ipstenu

Everyone tells me ‘Go out for a drive’ and my thought is ‘To where?’ Maybe it’s a factor of the green/eco-friendly/save-the-damn-earth/communist/socialist agenda of which I partake. Maybe it’s because I’m new at this. But I don’t get the whole concept of going nowhere. Now, I do go for bike rides and hikes, and people might argue that those are trips to nowhere, except those are trips to get out, enjoy nature, and get exercise. So they have a point, a purpose, and a meaning. Good for me and the world, you see. Driving just to drive seems silly, wasteful and weird. So with that in mind, I drove down to UIC campus to check out an SCA fighter practice.

Just photos this week. Thinking things later.

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Yeah, that’s it. That’s the one. It’s … mine. What is it? It’s a 2008 used Ford Escape Hybrid, with 7918 miles on it, fully loaded, AWD, roof rack and all for less than the cost of a new base model hybrid.

Excuse me, I need a paper bag to go breath into a few times. I’m sure you understand. If not, watch this commercial and put a pillow under my head.

Actually I’m doing okay, I’m just having mild freakouts once in a while and then a squee of delight. I drove it home, since I knew the way better, and didn’t hit anyone.

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So after a test run at Chicago North Toyota, the Prius is out.

I know, I know. It failed the test drive test, which is simple: “Both drivers of a vehicle must take the wheels out for a spin and approve. If either driver doesn’t like the car enough to make faces, the car is out.” There’s a side note of ‘If either driver can’t figure out how to turn the car on…’ but that’s sort of understood. Personally, I feel the biggest problem was the Toyota guy (who shall remain nameless) and his ‘tutoring’ of how to drive.

The hunt continues!

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Here’s my problem. I fell in love with a car.

Right now, my friends, family and those who’ve read this blog are probably laughing. Me, the chick who hates driving, who hates cars, who would rather walk from Solana Beach to Del Mar than take a bus (only 3 miles, not bad), the woman who adores her bike so much she likes to bike in the cold October rain, has fallen for a car.

And it’s the freakin’ expensive Prius. A fully loaded Prius is $35k, and honestly, that’s more than I was thinking of spending. The worst part is even the used ones are around $20k, which is the upper end of where I was looking.

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It actually wasn’t raining that bad. Yesterday when I got up it was raining and my knee hurt. After my trip to Japan in 2008, a cane for a month and a round of therapy, I’ve settled into the reality that my knee is always going to hurt. It’s not surprising. I broke my arm 21 years ago, and it still aches when the weather changes. The knee has the same effect these days, and when we went from crisp to the 70s yesterday, I hurt with every step. Ironically, perhaps, biking hurts less and I probably should have biked (the weather was lovely after the AM rain), but I thought I’d listen to the weather guy about the expected downpour in the morning. I hate going to work wet. Since yesterday was so nice, I decided to chance it today and bike in. And I got wet.

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Project Runway, now on Lifetime, is a whole different show that is exactly the same in a totally new way. Lifetime is a channel that many of us go out of our way to avoid. Unless you’re the sort who lives for movies about battered women who get strong and move on (played by Nancy McKeon) or alcoholic/bulemics who find the courage to heal themselves (played by Judith Light), this is not really the channel or you. And yet now I find I watch two shows on Lifetime regularly enough to record them. One of them is, of course, Project Runway.

What’s changed since the move to Lifetime? What did Bravo do that annoyed and what does Lifetime do to celebrate? Here we go!

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It’s October, and that means every politician in town, new and old, is out there stumping away in the strangest places. I run into a lot of them at the Metra station and, while I normally tell them “I’m Canadian” (a half truth), if I see they’ve got ballot petitions, I always sign up. The funny thing is that, dressed as I am with my bicycle, they rarely talk to me at the Metra, but they always do at the CTA. Is there some rule that hipsters (hah) and eco-friendly urban-hippies aren’t politically savvy, or are we too smart? Is it that I look too young to vote or disinclined?

I put this out there: Every time anyone, no matter what party, asks me if I’ll consider signing a petition to put someone on the ballot, I sign.

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I’m going to be upfront and admit that I’ve never actually liked this plugin. A very large part of me wants to side with Matt Mullenweg in that if you have a good server, configured properly, with a decent host, you should be just fine. Also, it doesn’t really work well with my favorite anti-spam plugin, Bad Behavior, which stops 99.999% of my spam cold. But. Over the years of running a vaguely popular fan site, I’ve been nailed by service spikes that killed me and everyone else on my shared hosting setup (multiple websites, not all connected, sharing a virtual server). At one point, I had to offload ‘news’ to LiveJournal, but since then, I’ve pulled it all back to WordPress, moved to a virtual private server (VPS, just me and my sites on a virtual server) due to the need for better support, and I was kind of complacent. Things were trucking along just fine, we had some major news that were handled without a blip, and I thought I was cool.

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They called this “The Real Power of The DC Universe”

Originally designed as a promotional piece for DC Comics at the San Diego Comic-Con, this is an oversized poster featuring the Women of the DC Universe. Measuring an impressive 39′ wide x 24′ high, the poster shows Catwoman, Oracle (Barbara Gordon, the original Batgirl), Zatanna, Black Canary, Power Girl, Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Batwoman, Vixen, Poison Ivy, and Harley Quinn (collectively regarded as the REAL power of the DC Universe) in their bridal best, as depicted by acclaimed artist Adam Hughes.

Make your own conclusions. But yes, I snapped up a pick of Batwoman, Wonder Woman and Babs for my rotating header.

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A little while ago, I wrote about how a favicon defines a website. What about what defines you, the Internet person, however? We all have a thousand IDs spread all across the IntarWebz, demonstrating various aspects of our personality. Since 2006, I’ve been using the same image as my avatar pretty much everywhere: a stencil of Renee Montoya as The Question. This summer, a new artist picked up the brush and Cully Hamner’s take on Renee and her world became the de rigur look of the lady. So I decided today to switch over my icons to the new stencil. What does that mean in 2009? Is there an easy way to change your visual identity across multiple sites in one fell swoop?

There is and it’s called Gravatar

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I still don’t really like driving, but I’m better at it. Better enough at it that as of 09-09-09, I am a licensed driver in the state of Illinois. Only 16 years past the ‘normal’ date. Shocking.

I didn’t scan in my own since it has a new fancy reflective thing on it, which makes it hard to scan. Anti-theft being what it is, I can’t really say I’m upset about this. Oddly, when I first moved here (at age 20), a red background on your license or ID meant you were under 21. Now they have a vertical license (photo on top, info underneath) for the kiddies. I suppose that makes it easier to catch, but they’ve ‘redesigned’ the license at least 4 times since I’ve been here, and I’m sure it just makes everyone more confused.

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So I waited until they rebooted Batman to bother picking up Final Crisis. When I got to the shop, they’d sold the last copy of the trade paperback (TPB) of Final Crisis, so I could only pick up Batwoman Detective Comics (Featuring Batwoman and The Question) and a copy of Final Crisis: Revelations. Now, the latter is pretty much a funky Christian Bible tale which I only made it through because I went to an Episcopal school for a few years, and I actually remember some of the Catholic dogma they taught in Christian Traditions. Otherwise, like most modern Jews, I learn about Catholicism via TV and Tom Lehrer’s Vatican Rag. In Final Crisis: Revelations we learn than Vandal Savage, an immortal super-evil-dude is actually Cain (which is why he can’t die) and his return is meant to bring Apokolips (not a typo). His daughter, Scandal, isn’t mentioned, but it got me thinking that perhaps she’s the Messiah in the DC universe.

I’ll try to explain the background in a non-boring way to you non-comic nerds, but this is fake religious hokum combined with comic books. It’s weird, just go with it or come back next week.

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I’m not going to apologize for making you feel like a schmuck. You know who you are. I have morals and standards and I, personally, don’t look up certain information on the net, even though I could, because it’s just not my damn business.

At the same time, I’m not trying to make you feel bad. My morals are not, never have been and will never be forced on you as the way you must work. This is just the way I can sleep happily at night, and not stay up feeling like I’m a little boy caught peeking up girls dresses. If you feel that what you’re doing is okay, then fine. I don’t actually judge you or think any more or less of you for that in general. I expect people to have different ethical marks than I have, and unless our viewpoints are in direct conflict, we’re cool.

So here we go about morals, ethics, and perceptions.

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I am 32 years old, and it wasn’t until August that I took my first driving lesson by a non-familymember/family friend.

I am 32, and for 15 years, I’ve not had a drivers license or permit.

I am 32, and at 18, I once failed the written drivers test.

So yeah, there’s one part of my life that’s always been a ‘failure’ in the sense that I never achieved the goals my family had for me, and that was in driving. I just don’t. I don’t like it, I don’t even like being in cars.

But here I am, 32, and it’s becoming a bit much to cage rides or take cabs and buses and so on.

So on Friday the 7th, without telling anyone, I went and took the written test, got a permit, and signed up for some lessons.

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Like all offices, I have one with good bathrooms and not so good ones. The best ones have soft toilet paper, a supply of paper towels, a working emergency tampon machine, and decent lights. Oh, and a fan. It MUST have a working fan for those days that everyone at work has the chilie. I told them not to. And every office has a bad bathroom, with TP that we call ‘John Wayne’ (doesn’t take crap off anyone), no fans, mold … yeah. You’ve been there.

So what happens when the good bathroom goes bad? We fix it!

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Credit: There, I Fixed It

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Imagine summing up everything a website is about in a 16×16px square. That’s the goal of a favicon (short for favorites icon). Pretty much every site out there has one, and it’s a devil of a task to make one that looks appropriate, identifiable and understandable in such a small space. As much time as I spend tweaking a design I spend on a favicon because they are that important for the look and feel of a site. A site without one is nearly naked.

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Back in the end of April, I started puttering around with a plugin I called Ban Hammer, which had the effect of blocking anyone who was on my comment blacklist from signing up on any of my blogs. By May, it was ready for public consumption and I put it on the WordPress site.

Yesterday I entered it in a plugin contest. Please go check out the Ban Hammer entry and, if it’s useful/cool to you, vote for me! Seeing who I’m up against, I don’t think I’ll win, but I’d like to see how far my little engine can go!

And yes, Ban Hammer’s mean to evoke a picture of Thor or some such creature with a hammer, smashing spammers in the head. I used the title once when coding a ‘ban’ feature on PernMUSH, many moons ago.

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Earthlink has seriously annoyed me.

On one of the sites I host, I saw someone post a complaint that they weren’t getting emails from the board. Now I get a lot of bounced email from that site, but it’s not their fault. Spammers like to sign up with fake emails and all those bounce. Every week I collect the repeat offenders and add them to my ban list, but I end up sending between 10 and 100 ‘bad’ email a week. It sucks, but there you are. Once in a while, the ’sources’ of those bad emails (gmail and yahoo and anything *.ru) block me, but when I explain what’s up, they unblock quickly. Gmail blocked and unblocked me within moments of each email. So, like the good webhost I am, I took a look and found out that, indeed, the emails were bouncing with this message:

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently: [person]@earthlink.net

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 8): 550 550 Dynamic/zombied/spam IPs blocked. Write blockedbyearthlink@abuse.earthlink.net

Now I know I (ipstenu.org) am not a spammer, and I know my domain isn’t open so spammers can’t use me. But I also know that sometimes if you get a lot of automated emails, some ISPs get narky. I figured I’d email the blockedby account and get it cleared up. I should have known better.

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I don’t usually post this, but I have some friends out there who are being fooled by this charlatan and I felt a little Randi in their day was needed. The Amazing Randi will show you how you too can practice the same magic as Uri “Fake” Geller.

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