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apocryph.orgnotes to my future self |
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apocryph.orgnotes to my future self |
Last Wednesday I discovered my first substantive complaint about my new Civic SI. I was on the way to the range, with my Glock 19 in a OWB Comp-tec holster on my hip at about 4 o’clock, when I climbed into the racing-inspired seats with their aggressive side bolstering, only to find the bolstering does not interact well with a holstered weapon. The bolstering pressed the holster firmly into my side and made for a most uncomfortable ride. A cross-country trip would be impossible with that particular holster.
This is, in the grand scheme of things, a minor complaint, as I’d need a cross-draw or more comfortable IWB holster for prolonged driving anyway, but it’s worth considering if you carry in a strong-side holster every day and find yourself doing alot of driving.
Last week I bought a new car. The dealer I purchased from offered a $200 “free gas” card as part of their counter to another dealer’s offer. It was obvious at the time the cards cost them less than face value hence their preference to use them in lieu of a cash discount, but I foolishly treated them as equivalent to their face cash value for the purposes of negotiation. Once I got home and researched the cards a bit, it became clear they are one of the many bits of sales trickery in the car salesman’s arsenal.
You can visit the FreeGasCentral website and see for yourself, but here are some notes:
The way the card works is thus: you activate the card and choose the brand of gasoline you’ll be buying (Exxon, Chevron, Wal-Mart, etc). You then save your receipts every time you buy gas from the specified brand (and ONLY that brand).
Two days ago I finally pulled the trigger on my first new car. I’ve been driving my parents old 1992 Accord LX for nearly ten years now, so I kind of have it coming.
The photos are up at here. Here’s a preview:
As expected, the car buying experience was not pleasant. I started looking a couple of weeks ago, and contacted at least half a dozen area dealerships for quotes. The responses (and dollar amounts) varied wildly. Some quotes, and some comments, follow:
Best price: $22,000 out the door.
This is the first dealership I heard back from, and also by far the most pushy and unpleasant. I’ve received roughly ten emails from Mr. Pham, most of them frenetic and pushy.
At work I’m building a simple tool to populate a FogBugz wiki page with build information. One of the things this tool needs to do is pull the XHTML contents of a wiki page, parse it (as XML), and take action on the resulting document tree. Initially I expected this to be stupid-easy, as XHTML is just XML, right?
Au contrare!
The first problem is XHTML documents likely contain entity references like and whatnot. These entity references aren’t XML entities, they’re XHTML entities, so you must load the XHTML DTD in order to resolve them. Trouble is, this means there must be a proper XHTML DOCTYPE directive in your XHTML (which there isn’t in my case since I’m using fragments).
Once a valid DOCTYPE directive is added to the XHTML, now .NET will download the full DTD from W3 just to parse a little XHTML fragment. Not acceptable.
I’m trying to geotag the photos from my brother’s wedding using a combination of Picasa and Google Earth. I’ve done this before many times but now I do all my work from a non-admin account under Windows XP, and I’m running into a problem.
When I click the Tools | GeoTag | Geotag in Google Earth menu item, for some reason MSI is launched trying to find the Google Earth.msi in a temp directory in the admin user’s Documents and Settings folder, which obviously my non-admin account doesn’t have the privs to read. The resulting dialog box says:
The feature you are trying to use is on a network resource that in unavailable.
Click OK to try again, or choose an alternate path to a folder containing the installation package ‘Google Earth.msi’ in the box below.
Of course, the box below contains only the path into the admin’s profile folder, and there’s no option to change it or browse for an alternative. If I click cancel, the box reappears.
Last Monday, 4 August, my little brother Seth was married, and I gained a new sister, Hailey Edwards Nelson.
The photos are in the process of uploading. Find them here.
The wedding itself was great, and my family turned it into a mini-reunion. It was great seeing all my sibs in one place, and Seattle was nice (although the politics and the traffic ensure I’d never live there). I still can’t believe one of my siblings is married. We really are getting older!
Much as it pains me to admit it, my birthday is coming up soon, so I’ve put together a last-minute birthday wishlist for my family.
I’ve been aware of the frenetic activity around Twitter for at least a year now, but I refuse to use it, both because it’s hard for me to see the value of 140 character text messages and because centralized Internet services leave a bad taste in my mouth. Such is the extent of my aversion that I limped along with my own PostFix/Courier-IMAP mail system with shitty webmail clients like SquirrelMail for years before my time in Iraq convinced me there’s simply no open-source email system remotely competitive with Gmail. When I switched my domain over to Google Apps for Domains, it was with a strong sense of shame, as though I’d been beaten in some epic contest.
The difference, of course, is that I desperately need stable, performant, spam-free, accessible email. I do not desperately need Twitter.
However, I am interested in the concept, and I’m not arrogant enough to believe all those millions of Twitter fans are all wrong.
I finally decided I wanted to set up an OpenID ID attached to the URL of my personal website, apocryph.org. I just set up an account on MyOpenID, installed the Drupal OpenID URL module, and configured it to point to my MyOpenID URL.
I set OpenID Server to ‘http://www.myopenid.com/server’, OpenID Delegate to ‘http://codebloc.myopenid.com/’, and OpenID XRDS Location to ‘http://codebloc.myopenid.com/xrds’. And that was it. Now http://apocryph.org is a valid OpenID. Too easy.
Today the Supreme Court released its decision affirming Heller v. District of Columbia, finding the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own and possess a handgun for defensive purposes in one’s home.
The finding of an individual right has been widely expected in the gun rights community since oral arguments earlier this year, but the results were still a bit surprising, at least to me.
First, the court was divided 5-4, with all four liberals dissenting. If Justice Kennedy had gone the other way, we’d have a SCOTUS precedent for the collective rights interpretation of the 2A!
