Rodent Patrol
Warning: this may be a little gross for squeamish/PETA readers...
So we have these next door neighbors. And they have a lot of people living in their house. And 4 dogs. And the amount trash they produce as a household overflows from the bins. And that (among other things) has given them a pest problem. Ants, rats, mice, whatever. This spring, his wife made him tear down the shanty/shack he built in the back yard because it was infested with rats. He told me they all ran into my yard. Thanks. The rats made their way to my storage shed, which Tracy discovered a few weeks later. That totally wigged me out to see 3 or 4 rats running around in there, so close to my house. I am like Indiana Jones's dad, I hate rats. After scaring the remaining rat out (and doing a little adrenaline dance when he exited between my legs) I cleaned it out and put out poison. It vanished, they vanished. We also found a few mice dead in the pool. Yuck, but at least they were outside. I've never lived anywhere that rodents were a problem inside or out. I guess in SoCal, the proximity of homes and dense population gives them a little bit better place to survive. Having neighbors with a rodent problem doesn't help either.
So last week Tracy swears up and down she saw something dart across the living room floor out of the corner of her eye, but didn't get a good enough look at it to tell if it was a lizard or a mouse. Yes, we had a lizard in the house once or twice, they like to sleep near the door frame on sunny days. The next day she says she saw it dart around again and said it was definatly a mouse. So I tear up the living room looking for signs of mice and find that the AC intake vent isn't installed properly, leaving a gap which the little bastards could squeeze thru from the airbox. The AC intake bridges the living room and the garage because the airbox is in the garage. So I reinstall properly, closing the gap. I also used some expanda-foam to fill in a bunch of cracks and areas around the airbox. That was last week, no sightings since, even the crickets have disappeared. I figured he found his way out in the middle of the night somehow.
But tonight, after eating a glorious meal of orange peel chicken, I was sitting on the couch using the laptop when some movement caught my eye. The little bastard darted from beside the TV and went under the couch I was sitting on. Two words: heebie jeebies. I whipped out the mag-light and investigated. He must have gone into the couch. So I got Tracy to man the hallway with a broom. Didn't want him going into the bedrooms...I wouldn't be able to sleep, might have to burn down the house or something. I armed myself with a broom as well and started trying to get him to exit the couch. I turned it on it's side, nearly knocking down our ceiling fan. I beat on it, I ripped up the bottom and poked around, beat it some more, nothing. At one point, after a hard smack, I heard him plop from one side to another but no exit was made. So I pushed it over and let the whole 3 seat couch nail the ground. Instantly, he darted onto the tile and hid behind the nearby vaccum cleaner. I removed the vac and he took off again in an attempt to run into the kitchen.
Keep in mind that no animal runs well on polished ceramic tile. They just kinda slide. Ever see a dog or cat try to run on tile? Imagine that but shrink it into mouse form and feed it some crack to enduce the amazing 10-direction-changes-per-second running style of a mouse.
I did a quick street-hockey move with the broom and he went flying across the tile and slapped the wall near the front door, stunning him for a moment. Totally unprepared to actually catch him, I ran at top speed to grab some some yard gloves while Tracy (who was until now standing on a chair, screaming) fetched a plastic bag. He regained his composure and started to make his move again so I pinned him with the broom. Haha! Got you now, little fucker! But he was squirming a lot...I didn't want to get bitten in the capture attempt. So I did what any momentairly insane rodent hunter with street-hockey skills would do: dropped the puck. I let him get a few feet away and immediately slapped him into the wall again for a 2nd stun, this time a little harder. Whap! I quickly grabbed him with the gloves, put him in the bag, took him outside and bashed him against the ground a few times before depositing the bloody mousebag of death in the trash.
Holy fuck that was gross. Yikes.
I immediately felt a lot better knowing it was dead/gone, but the whole ordeal put me a little on edge. So I proceeded to place a few traps around to see if there are more that need the kaibosh. Damn dude. Rodents suck. w
Halloween Humor
Seen on the side of the zombie container in "Return of the Living Dead":
DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
CALL 1 (800) 454-8000
Call the number. But not from work.
Cherry Vanilla Dr Pepper - Ma Na Ma Na!
The new Dr Pepper ad for Cherry Vanilla has some familiar music to it...click on 'media gallery' and then the 1st TV ad: "Date".
http://www.drpepper.com/CherryVanillaDP/index.aspx
Turns out, it's this:
http://www.devilducky.com/media/7452/
Man, the muppets rule.
script.aculo.us
script.aculo.us - web 2.0 javascript
If you develop web apps and you haven't heard of this, go check it out. It makes it easy to add great functionality to your apps like drag-n-drop, visual effects and auto-completing text fields. There is another article that provides a way to use script.aculo.us in S5 slides....which you should also check out. ;)
http://labs.cavorite.com/presentacular/
For some demos of this technology, check this out:
vi global addressing
Something I found very useful today:
ITworld.com - Search and replace with vi -- part 1
There is another form of line addressing called global addressing. It is similar to the % (all lines) address, but allows you to limit the search and replace action by specifying certain text that must appear in a line before the search and replace action is applied to it. An example is show below. The syntax shown below would read "for all lines containing `some text', search for `search text' and replace any instances with `replacement text.'"
:g/some text/s/search text/replacement text/
In effect, you are requesting that two strings must be found in a line, but only one of them is to be replaced.
Web 2.0: 4 Layer Philosophy
Good article on 4 layer philosophy in "Web2.0" design.
from http://particletree.com/features/4-layers-of-separation/
Thanks to a lot of progressive education, web developers are starting to
regularly practice three layers of separation (structural,
presentational, and behavioral) in their projects and applications.
Loosely assigned, XHTML builds the structure, CSS defines the
presentation and JavaScript (for the most part) creates the behavior.
This code segregation allows developers to create web applications that
are organized, maintainable and reusable.
I believe, however, that a fourth layer of separation is being
neglected: the data layer. This layer is represented by server side
scripts that process and retrieve information from a data source. More
often than not, we find this layer embedded messily into the structural
layer. When the goal is to build modular architectures that are flexible
and adaptable, combining structure and data processing is, in the long
run, going to be very costly conceptual mistake. Through the use of a
very promising XML technology, XSLT, we can free our data processing and
retrieval logic from our display and structural logic completely and
build web applications that are easier to understand and faster to
iterate.
</i>
Collections: Zim and Calvin & Hobbes
Both have been finally released:
Invader ZIM - House Box Complete Set (Vols. 1-3 Plus Extra Disc)
Yes YEEEESS! The complete Zim collection is finally MIIIIINEE!! Now I have the resources to bring DOOM to the DOOMED souls that stand in my path of DOOM!
Ahem. I ordered this already. The cool part about it is that if you already own the other DVD's you can just order the box with the extra disk. So many publishers come out with a collection once all the DVD's are out that I waited. Guess I didn't need to. Super cool.
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes is also here. Finally. I've been so confused trying to collect them, they're not numbered and there is a lot of redundancy with the other collection books out there. 3 paperback (archive quality?) volumes of every C&H comic ever made, each with a number so you know what and when you're reading.
But if you don't want to buy this and instead want each book individually (probably better for casual reading), here they are in order:
- 'Calvin and Hobbes'
- 'Something Under the Bed Is Drooling'
- 'Yukon Ho!'
- 'Weirdos From Another Planet!'
- 'The Revenge Of The Baby-Sat'
- 'Scientific Progress Goes 'Boink': A Calvin and Hobbes Collection'
- 'Attack Of The Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons'
- 'The Days are Just Packed: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection'
- 'Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection'
- 'There's Treasure Everywhere--A Calvin and Hobbes Collection'
- 'It's A Magical World: A Calvin and Hobbes Collection'
I'll probably order Calvin later or maybe put it on my xmas list. (Tracy, you reading this?) ;)
Google Reader
Super cool. I've been using Gregarious (web based RSS reader) for a while, and will probably continue to do so. But for the average user, this is going to be the tool to use to do RSS feeds. The biggest problem with RSS feeds for me was that I had 6 different places I might look at them. And even OMPL syncing wasn't up to snuff. Different clients, differnet machines, just a PITA. Anyway, check it out, it's worthy. Web 2.0 yay!
Banana's are great
I love banana's. I drink a banana flavored breakfast drink every day. I say that oranges are my favorite fruit but really, I eat a lot more banana's than oranges. So does the average american. The apple takes a distant second to banana's as the most popular fruit. The banana that we see in the supermarket may be going extinct:
Can This Fruit Be Saved? - Popular Science: > That sameness is the banana's paradox. After 15,000 years of human cultivation, the banana is too perfect, lacking the genetic diversity that is key to species health. What can ail one banana can ail all. A fungus or bacterial disease that infects one plantation could march around the globe and destroy millions of bunches, leaving supermarket shelves empty. A neat article. Definatly worth a read. Another clip:
Bananas have always been a technology incubator. Because they're a time-sensitive product—they need to be harvested green, then delivered to market just at ripening time—systems had to be developed to bring precision to the picking and shipping processes. Leonel Castillo, a banana-production consultant who grew up in Chiquita's corporate compound near the city of San Pedro Sula, on Honduras’s northern coast, explains that the old way was “to wait until you could see the ship coming over the horizon toward port.” Then banana workers would engage in frantic nonstop harvesting and rush the crop to the boats. Chiquita engineers developed the first radio networks in the tropics as a way to bypass this antiquated system. The fruit’s popularity also led to the development of ripening rooms whose controlled environment can slow or speed the way picked fruit ages; refrigerated steamships; and early precursors to bar-coding that allowed each bunch to be tracked by field, plantation, originating country and shipping container.
More from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana