Lewies Blog

A little over a year ago, I participated in an acceptance test for an upcomming service called NewsworthyAudio. The service converts news stories to audio. During the test, there were stories read by people, and others read by computers. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between a person and a machine. They have software that has many “bits” of a real person speaking that strings those bits together to read out the story.

I bring this up because they sent me an email today regarding there service. They have 5 new free podcasts available in the iTunes library. They are also taking surveys in return for a free week of there service once they go live. If you are interested in what they are about, head on over to register and take the survey. After that, subscribe to the iTunes feed and listen.

Three o’clock in the morning and all is well.  Well, not really.  My wife and I were hungry and we went over to WaWa to get some grub.  We ordered and paid for everything just fine.  A new guy was making sandwiches and wasn’t sure what he was doing.  He made lots of goofy comments that made us think he was either on something, or just a bit slow.  He had purple fingernails.  I was trying to figure out if it was fingernail polish or if he had a medical problem.  He made one of the worst wrappings of the sub that I had ever seen.  Angel said that she had seen worse.  He totally messed up on the Turky bowl.  Actually we had to keep reminding him it was on the slip, and ingredients that were needed.  We started out with a small container of mashed potatoes and then he found a kaiser roll to go with it.  He started working on my sub and we asked where the turkey was.  Someone came and showed him the turkey and instructed him as to how the stuff was supposed to go together.  My own sub didn’t start off well.  He put cheese on the bun and toasted that.  Rubbery bread, yuck.  He put on a little cheese steak and a little sause from the meat balls.  Then he put on lots of lettuce and three handfulls of onions.  Just one handfull would have been enough.  I just figured I’d let him get on with what ever he was doing.  It was just taking so long anyhow.  Angel told him to forget about cutting it in half and just wrap the thing.  I stopped him in the middle and told him how to wrap it better.  My god.  After a long time, we were free to escape his mindset.

Sometimes, I surpass my own geneouse.  Something got done today that was an amazing solution to a difficult problem regarding cyclic redundancy.  The side effect of this solution has sereouse potential to solve some very aged and hard problems that have been left hidden away in a corner.

All of this has to do with the implementation of Http Modules within ASP.Net.  With these special modules, you can catch the process of a web page before the web server processes it in its own normal way.  The power of them is so strong once they are understood that you can make all kinds of tweaks that were never possible before.

So today, I solved an immediate problem, impressed the manager on how I solved it, and collaborated on how we could use the method to solve some past feature requests.  When I left for home, I already had a working solution up and running on my local machine in the office.  What a day.

I was doing my thing today, in the zone and programming with style. My co-worker says he’s gettng reports of people getting email. My heart just sank. I spent some time just trying to figure out who exactly got emailed. Over 300 people got the message. My manager was not too pleased when I told him the news.

By the end of the day, my manager was a little happy. I had completed some work for him that he seemed to be uncertain about in the morning. It’s like a television episode in a way. A problem in the beginning, catastrophie in the middle, and at the climax, the problem is figured out and quickly everything ends as it began.

I also found out that Macromedia offers a developer edition of ColdFusion 7 MX on there website. I feel like such a dunce. I went through all of this trouble to find a free server (BlueDragon), and here there was a developer version of the real thing. I also got a hold of a few ColdFusion samples (GuestBook, FileUpload, Portal) off of Planet Source Code and learned a few things.

I’ve been tasked to learn ColdFusion this weekend. If you see any web pages on the internet where the name ends with CFM, those are ColdFusion web pages. I don’t have any software, and a server wasn’t provided for me to work with. I was a bit confused on how I was supposed to learn the stuff. We have a new guy comming in on Tuesday and I need to know ColdFusion by then so I can help him get up to speed.

I did some searching on the internet. I found a product called BlueDragon that can run web pages with ColdFusion tags in them (ColdFusion Markup Language - CFML). It can run on its own on port 8080 by default, and you can also map it to Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS). The best part of the deal is that this server is free.

I found a few websites with ColdFusion tutorials. I also found that Macromedia has a website that I could use as a reference for everything CFML. I always looked down at ColdFusion as if it were almost a joke. When HomeSite started supporting ColdFusion tags, I was busy learning Active Server Pages (ASP). Thank goodness for that, as ASP has caught on greatly compared to ColdFusion.

It seems that ColdFusion has finally caught up with me. The good news is that I already know so many programming, scripting, and markup languages. This is making it easier to catch onto CFML.

A deadline is approaching to fix a mirror. Inspection is due this month and the glass is missing on the drivers side. I’ve been searching all over the internet and keep comming up with kits for the whole drivers side assembly rather then just the glass. I did find someone on ebay who can make custom glass cutouts for any model vehicle. The problem is - it is just the glass. I need glass with a backing on it as well. Don’t ask me where the backing went. I’m under the impression that it just “popped out”.

So the kit retails at $171.29 US. I’m usually finding it priced just below $90 on the internet and a very limited few price it just below $60. I wonder how much an auto dealer would charge to install the thing. Anyhow, if you have a used driver-side Pontiac Montana 2002 mirror available and it is still May, leave me a comment. One can only hope.

My mother would swear up and down a few times that I would not make it to the age of eighteen. Of course, it was just little things that kids get in trouble for that made her say it. Luckily I made it past the big day in one piece.

So lately I was thinking about milestones with age and such. Being 18 is the big one because you get so many rights and privledges (along with the satisfaction that your mom wasn’t rite for a change). At age 21, you are permitted to legally drink. At age 25, you are able to rent vehicles. At age 35, you can become president. When I become 65, I may be able to retire work as a wal-mart greeter.

As you get older, there seem to be some pretty large gaps. I figured out a new milestone that is comming up. 1 billion seconds. Call me crazy, but I figured it out. On February 3rd of next year (2007), I’ll turn 1,000,000 seconds old at approximately 7:26 and 40 seconds in the morning.

I’m estimating that I was born between five and six in the morning. Either way, my billionth birth second will be that day. So how old is that in years? Thirty one. So if you are
at 31 years of age and about four months from your next yearly birthday, I wish a happy billionth bithsecond to you.

I was reading the ID3 podcast magazine with an article about Trademarks (Trademark Law Can Protect Your Podcast’s Name). Although there are some laws protecting the name of your podcast without having to register anywhere, they suggest that you do so with the United States Patent and Trademark office (USPTO).

I was curiouse and had a look. I found a page to help me get started with trademarks. I soon found the link to forms to file for trademarks. A few moments later, I found exactly what I was looking for. I found the trademark filing fees were $325 US to file electronically ($375 by paper). On top of that, you need to file an Alligation of Use form ($100) if someone else uses your mark.

Of course, there are a ton of services that help you file trademarks to make it easier for you. One of them that I had seen charged $159 in addition to the application fee and includes a trademark search. They also claim that a lawyer would charge $1,285.

Why is this trademark office so money hungry? Perhaps if there was a fee of $25 dollars, I would file with the name of my podcast as a trademark. How involved is it, really? Someone clicks a button that says “Approved”. Where is the value of $325 going? What does that itemized list of services that they actually provide look like?

Back in the day when I went to school, we had been told that the simplest way to make a case for your trademark was to put it in an envelope and mail it to yourself. The reason behind this is that the United States Postal Service (USPS) would mark it with the place and date that it was received in the system.

When you receive the letter - don’t open it. It gets filed with your important papers and to be opened in court if the need arrises. This helps prove your case that you were using the trademark earlier then someone else and the federal government was used to prove the date. The main rule for trademark laws is that you need to be the first to use it. I think if you can prove that you used the mark earlier then someone else who is using it (even if they registered it), then you win. I could be wrong there.

I guess you could call that system “the poor mans trademark protection”. However, I don’t think you can use the ® symbol after your trademark since it isn’t registered with the USPTO. I wonder if it would be cheaper to register with other governments just so that you could use the ® symbol.

From what I have seen on the internet, you can still use the ™ or ^SM Symbols as long as you are claiming to have rights to the mark. It is possible that people do this even when those rights may not be valid.

Note: This is not legal advice.

Two geese had some goslings recently and were watching over them at the pond in front of where I work.  The two geese took off with four of there goslings and left three behind since yesterday.  The feathers of the remaining goslings are already starting to turn dark on there backs and they don’t seem to mind people walking up to them.  I just found it a bit interesting to see what appeared to be yellow chicks with big black feet like ducks.  Later in the day, someone else mentioned that the goslings were gone, but that four geese were around the pond now.

One of my coworkers sufferd some road rage.  A woman speed past her and cut in front of her from the merge lane.  Then slowed down and just laid on the horn.  Then she stopped at the light (which was green), got out of her car and told my co-worker to roll down the window.  The co-worker just drove around the womans car.  So this woman chased followed her all the way in.  The guy at the front desk was called to come meet her as she came in. This woman started yelling at him and a few other people around there.  She started really getting into the face of this other person who was in a van asking her to calm down.

Well, that’s just wierd people for you.  I hadn’t seen road-rage go that far before.  That’s just harassment.  My co-worker was concerned that the woman may even be stalking her until she left work for the day.

I recently pulled out my W-10 Digital Voice Recorder and started grabbing the old files from it. I immediatley found two things that I just hated about this thing. First - the speed at wich files are transfered to the computer is very slow. The other is these thwap sounds. The recorder inserts these high noises of clicks, thwaps and scratches. I eventaully found a program to help me edit the files to remove the sounds called Audacity. The thing is, these sounds shouldn’t be there in the first place. Hopefully with the WS-200S that I just purchased, these problems will not be apparent anymore.

I also found a few old files on my old hard drive and uploaded them to the DreamyAudio podcast. It looks like I need to download a program (such as ID3-TagIT) to edit the meta-data within those MP3 files, as the feed that reads them looks a bit odd now.

It appears that the ID3-TagIT website is having some problems.  I’ve sent an email to the author, but thankfully I still had a copy of the program on my old hard disk.