disappeared from view during his orbit and you can clearly see him when he steps out of the space ship. It would appear that he did not really travel in time. If he did, there’s no way you could see someone whose existence is at 3:00pm while your’s is at 5:00pm. To me, that’s what time travel is.

What’s really happening here is explained in the article I linked to above. The key here is that the speed of light (transmission of information from an event in the space-time continuum) is constant for all frames of reference. The speed of light coming from a guy standing still with a flash light (relative to the person measuring the speed) would be measured to be the same speed as that of the light coming from the headlights of a car going 100 mph by him, not the speed of light + the speed of the car.

So, if the Mythbusters could test the possibility of Superman going back in time by whizzing around the Earth, they would declare it as busted!

Time is definitely a bizarre thing when you think about it and I think it’s about time I go ahead and post this, LOL.

I have finally done it!!! My website is no longer using frames after years and years. It’s now using a combination of CSS and DIV containers to control the layout. I think I have made changes to all the pages and scripts that I needed to LOL. As you’ll notice, I no longer have my embedded midi player on the bottom left. Instead when clicking on a link to play a random midi file or any particular one, it will open a pop-up window with the midi player. Any future midi files will be targeted to that same pop-up window and start playing.

As a result of this, I have had to modify my .htaccess file to redirect any links that might be going to my old index.shtml (the file that contained my frame information) or main.php (which was the home page file loaded into the right-hand side) to just the root at “/” so that it loads the new index.php.

The main thing that is bugging me so far is that with Firefox, the pages that have an embedded object such as a media player, flash player, or YouTube player causes the left menu to be redrawn… except for the NASCAR page for some reason . In IE, this does not happen. Trying to make things behave the same or as close to possibly can be a real pain sometimes. Anyway, now my website will be easier for search bots to handle and for people to bookmark and refresh pages!

Well.. upon further review, I think my modem tweaking was just a coincidence.  Tonight I seem to get more or less the same results with the default Windows settings vs the tweaked ones.  Think I got too excited.  In my haste, I neglected to change back to the default settings to see if the tests went back down, and then change back to the tweaked settings to see if they sped back up again.  Dumb on my part…