(Ft. Worth, TX, USA)

aubreyturner.org

Monday, June 25, 2007

Monitoring The Conversation

One of the side effects of the rise of weblogging is that companies are becoming keenly interested in what people are saying about them.  People are increasingly turning to search engines to gather information about the experiences of other customers before they consider doing business with a company.  This has led to the growth of reputation management services that “mine” weblogs, message boards, and any other relevant websites to find what is being said, and in some cases to “counter” that information with their own. 

Sometimes that strikes me as a bit “big brotherish,” but I suppose as long as the company joins the “conversation” (as these reputation managers/miners like to call it) in a honest fashion, it’s probably not too bad.  At least it gets them talking.  It’s when companies try to astroturf blogs or message boards that I find the practice reprehensible. 

It was almost by accident that I discovered these services.  I tend to review my referrer logs frequently in an effort to block abusive spam referrer entries.  I don’t remember the name of the service anymore, but it showed up because it was using its own robot to spider my site, and it was hitting the site frequently enough that it looked abusive.  Because there are so many robots already hitting the site, I tend to block anything that hits the site too often, other than Google, Yahoo, and MSN (and even for those I use robot.txt directives to slow them down to prevent performance impacts).  So whenever I discover one of these services hitting the site I just block its referrer, user agent, and/or IP, because I don’t trust them to obey robots.txt.

But this morning I discovered another service through an almost accidental referrer entry.  It’s called Conversation Miner and it’s from a company called Converseon.  In this case they appear to be using Google’s cache to get my page data, thereby circumventing the need for a robot of their own, and also preventing me from easily blocking them (or at least that’s how it appears to me, as I didn’t see any obvious activity in the past few days that appears to be a Converseon robot).  It’s actually a smart strategy.  Since Google is already spidering the web, and monitors blogs, why bother reinventing the wheel and having to index and store all that content?  It’s simpler to just mine Google’s database by searching for information that’s directly relevant. 

Anyhow, the way I discovered this was with this referrer entry:

http://72.51.39.238/~jdoak/converseon/ pagerecord.php?id=436647


Curious as to what that was, I attempted to follow the link and was greeted with an HTTP authorization prompt for “Conversation Miner.” A quick search on Google took me to Converseon’s page on the product.  But when I checked the logs, I discovered that the page at the above link was just loading my CSS file and nothing else.  This is an indicator that it’s using a cached copy of the content, but that the cache was not scrubbed to remove all external references.  I often see similar entries for users who hit the Google cache for my page (it only loads CSS and graphics, and the graphic file loads cause entries in my image hotlink log that are very distinctive).  In this case they seem to be ignoring images and just loading the CSS, though.

The only other information I could glean is that the IP is a server hosted by Server Beach and the IP of the user (not shown here) was from a Speakeasy DSL user in Los Angeles, CA.

Whomever you are, ~jdoak, I’d be really interested to know why you’re monitoring my site and/or what triggered Converseon’s interest in it.

Friday, June 22, 2007

Brother Slaying Brother?

This all seems a little strange and sad:

A Trophy Club man has been arrested in the fatal shooting of his brother, a well-known peace activist, who was found dead in a pickup on U.S. 377, a police spokesman said.

The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the dead man as David Honish, 52, of Denton.

He was found at about 11:30 p.m. Thursday by a Flower Mound police officer who had stopped to check on the pickup parked along the highway with its engine running, said Officer Paul Boon, police spokesman.

Investigators “following up on leads’’ arrested Mark Francis Honish, 44, near his home in Trophy Club, Boon said.

I had exchanged a number of emails with David Honish when he was still associated with the effort to get the Tactical Edge shooting center off the ground (at the time in 2003 it was known as “H3 Tactical Edge").  I also had some emails with his brother Mark regarding their membership plans and my thoughts on them.  And I had also met him and his brother on one occasion at a gun show.  Later, though (in June of last year), there appears to have been a rift between the two concerning the direction the range plans were going.  David sent me an email detailing the differences between the two and what he saw as the errors that Mark was making.

The articles that are out at the moment don’t offer any idea as to motive, but then it’s still early.  I can’t help but wonder if this project had anything to do with it, though.  Money and business can destroy families and relationships if people aren’t careful, and this range project has been troubled from the start.  I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Update: I suppose it was too much to ask for the media to not spin this in such as way as to insinuate that this was related to the shooting sports in general.  Here’s the take on it from the Dallas Morning News:

A man involved in opening a premier shooting range has been arrested in connection with the death of his brother, a Denton peace activist who was found slumped over the front seat of his truck with a gunshot wound to the head, Flower Mound police said.

Oh… and it appears they did a Google search on Mark and/or David Honish, since they quote an old post of mine (and my site happens to be the first hit you get for Mark Honish):

A firearms expert, Mark Honish was president of Tactical Advantage, which plans to open the nation’s largest indoor shooting range in Roanoke in the fall. The City Council voted in 2003 to approve the construction of the 40,000-square-foot Tactical Edge Performance Shooting Centers.

On the Web site Aubreyturner.org, David Honish wrote in 2003 about the pair’s plan to start the gun range. “Long story short, we need $400K in private investment to qualify for the loans to make this happen,” he wrote. “Will work out the details with my brother & have info on it in the near future for you.”

The comment on the old post is from David in reference to a later post I did regarding the life membership (which also spurred several emails).

Update 2:  It now appears to be some kind of ongoing feud between the two brothers that led to the murder.

A threatening e-mail found with the body of a Denton peace activist revealed a long-standing sibling feud and led to the arrest Friday of the man’s brother, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.

The printout of a June 6 e-mail from David John Honish to his brother Mark Francis Honish read, “You don’t roar at me and wag your finger in my face, EVER AGAIN IN THIS LIFETIME [obscenity]! I explained to you in Feb 2006 that I was finished taking [obscenity] from you. I meant it. There will be severe consequences for noncompliance ... because of your own stupidity and your ongoing felony possession of firearms,” according to the affidavit.

...

Investigators stopped Mark Honish on Friday morning as he was pulling out of his driveway, according to the affidavit.

When he was told of his brother’s death, Mark Honish said, “He has been threatening me, but you probably know that by looking at the e-mail in his truck,” the affidavit says.

Blood was found on the running board of Mark Honish’s truck, and its tire treads matched the tracks left at the crime scene, according to the affidavit.

David Honish’s ex-wife told investigators that the brothers did not like each other and had been feuding for some time, the affidavit says.

Monday, June 18, 2007

Nothing Worse Than A Rude Bliss Ninny

I saw a commercial on TV the other night that was advertising one or another of Toyota’s little roller skate cars.  It annoyed me, so I decided to share…

The commercial opens with a woman driving and a man in the passenger seat.  He mentions to the driver that the fuel gauge is nearly on ‘E’ and that maybe they should stop for gas.  He says this several times as the woman driving blithely ignores both the stations and him.  Finally, she turns on the radio to drown him out.

Maybe I’m just more paranoid than most, but I tend to drive on the top half of my tank.  When it gets much below 1/2 I start looking to fill up. 

It’s people like her that cause traffic tie ups and price spikes at gas stations whenever something happens, like we saw on 9/11.  Heck, she’s probably the type that would yell to the politicians that those nasty station owners were gouging her.

The whole head-in-the-sand come-what-may bliss ninny attitude just frosts my cookies.  And not only is she a silly bliss ninny, she’s a rude one.  If this has been a real relationship, not just a commercial, I’d probably reserve some blame for the guy, too.  If it’d been me, the first time she did that smug ignore routine and then turned on the radio I’d have told her to frak off.  I have absolutely no patience for that sort of B.S.

If you’re the type that chronically drives around on ‘E,’ I’m going to drive by and smile and wave at all of your happy asses while you’re stuck in line at the gas pump the next time something bad happens.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

PDA Dithering

My old Palm Tungsten T3 is on its last legs.  Or, more accurately, its battery is on its last legs.  It’s mostly my fault, as I tend to keep it in the cradle all the time, which encourages battery memory and increasingly diminishing charge capacity.  Right now it won’t last more than a day away from the cradle. 

Even when it was working well, though, I wasn’t that impressed with the T3 (at least compared to my ancient Vx).

I had difficulty finding a hard case for it that wasn’t too bulky to carry.  The Vx was good in this respect, since I had a good clam-shell case that fit well in my pocket.  The T3’s case was significantly thicker as it somehow had to allow for the top of the T3 to slide up and down without hitting anything.  I gave up on the hard case and sold it to someone else who had a T3 and just used the leather flip cover.  The problem I’d find is that this didn’t protect against the buttons on the side getting pressed in my pocket, so in several instances I’d pull it out to find it in voice memo mode, or worse, frozen hard.  I’d have to reset it by pressing the stylus in the hole on the back (fortunately it never lost any data, though, since I didn’t have to invoke the full cold reset procedure).

So now I’m trying to figure out where I want to go from here.  As I see it, my options are:

• Buy a replacement battery and perform risky open-Palm surgery to try to revive the T3
• Buy a full-featured replacement
• Limp along until August when I can get an upgrade to a smart phone with Verizon
• Get a cheapo bottom-of-the-line model that just does appointments and address book (i.e. the Z22).

The battery replacement option might just keep it alive for a while, but eventually I’m probably going to need a new one.  Looking at replacement models, though, I see just a few current Palm models, as well as some PocketPC models (mostly HP/Compaq).  But I think the writing is on the wall for the PalmOS, so I suppose it’s time to consider the PocketPC.  At the same time, though, I’m having a hard time with the prices I’m seeing (i.e. $299-$499 for iPaq’s).

And while I’m also tempted by some of the smart phones, I’m also having a hard time justifying to myself the $79.99 monthly fee for the associated data/voice plan with Verizon.  The other problem with the smart phones is that is would seem hard to use the PDA/email functions while also talking, unless you use a Bluetooth headset (which I find dorky and annoying; most ear pieces interfere with my glasses).  Further, I don’t really *need* email or most data functions.  What I really need is calendaring and contact management.

For now I guess I’m going to continue to muddle through, since I can’t make up my mind.  Although every now and then I check to see if there’s something on eBay that’s not too expensive that might do what I need.  But at some point soon I’m going to have to come to a conclusion, since my T3 is pretty much useless for travel, since it dies within about 12 hours of leaving its cradle.

Being Prepared At The Stop and Rob

That last post on the convenience store killing reminded me of this:

Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.

That may seem a bit paranoid, but if you’re working in a dangerous environment, it’s good advice.

Oh… and don’t forget this bit of advice:

Remember the first rule of gunfighting… ‘have a gun.’

No Social Compact For Mutants

On Tuesday the clerk at a convenience store in Bedford was shot and killed during a robbery.  In the linked article, there’s an interesting statement from a woman who lived nearby.

“I asked him on Friday if they would hire me,” Zuber said. “He said no because it was too dangerous.”

I wonder if he knew that this would eventually happen?

Anyhow, the other thing about this story that caught my attention was that the shooting was completely unprovoked.  They didn’t even give him a chance to comply.  The mutant thugs just shot him in the head as soon as he opened the register.  But they didn’t get away with any money because he somehow managed to close the register when he was shot.  All told, it was a senseless and needless murder and the suspects were arrested this morning and are now stewing in the Bedford jail on capital murder charges with a $1M bond on each one.

Someone on one of the local TV news shows said that he would have given them anything they wanted, and couldn’t believe that they shot him.  This brings up a phrase that drives me nuts:  “Just give them what they want.” This is usually followed by, “Don’t be a hero.”

The people who usually say these things think it somehow makes them morally superior.  And they usually get all bent out of shape when someone gets killed who complied with the thug’s demands.  The problem here is that thugs have no social compact, so this “deal with the devil” isn’t so much of a deal after all.  It must be understood that you can comply with every demand, give up everything you have, and still be killed.  This is why I think fighting back is a better overall policy. 

Of course, this doesn’t mean that every single situation would allow it.  If you let someone get the drop on you, it’s generally too late to fight back when the gun’s against your head.  But where possible, I think society would be better off if these scumbags would end up dead most of the time.

Like in this case:

A suspect was killed during an armed robbery attempt in Balch Springs around 9:30 p.m. Wednesday, police said.

...

Authorities said the suspect entered the store with a shotgun, the clerk fought with the suspect and the suspect was killed.

Police said they have no plans to file charges against the clerk.

Call me a bloodthirsty unrefined uncivilized Neanderthal if you like, but we need more like this and fewer like the former.

Popping My Head Up

I’ve been busy over the past month working on the plan phase for a project.  While it’s been pretty busy, it’s also been interesting.  The project I’m working on is intended to be an enterprise-wide service (including both web services and reusable UIs) for all applications that need to access data in this particular area of the business (in keeping with my policy of not identifying my employer, I have to be careful not to give too many specifics).  What’s interesting is that working on this project has given me some exposure to things at an enterprise level that I haven’t been able to see before. 

Previously, we’ve had problems where different divisions or business units would create their own applications that pretty much did the same thing.  Of course, each unit would claim some unique requirement, or that there was no other service available.  In addition to this project, my current job responsibilities have me reviewing other projects that are coming forward at the enterprise level in my particular area.  In particular, I found it interesting that one of the other projects that came through this week was one that consolidates an application that I worked on three years ago with those from two other business areas to finally create one unified service that provides this particular function.  In the past, whenever I heard of some other business unit or division creating a similar service I always made sure to inform them of the one I worked on, but up until now it seems like no one was willing to listen.  I’m not sure why it took so long to get to this point, but we now finally have a single board for this area of the business that reviews projects across business units and forces them to work together.  It’s probably kind of annoying to some who have the “not invented here” syndrome, but I’m sure it will eventually save money, as it’s certainly more efficient to pay (for example) $1.5M for one service than $1M each for three services that do the same thing.  It just takes more planning up front to make sure all requirements are covered.

Monday, June 04, 2007

KellerFEST Carnage

A tale of wind, rain, mud, twisted metal, sweat, sunburn, and heatstroke avoidance...

For the past three years Keller’s CERT has put in an appearance at KellerFEST.  Mainly we’re there for minor first aid and whatever other support may be needed (usually this means hanging out at the barricade and verifying that people trying to drive in front of the town hall really have a reason to be there and aren’t just looking for a parking space).  This year, however, turned out to be different.

Most of the vendors who set up on the lawn used either EZ-Up or FirstUP tents (the kinds with the metal collapsing accordion frames).  The thunderstorm that rolled through on Sunday morning made quite a mess of these, as it appears that an EZ-Up becomes a kite in 60mph winds if it isn’t very securely anchored.

The call went out at about 9:30 on Sunday morning for CERT members to come to KellerFEST to assist the vendors in salvaging their equipment, or at least try to mitigate the safety hazards.  After a safety / incident briefing at 10:15, we set out to assist the vendors.  Mainly this consisted of helping them disassemble their mangled EZ-Ups to the point where they could be carted off to the dumpster.  I would estimate that 25-30 EZ-Ups were destroyed, and we had a large construction dumpster full of mangled metal remains at the end of the day. 

The day had started overcast, but by 11:30am had cleared and we were exposed to the full sun as well as the full effects of the humidity rolling up off the over-saturated ground.  By this time we were also assisting some vendors move their tents (those that had survived) from the mudhole of the west lawn over to the traffic circle.

By about 2:00pm, the worst of it had been handled, and we were able to take a break.  I found that between the sun, the humidity, and wearing my vest that I was just about as soaked as if I’d been caught in the rain.  Further, despite applying sunscreen on several occasions, I was still burned in a few places. 

Anyhow, a few interesting things come to mind after considering what we encountered:

  - First, anyone with a big, heavy piece of equipment (such as a Harley motorcycle) should never be allowed to set up on the lawn.  It took two KPD officers and me to push that monster across the lawn, through the mudhole, and back onto the pavement.

  - Because of fear of damage to the lawn due to the water and mud, the organizers weren’t allowing golf carts onto the grass.  This meant that in many cases vendors (and us on their behalf) had to hand carry items from the old location to the new.  At one point we had a team of 8 people moving someone’s junk (she had a ton of metal items she was selling).  I remain unconvinced that a golf cart would do more damage that 8 people making 5 round trips each. 

  - It might be good to have someone designated as a safety officer to check on people’s tents for obvious hazards before opening.  Someone on the east side of the circle was using gallon cans of oil-based deck stain to hold down his tent.  Not only did the tent blow away completely, the cans came open, spilling the stain not only on his tables and equipment, but splashing it on other tents as well.

Friday, May 25, 2007

Fox 4 Weather Smackdown

I happened to notice a new news “promo” clip during today’s noon news on Fox 4.  These things are on all the time, and I usually tune them out, but this one caught my attention because it actually had the audacity to show some of the station’s viewers in a rather unflattering light.

One of the things that I like about Fox 4 news is their viewer’s voice segment, mainly because they’re not afraid to let their viewers have enough rope to hang themselves.  Almost invariably after a severe weather outbreak Fox 4 will get irate callers berating them for interrupting their favorite show to cover the weather.  The best (and most irate) callers are usually those who are fairly distant from the weather event.

The promo starts with video of various severe weather events: ominous clouds, lightening, rain, winds, and tornadoes.  The voice-overs, though, are audio from the aforementioned irate callers.  I especially liked the juxtaposition of the picture of a tornado and a house with a missing roof and an angry woman screaming that they need to stop covering the weather.  Then the spot flashes to text that states (as best as I can remember it): “When severe weather strikes… we will always break in.” Right about this time they cut back to more severe weather video, but they audio is now from people who called to thank Fox 4 for covering the weather.

I tend to agree with Fox 4 on this one.  I know that more than once I’ve tuned to them after my weather radio has gone off to see exactly where the storm is right now and where it’s headed so I can determine if I need to go cower in the bathroom   or if I can relax. 

Granted, the sun may be shining in your neighborhood right now, but since a TV station is something of a blunt instrument, their warnings aren’t always going to apply to everyone.  In the grand scheme of things American Idol or House is but a passing bit of trivia as compared to imminent death from above (whether your own or that of someone on the other side of the metroplex).

Monday, May 21, 2007

Indeed

Another Oleg Volk masterpiece.

Found via Tamara K.

Caption This!

Ouch:

Real story here.  Inspired by Grouchy Old Cripple.

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Politically Incorrect School Supplies

I got a cigar catalog yesterday and it got me to thinking about something from back when I was in elementary school.  Our school supply list called for an actual cigar box for storing our supplies.

I remember that we used to go to Nash’s store in Pritchett, where Mr. Nash would give us empty boxes for free.  I can still almost smell that King Edward box today.

I’ve noticed that current supply lists call for “cigar sized” plastic boxes.  Can you imagine the moaning and wailing if someone brought a real cigar box to school today?  They’d probably call the cops and lock the kid up for possessing a “tobacco product.”

Full Contact Symphony

Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but a Boston Pops concert is not the sort of event you expect fisticuffs to break out.

Something else popped at the Boston Pops opening night concert - a fight broke out in the audience at Symphony Hall.

Television video of the fight Wednesday night showed two men struggling in the balcony - one with his shirt pulled off - as several people stood around them and the orchestra and singer-songwriter Ben Folds performed a medley from the movie “Gigi”.

Conductor Keith Lockhart briefly halted the performance while the men were escorted out.

Witnesses said they heard a scream from the balcony, and the sound of chairs falling, then a second scream as the fight escalated.

“The first time there was a scream, Keith looked up that way but he kept going,” audience member June MacIndoe told Boston’s WHDH-TV. “Then about a minute and a half later ... there was a big scream and you could hear chairs falling over and you could see them up there, fists going.”

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t explain why the fight started.  I can just see these guys getting into it over something like viola vs cello.

Viola rules, dude!

No, screw you, cello rocks!

Viola!

Cello!

Viola guy throws a wild haymaker at Cello dude and now it’s ON…

Night Owl Weekend Warning

This site, as well as my email access, will be down early on Sunday morning for approximately 5 hours:

Due to space and power constraints in our primary datacenter we are moving the entire shared cluster “looney” to our LAX facility at 12:01AM PDT, Sunday morning, May 13th 2007. You are receiving this e-mail because your account is hosted on the looney cluster. All webservers, mail servers, file servers, and MySQL servers in the looney cluster will be unreachable during the move, which we expect to take approximately 5 hours.

I was glad to see this email notification, since it had appeared at one point that they had stopped giving direct notification and were instead relying on people to check the Dreamhost Status site (or its RSS feed).  I thought that having to monitor their blog was a crappy way to do business, and perhaps that message got through, since the above is exactly what I wanted to see (specific notification to the affected users about the exact nature of the event, rather than a non-specific message on a blog that required you to sift through a long list of server names to determine if you were affected).

Anyhow, I certainly don’t plan to be accessing the site or my email during this time period, as I plan to be asleep.  But then I’m not so much of a night owl anymore. 

Monday, May 07, 2007

No Place For Plastic

In my last entry I mentioned mining new veins of stupidity.  I guess there’s no better place to start than my own…

On Saturday I met up with some friends over at Bass-Pro for some time on the pistol range.  When I got back I decided to go ahead and clean the guns right then so I wouldn’t have to worry about it later.  As I was disassembling my S&W 22S I somehow managed to dislodge the entire slide assembly, which (under spring tension) launched itself into the air and landed on the hard tile floor.

It’s not like I wasn’t warned that it could happen:

I’d also had the spring and recoil rod launch themselves before (I ended up having to order a new recoil rod, as I never found the original in that incident).  Still, even being careful and mindful of all the past incidents and warnings, I somehow managed to fumble the damn thing. 

When I picked it up I noticed that the little “cup” that holds the recoil spring was broken.  It’s part of what they call the “slide insert” (#37) and it’s made of plastic.  The slide insert also holds the firing pin, firing pin return spring, and firing pin stop pin (6,7,8).  In other words, it houses the firing pin assembly.  Fortunately, all of these parts are available from Brownells and together only cost $19.42.  Not a horribly costly mistake, I guess, but it’s still annoying that important internal components of a pistol would be made from plastic. 

Speaking of internal components made of plastic, my other annoyance with this gun is the recoil spacer (part #25 in the previous diagram):

It seems to be a weak spot in the design of this gun.  It’s made of nylon and it seems to wear out quickly.  They’re not terribly expensive ($1.69 from Brownells), but it seems like a bad idea to use something so fragile as part of the recoil spring assembly.  I had just replaced the one in this gun before going to the range.  We only put about 50-100 rounds through it and already the new spacer was showing signs of wear.  I don’t have an exact count of the rounds expended with the one I had previously replaced, but I don’t think it was more than 500.

Now there are those who also decry the use of “plastic” (or polymer as the manufacturers prefer) at all, but I’ve found that if done right it’s not a problem (such as the lower frame of the Glocks and Springfield XD’s).  I should also note that my Browing Buckmark uses a plastic recoil spacer, but even after all the times its been fired the spacer looks nearly new (I’m guessing several thousand rounds).