Last night, Charlotte and I completed our training as Neighborhood Emergency Response Team members!
This is one vital step in our multifaceted strategy to take over the world!
We have been studying disaster preparedness, fire safety, light search and rescue, triage, basic disaster medicine with the SF Fire Department. We even got to put out a real fire and make a mess in the parking lot with a 3A 40BC extinguisher (the kind of extinguisher that YOU should have in your home, car and workplace… you have one in each, right? If not, we’ll sell you one, at a very reasonable price…).
We got certificates. We’re NERTs!
We got gloves and super duper ity bity flashlights (I almost blinded Charlotte, oops. But the veins in our hands look really cool) submersible to 500ft and guaranteed against… let me read the manual, “Pelican Unconditional Lifetime Guarr… blah blah blah… defects in workmanship… blah blah blah…. THE ABOVE GUARANTEE DOES NOT COVER SHARKBITE, BEAR ATTACK OR CHILDREN UNDER 5.” Ha!
We were instructed never to walk into a building and shout “NERTS! We’re here to help!” People would just look at us funny. We’re supposed to say “Rescue Team!” Already our self esteem is being tested by the industrial firefighting complex. ;-)
This is an important part of our disaster preparedness business. Which, in all honesty, is looking pretty tenable.
Just like the last time, my vote in San Francisco counted for little.
Continue reading ‘How I voted’ »
Voltage Loss Tables: Calculate how many volts are eaten up over a given distance
voltage loss = amps * wire resistance * distance in feet * 2 wires (1 wire in each direction!)
Sources http://www.cirris.com/testing/resistance/wire.html http://www.paigewire.com/volt_loss_formulas.htm
Continue reading ‘Voltage Loss Table’ »
If you have TestTrack Pro 4 from Seapine Software, you might find the following useful. Change the email notifications as such and the emails will be in a much more readable format.
Continue reading ‘TestTrack Pro 4’ »
VNC SingleClick is a program that lets a person run a small (166k) program in order to let another user see their computer screen and/or control their computer. It’s way useful.
Here are notes I took on how to set it up (these instructions were ripped from a doc I wrote for another purpose. Sorry if it’s slightly unintelligible)
Continue reading ‘VNC SingleClick’ »
update: I removed this plugin. I now just trust in Spam Karma
Spam Karma does a great job of managing my comment spam. But I’d like to do more to keep those 500 comment spams/day out of my database entirely. So I’ve installed the Challenge plugin. It’ll make you do math in order to leave a comment. Spammers hate math. It’s like their kryptonite. I hope you don’t hate math so much as to not leave a comment.
Update Feb 10, 2008: See this post where it is now successfully installed! W00t!
Update Nov 10, 2006: FastCGI isn’t stable. So I am disabling it. I’d sometimes see a 30 second timeout error right next to a 2 second load time. It just isn’t stable. :-( Sometimes it would crap out on an upload, sometimes on downloads…
The whole site should be much faster now that I’ve set up FastCGI on my Dreamhost account :-)
Here’s how I had configured it:Put the following at the beginning of the .htaccess file of the directory I wanted to run FastCGI on. IE: in ./lee.org for the whole site or in ./lee.org/blog for just the blog:
Options +ExecCGI
AddHandler php5-fastcgi .php
Action php5-fastcgi /php5-wrapper.fcgi
Create a file called php5-wrapper.fcgi and put it at ./lee.org. Make it executable by the user. Put the following in it:
#!/bin/sh
export PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=3
exec /usr/local/dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi
Click the checkbox in the Domain section of the Dreamhost Panel saying “FastCGI”.
That’s it.
Please note that comments left on my syndicated Gadlenblog account do not make it back to my normal Lee.org blog. Since I only read the Lee.org blog, I’ll never see your comments.
Please don’t leave comments on my syndicated blog, Gadlenblog.