After responding to a few ads on Craigslist and receiving no response I’ve hit upon the fundamental problem with free ad services: the seller has no “skin in the game.” Since the seller’s cost to post is free, he or she has nothing at stake and therefore doesn’t feel as compelled to respond to queries as he or she might when using paid ad services.
Maybe the problem is that email is too easy to ignore. Perhaps if Craigslist offered a better way of contacting sellers this could be alleviated.
Ibiblio’s Paul Jones, Keeper of the Rubber Chicken, posted to a story of a guy who built a robot to cruise around the office for him while he worked from home.
Continue reading
I thought today’s date looked familiar. Today’s the anniversary of the morning after Hurricane Fran came ashore. For some like me, the night it came ashore and the following day blended together, as I didn’t get much sleep after a tree came to rest 3 feet away from my once-sleeping head.
(I blather about this every year, don’t I? A sign of geezerhood?)
There’s a weak storm churning off of Wilmington now which hopefully will bring rain to the parched state. Let’s hope it stays weak, but brings the rain.
It’s day four for millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, reported missing when he failed to return from a routine flight. His friend Sir Richard Branson calls Fossett “a tough old boot,” and its true Fossett has possibly more experience at cheating death than anybody. Still, with the search stretching on this long I’m starting to doubt that Fossett is alive.
If he is gone, the world will have lost a great aviator.
[Update]: Its actually day, four, not two. Even worse for Fossett, unfortunately.
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?
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.
Continue reading
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.
Scott is now officially a hero, having volunteered to ride in this weekend’s MS 150, raising money for multiple sclerosis research for the National MS Society.
Why not kick in a few bucks to Scott’s campaign and become a hero yourself?
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.
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.
