Zydecopious

The family and I went to see Zydecopious play at Seaboard Music Friday evening. My parents and brother’s family joined us and a bunch of our neighbors for the free show at Seaboard Station next to Peace China. Hallie and her cousin Hadley got the dancing started and by the time the show wrapped up there were dozens of couples dancing to the zydeco music.

The kids had been looking forward to this show for a week because we’ve been talking it up. Travis has played his zydeco CDs non-stop for the whole week. We knew they would love it but I have to say I didn’t realize just how much they’d love it. I’ve never seen happier faces on Hallie or Travis then I did Friday night. Both got time on stage playing the rubboard and tambourine and both clearly relished being onstage.

Now we’ll have to see when we can see them play again. It was a fantastic way to spend a Friday!

Returning from another break

MT.Net was down for the last couple of days due to more strangeness seen on the server. I took it down and rebuilt everything.

Should you experience any quirkiness here (outside of the stuff I post already, ha ha), let me know!

Hasta la vista

Yesterday evening I noticed our leafy backyard looked noticeably less leafy. It seems our neighbors behind us decided to clear-cut their backyard, removing the lovely natural screen we enjoyed that made our backyard so cozy. It’s their right, of course, as most of the trees between us belong to them, but we sure miss ’em. And just last weekend we were proudly showing off our leafy backyard to my parents.

We’ve got a 20-foot buffer between our back fence and our property line, which we may now fortify with some good screening shrubbery or trees.

Update 17 June 2009: It turns out their cutting was far more modest. There’s still a good number of trees back there, so that’s good.

Did Air France 447’s tail separate from the plane?

The L.A. Times reports that the recovered tail of Air France Flight 447 indicates the plane broke up in midflight, eerily similar to the 2001 crash of an American Airlines Airbus leaving New York. In the earlier accident American Airlines Flight 587, an Airbus 300, had taken off into turbulence from a preceding 747 and the pilots apparently overcompensated with the rudder, causing the entire tail section to break off from the plane.

I’ve been thinking for a while now that these two crashes seem to be related. We’ll see for sure if/when the rest of the plane is found.

How to rewrite a hacked URL?

Hey Lazyweb,

When my WordPress site got compromised, The Google began indexing links that have a “?y%” in the middle of the URLs:

http://www.markturner.net/2007/04/page/4/?y%/you-are-what-you-grow/

This turns the second half of the URL into a query string, which complicates fixing it a bit. I’ve tried a few RewriteCond rules but haven’t figured out this voodoo well enough yet:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} y\%/(.*) [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) $1 [R=302,L]

Anyone have any pointers on how to turn the above URL into this?

http://www.markturner.net/2007/04/page/4/you-are-what-you-grow/

P.S. WordPress 2.8 is now out. Time to upgrade!

Relax (Take It Easy)

Relax (Take It Easy) (YouTube)
Mika

Took a right to the end of the line
Where no one ever goes.
Ended up on a broken train with nobody I know.
But the pain and the longings the same.
Where they’re dying
Now I’m lost and I’m screaming for help.

Relax, take it easy
For there is nothing that we can do.
Relax, take it easy
Blame it on me or blame it on you.
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Jack Daniels

It turns out the man who was killed by the Amtrak train in West Raleigh the other day was Jack Daniels, longtime owner of Jack Daniels grocery at the corner of Jones Franklin Road and Athens Drive.

I’d never gone in to Jack Daniels but my friends all said it was a very friendly place. Seeing the shop make me smile as I drove by it a few weeks ago. The store was in great shape and seemed to be supporting the neighborhood. It certainly was a fixture.

My condolences to the Daniels family.

The life of a startup

Driving by the hole that is John Kane’s North Hills project, I was reminded again of the building that used to be there at 4200 Six Forks Road, where I once worked for HAHT Software 13 years ago.

One day at HAHT the weather was just too nice to be spending the day indoors. Some conspiring took place among the HAHTsters – whispering in the halls, that sort of thing – and before you knew it, the entire company was filing out to their cars. We assembled again at Capital Bouelvard’s Adventure Landing, where we proceeded to race each other on go-carts for the rest of the afternoon. Man, that was a fun place to work.

I’ve got video of that event somewhere. I’ll post it once I get it digitized.

Mary Easley and N.C. State

I tell you, I should’ve gone into academia. Where else can you be asked to resign, then take a six month paid vacation on a salary well into six figures? Yes, life is good inside the ivory towers. Well, execpt for the students who are being milked for a hefty tuition raise this year.

Then there’s the case of N.C. State Chancellor James Oblinger, who resigned today as emails surfaced contradicting his earlier statements of non-involvement in the hiring of Mary Easley. Oblinger was either lying or he admitted that as chancellor of one of the nation’s leading technical universities he didn’t know how to search his own emails. I’m not sure which is worse.
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