In The Mood

Robert Plant - Principles Of Moments

When this album came out I was still in junior high school and just starting to appreciate Led Zeppelin and Robert Plant. This song always takes me back to that time. The lyrics are simple but even so Plant knows how to craft a song. I love the bridge in this one.

Check out the breakdancers in the video (and Plant dancing with them). That’s pretty much the last thing I would’ve associated with this song.
In The Mood
Robert Plant

I’m in the mood for a melody
I’m in the mood for a melody
I’m in the mood
I’m in the mood for a melody
I’m in the mood for a melody
I’m in the mood
I’m in the mood for a melody
I’m in the mood for a melody
I’m in the mood
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Wasteful packaging

I got a cool LED book light for Christmas. It’s small, lightweight, and very bright: pretty much the way a booklight is supposed to be. The only real problem is the packaging it came in: it’s a huge, empty plastic box.
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Owie

What a way to finish the year. I’m aching today after spending hours working in the attic during the last few days. Now that the Christmas/Halloween decorations are ready to return to storage I thought now is the time to finally double the flooring space in the attic. Its turned out to be more work than I remembered.
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Panoramic photography

I really love hobbies or projects that tie together many of my interests. One project that does this is the field of panoramic photography. It touches on astronomy, photography, mapping, math, orbital mechanics, image manipulation, spycraft, open source, and good old-fashioned duct-tape engineering. Maybe even a bit of fame, too!
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Fun with VMware networking

I’m working from the in-laws’ house today, so I need to access the same networking stuff I do from home. I have Tunnelblick running OpenVPN on my OS X laptop to provide access to my home and office servers from here. All that works fine for my OS X apps but it doesn’t carry over into my VMware Fusion sessions. Those sessions treat themselves as independent devices and therefore don’t route through my VPN.
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Rain

Looks like we got a total of 1.06 of rain yesterday (midnight to midnight). Unlike other rains, I wasn’t able to capture any of it in Lake Turner as I’m in Virginia now.

There is a person in Garner selling 300-gallon plastic tanks, though, and I’m considering picking up another one. Can’t have enough rainwater, y’know.

Highlights of 2007: Turner family reunion

The “next generation” of Turner family reunions took place in Pine Mountain, Georgia in June. This was the first family reunion organized largely by my generation of Turners. We had a great time visiting with all the other Turners, though it ended way too soon they way these things tend to do.

Our kids have it good in that they’ve got so many cousins nearby. Its good to get them acquainted with their larger family, too, so reunions are important. From all accounts, they had a ball playing with all of their extended cousins.

We’ve decided to do these things every two years. They’ll get more valuable as we go, I’m sure.

Highlights of 2007: Blog homeruns

This list naturally draws most of its material from the blog. Thus, it makes sense to recognize the posts and changes that are significant here at MT.Net.

From the propeller-head side, I migrated my blog’s software from its old Drupal beginnings to WordPress. With this change came the addition to the archives of my very first blog posts, originally posted in some of the first primitive blogging software, bplog. I think its fun to read how my blogging has progressed over the years.
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Time for the Highlights of 2007

Its time for me to write my annual recounting of this year’s notable events. Putting this list together this year has amazed me at how many things I have to write about. Just to give you an idea, the AT&T billing nightmare and the bogus car warranty calls that I’ve been incessantly blogging about didn’t even crack the top ten! The Chinese proverb “may you live in interesting times” certainly applied to me this year.

With all that said, let’s get on with the list!

NY Times covers “ghost calls”

On a related note to the hang-up calls I mentioned, Slashdot pointed to a N.Y. Times story on so-called “ghost calls.” The story is a good primer on what web resources exist for tracking these calls. In other words, this story describes the kind of battles I’ve been fighting for the past few months.

The story also provides an interesting tip for defeating the calls that I hadn’t heard of before:

Because the predictive dialers try to identify answering machines by measuring the amount of time that someone or something speaks, one way to defeat them is to give a long greeting, as an answering machine does, rather than a simple hello followed by a pause.

Be sure to check the comments in the Slashdot post, as the geeks (as usual) have excellent information on how these predictive dialers really work.