August 2005 Archives

This really sucks. Time Warner Cable is really screwing me over. I called them yesterday to have my cable turned on in my Syracuse apartment, but was told someone would have to come by and connect it because it's disconnected. And... There's not a slot open until Tuesday, September 6. I really don't know how I'm going to make it through the next weeks. I suppose by signing onto AIM from my cell phone and frequently visiting the Kimmel Computer lab, which is only two blocks away, I can survive. I'll only be able to get the eight over-the-air stations on TV, if I feel like installing an antenna. It's probably not even worth the effort. I will have my XM satellite radio though, which might help pass some time.

Anyways, I'm leaving for Syracuse around four this afternoon. I'll probably be best-reachable by phone, +1 315-601-1865.

I found out today that my first shift at Target won't be until next Friday, a little later than I had expected. Oh well, I suppose that give me some more time to setup my apartment. I'm not sure now when I'll be moving back up to Syracuse, probably Sunday or Monday.

There's not too much else that's new. I found out my camera lens must have some damage, or some dirt must have gotten into the inside. You can tell on some of the photos from recent entries. There's a black spot that appears when I zoom in. I'm not going to get it fixed for a few weeks though, because I want to make sure I have the camera for the first few weekends back at college.

I unlocked my Austrian phone that was locked to the provider Drei today. I used GSM Liberty, which sent me a cable and a username/password to use MotoPhoenix. I have a Motorola 975c that I got in Austria when I signed up there. It's a billion times better than my Samsung here, so I wanted to be able to use it here too. It's UMTS enabled for fast internet and video conferencing, which is sort of useless here in the States, because there's no infrastructure for this yet! But it's reverse-compatible for GSM 900/1800/1900 so I can use it here with Cingular or T-Mobile.

Below is my schedule for this fall. Classes start on the 29th of this month.

Courses:

ECN 203: Economic Ideas & Issues in Lyman Hall 132
GER 365: Nineteenth Century Prose in HBC 213A
GEO 500: Urban Syracuse in Eggers Hall 070
NHM 422: Beer and Wine Appreciation in Slocum Hall 108
PSC 300: Oil, Water, and War in Eggers 010
PSC 353: International Organization in Hall of Languages 102

My Site Meter tracking tool recently added a feature to let me view my recent visitors on a map. How incredible is that? Well, I suppose it's nothing specially really... All that's done is taking the visitors' locations and pinpointing them on a map. But I just noticed this new feature, and thought it was worth a weblog entry. By holding the cursor over a dot you get the details. The red dot represents the latest visitor, the green dots the latest 10, and the white the latest 100.

There's not just a world map either! You can zoom in on continents for a closer view.

If you want to try out the real interactive map, click here.

After two days of having my exercise rained out, I finally had some. In fact, by my standards, it was an insane amount.

At around two this afternoon, I biked the Vestal Rail Trail both ways, for a total of four miles (6.4 km). I had a physical therapy appointment at 3:15 (I'll get to that later), and then decided to bike again around six. So, I biked the Rail Trail another time, bringing my total bike milage to eight miles (12.9 km) today. I probably won't be able to move tomorrow, but at least I feel like I did something worthwhile today.

According to my physical therapist, my left rib is turning out nicely. Like last Tuesday, I got a fairly long heating pad treatment, followed by an ultrasound, and then some hardcore manual rib alignment by the doctor. He also put two six-inch (fifteen-centimeter) bandages on my left rib, which should keep me from applying pressure there. I have one more appointment left (Thursday). Hopefully this will solve my problem for good.

Here's something random:

Apparently redheads feel less pain. Well, for now it at least seems that "redheaded mice" feel less pain. This was the result of a study at the Medical Research Council in London. The mice weren't redheaded of course, but they were injected with a morphine-like substance that apparently redheads produce. So apparently my body produces natural "morphine." Great!

Only problem... For some unknown reason, this only has an effect on redheaded women, which might be explained by the different ways men and women's brains function. However, you'll only find this in some of the articles below. The media can't seem to get its facts straight.

Another interesting fact:

"Seventy percent of redheads are redheads because a particular gene doesn't work" -Prof. Jeff Mogil of Montreal's McGill University

Read More:

CTV Article
NewsMedical.Net Article"
The Advisor Article

The past three days have had the same kind of weather pattern. Sunshine until around three in the afternoon, and then thunderstorms. And, for the past two days I've put off getting out of the house and doing some biking until it was too late.

So, instead I've done virtually nothing the past two days. Just random website maintenance and attempting to get a calendar running on my website, along with redesigning my mom's website to bring it out of its late-ninties timewarp.

Tomorrow I'm going to make sure to get out of the house. Well, I'm sort of forced to anyway, as I have a physical therapy appointment at 3:30. But I hope to get some biking in before that.

We don’t have any power as I’m writing this. And what’s worse, we don’t have any internet, because apparently the cable provider doesn’t have any power either. Our cable modem and our router are hooked up to a UPS, which keeps reminding us every thirty seconds that we have no power. Apparently there’s no way to shut off the beeping without shutting down the entire unit.

Anyways, I might as well sit here and type out a summary of my travels today. It was a traffic nightmare. I left at 10:40 and got to Syracuse at 1:15. What’s wrong with that? It’s a 75-mile (121-km) trip! It usually only takes me a little over an hour, but today it took me two hours and 35 minutes. First there was paving being done near the Onondaga County line. This slowed down traffic to a halt. Then there was an accident-related detour immediately after that. A truck had jack-knifed right before the Onondaga Nation exit, requiring the entire interstate to be shut down in that direction for a five-mile segment. Traffic was diverted using the parallel two-lane highway. What a mess that was.

(The power just came back on!)

Anyway, I had planned to do some assembling and arraigning in my apartment before picking up my dad around 2:30. Thanks to this delay, this plan didn’t materialize. I barely had enough time to unload all the stuff I had brought and then go eat something.

The trip back went fine. For the first time since I’ve been back in the States, it actually rained a decent amount though. Since the Johnson City traffic circle project is a real nightmare right now, I decided to use the Vestal exit, which is a relatively long detour, and leads me over Pierce Hill Road, one of the steepest in Vestal. Apparently it had just been coated today with oil and gravel, which was now wet. What a mess. To avoid damaging my car’s paint job, I drove the entire two or so miles (3.2 km) at 15 mph (24 km/h).

I am so sick of driving right now.

This past day I actually took advantage of summer. I swam for a bit and then biked a total of four miles (6.44 km) in 20 minutes on the Vestal Rail Trail.

After eating at Subway I drove to Staples to look at chairs, and then to Target to pick up some shade mounts. Apparently we're too upscale at Target to carry shades and shade accessories. We only sell curtains and curtain accessories. When I found this out I realized I'd have to go to the most dreaded store in retail... Wal-Mart.

You've got to love 24-hour operations! Tonight they were tearing up the floor with a jackhammer-sounding device and moving entire aisles on wheels, and thus randomly zoning off sections with caution tape. At one point I walked down an aisle only to find out I had just been boxed in by caution tape on three sides, with a rapidly-disapearing exit.

I eventually found the shades section, and their were two interior mount sets left (62 cents each). I picked one up and made my way through the maze of confusion to the front registers.

I suppose it was a more exciting afternoon/evening than staring blanking into my laptop screen!

Tomorrow I'm heading up to Syracuse and back for a third time in nine days. I'm bring some more stuff up and assembling a few things. Then, at around 2:30, I'm picking up my dad at the airport, who's flying back from Scotland today.

I just stepped outside while letting my dog out, and I realized I'm being a complete waste of space! On the one hand, I always look forward to summer, but on the other hand, I just end up sitting inside all day, in front of my laptop.

So I decided I'd change that today. That's right... I'm going to find my bike, which is hidden somewhere in the basement, and, after necessitated maintenance from not using it in ages, ride it down to the Town Square Mall and then ride the Vestal Rail Trail path down there. That'll probably be the most exercise I've had in months.

At around 11:25 this morning I was attempting to reinstall and setup the mt-rebuild script for my weblog. It's useful because I run the MTOnThisDay plugin on this weblog (see right column on main page). In order for this plugin to work properly, I need to rebuild the main page once a day. For a couple of months I ran the mt-rebuild script without any problems. It was deleted when I had the whole upgrade problem to MovableType 3.2 Beta (See "23 Hours of Panic"). I guess mt-rebuild doesn't work with 3.2 Beta, as I was getting errors. My frequent attempt to fix these errors caused me to run the script multiple times, which is probably what got my account suspended.

The Lypha support team first told me it was from a possibly malicious script in my /tmp directory. It does appear that it was simply the mt-rebuild script though. In any case, I'll be manually refreshing my weblog until I can be certain that mt-rebuild or a similar script can run fine in cooperation with MT 3.2.

My greatest success of last night was getting the LiveJournal log in to finally work, with a minor alteration to the OpenMTLogin plugin's cgi file. Now if only more people would comment...

It's that time of year again... Doctor visits. I take care of all of them while at my parents' house in Vestal. On Monday I went to go see my general physician for a physical. This past day, Tuesday, I had a physical therapy appointment at 1:15, and then an eye exam at 3:15. Tuesday's visits both require a follow-up, to take place Monday and Saturday respectively, so that's five doctor visits in a week! Craziness. The physical therapy was for my rib issue. None of the previous doctors I had visited could figure out what was going on, even with the help of x-rays. The physical therapist took one feel and was able to tell me one of my ribs is basically out of position, and essentially crossing the one above it, leaving a big gap where it's supposed to be. He had me lye with a heating pad for about twenty minutes, which burned my arm (the mark is still there). He then did an ultrasound, which took about another ten minutes. The last twenty minutes he basically massaged the rib area and started using force to push the rib back into position, aided by me stretching in the opposite direction that he was pushing. He then told me about two things I can do at home. The first was really complex, I felt like a gymnast, and I have forgotten how to do it already. The second is easier and is basically a stretch to the right while taking a deep breath, so my lungs place pressure in the right area, I suppose. Remember a couple weeks ago I complained about my vision fading in my left eye? I was right. In the last three months I have gone from having both eyes at -2.0 dioptre to having my left eye at -2.75 and my right eye at -2.5. Great... I'm going blind. I rounded off the evening re-precoating the diatomic earth filter of our pool. It's new, and for some reason it's not working how it should. I then dug a few holes for flowers in the garden, and then went swimming. Quite the filled-up Tuesday.

I've been spending most of this week randomly tweaking things on my weblog. Along with installing about half-a-dozen plugins, I spent the entire night last night, and a good amount of this morning, trying to get LiveJournal sign in to work. Since everyone and their mom (or perhaps their sister) has LiveJournal, I thought it'd be a great feature to add. There's a plugin by markpasc that adds this functionality. I installed it, created a LiveJournal account for testing it, and have gotten to the LiveJournal verification page, where LJ asks me if it's OK to send my identity to newkai.com. Then, however, I get this error: Undefined subroutine &Digest::MD5::md5_hex called at signon.cgi line 103. So close... I have Digest::MD5 installed on my server... That can't be the problem. Anyway, I've asked for help on the Six Apart forums, so maybe I can get it working sometime in the not so distant future. I also just updated to the latest nightly build of Movable Type. A new beta release is coming out tomorrow, so this was quite pointless, but I thought I'd try it out anyway. It seems to be working fine. Update: LiveJournal login now works!

This was always the slogan of Baquacil, the chlorine-free pool care system my family has used in our pool since we got it over eleven years ago. Now their slogan is "Chlorine-Free, Care-Free." Yeah right. I think my parents have put about five times as much time into maintaining our pool, then they ever swam in it. And they swim in it a lot! Pools are such a mess. It's always a huge sensation when our pool is actually crystal clear. And, sadly, this state hardly ever lasts more than a day or two. I drove down to get our water professionally tested at the pool place. We do this about twice a week. The guy who tested it and I joke about how our pool is cursed. I should probably go swimming. It's a wonderful 86°F (30°C) outside. I've been really tired these past few days. I don't know whether it's the jetlag or something else. And for some reason I'm writing in really short sentences. I give up, this post is going nowhere!

Starting yesterday afternoon, I completed a set of upgrades and installations to this weblog. I upgraded the templates and decided to stick with a white background (much easier to read), and installed a bunch of plug-ins to protect the weblog and comment posters from spam. I suppose I should give some credit:

• BetterSpamProtect
• MT-DSBL
• MTDisguiseCommentURL v0.5 Beta
• Project Honey Pot
• SpamLookUp
• Quasi-Spam Filter

So I hope I'm now well-protected against comment spam, while letting my visitors comment without signing up for anything. I also added Keywords, which automatically creates keywords from what's in my title, body, and comments of my entries.

I flew back to the States on Tuesday. It was quite uneventful. My last weekend in Vienna was great, thanks to Kerstin, Tom, Oliver, Stani, etc. Wednesday morning I drove up to Syracuse to check out my new apartment. It is great. The only problem was that it was hot as hell (89°F / 32°C as I later found out) in there, so I drove to Best Buy and picked up an air conditioner. Installing it hurt by back pretty badly, but now I'll at least be able to sleep when I'm in Syracuse. I also drove out to Target, and strolled around the store. When I reached the back wall, I ran into Ardi and Liz. I knew Ardi was in Syracuse, and had already talked to him about meeting up later in the day, but this was quite the coincidence! I then went to the office and said I was available to work again starting August 22. In the evening I met up at Starbucks in Fayetteville with Ardi, Liz, and one of her friends. After finishing our drinks we decided to go bowling at Erie Lanes or whatever it's called. We needed to pick up some socks since we were all wearing sandals, so we drove across the street to Target and picked some up. The bowling place was closed, so I suggested Faegans instead. We had a drink at Faegans and then went home. Thanks to my jetlag, I was horribly tired, and thus went to bed almost immediately. The next morning I ate breakfast at Bruegger's at 7:30 (jetlag again), drove to Carousel, and then did some more rearranging in my apartment, before driving back to my mom's house. The full photo collection of this trip can be found here. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me for the night out, but Liz took some photos, so maybe I'll get ahold of them and put them up later.

It looks like I've finally succeeded at keeping the spam out. Thanks to numerous plugins, the weblog has gone over an hour without a single spam comment. So commenting without TypeKey sign in is on again.