I offer a bit of advice if you are considering buying a household appliance at Lowe’s. They tack on an additional charge that you may not even realize. It’s a nifty way they pad their profits and most people are none the wiser. Continue reading »
I think perhaps the solution to every problem is trivial, if only you know the domain in which the solution lies. Of course determining that domain is the hard part of finding a solution. Two examples from the newspaper led me to this hypothesis.
One is the crossword puzzle in the daily paper. Once you get a sense of the types of words they tend to use, you can more quickly and easily solve a puzzle. For instance the words Era and Eon appear frequently. Once you know this, any clues that remotely result in one of these words makes the puzzle easy.
Another is the puzzle for children in the comics section that asks you to find six differences between two similar scenes. Once you realize the types of differences they mean, it is very easy to solve such puzzles. For instance someone’s arm is slightly bent, or their hair is slightly longer. On subsequent puzzles you simply look for similar kinds of differences.
These solutions seem to lie in particular domains, such that once you stumble upon them, the problems are easily solved.
Finally!
Bush Smushed
After years of higher priority projects (i.e., procrastination), I finally built a workbench for the garage. Linda got me going with an offer to buy me the lumber as a Christmas present. I decided on the plank-top workbench featured in ShopNotes magazine, Issue 75, May/June 2004. This turned out to be an exceptionally sturdy workbench for only about $100 in materials.
Workbench
If you use a shared-hosting web service, it may be more difficult to run a PHP script through Cron (Crontab). If your script uses MySQL calls for example, your hosting provider may not provide access to the MySQL library when your script runs through Cron. Here’s a method that works just as well.
If you maintain a website at a shared-hosting provider, you may not have control over how your Apache log files are archived. These archives may also be overwritten, so if you’re interesting in keeping statistics for later analysis, you’ll have to archive your log files yourself. Here I provide a simple PHP script you can run to save your own log files.
What did Della wear?
She wore a new jersey.
What did Tenna see?
She saw what Arkan saw.
What did Missi sip?
She sipped her Minnesota.
You can’t steal second base and keep one foot on first.
If you aren’t the lead dog, the scenery never changes.
Here is a collection of persons aptly named for their chosen occupation:
Storm Field, weather forecaster
Remeisha Shade, weather forecaster
Al Sunshine, weather forecaster
Dr. Hart, cardiologist
Dr. Hartley, cardiologist
Tommy Tune, musician
Larry Speaks, whitehouse spokesman
Deborah Storey, newspaper editor
True greatness is like a river; the deeper it is, the less noise that it makes.
The strongest rebellion may be expressed in quiet, undramatic behavior.
–Benjamin Spock
The best parts of anything are always impossible to remove from the worst parts.
There is a public building in my community that is so poorly designed, I just have to comment. It’s amazing this building was designed, approved, funded with tax dollars, constructed and accepted. Apparently no one raised any objections as to its usability and fitness for its purpose.
Problem: When you try to uncompress or compress a large file (e.g., 8Mb or more) using WebShell3 in the H-Sphere Control Panel, the file is not completely uncompressed and WebShell3 seems to hang. IXWebHosting is one hosting service that uses H-Sphere.
Solution: The uncompress or compress function takes a while. Apparently the Internet browser (e.g., Microsoft Internet Explorer) times out waiting and closes the connection. WebShell3 probably interprets the loss of connection and aborts the operation. A work-around is to increase the keep-alive timeout value in IE, which defaults to 1 minute.