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New feature: Plugoo widget
If you’re a regular visitor to the site, you may have noticed that the IM Online widget disappeared last week. I disabled it for one reason: loading the jimcofer.com homepage is dependent on the IM Online widget loading quickly; if the servers that power IM Online are under a heavy load, then the IM Online widget will appear to “hang”, and this causes the jimcofer.com site to load slowly for end users. IM Online used to “hang” only once in a blue moon; in recent weeks, however, it seems to hang several times a week. So for performance issues, I disabled the widget.
I did, however, find a nice replacement: Plugoo. Plugoo is a Flash-based instant messaging widget with a unique twist: platform agnosticism. Other instant messaging programs offer “embedded” instant messaging clients that you can add to your own web site (AOL offers WIMZI, for example). But these clients tie me (the website owner) to a particular service, such as AIM or Yahoo! Messenger. Many of these services also reveal your AIM\Yahoo! Messenger user name to the general public, which is something you might not want to do.
Plugoo is different. You sign up for an account at the Plugoo site and choose which instant messenger you’d like to use with the plug-in: AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ, Google Talk or Jabber. You then add a customized “buddy” or “friend” to your contacts list on the service you chose to use with Plugoo. The website widget then sends messages to the customized “buddy” on your list, who then turns around and forwards them to you. You, the website owner, are completely anonymous in this setup. And you can change which instant messaging service you use on the “backend” at any time.
That’s pretty cool, huh? Let’s test Plugoo out and see how well it performs. I’ve already noticed that it takes a few seconds to load; however I’ve noticed that it doesn’t slow down the rest of the jimcofer.com content, so perhaps it’ll stay.
Happy Georgia Day!
Happy Georgia Day, everyone! Although I now proudly call North Carolina home, I spent the first 33 years of my life in the great state of Georgia. As such, I’m kind of attached to my “home” state.
On February 12, 1733, British general and philanthropist James Oglethorpe disembarked from the HMS Anne with the first settlers of the future city of Savannah. Interestingly, Georgia was originally founded as a “debtor’s colony” – a colony where Britain’s “worthy poor” could grow silk, indigo or rice to pay off their debts. However, so many years passed between the initial idea and the actual granting of the royal charter that few debtors actually made the move. In fact, less than two dozen households would move to Georgia to pay off their debts. Instead, the colony was filled with poor English artisans and tradesmen, as well as Protestant refugees from Switzerland, Germany and Austria. When it became clear that the Trustees of the Province of Georgia could no longer govern the colony (especially since their initial goal of helping debtors had been ignored), Georgia became a crown colony. After joining the Revolution despite the large number of Loyalists in the colony, Georgia eventually became the fourth state of the new United States of America by ratifying the Constitution on January 2, 1788.
Some interesting facts about Georgia:
– Although James Oglethorpe didn’t spent a lot of time in Georgia, he did spent a year there 1735. He secretary during this time was Charles Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism. Although Charles and his older brother John were known as “rebels” in the Church of England, Charles remained loyal of the Church of England and died an Anglican priest.
– Georgia is the largest state east of the Mississippi River (although Michigan claims to be larger because they count lakes as “land”). Georgia also has 159 counties, the most of any state in the U.S. besides Texas.
– Georgia was named in honor of King George II of Great Britain. Six other U.S. states are named after monarchs: North and South Carolina are named for King Charles I of England, Virginia and West Virginia were named for Elizabeth I, Maryland is named for Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of King Charles I of England and Louisiana is named for King Louis XIV of France.
– Georgia’s Cumberland Island is the largest undeveloped island on the Atlantic Coast. You can get to Cumberland Island by taking a ferry from St. Mary’s, the second oldest city in North America.
– Some famous Georgians include Joanne Woodward, Kim Basinger, Julia Roberts, Holly Hunter, Brittany Murphy, Dakota Fanning, Oliver Hardy (of “Laurel and Hardy”), Lawrence Fishburne, Ossie Davis, Chris Tucker, Stacy Keach, Robert Patrick, Kip Pardue, DeForest Kelley (“Bones” from Star Trek), David Cross (played Tobias Fünke in Arrested Development), Steven Soderbergh, Bill Hicks, Jeff Foxworthy, Paula Deen, Ed Helms, Sterling Holloway (did the voice for Winnie the Pooh and 100 other Disney films), Spike Lee, Jerry Reed, Burt Reynolds, Nipsey Russell, Ty Pennington, Ryan Seacrest, Ted Turner, Jim Brown, Ty Cobb, Bobby Jones, Larry Holmes, Herschel Walker, Jackie Robinson, Bucky Dent, John Henry “Doc” Holliday, James Brown, Gladys Knight, Little Richard, Otis Redding, Ray Charles, André “André 3000” Benjamin, Jermaine Dupri, Brian “Ludacris” Bridges, TLC, Harry James, Buckner & Garcia (of “Pac Man Fever” fame; they also do the “Waffle House songs”), Brenda Lee, Trisha Yearwood, Travis Tritt, Alan Jackson, Ray Stevens, Amy Grant, Jessye Norman, Madeleine Peyroux, Bill Berry and Mike Mills (of R.E.M.), Duane and Gregg Allman (of The Allman Brothers), The Black Crowes, Drivin’ ‘n Cryin’, Guadalcanal Diary, Pylon, The B-52s, Collective Soul, Indigo Girls, Widespread Panic, Howard Finster, Margaret Mitchell, Alice Walker, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, James Dickey, Clarence Thomas, Andrew Young, Juliette Gordon Low (founder of the Girl Scouts), John C. Frémont (explorer and first Republican candidate for president), Crawford Long (performed the first surgery with patient under anesthesia), Bert Parks (TV personality and longtime host of the Miss America Pageant), John Pemberton (inventor of Coca-Cola), Pernell Roberts (Trapper John MD!), Junior Samples (if you have to ask…), Will Wright (developed the computer game Sim City), S. Truett Cathy (founder of Chick-Fil-A), Clark Howard and Deborah Norville. There’s also Jimmy Carter and Nancy Grace, but I don’t claim those two… I like to pretend that they’re from Ohio.
Sad News from Charlotte
Sad news from Charlotte today: the Carolina Panthers released veteran linebacker Dan Morgan this afternoon.
It is not known at this time whether Morgan suffered a concussion while answering the phone when the Panthers’ front office called.
Automating System Maintenance
Windows has some nifty built-in system maintenance tools. Disk Cleanup, for example, rids your hard drive of unneeded temporary files. Disk Defragmenter reorganizes your files for optimum system performance. Sadly, though, there’s not an easy “just click here” way to automate those utilities. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t automate those tasks:
Automating Disk Cleanup
You can make Disk Cleanup run as often as you’d like. It takes a little bit of work, although once it’s up and running, you don’t have to do anything else:
1) Click Start > Run
2) Type “cleanmgr.exe /sageset:50” (without the quotes) into the “Run:” box. Note that you can use any number between 0 and 65535 with the /sageset switch. I chose the number in my example (50) for simplicity reasons.
3) A window will appear that looks much like the standard Disk Cleanup screen. Choose which options you’d like Disk Cleanup to clean and then click “OK”.
4) Click Start > “Control Panel” > “Scheduled Tasks” > “Add Scheduled Task”.
5) Click “Next” (there will be a considerable delay between this step and the next).
6) You will be presented with an alphabetical list of most of the programs on your system. Scroll down and choose “Disk Cleanup”, then go on to the next step. If you don’t see “Disk Cleanup” listed, click “Browse” and navigate to the Windows\System32 folder and click on “cleanmgr.exe”.
7) Give the task a name and choose how often you’d like the task to run, then click “Next”.
8) Refine your time choices on the following screen, then click “Next”.
9) Enter the user name and password of the account you’d like the task to run under (usually this would be your own user name and password), then click “Next”.
10) Make sure that the “Open advanced properties for this when I click Finish” box is checked, then click “Finish”.
11) In the window that opens, look for the “Run:” box near the top of the screen. Type in “/sagerun:50” at the end of the run command, so that the complete text looks something like this:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\cleanmgr.exe /sagerun:50
12) Click “OK”. You be probably be prompted to enter your user name and password again; do this.
As you might guess, you can run the SAGESET option with different numbers to create multiple “profiles” for Disk Cleanup to use. For example, you might want to have Disk Cleanup clear out your Temporary Internet Files daily, but only do a “deep cleaning” once a week. In this case, you’d run SAGESET with one number (say, 50) and choose only the “Temporary Internet Files” option. You can then run SAGESET again with another number (say, 51) and choose to clean out all options. You’d then schedule one task to run daily with the /sagerun:50 option, and another task to run weekly with the /sagerun:51 option.
Ashes to Ashes: Season 1, Episode 1
It’s finally here:
After what seems like forever, the BCC aired the first episode of Ashes to Ashes this past Thursday. The show is the sequel (of sorts) to my all-time favorite TV show, Life On Mars.
As you might know, Life On Mars is about Detective Inspector Sam Tyler, a police officer in modern day Manchester, England. One day while on duty, Tyler gets hit by a car. When he wakes up, he’s still in Manchester, he’s still a cop… but the year is 1973. He’s found by some Manchester cops who think Sam’s just passed out. While trying to figure out who he is, they find his badge and some papers indicating that he was transferring from one Manchester precinct to another. When Sam wakes up, they helpfully take him to his new precinct. Sam, totally confused but feeling he has no other choice, begins working with the cops.
There’s his boss DCI Gene Hunt (pictured above, left), DS Ray Carling, DC Chris Skelton and WPC Annie Cartwright. And what a motley group they all are. Hunt, Carling and Skelton are racist, sexist, homophobic, and slightly corrupt. They solve crimes the old-fashioned way: by smacking people around until someone talks. Sam, needless to say, feels like a fish out of water. He’s used to a world with advanced forensics, mobile phones and laptop computers… to say nothing of more politically-correct attitudes. In a very real sense, much of Life On Mars is an ordinary cop show. It’s as if someone from one of the CSI shows somehow traveled back in time to wind up on Kojak.
But there’s more than that. Sam can hear voices. Sometimes they come from the radio. Sometimes they come from late night TV. Sometimes he can just hear them anywhere. The voices are those of people in his hospital room back in 2006. He can hear the voices of the nurses working on him. He can hear his Mom’s voice when she comes and visits him. Her can hear the doctor giving his mother Sam’s prognosis. But all is not, exactly, what it seems. Is Sam really a time traveler from 2006? Or is he just crazy and it really is 1973? If so, why does he have visions of a life in 2006? And why go back to 1973? Why that specific year? You’ll just have to watch the show to find out!
In any case, Ashes to Ashes picks up the story. Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes, from Spooks) is a hostage negotiator. She supposedly has the day off to celebrate her daughter’s birthday. But she gets an urgent call while driving her daughter to her birthday party: a street crazy with a gun has taken someone hostage, and has asked the police for Drake specifically. She has no other option but to attend to the matter.
While Alex is talking with the hostage taker, he suddenly starts singing “I’m happy, hope you’re happy too” (from David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes”). Alex’s daughter, who has ignored Alex’s order to stay in the car, becomes scared and rushes towards her mother. The hostage taker, seeing an advantage, releases his hostage and takes Alex’s daughter instead. In the confusion that ensues, the two disappear, and Alex almost loses it when a gunshot is heard. Tracking down the noise, she finds her daughter unhurt and the hostage taker gone. Alex calls her daughter’s godfather to take the child on to the party while she “cleans up this mess”.
After talking with the cops and “cleaning up the mess”, Alex gets back in her car to drive to the party, only to find the hostage taker in the back seat waiting for her. He takes her to a barge on the Thames where he shoots her. Alex later wakes up on the barge… only to find herself in the middle of a party fueled by cocaine and hookers. And oh yeah, it’s now 1981. The sounds of police sirens can be heard as Alex walks around the party trying to make sense of it all. The party is being raided by the cops, and the host apparently thinks that Alex is the one that’s called them. He tries to take Alex hostage, only to run smack dab into… Gene Hunt, Ray Carling and Chris Skelton. Hunt initially thinks that Alex is “just another prozzie” from the party… until he searches her and finds her badge.
Alex is even more freaked out by her time travel than Sam Tyler was. She’s a trained psychologist, you see, being a hostage negotiator and all. She tries to rationalize everything, to make sense out of her situation… until she mentions Tyler to Hunt, who reveals that Tyler only died the previous year, and that’s a big part of the reason why he and his crew moved to London. Unlike Life On Mars, where it wasn’t immediately clear why Sam was transported back to 1973, Drake thinks she knows exactly why she was sent to 1981. She’s convinced that the hostage taker (from 2006) is a drug lord (in 1981), and that by busting him, she can put him in prison and stop herself from getting shot in 2006. Just like on Life On Mars, though, it just isn’t that simple.
What, exactly, the future holds for Alex isn’t clear (hey, it’s only been one episode!). I’m glad that the show’s writers didn’t take the “easy way out” by simply making this Life On Mars 2. Sam Tyler’s character is firmly a part of this show, everything that happened in Mars affects Ashes. Alex uses her knowledge of Sam to make the transition from 2006 to 1981 somewhat easier. She knows, for instance, that Sam heard his voices mostly in radios and televisions, so she seeks out both to see if she can hear her doctors. No dice, apparently (at least so far). And just as Mars had its surreal moments, so too does Ashes. Instead of being haunted by Test Card F like Sam, Alex is haunted by a Pierrot clown (perhaps not coincidentally, David Bowie dresses up as a Pierrot clown in the “Ashes to Ashes” music video). And unlike Mars, where Test Card F could only originate from the TV, the clown can apparently show up anywhere, much to the distress of Alex.
All in all, it’s a great show so far. But then, it also has some massive shoes to fill. It would be hard to be “as good as” or “better than” Mars, especially since this is a follow-up. But everything’s good so far. Especially the soundtrack. While I liked Mars’ soundtrack, I’m really digging Ashes’ soundtrack. Episode 1 alone featured “I Fought The Law” by The Clash, “Vienna” by Ultravox, “Are Friends Electric” by Gary Numan, “No More Heroes” by The Stranglers, “I’m in Love with a German Film Star” by The Passions, “Careless Memories” by Duran Duran and “Same Old Scene” by Roxy Music.
That last song, in fact, is used at the very end of episode 1. Drake is alone in her apartment. She grabs a police radio and, hoping that anyone from 2006 will hear her, begins a short speech where she promises her daughter that she’ll come home. By the time the speech is over, Alex is in tears. Exhausted and resigned to her fate in to be in 1981 for now, she seeks out Gene and the rest of “the gang”. Alex heads back to an Italian restaurant that appeared earlier in the episode. She sits at the bar. Gene walks up, pours her as glass of wine, then walks away. She looks back at him, then stares off into space… as the song goes on:
Nothing lasts forever
Of that I’m sure
Now you’ve made an offer
I’ll take some more
Young loving may be
Oh so mean
Will I still survive
The same old scene?
Fucking perfect.
News for 02/09/2008
Everyone knows that cables are a ripoff. When you buy a new HDTV from Best Buy or Circuit City, the store only makes a few dollars off the TV; where they make their real money is on the overpriced Monster Cables. Pretty much every techie knows this, and perhaps the non-techies learned about it this week, when Consumerist ran this story about it. It seems that a Radio Shack employee faxed Consumerist an internal Radio Shack memo that contained the retail price, wholesale price, and markup percentages for all Monster Cables the chain carries. And the sheer profit margin on them is, quite frankly, breathtaking. A 19 foot Monster HDMI-DVI cable costs Radio Shack just $99.94; the store then truns around and sells them for $179.99. An 8 foot Monster component cable costs you $91.99, but one costs the Radio Shack store only $41.60 – a markup of 219%! Don’t get me wrong folks: Monster Cables are quality cables. It’s just that buying Monster Cables are like paying $400,000 for a 2008 Mercedes C-Class (average actual price: $35,000). I almost want to ask the people that run Monster Cable how they sleep at night… but I already know the answer: on top of a huge pile on money!
If you’re the kind of person that actually likes Monster Cables, you might be interested in this: a $6 million home theatre. Known as the Kipnis Studio Standard, this baby sports an 18′ x 10′ Stewart screen and a Sony SRX-S110 projector that upscales Blu-ray and HD-DVD movies. Click the link to check out Engadget’s post about it – they couldn’t be bothered to even get in to the audio portion of the theatre.
Strawberry Cheetos? What will those crazy Japanese think of next?
This is… disturbing
OK, I know I’m late to the scene with this one… but man, there’s just something so disturbing about this video:
I don’t know if it’s just the subject matter, or the cheesy “special effects”, or how the video is one “music video cliché” after another… or whether it’s just Samwell himself. I don’t know, but I do know that this video just gives me the heebie jeebies for some reason!
Creating Files With No Name
It doesn’t happen that often, but there are times when you might need to create a file without a name. One example is an .htaccess file. It’s a plain text file used on web servers to (generally) control access to certain directories. For example, most smaller web sites (like this one) are hosted on “shared servers”, that is, a server that hosts multiple web sites on one machine. To keep other (legitimate) users of the server from accessing my files, my web host uses an .htaccess file to restrict access to my files to anyone with my user name and password. Likewise, I use an .htaccess file in my own site to keep people without a username and password from accessing certain “storage” directories.
The problem with creating or editing such files in Windows is that Windows hates files without a “proper” name. Windows wants a file called “filename.extension” (like notes.txt) and it just chokes when you want to create a file without a name like (.htaccess). So if you need to edit your .htaccess file on a Windows computer (or, for that matter, any “hidden file” on a Unix system, like .config), Windows usually pitches a fit and demands that you give the file a name.
To get around this, simply put the file name in quotes when you go to save it. For instance, in Notepad you’d click File > Save, then choose “All files” and enter “.htaccess” as the name… aaaaannnd presto! One .htaccess file created in Windows, without the hassle!
Geek Basics: RSS
“RSS” stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. RSS is a way for websites to “push” data out to their readers. The idea behind RSS is similar in concept to “email updates” you may choose to get from cnn.com or some other site. However, RSS works very differently under the hood. Whereas email updates can only be sent to a single email address, RSS has lots of nifty tricks that make it much more useful than a “CNN Headlines” email.
To understand how RSS works, you need to know that it all begins with a piece of software called an “RSS reader” or “RSS aggregator” (or just “aggregator” for short). In most cases, you’d need to download an RSS reader and install it on your system. Then you enter the names of the RSS feeds you want to subscribe to into the RSS reader. The software will then begin checking a specially formatted page on the website in question. The reader checks that page at a timed interval (usually 1 hour). Any new entries are then copied into your reader software, where you can read them at your leisure.
To put it in simple terms… Have you ever sat at a web page and constantly reloaded it? Maybe you were at ticketmaster.com waiting for concert tickets to go on sale… Maybe you were at fandango.com waiting for Star Wars tickets to go on sale… Maybe you were waiting for a news item to appear on your local TV station’s website… Whatever the case, you were at a site, refreshing the page every 30 seconds or so, waiting for new entires to appear. That’s exactly what an RSS reader does, only it does it automatically, behind the scenes, once an hour (or sooner, if you set that option). The web page that the RSS reader is loading is specially formatted, and when the reader finds a new entry, it copies it to your computer so that you can read it.
Here’s where RSS gets interesting.
First of all, there are several ways to get feeds. If you’d prefer using a standalone program to read feeds, you can download a free program like RSS Bandit or SharpReader. If you’re a big user of Microsoft Outlook, you can upgrade to Office 2007 (which has an integrated RSS reader), or you can install NewsGator, a free plug-in for Outlook 2000\2003 that integrates feeds into Outlook. If you use lots of different computers during the day, you might want to look in to online RSS readers like Google Reader; instead of downloading new feeds to your desktop computer, Google Reader downloads then to your Google Account, so you can check the feeds from multiple computers – just like web mail.