All posts by cs

branded

My address is ruined. AOL has blacklisted it. My email address is parked in many co-worker address books and some of those poor goobers got hit with the notorious SoBig.F. The worm spoofed my good name and the rest is spam junkmail virus history. What’s funny: My “disposable” (yahoo) email address, the one that I give out to strangers figuring that it was sure to wind up on many nasty bulk mail lists… is unscathed!

capitalizing on the sadness

CNN has been airing the darkmoments rehash. Also, watched the documentary on PBS with the step by step collapse of the twin towers. I remember the media replays in the days and months following merely showed billowing smoke and perhaps a brief frame or two of one of the airplanes at or just before impact. Too intense. Finally, Time/Newsweek put the fireball on the cover (and were chastised for it). Two years later they are considerably less restrained about what they serve up. They show the entire sequence shebang including the play by play collapse. Luckily, Media shows restraint in not showing the rain of suicides that fell to earth from the shattered top level floors and fire inferno, but I predict that by next anniversary they won’t be holding back.

superstitious

Fuzzy Dice, Dingo Balls swinging from the rearview mirror — my FO brings SpoongeBob SquarePants with him. SpoongeBob enjoys the ride height and view from a window ledge mounted ashtray. In the shuffle of airplane swaps yesterday, SpoongeBob stayed behind in his perch. He is on an adventure…

more than you want to know

The car wreck was 3 years ago. Her life ended. Maybe she explains woe to all of her customers. It was the long tissue hair dam destined for my neck that this hair stylist somehow misdirected for it whipped across my open mouth like gag. She giggled at this and I eased her embarrassment by saying ‘ okay I can take the hint — you do the talking then 🙂 ‘ This she did — by proceeding to explain the somehow of that impaired nerve damaged arm, the botched remedial repairs the side effects that ravaged her body, the intolerance to cold weather, the laryngitis caused by medical procedure, the permanent vocal cord damage and lung damage by that medication, the pains killers, the… As a captive audience, I’m taking this all in with eyes studying a framed family portrait on the booth counter top. The picture transformation from her former life was startling. The woman cutting my hair was withered. Frail. A shattered wracked tormented shell of her former self. The framed picture included young children. I wondered if they had been in the car. I didn’t want to go there. In my younger years I would have tuned this downer right out. But, with maturity, comes a discovered sense that life is precious and fragile. Drive safely.

Queen_E

Elizabeth, on DVD, is worthwhile viewing. What you might call a historical novel, it was good drama. Interesting perspectives on English monarchy and church vs. state, early feminism, power and conspiracy, political agenda vs. conscience and moral belief. (some brutality but less blood and gore then say, Braveheart) You can’t look away without loosing your place.

moblogging

def. — mobile blog —
Happened to be researching camera phones and learned truth. The pictures portrayed in the sales pitch, which seem to appear instantly on the phone at the other end, — don’t. They must first travel to a picture-mail server where they are stored. (It would have been really cool to be talking to someone and send a picture while doing so just as the ad leads us to believe.) As an alternative, the caller can send them via email. In any case the recipient ends up doing a download to his computer or enabled phone. And, BTW, these phones are not interoperable.e.g., a Sprint phone can’t send / receive snapshot images from an AT&T customer’s phone. So, most people will end up sending these photos via the email procedure. Following the picturephoning trace it dawned on me that I could create a similar application that would retrieve images AND text and post them automatically to the web. You are reading my first moblog post. Previously, I had to go to find a browser and enter my spiel from a web page form. Now I can submit web log data from ANY email enabled device whether it be Outlook Express, HotMail, a PDA, or even pager or phone.Un-wired. Pretty kewl, eh?

The old way: Lemme tell ya the hoops to jump through to get a photograph on the web (until now). Take the shot. Wait until you get home. Connect your digital camera to your pc with USB cable and upload. Using FTP client software upload the image file to your server. Add html to your web page to display the picture and upload that. Not digital? Take film to photoservice for developing. Retrieve prints. Scan prints. etc., etc…

And how it works: I wrote CF code that checks an email address on the email server and greps any msgs found therein for posting. I include a password in my email header so that other unintended msg errata doesn’t make it to the web. When a genuine moblog is found, its content (title, body, date) is parsed and inserted in the database. When you access this web page the post dynamically renders. An email attachment file is handled the same way. If my camera phone includes an image file, the application will save it to a folder on the strombotne.com server. Easy as pie! Moblogging is the way to go.

Go dogs Go

Local park curator and greenway keeper, ‘Boathouse’ Bill made sure we had the event on our calendar and Dawg loves the Frisbee Toss Competition so… out of retirement — an encore performance! Even though we are strictly amateurs Dawg is the crowd pleaser. I suppose it’s the sight of 100 lbs. o’fur accelerating and then launching with air under all four, whilst focusing on plucking the saucer mid flight. The ringers in the crowd are low built hyper quick Australian cattle dogs. Very efficient. They hustle without distraction. Even still our boy scored points agin’em. Fetch it dawg!

early run

Dawg and I set out an hour before sunrise. The sky had already begun to lighten but under the canopy of trees it is relative darkness. In fact it helps not to focus down directly at the trail but eyes straight ahead. The iris can draw in more light this way and you “see” things peripherally. Well, basic trail definition anyway. One must be mindful for ruts, semi-submerged tree roots, the chance hazard like deadwood or very rare but possible copperhead basking in the residual warmth of the path : – o Other pitfalls: Spider ticks like to spin a strand or two of web across the path so as to snag a free ride from the first host (victim) of the morning to come along. You get this trip wire across the face or torso. Flailing about with your arms/hands to rid the sticky stuff from your hair is futile. Joys of trailblazing. Geez, I’m kind of wondering now why I didn’t just wait for the sun.

too close for comfort

For the house next door, summer went out with a (very big) bang. An electrical storm struck yesterday afternoon and a lightning bolt blew a hole the size of cannon ball shot. Being a short distance away we can tell you that the retort from the strike was deafening and the flash the color of sun with reddish peripheral tinge. I can only imagine that the structure must have rattled too. The occupants were unharmed but in the excitement of the moment the fire department got called. Aside from the gaping dark hole left in the wall, there was a small problem in that the charging FD brigade, traipsing upstairs in their black fire fighting boots, tracked a little wet mud. The carpet was installed new 2 weeks ago…

3 out of 5

In the spirit of open mindedness, I watched C H I C A G O on the dvd player. Catherine Zeta-Jones sure is easy on the eyes. Rene Zellweger is a very versatile actress. While otherwise disliking actor Richard Gere as just another Hollywood pretty boy from the same ‘can’t act – no brains’ mold as Tom Selleck, Mel Gibson, I thought that he gave a fine performance. I especially liked him in the marionettes and ventriloquist dummy act scene as well as the lawyer courtroom drama musical adaptation. Sex sells. Seemingly every scene features Vegas chorus girl style skimpy costume line dancing or trapeze swinging. There’s always a rump or thigh displayed at any given moment. To be fair, the other critics in my audience did not see it in that way. They looked beyond this to see fantastic dance choreography and artistry. Something for everybody.