I took the day off Friday thinking I would be going to the Rush concert with my brother. Once the date was moved, I opted to take the family to the North Carolina Zoo instead. Before I left, though, I welcomed two new neighbors to the neighborhood.
We made it to the zoo around lunchtime. After buying our season membership, the first thing we did was eat our lunch on the member deck. It was fun remembering the last time we had all eaten there: strollers were involved!
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After spending lots of time lately wiping our dog’s muddy paws, I discovered a good way to keep the dirt out. I had been thinking that some kind of socks or dog shoes would be a good way to keep mud out of the house but I found a way that’s even better.
It seems the mud tends to stick not on our dog’s pads but inside the claws themselves. I figure some kind of treatment (like glue, perhaps) that could fill in the gaps inside the claws would go a long way in keeping the hard-to-reach dirt out of our dog’s paws.
Now, do I feel brave enough to try it?
I have often taken issue with his political views, but I was sorry to hear Tom Fetzer is fighting cancer.
From an idiot blogger: get well soon, Tom.
Tom Fetzer, the well-known North Carolina Republican and former mayor of Raleigh, is fighting cancer.
Fetzer, who will turn 56 this month, said Friday that he began feeling sick and run down about six weeks ago. After a CT scan found a mass in his abdomen, he was diagnosed two weeks ago with a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
He recently began chemotherapy treatments at Rex Cancer Center.
“Cancer is a random and unpredictable monster,” he said. “My doctors have given me great confidence I will be able to overcome this. They tell me this form of cancer responds well to chemotherapy.&”
via Former Raleigh mayor Fetzer is fighting cancer – State – NewsObserver.com.
I was speaking the other day to a friend who’s one of the City of Raleigh’s leaders. He was telling me about the book he’d been reading, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. Though there are many insights in Gladwell’s book, my friend was particularly taken with the point Gladwell made that no one does it alone.
“It’s true,” he told me. “The people who think they made it themselves are fooling themselves. Everybody, everybody who’s ever ‘made it’ did so with someone else’s help.”
I completely agreed. All my youthful naivety about how America is supposed to work – how we’re a classless society and ‘all men are created equal’ – has always been sheer fantasy. I look at some of the kids in my side of town, growing up in some of the toughest situations imaginable. The deck is so overwhelmingly stacked against them that it’s a wonder anyone manages to escape the cycle of poverty and violence.
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I was invited to the Saint Monica Teen Center to speak tonight on the topic of blogging to the kids involved with Raleigh’s Digital Connectors. I’d been looking forward to this talk for over a week as I love speaking to kids about technology.
Not having a real outline on what I should discuss, I began by explaining how I got into blogging, what keeps me going, and then took questions about some of the stranger happenings that I’ve experienced because of my blog. After nearly ten years of blogging, I’ve gained quite a few of these “strange experiences” and my biggest problem tonight was deciding which ones I wanted to share!
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Looking over my logfiles tonight, I noticed a host trying to access a file I don’t have, backwpup.php.
46.4.202.87 – – [31/Mar/2011:19:00:03 -0400] “HEAD /wp-content/plugins/backwpup/backwpup.php HTTP/1.1” 403 – “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”
It turns out this is a WordPress plugin that has a bug which lets an attacker traverse the file system. In other words, an attacker could then view any file on the server that’s accessible to the webserver process.
I hadn’t seen it before but it hasn’t been out too long. I don’t use that particular plugin but those who do should be aware.
It looks like all hope is not lost on Google Fiber coming to Raleigh (or Durham, or any of the other dozens of NC cities hoping to get it). Tanner points to this update from the announcement on Google’s blog:
Update 4:15PM: We’ve heard from some communities that they’re disappointed not to have been selected for our initial build. So just to reiterate what I’ve said many times in interviews: we’re so thrilled by the interest we’ve generated—today is the start, not the end the project. And over the coming months, we’ll be talking to other interested cities about the possibility of us bringing ultra high-speed broadband to their communities.
Perhaps there’s hope for high-speed Internet in North Carolina after all?
The meaning of the word “to kick” is ambiguous. Early in its existence it meant “to quit” as in phrases such as “kick the habit,” “kick the bucket.” Yet it is also used to mean “to start something,” as in “kick it.”
Kinda interesting how that happened.
I was sorry to hear that Google passed on North Carolina for its Google Fiber project. Kansas City, Kansas won out.
I hope it had nothing to do with the animosity our state’s current leadership has shown towards high-speed broadband, but you never know.
After a careful review, today we’re very happy to announce that we will build our ultra high-speed network in Kansas City, Kansas. We’ve signed a development agreement with the city, and we’ll be working closely with local organizations, businesses and universities to bring a next-generation web experience to the community.
via Official Google Blog.
Update 9:26 PM: All hope may not be lost for NC after all.
Here’s a nice guide to repairing CFL bulbs yourself!
I don’t know about you, but I’m so used to the paradigm established by old-style incandescent bulbs that when one of my CFL’s “blows out,” it doesn’t even occur to me that I might be able to repair it in the garage. Or at least, it didn’t until I saw this page from Pavel Ruzicka, which does a good job of explaining the general principles of operation of CFL lamps and gives great details about their most common failure modes. Apparently, replacing a single capacitor will often do the trick. [via Hack a Day]
via Make: Online | Circuitry, Anatomy, and Repair Tips for Common CFL Lamps.
