Phil online

I’ve been “reading” (books-on-tape from simplyaudiobooks.com) the trilogy of books titled “His Dark Materials”: Golden Compass / Subtle Knife / Amber Spyglass. My son read the first one year or two ago, but didn’t get into it much. He’s not much for fantasy, and this book is a bit mystical. But it relies on science and theories of the multiverse as its basis. There’s lots of “unknown” things in it, but that’s ok with me.

But the interesting part is that the books’ climax in a war on religion. (more…)

Last year I travelled to India for two weeks on a business trip. We barely made our connection onto India Air in Europe. Our luggage was not so lucky.

We waited for our bags to arrive on the carousel. They never came. Someone announced something in Hindi or Tamil, and the throng of waiting travellers mobbed the toll booth cum information desk. Apparently we all had to fill out forms describing our lost bags. I was in the middle of the crowd, but I was out of my element. Eventually I was one of the last people to see the clerk.

His English was weak, but he pointed at various forms, asked for ID, verified my address and so on. And then he disappeared — with my passport. (more…)

Pete Miser is a hip hop (”rap”) artist from New York (via Portland, OR) whom I’ve never heard of before. Probably you’ve never heard of him either. But his style is very clean and polished, and his music is so full of life and character that it sounds effortless in spite of its complexity. (more…)

I have had DirecTV service for about 9 years, Tivo for 6 years and Vonage for 2. I love them all dearly, but they don’t all work well together.

Well, DirecTV doesn’t like Vonage. It won’t complete its calls to the mother ship. Apparently this isn’t required for long-term service, though, as I haven’t completed a call in years, to my knowledge.

Tivo’s modem works just fine on Vonage. I really need Tivo to make its daily call, so I’m glad I don’t have any hoop-jumping to worry with there.
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We’ve moved. We had the house at 1463 Janice Court spruced up and prepped for sale. I really enjoyed the house and the neighborhood, but it’s time to move on. Now, though, with the house all cleaned up, a new roof, new carpet, new gutters, fresh paint… it looks so adorable! It’s even nicer than when we lived in it.

I made a flyer highlighting the nearby nature trail. If you’re in the area, stop by to visit it even if you don’t need a house. It’s a nice trail. It was built by a neighbor for his wife who died recently (I think) of cancer. It’s truly a labor of love, and it shows.

The Nature Trail flyer

Maybe I should put a geocache there.

A while back I wrote here about trackback spam. Today I upgraded to WordPress 1.5, and in the process I reset a lot of my plugins and hacks. I brought the trackback and comment spam blockers forward with me, and I’m happy to report they still work. (yay!)

I still get several dozen trackback spams a week, and it’s a pain to go moderate them. But 1.5 makes it a tad easier. And anyway, at least they’re not making it into my blog.

Comment spam blocker: wp-hashcash
Trackback spam blocker: trackback-moderation
Pingback spam blocker: pingback-moderation

A friend of a friend also bought a house in pre-foreclosure. She got a great deal. But it came with an antique piano, badly out of tune, which she didn’t want. She offered it for sale. I offered to come see it, but it would have to wait until I bought my new house (in four months).

To make a long story short: she gave us the piano for free after weeks of trying to donate it to a charity who gave up trying to move it.

It will take some bucks to get it tuned and repaired a bit. But it’s a free piano and it looks great in my new living room.

I managed to squelch all the comment spam on my blogs, so now I’m being pummeled by trackback spam. I installed the trackback moderator plugin, though, and that should kill it for now. I’ll test it by trackbacking against Godvertising.com now…

I was reading this book about optimizing Google’s Adsense (What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense!). In it, Joel Comm describes how he went from $900/month in Adsense revenue to $15,000+/month! Oh, man! It was too juicy to pass up! One of the many things he talks about is integrating your ads into your site. You’ll have to read the book for all the details, but this plug-in should help.

So, I knew I wanted to put Adsense ad blocks in the middle of WordPress posts. I knew I could do it with some simple hacks to WP, but I thought it should be a plugin. It turned out to be remarkably easy to do, and (more…)

Here’s the next feature I need to add: Voice control. You say “Surf the web” and the computer brings up internet explorer. Way cool!

In particular, this app will voice-automate FrodoPlayer and iGuidance (navigation system). That’s what I need. I hope there’s not too much road noise in the car to be useable.

Someone’s developing a tool that tracks location and speed on the GPS constantly. It generates track files that you can later use to generate maps from www.gpsvisualizer.com.

Looks like I might need ComFoolery to make it work in tandem with the nav software. Maybe I can get the Nav software to always save a track instead…?