Cheap Thoughts: Using pictures to express emotion in IM clients

Macintosh OS X instant-messaging (IM) clients display your login picture during chats. If you’re having a chat, the traditional way to express smiling is to use a emoticon like this: 🙂 . Why not make your login picture smile, instead? Take different shots of yourself expressing various emotions and provide an easy way of changing them during a chat.

Nothing expresses emotion better than a face. Why not put this to use?

Koopman meet-and-greet

On my last deployment to the Persian Gulf, a pair of TAD (temporary assigned duty) guys joined my ship for the countless doughnuts we did there (the Persian Gulf, in spite of its fearsome reputation, is unbearably dull 99.9% of the time). One of these guys was Chuck, a wet-behind-the-ears E-4 who thought he knew it all. We delighted in proving him wrong with the typical “new guy” pranks.
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Rodger Koopman

I was delighted to find out today that Raleigh’s District B has some real choice for next month’s election: Rodger Koopman. I think Koopman will bring a breath of fresh air to the Raleigh City Council, something it desperately needs. He gets bonus points for being a veteran and an IT geek like me.

Koopman is also steadfast against paving our nature parks, like Horseshoe Farm Park and my beloved neighborhood park, Durant Nature Park. In other words, Koopman will actually listen to his constituents. Imagine!

Koopman is attending some meet-and-greets tonight. I might show up to see what he has to say. For those who can’t make it, you can watch the Youtube campaign video from his run for Wake County Commissioner last year.

Long Day

First official day of Kindergarten for Hallie, and preschool orientation for Travis, neither of which I got to attend. Busy day of work. Painters here all day. Doctor’s appointment. Messing around with my Flickr account.

Long day. Time to turn in.

Quirky server issues

So the switch to the VPS Farm hosting provider is not going as smoothly as I’d hoped. Even with a swap partition enabled, the session ran out of memory.

I set up my home network management software instance to monitor the server for memory issues but I turned my network management box off as painters are working in the room where it normally lives. Thus I was unable to track issues with the server. I did have a console open on it which indicated it died around 11 AM today, though from what I still don’t know. Seems every 36 hours it decides to done blowed up.

Bear with me, folks, as I work out these issues. Thanks, y’all.

Tuscany Industries phishers persist, switch numbers

Despite being hung up on Friday, another Tuscany Industries (or Upgrade Now) car-warranty-expiring phishing call just came in, this time from 208-839-2686. This number, according to Google, is the mobile phone number of a man in White Bird, Indiana – an unlikely phisher. Falsifying their CallerID. Geniuses, real geniuses.

Since you clowns are most likely are reading this, let me tell you your days are numbered. You had a good gig while it lasted but I’m on to you. You’ve pissed me off and I will find you and I will turn the whole state and federal law enforcement teams on to you if that’s what it takes.

Roy Cooper’s office and I will have a conversation about this today. Count on it.

Google Earth Flight Simulator

The latest version of Google Earth has a crude flight simulator as an Easter egg. Simply hit Command-Option-A in the Mac version and a flight simulator dialog will pop up. After you’ve “discovered” the Easter egg, it will appear in the Tools menu for future flights.

I tried flying it and was wildly unsuccessful. Didn’t try it with a joystick or with my yoke or pedals. I still prefer the freeware flights that Flightgear provides. Still, its kind of cool flying around with picture-perfect scenery, even if you wind up crashing into that scenery a bit too often.

(h/t, Marco via Boing Boing)

Sunday Wrapup

We had a good time at the New Hope Valley Railway this morning. We got there around 10:30, which is normally enough time to ride the first train. Today was a mob scene, however, and we spent thirty minutes just waiting in line to buy our tickets. It seems the railway can’t sell tickets fast enough and that leads to delays. I suppose it doesn’t matter, though, since they only have one train and one track.
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New Hope Valley

We’re on our way to the New Hope Valley Railway this morning to ride the train, since its the first Sunday of the month. Kelly will stay here and get some of her new editing project done.

The weather this morning is fall-like, the first cool morning in recent memory. It should be a fine time to ride a train through the dry, dying woods!