Category Archives: Living

Tech Tricks

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Here are a few low-tech computer tricks I’ve started doing lately:

  • I’ll periodically bump the wrong keys and find keyboard shortcuts that I didn’t know existed for sending an e-mail mid-sentence. It’s one thing when you’re e-mailing a friend ramblings about cheese (they may even be glad the e-mail got cut short?), but when you start e-mailing important people, it becomes a bigger deal. The last thing you want to do is e-mail the chief of police and say, “I’m working on an article and I’d like to mee”… The simple ‘fix’ is to not let your e-mail program dictate how you compose a message. The “To:” line comes first. Do it last, so you can’t mess up.
  • When attaching files, do it before you write the e-mail. I can’t believe how often people (myself very much included) send e-mails referring to attachments, but forget to add the attachment. If you can get in the habit of making attaching the file first, it’s a lot harder to mess up.
  • When downloading things from the Internet, always, always, always click “Save” instead of “Open.” I tend to do Open instead, because it seems like a needless step to save it to the Desktop and then open it. But in the past week I’ve lost two files because I click “Open” on a draft someone sends me. I spend a long time revising it, and hit Save every minute or so. But it gets saved to a temp directory that’s virtually impossible to find. Today I spent considerable time poking around the directories, and found that what’s stored is VERY limited. If you’ve visited any sites after you last saved the file, it’s practically assured that your file is 100% gone, because the cache will get purged. As I’ve said before, I’d consider this a fatal design flaw, and I can’t believe more people don’t have problems with this. So always, always, always save to your Desktop and then open. And, if you’re working on a file and about to close, don’t close it unless you’re positive you know where the file is being saved.

All of these are things that take some time getting used to. But I think they’re like, say, using a PDA: you have to commit to doing it 100%, or it’s utterly useless. If your calendar doesn’t contain everything you’re doing, it’s worse than having no calendar at all. I need to work on automatically clicking that “Save” box when downloading a file, and I need to work on re-ordering, into a non-intuitive way, the way I write e-mails. But if I can get the habit down right, the first time, in mid-sentence, I get an error that I can’t send an e-mail with no recipient named, it’s paid off. And the first time I don’t lose an hour’s worth of revisions and additions, it’s paid off.

Comic Critic

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A review of the Sunday comics…

  • Dilbert: An employee needs to ask his VP a question, but is told he can’t talk directly to them. Rank: something slightly short of a smile.
  • Opus: Too long to read.
  • Get Fuzzy: one animal repeatedly throws rice and blasts the other in the face with an airhorn. Rank: slight grin.
  • Ask Shagg: Facts about squid. With a joke about them playing ping-pong. Rank: less than a smile.
  • Zits: Jeremy has fantasies about his guidance counselor. Because she’s female. Rank: shrug.
  • Monty: Monty shares demotivational sayings with his parrot which has a motivational calendar. Rank: smile.
  • For Better or Worse: The kids set their clocks back. One is shocked that his toy, broken within the hour, is still broken. Rank: eyeroll.
  • Bizarre news story called “What is Innovations?” Not read because it’s not a comic, and because the grammar is abysmal.
  • Curtis: A kid doesn’t do his homework and is honest. He gets sent to the principal’s office. Rank: sigh because it’s boring, and because no one goes to the principal’s office for not doing their homework.
  • Mother Goose & Grimm: Two characters in prison, one remarks to the other, “I’m doing forty years to life. I swiped a $50,000 stapler from the Pentagon.” Rank: smile.
  • Foxtrot: Too lame and complex to summarize. Rank: bleh.
  • The Family Circus: the kid is counting nuts. “I’m making sure less than half of these nuts are peanuts,” he says. Rank: smile, because it’s something I’d do.
  • Non Sequitur: It’s seven paragraphs of text. Skipping. Rank: F, for “Failed to even understand the assignment.”
  • Rose is Rose: Some crazy lady confuses her with someone else. Rank: bleh. Might have been better if it was earlier in the comics.
  • Adam at Home: Two people get each other’s business cards. Rank: Can I have my time back?
  • Rhymes with Orange: Innovations in child care. Rank: Shrug. I’ve seen worse.
  • F Minus: A kid turns 14. His friends gossip that he’s 13 but his parents are superstitious. Rank: It’s not an F minus, but it’s no A, either.
  • Princess of Ai-land: Huh? Way too much to read. Rank: Didn’t even read it.
  • Stone Soup: Someone says she hopes her daughter doesn’t end up in therapy. Lots of people in the bar say they’re in therapy. Rank: I thought comics were supposed to be funny?
  • Arlo & Janis: The second comic about Daylight Savings Time. These ones joke, “I’d rather sleep late than go to bed early.” Rank: shrug. Which is becoming one of the highest compliments for a comic.
  • Doonesbury: Someone asks someone else for $5K for a motorcycle. The other guy rambles about how unsafe motorcycles are. Rank: F, for “Failed to even try to be funny.”
  • Zippy: I don’t even get this one. Rank: F-.

Conclusion: I’ve laughed more watching the Patriots in the first five minutes of the game. And nothing funny has happened. I thought comics were supposed to be funny.

Overcoming Errors

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I just updated PHP and Apache on this machine. Gentoo seems to have changed the way they do some things… But a few notes along the way, since there isn’t much in the way of helpful links out there…

  • I kept getting this error: 
    apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1 for ServerName
No Listening Sockets Available, shutting down.
Unable to open logs
    The usual suggestion with the “No listening sockets available” is that port 80 is being used by something else. Maybe Apache hasn’t actually shut down and you’re trying to restart it. However, in my case, I had made very certain that nothing was on port 80. The problem is actually caused by the fact that, after an upgrade, the “Listen” directive randomly goes missing. Tucking “Listen 80” into the top of a virtual host fixed everything.
  • Keep backups of all your config files. I screwed up and let them be rewritten as I upgraded Apache.

E-mail Gates

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This is surely not a revolutionary idea, but I’ve never seen references to it before. I forward my mail to my GMail account. I do own two domain names with mail services, though, but I just forward what I need to my GMail account.

Some sites require an e-mail address to sign up, and they send you a confirmation e-mail, so it needs to be real. However, I have no interest in letting them e-mail me long-term. The general solution is a “throw-away address.” You use it once and then delete it.

Here’s an idea that seems a little less wasteful to me. I call it an e-mail gate. I can set up a forwarder pretty easily. As long as I’m logged in, it’s just a few seconds of work. I can also remove a forwarder in a few second’s time.

So you might have an address like matt@gate01.ttwagner.com. (This sub-domain doesn’t even exist right now, so don’t bother trying it.) I can “open the gate” (turn the forwarder on), sign up on the site, get my confirmation e-mail, and then “close the gate” by turning the e-mail off. Consequentially, any crap they send will bounce back with a “No such address” message. But when I want to get e-mail or a lost password reminder, I can just turn the gate on for a minute. Unless you’re getting inundated with spam (e.g., tens of thousands a day), opening the gate for under a minute won’t be enough time for much crap to get through. Unlike throwaway addresses, you can use the same address as multiple sites, making it easy to remember what address you used.

It’d be neat to write some code to give a web-based interface to this. I think I need to get it working with some mail daemon that supports a MySQL database of users, though, since it currently involves putting the address in a text file, updating the address cache, removing it, and then updating the cache again. It’s quick if you’ve got a shell open, but it’s a bit of a pain to script.

Being a Smart Millionaire

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Like many people, I’d like to be extraordinarily wealthy some day. Between a string of business ideas that I’m convinced would make me fantastically wealthy, and the lottery which never seems to work out in my favor, I have lots of occasions to hope I’m rich.

Of course, as a millionaire, there are lots of extravagant purchases I’d like to make. But I think you can make them a lot less extravagant.

For example, I’m a nut about keeping my car really, really clean. It’d be nice to build a really nice auto garage, where I could do detailing, and maybe even hire a mechanic to keep up my cars. So why not buy a failing auto garage business somewhere, fix it up to millionaire-pet-project standards, and then put it in business? It might not be profitable, but it’ll at least defray the costs of running it just for your own use.

And what millionaire doesn’t own a limo or two? There are some seemingly-rare models for sale right now. So you pick them up, and start a limo company. You can make sure not to over-schedule them so that there’s always one available for your use, but when you’re not using them, they’re making you money. Again, it might take a long time to be profitable. But you view it like how I viewed the first hosting company I started: I wanted the server for myself, and if I could get people to subsidize the cost by buying space, great. It’d be great if I someday made a profit, but if I just ended up having use of a dedicated server on the cheap, that’s great too.

You can even work philanthropy in this model. Merrimack’s library is badly in need of a new building. I bet we can find a neighboring town that shares our need, too. So you build a really, really nice library somewhere, merge the two libraries, and donate it to the town. But, when you build the library, you build in a few spaces for a coffee shop and deli. And, as part of the donation, you own rights to put in retail shops there in perpetuity. Will you ever make enough to pay off the library? I doubt it. But getting a little income from a philanthropic donation? That’s nothing to complain about!

If you weren’t too picky about people using some of your properties, you could even apply this “semi-business, semi-personal toy” model to real estate. As a multi-millionaire, I’d love a few vacation homes. For example, this would be a great retreat /vacation home. But I’d only use it for a few weeks at a time. This‘d be awesome, too. Add some oceanfront property and maybe a winter retreat in a tropical location. But a lot of them you won’t live in for more than a few weeks at a time. So you file a corporation, have it own your vacation homes, and rent them out most of the time. Of course, you keep your personal property in your main home. And the others are just awesome vacation homes. And when you’re not using them (which is most of the time!) you’re renting them out, paying off at least the costs of maintaining the homes and paying their tax bills. And, ideally, making owning them a little less expensive.

Granted, I don’t quite have the money to buy a slew of vacation properties, or start a limo company, or buy a private room in Internap’s Boston data center. But if I do, you can bet that I’ll be gaming my purchases to try to make me a little money, too.

Zombie Music

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Now that I’ve gone over how to defend yourself against zombies, I have a shorter list. As always seems to happen with zombies, you’re going to have a couple times when you fight a huge wave of them. And, well, everything is better with music. If you’re taking over a Costco in the event of a zombie invasion, it might be neat to play the music over the PA system. Keep a playlist on your iPod or whatever dedicated to the occasion. Here’s what I recommend for the playlist:

  • “Living Dead Girl” by Rob Zombie
  • “The Blue Wrath” by I Monster (this might be good for when they first start. It’s, not very coincidentally, the intro song to Shawn of the Dead)
  • “Gone Guru” by Lifeseeker. I’m not entirely fond of the song, but it’s perfect for situations like, say, if some of your other humans become psychopathic and start shooting at you from a Jeep. There’s some foul language in this song, so if you’re slaughtering zombies side-by-side with small children, you may want to skip this song.
  • “Song 2” by Blur. Unfortunately, this song wasn’t featured in a zombie movie or video game, nor does it have “zombie” in its title. But if you’re about to run out of music in the middle of fighting zombies, it’s better than having Hillary Duff come on.
  • “Kerncraft 400” by Zombie Nation. This has a good rhythm if you’ve got the slaying down to a science. Put it mid-way in the playlist for when you’ve already found your groove. It’s also good if you’re driving a truck around running zombies over.
  • “Bodies” by Drowning Pool. This isn’t my type of music, but it’s perfect for the occasion. This is what got me through to the “Zombie Genocide” achievement in Dead Rising.
  • Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” isn’t bad, either. While you’re busy fighting zombies you might be too distracted to notice that the lyrics really don’t make any sense.

WBC

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Here’s a fun story. The Westboro Baptist Church was ordered to pay $10.9 million in Maryland after they were sued for protesting at the funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq. These are the “God Hates Fags” people, the “Thank God for AIDS” people, the “Thank God for IEDs” (Improvised Explosive Devices) people, and even the “Thank God for 9/11” people. Oh, and “Thank God for Dead Miners.”

They plan to appeal, but frankly, everything I’ve seen suggested that they have some pretty bad counsel. Their counsel, by the way, seems to consist of some of their members. (But if it can be overturned in a matter of minutes as Phelps said, why did they lose in the first place?)

From what I’ve read, their belief is basically that they — a very small church that the Baptist church has been careful to distance itself from — are the only ones in God’s favor, and that every bad event in the world is God taking vengeance on homosexuals and society’s tolerance of them. Shockingly, they haven’t been well-received anywhere they went.

Police Trivia

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Through the school paper, I’ve been talking with some of the supervisors in Campus Police. The guy I interviewed last night is the perfect person to interview: you ask him a question and he’ll talk for a while, so it’s not a round of 20 Questions. Some of what he said isn’t really relevant to the article I’m working on, but it’s really neat anyway.

For example, would you ever have thought that:

  • Repeated studies have shown that an officer whose shoes aren’t shined is significantly more prone to being attacked? Not, presumably, because criminals secretly have major OCD, but because, on a subconscious level, it communicates that the officer is not at the top of their game. Or at least that’s what researchers have theorized.
  • If you’re an officer with a holstered gun, and someone comes at you with a knife, if they’re closer than 21 feet, they’re going to stab you before you can fire. This one surprises me a lot. Five feet and I could see them lunging at you. But 21 feet seems like an incredible distance. I remarked about how surprisingly high that was, and he told me that they periodically demonstrate it at the range: someone stands (well off to the side so they don’t get shot) 21 feet away, and, when a signal is giving, the officer pulls his gun and fires at a target, and the guy 21 feet away starts running. Every single time, he’s past the shooter before they get off their first shot.

I Live in a Web Browser

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I don’t know why I keep eying quad-core systems. With the exception of playing music, copying files from my camera, some word processing, and IM, I live in a web browser. Here are some of the big uses:

  • GMail, my mail client. When I’m at my computer, I almost always have GMail up. I have a client for my Treo that lets me check it there. My school e-mail forwards to GMail. My ttwagner.com and n1zyy.com mail forwards to there.
  • Google and Wikipedia. I rely on Wikipedia way too much. But between Google and Wikipedia, I feel like I can do anything.
  • Google Docs is slowly winning me over. I move between my laptop, ‘public’ Office 2007 computers, and an office computer with Office 2003, so I’m hardly sold on any one particular interface. Google Docs is word processing (and spreadsheets) without the crap, although sometimes I do prefer to have it locally. But honestly, my life depends on the Internet, so ‘safety’ of files (in case I lose Internet access) really isn’t even one of the big issues.
  • Google Calendar has proved way more useful than I expected. It integrates nicely with GMail, sending me reminders and offering to let me schedule things that get e-mailed to me. And Goosync gives me an app on the Treo to sync my Treo calendar with my Google calendar. Bliss!
  • All my good photos end up on Flickr, and I buy and sell stuff on eBay often. I get my news through BBC and Google News.
  • I run a private Wiki. This is more useful than I ever imagined. I’m not quite as committed to it as I’d like, but I’m trying to keep all my class notes up there, which has a lot of benefits. During research, it’s a handy link dump. When drafting a constitution for a club here, I used that to allow collaborative editing.
  • I host a few mailing lists. Trying to keep a text file with 90 names and e-mail them and remove bounces and find people is a pain. Mailman is a savior.
  • I host multiple blogs. These are obvious, but there are some more I’m starting.
    • One, that never caught on, takes a pretty literal definition: a web log. I wanted a way for us to keep track of petty things that were going on, and have everything logged somewhere and searchable.
    • I’m also drafting one for the Democrats. A big part of what we do is outreach/publicity, and a blog is ideal for this.
  • Tonight I realized that none of my ‘task management’ systems worked. So I set up Mantis. It’s not perfect, but it works pretty well. Setting up Bugzilla is pretty intense, but no so with Mantis. The “problem” is that it was intended for software bug tracking, not keeping track of work I have to do, so I have fields like “Reproducibility” and other holdovers from software. I may do a little tweaking. But my plan is that anything I have to do should end up in there. Everything is in one place, and I can slice the data a million different ways, by priority, by category (one for each class, one for each club, one for each major class project, one for “Life”), etc.

Truly, without Firefox and a browser on my Treo, I don’t think I could get by. And I sometimes wonder if it’s worth paying monthly for a dedicated server. But I get so much benefit from the services I host for myself that it definitely is.