Working Outside
Worked
outside for a few hours today. New laptop + powerful wireless means we
can sit in the grass against the tree, in the sun. Very nice. In the pic
is Brian, just about ready to fall over.
The reason I'm working outside? Work's been ultra-workey the last few weeks. This week will be a 70+ hour week for me. A first since the Telalink days I believe. But it's ok, I'm really enjoying it...and the overtime is nice. I'm implementing internal corporate blogs. And since it's a big company, it requires a pretty robust solution. Above about 500 employees, you have to start looking at internal company tools like an ISP would. Scaleable, manageable and self service. And since I should expect 10K users, self service is required. A Blogger appliance would be the best IMHO, but that doesn't exist and my contacts at Google haven't told me of anything like it coming out. So, I used a pretty famous open source package, LiveJournal, modified to work with our intranet SSO, fit corporate style, etc. Kind of a bitch to get going. mod_perl + apache 1.3.x. Wish it could run on Apache2/mod_perl2, I feel so lame putting a 1.3 out there after going to ApacheCon. Did a beta demo today to show it to the manager of our department. Good stuff, he liked it. A few more weeks of polish and we release it to the CIO, the first customer. Then to a few VP's that have been asking for it. Then everybody else. It'll change our corporate culture for sure.
Off-Road Skateboarding
Pics of Dan and Will trying out Patty's off-road board and Will's carve board. Cool!
Smoke-walk
Taking a smoke-walk with my co-workers. It's like a smoke-break but instead of smoking, we go for a walk. Discovered a nice little path that takes you out of our office complex and onto a neat little hill overlooking the freeway.
Walking between meetings
So, here I am again walking the .8
milewalk
from W to AE. It's a beautiful day outside. I should do more walking.
A parent's primer to computer slang
This is too good not to share:A parent's primer to computer slang
Killing Referer Spam
Apparently spammers have taken to hitting up web servers and flooding them with REFERER spam. Stuff like this:
219.235.236.225 - - [07/Feb/2005:14:34:23 -0800] "GET /pictures/index.cgi?mode=album&album=/cars/misc/rally HTTP/1.1" 200 11108 "http://texas-holdem.crescentarian.net/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; iRider 2.21.1108; FDM)"
Notice the texas-holdem stuff. So that appears in my log analysis software, flooding it with this junk. I figure it's either bots that do this on purpose or people who have downloaded spyware/adware. Either way, it's annoying. This is my solution:
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer
"(holdem|hole-em|casino|viagra|chatt-nett|diet-pills|poker|mortgage|roulette|valium|phentermine|loans)"
referer_spam
order deny,allow
deny from env=referer_spam
CustomLog /home/nathan/logs/www.mybrainhurts.com-access.log combined
env=!referer_spam
CustomLog /home/nathan/logs/www.mybrainhurts.com-spam.log combined
env=referer_spam
So, the first line sets an environment variable "referer_spam" if it encounters any of the regex in the Referer. The next section disallows them to access files on the server and tosses a 403. Heh, bastards. The next 2 lines define different log files for the stuff tagged as "referer_spam". Easy.
Kryptonite Margurita's
I am Superman. Yep. And normally jumping down 2 flights of stairs is no problem for me. But that damn waitress must have put Kryptonite in my Margurita because I nearly broke my damn foot. I thought I tasted something funny after the 3rd glass. Luckily, I didn't drink 4 of them or I might have actually broken it. Instead, I just twisted it and am walking with a limp. Damn agents of Lex Luthor!
sigh
Yea, so I took a long step down some stairs last week, missed and twisted my ankle pretty bad. Not the bad leg, the other one. The strong one. Luckily I am a pretty flexible guy or I might have snapped something. I went to a friends house afterwards and put ice on it for a while. But the next morning, it was black and blue and red so I carted myself down to Urgent Care thinking I had broken it...sure felt like it. I waited nearly 3 hours, but when I finally saw the doc he sent me off for an x-ray and determined that I hadn't broken anything. Whew. I couldn't handle a cast right now. Turns out that the 'bruising' I had was not a bruise but FROSTBITE! Guess I held the ice on there too long. It went away after 2 days. It's been 5 days and my foot is still a bruised from the inside but feeling better. I had been using crutches last week and am back to the trusty cane action. 'Click-pop...click-pop' as I walk down the hall. Heh, feels like 2 years ago.
Oh well, I guess I'm not too hurt. But that's because I am Superman.
Link of the day: 48 Laws of Power
HH @ Karl Strauss
The beer on the right is a Karl Strauss Red. Will, Zac and I went out to happy hour tonight. It's not actually happy hour -or- happy hour prices, we just call it happy hour because we drink beer after work. We should do that more often.
Work has been pretty fun lately. I have been giving lots of presentations. Guess I like teaching people new things and I have always been pretty good up in front of an audience. I've also been spending a lot of my spare time doing work stuff at home. I generally try to keep that to a minimum but it's motivating when you like what's your working on.
This weekend is the SuperBowl/Best Commercials of the year. Party at Geoff's. W00t!
Tracy's first IV
So
I finally let Tracy stick me with a needle. For practice! I must be in
love or something. But it had to happen one day, might as well get it
over with. She's been salivating over my veins since the first day we
met. She and her nurse friends would say "wow, you have such great
veins!" while gathering around my arms like vampires. But, it wasn't too
bad. She did an IV for practice. A weathered nurse does it in about .5
seconds, but since Tracy is new, it took her a bit. And it was the first
time I started to feel ill at the sight of my own blood. Mostly because
I watched the little plastic thing wiggling around in my vein. Shouldn't
have done that. But I lived and she got more practice.
The only bummer is that she didn't hook the IV up to a keg. Even though I specifically requested it. But she swore that's not good for your liver and so I got 0.0 proof Saline instead.
Body Worlds
Tracy and I went up to LA today to see Body Worlds at the California Science Center. It's an exhibit of a new technology that has allowed plastination of human bodies. It is bascily a chemical process that turns living tissue into plastic/rubber material. The bodies are on display in various active positions so you can check out what a body looks like with no skin, muscle, etc. They have the ability to only preserve the parts they want (the blood vesseles for instance), which was pretty neat to see. It's only in California for a little while longer, I highly recommend you go. It is very cool, especially if you are in the medical field or have any interest at all in health or your body. Beware to those of you that are squeamish: it's gruesome.
The tech behind it is neato. They wash all the blood from your body and let it soak in water. Then they replace the water with acetone. Once all the water is gone and only acetone remains, they suck out the acetone and replace it with a checmical that plastinates it. Then they cure it with light or heat. Pretty neato. They even had a full horse and rider near the end, pretty amazing.
Traffic afterwards was terrible, but David and Ann met up with us for some Korean BBQ in Hollywood. Good stuff, and my first experience with it other than my man Nick. ;)