If you were expecting some big year-in-review … well, you’re not getting it.

But you can do it yourself. I personally recommend a more in-depth look at my 2004 archives of greater import than the blather than you see here on IJSM.org.

[Note: if I were a nice guy, I would probably have my archive pages set up to pull the title and an excerpt. I'm not a nice guy, though.]

Have a happy 2005. 2004 was pretty good to me; I hope that it was to you, as well. If your 2004 sucked, well, you can use the arbitrariness of a new calendar year to give you a sense that there are new possibilities. If you feel the sting of my sarcasm, understand that I’m one of these people who think that every day is a new chance at changing, but that change comes over many days. I’m cynically positive like that.

Tonight, I will watch my first real, live NBA basketball game.

I’m way geeked.

I’m thankful that Stephen is going with me to keep me awake on the way to and from the game. It’ll be a little bit of a late night driving back, but this is going to be fun!

I’m leaving soon to go home, do a couple things, and grab my digicam. I’m sure I won’t get great shots—we have pretty good but not floor-level seats—but this needs documentation!

Jerry Orbach, one of my favorite character actors, has died as a result of prostate cancer.

Said to Gareth yesterday:

Y’know, I used to get sinus infections about every six to eight weeks and have a real good and nasty sinus headache about once every two or three months. Now, I get the sinus headaches very regularly, and I haven’t had a sinus infection for a year or so.

I seem to have fought this infection fairly well, and I could tell when I got up in the middle of the night that I was getting to the big breakup of it … which ends up looking and sounding very nasty. I’ll just leave it there.

But if I’m loopy for the next day or two—well, loopier than normal—you’ll understand.

Like I told Jeff and Amy earlier:

I ran UPDATE phpbb_posts SET poster_id = 861 WHERE poster_id =701; when I should have run UPDATE phpbb_posts SET poster_id = 861 WHERE poster_id =710;

The only problem is that user 701 is kinda prolific … when I saw “2206 Rows Affected”, I groaned. This should have been, oh, five rows.

By the end of the week, I’m going to have a script to do the two-phpBB-accounts-into-one merge for me. This is the first time I’ve really screwed it up, and I don’t want to do this again!

Two Firefox tweaks I will always do:

1. Set network.cookie.maxNumber to 65535 to get virutally unlimited cookies.
2. Add support for HTTP pipelining to make your requests go in series rather than parallel.

The latter may not make sense to those of you who don’t think about how pages are put together and transferred over HTTP. If you think of the page being broken up into objects—images, text blocks, stylesheets, etc.—you’d rather utilize your bandwidth by taking as many separate requests as you can in simultaneously, rather than downloading image #1, image #2, etc.

Post any Firefox about:config tweaks you think that I should consider using here.

For new TiVo users—like my brother ;)—a compendium of good online resources for learning about your new toy.

… has to be getting food shipped up to you in orbit so you don’t have to come home early.

This Permanent Manned Capability thing is important to me, and I’m glad that we’re going to be able to keep it up a while longer. I’m hopeful that I will again not wake for a day when we don’t have homo sapiens not tied to Earth’s surface by gravity.

There were 297 attempts to comment in the 54 or so hours I was away from home … on IJSM.org alone. I have 363 unread emails in another account, the vast majority of which I presume are also spam attempts.

I think I did the right thing in following my gut instinct. Now I need to write up a shell script to automate this for me as a “vacation” mode, since I have multiple installs to safeguard. If anyone is interested, I will be happy to pass the shell script along.

This time, I’ve followed my gut instinct: all my WordPress are currently set to make me approve any comments before they are published. Every once in a while, the comment spammers figure out a new combination that slips past my defenses, and I’m just not interested in that happening while I’m off enjoying time with family.

How’s that for a big ol’ lump of coal for the comment spammers?

I’ll remove 100% moderation when I get back on Sunday night. To you and yours, a Merry Christmas from me.

For those of you office workers who are unmotivated today, Christmas Eve Eve, I present: Macromedia’s Holiday 2004 Penguin Diving Competition.

Yes, now you can launch penguins into the sky, make them spin, and enter the water with the skill and élan of Greg Louganis!

Or not.

Either way, you’ll get through the afternoon now, trying to get a perfect 30.

[And yes, I will bring up that motivation equation from now until the time I stop Weblogging. Dammit, I'm proud of that entry!]

[HT to Sarah.]

Well, I just got a stay in something I was dreading. Yesterday afternoon, there was a rumor floating about that upper management on my contract was mad at the incompetence of one of the NASA field centers—the one in Florida—and was considering sending someone from my company there to conduct an inspection of a troublesome part.

I volunteered, mainly because I’m the only single guy on our contract. [I'm also junior.] I found out just now that nothing will happen this week.

As my boss said, “Our luck … we’d send you down there, and then something would happen and you couldn’t fly home before Christmas.” He’d be right … that is about our luck right now.

Personally, I think I’d tell corporate to kiss my butt, and I’d just drive the rental car to Mississippi from Florida.

It’s gonna get reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeal interesting as 12 May gets closer and closer. [Not that I believe a 12 May RTF launch date, but anyway.]

Back in October, Anil Dash pointed me to a great essay by Chris Anderson: The Long Tail. Anil has come through again, pointing to Anderson’s new project The Long Tail. Anderson is seemingly so enraptured by this phenomenon that he’s created as a follow-on resource to that article. He’s subtitled it “A public diary on the way to a book”, one that, if published, I would personally pre-order.

Man, the last 24 hours with me and computers have sucked.

First: Our DSL connection at home is dying. Back when Mark was here, we upgraded the firmware [his idea]. On Sunday night, when I’d get five minutes’ connectivity before losing synch, I decided to upgrade the firmware on my modem. No change. Last night, I call Bellsnot Tech Support … to discover that it’s been outsourced to Bangalore. That’s fine, but “Kevin”, I know that’s not your real name. Be real with me, people. [Poor guys ... trying to understand ignorant rednecks at three A.M. after a half-case of Natty Light ... these people need hazard pay. I don't understand said rednecks, and I live here.]

So, after a half-hour of me convincing the guy that I know what the hell I’m talking about—yes, there are lights, yes, here’s what they say, no, there’s no apparent problem with the modem, because I went to the manufacturer’s sight, grabbed a PDF of the manual, and did some studying up!—I pull the modem out from behind the router and plug it into my switch. :shudder: The tech tells me of this nice private IP to hit to configure the modem, and we change it to Always ON from On Demand.

Sadly, this doesn’t help.

I get angry, bite the head off of the next person I talk to on the phone [sorry again, Jamie], and proceed to wax the computer in Madden 2005 a couple of times to make me feel better. Still unconnected, I go to bed.

I get here to work today, and then I find that … suddenly … my feeds are gone! WTF?! Thank Providence for backups … one-click restore is nice. Note to self; do a nightly SQL dump from now on.

I hate computers. I hate Bellsnot. As much as I hate Knology, I’m going to see if they have a modem I can pick up on my way home tonight, and if they do, I’ll be a cable modem user again.

This is ridiculous.

Jeff has some great thoughts on the subject of Christmas.

Aunt Linda and Uncle Ed had brought us to the party and there we got to sit on Santa’s lap and tell him what we wanted for Christmas and we’d receive some various small candies, toys, and trinkets. After only about thirty seconds on Santa’s lap, I had come to the clear conclusion. This wasn’t Santa, this was Uncle Ed. Even at that young age, my tiny little mind “got it” and it’s bounced around in my head for twenty-five years.

• Santa isn’t a real person.
• Uncle Ed was doing this because he loved these children and he loved me.

Amen, Jeff.

Looks like the contract people finally got it together and added contractual support for using SpaceHAB’s Integrated Cargo Carriers on upcoming ISS logistics support missions. Definitizing this was a frustration for just about everybody involved—which didn’t include me, because, thankfully, my bit of the unpressurized world doesn’t include SpaceHAB [for now, anyway].

I only wish that I could tell you what we just heard is coming down the pike. It would easily be the highest-profile project I’ve worked on to-date. If we get the work—and I bet we will, given the constraints of the job—my life will turn into a work-based black hole early next year until it’s done. But it’s pee-my-pants-and-drool-all-over-myself cool. So here’s hoping.

“The only stupid question is the one that goes unasked.” –unattributed.

I often say the above, and it’s true. Today, it’s true for this reason:

Geof: I have a question for you, my iPod-owning friend: can I mount/dock my iPod and play songs from it over my computer with iTunes? [in essence making it a temporary external HD]
Smiley: (nod)
Geof: Well, damn. Why didn’t someone tell me?!
Smiley: You never asked

Now I want an iPod.

No apologies or lame BS about how I haven’t written lately. Let’s just jump in to a discussion I want to foment.

This past weekend, I had the great, glorious fun of helping shepherd 30 of my Internet friends around Nashville. Ostensibly we were there for Andrew Peterson’s annual Christmas concert—in which he and some of his awesome Nashville musician friends gather to retell the great story of the birth of the Christ child—but truly, we were there for fellowship. Don’t believe me? A number of people—Mark, Katey, Morgan, David, and Susan all come to mind—came for part of the weekend and didn’t even go to the show [all due to scheduling conflicts]. They all drove or flew to Nashville just to … hang out. None of them spent 48 hours in Nashville.

It’s quite amazing to me what has happened to this little community. I have my part in that, because I was the first person nuts enough to say, “Let’s get together for the sake of getting together.” That went well, and a dozen or so gatherings have occurred since—some around shows, some just because we want fellowship.

There’s a large contingent of folks that feel left out of what we just shared together. I have words for them: gather on your own! Here’s all it takes:

• A date.
• A place to stay. It should be as inexpensive as possible; if it isn’t inexpensive, it should be a place where everyone can gather together in order to attenuate the “Man, it sucks that we have to pay to stay here!” factor. On this score, your apartment is not so good, but your local state park with cabins is good.
• An idea of a couple of things to do and a couple of places to go and eat. You don’t have to plan the whole thing out; you just have to give the event some semblance of something to do.

Really, that’s it. We’re all just looking for a reason to get together. The first .net meeting was held here in Huntsville, at the state park atop the mountain on which I live. I rented two cabins for the weekend. You might not can afford that, but if you can mass the credit and have people chip in, it’s not so bad. [They're going to likely pay more for travel anyway.] I pitched it with this idea: UAH had home hockey that weekend. I could score us free tickets. We’d get together, get to know each other, watch some hockey, eat together, stay up late tossing movie quotes back and forth—well, that is if you’re Trey and Chrissy, who quoted So I Married An Axe Murderer for hours on end—and generally have a good time. We went bowling, and we didn’t plan to do so. We planned to go to church together, and we didn’t.

It was a success, and it started the ball rolling.

Since then, I’ve gone to Lynchburg, VA; Memphis, TN; Tuscaloosa, AL [willingly!]; Muscle Shoals, AL; Atlanta, GA; and Nashville, TN to gather with these people. Other gatherings have happened in TX and NC without my presence. [My presence isn't required. If you're waiting on me to attend, you're in trouble!] A CA gathering was attempted, but that’s a big state to gather together.

Other folks have whined about not being involved. They need to suck it up and just get together with the people in their area. That’s what the NC people did—they gathered the bulk of themselves together, had a little fellowship one weekend afternoon, and enjoyed themselves.

This should happen more often. It’s just not that hard to pull off!

WordPress version 1.2.2 is now available for download.

I never even got my 1.2.1 upgrade done!

Looks like Matt’s threat hasn’t held true yet.

I’m back.

I have many things to say, and I might say them soon. I’m in a massive writing funk.

But while I’m here, I must say that I agree with USA Today:

Andrew Peterson, Behold the Lamb of God. Magical and moving, this “true tall tale of the coming of Christ” is the perfect antidote for the 732nd playing of Jingle Bell Rock.

Go buy Behold the Lamb of God now.

This week kicked my ass.

Not to say that it wasn’t good.

It’s just that my ass was kicked.

Good things happened; Jessica and Doug had birthdays.

This weekend will be great. Lots of .net people descending upon Nashville. Mass insanity.

I’ve got a telecon to listen to while I pack, and then I myself will descend upon Nashville.

Nashville is not ready for this jelly.

I’ve just gotten another great tool in my comment spam-fighting arsenal: Kitten’s Spam Words.

There’s nothing like queueing up a bunch of comment spam attempts, clicking ‘em down, and then having the particulars of the spam attempt—email address, IP, URLs, author name [usually a spam word itself]—all dumped in the moderation tripwire system in WordPress. Considering that IPs get dumped, it really does well when combined with Dougal’s TarPit.

Oh, and it doesn’t add duplicates, either.

I think I’m in love. [Why have I waited so long to use this?!]

When Lena and Kristy got bounced from The Amazing Race, Season 6, because Lena looked through approximately 100 hay bales without finding a clue, it was a really bad day for her.

How bad?

The probability of zero successes in 100 tries in a field where there are 20 clues in 270 hay bales is around 0.045%.

That’s damn unlucky.