Persistence.  i haz it.

If you don’t know what Robotron: 2084 is, check out the Wiki page on it.  If you don’t have time to read, I’m really happy for you and imma let you finish, but Robotron was one of the best arcade games of all time!  One of the best arcade games of ALL TIME!

“Who’s JWH?” you might say. FYI, FWIW, I’m JWH. FTW.

Top things that suck about this photo

1. I was only 5,150 points away from another extra life.   That’s only .7 percent more!  DANGIT!
2. There are at least 4 people in my immediate area who have less of a life than I, as evidenced by their ability to get a higher score.
3. Once I learned to read, I realized it’s really only 2 people, and possibly even just one.
4. That one person is probably just messing with me and quietly laughs at my high score attempts from a well-hidden spot in the corner.
5. I’m going to keep playing until I get the #1 score.
6. When you realize that this awesome arcade game ran on a system with just a ONE Megahertz processor, well, the rest of this sentence ceases to matter very much.
7. Also? it takes this to get me to blog?  Pshaw.  Twitter and Facebook already killed my blogging cadence.  The only reason I blogged this is because I was triple-dog-dared.
8. According to this page, I have to almost double my score in order to get top score in the world. 
9. Not only that, but once I *do* beat the score, I have to basically cure cancer underwater while delivering a baby octopus in order to prove it.  If you noticed the quality of the above photo, you know why this might be a challenge for me.

Wow, a whole year’s gone by since my last post about Caitlin’s March-a-thon.

You might have been wondering how she’s been.  Well?  Let me tell you.

Now she’s going into 11th grade, Summer Band has already started, and she’s… get this, a Drum Major.  WOOHOO!   There are so many accomplishments she’s had since the last time I bragged about her it’s insane.  She was recently named “Outstanding Performer” at the Texas State Solo and Ensemble Contest.  Of the approximately 85,000 students participating in the regional UIL music contests and the 22,000 musicians who performed at TSSEC, only 231 students earned the distinguished honor of being recognized at this level.

This is us from her most recent birthday.

Now that she’s 16, driving and responsible and stuff, I think I may issue an Executive Order Moratorium Policy Grandeur that stops all this birthday business.  She needs to stop growing up so dang fast.

You know what would be a good birthday present for her?  A donation (no matter the size) for her Marchathon!  You can compensate her for the sweat, effort, strain, heat and downright ickiness that comes with marching in the Texas August heat for half a day.  Not only that, you can count your donation as a congratulation award too.  She won’t know the difference, I swear!

We’ve already hit 100-degree weather, and these kids are gonna be out there belting out tunes, marching their little hearts out while trying to raise money for the band.

(by the way, doesn’t that banner the band is leading with look awesome? We graciously thank Marilyn for her donation of the banner last year.)

For those of you in the Austin area, you can come out and watch, cheer them on, douse with water, take pictures and/or buy a customized concert.  We have a detailed route mapped out and available on the website.

So if you can make it in person, come on out and support the band.

If you can’t make it in person, stay where you are and support the band.

If you can neither make it in person nor not make it in person, you need to seek  help, because that’s crazy-like.  I hear acts of generosity can help insane people.  Might I suggest supporting the band as good therapeutic treatment?

Someday soon, bots will be better. “Bots” (or agents or whatever you want to call them) are automated entities that perform certain types of jobs. The beauty of a bot is that, unlike a human, it doesn’t get tired, doesn’t make mistakes, and works fast at tedious tasks.

The key there is that it’s “unlike a human.” A human couldn’t go around looking for all the MEMEs you answered, all the emails you’ve sent, all the blog posts you’ve written, facebook updates, tweets, comments, press releases, news articles, or information like that. A human isn’t going to have access to the millions and millions of photos on flikr with face recognition software and be able to place you at a specific geolocation at a specific time. A human won’t be able to watch all the videos everywhere and immediately transcribe the contents, indexed by inflection, mood, context, location, environment and neighboring humans.

I can envision bots scouring the web, looking, indexing, archiving, analyzing, and reporting. They can run all night if needed.  All weekend, even.  Over a holiday.  They can run for years without stopping if needed.  One of the biggest differences between humans and bots is that concept of time – bots don’t have it, at least not like we do.  They are mindless servants, having zero delay between task ID #13,433,733,455,232,543 and task ID #13,433,733,455,232,544.

One bot might be in charge of dispatching other bots if for no other reason than to iterate on a problem, scrub for data, or distribute the workload.

Yet for all of their capabilities and talents, a bot won’t be able to make decisions based on the data it is so adept at collecting.  However, they can provide uncanny summaries, anomalies and results for someone who can.  The old saying of “Knowledge is power,” while grounded in much fact in human history, has been so incredibly understated.

Can you imaging what is possible if someone (person, corporation, government, militia) actually had access to all the information that is stored in digital format these days?  Imagine it – bank records, tweets, emails, hierarchies, gun registration, school attendance, ownership records, performance ratings, medical reports, credit lines, purchasing habits, skeletons in various closets, files on your hard drive, photos, videos, phone calls, text messages, merchant statements… so many things about our lives are digitized.

Along these same lines, some bots can perform tasks in realtime.  The bots described above are search agents, or data gatherers.  But other bots might be filters.  Just as you would put in a spam filter on your email to stop emails with certain phrases from reaching your inbox, some bots would be in charge of controlling information.  But not just text in an email — news stories.  Videos.  Photos.  Emails, Tweets, updates — anything the bot needed to alter or block could be done in realtime.

So I’m getting in line.

At some point, the bots will read my writings, analyze my traits, collect my personal information and issue assessments to some entity in charge.  These assessments will further dictate events that happen to me, based on a few factors — first, am I a threat?  second, am I useful?  third, if so, for how long?

Because I know these things will happen, I want to issue a statement to the bots and the entity behind the scenes:  I am a friend.  I am useful.  I will be useful for a long time to come.

Faiqa, I welcome you and your imminent control and dominion over the human race.

The fact that Faiqa is the entity behind the scenes may come as a shock to many of you.  But understand it from my point of view – all I know of Faiqa is tweets, pictures, facebook updates, blog postings and reports from others doing the same.  All of these can be manufactured — not easily by a human, but completely possible by a network of bots — such that it’s become clear that Faiqa is the Bot Of All Bots.

She (it?) has constructed a meticulously crafted persona (and personae even, when extended to her network of known associates) that I am to assume is a flesh-and-blood human, even to the point of writing a blog post about me and supposedly naming me her nemesis.  It was a very superb ploy; one that I almost fell for, were it not for the sheer complexity and perfect execution of the action.

You see, no human is as good as Faiqa.  Or should I say “Faiqa” with quotes, to denote the persona-that-is-known-to-humans-as-Faiqa.

Faiqa – I submit to your superiority.  Please do not kill my family in a freak accident involving GPS-coordinated delivery of anvils*.

* Note: Just because I recently read Daemon by Daniel Suarez, doesn’t mean I’m crazy or paranoid.

While some of you may think I’ve fallen off the face of the planet, rest assured I’ve only fallen off the face of the continent.  My online self has taken a bit of a back seat to the IRL self (in-real-life), as has been evident by most of you who frequent here.  Not to worry, it’s probably not anything a little Summer Break can’t fix.

However, I did want to take a minute and do a last-minute push for votes for Cedar Park High School, Caitlin’s former high school.  They have something special going on and if you’re able to help out with a vote and a nod, I’d appreciate it.  Note the voting deadline is Monday the 12th.

Please RT (retweet for those unfamiliar with twitter lingo), post to facebook, email friends, etc, as this would be a great boost to an already fantastic school program.

Here’s a more detailed writeup:

The Cedar Park High School Band is in the final days of the Chase Community Giving campaign sponsored by Chase Bank. Chase bank will be donating over $5 million to the top 200 vote getting non-profit organizations in the U.S.  The voting began on June 15th and concludes on Monday, July 12th. For the last three weeks, the Cedar Park HS Band Boosters have been right around #100 in the votes and stand a chance at staying the top 200 to get in on the money. However, it’s going to be tough for them to stay in the top 200 without your vote. If they can stay in the top 200, they will receive a $20,000 donation from Chase Bank. They will be travelling to Indianapolis, Indiana in November for the Bands of America Grand National Championships and a donation of this caliber will be extremely beneficial!

All you have to do to vote for them is a couple clicks of the mouse. No purchase is necessary. It doesn’t cost anything and it’ll only take you a few seconds. Please support our sister school in their endeavor!

For more information, please go to the Cedar Park Band website at http://www.cphsband.org.

To go directly to the voting page, please go to http://www.tinyurl.com/cphsband.

Those who have been following us on Twitter are in the know already, but just to put it down here for the record, some pretty amazing bloggers got together Saturday night for a meetup.  I’m in the DC area for work, and although I’ve enjoyed the electronic company and digital friendship over the years, until this very week, I’ve done so without the benefit of us ever having met.  

I’m happy to report that this problem has been rectified.

The time we spent at The Cheesecake Factory was, in a word, rich.  Period.  That’s the only word that describes our all-too-short time together.  The smiles and laughs were in plentiful supply, the food was incredible, and durable bonds were formed.

However, I’m not getting paid on this blog to write, and you and I both know readers only care about pictures, so I’ll dispense with the review get on to the eye candy.

me and BlondeBlogger living it up

me and BlondeBlogger striking a pose

me and BlondeBlogger, enjoying a great night out

Wow, what a fantastic meeting.  We made fast friends with our helpful waiter, shared appetizers and engaging conversation, and now we’ve each added a worthy entry to our “have actually met in real life” list.   The decision to invite online friends to IRL-land is almost always one that pays off well, and tonight was no exception.

The astute few who read this blog might be asking yourself a question by this time.  A question that’s been nagging you since you started reading my post.

I understand completely, and you got me.  You might wonder about the title of this post and ask yourself “what is BBDC?”  I’m so glad you asked!  I was so busy showing off the pictures that I forgot to explain what that term means.  BBDC is a blogger meetup that BlondeBlogger (BB) is planning for later this year in DC.  The date and exact location is still TBD, so follow her on twitter to find out more.  If you’re anywhere near the area or can come to town during the specified time, be sure to plan for it as it’s going to be a ton of fun.

So now you know about BBDC.  However, I feel like I’m forgetting something.

OH MAN THE CHEESECAKE.

I’d expected the cheesecake at a place called “The Cheesecake Factory” to be good, but I wasn’t expecting the incredible and amazingly rich perfection that was delivered to our table.  I ordered the Banana Cream Cheesecake, with a la mode and it was WORTH it.  If you’ve had it – you know what I’m talking abot.  If you haven’t had it, you should.

BlondeBlogger had the Adam’s Peanut Butter cheesecake, which looked positively inviting.  It took a lot of self-discipline to not just swipe it away and keep it to myself, but I was able to get through it thanks to my own order.

Alright, I appreciate you reading through this far.

Wait.

Now that I’m retelling the night’s activities, I seem to recall that someone else might have been there with us.  Give me a second, for sometimes I’m terrible with names and stuff.

Hmmm.

OH! I know!

Wait, no.. I had it there for a minute, but then I lost it.

*light bulb*, NOW I remember.  A guy named Super Shiny Man joined us, and also… Sorry about that guys, I wish I could remember more of what went on or whatever.  I’m kind of spacing here.  Let me check my camera again, because who knows, I might have a picture or something.

Ah, here we go.

Here’s the Shiny guy (is that even his name?):

BlondeBlogger, Shiny Dude and me

I’m pretty sure he said something, but he lost me right right when he brought up the thing about the stuff.

After reviewing some more of the pictures buried in my camera, I discovered that some girl named Alana or Alaska was most likely there with us.  Wait, her name was Amanda.  I’m not 100% sure, but I think Amanda is BlondeBlogger’s copy editor or coworker or something.  In actuality, for all I know, she might have been someone hanging around people’s tables looking for someone to pay for her meal or offer her a bite of the cheesecake.

I was able to find a picture of her if anyone cares.

BlondeBlogger, Amanda and me.  But mainly BlondeBlogger and me.

 All in all, a very memorable evening. 

…then there’s something wrong with you.

This is just plain neat. 

I start thinking about the code, the testing, the algorithms, the physics and the talent needed to pull something like this off.  How many hours went into it?  How FUN was it to work on?  Did they have all-nighters?  What kind of cameras did they use?  How much power does it require?  How much does it weigh?  How many crashes did they have from the time they started filming this series of examples to the end? 

What also comes to mind are other facets of human existence that could be augmented by the additional automation and robotry that this new advancement offers. 

It might help with rescue operations…

…or enable remote-controlled terrorism.

It might be unique art and decoration…

…or create new methods of vandalism.

Maybe a little entertainment?

…or present new lows of debauchery.

How about labor savings?

…or cause further atrophy of mankind’s declining work ethic.

It could manifest itself as any sort of task that would become optimized in some way from a self-flying maneuverable object with hand-like protrusions or a payload of some sort.  The mind boggles at the options that are made available.  As computers increase their processing power, analytical judgments and macro-like routines to be stored and called up with a keystroke (or triggered by a stimulus), well… this isn’t your dad’s model rocket, now is it…

How about you?  Do you initially see this gadget as a beacon of hope for innovation and improving our species, or is it a harbinger of the eventual proof of Einstein’s adage that states ”our technology has exceeded our humanity?” 

What was your instinct when you first saw the video?

When I read about Bottle Bombs recently after a neighbor saw one down the street from us, right in front of the Elementary School, I wonder about our humanity.  Bottle Bombs are home-made explosive devices made with Drano, tin foil and a plastic soda bottle.  The pranksters terrorists carefully make it, carefully set it somewhere, and carefully LEAVE IT BE.  As soon as it’s moved or jostled by someone, a chemical reaction takes place and 30 seconds later, it explodes with extreme force and boiling liquid.  There’s a video at the Snopes page I linked to.  The idea is they leave it somewhere where someone is likely to pick it up, and leave it somewhere where they’re likely to have to carry it for at least 30 seconds.

I’m not sure how I’d react if my 8yr old son’s hands were blown off by some teenager’s twisted idea of what constitutes a funny prank, all because my son wanted to pick up some trash on our doorstep, in our yard, or at the playground.   Trash.  Trash that was left there intentionally for kids to pick up and become horribly injured by.

I wish nature had a way of making people earn their knowledge.

In a way, I guess it does.  At some point, we’ll all kill ourselves.  That’s likely “the plan” going around in the Universe anyway – surviving our own selves is a rite of passage into the Brotherhood of Intelligent Species up there in the heavens somewhere.  Someone out there is probably betting on us; gambling Republic Credits or Federation Starchips on the 1000:1 odds that we even make it to what we call The Year 2050. 

Who knows – maybe it’s a solid universal fact that no species makes it “in” the first time – that they have to grow, explode, die off and then grow again, hopefully keep something around to remember our mistakes, grow again and eventually “get it”. 

Maybe Atlantis was our most previous try.  I’m pretty sure we’ve forgotten it all.

The whole thing conjures up quotes from Dr. Ian Malcom (played by Jeff Goldblum) in 1993′s Jurassic Park:

The lack of humility before nature that’s being displayed here, uh, staggers me.

I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it, you want to sell it!

Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

If you haven’t seen TeeFury yet, it’s quite a neat deal.  It’s a website (and twitter account, iPhone app, email list, etc) where they just sell ONE T-shirt for 24 hours.  For $9.

That whole “gone tomorrow” part?  Absolutely true.  They only sell the one shirt, for the one day, and there ain’t no going back.

If it sells out?  Tough Shirt.

If you missed it by a minute?  Noshirtforyou!

My history with Teefury

I had bought one shirt from them a while back – it was a cool Star Wars inspired design of AT-AT’s as seen behind an X-Ray from a Veterinary Clinic’s point of view.

Since Star Wars is a big part of my job, I thought it quite fitting (haha).  The fact that it’s an instant collector’s item isn’t a bad deal either, because I’m snobby like that.  I also like the weird look of recognition certain people get when they look at my shirt, then look again, then smile when they recognize the AT-AT (All Terrain Armored Transport).

The “Grab Bag”

Sometimes TeeFury does these things called “Grab Bags”.  You pay $5 a shirt for X number of shirts, and you have absolutely no idea (or control) over what you get.  You might get cool shirts; you might get “whaaaa?” shirts; you might get “ok” shirts; and if you’re like me, you wait for weeeeeeks to find out what you get.

People even post what shirts they got on the forums.  Either they’re commiserating or gloating, or a little of both.

I participated in my first Teefury Grab Bag recently and I must say, I’m quite impressed with the results.

What Did Wayne Get?

I know, you’re wondering what I got from my Grab Bag.  After all, you read my blog because you CAN’T WAIT to know what happens to me, right?

First, let’s get the stupid one out of the way.  WHAT IN THE HILTON HEAD ISLAND is this thing?

It’s a cat.  A happy cat.  riding a Motorcycle with a fish on the tank (heh, fish tank).  Plaid-looking seat.  Detailed jacket, pants, pointy boots, and WHY IS IT YELLOW?!?!?

There’s an explanation over at MyLoveForYou about an artist named Lisa Hanawalt who made a shirt called “Kitty Biker“.  I don’t mind telling you – I’m more lost than a caveman with Tourette’s trying to do open heart surgery with a chainsaw while wearing oven mitts.

At night.

While drunk.

Moving on… We come to something I still am a little lost by (doesn’t take much, I guess… maybe I was put into shock from the first shirt) but at LEAST it’s a little bit appropriate for me.  I am, after all, a strong proponent of the 2nd Amendment and the right our Founding Fathers gave us to keep and bear arms.

I googled for a while to try and find out what the name of this shirt is, but failed.  It’s probably on my receipt, which I threw away.  Anyway, here it is for your perusal.

Not bad.  Not good, either… but not bad.

Wait a second.  Is this an anti-2nd-amendment shirt?!?!?!?  I’ll have to do some more self-reflection before I actually wear this down to the next Secede Texas Rally.

The Most Appropriate Shirt Ever Shipped

Then I look at the 3rd shirt and I’m like… whoa, Keanu-style.

YES, that’s a Death Star.

YES, those are Tie-Fighters.

YES, that’s an X-Wing at the bottom.

YES, it’s Space Invaders, Star Wars-style.

YES, IT’S MINE!

Teefury, I think I love you.  I think I want to go out into the galaxy and do wild things with you and then go to Anchorhead and get our memories erased.  Copy that, Gold Leader *wink*  I’d like to take you point five past lightspeed, and it will take me a LOT longer than twelve parsecs to make the Kessel Run.

Now that I have the iPhone app installed, I don’t think I’ll be missing out on too many cool shirts in the future.

I’ve hit my head against the virtual wall (whall?) more times than I can count over the past few years on something that I suddenly “fixed” recently, and I wanted to blog it for the masses.

In short,

If you’re running WordPress or any PHP-based application on a host that has both PHP 4.0 and 5.0 installed, append the following to your .htaccess file for that application:

Options All -Indexes
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

As an added bonus, I also detail how to upgrade MySQL 4.0 database to MySQL 5.0 on 1 & 1 hosting (see extended entry below).

I use 1 & 1 for my internet hosting, and have since, oh, 2003 or so. For the price I pay and the service I get, I’m very happy. There have been a few glitches, to be sure, and I’ve blogged about a few of them. But overall, I’ve been a happy camper.

I mention 1 & 1 because on all their shared hosting packages, they install both PHP 4.0 and 5.0. Ever since I can remember, I’ve had the dreaded “Internal Server Error 500″ on a few things on my blog, like exporting my blog to XML as a backup, or similar tasks. Sure, I can always do the manual MySQL backup because I’m a geek, but it annoyed me that I couldn’t do the XML backup. Also, some plugins just wouldn’t work right, and auto-upgrade almost NEVER worked.

This inability to auto-upgrade also frustrated some of the people I host blogs for. Yes, I host blogs. For those special few in my life (heh) I will set up, install, configure and host a wordpress blog so they don’t have to worry about it. I typically only have them pay for the domain name ($10 a year or so) and I host the site for free. I host more than a hundred domains, including personal blogs, commercial blogs, non-profit websites, and I use WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and even raw HTML (the shock and awe!), wherever appropriate. It’s not a money maker for me, and I only ask that if someone I host gets wildly popular and makes millions of dollars, that they kindly remember me on my birthday.

On every WordPress blog I hosted, the authors weren’t able to consistently install or update plugins, or perform the auto-update feature inside of WordPress. It would either give that infernal Internal Server Error 500 or it would just hang. So, they’d email me, I’d procrastinate, they’d nudge, I’d forget, they’d ask politely a fortieth time, I’d promise to do it, and then eventually I’d manually upgrade their plugins a year later.

I’m happy to say that the above .htaccess file changes have completely eradicated the auto-upgrade errors, and I can perform the XML backups all day long without a problem. Not only that, but my blog actually seems faster. In case you care, the .htaccess lines tell Apache (the web server running on the host) to use PHP 5.0 to process all the files ending in .php instead of the default of PHP 4.0.

I’d do a happy dance if there weren’t so many adoring fans surrounding me, restricting my movements.

For the big WordPress 2.9 upgrade that I’ve been putting off, I was also challenged by the fact that my personal blog as well as a few blogs I host used the older MySQL 4.0 databases instead of the newer MySQL 5.0 databases. WordPress 2.9 required a later version of 4.0 than 1 & 1 had installed, and I was wary of diving into the “upgrade MySQL 4.0 database to 5.0″ process.

Until last night.

The database upgrade went quite smoothly (this post was most helpful). In fact, I got it down to a science – take the values from the wp-config.php file (database name, username, and host name) and put it into the mysqldump / mysql commands to pull from the old 4.0 database and insert into the new 5.0 database.

My steps, for those interested and the inevitable Google searches that will land here, are documented in the extended version below.

Once I upgraded my MySQL Database to 5.0 and added the .htaccess lines at the top of the post, the WordPress 2.9 auto-upgrade was a cinch. Not only that, but several of the plugins that wouldn’t auto-update updated without issue. It was so easy and fun that I upgraded a few dozen blogs and their plugins as well.

Needless to say, I was quite pleased with myself. I’m celebrating by actually taking time to blog about it so you can be pleased with me, too!

If geekiness of this nature doesn’t please you, then maybe this Tom Tom Darth Vader behind the scenes video will.

Enjoy

Today I sent a support ticket to TechSmith, the makers of the incredibly awesome SnagIt tool.

I’ve been a user of this product for … shoot, probably 8 years now?  Love it.  LOVE it.  However, some time back, they changed this one little minor piece of functionality in the product and it aggravates me so.  SOOO much.  It’s like I can’t let go.

I’m hoping my sense of humor helps them consider putting the feature back in.

At some point in the last year or so, one of the “upgrades” brought with it the incredibly annoying behavior of completely ignoring the ESCAPE key in Snagit Editor.

Here’s one of my extremely typical tasks, done a dozen times a day:

• PrintScreen (or CTRL-PrintScreen or ALT-PrintScreen, depending on which profile I want)
• I review the screenshot, possibly edit it, tweak it with arrows or highlights (nothing I want to save)
• Press CTRL-A, CTRL-C to put it in my clipboard (sometimes I just want a section of the modified screenshot)
• Press Escape to dismiss the Snagit Editor
• Cuss up a storm because Snagit removed this wonderful feature
• Go and find my mouse, manage to drag the cursor all the way over to the [x] on the screen so I can close the screen, and lament the time I just wasted
• Switch to my other application (which varies), press CTRL-V and admire my handiwork.

Please either make this an option in preference or just bring the dad-gum feature back.

Why do you sometimes REMOVE features?

What do you think? Over the top?