Category Archives: General Ramblings

To post or not to post? That is the question.

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After reading Be Careful What You Post, this got me to thinking about something I’ve thought about fairly often. In the past there have been many things I’ve wanted to say or get off my chest that after thinking about it decided against making a post. The reason being, for good or bad, that anything you post, say in a tweet, or write in an “open” forum is there for all to view potentially. This includes past, current, or possible future employers or someone that knows someone who knows some person, company, or product you talked about. In this age, you know that anyone that is thinking about hiring you, that you currently work with, that you’ve just asked out on a date or whatever, is going to look your name up on Google or some other search engine or social network like MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter to find out what they come across.

Since I’ve been doing a lot of twittering lately (I think that addictive nature of my personality has, at the moment, grabbed a hold of Twitter), I sometimes wonder if people forget that what they say in @replies are completely open for public viewing. I also wonder about how private direct messages really are. I also wonder about the integrity of the authors/creators of all these Twitter clients and Websites that ask for a username and password.

So, I guess, in the end, unless you don’t care who might potentially read what you say and the possible repercussions if they do, well, then don’t post, tweet, or write it. :)

Nothing or everything including the kitchen sink?

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As you can tell, I have not said anything on here since July.  A lot of things have happened since then that I could go on about.  So, do I talk about everything in one post or keep it all separate, focused on one topic?  I suppose what I could do is just a brief synopsis of what’s been going on without too much detail and those things that could be detailed out I will do in some other more focused posts… provided I get around to it LOL.  So, in brief what’s been going on:

  1. I’ve started playing EverQuest II during the past few months.  This mostly explains my absence from the blog. :)   I’ve started playing a Warden in the game that has reached level 72 and is also a level 72 tailor. I happen to be on the Befallen server and am currently in the Elysian Storm guild on there.

  2. I have been dealing with this Gout Arthritis stuff in my right foot.. big toe area.  What a pain in the, well, foot. LOL.  After this last flare-up I’ve started taking medicine to help keep my Uric acid levels normal.  Looks like I’ve reached that point in life where you have to start taking some kind of medicine every day. I’m sure being old and over-weight has much to do with it… the body is falling apart.  I really need to exercise but my jacked-up foot is preventing that at the moment.

  3. I have been keeping my WordPress blog and Gallery up to date during this time; however, there were some problems with the latest Gallery upgrade.  In short, after upgrading to version 2.3 of Gallery2, I could no longer log in as admin or any other user.  It would just timeout/lockup.  Thankfully I was eventually able to restore my gallery back to version 2.2.6 and am able to use it fine.  I will hold off upgrading my gallery again until they release version 3.

  4. During my problems with the gallery upgrade, I started to check out the Coppermine Photo Gallery script.  To test it out, I made a gallery for my EverQuest character to hold snapshots and so on.  Not sure if I want to include a link to it yet. The code is much less complicated to deal with and does seem to put less stress on the server.  Customizing the theme also seems much easier and intuitive.  My main problem with it so far has to do with how it handles SEO urls and urls in general.  The links to image pages are not consistent as they are based on the position of the image in the album and not the actual image.  So, if I were to post a link to an image page and then changed the album sorting order or even added new images to the album, that link would all of a sudden point to a different image.  Dumb.  From what I read about the newer version of Coppermine it will correct that and use image IDs instead which will always be the same.

  5. During this time there’s also been an historic presidential election.  As it happens, the candidate I voted for, Barack Obama, won. :) Hopefully he can help improve this economy which has gone down the toilet and change how the rest of the world sees the United States. I don’t even want to think what my 401K is worth now. The positive thing is that I shouldn’t need it for some 20+ years. There’s a lot I could go into but this isn’t the post for it.

  6. I have added to my DVD collection during this time; however, I have not got around to creating DVD pages for them yet. Once I do, I’ll make a posting about them. :)

Well, I guess that’s it for now and will publish this.  The Big 12 Championship game is about to start between the OU Sooners and Missouri and I’ll be watching that.

Why it pays to rent an apartment (fixing a leaky fridge).

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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! Green with Envy 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.

Should I add additional programming content to my blog, or my website?

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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!

My thoughts about Time.

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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. :shock:

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. Green with Envy