Monthly Archives: January 2005

Mixed Results

Body Stuff

Today was the first weigh-in of the new year and produced mixed results! I lost 0.8 pounds, but gained 3.3% body fat. I pretty much understand the weight gain or loss, but the body fat measurement is a bit less reliable in my opinion. The scale measures body fat by putting an electrical current through from one leg to the other. It seems that there are too many variables in this process for it to be a consistently reliable measurement. So, the year-to-date results are weight down 0.8 pounds, body fat up a total of 3.3%.

Because of travel schedules, I won’t be able to do another weigh-in for three weeks. Let’s see if we can get two weigh-ins in a row recording a weight loss!

Poker Spam

E-Mail Musings

I’ve had to make several changes to the comments capability on this weblog
over the past few days. The reason: spam. Some group of on-line gambling
sites are spamming all of the web logs they can find. Their actions are a
sad commentary on our times when a few people take something useful and
interesting and drive it into the muck and garbage, spoiling the capbility
for everyone else. However, there may be some light at the end of this
tunnel. I ran across a blog called In The Trenches by Kevin Devin
(www.kevindevin.com) where he talked about the problems with comment-spam
in Word Press web logs (since this post is coming through e-mail, I can’t
include links in clickable form). A comment posted by Matt (photomatt.net)
directed me to what looks like a clever method of defeating this
comment-spam. Wp-hashcash is a set of code written first by Matt Mullenweg
and then enhanced by Elliott Back (elliottback.com). I’ll be installing
this code this evening! I’ll be quite happy to see this stuff go away and
not come back.

It has been lightly snowing much of the night and most of the day today. It
looks quite nice out my office window. Perhaps by tomorrow we might have a
couple of inches of new snow. I expect that the mountains are getting a
good dose of snow. The newspaper yesterday reported that Yellowstone
National Park has far below normal snowfall for this time of year and
hasn’t been able to accomodate very many snowmobiles so far this year. On
the other hand, some people in our neighborhood who spent the holiday in
Island Park, Idaho, reported lots of snow on the ground up there. Let it
snow!

I’m sending this post in through my work Lotus Notes e-mail system. The
purpose is to see how this kind of e-mail is handled by the web log —
perhaps some additional formatting work may be needed. Once I get the
comment-spam problem put to rest and get the e-mail posting working
correctly, I probably won’t have much more to do to the web log for a few
weeks. Then I can work on a better method of handling pictures!

Sunday Afternoon in Church

E-Mail Musings

We are now on the afternoon church schedule. The meetings now start at
12:30 p.m. and end at 3:30 p.m. The afternoon schedule is quite nice. I can
sleep in, have a leasurely morning, and leave for Church about 12:15.

Testimony meetings always start with a bunch of the kids standing up to
bear their fledgling testimonies. It’s good for these kids to stand up and
express a little bit about their beliefs. We’ve gotten to know a few people
in the Ward. I like this place and enjoy being here. It has started to feel
like home.

My brother Perry also has a web log (see the link on the right). He’s been
collecting lists from people about the year 2004. It’s worth checking out
the comments to his blog entry. There are some things that I’m quite happy
about:

1. Internet connectivity. Slowly but surely I can be connected to the
Internet wherever I’m located. Having connectivity across Europe this fall
seems quite incredible to me.

2. Photography. I ran across a website the other day that featured images
of people the author had met around the world over the past year. I’ve
taken lots of pictures of things and perhaps it’s time to start taking more
pictures of people.

3. Family close by. Not since we lived in Chardon, Ohio have we lived
reasonably close to family — particulaly family that don’t require a long
distance phone call. In Chardon it was Nina’s family and here it is my
family.

4. New beginnings that aren’t so very new. It’s a new year that is barely
distinguishable from last year, but the arbitrary New Year affords an
opportunity to change some things.

Life is good for us!

————————–
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

Another Year Has Begun

General

A good friend told me once that any day that starts with him being able to be vertical has to be a good day. The same could be said about a new year. Being above ground and vertical is a very good thing. Over the past few days a few snow squalls have blown through leaving behind about four inches of snow. East of here in Soda Springs, which is about 1,200 feet higher in elevation, some six to eight inches of snow are on the ground. The snow is rather dry, unfortunately, having left almost all the moisture behind in the Sierra Nevada mountains where it came down in somewhat unwelcome quantities. There’s been enough snow, however, to cause me to get out the snowblower the past three mornings and get rid of the snow on the driveway. Maybe this counts as exercise?

The month of January will be very busy. I’ll be headed to Belgium on the 8th returning on the 19th. After a couple of days at home, I’ll be headed for Orlando and the Lotusphere Convention for the last week of the month. I’ve gotten quite used to listening to podcasts on my iPod, but that whole setup is built around my home PC. I need to get this stuff transferred to a laptop so that I can keep up-to-date while I’m travelling. I’ll need to figure out if there is a way to transfer my history from the home desktop computer to a laptop so I don’t end up downloading everything all over again. That’s just a waste of bandwidth.

I think I have the e-mail posting problem resolved, but there’s still one problem that currently belies explanation. I’ve put a wget command in crontab to run every hour. That is working, but I’m also getting a "file or directory not found" email being sent from the web server at the time that the crontab is being run. I’ll have to ask someone at work if they know what the problem might be. It’s pretty strange. But, because I think email is now working correctly, I’ll send one in this afternoon and see if it gets posted.

The remnants of Christmas have pretty much disappeared from around the house. The only thing left are the lights along the roof of the house that Jared put up when he visited here over Thanksgiving. The Young Men’s organization in our Ward is doing a service project this week of taking down lights and I’ve signed up. They should be coming on Wednesday which will remove the last evidence that we decorated for Christmas this year. Bradica (the dog) now has several fewer things to stand underneath as both Christmas trees are down. Why do dogs stand underneath trees and branches so that they rub across their backs? Or is it that only our dog stands underneath things? It’s also another mystery for a Sunday morning.

It’s time to head for the shower and get cleaned up to go to Church. Today is Fast Sunday — the day when we skip two meals in a 24-hour period and donate the money we would have spent to the Church to be spent on the poor. This Sunday we are being asked to fast and pray for the families of the victims of massive Tsunami’s that followed the earthquake in the Indian Ocean and to donate generously to the relief efforts. They are indeed in our thoughts and prayers and we’ll make a significant donation today.