I recently installed Internet Explorer 8. Windows Update has been nagging me to upgrade and I do web development work, so I figured it's worth checking out and having around if for no other reason than to occasionally check out how various web sites (including my own work) look in various browsers that typical visitors will be using, even if Internet Explorer isn't my personal favorite browser.

[Currently I'm gravitating between Firefox - cross-platform, quick searches, and lots of add-ons, not the least of which is Firebug, a web development helper extension; and Google Chrome, whose most compelling feature for me is its high-performance Javascript engine.]

I've currently got Google Chrome set as the preferred browser in XP Pro (set in "Set Program Access and Defaults" found in the Start Menu if enabled in the Advanced Options of Start Menu Customizations or in the "Add or Remove Programs" Control Panel applet) so that if I click a web link in an email, or in Tweetdeck, or any other Windows application that renders web links as clickable, it pops open a new Google Chrome window (or a new browser tab, if Chrome is already running). Sometimes in the course of my web development work, I may have any or all of IE, Chrome, or Firefox open.

Shortly after installing IE8, I noticed that when an instance of IE8 is open, it appears to intercept the windows URL handling event at a low level without permanently changing the current selection of preferred browser. The annoyance factor is mitigated somewhat by the fact that when IE 8 is closed, URL handling goes back to being handled by the preferred browser.

I'm sure there's probably a hidden option somewhere or a registry hack to get rid of this annoying behavior short of falling back to IE7.

Update: It's not consistent, but when IE8 is open, sometimes it completely consumes the URL handling event and sometimes it handles the event (opens the clicked URL) and passes the event on to the desired default browser which then also opens the clicked URL.

Callie, our calico domestic short hair died last Thursday evening at our vet's office shortly after 9PM CT, apparently from a pancreatitis attack.
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Callie will be especially missed because from the day we first brought her home, she was extremely affectionate, sometimes rubbing her cold nose against our faces, often curling up on our laps for a nap. Often, she would come down to the basement and sleep on my lap (usually as a ploy where she would then get up and eat Fluffy's food -- that we kept in a dish on the floor in the basement -- as soon as i dozed off).

( politics test meme )
Oh, BTW, clear-gifs with ad-word alt-text have been removed.

Lori and I spent the day with my two nieces, Breana and Brittney, who are staying with Brittney's godmother and her kids.



That's Brittney (left), who just turned 5 a couple of weeks ago, and Breana, who turns 7 in a bit over two months. TEH CUTE!!111

( the day's events )

At the end of the day, it was great to hear the girls say that they enjoyed the day and that they're looking forward to coming back to Chicago next year and spending time with their Aunt Lori and Uncle Doug. The day was a bit on the expensive side (compared to a typical weekend for just Lori and I), but it was well worth it to get a chance to bond with our nieces whom we don't get to see often.

Other selected photos from the day

Yesterday afternoon, I caught a problem that would've had rather large production processing implications. Saved the department I'm working for the hassle of having to deal with a huge surprise crisis early this morning. The $client FTE that I brought this up to says he owes me lunch. YAY!

( geeky details )

What is the deal with bacon?

I had assumed that it was just something that radparker fixated on for a bit, but maybe it's not.

There's a BaconBOF (BoF) at YAPC::Chicago.

Had a pretty uneventful New Year's Eve. My mom says that as you get older, going to big parties for NYE becomes less of a priority. I guess so. Went out to dinner with Lori for steak dinner at Outback. Yummy.

After that, we went and saw Chronicles of Narnia. I remember when I was in grade school, a lot of my friends were reading it for fun (at least I think so, anyway). I always wanted to read it myself, but never got around to it. I recently became aware of the fact that the story is considered by many to be an allegory for the life of Jesus. (Hmm. Thinking back again... nope, the friends I knew who read the book didn't seem terribly religious -- at least not in a proselytizing sort of way). The movie was entertaining enough for light fantasy. A few current friends of mine have remarked that the movie didn't do the book justice. What movie treatment of a novel does, really? I never read the book before, so I guess I didn't really miss anything.

When we got back home, Lori went to bed (before midnight), and I turned on the TV to see what was on. Naruto marathon. Kewl, but I've already seen all the episodes they were showing, other than the single new episode for the night, which I recorded. After that Stroker and Hoop (which I think is mostly lame and mainly just coasting by on its reputation from the first episode where they showed some skanky topless chick with tasseled pasties firing a machine gun), 12 oz mouse (LAME), and Aqua Teen Hunger Force (which is sorta funny in a surreal sort of way SOMETIMES). WTF is with Cartoon Network? Two more shows I can't stand or don't get: Perfect Hair Forever (which seems like a major train wreck to nowhere getting by on its anime aesthetic) and BoBoBo BoBo BoBo (which just seems mostly stupid). Maybe CN should just be done with it and bring back GI Joe. (Yes, I'm being really sarcastic.)

Also, today, I spent some time watching some stuff I'd recorded on my MythTV box but that I hadn't gotten around to viewing. I also checked coming recording schedules and saw that Full Metal Alchemist isn't being recorded on weeknights anymore. I went to the TV guide to see what's going on with that and found that the weeknight Adult Swim has been reworked.

Bad news: no more weeknight FMA and no more weeknight Ghost in the Shell. The remainder of the shows are OK, but I'm not really interested in seeing them rerun more.

Good news: I'll be getting to sleep a lot earlier (maybe at a sane hour for a change). At least that's the plan.

Yesterday, I discovered a new streaming music service - Pandora. Basically, a user sets up one or more "stations" representing a particular style of music the user likes starting out with a representative artist or song.
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If you ever find yourself in the position to have a pizza place and you're gonna have related deals on different size pizzas, it might not be a good idea to forgo the traditional use of pizza sizes (M, L, XL, etc.) in favor of clever-sounding names that sound the same over the phone, unless you think people ending up getting a different size pizza than they thought they ordered would be a good thing.

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Today in IRC, somebody was talking about watching a Time/Life commercial for The Superstars of Country Collection. Someone else in the channel thought it somewhat frightening that the first person was also a metal fan. At which point, I mentioned Johnny Cash's recent cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" and that I thought I recalled a metal band doing a cover of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" (Social Distortion). In the process of googling for metal covers of "Ring of Fire", I stumbled onto a pod cast of song covers - Coverville. Fun!

I've recently found a usable pod catcher (jPodder - a java-based pod catcher) and I've been exploring various pod casts. I was originally motivated to find a pod catcher by the weekly Battlestar Galactica commentary podcast by the show's executive producer. Other than that, I've subscribed to a couple of NPR shows that are broadcast on the weekend, when I'm not normally listening to the radio.

I also stumbled onto another pod cast today - Karin's Themed Songs Podcast. I haven't listened to it yet, but it sounds interesting.

Just now, on the way back from the post office (about a block away) on a work break, in the middle of a block I noticed someone walking a few feet behind me off to my left. I didn't think much about it at first since I work in the Loop in Chicago; it's not unusual for people to walk down the sidewalk fairly close to each other. One's sense of personal space gets pretty compressed (if it would've been in the suburbs, I probably would have gotten creeped out by someone I don't know getting within a few yards).

I kept walking back towards the office and after walking another 15 or so feet, the person had closed to within half an arm's length away. I abruptly stopped. My follower didn't expect that, so he walked another step and turned back to face me. He appeared to be on the thin side, approximately my height. He had a black hooded sweatjacket. His hood was pulled up over his head and his hands were stuffed in the jacket pockets, arms straight, stretching the jacket fabric. For an instant he just stood there looking at me (I assume he was looking at me - I don't really recall paying attention to his face or even remember to what extent his face was exposed from under the hood). No plea for spare change. No request for directions. Just standing there looking at me.

Just as quickly as I had stopped, I started walking again, veering a bit to the right to walk around him.

The whole incident probably lasted no more than five seconds.

I kept walking, not looking back, but for the next block or so I kept peeking over my shoulder or glancing into the reflections in the passing storefront plate glass windows to see if anyone was still following particularly closely. No one was following.

For all the years I've worked in the Chicago Loop, encountering on the street countless panhandlers, clipboard-armed opinion pollers, coupon distributors and pamphleteers, I've never been so creeped out. I wasn't creeped out so much just over the invasion of personal space as much as that when I stopped, he also stopped and stared at me casually, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, all while not even uttering a word.

Well, how about a needle? Or a hot poker?

I just got back from the cornea specialist. I'm going to have to have my lower tear ducts cauterized shut. Fun. FCVO "Fun".
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Haha! Planet-Dissolving Dust Cloud Is Heading Toward Earth!

Good news. Bad news.

Good news.
Yahoo is carrying stories from the Weekly World News - indulge in the guilty pleasure of reading WWN without the embarrassment of actually going to a store and buying one.

Bad news.
Apparently a lot of people get their news through Yahoo and Yahoo carrying WWN articles gives them a certain amount of credibility with some people ("You might be a redneck if..."). Enough to warrant a shiny new entry on the Snopes Urban Legend site: http://www.snopes.com/science/dustcloud.asp

Every morning on the train ride to work for the past year and a half, I've heard the now familiar overhead announcement asking passengers to add their eyes and ears to those of the rail line's conductors and security personnel and to watch out for unattended packages and other suspicious activity. I've heard the announcement so many times -- at least once on the way to work and once on the way home -- that I've mostly tuned it out as part of the background noise.

This morning, just after boarding the train and barely even having had a chance to find a seat and sit down, before the train had even left the Schaumburg station where I get on, people towards the rear of the car I was in started slowly getting up and heading towards the head of the train and towards the car's exit. I heard a few scattered mumbles: "somebody told us to evacuate the train". At about the point where there was a break in the stream of people in the aisle and as I was about to get up and leave the train with everyone else, a voice came over the PA: "Joe, load everyone back on."

Everybody turned around, headed back to their seats and sat down. After things settled down and the train started moving, the conductor started making his rounds checking and collecting tickets, he announced to everyone in the car what the fuss was all about. Apparently someone in the car behind mine either had sat down on one side of the aisle and place their packages on the seat across the aisle and had dozed off or was somehow not present (maybe visiting the bathroom) when other passengers noticed the unattended packages and notified the conductor. The conductor, after receiving no response when he asked other passengers in the area to claim the packages, called for passengers in that car to start evacuating. The owner of the packages finally owned up to the packages after the car was nearly half evacuated.

The conductor, while explaining the situation after the all-clear and restating that people should feel free to notify a conductor of suspicious people or packages. Additional helpful conductor hint: "If you see unattended packages, please notify train staff and don't kick the packages." Duh! I don't know if that was supposed to be some attempt at levity, but it was pretty weak.

I've had Vonage VOIP since around March of this year and have been quite pleased with the service. The sound quality on the line is indistinguishable from old POTS quality probably 99% of the time. (The other 1% or so of the time there are some slightly noticeable digitization artefacts and sub-second delays, but that's probably due to the fact that I'm on DSL and about 13kft or so from the CO and the DSL connection has occasional line quality issues.) I'm on the $14.99/mo 500 minute plan. I rarely go over 500 minutes of usage in a month, but even if I did, I'd have to chew up a buttload of minutes at abour $.04/min before I'd even come close to the $40/mo I was paying SBC just for local phone service (and that's not even including long distance service yet).

One of the things that annoyed Lori (my wife), was the fact that unlike using an answering machine, Vonage's included voicemail system doesn't have any kind of obvious indication that there are received messages waiting. However, Vonage does have an option to send email notifications (with or without a WAV attachment of the voicemail) of newly received messages. So, about three months ago, I set up a procmail recipe to watch for voicemail notification emails from Vonage that triggers an X10 command to turn on a nite lite in our kitchen so Lori knows when there's messages waiting. It's not a perfect system (i.e. there's nothing to turn the light back on in the event of messages received that remain unread after a power outage), but it eliminated Lori's desire to go back to using a regular answering machine.

Earlier this week, I thought it would be cool if I could also be notified on our cell phones by SMS text message when new voicemails arrive for when we're not in the house to see the nitelite -- like when I'm at work (I've been dealing with handling my parents' divorce from my mother's side for the past two years, and even though you give people your cell number and tell them to use that number for urgent issues, I still get voicemails for urgent issues left on my home voicemail during business hours when I'm not home).

So, this week, I went out searching for the web to SMS interfaces for Lori's and my cellphone providers. Having found those, and armed with Perl and a core module called LWP::UserAgent, I modified my procmail script and added a quick and dirty perl script that parses the email notification and sends a text message to Lori's and my cellphone indicating that a new home voicemail has arrived, the caller's phone number, and the date and time that the message was received by Vonage.

---- BEGIN ~/.procmailrc -- procmail recipe file
LOGFILE=$HOME/procmail.log
VERBOSE=ON

# Turn on kitchen nitelite on receipt of notification of new voicemail
:0 c
* ^From:.*13125551212@vm\.vonage\.com #not my real phone number
| br a8 on

:0 Ac
| ~/code/vm_parse.pl
---- END ~/.procmailrc

---- BEGIN vm_parse.pl -- Voicemail notification parser and SMS text send
#!/usr/bin/perl

use LWP::UserAgent;

my $date;
my $time;
my $from;
my $urgent;
my $private;

# Parse the Vonage voicemail notification email
while (<>) {
    if (/^Date: (\S+) (\S+) (\S+) (\S+) (\S+)$/) {
        $date = "$2-$1-$3";
        $time = "$4 $5";
    }
    if (/^From: Outside Caller \((\d+)\)$/) {
        $from = substr($1,1,3).'-'.substr($1,4,3).'-'.substr($1,7,4);
    }
    if (/^X-Priority: 1/) {
        $urgent = 1;
    }
    if (/^Sensitivity: Private/) {
        $private = 1;
    }
}

# Build the basic SMS message that will be sent
my $msg =
    "Home Voicemail\r\n".
    "From $from\r\n".
    "On $date\r\n".
    "At $time\r\n";

my $flags;
my $urgent_string;

# People leaving voicemails on Vonage's system have the option of marking the message URGENT or PRIVATE
# I don't think this has any delivery functionality beyond being purely informational for the persion the message is being left for
if ($urgent) {
    $flags = "URGENT";
    $urgent_string = "on";
}

if ($private) {
    $flags .= " " if $flags;
    $flags .= "PRIVATE";
}

if ($flags) {
    $msg =
        "$flags\r\n".
        $msg;
}

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;

# sprintpcs' SMS web interface insists on a cookies' capable browser
# it only sets a session cookie, so, no permanent cookies end up getting sent
# what the purpose of that is, I'm not sure. Maybe it's supposed to be some
# sort of measure to restrict bots, but this kinda makes that moot
$ua->cookie_jar({ file => '~/.cookie.txt'});

# Visit the SMS text message web form -- this is just so messaging.sprintpcs.com has an opportunity
# to push a cookie at us
my $response = $ua->get('http://messaging.sprintpcs.com/textmessaging/compose');

# A cool thing about LWP::UserAgent is that if you assign a cookie jar as above, the cookie handline is all
# handled transparently behind the scenes
$response = $ua->post('http://messaging.sprintpcs.com/textmessaging/composeconfirm',
                      [ "phoneNumber" => '8475551213', # Sprint PCS cellphone number to deliver to
                        "message" => $msg,
                        "composeCharCount" => '160',
                        "callBackNumber" => '',
                        "deliveryMethod" => 's',
                        "x" => '5',
                        "y" => '5'
                        ]
                      );

# US Cellular doesn't require cookie setting, but in a regular browser, javascript is used to compose the actual
# transmitted message (hidden MSG field) from the visible form fields on a browser. Not sure if the form processing
# CGI on the US Cellular server pays attention to MSG_TMP, count, or tc_agree -- they're likely ignored, but I
# haven't investigated this
$response = $ua->post('http://usc.ztango.com/uscwmss',
                      [ "MSG" => $msg,
                        # Lori's US Cellular phone number
                        "ADDRESSES" => '8475551214',
                        # From address is required by USC, so set it to the home phone number
                        "FROMADDRESS" => '3125551212',
                        # Not sure if this is actually used by the form processing CGI on the USC server
                        "MSG_TMP" => $msg,
                        # Not sure if this is actually used by the form processing CGI on the USC server
                        "count" => '132',
                        "URGENT" => $urgent_string,
                        # Not sure if this is actually used by the form processing CGI on the USC server
                        "tc_agree" => 'on'
                        ]
                      );
---- END vm_parse.pl

hack ('hak): n. creative practical joke

OK. Well, Balloon-Juice technically isn't a community blog. It's definitely John Cole's blog i.e. he's the only one that can make posts to start new threads, but anyone can add comments to his posts.

OK. I'm a geek. I just stayed up 'til past 4AM 'cause I found an interesting community blog on politics (Balloon-Juice - the owner is slightly right of center; FWIW, I'm pretty close to dead-center... maybe a tiny, tiny, bit to the left) and I found a post on teaching Intelligent Design (*cough*creationism*cough*) vs. evolution in schools. I figured I'd respond to it and I figured I'd spent enough time on it, I might as well crosspost it here.

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