Everything that comes out of Dossy, from the strange to the banal.
del.icio.us/dossy (RSS) links since November 5, 2007 at 09:00 AM:
November’s MySQL Meetup was fun, having two new members attend: Jen and Mor. Pete also made it to the meetup, and the four of us talked about:
As convenient as it is to meet at Panera Bread as meetup attendees can get themselves food and drinks easily, I’m somewhat disappointed with its management’s inability to manage the reservations for their private room in back. I really do want to start digging deeper into MySQL and try to get speakers to present to the group, and the unpredictable availability of the meeting room makes this frustrating.
Amy Kearns suggested that I call the local public libraries about hosting the meetup in their space. Apparently many now have free wi-fi and some may even have a projector we can use. Certainly, the price is right (free!) and the benefits of having a dependable reservation and possibly a projector, in my mind, outweighs the convenience of food and beverages at Panera.
So, for December’s meetup, I’d like to experiment by having the meetup at a public library. The currently scheduled date for the meetup is December 5th, the first Wednesday of the month. How many people think they can make that date? Of those who think they can, where are you travelling from? I’d like to pick a library that is centrally located for the majority of the people who plan to attend.
Please RSVP for the December meetup and in the “comment?” box, indicate if you have a preferred library where you’d like the meetup to be held–especially indicate if you’re already a patron of that library. Once I get some responses, I’ll start making calls and travel to some of these libraries to see which would work best for us.
I look forward to seeing you in December!
Tags: New Jersey, MySQL, Meetup
I have way too many saved emails in my inbox, over 5,500 when I started writing this. Of those, over 2,200 are AOLserver-related. I haven’t them filed away yet because they represent a loosely organized “to do” list for me. But, with so many open items, it’s a daunting task to go pluck out interesting things to work on, so I’ve mostly avoided doing it and haven’t gotten anything done.
I’ve wanted to get my inbox back down to a manageable size for a while, so I’m going to go through it and create a high-level summary of the open issues so I can finally file all those old emails (dating back to 2004, some of them) away.
On with the list …
… and this is only a partial list. I still have plenty of emails to go through in my inbox–I’m only down to 5,100 messages, now.
Of course, if you’d like to help out by tackling any of the items on the above list, don’t let me stop you–go right ahead! If you want to know more about anything in particular, just ask.
Tags: AOLserver
del.icio.us/dossy (RSS) links since October 29, 2007 at 09:00 AM:
After some fussing around, I finally fixed the duplicate packet problem on my wireless router. This fixed my annoying “echo problem” with Second Life, where everything I did was happening twice (chat would echo, etc.) due to each UDP packet being sent/received twice.
Now that I’ve gotten that fixed, I’m prepared to take a serious stab at getting into Second Life. I introduce to you, Dossy Shamroy:
I’m reading the clothing tutorials and will be making myself a wardrobe pretty soon, and look forward to learning LSL to do some scripting, too.
If you’re a SL citizen, feel free to look me up.
Tags: Second Life, Dossy Shamroy
I don’t know what it is, but these Glade “Angel Whispers” candles have a scent that really makes me happy. It’s a sweet smell and not overly flowery: I don’t like scents that smell primarily of flowers. It’s a very mellow scent: the kind that doesn’t really get stronger the longer you leave the candle burning, which can really become overpowering.
Here’s a quick picture of the candle that’s currently burning on my desk:
Tags: Glade, Angel Whispers, candle, scent
Someone asked if there was a plugin for displaying the character count of the current message in a Pidgin chat window’s input widget, which would be useful when using Twitter via IM, to know if you’re going over the 140 character limit. I looked things over and came up with this simple plugin after about two hours of hacking … it places the current character count on the right-hand side of the GtkIMHtmlToolbar:
I’m inclding the new plugin’s source as a diff/patch to the Pidgin source, and a pre-built DLL binary for Win32:
For those of you on Win32, just unzip the .zip file into your C:\Program Files\Pidgin\plugins directory. Then, go into your Buddy List window and select “Tools -> Plugins,” then click the checkbox next to “Conv. input chars count“. That’s it!
Let me know what you think of the plugin. Thanks!
UPDATE: I’ve finally gotten around to spinning a Debian 4.0 etch .deb for i386. If you’re on Debian, give it a try.
UPDATE: I’ve also spun a Fedora 8 RPM for i386.
Tags: Pidgin, Twitter, instant messaging, plugin
(click for full-size image)
DSLreports.com offers a neat view showing “actual” Verizon FiOS coverage using Google Maps. The screenshot above shows Butler, NJ (07405), which I drew a big blue ring that shows a total lack of FiOS coverage within a 12 mile radius around Butler.
Come on, Verizon … hurry up and roll out FiOS in Butler! I’m waiting!
Tags: Butler, NJ, Verizon FiOS
del.icio.us/dossy (RSS) links since October 22, 2007 at 09:00 AM:
If you read my blog in a feed reader, you probably never see my blog’s display ads. But, a large majority of my blog’s traffic comes from search engine referrals (thanks, Google/Yahoo!/Microsoft, etc.), who generally do see the ads.
One of the ad types I use is Amazon’s Omakase Links (Omakase FAQ) in my 300×250 ad unit that’s inline in the blog entry. See the highlighted area in the screenshot below:
(click on image for full-size)
According to Amazon, the Omakase Links ad unit “uniquely [combines] information on each site visitor’s taste, the site’s content, and historical trends to dynamically generate relevant ads that Amazon serves to your site.” In theory, this is great … serve more relevant product ads to a viewer in the hopes that you’ll see a higher click-through rate and more conversions, everyone wins, right?
Well, I was surprised this evening when I was posting a new blog entry. I generally double-check them after posting and normally don’t look at my own ads, but when the Omakase ad unit loaded I did a double-take. What are normally innocuous ads to product links that are pretty geeky, I was surprised when I saw the ad unit populated with sex toys:
(click on image for full-size)
Okay, so I have blogged about Amazon.com selling anal douche years ago, and about how they expanded their offering into a full “Sex & Sensuality products” section, but is this why sex toys are showing up in my Omakase Links ad unit?
Don’t get me wrong: I really don’t mind. If these are the products Amazon.com thinks will sell the best in this ad unit and I get some referral commission off those sales and someone out there gets happy in bed, everyone wins, right?!
So, if you visit my blog instead of reading it through a feed reader and you don’t block the ads, when an Amazon.com Omakase ad unit appears, what kind of products does it show you? Tell me in the comments below–it could be interesting to see the range of suggestions.
Tags: affiliate marketing, Amazon.com, Omakase, sex toys, funny
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