Lewies Blog

I hadn’t been playing it much lately, so I didn’t notice when it happened. My mother in-law was getting things setup for the kids as she does most weekends. The Sony Playstation 2 was no where to be found. The controls, the games, the memory cards - all gone.

I think she is more upset about it then I am. I hardly play it any more these days.  We usually let my nephew and neice play it when they come over to visit.  I don’t know who took it. I’m mostly upset that they took my PS2 Linux CD’s. The rest of the stuff is easy to get a hold of. I didn’t really play with Linux on the PS2 that much but the kit was about two hundred dollars alone. I mainly had it just to say that I could do it and see what it was all about.

I’ve already had plans for the PS3 with my taxes this year. The PS3 comes out later this year and costs just as much as a computer now.

I’m just going to have a lot less trust in people who come over now.

I got a lot of work done today on my particle lab in SecondLife. I’m working on a portion of it that allows me to change the color of each particle. To make things more visual, I created some objects to allow the end-user to adjust the color with HSB. (Hue, Saturation, Brightness). I personally feel that this is an easier way for non-technical people to choose a color, because they don’t have to remember how light is mixed to get colors by adjusting RGB (Red, Green, Blue) values.

I have a ring representing 360 degrees of hue that will rotate when you press arrows in the direction to move. The Saturation and Brightness are represented as a gradient in the center. When the hue is changed, the gradient changes to reflect that hue. Saturation is changed by pressing the left or right arrows to the side of the gradient. Brightness is changed by pressing the arrows above and below the gradient. I have a small ring to let the end-user see what the end color will look like.

Second Life only understands RGB values. This would have taken a long time for me to do the conversion between HSB and RGB values, but I had done something similar in the the past in JavaScript. I Simply changed the code from JavaScript to LSL (Linden Scripting Language).
The colors appear to be accurate so far. I need to add some more functionality as it is still a work in progress. There are transparency effects that I need to put in. I also need to get it synchronized with the particle emitter that my Particle Lab communicates with.

• Lewies Color Picker 1.0
• Lewies Color Picker 1.1

With all of the privacy statements that loan companies and such bring to your attention, you would think that the whole industry would be very sensitive about it. Unfortunately, I’ve been getting spammed with offers since I purchased my home almost every day in the mail.

On of the things that these companies do that really gets me mad is disclosing my financial information on a post card. That’s rite, they write on the post card how much my home was when I purchased it, and an estimate of what I pay each month. These people will do anything to get my money from interest.

I just hate all of there little tricks to make envelopes look like official documents from the government, contests, or overdue collection notices. The first thing I do is look at the size of an envelope. If it isn’t the standard size (about 5 inches by 10 inches), then it is probably not worth taking a look at it and I put it at the bottom of the pile of mail to look at. Same goes for any color other then white. If there is writing on it other then who it is from, your address and the post mark, then that also lowers my interest.

I’ve got a few forms here for filing my taxes. I installed some software (TaxCut) to take care of them and almost have everything done at the federal level. I’m missing a tax form for my mutual fund this past year. I logged onto the website where I can access tax information and the only forms available were for every year up to 2004.

You would think that if a service was available through an automated system, then forms like this could be generated on the fly on the first day of the new year. I wonder what the hold up is. I’ll just have to wait it out until they can get there act together.

Usually I go to H&R Block every year. I spent $167 filing my taxes last year for state and federal returns. I haven’t figured out if there is a place on my tax forms to claim that fee. This year I’m getting frugal about everything. I’m trying to do things on my own - or with the assistance of the internet and cheap software. That means I have $167 extra in my pocket until the refund comes. Actually, I still have filing fees, and the price of the software. I’m still saving money, I think.

There are many useful tools on the internet, free for anyone to use. I got very familiar with one called log4net. This tool allows application programmers on the .Net framework to log every little detail in just about any data medium that you can think of.

In the past, I’ve always used the Console to write out information, the Debugger to write out debugging information, and the event log, email, and databases to store error messages. These varied from different applications.

With log4net, you don’t specify the data storage location within the applications compiled code, but rather a configuration file. In the code, you only specify if the message and/or exception to store is debugging information, an information message, a warning message, an error, or a fatal error.

The configuration file is where all the power comes in. You can choose what level of messages should be sent to each storage medium. For console applications, I specify information messages. Warnings, Errors and Fatal messages are logged to the console as well since they are at higher levels then information. I also configured it to send warnings or higher to an administrator through email. There are also methods to save to different types of databases (in my case, I tell it to log everything while in development). The list goes on for all the different places you can save to.

Yesterday I was clueless, today I’m ready to debug the world.

These days, most of my comments in moderation are in regards to what appears to be some kind of diet pill. I fear even mentioning it for I may be marked as a splog by search engines.

The upgrade of my blogging software went smoothly last night. I even signed up for a WordPress account so that I could get a special key for a new plug-in called Akismet. I just figured it was a new requirement for the moderation of comments that I used before. Apparently, I was wrong. I got a little message when I logged in today.

Akismet has protected your site from 3 spam comments.

It appears that comments are now differentiated between moderation and spam. I can hardly believe it. Now I just have to view them and mark individual ones as “not spam”. No other requirements are necessary on my part in regards to spam. Gone are the days where I would have to mark spam as spam when moderating legitimate comments.

One day, perhaps, I may forget what spam is was.

Tonight I backed up my database and the entire site. The reason was simple. I wanted to upgrade my blog software to the next version of WordPress. It has been out for about a month now, but I’m just now getting around to it. It is a bit easier then I had expected. The hard part was just backing up things.

Once I got everything uploaded for 2.0, I found that my website was just a blank white page. I forgot to leave my content folder that had all of my themes in it. I uploaded the content back into the folder and my site was looking normal again.

The back-end administration is very nice to look at now. I now have a nice editor to edit my posts, but it isn’t too friendly with the Google toolbar spellcheck feature. The spellcheck does work, but once you correct a word, some resizing glyphs appear around it. Once you are done spell checking, the background does not turn back to white. Still, I can work with it.

One interesting feature is the ability to upload files for individual posts. I may have to try that out. I also noticed that you can now have screenshots of your themes. I created one for mine and uploaded it. Just make sure the name of your file is screenshot.png and appears in the same folder as your theme. I didn’t try other image formats.

That’s about it for now. Time to sleep.

It’s been a while since I posted any of my dreams online. I think I got a little side tracked with a lot of things happening. I got around to posting the last four dreams from last year onto my Dreamy Audio podcast. As always, my dreams are a bit odd. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to write transcripts for them. Since it has been a few months, I don’t remember the dreams too well or what I was saying in that half-woken up state. I tried my best to help out. Anyhow, if you don’t have an iPod or another audio player, you can simply listen to the files by downloading them to your computer or using the flash player on the web page. You can always get your own free iPod too and hang out with all the cool kids.

Dreamy Audio 063 - Expensive Networking
Dreamy Audio 064 - Damaged Cards
Dreamy Audio 65 - Barn Renovation
Dreamy Audio 66 - Joke Fighter

It’s a little late for Christmas. My brother sprung the idea on me last year pretty close to Christmas. My wife and I felt bad about it and I found a few things for him. Unfortunately, he was unavailable for a while during and after Christmas. Things began to sit and finally forgotten.

I saw him online tonight and found that he was available for me to come over and chat. We caught up on a few things in each others life. He now has a DVR like I do, but his doesn’t support HDTV. Mine supports it, but I don’t have HDTV. Go figure.

I got my GPS device back as well as some old PS2 games. He gave me Unreal Tournament since he couldn’t sell it on e-bay at a decent price. I hadn’t played the game and had avoided it since it appeared that you could not play it on your own. Apparently I was wrong about that. I don’t know if I’ll ever find time to play the games though. Ico, Dark Cloud, and Dark Angel are all Teen games, so a nice child around here may get some entertainment out of those if they are good.

My brother liked the gifts I presented to him. They were season two of Ghost in the shell. He liked the movie a lot and wasn’t aware that they had made a series out of it. On the side, I got him a bag of Feline Pine for his kittens. The stuff works wonders here, as it absorbs all the ammonia and breaks down into saw dust. It is supposed to be good for the environment too. Everything else that we have tried doesn’t do much for the stink. Keep in mind that I am down to eight cats around here now.

On that thought, our foster kitty didn’t come back from the pet store. A friend had stopped by to take her to adoption day. My wife knows more about that then I do. It appears that we are down to seven cats. That number can change in a phone call. A while back, a feral mother was caught after many years of chase and traps. She is now fixed and in good hands. My wife assisted her friend this last time and got her. They (and many others) were so proud of a job well done. Most of the foster litters staying in our home were from this mother.

So my oil ran out on Thursday. I got one hundred gallons on Friday for a little over five hundred dollars (including a payment for money I owed them for earlier repairs). Problem - I can’t purge the air. I tried looking for a bleed valve at a hardware store and found something to close the line. Problem is that I didn’t know what a bleed valve looked like. Found some pictures on the internet and got the concept down.

I went back and couldn’t find one that allows you to choose both passages to be open or just one. I ended up buying a T-shaped pipe and figured I could hook the earlier valve to it. Unfortunately, the pipe doesn’t connect to a three-eighths inch thread. Most that I read about on the internet said that three-eighths inch is standard. This one appears to be a half inch or perhaps larger. I gave up and called the oil company for a technician to come out and purge the air out of our system. I only got a message service that told me that they would notify the office.

There is some good news in my life. I replaced the air filter in my car but that still didn’t fix my engine trouble. I stopped by an auto-parts store on Friday and picked up some spark plug wires. I replaced them rite there in the parking lot after I did some shopping next door to it. The engine light remained on, but I didn’t have any misfired pistons. The car even ran smoother. Later that night, the engine light went off.

I’ve had times when the car is idling in park and it sounds like it is in a loop of strong and not so strong work. Oil changes wouldn’t help it and I figured the car was just getting old or something. It appears that spark plug wires can have a significant impact on your car. They were my last option before going to a mechanic. I think they came to about thirty-five dollars. There were about seven varieties to choose from, so I chose the second best.

I’ve been trying to do a lot of things myself lately to avoid the cost of service. I’ve been learning a few things too. It is amazing to find myself able to talk shop about a things, even if my knowledge is shallow. Maybe it is another level in my life that I am advancing to. Maybe I’m just frugal or broke. Maybe I’ll even do my taxes on my own this year.