Month: April 2005

Imaging you’re doing some roofing work and you find a bunch of old currency, worth $120,000 to a collector. Would you

A) Alert the owner of the house?
B) Take it, lay low and sell it discretely to a collector?
C) Take it, call the media, and pretended you dug it up in your backyard? And take photos of yourself like this:

METHUEN, Mass. Apr 29, 2005 ? Four men who made headlines by claiming they dug up buried treasure worth as much as $125,000 from one of their yards were charged Friday with stealing the cache of old currency while doing a roofing job at someone’s home.

The arrests came after the men made several appearances on national television, and police noticed how the story seemed to change each time.

So far I’ve enjoyed Survivor: Palau, mostly due to the fierce competitiveness and smart strategizing of Philadelphian, Stephenie Lagrossa. Her tribe became the first to lose every single immunity challenge, but it was her teammates that consistantly let the tribe down. Stephenie kicked ass wherever and whenever asses were found and her possible comeback was a great story to follow. Last week she was about to get booted off of Palau, but Janu, the Vegas showgirl with unmeasurable body fat, decided to quit instead.

I didn’t think Stephenie had a chance this week, but she did her best. She tried to get together an all female alliance (which never works), but Caryn ruined it by telling Tom. I think Caryn is in love with Tom. I wish the immunity challenge would have let Stephenie go head to head against the others in running or swimming, but instead they threw coconuts into squares.

This is the first Survivor post I’ve made here in a while, so I want to say so long to Stephenie and they ever do an All-Stars 2 (hopefully they won’t, because the first one sucked) you’ll definitely be on it. Great job.

JohnS writes:

What?s goin? on at the Tree House? Well as always, there?s Christian Open Mic Night on Sundays and Thursdays, and secular Open Mic continues (for now) on Wednesdays from 7 to 9 with Johnny Miles. But things are changing a bit on the weekends. Performers will now play just from 7:30 ? 9:30 instead of the usual 8 ? 11pm. As I understand it, there may be a number of reasons for the change. The owners face a lot of problems keeping the business viable for extended hours, with the overhead associated just keeping the place open, and the late eves may not be profitable. (I?m curious to see how this pans out though, because my experience lately has been that whatever crowd did gather was often late-arriving.) Anyway though, I also heard from T.H. ?insider? Bob (I am not sure if he would be considered ?staff?, but he?s always around the place) that there were some other considerations. The shorter performance hours are also in hopes of encouraging artists to play more original music and less covers. How so? Well, playing two hours instead of three might allow performers to eliminate some of the ?filler?, i.e. cover songs. Uh, OK, but Why? Well, believe it or not, small coffee houses like the Tree House are actually required to pay a fee (hundreds of dollars per year) to ASCAP for royalties on performances of copyrighted material. So, technically it costs the T.H. for all those times Ben Garvey performs Beck?s ?Cut in Half Blues?. I would have been skeptical about this, but it?s not the first time I?ve heard about this issue at a coffee house over the years. I have not spoken to Randy or Tina, but that’s the scuttlebutt.
What do you all think?

Ben adds: The ASCAP fees the Treehouse pays probably fall under the public performance license. A blanket license just to play music from the CD player may be cheaper, but I don’t see how you can keep the occasional cover out of weekend performances. I’ll bet ASCAP will force them to pay the fees even if they get rid of covers.

I’m not surprised about the shorter time slots, although I thought they should book two performers a night like most coffeeshops do. It usually ends up working out that way anyway, with the booked act bringing someone along.

What I would do to improve weekend traffic at the Treehouse is set up a deal with the great neighboring restaurants to make it the official waiting room of for the Tortilla Press, Nunzios, and Water Lily. Have the hostesses call the the Treehouse and announce when people’s tables are ready. Just a thought.

Today I received in the mail a copy of Acoustic Ross’s EP titled, 918 UFN. For some reason on the other side of the CD it says “ohio toothbrush sarcas,” which sounds like every other email subject I get.

My favorite song so far is Just The Thing, which continues my theory that 99% of all artists put their best song 3rd on the CD.

I also like the format of the EP. The first four tracks are songs and the next four are audio commentaries overtop of the first four songs. Haha.

He also included a copy of his humor/news zine, News from Around the Bend. So far it looks pretty good. I was going to post a hilarious picture of his cat, but I couldn’t find it.

I added a revised version of Cutie Theater. It has one small change, but it’s worth a new viewing.

In 2002 I looked around to find a good, free, open-source content management system for my website. I settled on PostNuke, the software currently being used to produce and store the text you’re currently reading. At the time it had great reviews as an alternative to the popular PHP-Nuke, which had a reputation for glaring security holes.

Short Version: I tried to update the version of this software and the site passed out. No moves will be due in Odd Man In tonight, but the game will resume tomorrow.

Read on for the whole story.

Update: I added an apology to the kicked players. Read on for that, too.I installed PostNuke and liked it a lot. It wasn’t perfect, but it was fairly easy to customize once I got a hang of how the modules worked. Not everything worked like it was supposed to, but it was pretty good. I updated the version a few times, each of which was a huge pain in the ass. I’ve had problems at every upgrade, so I settled on the most popular version: 7.2.6. I didn’t really bother upgrading after that.

So, eventually I write this game called Odd Man In, as a PostNuke module so I wouldn’t have to worry as much about user authentication and security. Haha.

Yesterday I was handed the names and secret identities of 4 Odd Man In players, which should have all been kept a secret. I assumed they were sharing information outside of the game, which is against the rules. They denied it, but I kicked them out of the game anyway. Some said that there may be security holes that I haven’t patched, allowing someone to read the database and discover someone’s identity.

To be fair I did a google investigation to see if there were any known exploits that could do this. To my surprise, I was able to write a script in about 5 minutes that could retrieve anyone’s identity. Ugh.

This doesn’t mean the players kicked out weren’t cheating, but greatly calls into question whether the information obtained came from legitimate sources. Given the information I know now I definitely would not have kicked those players from the game and it reminds why I have been so hesitant to do so in the past. I apologize to them if they weren’t cheating.

To maintain the popularity and integrity of the game it’s my duty to make sure these security holes are plugged up, so I tried to upload the latest version of Postnuke and the site went down for about 8 hours. Doh!

No moves will be due tonight, but the next round should go as planned tomorrow night. In the mean time you might see some weird formatting things or broken links. Bear with me on those. New users might also have trouble accessing the message board.

This sounds like the premise of a new TV show.

MESA, Ariz. (AP) – The Mesa Police Department is looking to add some primal instinct to its SWAT team. And to do that, it’s looking to a monkey.

“Everybody laughs about it until they really start thinking about it,” said Mesa Officer Sean Truelove, who builds and operates tactical robots for the suburban Phoenix SWAT team. “It would change the way we do business.”

Weighing only 3 to 8 pounds with tiny humanlike hands and puzzle-solving skills, Truelove said it could unlock doors, search buildings and find suicide victims on command. Dressed in a Kevlar vest, video camera and two-way radio, the small monkey would be able to get into places no officer or robot could go.

What could possibly go wrong?

The White Stripes released the single, Blue Orchid, from their upcoming album Get Behind Me Satan. The song sounds like nothing they’ve ever done before, but it fits with the title of the album. It’s full of high falsettos and high pitched guitars. I listened to it about three times and liked it more every time.

You can get it on iTunes or probably just google for the MP3.

Update: Or you can listen to it here!

I’ve decided to do something that would have been unthinkable for me a few years ago. I’m giving up Doritos. They’re just too good and whenever I eat them I feel sick afterwards. I can handle eating other types of chips, but with Doritos I can’t stop and end up wanting to puke.

I thought about maybe just eliminating the prime offender, Cool Ranch, but I would just end up getting hooked on the Pepper Jack or Salsa.

A huge congratulations goes out to Brian and Johanna Olexy on their wedding this past weekend. I had a blast.