Category — Uncategorized

My youngest heard a train horn (we live sort of close to some tracks – they’re about 1/4 mile away) and proclaimed “choo choo” and then started tugging on the box with all the trains in it.  So we got them out and he played with them up until bedtime.

This is my favorite train in the set, the green one’s name is Derek.  Here he is having a conversation with Sir Topham Hatt, the dude that runs the show.

Yes, I’ve lost it – I’m photographing toys.  Worse, I hated the lighting in the living room, so I broke out my lighting kit.  This was lit with a shoot through umbrella with a SB24 @ 1/4 power.

We officially got a metric ass-load of snow today.  This was the view out my front door.  That black spec near the base of the gas lamp is our mailbox.  I also got a shot out behind the house showing just how deep the snow was:

On Tuesday, a couple co-workers bet lunch that the forecast was all hype.  The over-under was 8″ with multipliers at 50% and 100%, meaning if their was under 4″ or over 16″ it meant two lunches.  Looks like Jason’s got two lunches coming his way.

Hard to believe it’s been 31 days! My youngest is sick with a fever, though once the Tylenol kicks in, he’s in good spirits, like here when he’s running trains down the hill.

Every time I use Adobe Flash, I end up feeling like a “very special” computer user, except one that is also drunk and wearing mittens. I can honestly have called myself a computer programmer of some sort since I was 7 (though I don’t list Apple Basic on my resume these days) and I’ve gotten to be a fairly competent Photoshop user, yet something about Flash is not clicking for me.

Tonight, I needed to update the banner that is on the home page at WMSE.org for an upcoming promotion they are having. It should have been pretty simple. There is a main SWF file that does the banner rotation, and I’ve edited that before, groping my way through ActionScript. It basically loads several other SWF’s to display as sort of a slideshow, but tonight I had to create a whole new SWF for it to display- nothing fancy, no animation, no video, and someone already did the artwork. Yet for the life of me it took almost an hour to figure out how to make it a clickable image. In the end, after much Googling I figured out how turn the image into an object, make it a button and set the action to getURL.

Oh yeah, WMSE has indeed updated it’s web site. I was a little premature back in December, but it’s been live now for a few weeks.  They will be promoting it on the air soon. There are still a few bugs that crop up from time to time (like random users can’t access the archives – if you’re one of them know I’m still trying to get to the bottom of it), but for the most part it is pretty solid, and is only going to get better from here.

Turns out the whole Black Mustang Club calendar issue came from Cafepress, the printer of the calendars.  They were concerned about the use of the Ford logo and contacted Ford to get approval.  Whitney Drake explained it to the club in a letter posted to their forums.

Wii Bowling last night.  One eff-ing frame away from a perfect game!

Yeah, the split in the fifth frame killed me.

Pop marketing quiz:

Q: What’s the best way to treat your most loyal customers?

A: Threaten to sue them over copyright that’s how.

It seems that Ford took this moronic move when they caught wind the Black Mustang Club shot pictures of it’s members cars and made a calendar.  They sent Cafepress a takedown notice claiming all the images in the calendar are the property of Ford. I’m so glad we turned in the wife’s Escape early before the lease ended.

I want to hear that meeting.  I’m sure it showed up on everyone’s Outlook calendar as “How to big a colossal douchebag to our best customers.”  This makes about as much sense as Harley-Davidson going after every biker dude and chick that has an H-D logo on their body. Here you have a group of customers who are so loyal to your brand, they form a club and you tell them that while they may have legal title to the vehicle, Ford still owns it.

Original BMC forum message

Update: Turns out Ford wasn’t the one that raised the stink. Cafepress was being overly cautious. BMC Forum Thread.

Omar Shahine recounts a horror story about getting stranded in Mexico with his wife and one year old thanks to Alaska Airlines massive incompetence. When was the last time you heard some one say how great an airline was? Omar’s story is not new (and he admits as much) and not isolated to Alaska Airlines. Why does air travel have to suck so bad?

I certainly don’t miss the travel I did while at Microsoft. To their credit, they contract with an awesome travel agency who’s emergency line can literally move mountains.  Our family is booked for two trips this year (the most recent we booked is my wife’s inaugural trip to Vegas later this year) and it is stories like these that have me cringing every time I think about getting on a plane.

Looks better large (click to see a large version). This is some fog coming off of the Lake Evinrude at the Milwaukee County Zoo.  I’m sure it has a name, but it escapes me right now.

Tech Notes

20D, EF-s 17-85, 1/125 @ f/9, ISO 400

I got the following email this afternoon:

I know enough that the email isn’t legit. First off, $15 sales tax on a $421.85 purchase? That works out to 3.5%. Given the purchase was listed as shipping to “Nancy L Heck, 90 Monrovia St. Beverly Hills, CA 90015 United States” I know California sales tax has to be higher than than. Secondly, a $420 bridal set?  In Beverly Hills?  Come on.

But I thought I’d see what was behind it. In this email there was a link to dispute the transaction. “OMG! I didn’t buy a Gold Bridal set! <click>” That site was hosted on an IP Address that WhoIS said belongs to Zocalo CoffeeShop. Going to the root of the site showed it was just a simple LaCie NAS device hosting a few pages for redirecting the unsuspecting user elsewhere. Something tells me there is one of these sitting with in WiFi Range of the place, sucking off of their Internet connection:

The redirect takes to to another IP address, this one with a hosting company out of Mississauga, ON. The site links into what is obviously a user directory called “test” and runs a fairly convincing looking site that looks like a PayPal login:

The sad thing is, this must still work in this day and age. Knee jerk reaction must be, I didn’t buy this, let me dispute it. If one person falls for it, their bank account could be gone in seconds, and that is all they are hoping for. This person somehow got around a few spam filters as the message was in my inbox. Meanwhile, some coffee shop probably doesn’t know it is helping harvest PayPal passwords.

It took me all of five minutes of looking at what was hosted on those sites and querying WhoIS (for the love of all that his holy, never go to those sites with scripting turned on in your browser - I use the awesome NoScript plugin for FireFox.)  It took me long to gather the screen shots and post this entry.

It just goes to show if you’ve got WiFi at home, you should secure it – you never know who could be using it. Last night, the neighbor kid knocked on the front door asking if he could have the password for our network so he could use his new iPod Touch he got for Christmas. I told him no. I like the kid and all, and he saved me the pain of mowing the lawn this past summer, but you never can be too safe. Plus with as cheap as WiFi routers are these days, for the price of a few tracks off of iTunes you too can be living the wireless life.