Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Month: April 2003

  • Site Updates

    I’ve been busy on this site the last few days with updates and revisions. To wit:

    1. Got the search feature working (finally). This is using MySQL’s built-in FULLTEXT indexing capabilities; it’s pretty slick, the first time I’ve played with it. It does natural language searches using frequency of keywords to produce relevancy scores… if you understood that, drop me a line because you’re as big a geek as I am…
    2. I’ve been adding new ebooks for the Palm Reader. I finally buckled down and loaded the Dropbook software on the new machine at home, and hacked up a PHP command-line script to do almost all of the work in converting Project Gutenburg texts to PML format. Now I can crank out several ebooks a day.
    3. Added the “Word Stemmer” item to the list of projects on the right. It’s a PHP class I wrote myself available for download; I’ll be putting more up there as I get them prettied up, code-wise.

    There’s been several other tweaks I’ve been doing behind the scenes, too. Nothing overt, but stuff to make things (hopefully) run more smoothly.

  • Survival Tips

    A co-worker has one of those page-a-day calendars, where you tear off each day and it has some interesting content of some kind… normally, they’re comic strips, or trivia, or word-of-the-day things, but this one is a survival calendar. So it has things like “Today in survival history” and “Today’s Hero” and the best, various survival tips.

    Among such choice tips as “How to stop a runaway camel,” “How to escape from a sinking car” and “How to foil an alien abduction” is one that was too good not to share here:

    How to Jump from Roof to Roof

    1. Look for any obstructions like gutters and small walls at the ledge of the roof.
    2. Make certain that you have enough space to land and roll.
    3. Check the distance between the buildings.
      Most people cannot jump farther than 10 feet, even at a full run.
    4. Run at full speed toward the edge.
      You will need 40 to 60 feet to gain enough speed to clear about 10 feet of distance.
    5. Leap.
      Make sure your center of gravity is forward. Try to land on your feet, then immediately tuck your head and tumble sideways onto your shoulders.

  • Is there a doctor in the house?

    My wife and I went to the Bon Jovi concert in Portland Monday night, and talk about a show. Damn right.

    The Goo Goo Dolls opened for them, and they were very good, too. Played to the audience nicely. Good choice to open, the crowd loved them.

    When Bon Jovi hit the stage, though, the audience went nuts. And if the Goo Goo Dolls plays up the crowd, then Bon Jovi has it down to an art form; they love their fans. I mean, the audience sang the entire first verse of “Wanted Dead or Alive,” not just the chorus, which you’d expect.

    Anyway. They played for 2 hours, a great mix of old and new of just about every hit you could name. Interestingly, Richie Sambora sang “I’ll Be There For You” while Jon took a quick break offstage.

    It was a great show, hell yeah.

  • Spring Ahead

    Daylight Savings Time for DummiesDaylight savings.

    Feh.

    I hate daylight savings.

    But I thought this picture would be amusing.

    Enjoy.