I’m going to rename “Wednesday” to “Waynesday”.  Any Objections?  See if you can spot the references to me in the following subsections.

Google Maps “Street View”

I suppose I have zero street cred now. Until yesterday, I’d NEVER seen “street view” on Google Maps. I use Google Maps a LOT and I just now noticed the little camera icon on some of the turns.

You click on the camera icon for the turn, and it shows you a picture of what it would look like from your car if you were right at that place!  How crazy is that!??!

That is just plain cool.  But not only that, the arrows are interactive, and can pan and zoom around so you can actually simulate the action of turning.  The visual effect is very impressive.  It’s also remarkable to me how they superimposed the blue lines onto the ground, making me think of the yellow first down markers they do for football games on TV.

I did some tests for my own home, and sure enough, it has the entrance onto my street and actually goes to my mailbox.

I assume it won’t be long before the in-car dash GPS and driving assist systems offer these visual cues.

I assume it won’t be long before the systems can display transparently on the inside of the windshield.

I assume it won’t be long before people are dependent upon the Windshield Automatic Yield Navigation Electronics (WAYNE) system to get anywhere, and the general population will lose its ability to navigate themselves in older cars.

I assume it won’t be long before the first hacker devoted to the Sun God RA, gets into the main centralized street view system, chanting “RA, RA, RA! GOD OF THE SUN!” and turns everyone’s navigation system to point them off the highway, over a side rail and right into the Sun.

SharePoint SP3 issue

We’re in the process of upgrading from SharePoint 2003 to MOSS 2007.  As part of preparation, we loaded service pack 3 on our main SharePoint 2003 server, and everything seemed fine until the next morning, when nobody could use Datasheet view on lists.

Some quick googling helped us find that this is a frequent enough issue that MS issued a hotfix.  So I did an online request for a hotfix, which assured me that I’d hear from them within 8 business hours, which is a long time when you’re paying a consultant to spend time with you onsite to help with the migration.

That’s just too long for me to wait, even WITH an awesome consultant, so some more googling resulted in what the actual “fix” was, which is to add 4 lines to the ows.js file - seems one of the service packs overwrites that file with a version that conveniently disabled activex, something Datasheet view highly depends on.  Ooops!

Which is a nice segue into our most anticipated weekly part of the series:

Best of LOLcats

I wonder if this LOLcat sent his MyCoke code to Avi.

Wow, they’re synchronized hamsters, even.

It’s the kitty that does it for me.

One of the smartest things I’ve seen in a while is the Wordpress “Recheck Queue for Spam” feature:

When I first started blogging, I thought “no big deal” because I get a notification of the spam and then I go in and mark it as spam.  Seeing as how Akismet catches tens of thousands of spam comments for me, I figured I could handle the one-off’s with no problem.

But then my blog got a little more popular and there was more comment spam.  Even though Akismet still caught the vast majority, there was still some I had to moderate because it “got through” Akismet.

Then I installed the Add Meta Tags plugin, and I noticed my blog and my posts being visited more often by Google searchers, and I welcomed the new visitors.  I was impressed by how much more visible my blog was.  And of course, comment spam went up by a LOT.  Again, Akismet caught most of it but there was a noticable increase of spam going to me for moderation. 

So while I still think my spam management tasks are minor compared to many (maybe a dozen a day in my moderation queue), I was very glad to see the little link called “Recheck Queue for Spam”.  I’m happy to report that EVERY SINGLE TIME I’ve clicked it, it has 100% removed the spam and 100% left alone the “real” comments.

What I like about this spam management system is that every time someone tags a comment as spam, Akismet get smarter.  The comments that “get past” Akismet just mean that I’m one of the first to get the comment.  After a short time (minutes, hours), Akismet wizens up and when I “recheck queue” it has learned about those comments and takes care of it for me.

Yay Akismet!

You’d think I’d be content and this would be enough.

Oh, no.

You see, I’ve also put an entry into my crontab file to automatically click the link for me every hour, so the queue automatically gets cleaned out for me and I don’t even have to click the link!  Huzzah!  I figure this way, Akismet gets smarter quicker for others as well, via the verification and removal of spam comments.  Sure, I’d probably be a better spamnetizen if I actually marked the spam as spam myself and submitted it, but who has time for that?  Hopefully someone else.

0   *   *   *   *   wget -O - -q -t 1 http://whall.org/blog/wp-admin/edit-comments.php?page=akismet-admin&recheckqueue=true&noheader=true

I started wondering why yahoo or google doesn’t offer this feature… I mean, wouldn’t it be even more beneficial in email, where you’re dealing with a much bigger influx of content, and even more value for identifying spam AFTER it’s delivered? 

Added bonus:

If you read down this far, I give you an added bonus.  The Bible says that God’s promise to mankind that he’d never again send a global flood is represented by the rainbow.  Others have said that Beer is proof that God exists.

This picture combines both ideas.

(click to enlarge)

I started a reply to Dave2 on his comment on yesterday’s post but realized I was working so much on it, it can pass for it’s own post!  See, I’m efficient like that.

If you didn’t see the post, go read the section on economy and then Dave2’s response.  I shall pick up from there.

And I feel like I’m one of the smarter, more educated citizens.  So I have to believe that *if* I’m one of the smarter citizens, that means a lot of people in the country know less than I do.

If that’s true, then it’s all the more reason for our headlines to be as unbiased as possible.  Hopefully we can agree on that.  We don’t want a forever-rosy picture painted nor do we want doom and gloom all the time.  The danger of either is the impact it has on people’s actions.  Do we scare people into hoarding?  Do we mislead them into blissful happiness so they’re not prepared?  Do we pull the wool over their eyes?  Do we get them to vote one way or the other?

So when I look at the mainstream media, I see bad news and doom-and-gloom everywhere.  But when I do some of my own digging (and yes, listening to conservative talk radio some of the time) I find mention of facts that were conveniently left out of the doom-and-gloom headlines. 

I mentioned GDP in my economic treatise, and how it’s traditionally been the measure of what a recession is, and then Dave2 let me know that sane and modern economists don’t use that measure any more.  I was unaware of this.  After all, I don’t read the economist, where they say we’ve been in a recession since last year because they’re going to choose to use GDP per head instead of GDP for the nation.  Ok, they choose that metric instead; fair enough, I suppose.

If we can’t look at GDP, can we look at unemployment?  I can spin with the best of them.  What would this graph of our unemployment rates for the last 6 years make you think?

Maybe that unemployment is at near record lows right now for the last, what, 6 years?  This is straight from the US Dept of Labor Bureau of Statistics.  (I’m using http://www.tradingeconomics.com for the neat graphs.)

What about this graph depicting the job gains and losses per month?

This shows, in hundreds of thousands, how many new jobs (in yellow) per month there were in the US and now many less jobs (in red) per month there were.  This is for an 8.5 year span, basically from a year before Bush took office until right now.

Some might look at this and say - holy crap, Bush took office in early 2001 and “look what he did” to the job market.  That looks like more than a million jobs lost!  Or maybe you could look at the graph as a whole and notice how much more the numbers are in the yellow and it’s only for the last 4 months that the job losses were negative, and they’re WAY less negative than in 2001-2003. 

April 2008’s job losses were what, 20K?  There were more than a million new jobs in 2007 alone.  In fact, I don’t think we’ve had job loss since 2003.  So we’ve had millions new people get jobs in each of the years 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007, and we’re worried about a couple dozen thousand? 

How come these “sane” economists aren’t giving us the full story?  No, instead, they say “we’re in our fourth straight month of job loss” and they use the 80,000 number and the 20,000 number in the headline to SCARE people.  Why didn’t they do a headline in November 2005 saying “359,000 more people found jobs last month“?  Or in March 2007 saying “259,000 less people looking for jobs“.  I’ll tell you why.  Because it’s POSITIVE news.  The news agencies hates positive news.

So maybe we should look at interest rates?  Here’s the overnight, 2yr and 10yr interest rates over Bush’s term so far

I’ll be frank - I have absolutely no clue what this really means.  All I know is that it was probably a really good idea to borrow money between end of 2001 and beginning of 2005, a bad idea to borrow money from 2005 to 2008, and now it’s a good idea to borrow money again.  Is that about right?

What I *do* gather, is the following.

• More people have jobs than ever before
• Lots of people spend what they shouldn’t (the credit crunch)
• Lots of people gambled on buying houses they shouldn’t (subprime debacle)
• Those people who gambled on buying houses they shouldn’t (with “interest only” loans, no less), now faced with either losing their house or going deeper in debt buying more things they shouldn’t, ended up trying to get a bailout and complaining that they’re stuck in the mess they put themselves in.
• The democratic nominees think that one way to fix this is to take away more money from successful Americans (raising taxes and a windfall profits tax)

Maybe we need some social networking site that allows people / bloggers to counter the headlines seen across the nation.  When someone claims “20,000 jobs lost in April” in a headline, something like digg or reddit allows people to point to it and expose more of the data.  Maybe it should be called perspect or wholestory.com or something, I don’t know.  I just wish it were easier for people to get MORE data without it being condensied into the headline the masses depend on for their daily opinion. 

As far as who owns the influential news sources, your claim is news to me (pardon the pun).  I didn’t know CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC and CBS were owned by conservatives (you didn’t say that; I’m inferring it).  I’ll have to check it out, but I can’t guarantee the timeline in which I do.  My quick searches resulted in a left-leaning list so far and how the Jews own it all, whatever THAT means.

Another weekly update of stuff you don’t want to MISC.  Well you liberals might want to MISC my economy comments.  I guess they could be called economents.

Iron Man

I, like many of the bloggers I read, saw Iron Man and loved it.  I classify the movie under “Movies that did not suck at all”.  I really enjoyed it.  It is PG-13, and it’s rated such, in my opinion, due to the violence.  Still, a great flick. 

Jaden’s favorite parts were the flying.  Bravo, Jaden.  Bravo.

Quick comment on economy

I wish the media would give the full story when they report stuff.  Why do I have to go looking to find out some of these things about the economy?

What I learned recently was that a “recession” is defined as two (2) quarters of negative growth in GDP (Gross Domestic Product).  I thought, based on what the media tells us, that we’re in a recession.  But when you look at 4th quarter of last year, GDP grew by 2/10ths of a percent.  In 1st quarter of this year, GDP grew by 6/10ths of a percent.  I know it’s not a lot, but it is growth, and it’s increasing.  And the stimulus checks aren’t even here yet!

In fact, maybe the media should have been saying as the headline:

GDP growth rose 300 percent quarter to quarter

It’s true, right? Oh wait, the media doesn’t like telling truths that helps people feel good.  They’d rather scare people, I think.

The only reason the media gets away with distorting the truth is because people let them.  I implore the masses (you know, the dozen or so people who will read these words) - PLEASE question the headlines you read.  The media has one main goal: sell papers. I believe the media has ulterior goals of pushing agendas, but the first goal is still enough for all of us to question the headlines.  When they report “41 children from polygamist compound found to have had broken bones”, find out what that is compared to normal kids.  If they reported all the facts, they’d disclose that 9% is lower or the same as typical farm population kids.  Oh, and they don’t disclose that they got the 41 number from any child that had or has ever had any kind of broken bone.  But of course your head gets filled with images of 41 kids with broken arms and legs *right at this moment*, not in any time of their 18 years of age.

I guess I should get my warning out there.  If the democrats come in and raise my taxes, I feel like I’ll give up.  I’ll stop working so hard.  I’ll show them what it means to disincent those of us who actually work for a living and try to succeed.  I work harder and smarter each year so I can make more money, not so my “excess” (their term) can go to someone who doesn’t give a flip.

TequilaCon 2008

I, unlike many of the bloggers I read, did not attend TequilaCon 2008 in Philadelphia.  I’m not sure if I’d be suited to attend such a drink-fest, so maybe I can plan to attend in the future as official photographer or something.  The twitter updates were hilarious. 

Yeah, this is probably something better for me to watch than participate in

Best of LOLcats

You might not know it, but I’m a pretty big Michael Jackson fan, as I’ve publically and shamefully confessed before.  In one of his biggest hits, he sings about how some kid is not his even though the mom says he’s the dad. 

I don’t think I have this problem.  And I have “proof”:

Yeah, I’m thinking the resemblance is there.

We just need to get the guy to learn how to grow a beard.  I guess now I know why they call it a “proof”.

I will now bring out my crystal ball and predict that someone with an affinity for pig rabbit combinations will say something about Hawaiian Shirts and likely lobby their senator to introduce a bill to ban them from all people with the middle name of Wayne.

Oh, and speaking of bragging about my kids, look at the Thank You letter Jaden wrote for his awesome Kindergarten teacher.

(click to enlarge)

Man.

I’m *so* close to possibly thinking about the fat chance of me trying out for this.

Maybe you don’t understand how much I enjoy YES’ music.

Maybe you don’t see how an experience as grand as singing with Jon Anderson would be for me.

Maybe you fail to grasp how the weighing of that grand experience against the potential humiliation I would face is a monumental task my brain is struggling to deal with.

Maybe you’re ok with ending a sentence with a preposition, or with one word sentences in general.

Maybe.

(*thinking*)

Tuesday is a GREAT day for my Sunday series!  It never hurts to mix things up a bit.  Well, unless you mix up the sugar and the rat poison.  In this episode I not only bring you more LOLcats than I’ve done in a while, but I also deliver a Palindrodometer.

Even those of you who despise LOLcats, I challenge you not to chuckle at least once at the list I’ve compiled this week.  The LOLMonkey itself is enough to get a small chortle.

Dave2’s Blogiversary

If you don’t know about Dave’s FIVE YEAR Blogiversary, then you’re either hiding under a rock, or you don’t know who Dave is.  Or both.  This guy knows how to give stuff away (although, now that the entire winner’s list is in, evidently he doesn’t know how to give stuff away to ME.  I’ll have to work with him on that)

Get this - the guy does a whole WEEK of giveaways.  I added it up and it’s more than $500 worth of stuff.

Please sing the following to the tune of “Twelve Days of Christmas”

On the first day of Blogiversary, my friend Dave gave* to me… the rules of his blogiversary.
On the second day of Blogiversary, my friend Dave gave* to me… too many shirts, and the rules of his blogiversary.
On the third day of Blogiversary, my friend Dave gave* to me… Try Evil Hats, too many shirts, and the rules of his blogiversary.
On the fourth day of Blogiversary, my friend Dave gave* to me… Custom Playing Cards, Try Evil Hats, too many shirts, and the rules of his blogiversary.
On the fifth day of Blogiversary, my friend Dave gave* to me… DAVE… IN… MY… TOWN!!!… Custom Playing Cards, Try Evil Hats, too many shirts, and the rules of his blogiversary.
On the sixth day of Blogiversary, my friend Dave gave* to me… six apologies, DAVE… IN… MY… TOWN!!!… Custom Playing Cards, Try Evil Hats, too many shirts, and the rules of his blogiversary.
On the seventh day of Blogiversary, my friend Dave gave* to me… seven million winners and a vlog, six apologies, DAVE… IN… MY… TOWN!!!… Custom Playing Cards, Try Evil Hats, too many shirts, and the rules of his blogiversary.
On the eighth day of Blogiversary, my friend Dave gave* to me… eight lame excuses, seven million winners and a vlog, six apologies, DAVE… IN… MY… TOWN!!!… Custom Playing Cards, Try Evil Hats, too many shirts, and the rules of his blogiversary.

 *not!

I already have plans to order me a couple decks of those awesome cards…

THANK YOU DAVE FOR putting on such a great series!

I brake for palindromes

I beg you - please don’t ask me why I feel compelled to share my palindrome experiences with you. Call me a race car, call me Otto, I don’t care. Do you know what my favorite number is? I prefer PI.

Best of LOLcats

Here you go.  And yes, I’m talking to you, Raganator.  Oh, and everyone else, too.

^^^ sometimes I need this kind of TLC ^^^

Time Warner Cable’s RoadRunner Internet service offers a $10/month “turbo upgrade”, which makes the already-fast broadband connection accellerated to 15MB/s download and 2MB/s upload.

(Wayne dramatically waves arms in horizontal arc)

Discuss.

Update on 4/24: There’s a review posted online, pretty good review. 

Tonight is the RUSH Concert here in Austin!

I blogged before about one of my all-time favorite artists coming to town and the awesome tickets he got for us (don’t forget, I’m Uber Awesome, in front of the “Nearly Cool” section, and envied by the “Sucks to be me” sections), but I have some more news.

First, that same friend happened to see Alex Lifeson playing pool last night down at the Four Seasons, where visiting acts usually stay when in Austin.  I haven’t heard word from him yet this morning, so I can only assume he approached Alex, said he admired his work, asked not to be pushed down the stairs and Alex laughed so hard they immediately hit it off and have stayed up all night jamming and showing him the “tricks” of playing awesomelike.  As far as I know, they jetted to Mexico and are on their way back.

Secondly, while I haven’t heard from my friend yet, Geddy and Neil did contact me early this morning about my recent progress in the Guitar Hero III game.  Evidently they are HUGE fans of the game, but can’t quite get all the notes all the time.  They saw my online ranking going up and up and figured they’d ask me for some tips.  I can’t say as I blame them, because look - I’ve doubled my ranking in a week or so, and I still have dozens of songs to play and submit online.

Geddy was all, “I really respect your diligence and effort towards perfection, eh.  I also see that you’ve only logged half of the game so far and have many songs still yet to register on the site, so we’re ignoring your 14,489th place, eh, knowing that you will achieve in the top 100 once all the scores are registered.  I like playing Bass, of course, so will you Co-op with me, eh?“  I mumbled something about needing to sleep or something, so he quickly added “Wayne, eh, I have Neil with me and we can play Rock Band together, eh?“ 

Then there was a pause and Neil came on.  He started on with “Hello, Wayne, eh.  You know how Rock Band is 4 members? Well, Rush, as you know, eh, is only 3 members, so we need someone to fill in with vocals and guitar/bass, whichever you’d prefer to do, eh.“  I still hemmed and hawed a bit so they offered me a signed copy of the Rush comic book.  I said I already had one.  Then they offered up seats in the first five or six rows, and I said I already had 3rd row.  Then they said they’d put on the next album “brought to you by the letter Wayne” and they actually got my attention.

Seeing as how they were asking so nicely, I couldn’t turn them down.   We ended up jamming in their hotel suite, and once their agent woke up from his stupor and shook the scantily clad women off of him and saw what we were doing, he decided to create this new LOLhero tour, with me and Rush headlining.  We came up with the name WHRUSH, The Great American LOLhero

If this is what happens the day OF a concert, I can’t wait for what could happen the NIGHT OF!

How many licks does it take to get to the center of a weekly blog summary?  Uh-whunnn, tuh-HOOOOoo, forty-threeeeee!

Furniture repair?

My main question here is - is it worth trying to repair furniture myself?

I’m a pretty handy guy - I’ve done my own water heater installation and replacement, flooring, wiring and electrical (replacing light switches, fixtures), minor plumbing, wall repair and even have framed up a wall from scratch (with lots of help from experts).

We have a big L-shaped suede-like couch that we’ve loved for a long time.  It’s pretty old (10 yrs) and I’ve done minor maintenance on it when I could, like when a bolt breaks off or something.

The long side of the couch has a pull-out bed, and the other side has two recliners built-in to the couch, which is extra-special nice.  We also have two matching lazy-boy style recliners in the living room, and the armoir and end tables in the living room also match style-wise (antique-ish rustic wood).

Over the years, we’ve really used up this couch.  But it’s not like I have a ton of money waiting to be spent on furniture, so there are a few things I want to fix, and I don’t know if I should just call someone out and get an estimate, or try to tackle it myself to save money.

Here are the things I want fixed:

• Springs
  The pull out bed cranks and creaks and isn’t connected all the way with all the little 3″ springy whatevers.  Also, the sofa part over the pull-out bed collapses in when you sit on it, and I’m guessing the springs are disconnected or shot in some way.  I worry about working on this myself, because maybe there are special tools that help to safely connect them.  They look like they have some industrial-strength holders that probably require some tool to fold over properly.
• Fluffiness
  A good example is the 2nd pillow from the right — see how it sags?  The filler or fluff inside the arms, backs and puffy parts of the couch is just flatter than it should.  I assume that the filling inside the fabrig settles as time goes on, so is it easy to just get some of my own and find a way to give it a fluff lift?  Or should I match the same filler?
• Fabric
  There are sections of the fabric where stains or spills have really changed how soft the fabric/suede-like material feels.  So far we just clean it when we can, but I’m interested in finding out if re-upholstering is something that can be affordable given that the couch itself is mostly sturdy and strong.  And is that something I can try to do myself, if I go out and get the material?

I’m thinking if I fix the springs and fluffiness for a decent price, we can wait on the fabric. 

So - you got any suggestions?  Or maybe the name of a local Austin mobile furniture repair shop you can recommend (I have access to yellow pages, thankyouverymuch but I really like recommendations).

Mr Excel Podcast

I mentioned my new Zunetastic fortune earlier in the week, and I’ve been gettin’ into the podcasts.  Podcasts let me manage my audio and video input for my life much like netflix / blockbuster online let me structure and control my movie watching.  It’s TiVo for talk radio.  I’m cuckoo for cocoa-casts.

One of the podcasts I’ve come to love in a very short time is the Mr Excel podcast (or “netcast” as he says).  He typically does 2-4 minutes of a neat Excel trick or feature, which is great for quick catchups. 

There are a few things I really like about the podcast and the way Bill Jelen does his:

1. They’re short and to the point
2. He talks fast, which is a personal preference of mine.  See #1.
3. He does a screenshot for the bulk of the video *and* has him on camera/headset in the lower right corner.  I think this lends the added personal touch and also helps his meaning get conveyed with 28% more accuracy.
4. They’re edited for time.  See #1.
5. He knows what he’s talking about.  So while he is short and to the point (see #1), he adds small contextual references while he speaks so there’s a strong likelihood that you’ll pick up something you didn’t know, even if you already know the main subject of the podcast.

I’ve been seriously thinking about starting a podcast on the subject matter(s) that I can contribute to, and until I saw Mr. Excel’s format, I wasn’t sure what would  be easily consumable, not a tremendous drain on my time, and desirable to the end user.  I think I’ll ask Bill if he has any tips on using that format.   I’m leaning towards something like “Wayne’s Tech Tips” or “What Wayne Knows” or “5 Minutes With Wayne”.   Or I would call it “WHALL over the place”  It would be a < 5 minute podcast on something technological, ranging ALL over the place including networking, unix, windows, hardware, text manipulation, databases, firewalls, and anything technical that anyone can learn in less than five minutes but would help them in their job or hobby.