Eaghra

One of my projects lately has been trying to revamp my family site, fix bugs, finish old sections never completed, etc., which all basically means to make yet another attempt at trying to get people (family) to use it. After my last bout of bugs with broken RSS for no apparent reason, I decided to look into converting at least the blog portion to some other software. I played around with a couple and settled on hacking up WordPress to work with the user system on my site to allow multi-user based WordPress blogs on the permissions of registered users from the main site. It all worked beautifully and then I got hooked.

That software is amazingly good. The extensibility, the administration, the themes... all of it kicks so much ass that I never could have hoped to build something like that given enough man hours. And frankly, it impressed the rest. My brother has been using it since the day I created it, my aunt/uncle are about to use it as a base for their updates now that they are moving overseas and I'm also hooking my sister up with it and Flickr. All in all, it was the best thing I could have done to help the site and its intended purpose of communication.

The downside, is that I really don't want to do the double posting anymore between here and there given the formatting options and styles I can apply over there that I'd have to translate here, not to mention the automatic api hooks available to WordPress administration/posting. So I've decided I'm only going to post in one place now, and that's over there. If you want to follow, feel free, but I'll still be looking in over here to read and respond to all of you posting on LJ.

site: http://ryan.oharaweb.com
RSS: http://ryan.oharaweb.com/feed

Last week was an historic moment for fans of Rush, as they appeared on American TV for the first time in over 30 years. While I would love to know why, The Colbert Report seems quite fitting and almost self-explanatory. Seeing as how I haven't had cable in years, I had to resort to other methods of watching it after the fact. One of those methods is now online at the Colbert website and has a bonus backstage event; Rush playing Rock Band. Can you guess what happens? Yeah, they fail bad.

Anyways, the real meat of the show including the interview with all 3 (3!! even rarer these days) and them playing a song is also on the main Comedy Central site now. Of course, the rest of the show's tidbits where they appear in script are on the show, including Colbert reading off By-tor lyrics to start a segment since the producer being a huge Rush head, changed the prompter, are also available as separate segments below the video.

Ok, there were only 3 things that I was looking forward to with the PS3. Gran Turismo 5, Metal Gear Solid 4, and WipEout HD. 2 of those have come to pass. WHD should be here by now, but it's not and it was announced last week that it's been delayed for technical glitches that they're having a hard time fixing, and they're issues that nobody in the community has been able to solve yet. Frankly, nobody knew what they were talking about since the game has been playable at demo events for nearly a year and it was gorgeous/smooth/etc. So what is the technical glitch?

Word has just come out that the glitch in question is: seizures. Namely, epilepsy. It's apparently failing big time. So much so that the game needs to be re-engineered. Now, I remember from back on ps1 when WipEout launched, there were warnings that if bright flashing objects can cause you to seize, you shouldn't play this game, or at least be aware of this possibility. Is there any reason that isn't good enough anymore? I seriously hope that they're simply introducing a setting to tone down the glitz for those that can't handle it because I for one want my mind to be blown while knowing that I'm playing the game the devs actually envisioned.

Well, I'm sure my mind will be blown anyways, but I want to see the original. If the original isn't there, I'm sure somewhere down the road this will be a collector's pirate version to have.

WipEout HD delayed for failing epilepsy tests

An odd bit of tagging I saw. Did a double take and then took a picture.

Lately, my drive that contained all my music died. Well, it didn't die, but something got corrupted and OSX absolutely refused to fix it since it was formatted FAT. Serves me right, but it at least let me copy everything off it before disallowing access. So I copied it all off, formatted and copied it back using the same name, thinking iTunes never would have known anything happened. At least I thought that's what would happen.



Basically it was a whole lot of that. Turns out I was a few thousands tracks short. Luckily, they are all on my iPod. So the quest then became how do I merge this all back together?

I had been using iPodDisk before to be able to mount it as a browsable volume complete with a folder structure of artists, albums, etc., but that was going nowhere fast since I had to manually inspect all the tracks and then refind/reimport them, not to mention crashing a lot for some stupid reason.

Then I found Senuti. It looked so unbelievably basic that I thought in no way was it going to do anything. Turns out, well, I'm writing about it now. It has some prefs in there that were exactly what I was looking for. Skip songs already existing, copy the missing back over named exactly as my library expects them to be (my xml file and library still thinks the tracks are all there, except they aren't), and update the library. Did a couple test runs on one missing album and it worked. So I've got the whole thing selected now and am copying all of the current missing tracks back over. I thought this was going to suck as a salvaging project, but now I just need time to let it run is all.

I probably should have just done this to begin with. Nuke the drive, set up the folder name to store it back into, and recopy off the iPod instead of what I did.

The only problem after that is going to be finding the missing songs on the ipod. I originally had it set up as auto syncing, and that first plug-in back to the missing library (yesterday), it started removing some songs it couldn't find that I had played on the ipod while trying to sync play count and whatnot. I forgot how to cancel that prior to syncing (cmd-option while plugging in), nor fast enough while syncing (stupid small x button in the title area). I'm pretty sure I can find out which ones they are pretty soon over the next week since I've already found a few crucial pieces that I've been listening to a lot lately that somehow were the first to go.

Well, I've decided rather than try to constantly roll my own, as fulfilling as it is, I'm going to abandon posting pictures here in either the blog or the photo album that originate from my day to day life which live on my family site. Instead, for 24.95/year, I've signed up for the pro flickr account so I can do whatever, whenever and also be on a much larger social network and not have to replicate my work to do so (every post here is also a post on the family site). That and I can export straight out of Aperture which is such a nice feature. ...And also not worry about my home bandwidth taking a random beating. ...And then maybe a certain phone in the future would allow real time posting, if such a thing existed. ;)

If you're on there already and I don't know about it, let me know your id so we can be contacts, mkay? Me? I'm eaghra if you couldn't have guessed. I've started posting with the last couple trip entries, and I'm going to work my way back in my own albums to stuff I like as I have time. Basically, from now on I'm going to make that my main place of interest for photos.

If you wish, click on for some pics of trip from Door County and Wyalusing.

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A couple days late, but yeah, it kicked ass. From what I hear it's not the last and there will be a Farewell tour before it's over, because frankly I would have hoped for something more than a near repeat of last year before the final bow, unannounced or not.


Set 1:

Video Intro (same as 2007 leg, features all 3 band members)
Limelight
Digital Man
Ghost of a Chance
Mission
Freewill
The Main Monkey Business
The Larger Bowl (with McKenzie Brothers intro from 2007 leg)
Red Barchetta
The Trees
Between The Wheels
Dreamline

Intermission


Set 2:

Far Cry (What's That Smell video featuring all 3 members)
Workin' Them Angels
Armor and Sword
Spindrift
The Way The Wind Blows
Subdivisions
Natural Science
Witch Hunt
Malignant Narcissism (drum solo)
Hope
The Spirit of Radio
2112: Overture / The Temples of Syrinx
Tom Sawyer (South Park intro)

Encore
One Little Victory
A Passage To Bangkok
YYZ
Video Outro (featuring Alex and Neil)

As promised, my comments while biking/kayaking. Oddly enough, the part where I comment on how quiet it is, the wind kicked up, the mic readjusted and you can hardly hear me.


Wyalusing State Park from Eaghra on Vimeo.

Well, after thinking about what I felt about northern Door County, I decided to leave it at that so I would have a reason to return again with plenty of things left undone. So instead I decided that I'd pull a pretty crazy maneuver and check another item off my list; see the area where the Wisconsin River meets the Mississippi River. Granted, when you're from Stoughton, everyone has been there in either 6th or 7th grade for a week long field trip. However, when you're that young, they don't exactly let you stray far.

So I went about as far away as you can get from northern Door County and made a bee line diagonally across the state to Wyalusing State Park. This time I was going to make use of my new tool, the bike kayak trailer. I dropped my car off at the finish, and rode to the start... kinda. I took video this time around and kinda video-blogged it which will detail all my musings, bumps and bruises on the trip.

After that, I was so tired and sore that I figured I'd bring it on home. Depending on how I feel tomorrow morning, I may or may not call this excursion over.

So today I left the resort, filled up with gas and meandered into Peninsula State Park which was only about 4 miles up the road from where I was. After blindly driving through the maze of campsites, I saw a sign that said Kayak launch. So I turned in, parked and got ready. There were 3 visible islands in one direction, and the sweet looking cliffs of the shoreline in the other.

So I followed the shore for about 3 hours, which actually was probably the harder option given the distances involved in where I eventually paddled to, but it was pretty sweet seeing the cliffs and what looked like a mini Giant's Causeway in many of the shallow areas, with all the perfectly flattened and arranged rocks from eons of erosion shining through some pretty clear water.

I then came back, hopped in the car, ate and went up to Gills Rock and got on the passenger ferry to Washington Island with my bike. Let me say, car ferries have nothing on that thing. Took off at like mach 2 and just skipped across the waves in the strait and arrived at the island in about 10 minutes or so.

I then spent the next 3 hours and rode the entire circumference as best I could, saying screw the bike trail signs, I'm forging my own path. However, little note... don't trust the gps when the road turns into gravel. What I thought at one point would be a nice coastal ride, turned out to be a dead end. 2 miles back the other way to get back to a road that would take me north so I could continue on.

And a note about Washington Island, and for the most part most of the northern section of Door County; living in the city you tend to forget what fresh air really smells like. I swear, biking around the island, it was like you could feel yourself recharge with every deep breath. There was something so very different about just being there. I think I'm going to have to make a habit of coming back this way every now and then.

without any real plan other than the kayak on the roof and bike in the back, i drove off this afternoon and headed north. i decided on door county since i've never been there.

so here i am typing this on my psp, since annie has my laptop, in egg harbor at a place called the landing resort.

tomorrow is paddling and biking around. pics whenever i get back.

I've been thinking about this one rather slowly for over a year now, but I finally got figured it out. I can now tow my kayak on my bike. In searching for this solution I got asked a whole lot of "why?", so I'll explain. Unless you want to head back upstream to where you parked your car after x amount of hours paddling downstream, you've got a bit of a conundrum. If you're in a party with multiple cars, you left someone's car at the end and you all load up and head back to the start to get the other cars. No problem there. If not, you need to either leave your boats at the end with one person sitting guard, walk or bike back to the car, and drive back to get the boats and other people.

Also, I'm pretty much just going solo everywhere. Personally, I don't like leaving some nice boats unattended in a random location.

So with this option, here's what I'm going to do. Drive to the end, drop off my bike and lock it up, drive to the start, get in the water, paddle to the end and then load the boat onto the bike. Then it's just a bike back to the car with boat in tow.

So, what is it? Well, it turned out to be quite simple really. I had been looking for child/pet trailers either new or used, but they're all a bit pricey and would be totally destroyed (cut in half vertically) for what I need. Turns out there's a few options out there that are just flatbeds for cargo carrying. After hunting around, I found that the Burley Flatbed is just about right. It's unfortunately about 2 inches too narrow in the flatbed part at my kayak's widest, but that shouldn't be a problem since the depth will probably make up for that. If not, it can lay slightly sideways as if it was a very wide J-Cradle. The problem lies in extending the flatbed back about 8 feet.

Well, after finally finding a Burley Flatbed in town to look at in person, I realized it was not a problem with the way it was constructed. The hitches are 1" rectangular sockets that an aluminum pipe slides into. I just simply have to find 8' of square pipe, drill some holes to make a couple hitches, attach the original piece to one end so that can hook up to the bike with its attachments and then attach the other end into the flatbed. A few hours later I finally found my steel and after a few minutes of drilling and cleaning it up, there we have it.


Total cost: $245

Every other pre-built/custom option I found out there ranged from $300 to $600+. Not only that, but it's not permanently a 10' freak trailer that serves one purpose. I can remove the extensions and use it as the original flatbed.

Win-win.

Even better is that it all breaks down with the longest piece being 4' and it fits in my car. My vacation is this week and I'm outta here!

On Saturday, I saw the squirrel again. Once again, it was the same area, this time on yet another tree right across the street from the second tree, which was across the street from the first tree. If you have a severe aversion to cuteness, turn back now. 28 pictures, 1 video, and the most flippin' awesome and heart-wrenching story of my postal career after the break.

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Well, the robin tried to attack me and I found the baby squirrel on the tree across the street. So I guess he lived. I damn near about walked into him on the ground before I saw him sitting there only about 5 feet away from me. Funny thing is that he didn't see me either and continued eating whatever it was. So I got out the camera and got to ground level to take a shot. Too bad my hand wasn't still as that picture was completely ruined. He then scurried up the tree a few feet and played a game of keep away with me as I tried to get another shot. His climbing has definitely improved from yesterday. I think I might have to give him a name if I'm going to keep running into him.




Even cuter was first thing in the morning when I'm down by the river and saw some goslings with their parents. I tried to get closer, but they immediately saw my intentions and hopped in the river.

That number up there, 25,532, is big. What it represents is the amount of steps I take on my route. Ok, not my route, but the route I'm still filling in on. Yeah, I said I'd quit it when Ted came back and began casing mail again, which in turn cut my hours. But truth be told, 7-8ish hours of day of work and keeping a regular route/schedule was still worth it to me. Now he's gone again getting his metal taken out of his leg, so I've got the full deal to myself again. However, once he comes back, maybe next week, it might really be time to call it quits on holding down City 1 and let someone else take the meager hours that are about to start. He refuses to quit and give up to the fact that he probably can't deliver that route anymore, and for that I give him praise, but it also irks me that it's just going to be that much longer until it's mine. However, he is going to try walking for at least a couple hours a day to start, and that just leaves me with 5 hours of work if I was to keep it. Nope, not worth it.

So, before it all comes to an end in the next week or so, I thought I'd find out what has actually been simultaneously killing me and boosting my stamina/strength, let alone losing a lot of weight. It's all those damn steps. Granted, I'm willing to admit that the pedometer may have been faulty or have a degree of error, but even giving something as big as say 10% either way, it's still a freakishly huge number.

However, there's good evidence that it's all very accurate and here's why: The point at which I am always suddenly tired and wishing I was done... the point at which my legs and body are starting to ache and are saying, "ok, this route has gone on long enough. you should be done already.", just so happens to be 18,000 steps and some change. I think I wrote before somewhere that when I took the pedometer out in Madison on what I thought were average to heavy routes, they ended up being 16,000 - 18,000. So, not only is this way over that, it's also damn near the 10,000 steps a day rule in overtime alone.

Today, though, was one of the most freaking awesome days I've had in a long time. It started with crummy weather, but we were guaranteed an awesome day at some point, and it followed through at about 11am. The sun broke out and the temp picked up about 15 degrees. Lost the coat, put on the shades and strolled my way through the rest of an easy, yet hard (Wednesdays suck... papers) day. And to top it off, I was treated to not one, but two awesome shows of Nature HD.

First, as always is the case somewhere, this pair of Robins decided to make a nest in a decorative basket next to the mailbox at this one house. Every day for the past 2 weeks, they've seen me coming and flown away in a tizzy fit, only to come back when I'm standing there and sit on the railing and stare me down with the hair on their head completely raised to assume the fighting posture. Sure enough, there are some eggs in the nest inside the basket and they're protecting them. I know at some point they're going to actually start attacking me since I'm literally about 2-3 feet from it.

I thought for sure it was today since when I walked up, they didn't fly away. Instead, he (she) sat there and stared me down while keeping the eggs warm. I flapped my arms around, shouted out to flee while I walk up, and even slapped a paper on the railing. Nothing made him flinch. So I thought, ok, I'm heading up. He didn't move. So I slowly got out the camera and shot away.





It's only going to be a matter of days I suspect before they hatch and they flat out start dive bombing me. So then I walk back to the truck across the street and what do I see while approaching the truck to drive up? A hapless little squirrel trying its best to climb a tree, but it's not very fluid. At least I thought it was a squirrel, but it appears kind of small. And then I see why. There's a blackbird attacking him. Constantly diving at him and once in a while hitting him. Was it injured and trying to get away? I fly into the truck, start it up and race up to the end of the block where I park right next to the tree, which just so happens to be the spot for my afternoon 10 minute break.

Nope, it's a baby squirrel and it can barely walk and it looks like it's learning from trial by fire how to climb a tree. Get the camera back out.



Meanwhile, now that I'm there, the bird won't attack and instead sits and waits on the other side of the tree. This being my break, I'm there about 10 minutes and nothing happens. The squirrel sees me and is now even more freaked. He won't move from that position at all. And this guy is tiny. His body is about the size of my hand and his tail making it twice that. His legs, however, are just quivering as they hold on for dear life, hoping that this bird doesn't come after him again.




Meanwhile, he's totally losing his chance to escape. I finally have to stop playing David Attenborough, and proceed with work. So I grab my stuff and hurry out and try to finish the two swings as fast as possible. I get back about 10 minutes later and I see two birds now diving at the ground by the tree. Oh no.... is he dead already? I get closer and I see nothing. Nothing on the ground, nothing in the tree, nothing in the pine. So I guess I'll never know the fate of that little guy.

As my dad would say, I thought I'd give you a heads up on a sweet deal. For those of you who have taken the dive into HD, specifically blu-ray, there seems to be an internet only deal at bestbuy.com where all the movies that are currently $20 each this week, can be had for $15 each when purchased in sets of 2. The caveat is that it's only 2 you can buy for that deal.

So what did I do? I ordered twice and got 4 movies and selected in-store pickup. 1 hour later I drove over and picked up the 5 disc Blade Runner, Pan's Labyrinth, Gattaca and Goodfellas for $15 each. That right there is an insane deal. Blade Runner alone is over half that cost when not on sale.

2 for $30 Blu-Ray movie disc offer

I Can Has Cheezburger is my new favorite site as it almost always cracks me up or puts me in a good mood. Can't go wrong with that, and there's been a couple entries lately that have had me practically bawling. Granted, like any joke, they're all immensely more hilarious if you don't have to watch or read the spoiler after the picture to figure it out.

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/05/05/funny-pictures-fly-u-foolz

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/06/02/im-in-ur-quantum-box

So last night I was browsing around doing god-know's-what, and I had this urge to figure out how people were coming up with forum signatures that showed their WoW stats. They were really simplistic (name/server/level/race/class) and figured they were just scraping some page somewhere, perhaps even a service provided by someone so long as they updated it. Having recently setup the wowhead xml scraper for a newer version of the deceased itemlinks, I got to thinking if there's some way to apply that to the armory.

My initial attempt to find out said no. Bummed, I almost dropped the idea, but did some more google-fu and found out that the armory is actually xml. It's just that some browsers show the transformed xml, and/or if an unapproved agent string is sent, you get the transformed xml back. ie, no way to parse it. Turns out, Safari is one such browser. Loaded up Firefox and lo and behold, raw xml in view source. My mind went reeling. So as usual, I slept on it.

Woke up, looked at it some more and IM'd Brent and asked what he thought of polling the armory to display every facet of information possible on the guild site for the member pages. He said sure and then proceeded to ask questions I hadn't thought of, like remove the entire guild roster and build it dynamically from the guild tab of the armory since it is so wildly out of date because it relies on people to update it. Sure enough, that was possible too. So now I had a project to rebuild the interface for displaying members and their individual data, while retaining any custom info they may have already entered.

A few hours later we have success. Well, not complete, but it's a matter of preference for me. I wanted to show equipment information linked up to wowhead as well (I was shocked, the blizzard id's for items are the exact same as wowhead... maybe there's something obvious i missed there, but it was news to me), but that turned out to be about a 5-10second parse job for each page hit using the method I had already implemented for parsing text. I need to come up with a way to store that info in a local db and only reparse if it has changed. That'll probably be soon enough. Otherwise, for those who are in the dg crew, feel free to tell me how you'd rather see it laid out or what to show.

I knew this day would be coming: in vitro meat. The latest in the X Prize type realm is to create lab grown meat fit for consumption with a slight measly reward of 1 million US dollars. Even with a low payout, someone will take that challenge up because I guarantee you that is the future. It'll be far cheaper to mass produce meat in vats than it would be to raise and slaughter the current millions and billions of animals. As a bonus, you'd make every animal lover happy seeing the last slaughter house shut down, not to mention every republican for not having to pay out wages when machines can do every step of the process.

To me, I had always envisioned a future where just like we look back on the middle ages as being primitive, they look back at us wonder what in the world we were doing with our food stock and how we ever managed to get through this time period in any sanitary fashion without killing us all from some mass spread of diseased meat that we were unaware of due to our practices. Well, it may come sooner than I thought.