The BoneBlog

If things are working properly, the image below will refresh every 5 seconds or so with updated baby chick action. Don't be alarmed, if the chicks aren't moving they're asleep or my fancy PowerShell script that updates the image quit working - IT Department

If you're using Firefox, you can try to watch video with this link, username is visitor, there is no password.  If you're using IE, you're out of luck.

Here you go folks, the big reveal. It’s not perfect, there are things I would change if I had time but hi, it’s Christmas Eve so it’s not going to happen.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

The FM transmitter Greg bought last week was crap, and we needed one that worked well, else nobody would be able to understand why we had seizure-inducing flashes going in front of our house.  And while this is, after all, Jefferson County, we can't exactly erect loudspeakers or tap into the tornado sirens to broadcast our music.

So Greg went and bought a kit from a local electronics store, and then did this to the kitchen table:

The crayons and cars?  Also his.

Heh.

Anyway, after many hours of soldering, admonishing Ethan to stay back from the iron, and cross words between us about measuring voltage across a resistor, we had something like this:

WHICH.............

WORKS.

Just as I knew it would, despite Greg's self-doubt. He's brilliant, and I had faith in his abilities.

And now, after putting out a sign and a spotlight giving passersby the correct frequency, we have people stopping in front of our house all night long.  Nice, eh?

So Greg's had this light controller for a couple of years now but we haven't really used it to its full advantage.

"This year," I said, "THIS year we're gonna use it, even if we have to put our lights up in October." I was very insistent because last year we didn't put up any lights AT ALL, and what kind of loser technophiles don't put up any lights AT ALL?

So because I'm The Boss, we put up lights. Lots of them.

People have been driving by slowly for days, and the delivery men have to jump over myriads of extension cords. We'll probably cause a wreck or something and get sued.

It wouldn't do justice to the effort if you couldn't see what our home looks like during the day, so I have taken photos so you can see just exactly the kind of excess we're dealing with, here:

Disclaimer: The video you are about to see is not of the best quality -- we need to enlist John for that -- but Greg is all antsy to get this posted and he says it's cold outside and he'd have to stand in the neighbor's yard and people keep driving by and we have to put it up AS SOON AS POSSIBLE before he explodes, despite the burnt-out bulbs that need to be replaced and the focusing issues.  We discussed this at length and I decided I wouldn't make him go out and record it again. So, gentle readers, I am not at fault for video quality complaints.

I did, however, encode the lights.  So if you don't like the presentation, THAT is my fault. 

Enjoy!

Carol of the Bells:

Blue Christmas (my favorite):

<Begin Nerdy Content>

I apologize for the boneblog outage yesterday, seems power and internet here at the house have been getting worse and worse.  As a result, I convinced my employer to move all of the servers and various network junk out of my "bunker" and into a colocation downtown.

Originally I had intended to make this a tediously planned move so the only outage would be me packing things into the car and moving them.  Mother Nature and Ameren had different ideas.  Our power went out about 9:30 Wednesday night and when it still wasn't back up Thursday morning I decided to give up and move everything sooner.  After the latest power outage and a failing UPS left several servers in less than stellar condition The Boneblog was a little low on the priority list.  I don't have a picture of the setup at the datacenter but trust me, it looks like something recently moved from Jefferson County.  The Boneblog's current home is on a pretty nice Poweredge 2900 that is stacked precariously on top of two not quite so nice white box severs from 5 - 6 years ago, none of which were ever intended to go in a datacenter rack.  Oh well, at any rate it is a move up and all should be well.

</End Nerdy Content>

For those uninitiated, Laurel has her own blog at http://www.fartsome.com.

The word 'fartsome' is a word she made up last year.  I posted about it here and here. 

It only seemed right to register the domain and go forth.  Don't worry, finger-pointers, we approve all her posts before publishing so nobody gets too carried away.

Here's to indulging creativity in a nerdly fashion.

I've jumped on the Twitter Wagon.

For those who don't know (and as behind-the-times as I am, I'm behind on this myself), it's designed as a way to give short updates to the question 'what are you doing?' but is also useful for general thoughts that don't necessarily translate into a full-fledged blog post.

You can see the most recent updates on the right sidebar under the archives list.  Join up yourselves so I can see what you're doing!

Dear Genius IT Department of St. Louis Community College:

Though I sometimes question my decision, I am one of your students.  I know you think you are doing us a favor by providing us with college e-mail addresses (though you are at least one decade --that's 10 years, look it up if you need to -- behind most other educational institutions in doing so).  I know you think that giving us a hip Windows Live e-mail address is going to make us turn cartwheels across campus and all that rot.  I know this sweet revolution comes at the same time as your hot-dog web redesign that made your website look slick  but also took one-click tasks and turned them into three clicks.  Models of efficiency, you are.

I hate to burst your bubble, but some of us, Genius IT Department, already have e-mail addresses.  Some of us have a real fondness for our current addresses because --among other reasons -- they are easy for people to remember.  Some of us like our current addresses so much, in fact, that we don't want your e-mail addresses and are in fact offended at the '2' after our name in your addresses, just on principle.  Some of us entered our current e-mail addresses in your electronic system as our default addresses because (I know this will come as a surprise to you) that is where we want our correspondence to go when our professors utilize the electronic communications distribution features at STLCC.  And some of us really detest that the domain is 'my.stlcc.edu.'

Still, if you want to waste your time and energy providing us with e-mail addresses even though we don't want or need one, that's cool.  Whatever it takes for you to get those 8 hours a day.

But.

When you decide to make the use of these STLCC-imposed e-mail addresses mandatory, you cross the line.  When -- without any notification whatsoever to your students -- you change our default addresses to these STLCC-imposed e-mail addresses, our unknowing professors send out important e-mails, and students do not receive them because they did not know you chuckleheads had chimped out and changed our default e-mail addresses, you cross the line.  When you make us log into one system to find out what our addresses are, then jump through hoops to log into another system, you cross the line.

In fact, the only reason it occurred to me that you may have lost your marbles and done this is because one professor told us she heard these addresses just might become mandatory in July or August of this year. 

While I like some surprises, I assure you this is not one of those.  You are provoking the hornets.

Love,

Michelle

Images on old blog posts should be back.  Not perfect yet as the thumbnails are just shrunk rather than resized, but at least there are images..  Wanna see how?  Not the prettiest thing in the world, but it's my first Graffiti Plug-in from scratch.

Imports System
Imports System.Collections.Generic
Imports System.Text
Imports Graffiti.Core
Imports Graffiti.Core.GraffitiApplication
Imports System.IO
Imports System.Web
Imports System.Diagnostics
Public Class ImageRedirect
    Inherits GraffitiEvent

    Public Overrides ReadOnly Property Name() As String
        Get
            Return "CS Image Redirect"
        End Get
    End Property

    Public Overrides ReadOnly Property Description() As String
        Get
            Return "CS embedded image plugin"
        End Get
    End Property

    Public Overrides Sub Init(ByVal ga As GraffitiApplication)
        AddHandler ga.BeginRequest, AddressOf ga_BeginRequest
    End Sub

    Private Sub ga_BeginRequest(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)
        Dim thelog As New EventLog
        If Not EventLog.SourceExists("Gregs Log") Then
            EventLog.CreateEventSource("Gregs Log", "GraffitiSite")
        End If

        If HttpContext.Current.Request.Path.Contains("photos/") Then
            Dim s1 As String = HttpContext.Current.Request.Path
            Dim strarr As String()
            strarr = s1.Split("/")
            Dim s2 As String
            s2 = strarr.GetValue(strarr.Length - 2)
            Dim dir As New DirectoryInfo(HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/photos/storage"))
            Dim files As FileInfo() = dir.GetFiles("1000.*." & s2 & ".*", SearchOption.TopDirectoryOnly)
            If files.Length = 1 Then
                HttpContext.Current.Response.Redirect("~/photos/storage/" & files(0).Name)
            End If 

        End If

    End Sub
End Class