That's "Leave Eye"

Sage Advice
Some words of wisdom from my afternoon tea:

Make Your Own Warning Labels
Yet another friend who knows about the 'bunnies' sent us this warning label he made:

The site allows one to generate pretty much whatever is desired, as far as warning labels go, but beware of the big, verocious, bunnies!

(please don't ask me what 'verocious' means... I don't know either.)

Who Is Sick?
After meeting up with a friend for lunch who said he, his wife, and several people he knew had been knocking on death's door with some kind of nasty head cold, I went and washed my hands.

Then later this afternoon I stumbled upon

http://whoissick.org/.

Quite an interesting concept and technical mashup idea.

Bunny!
Usually I'd pass stuff along like this to Rama but seeing as I haven't updated my blog in, well, ages, and this has to do with bunnies, here we are.

For those of you who know me better than most, you will know that my wife and I often refer to each other as "Bunny." It is kind of a joke, but then, you use it so often that it's not a joke anymore. Originally, we used this because of the scene in Pulp Fiction where the pair who attempt to rob the diner (Ringo and Yolanda) are hampered by Jules and Vince who also have guns, and Yolanda starts to wig out. Ringo tells her "be cool honey-bunny" and "are we cool honey-bunny?" etc. So we used it kind of like that as a joke/serious whenever moments of tension came up early on, and it stuck.

So it was with no big surprise that our friend David passed this link on to me this morning, and it just screamed out for my blog...

Behold, drivable electric pink bunny slippers:

From the minds over at Tesla Motors.

Ooo, that's gotta smart
As much as I would love to comment, I'll refrain, and just redirect you.

HA! Gotcha!
Figuring something out, especially after many frustrating moments, is quite rewarding. I only wish I didn't have to go through the frustration first...

At home, I have my personal website running off of Mac OS X, and I have been trying to get a simple PHP statement to behave as expected.

echo "$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']";

should print out the IP address of the machine making he request to the HTTP server, but on my home system it printed out the internal address of the server.
Let's just say that there were many frustrating moments trying to figure out why.

In the hopes that someone will benefit from my labors, here's what I found after many finely tuned Google searches, and ultimately ending up on Apple's Discussion Boards:

By default, sites setup on X Server have a 'performance cache' turned on. Ultimately this means that the 'REMOTE_ADDR' environment variable in Apache gets set to the address of the performance cache (which seems to be another instance of Apache running on the same machine) so you end up with it pointing to the server address. Entirely not useful, especially if you're trying to do some geolocating by IP address. After some reading, more, and a little more, I discovered the source of the problem, and the likely cause for a persistent, yet unexplained, problem. The performance cache is a proxy serving off of port 16080 and, as mentioned, causes the "real" server to unwittingly populate the REMOTE_ADDR environment variable with the server's address. The performance cache was also responsible for the aforementioned persistent problem, which was generally confined to people accessing my site from a Windows based machine, without including a trailing 'slash' on the requested URL. In these circumstances, the page would not load, with some forgotten error message. I now believe that this was an artifact of the 16080 performance proxy and perhaps the configuration of my router's firewall. However, after disabling the performance cache on all of the virtual hosts being served, by way of Apple's Server Admin application, both problems vanished, like an unsatisfactory meal, down the drain.

HA! Gotcha!

Digging Out...
Last we left our intrepid blogger there was 21.5" of fresh Colorado powder settled quietly in his back yard. Since then only a tad more seems to have drifted into place, for a total of 22":


This morning was all about shoveling snow. If you go back one entry you may recall the mounds of snow where our cars had previously been identified... I managed to find my 4Runner:

but there was no reason to excavate the Saturn, which still remains, shall we say, "blanketed":


<whew> The 4Runner is free!

...and all of that after already clearing the sidewalks and the deck!

Time to relax in the snow with Rama's requested shot of me making a snow angel:

Blizzard!
So, after getting called out I had to post some pictures of me being outside taking care of our heavily laden trees...


...and making a thigh high trough through our back yard!

Here's the measure at about 21:30 tonight (21.5"):

That mound in the foreground is a Saturn Coupe, and the one in the back is a 4Runner...

Here's the BBQ on the deck...


...and last, sort-of by request from Rama is a shot of Sarah "making a snow angel":

(I say 'sort-of' because Rama made his request too late to get a shot of me tonight... perhaps, if he asks nicely, I'll put one of myself up tomorrow, but then all you may see of me is a dent in the snow and a snorkel!)

The power's still on, so we're happy!

Blizzard?
Here in Boulder Colorado the forecast for today was 100% chance of snow, and predicted 2-3 feet of fall for the storm. Here's some pictures that I've been taking from my home office window (sorry about the quality... they are from my phone camera and through a screen), and I'll continue to update them as long as interesting.

This morning at ~9:

~11:

~12:

~13

~14:

~15:

~16:

~17:30:

This last one I had to bump up the brightness in post-prossessing so you could see (at least a little)...

Sadistic Humor
Akin to watching cats get flung from ceiling fans, and far better than the overplayed hit-to-the-groin, this film made me laugh to tears. Filmmaker Jessica Yu's hysterical 1997 Sundance entry, Sour Death Balls:

Fizzwizzle's at it again!
A while ago you might have read my post about Professor Fizzwizzle. Well it seems the Professor is at it again, this time in a new title: FizzBall



I recently received Grubby Games' announcement for the release of FizzBall and having loved Professor Fizzwizzle in his previous game, I downloaded the demo straight away. I've just finished playing through the demo period and must say FizzBall is a truly inspired, creative, addictively fun wonder, which I have purchased already. I also know a certain six year old who will absolutely love all the animals...

Nice work, and a 'hat's off' to the creative minds over at Grubby Games!

Just When You Thought It Was Safe...
Okay, you probably didn't think it was safe, but the newly updated "Press Freedom Index" is pretty disturbing none the less.

North Face Warranty
For years I have used a very nice red North Face jacket which I bought sometime in '98 or so. Loved it. It's been everywhere with me and has held up pretty well, considering. Besides the occasional case of being mistaken for the Ski Patrol, the jacket has been great. Light, warm, nice set of features, etc. But over the past year or so it stopped breathing. Three layers of Gore-Tex just stopped allowing the moisture out... which is bad. I would get a layer of frost on the inside of my jacket when snowshoeing. So, I recently took my sun-faded, well worn jacket into the local North Face store here in Boulder and had it sent in to the Warranty department, with no real expectations about what would happen.

Well, the FedEx truck just pulled away, and left for me a diminutive box, which said upon it in big black block letters "NO KNIFE."

Upon opening the box I uncovered a single sheet of paper from the North Face, and a plastic wrapped, new (as in unused) jacket (as in, their high end model, for this year).



Looks to be pretty sweet. It's got the new passive avalanche beacon on it and the "sealed" zippers, etc. The only downside is that it has pit zips which I'm not a big fan of... my old jacket had vents along the chest which I liked a lot. I find the pit zips to bunch up in, well, my pits, which isn't all that comfortable. But, hey, for a nice, brand new jacket for "no additional cost" I'll stop my complaining, and give pit zips another try...

The Net is Cool
It's true, it's cool. And getting cooler. Thanks to the efforts of us geeks.

One might ask what would cause me to make such a general statement... and if someone did, I'd say (in this instance) it's because I had to look up a couple phone numbers for local businesses. Sounds mundane I know, and in the days of yesteryear it was. You had to thumb through the big nasty yellow pages looking for something that might work. Now, all I have to do is type "wolf camera boulder" in my google search bar in my browser, and poof, the first entry is exactly what I'm looking for, with phone number, map, and all.

When the phone book gets unceremoniously dumped on my doorstep it doesn't even make it inside... it goes straight to the recycle bin.

Thanks to Google, and all the geeks out there which make the net cool!

Soundsticks Too!
So, I'm one who likes music. A lot. And I've not been feeding that need since I moved to my home office. Just haven't taken the time to set myself up properly. Until now, that is.

Just picked up (or should I say: just had delivered) a Soundstick II set by harman/kardon and I must say I'm impressed.

The look is pretty sweet, but these aren't anything new:

I'm sure most have seen pictures of these already, especially since they made a splash when they first came out. Well, if you've not listened to them, may I suggest you do. The sound quality is excellent, and the form factor is nice and small, perfecto for on-the-desk.