I haven’t written in quite some time in my personal blog – over 2 years!! I’ve just migrated the blog from Movable Type to WordPress and I will try to post ramblings at least every other week.
The posts from my old blog have been brought over but there’s probably formatting, etc which has been lost. I’m not going to go back and mess with all the old content but it’s here. I might mess a bit with the style/theme of this site until I’m happy with it, though I’m not a very “visual” person so it’s less about the colors and more about the content.
Here we go….
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Feb 2nd and 3rd 2008 was a PERFECT weekend.
It started out on Saturday with my youngest daughter winning her playoff basketball game. That was followed by my older daughter and a trip to Reading PA for a cheerleading tournament where they came in 1st for their division. They then came in 1st out of 27 teams for their level as the grand champion for their level with the highest score.
Then comes Sunday and Super Bowl XLII. It was our NY Giants against the undefeated and heavily favored New England Patriots. In what turned out to be a low scoring first 3 quarters, the 4th quarter made up for it with the Giants scoring a TD to go ahead, followed by the Patriots scoring a TD to go ahead with 2:42 left. What happened next was a drive every Giant fan (and probably every Patriot fan) will forever remember. Great catches and plays by Manning and 5 different receivers with the most amazing play of all being Manning escaping from being sacked to throw a jump ball to David Tyree who caught it against his helmet and somehow was able to hold onto it. Another pass and an easy pass to Plaxico Burress in the end zone to complete the most amazing drive in Giants history.
A PERFECT win to wreck the Patriots PERFECT season to end a PERFECT weekend.
After obtaining my Technician Class amateur radio license back in August, I picked up a book to study for the General Class license. It’s a much more technical test with more questions on specific frequencies, power, components of receivers and transmitters, antennas and general electronics. I definitely didn’t study as much as I would have liked, and I didn’t ace the test this time missing 4 of the 35 questions (out of over 480 possible questions), but that is well within the passing level. So at the BARA Hamfest at Westwood High School, I became a General Class Amateur Radio licensee. Thanks to the BARA VE’s for randomly picking out a good test for me to take. The asked if I was interested in the Extra test, but I just laughed. That will take some serious studying.
Since getting my license the beginning of August I joined BARA – Bergen Amateur Radio Association – which is a local amateur radio group that meets in Ridgewood, NJ. I also participated in my first contest which was the ARRL 2007 September VHF QSO Party.
I have always been interested in scanners and ham radios. Over this past summer I finally said I was going to do it and studied for the first level ham radio license. In early August I successfully passed and received my Technician Class license.
Within a couple days of passing, I was automatically assigned callsign KC2SAU. They allow folks to pick their own vanity callsign so I applied for K2DSL and just received approval. So, on the airwaves, I’m K2DSL.
Every once in a while, the quickest way to do something is go back to using an old DOS Batch command. Every time I know I’ve done something similar before, I can never find where I did it and I hunt around looking. I figured I’d post an example or two here so I know where to find them in the future.
Both the commands below expect a file called filelist.txt to contain a list of file names to process.
Command 1:
for /f “tokens=*” %%a in (filelist.txt) do @xcopy /y “%%a” “.\%%~pa” >nul
processes each row in filelist.txt in the format of:
Y:\directory\file1.htm
and copies file1.htm from a network share to .\directory on the current drive.
Command 2:
@echo off
for /f “tokens=*” %%a in (filelist.txt) do IF NOT EXIST %%a ECHO %%a
pause
processes each row in filelist.txt and checks to see if it physically exists in the current directory. If not, it outputs the name of the missing file to the command window.
I don’t know if these will help anyone else, but I know I’ll be able to find these examples quicker in the future!
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The normal train I take, and the car I ride in (along with a co-worker I commute with) derailed this morning. I got an email from the co-worker right after it happened. I happened not to be on the train today and working from home because of an appointment.
They just showed it on TV with 3 cars off the tracks and 2 leaning up against a pole. 150 people reported on the train and no injuries. Here’s a link to the first report by ABC on their web site – NJ Transit train derails.
For a change, I was in the right place at the right time.
My kids love pets. We have a cat for a few years now. Our neighbor has lots of pets. One cat named Rusty hung out with our cat a lot. It got to the point that whenever the house door was open, Rusty would come in. The kids really got attached to it and when the neighbors mentioned they might move, the kids wanted us to adopt Rusty. I said absolutely not! One cat is enough, plus Rusty already had a family.
A week ago, my wife was putting out the trash and I was on the train home from work. She turned around and the neighbors cat was dead on our lawn. I don’t think anyone knows what happened and why Rusty died, but my wife and the kids were heartbroken. She was balling when she called me to tell me. My one daughter was home but my other daughter wasn’t and I had to tell her when she came home. I can’t even imagine what will happen when our cat goes. Hopefully it will be a long, long, long time.
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I looked to see if the software I use was upgraded and it was so I backed things up and upgraded. Then I looked and the last time I posted anything was the previous time I upgraded the software. I guess I fall into the “Not a very active blogger” category.
So what has happened in the past 6 months? Launched a few new platforms at work with a great team of developers. The commute still isn’t bad which I’m sure shocks everyone that knows me more then it shocks me.
Went on an awesome Alaska cruise/vacation that was worth every penny, though I don’t want to know how many pennys it was. Over 3,000 pictures were taken in the 2.5 weeks we were on vacation.
Found geocache #600 though I didn’t do as much caching over this summer then I have in the past.
My little brother Barry has been on a couple more TV shows, the last being a good part on Windfall with Luke Perry.
The girls are ready to head back to school as 6th and 7th graders. Boy I’m getting old.
That’s it until next time and hopefully not the next time I upgrade the blog software.
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I know I haven’t posted recently. I guess I haven’t thought of anything to post others might benefit from. Well yesterday, it was raining all day so I figured I wasn’t going anywhere so why not update the software I use for this blog – Movable Type.
I’m pretty disappointed in the support they have previously provided for the Windows platform which is what my hosting is (by choice). Things never go smoothly with their upgrades which is why I typically wait weeks or months before upgrading in order to have enough people work through the problems that I can find solutions or workarounds on their support forums.
It looked like things were going smooth enough with the recent update to give it a shot. I downloaded and unzipped the install. Read the readme which referenced a web page. Their documentation is definitely lacking and I feel relies too much on the knowledge people have if they are intimately familiar with the software. I think that’s fine if I lived for blogging, but it’s just a tool I use to post. I backed everything up and then uploaded the new version after tweaking the config file. It didn’t work which based on my past experiences with this software wasn’t much of a surprise.
So I search the forums and find some hits on my problem. Some were involved and some were a bit more straightforward. I chose the option to edit the CGI files vs contact my webhost to make a change. I added a code snippet to the top of each CGI file (maybe 12-15 of them) and got past that problem. It wasn’t over yet…
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It must be wrong if you read/heard it on the Internet
Comments off · Posted by admin in Tech
I listened to a (not to be named) podcast on the commute home last night. It was the first podcast for this particular show I listened to and it was because of the recommendation from another podcaster that I subscribed (free) to this new one.
As I’m listening, I start noticing inaccuracies that are being made. This show is hosted and co-hosted by people that are (or are professing to be) computer experts. Now everyone can’t know everything about the Internet, but if you’re going to say something, one would hope you’re relatively certain about it, and with multiple “experts” participating, you think they’d correct any misstatements one of the others on the show made. Well, they didn’t, and it bothered me.
So imagine 10′s of thousands of people that listen to this, and yes their audience is this large, walking away with incorrect information on multiple topics. And then these people tell others and before you know it, the misinformation starts to spider out.
Now this info was relatively harmless though it was all about one web site – Google. Some of the misinformation was you couldn’t search Google and select only relevant content in a site, but you could on Yahoo. Well as long as I can remember, you could add site:somedomain.com to your search query and it will return just pages within that domain (or subdomain if you further qualify the site feature). You can also type it in on the advanced search form on Google where there’s an existing spot for limiting searches to a specific domain.
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