Category: moved from livejournal

Coffee!

November 19, 2004

[Cross-posted to and .]

Mmm… I apologize for not having better pictures, but I wanted to take a moment to brag about something…

I just got done roasting and then brewing a 50/50 blend of Organic Mexican and Organic Sumatra coffee. This was then ground and roasted with some wonderfully clean-tasting spring water, and it has made for an absolutely amazing friday afternoon snack. Unfortunately, I don’t have anything sweet (dark chocolate would be especially good) to munch on. :\

The coffee was acquired from The Runcible Spoon in Bloomington, IN, and the mug pictured above is a Ray Troll mug for Raven’s Brew coffee, purchased from SOHO COHO in 1996.

Did I mention my fondness for southeast Alaska?

food moved from livejournal

Mmm… Beer!

November 16, 2004

[Crossposted to and .]

Click for more…

So… My house smells like a brewery. Last week I decided to take a stab at brewing beer, so I picked up the supplies. Today I actually gave everything a go. Because it’s fairly involved and I’ve never done it before, I didn’t take a lot of pictures, but there are quite a few of them here.

Now I’ve got about a week or so to wait, then the beer will go into the secondary fermenter, with bottling coming a few weeks later.

It’s supposed to be a English Brown Ale, so hopefully it’ll be good. :)

beer moved from livejournal

Clifty Falls State Park

November 11, 2004

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In my driving around on Tuesday, I came across a place called Clifty Falls State Park. Per the state’s site it appears that I didn’t see all of the park that I could have. Alas, I did still have fun wandering around. Click the picture above to see the photos I took there. Also, it seems that the Indiana DNR has some videos of the park here. I missed the tunnel. :(

moved from livejournal outdoors travel

Mammoth Cave National Park

November 8, 2004

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Well, I sure was the cheap tourist today. I managed to visit three National Park Service sites, even though one of them was closed. Whoops!

So… What did happen today. (A word of warning about the photos… Something is odd with the automatic exposure on my camera. I think that it was set to ‘center spot weighted’ from when I was doing some eBay photos, so the exposure is quite a bit…. Off… In some of the shots. I’m sorta frustrated at that. At least it can be cleaned up if need be.)

Well, first I woke up at right about 8am, got dressed, then headed southbound on I-65 towards Mammoth Cave National Park. I stopped at Burger King for some breakfast (two egg/cheese crossants, hash browns, and a coffee) as it’s the only really veggie-friendly breakfast-serving fast food place that I know of. The trip down there didn’t really take too long, and while heading southbound I somehow hit a timezone border. WTF? I was headed practically straight south… Regardless, that all put me at the park at about 9:40am CST, which was just in time for the 9:45am Frozen Niagara tour. It turns out that this particular tour is the longest one offered on weekdays during the winter season. I wouldn’t have minded something longer, but with that being the only option, I took it.

Clicky if you really want to read this…

moved from livejournal outdoors travel

Help!

October 31, 2004

To all the electronics geeks, I need help finding something. I’m looking for a 1U enclosure for a project I want to work on, and I’d like it to be plastic. I’ve seen them around online, but I can’t find a place to buy them.

Do you know where I could get one?

I’ve got a piece of gear I want to mount in an enclosure, and a plastic box would work great… And being rack-mountable would be even better. :)

So, again, what am I looking for? A 1U rack mount plastic enclosure, similar to the one seen here. (No, it doesn’t need any knobs or switches or whatever, I’ll take care of mounting those.)

Thanks!

electronics making things moved from livejournal

Eclipse!

October 27, 2004

So, as most people know, tonight was the lunar eclipse which was visible all across North America (at the very least). So, what did I do? I took pictures of it, or at least tried to.

That image up above is a thumbnail from one of the images, slightly blurred to clean it up, just after the eclipse had fully taken effect. So, there you go: eclipse images.

These look a lot better once played with in Photoshop, mostly because I used some digital zoom, but this can be corrected for. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll end up with a nice Coolpix 4800 which should help alleviate this the next time.

moved from livejournal outdoors

:)

October 18, 2004

Ahh, I figured out the problem.

It seems that in my haste to get vpopmail reinstalled this morning, I gave it an argument of -DSPAM_THRESHOLD=5. Normally I wouldn’t have used that argument, but it seems that the updated FreeBSD port requires it. That, or I don’t remember using it last time… Anyway, that particular vpopmail flag made it DELETE all spam with a score of greater than 5. Sure, most stuff got through, but some was getting deleted. Oops! Since I’ve discovered this flag’s true use (note that this flag is NOT documented in the vpopmail docs) I’ve since recompiled with it set to 30. (And yes, that can only be set per-server, at compile time.) I figure that spam which received a score greater than 30 is hopelessly bad, and should not be delt with.

So, that’s that. Now it’s time to go home and have some dinner. I think tonight’s tasty treat will be veggie nuggets with a spicy salsa to dip them in.

computers food moved from livejournal

…

October 18, 2004

Hmm. So today I installed SpamAssassin 3.0. Things went good, except in the middle of everything an errant find command b0rked my vpopmail install. (Who would have thought that find . -delete -name “bayes*” would delete everything in and beneth the current directory, while find . -name “bayes*” -delete would only recursively delete all files matching ‘bayes*’.)

Anyway, vpopmail is reinstalled, SpamAssassin is doing it’s thing, etc. Except for one problem. I don’t get any spam. At all. I get messages that are flagged as not being spam, but I never ever get any flagged as spam. I’m really not sure what’s going on… SpamAssassin isn’t capable of deleting messages, and I’ve got nothing in place to ensure that the messages go away. And messages that are flagged as not being spam come through. So, I’m not sure what’s up.

One thought is that spam counts happen to be way down today (this is a distinct possibility) and that all the spam I am getting is the silly no body / no subject / no date mail, which the MTA is doing away with.

I guess the only thing to do is go home, reset the junkmail counters in Mail.app, and see if they increase over night. If I don’t get *any* spam, I’ll have to look further. Every message that I’ve expected to receive has gotten through… I just don’t have any test spam.

[UPDATE]

I’d forgotten I left this window open… In the mean time, I sent something that was apt to be flagged as spam, but it was legit. Now to figure out what’s going on…

computers moved from livejournal

!!!

October 14, 2004

Okay, now this is one of the most useful things I’ve installed in a long time. Google has introduced Google Desktop Search, and boy does it work well. It’s installed and picking through my email and my machine, and the searching is just great. Outlook search is notoriously faulty, taking a long time to pick through mail, being keyboard (and not context) based, etc.

Well, this tool sits there, indexes your whole machine, and offers searches on files, contents of files, email, chats, everything. It’s *exactly* what I’ve been wanting for quite some time. You know how it’s always been easier to search the internet than your local machine… Well, now searching your local machine is just as easy. This makes me really, really happy.

computers moved from livejournal

Mmm… Toxic!

September 29, 2004

Last night and I went wandering a rather interesting local park. This is Walden Ponds in Shelby Township, MI, which is located on part of the old G & H Landfill, which was a Superfund site. The restoration work is now done, and the wetlands have been turned into a Heron Rookery. There’s also an interesting trail which leads out the back of the park and eventually to Yates Cider Mill at 23 Mile and Dequinder. Oh, and you can’t forget the rather forboding water treatment plant which sits off to the side of the park, quietly cleaning up the filth.

Of course, we can’t forget an obligatory satellite photo of the site, complements of ‘s wonderful mapper.ofdoom. Set the format to Metro and the zoom to 0.5m/p for a good view of the site. This starts centered on the pond in front of the plant.

mapping moved from livejournal outdoors