Saint Patrick’s Day Pictures

Julien sent me a couple pictures from Saint Patrick’s Day, so I tossed them up in the photo gallery if anyone is really bored.


About to drink the foulest drink ever made.


This guy looks a lot like the guy that thrashed me at golf recently – gee, I look pretty serious too


“There is no such thing as fun for the whole family.” Bahahaha! Caught groping Julien, augh!


I might actually look better in Anne’s jacket than Anne does πŸ™‚ (maybe)

Update

I just realized that Jessica is a thief. 1st picture I have a necklace and a hat. 2nd picture Jessica has the necklace. 3rd picture Jessica has the necklace *and* hat. WTF?? I bet if you searched her house, maybe you would find every pair of sunglasses that I ever “lost” in my life.

And Google Said, Let There Be Shawn.

This was taken from the Book of Google (chapter 1, verse 1-5)…

In the beginning Google created the web.

Now the web was formless and empty. Spam was on the surface of the results, and the spirit of Google was hovering over the face of the index.

And Google said, “Let there be Shawn”. And there was Shawn.

Google saw Shawn, and saw that Shawn was good. Google divided Shawn from the spam.

And Google called Shawn awesome, and the spam he called lame.

You know the rest… πŸ™‚ Anyway, it looks like my blog is no longer banned in Google’s index (believe it or not, I actually have some useful posts/information once in awhile). I can only assume that Matt Cutts may have had something to do with it since he read (and commented) on this post last week (since it’s been banned for 15+ months and I’ve tried 3 or 4 re-inclusion requests without any success).

This is what my traffic (just from Google) looks like this month:

Shania Twain Helps Drunk Driver Drive

This is just weird… and even weirder that he got off because of it.

One of the most notorious drunk drivers in the Ottawa area has been found not criminally responsible on his latest impaired driving charges because of a mental disorder that makes him believe female celebrities are controlling his actions.

Matt Brownlee was arrested last October after police spotted a pickup truck speeding along a busy street in downtown Ottawa.

Matt Brownlee believed singer Shania Twain was helping him drive. (AP file photo)
The 33-year-old man told psychiatrists that he knew the legal repercussions of his actions, but believed singer Shania Twain was helping him drive.

Brownlee pleaded not guilty to four charges, including impaired operation of a motor vehicle and driving while disqualified.

On Monday, the judge drew on several psychiatric assessments in ruling that Brownlee was not criminally responsible for his actions because he suffers from delusions that celebrities such as Twain are communicating with him telepathically.

Ten years ago, Brownlee was given a seven-year prison sentence and barred from driving for the rest of his life after he killed an Ottawa woman, Linda Lebreton-Holmes, and her 12-year-old son while driving with a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit.

Earlier in March, a psychiatrist told the court that Brownlee suffers from psychosis and mood disorders resulting from a brain injury caused by the 1996 car crash.

Brownlee has been undergoing a series of assessments at the Brockville Psychiatric Hospital since last fall.

Another assessment of how much risk he poses to the community could see Brownlee being detained in hospital, released under supervision in the community, or given an absolute discharge.

Man Cuts Off Own Penis To Throw At Cops

I don’t really have anything that I can say that would make this any more (or less depending on who you are) funny… But DAMN it’s funny. πŸ™‚

Fik, 33, cut off his own penis during a Northwest Side rampage Wednesday morning. When confronted by police, Fik hurled several knives and his severed organ at the officers, police said. Officers stunned him with a Taser and took him into custody.

//www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-ouch17.html

How To C-Walk

I don’t even know what in the hell a “C-Walk” is, but it’s pretty funny. πŸ™‚

First you must begin with a signature stance, something that says,”Watch Out FOOL!

After that, take a quick little breather. But keep looking cool.

You should have the proper state of mind, such as pretending you have ants in your pants.

During your c-walk, take the time to check out the ladies if you’re impressing them at all.

//www.garageworksltd.com/HowToCwalk.htm

Hat Of Poop

If you ever wanted to wear poop on your head, but didn’t care for the smell, now you can!

The Japanese aren’t shy about bodily secretions and have a sense of humor about them unparalleled. And with their ability to make anything cute and cuddly, they have made even poo an irresistible fashion trend. This joke poo hat has the unmistakable color and shape of dung. With a black elastic strap to keep it firmly on your head, this plush poop is 5.5″ wide at the base and 4″ high. A fun party item or just wear it to make everyone around you think you’ve gone crazy. A hilarious item that is made in Japan… where else?

//www.jlist.com/PRODUCT/MAR028/TEXT/WACKY/TREN/

The guy wearing the hat looks “so” happy about it. hah

6 1/2 Pounds Of Food

Julien called me this afternoon…

Hey, let’s go to Big Bertha’s and see if we can do their “Big Ass Burger Challenge“.

So me, Anne and Julien tried it (we failed). In reality it’s 6 1/2 pounds of food… 1 lbs of beef, 1/2 pound for the rest of the burger (bun, lettuce, tomato, etc.), 2 lbs of beer, but the kicker is there is no way it was 1 lbs of fries… it was 3 lbs of fries.

Oh well… I finished the burger, beer and 1/3 of the fries… but it was too many fries for me (plus I wasn’t all that hungry to start with).

Installing APC On BSD Variants

Alternative PHP Cache is a PHP caching mechanism (like Turck mmCache, eAccelerator, etc.) that is being developed directly by PHP developers. In fact, PHP 6.0 is going to include APC Cache in it’s core framework, so it’s certainly something PHP developers/admins should start looking at.

Anyway, if you install APC Cache and Apache fails to start afterwards, check your Apache error log to see if you get something like this:

[Thu Mar 23 15:18:28 2006] [apc-error] apc_shm_create: shmget(0, 67108864,914) failed: Invalid argument. It is possible that the chosen SHM segment size is higher than the operation system allows. Linux has usually a default limit of 32MB per segment.
PHP Warning: Unknown(): Unable to load dynamic library './/usr/local/lib/php/apc.so' - (null) in Unknown on line 0

Most BSD variants (including Mac OS X Server in my case) don’t allow much shared memory to be allocated by default. Lucky, it’s an easy fix…

My OS had a default allowance of 4MB max for shared memory. You can alter that by adding this to your /etc/sysctl.conf file (or creating it if it doesn’t exist):

My new /etc/sysctl.conf file…

kern.sysv.shmmax=134217728
kern.sysv.shmmin=1
kern.sysv.shmmni=32
kern.sysv.shmseg=8
kern.sysv.shmall=32768

shmall should be shmmax/4096

So the above config will let you use up to 128MB for shared memory.

You can’t dynamically set the shared memory kernel variables with the sysctl command because once it’s set, it can’t be altered. Because of that, you must reboot your server after you edit the sysctl.conf file…

Update

I just realized that *only* editing sysctl.conf works on Mac OS X. For Mac OS X Server, you need to comment out the kern.sysv.shm* lines in /etc/rc (in Mac OS X Server those commands are called before sysctl.conf is read for some reason).

Drew Brees Gone

San Diego lost their starting quarterback this off-season to free agency (he went to the New Orleans Saints).

He hurt his throwing arm at the end of last season, and his ability to play at all this season was in question a little bit. I just hope Philip Rivers doesn’t turn out to be another Ryan Leaf. πŸ™‚

Final Design Review

I haven’t seen the “official” review response, but I think it went well today. Pretty much the HOA just wants a fence moved (maybe some other minor things), but all the “big” stuff I was worried about seemed to be fine.

So for the most part that means the house is pretty much good to go as far as the home owners association goes (this was the last of 3 necessary design reviews).

The members approved a retaining wall over 6 ft. conditioned upon it being faced with stone. This decision was made because it is a wall that will not be seen by anyone unless they are on your property. They also asked that your fencing proposed at the top of the slope adjacent to Lot 69 be dropped out of the line of sight for that property.

Google Not Interpreting robots.txt Consistently

I had an issue where Googlebot was spidering parts of my site that were not allowed in the robots.txt file…

My old robots.txt file…

User-agent: *
Disallow: /tools/suggestion/?
Disallow: /search.php
Disallow: /go.php
Disallow: /scripts/
Disallow: /ads/

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /ebay_

Hmmmm… that’s weird… Googlebot is still spidering stuff it shouldn’t be…

www.digitalpoint.com 66.249.66.138 - - [14/Mar/2006:06:21:07 -0800] "GET /ads/ HTTP/1.1" 302 38 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +//www.google.com/bot.html)"
www.digitalpoint.com 66.249.66.138 - - [14/Mar/2006:10:26:18 -0800] "GET /ads/ HTTP/1.1" 302 38 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +//www.google.com/bot.html)"
www.digitalpoint.com 66.249.66.138 - - [14/Mar/2006:14:29:35 -0800] "GET /ads/ HTTP/1.1" 302 38 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +//www.google.com/bot.html)"
www.digitalpoint.com 66.249.66.138 - - [14/Mar/2006:17:47:21 -0800] "GET /ads/ HTTP/1.1" 302 38 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +//www.google.com/bot.html)"

So I made an inquiry to Google about this, and I actually heard back (nice!)…

While we normally don’t review individual sites,
we did examine your robots.txt file. Please be advised that it appears
your Googlebot entry in your robots.txt file is overriding your generic
User-Agent listing. We suggest you alter your robots.txt file by
duplicating the forbidden paths under your Googlebot entry:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /tools/suggestion/?
Disallow: /search.php
Disallow: /go.php
Disallow: /scripts/
Disallow: /ads/

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /ebay_
Disallow: /tools/suggestion/?
Disallow: /search.php
Disallow: /go.php
Disallow: /scripts/
Disallow: /ads/

Once you’ve altered your robots.txt file, Google will find it
automatically after we next crawl your site.

Okay… I can live with that… easy fix. But check this out… Google’s own robots.txt testing tool within Google Sitemaps show the old robots.txt as being able to block Googlebot as expected.

So how about some consistency here? And more importantly, if anyone at Google is reading this, how about someone tell me why my blog is banned in your index… πŸ™‚

MPAA Suing Me

I’ve been waiting for this lawsuit for a few months now, and yesterday I finally got served the official complaint filed in the US District Court (San Diego).

Now we can finally get this show on the road… I’m sure it will give me all sorts of interesting stuff to blog about in the coming months. πŸ™‚

I’ll meet with my attorney tomorrow to give them the stuff…

Family Walks On All Fours

I saw this a couple weeks ago, and just now ran across it again. Dammit, I forgot to post it the first time around… oh well… better late than never.

An extraordinary family who walk on all fours are being hailed as the breakthrough discovery which could shed light on the moment Man first stood upright.

Scientists believe that the five brothers and sisters found in Turkey could hold unique insights into human evolution.

The Kurdish siblings, aged between 18 and 34 and from the rural south, Γ’β‚¬Λœbear crawlÒ€ℒ on their feet and palms.

Study of the five has shown the astonishing behaviour is not a hoax and they are largely unable to walk otherwise.

Researchers have found a genetic condition which accounts for their extraordinary movement.

And it could provide invaluable information on how humans evolved from a four-legged hominid into a creature walking on two feet.

Coke and Mentos

I’m not sure why, but the video oddly makes me want to try it myself to see if it really works. πŸ™‚

Update

We confirmed that this does work. πŸ™‚ We didn’t quite have as good of a technique for getting the Mentos into the 2 liter bottle as quickly, but it does in fact work. Maybe Julien or Scott will post the video to YouTube.

Nobody Likes Anne

I would just like to throw out a big *F-U*!!!! to Anne. She went golfing with Julien, Scott and myself this morning. Naturally Scott won (he has played a lot longer than anyone else). But it was Anne’s first time ever playing golf and she kicked the crap out of me and Julien.

“Oh… gee, another drive onto the green.” Whatever… no one likes playing with you Anne. Go eat corned beef instead.

I did get my first birdie ever today, so I’m still cool.

Insect Cyborgs

I saw this on Boing Boing this afternoon… it looks like DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is starting to research the feasibility of engineering insect cyborgs…

Quote from their website

DARPA seeks innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs, possibly enabled by intimately integrating microsystems within insects, during their early stages of metamorphoses. The healing processes from one metamorphic stage to the next stage are expected to yield more reliable bio-electromechanical interface to insects, as compared to adhesively bonded systems to adult insects. Once these platforms are integrated, various microsystem payloads can be mounted on the platforms with the goal of controlling insect locomotion, sense local environment, and scavenge power. Multidisciplinary teams of engineers, physicists, and biologists are expected to work together to develop new technologies utilizing insect biology, while developing foundations for the new field of insect cyborg engineering. The HI-MEMS may also serve as vehicles to conduct research to answer basic questions in biology.

No Mexican Jail For Me

Julien, Anne and myself made it back from the Baja 250 without spending a single day in Mexican jail.

You can get pretty close to the race action (as you can see here)…

On the way there… What the hell is this? 50 miles worth of snow at 4:00 am? Lame!!!!

We made it… this is what was going on.

On the way back… This was rather interesting… this was a Mexican jumping the US border to get INTO Mexico. πŸ™‚

Baja 250

I *could* be in a Mexican jail right now, but if all goes well I’m in San Felipe watching the start of the Baja 250 race.

Hopefully this whole “write now, publish later” thing in WordPress works… I’m even more hopeful that by the time you read this, that I actually made it to San Felipe, and am not in jail.

Get Drunk Remotely

The site calls them “Lover’s Cups”, but I think they are just a way for lazy people to get drunk with each other (like if I’m too lazy to go to a buddies house)…

Lover’s Cups explore the idea of sharing feelings of drinking between two people in different places by using cups as communication interfaces of drinking. Two cups are wireless connected to each other with sip sensors and LED illumination. The Lover’s cups will glow when your lover is drinking. When both of you are drinking at the same time, both of the Lover’s Cups glow and celebrate this virtual kiss.

//web.media.mit.edu/~jackylee/cups.htm

Neverland Ranch Shut Down

Today is a sad, sad day for the entire world… Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch was shut down today…

Michael Jackson has been ordered to shut his Neverland ranch by California authorities who have fined the pop star $US169,000 ($230,700) for failing to pay his employees or maintain proper insurance.

Jackson’s sprawling ranch in the central California foothills was closed yesterday, at least temporarily, by an agent of the State Labor Commissioner after the office discovered that his workers’ compensation policy had lapsed in January.

On a brighter note, Michael Jackson is looking pretty good these days, don’t you think?