Five minute Link-a-Licious

Awesome guitar

video

carved crayons

creepy image

wisdom from a young man

Worst picture of me ever

I took this picture, i'm not proud of it, but here it is. I never had a beard before, I don't think I like it. I figured my appearance can't get much worse than it is at this moment, and hey! if anyone wants to know what I look like, 99% of the time its better than this!!

Back story: I had a cold a few weeks ago. I got over it like any other. Except for a little cough. That turned into a slightly annoying cough about a week later. Then turned into a disabling dry hacking, choking fit that left me gasping for air except I could only inhale about as much air that's in a shot glass. This is really fun at 70 MPH driving to work on the freeway. And a cheap way to hallucinate purple, red and white spheres bouncing through the air.

Three doctor visits later, I'm being treated for asthma and pneumonia although I don't have all the symptoms of either. Just that there's not much oxygen exchange going on in the ol' bellows.

I get some new toys to play with for a couple of weeks! A nebulizer that makes a liquid drug into a fog that I breathe. This tastes bad, like sucking on an aspirin. There is also a small appliance the size of a mini-fridge that takes oxygen out of the air and squirts it through a long hose into my nose. It humms and rattles - kind of like my lungs do after I take a flight of stairs!

I also get this nifty and stylish nylon bag to accessorize with. It holds a small oxygen tank in case I want to go water skiing, parasailing, or anything else that requires more effort than sitting on my ass blogging!

Seriously, I feel pretty good. As long as I stay still of course. Also on a silver lining, I was able to escape the pleasures of nicotine withdrawal while I was zomibified on codeine and cough syrup for a week. I plan to take advantage of that and finally quit. This will make a few people happy and give me a couple extra bucks a week to blow on something equally useless!

Getting tired of this.....

I get alot of connection issues with Google, Blogger and Gmail. The page tries to load forever and then IE7 just gives up.

Is it me?
Is it WinXP?
Is it IE7?
Is it the Google behemoth cracking under its own weight?

Please, MacHeads, don't blanket blame Microshaft. I've said it before, I'll said one more time. I will never buy a clone again.

Yer killin' me Smalls, Bath Time!

Snagged from Automatic Daddy who got it from Norman Roberts

C'Mon guys, that's why its so expensive!

Here's a followup to a comment made by EG on a previous post Got a permit for that?

She mentioned something about smart criminals getting snitched out by the their footprints in the snow, and what do you know, the very next day.....

Local news item

Man, I'm itchy

My first foray into blogging occured elsewhere. I just noticed it still exists because someone clicked over to here from there and I stopped to read what I had written about a year ago.

I AM SO FREAKING PISSED THAT THERE IS SNOW ON THE GROUND

There are few things that elevate me into that trancendental state of......I can't even type everything I'm thinking its a tornado in here.

Deep breath.

I like to ride motorcycles. Maybe you knew that, maybe you didn't. It's difficult to describe the benefit I get from it, but here are some feelings:

solitude
meditation
therapy
synergy, man and machine
total concentration
doing something you're good at and doing it well
danger/adrenaline
edge of the envelope
silly, stupid grin
great acoustics in the helmet for us self-singers
wearing leather for a reason
the "chick factor" (not that I cash in on it, but its nice to notice ;P )
I suppose I could include the "from stop to warp drive in the time it takes to say Ho-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-leeeeeey Shiii-iiiiii-iiiii-t !!!!!!!" but its prolly included in more than one of the above.

Here are a couple of the posts I made once upon a time:

March 19, 2006

still too cold

Got in about a 45 minute ride but froze my tookus. It was 50 degrees when I left and 45 degrees with I got back to hot chocolate and vanilla rum. Still working out the winter cobwebs but confidence level is rising and did some hard riding. Hangman Valley Road is a great short trip-nice and curvy. That one decreasing radius turn still freaks me out but it feels great to hit the gas coming out of it and into the S-curves.

April 03, 2006

Idaho State Patrol

Put on about 100 miles today, went south of Couer d'Alene, ID on HWY 95 towards Worley. My radar detector paid for itself yet again. An ISP with a single KA band at about a half mile coming the other way. I'm not sure how fast I was going but I was in top gear which I only use when I'm dedicated to over 100 mph. Downshift, hit the brakes, the back end went a little squirrelly but I made it down to less than 60 pretty quick. I waved and he waved back. Sucker.

Lots of other bikes out today. What's the difference between a Harley and a Hoover? The position of the dirtbag! (courtesy of my harley bud)

May 32, 2006

I've been riding as much as possible, even to work and back in the rain. After it cost $50 to fill up my truck I decided a little moisture wouldn't keep me off two wheels.

Best ride so far: Friends were going to S. Dakota for a couple of weeks via Canada so I rode with them north thru Idaho to the border. Beautiful day, beautiful ride. They strictly adhere to the speed limit so for me it was a mellow, kicked back cruise. We took some of the smaller highways through Idaho and saw some tiny little towns I'd only barely heard of. Did pass thru Bonner's Ferry and Sandpoint which are a little "Californified" for me. When we reached the U.S./Canada border, we paused, wished each other safe trips and parted ways. With a devilish grin I stomped on the gasand headed south. Spent most of the next hour or so in the tripledigit MPH carving corners and dancing on my toes. Did have a bit of a scare once: I was hurriedly passing a group of cars because another group of cars were approaching in the other lane. I hastily dipped around them (105-115 mph I think?) but as the oncoming traffic went by, my radar detector exploded with a K-band alarm! My heart sank as I waved to the rear view mirror and flashed my brake lights. Yes, I did slow down, even pulled into a driveway a mile or two down but he (or she) never turned around. Guess I got a free pass on that one. A fellow biker perhaps? One can only speculate, either way I felt lucky. I kept the speed down to less than double the speed limit the rest of the way home.

Best ride coming up: Going back to Cali! Mid-August will see me spending a weekend in Manzanita, OR (on the coast) then south via hwy 1/101 into N. Cal where I plan to cut over on hwy 299 (great twisties!) which is south of the Redwood Nat'l Forest to hwy 395. I've heard 395 is a great road and I look forward to the mountains and scenery of the Sierra Nevadas. From there I'll head down to L.A. and San Diego. What I'm not really looking for, and hope I dont' see much of, is the scorching heat of the desert in August. I'm hoping the higher elevations of the mountains will provide some relief from that.

Back to 2007.
If you want to read about that trip to San Diego and see some cool pictures here are the links:

Oregon Coast/No Cal
Northern California
Yosemite
Leucadia
This post was removed
Heading home
Still heading home
Almost home
Oregon-last day

DING-DONG! I'm old

About 15 minutes into it I really had to laugh at myself.

I found myself singing along to the vignettes from a Time-Life infomercial selling "Classic Soft Rock" from the '70s. To my vague horror and amusement, I knew the words to every song they played yet I was barely out of diapers when these were on the radio!

I really had to restrain myself from ordering their set (20 bonus hits! plus an exclusive CD of 1977's top Soft Rock Hits! Not sold in stores!)

It was the testimonials (from satisfied customers) that snapped me out of it. They were all ageless boomers that had obviously "experimented" with the wacky tabacky back in the day.

I figure I'm about 20 years their junior so I'll let them revel in the big hair and synthesizers of that directionless time in rock history.


Dreams
Now here you go again
You say you want your freedom
Well who am I to keep you down
Its only right that you should
Play the way you feel it
But listen carefully to the sound
Of your loneliness
Like a heartbeat.. drives you mad
In the stillness of remembering what you had

Thunder only happens when its raining

Track list

My Favorite moment of Winter

I took these the other day. It got warmer and it dumped a few more inches but most of it is still on the ground. Gotta use the 4 wheel drive to get out of the driveway and around the block to the main streets.

This is as close as Maggie gets to the snow. She's no dummy!

Got a permit for that?

I renewed my Concealed Carry Permit today.

I still marvel at the fact that for $1 per month and about 15 minutes of my time, I can carry a loaded, concealed handgun just about anywhere I please.

If most people, or just more people, carried (or might be carrying) a defensive weapon and thugs and criminals knew it - would crimes against persons decrease? Would that thought cross a miscreant's mind "hey, there's been a local increase in legal possession and concealment of firearms, maybe I shouldn't mug that guy" or are they just not that logical and prone to forethought? Do they even read the paper?

Learn the safe use and care of a defensive weapon, license it and carry it legally.

What's your magic number?

I came across another blog about the number 27. These folks see the number 27 all over the place and I think they claim it may be a sign of divine intelligence (or the key to the Matrix?). It got me to thinking. Uh-oh you say....

For me, the number 3 and the number 48 have always been special. 48 because I noticed it pop up for me in funny places: I was born on April 8, my high school football jersey was 48 (running back), my randomly chosen radio call sign as a Juvie Hall staff was 48, and a few others. I don't pay much mind to it, just chalk it up as coincidence.

On the other hand, the number 3 carries much more significance for me. I won't detail every sense that makes it peculiar but it carries a solid, stable punch - much more so than, say 4 or 2. 7 comes close.

So where does 27 fit in? I think it is related to my 3. To wit: 27 is the product of 3 and 9; 9 being to product of 3s and 27 is also 3 cubed - or 3 to the power of 3. Adding the digits in 27, 2 plus 7 equal 9, again to product of 3 three times. 27 is 3 less than 30, a product of 3 times our base 10 numbering system. 27 is 63 less than 90 (again our base 10 three times and 3 times again) and 63 happens to be 3 times 21. 21 can be boiled down similarly (2 plus 1 is 3, 21 is 3 times 7 - another mystical number).

And on and on ad nauseum, ad infinitum, ad trinitum.

What's your magic number?

*.TXT

Anything ~~~ 1 from {infinity}

Everything ~~~ {infinity} = 1

Who are you talking to?

I was little under the weather over this last holiday weekend and spent most of it resting and feeling generally crummy. In the meantime, I picked up the laptop (gotta love WiFi) and spent some hours whittling away at the vast no-man's land of the Web. Not to be totally unproductive, I was also updating the virus definitions, getting the latest patches for Windows, running utilities to clean up old files and more or less organizing and optimizing my setup. There are dozens of enigmatic little files constantly running in the background, some of them apparently work very hard at something. I found a cool site called File.Net that gives the "face behind the mask" to all those little processes and how to tell if they are actually legitimate or useful. For example I found a few that were diligently slaving away for applications that I don't even use anymore - in the trash they went.

The bad guys who inflict viruses, trojans, spyware and other malicious programs onto the rest of us have a trick - they give their poisonous progeny the same name as a legitimate file and put it in a similar looking location - for example

"c:\windows\system32\crsrss.exe" or "c:\windows\system\csrss.exe" instead of "c:\windows\system32\csrss.exe".

While it reclines comfortably, hidden in plain sight, the infection spreads and eats up precious resources like CPU time and bandwidth, sometimes cannibalizing other files. This was my first personal lesson in the fallibility of Anti Virus protection.

Of course Windows XP won't plainly tell me in a simple way where a program that is currently running and in use came from and who started it, but I found an application that would tell me. Task Manager is a nifty little thing that looks a lot like Windows' Task Manager (the old cntrl/alt/del) except that it actually gives you information that you can use!! It even has a shortcut when you right click on something - BOOM!! Instant Google search.

And File.Net was usually right near the top of the results where I needed it.

Even armed with that information I barely chipped away at the iceberg underneath. Not to mix my metaphors, but I couldn't see the forest through the trees. I was keeping an eye on the chatter between my computer and the rest of the semi-anonymous world as I scoured Dell, Symantec, and Microsoft for some sense and reason. Ya right, who'd think the biggies on the scene would be the least helpful? The frenetic babbling machines seemed to have a lot to say to each other, ignoring me and keeping me out of the conversation. Through the morass of remote and local addresses, process names, TCP, UDP, ICMP protocols, netbios, ports (open, closed or stealthed), known hazards and potential vulnerabilities, IPs and subnet masks, inbound, outbound, localhost, firewall rules (and the occasional online backgammon game), I began to notice patterns.

Some talkers were more active than others-no problem, gag it with a firewall rule. After some trial and error (a few actually did need to communicate for me) and some more investigation it began to make sense. It felt like staring at one of those posters that don't look like a picture of anything until you stand back to look at it cross-eyed and out of focus.

That's when a three dimensional image of a whale jumping over a boat materializes.

I found some great help in the form of free and trial software such as WinXP running services, CCleaner, Spyware-Net, RegistryFix, Error Killer, PC Pitstop, Uniblue and dozens of other sites that each added their piece to the puzzle. Microsoft actually did make a contribution to me with utilities that I would recommend like Port Reporter, Baseline Security Analyzer, Tweak UI and Bootvis. By far the most easy-to-use, informative and repeatedly clicked tool was called ShieldsUP! - written and narrated by an old-timer in the code biz that had some illuminating history to share. He also shared his experiences of Microsoft's lax approach to internet security and "designed" flaws. Put it this way - if freshly shipped Windows XP operating systems were like new cars rolling off the transport truck at the auto dealership, each one would have the keys in it with the engine running.

It was those vulnerabilities and "look the other way security" that allowed my expensive hi-tech gadgetry to fall victim to a very subtle and potentially horrible sickness. In the end, it was something very simple and plain as day that led me to a solution - just like your house keys are always in the last place you look. I was combing through system files, web forums and alphanumeric gobbledygook when I opened a familiar folder: Network Connections. You see, I use my laptop with a wireless internet connection - I'm on the couch, in bed, at the table, etc. The only cord I use occasionally plugs into the power outlet. Yet right there in the Network Connections folder next to the usual trio of the 1394 Net Adapter, 10/100 Integrated Controller and the Intel PRO/Wireless Network Connection was something I had never seen before. A "Local Area Connection" (hardwired, tethering, land-line type connection) on "Linux IGD" (an operating system I have never used before). Even stranger still, it was chugging away at a decent pace sending something, I don't know what, but alot of it off into the Never Never Net Land of the WWW. A quick Google took me here and I learned that this is not a new problem for MS WinXP users.

So I squished it like a big juicy bug.

I have yet to see whether it caused permanent damage (besides my fried eyeballs) and its also possible that whatever spawned it is still fertile and reproductive. What I do know, besides some fresh techno-jumbo, is that where previously there had been unlocked doors, open windows and unsecured vaults within my trusty laptop, I still have my same old mutt for a guard dog - but he has a few new tricks.