Version 2.0 of Wordpress has been released. A nice Christmas present. I did the upgrade tonight, it was rather painless. All the plugins I use still work, atleast they appear to.

One important note before we begin: Many of the changes in WordPress from 1.5 to 2.0 are under the hood. They are things that you’re not going to notice unless you are developer. There are some features that casual users will notice that are significant, but (in my opinion) most of the real change has happened where most people won’t see. [.continue.]

Michael Vale, character actor best known for his portrayal of Dunkin Donuts sleepy-eyed Fred the Baker, died on December 24, 2005 in New York City due to complications from diabetes. He was 83 years old. In one of the longest running ad campaigns in TV history, Vale’s Dunkin Donuts Fred became a cultural icon with the unforgettable slogan, “Time to make the donuts.” [.continue.]

As a kid growing up I remember seeing the commercials.
I always liked that guy.

The Most Famous Address

N 39° 49.179 W 077° 13.864
Nice, easy walk on paved path. Opens at 8am and closes at dusk. Use silence and respect while pursuing this cache.

“Here, where they fell,
oft shall the widow’s tear be shed
oft shall fond parents mourn their dead;
the orphan here shall kneel and weep”

War, History, Peace & Plenty with Liberty holding a Wreath of Victory and a Sword of Battle

You are required to answer the following questions in order to claim the cache as a find:

1) What is the “most famous address”?
2) What was the duration?
3) What is the name of the monument?
4) Whose name is carved on the base of the monument?

Please e-mail the answers to us. DO NOT post them, encrypted or otherwise on this cache page. No internet “finds” - use your GPS to visit the site and gather the answers.

This was a virtual cache with some history to it up in Gettysburg.
With all my Christmas stuff done, I headed up to this one several days before Christmas.

The place was very quiet and the visit was really quite humbling. I encourage everyone to go and appreciate what so many did, so we do not forget.
I took some pictures.

The new guy at work will wet his pants when he sees this.
Do you like Star Trek? Ok, maybe like is not strong enough.
Do you live Star Trek? Well if you do and your website does not look like this, you are well, behind the curve.
The LCARDS Standards Development Board

For the nonST geek LCARS is an acronym for the Library Computer Access and Retrieval System interface used on Federation starships in Star Trek.

It looks purdy. It won’t happen with this site, but if you’re into it enjoy.

Monday I headed out to do a little geocaching since I had some time. It was quite cold, the walk a little longer than I thought up an icy hill and I had a dog half take a run at me. Besides that, it was a good cache. On the way to the path I walked passed what is left of a Lime Kiln built into a hill. I took a picture. Interesting, I never knew one was there.

What lies beFORE me?

N 39° 34.130 W 077° 01.512
Wooded setting near hilltop alongside bike/jog trail.
This cache was originally placed by Stripes17 on December 27, 2003. It was adopted by Jmatt50 on November 13, 2005. This rubbermaid container contains Stripes17’s first hidden cache. It’s name implies it’s golf theme. It was restocked by Jmatt50, after adoption, with some golf related items, including: tee packs, a couple sleeves of golf balls, a greens repair tool from the Las Vegas Country Club, a putt alignment gadget, a golf tool gadget, an emergency hooded pouncho plus a fresh log book & pen. Also included in this cache are some CITO bags. If you see any trash in the area of the cache and are so inclined, feel free to take a bag and practice CITO.

There is a nice golf course visible from the paved trail leading to this cache. In fact, Stripes17 says they heard a golfer yelling “Fore” while they were hiding the box. Recommended parking is at N39-34.141/W77-01.376. The entrance to the paved trail is a short walk away at N39-34.231/W77-01.483. Be sure to check out the Lime Kiln across from the parking lot. Total round trip walk is approximately 1 mile.

So this guy in France who’s apparently a part of ZDNET decided that ZDNet’s servers wouldn’t be able to handle their own image hosting. So he decided to use an image of an xbox from my server.

This kind of opened the door for me to do whatever I damn well pleased on his little french ass. [.continue.]

That is just funny.
Him being French somehow makes it funnier.
Can we say p0wned!
That is the danger in hotlinking an image, it could change.

I currently have Sprint as my local phone company. They are the only one in this area so I really don’t have much of a choice. I also have DSL with Sprint. Since I have DirecTV a cable modem is kind of out of the picture. I believe I could get cable modem service from either one of the cable providers up here, but don’t do it for a couple reasons. First being Sprint does not block port 80. I can as I have done in the past setup a web server from my connection. In fact this site started out on that connection. I also have up to 20 hours (I think) of dialup to EarthLink each month. This has come in handy several times when I need net access from my laptop and I was somewhere without an available connection. Sprint also does not cap or throttle traffic. No invisible caps here.

There are of course the negatives. For gamers pings are a bit higher since Sprint turns on interleaving by default. Interleaving is an error correction scheme used between the DSL modem and DSLAM to combat line noise. This is turned on whether it is needed or not and to get Sprint to turned it off pretty much takes an act of GOD. If Interleaving is off, it means you’re configured as FastPath. So what does all this mean? Interleaving can mean as much as a 30-50ms increase in your ping. Online gamers are not happy with this.
Price is another, it’s expensive. Comparing to Verizon DSL, Sprint is double the price.
There is also the $14.31 I pay each month in taxes to Sprint. This not being Sprints fault, all the traditional phone companies have this issue. All large companies also seem to have this last problem, bad customer service. I’m not sure if the people are lying to you on purpose or if they are just idiots. Having been lied to myself and reading the stories of other Sprint customers being either lied to or having to deal with incompetent customer service reps makes me pray I will never have to call them again.

I read the Sprint high-speed Internet discussion board on DSL Reports. This is a place that Sprint DSL customers can go to get help, find out information and just communicate with other DSL users. As far as help, it is 100% better than calling Sprint directly. There are/were several Sprint employees that on their own time would read and post to the board helping people out. Never were they acting as official representatives of Sprint. Just knowledgeable people that helped out other (they were customers too) DSL customers with their issues. I know one helped me after a CSR fubared my upgrade order.

Why the rant about Sprint?
In Sprint’s great wisdom, they have proclaimed that Sprint employees are not supposed to be posting without official permission.
That’s right, if you work for Sprint you CAN NOT post to this discussion board at all. What a load of crap. I’m sorry Sprint, but if I worked for you, which I do NOT, what right do YOU have to say what I CAN and CAN NOT do on my own personal time? Total BS.

I have a suspicion why this is being done. For the past year the buzz has been that Sprint Local Phone Service will be spun off to its own company or bought by someone else. For employees this is never fun. I suspect Sprint wants to keep any employee skepticism or personal views away from their customers.

Whatever the reason is, it still smells.

Stanley Twinkleflake is an exile. Three years ago, the diminutive snow elf and three of his closest companions were banished from the North Pole by an enraged Santa Claus, who accused them of trying to unionize his workshop.

“Now we can’t even go north of the Arctic circle,” sighs Twinkleflake, who has relocated to this northern Finnish town just shy of the 66th parallel. “You can’t even get decent cloudberries here.” [.continue.]

Santa is such the evil guy, isn’t he.

Myspace.com the free social networking website over the past few years has just gone crazy with the amount of people using it.

It wasn’t until this summer that I got a myspace account. Hey, I had to get one, to be hip and cool.

Not only people using myspace, but bands, companies and different clubs have setup myspace accounts to keep in touch with people.
A coworker of mine setup a myspace account for her cat. Who am I to miss out on that, so each of my cats also has a myspace account. Just crazy.
When you create an account on myspace you start out with a friend, Tom founder of myspace. There are some Tom spinoffs that are pretty funny, like Toilet Tom, Black Tom, Pope Tom Paul I and many others.

A wiki on myspace.

As we continue thru the internet age we find things come and go. It is not surprising that myspace.com didn’t start out as the social network as it is today. Myspace use to be an online storage company, but after the tech bubble burst Myspace went out of business in 2001.

This made me curious on when was the first mention of myspace on the internet. Finding this on the web would be rather hard to do, so I turned to Google Groups aka Usenet. The first post I found was from December 4, 2003.

Newsgroups: alt.toys.transformers
From: “wreckgar”
Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 11:05:04 -0600
Local: Thurs, Dec 4 2003 12:05 pm
Subject: Spread The Popularity of The Transformers
Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Report Abuse

Spread the popularity of The Transformers at www.myspace.com Its a free website where you can post all your info, pictures.. and you can link your favorite song to your site so that if somebody looks at it, the song will load. Its totally free, and pretty cool. Not sure how he does it, unless he uses advertisements to pay for it. THere is a link on his page how you can do the HTML thing for added wall papers and music and stuffeses. There is alredy one guy on there with a huge Transformer themed myspace profile. I have one on there now, but I don’t want any of you freaks looking at it. Wink Wink Nudge Nudge Nudge KNow what Im sayin, Say no more…

WreckGar

Damn spammers
Even this website, houseofmike was used before I purchased it. Some of the previous owner site can be seen at the Internet Archive. I wonder why the guy let the site go.

Oh, and I have also found houseofmike.com mentioned on Usenet. The one post dating back to January 14, 2001. I have to save that I bought the domain in May of 2004 and this was NOT me posting on Usenet.

Newsgroups: soc.subculture.bondage-bdsm
From: “Bubba” Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2001 02:17:41 GMT
Local: Sun, Jan 14 2001 9:17 pm
Subject: Re: Spreader bars. How I make mine
Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Report Abuse

Bob,
Great Idea… What size PVC are you using?

Michael

******************************************
Public Service Announcment:

Sending your sub on errands like servicing other Doms
can be fun for all, but…
Be secure with yourself and your relationship before
sharing your sub with anyone.

Play safe….Play Smart
www.houseofmike.com
******************************************

Um, I’ll try to remember that PSA.

I have wanted to put some of my favorite flash games up on my site, been on my to-do list. First one is up, the orginial Yetisports or Pingu Throw game.
Hit the Penguin! How can you have any more fun?

With the two week break I have, hope to get more games put up.