May 2011

There were 37 posts published in May 2011 (this is page 2 of 4).

Parcel arrived in the office of Postal service

Looks like more virus-laden emails are being sent, this time using “Postal Express” rather than the United Parcel Service notices of last time.

Again, do not open any attachments from people you don’t know (or services you don’t use).

Return-Path: post.express@wichita.com
X-Original-To: Mark Turner
Delivered-To: Mark Turner
Received: from wichita.com (200.146.124.135.dynamic.adsl.gvt.net.br [200.146.124.135])
by myserver (Postfix) with SMTP id 51AD9141BE
for me; Tue, 24 May 2011 00:27:25 -0400 (EDT)
Message-ID: 001a01cc19ca$e32ca4c6$0301010a@home-pc
From: “Post Express Service” post.express@wichita.com
To: Mark Turner
Subject: Parcel arrived in the office of Postal service
Date: Tue, 24 May 2011 01:27:27 -0200

Dear Customer

Your package has been returned to the Post Express office.
The reason of the return is “Incorrect delivery address of the package”
Information about your package is attached to the letter.

Thank you.
Post Express Service.

Attachment: Postal_Document_95816.zip

Fast food

Hamburger


On the way to Travis’s T-ball game, he asked me what fast food was. Surprisingly, I had to think about it. Like the famous definition of obscenity, it’s something that “I know it when I see it.”

So, what sets an Applebee’s apart from a McDonald’s? Or a Char-grill apart from a Mediterranean grill in a food court? And what category does Subway fall under? Is it the quality of the food, the speed of the food, or something else?

I decided that the best definition was that a fast-food place does not have a wait staff. Any place where you place your order at a counter (or drive-through) is fast food. If someone takes your order at your table, that is decidedly not fast food. Thus, even though Applebee’s are ubiquitous and the food is nothing to crow about, they are not considered fast food by my definition.

Leave it to six year olds to keep you on your toes!

To My Third Grade Class

It’s posts like this that make me wonder what it would be like to be a teacher:

To My Third Grade Class
We have 30 days left together. You don’t realize this yet – You are just eight years old and the only thing you count down to is Christmas. You are living for Soccer at recess, Spelling games, and Art on Fridays. You live for computer class free time and the moment you can multiply 6×7. That’s one one of my favorite things about you- you are too busy filling up today to worry about tomorrow.

This was written by an online acquaintance whom I’ve never really met but I read her blog because I love her writing. The post also reminds me of how quickly our own kids are growing, and how fleeting childhood (and life) really is.

It’s not about the bike, it’s about the EPO

Tyler Hamilton, one of Lance Armstrong’s most trusted lieutenants in many of his Tour de France victories, has told Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes that Lance doped regularly. His allegations follow those of former Armstrong teammate Floyd Landis.

Asked what he actually witnessed, Hamilton told Pelley, “I saw it in his refrigerator, you know. I saw him inject it more than one time.”

“You saw Lance Armstrong inject EPO?” Pelley asked.

“Yeah, like we all did, like I did many, many times,” Hamilton said.

Hamilton earned my respect when he rode through the 2003 Tour de France after breaking his collarbone. Later he lost my respect when he was banned from the sport for doping. After being busted for doping, Landis came clean with his doping history, which brought back a measure of respect for him. Hamilton says that if a rider isn’t taking EPO, he’s not going to win. Those seven Tour wins that Lance has racked up don’t seem as impressive or honest anymore.

In fact, I’ve gotten to the point that my respect for Lance actually drops now every time he denies doping. His claims of innocence are simply no longer credible.

I once loved the sport of cycling but the cheating and the fraud have long left me jaded and suspicious. If you have to cheat to become the champion you’re anything but a champion.

Dr. Bruce Ivins, revisited


Remember back in February of last year when I said the FBI was full of BS for blaming Dr. Bruce Ivins for the anthrax attacks? Well, it turns out I was right. Another bombshell hit yesterday when it was revealed that the weaponized nature of the anthrax made it all but impossible that Dr. Ivins produced it.

Why is it that the FBI too often is the gang that can’t shoot straight? They spend $100 million on an investigation and, once they hound one scientist to his death (after first forever tarnishing the reputation of another, wrongly-accused scientist), blame it on him knowing full well they were slandering an innocent man.

Man, I miss the days in this country when heads would roll when someone royally screwed something up. There should be more than one FBI executive seeking new employment right about now based on what they did with the anthrax case.

Or, as I said in my earlier post, perhaps the FBI really doesn’t want to find the perpetrators.

The truly social network

The last movie watched on our Netflix subscription was The Social Network: a movie loosely based on Mark Zuckerberg’s founding of Facebook. While the movie didn’t always paint a flattering picture of Zuckerberg, it did repeat that he was interested in “openness, making things that help people connect and share what’s important to them, revolutions, information flow, minimalism.”
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Javascript-based PC emulator

Fabrice Bellard, the author of the open source, VMware-like QEMU emulator I use every day, has written a virtual PC that runs entirely in Javascript called JSLinux. Geeky? Yes. Practical? No, but give the man points for being a world-class hacker!

Fabrice Bellard has written a 32 bit x86 emulator in Javascript — in plain English, he’s created a virtual PC that runs inside your browser, using Javascript. And then of course, he created a GNU/Linux variant that can run inside it — so you can run a full-featured PC inside your browser.

via Javascript-based PC emulator, running GNU/Linux – Boing Boing.

Playing in the dirt


I’ve been spending the past several weekends finally constructing some raised garden beds in the backyard. I’ve had a vegetable garden since we moved in but the ground wasn’t level and I got tired of the water I put on it draining into the yard (and the weeds moving from the yard to the garden). So back in March, I bought several landscape timbers and some spikes and engineered two nice, level beds for this year’s garden.

It took 3 cubic yards of topsoil, 2 cubic yards of compost, and 4 cubic yards of mulch to fill the area but it’s now full. We’ve got several plants in the ground now, courtesy of the N.C. State farmer’s market. I’ve fenced the garden off (mostly) and spent the past two days putting down soaker hoses for watering. My 330-gallon “Lake Turner” rain tank is now hooked to a sprinkler timer, which feeds the soaker hoses every three days. And, because it’s now level, the water in the hoses doesn’t all drain out the lower end. Sweet!
Continue reading →

Speeding motorcycles continue

My exasperation with speeding motorcycles near my home caught the attention of N&O reporter Chelsea Kellner, who wrote a story on the problem and quoted me.

And just in case you thought these morons would stop once word got out, you’d be wrong. They were speeding again as early as Sunday afternoon, the day of the article. Seems the motorcyclists don’t read the paper.

They were also going at it again this evening, so I called the po-po. It’s quiet for now, but I don’t expect it to last. I will continue to call 911 for the next several weeks if that’s what it takes to reign in these reckless idiots.