Month: January 2005

I’m in the first class lounge at Continential waiting for my flight to New Orleneas. Bachelor Party weekend.

Note, there are very few good reasons to have a Platinum Amex, but automatic access to the lounge + two guests is money. 2:30 PM and the drinks are free.

The camera is charged, the guests have signed the blog waiver, full coverage to follow.

Dear Corey Henderson (Gold pass holder) – 

—–Original Message—–
From: Corey Henderson [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2005 6:00 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Friday

Could someone tell me what the temperature was at the base or top of the mountain this past Friday Jan 21^st?

 Thank you,
-Corey Henderson (Gold pass holder)

I’ve been having a problem with comment spam lately — spammers using the blog’s comment functionality to post links which will get indexed by google and artificially boost their page-rank.

A) Google has announced, with support from MSN and Yahoo, rel=”nofollow” which should lower the incentive for spammers using this technique. The .TEXT version requires a recompile at the moment and I’m not running the source based install, so I’ll have to wait a while before implementing this.

B) A HIP-CAPTCHA Control can be added to .TEXT to make it v.difficult for spammers to automate posting. Clearscreen SharpHIP. I have chosen to skip this technique for now.

C) Preventing .Text blog spam using triggers. This is what I’ve gone with so far. Since all this blog content goes into a SQL Server 2000 DB, it is easy enough to add a trigger which checks for known spam titles and a high occurrence of HTTP in the comment data. Many thanks to Chrissy LeMaire for the code. Now that I look, it seems she is ALL-OVER this problem. Please email me separately if you post a comment that gets eaten by this filter accidentally. I’m terrified of false positives while spam filtering. Which is why I use Cloudmark SafetyBar (no false positives) for mail BTW.

Saturday I attempted to qualify for the Jeep King of the Mountain event at Mt. Snow.

Signing up, I had no idea what the format of the course was. As an ex-college racer I figured it would be a fun event — racing GS gates with a few banked turns and some table top jumps or something. Well, the actual format was only five GS gates (I was thinking forty) and six or seven considerable jumps. At the beginning of the day there were eleven skiers and thirteen snowboarders. I skied.

After course inspection, they opened up the course to training runs. I took my first crack at it, having never done anything like it in the past. Getting what I thought was more than enough speed, (probably 25 mph), heading directly for a 6’ high jump, who’s angle looked entirely too steep to me, unable to see anything below, popped the jump, launched into the air, landed about 18’ away, which unfortunately was about 2’ short of the landing. Crunch. My chin bounced off my chest; if my tongue had been out, it would have been severed.

I managed to get another three training runs in afterwards. Each time crunching one landing or another with considerable pain and frustration. Still I was determined to get a timed run and attempt to qualify for the main event on Sunday. Oh, btw, the top three qualifiers were up for a first place prize of $10,000 and a last place minimum prize of $1000 in Sunday’s race. And by the end of my third training run there were only five skiers left — the others had blown out knees or just chickened out.

The organizers had determined that the one of the final jumps was too large and that it was dangerous. They needed an hour to reconfigure the “feature”. I sat and waited. Clearly I had been beat up in my initial attempts, but only after sitting down for a while did it register that I was hurting. My neck was spasming; my vision was a bit blurred; I was dizzy.

I really wanted a timed run. They opened the course back up. Again, I inspected the course. Again, I stood at the top awaiting my training run. Full tuck, I managed to hit the first jump pretty well, yet I still landed HARD. I bailed out the run before the finish. I wasn’t having fun. I turned in my bib. DNS.

I just added a search link on the left. I am using Google until the gang over at Telligent Systems gets the new .Text 1.0 hotness aka Community Server released. (I’m running .96 now)

I stole this idea from the MS Exchange Team blog You Had Me At EHLO…  

Thanks to David Cumps for the original search button code

There seems to be a bit of javascript funkiness that is conflicting with my email link. Big giant shoutout to whoever can help me fix it.

As a relatively new iPod user, I’ve been doing the research on various alternatives to iTunes. I’ve already been the victim of an entire library deletion experience and let’s just say some swearing transpired.

I also needed to do an firmware upgrade on a friend’s iPod and was terrified of deleting all the music on it and needed some way to back it up first.

So what did I do? Well, early on I purchased Anapod Explorer which has all sorts of nice features including the ability to get stuff back off the iPod and do on the fly encoding from .OGG and .WMA formats. But it costs $25 and that’s per-personal-iPod, not per machine and can’t be used with friend’s units. I didn’t want to drop another $25 for this one task.

Then I discovered this great writeup at Engadget which referenced ephPod 2 on how to get your music off. They also give you a Mac option too if you are interested. (weirdly, the Mac method is much more difficult.) ephPod turned out pretty well, worked as advertised.

Oh and if you are wanting to backup/convert to MP3 your purchased iTunes stuff, go here: jhymn

I’ve noticed lately that when meeting new people in social situations I tend to do this thing where I say stuff twice.

New person: “How are you doing tonight”
Corey: “Excellent, excellent”
New person: “Have you seen this band before”
Corey: “Not live no, not live.”

WTF is that? Of course now that I’ve noticed it, it happens even more.

Hit some golf balls at Chelsea Piers on Friday. They run a smooth operation over there. Pretty reasonable economically (for Manhattan). It is all electronic, you get a card with X number of balls on it, stick it in the machine (not pictured) and it even counts down how many you have left. The best part is that the ball is raised up from a machine under the ground — height adjusted via aforementioned machine. You don’t have to do anything but stand there and whack away. You can rent clubs for cheap and they are very high quality for rentals. Includes space heaters for cold weather action. Recommended.

And check out that form! (I’ll take pointers, but you better be USGA certified)

I saw Tegan and Sara last night at the Bowery Ballroom.

Tegan and Sara are musical wonder twins from Canada.

The audience was filled with loads of girl-girl kissing. The trick when this happens to you is to squint your eyes and or only look peripherally and pretend that they are much better looking than the inevitably harsh reality. I have read conflicting reports to whether the girls themselves are gay or not, but I suspect even if they aren’t they don’t actively discourage the idea. Sara told a story on stage about a male “friend” who was there during Christmas dinner that made the audience groan a little.

I like lesbian-favorite, but non-gay (well bi-sexual, but married to a guy) Ani DiFranco also. What can I say? I like girls that rock.

Did anyone else see this Brad and Jen breakup quote: “Brad said that they spent the rest of the holiday working out how they would release the news of the split. They worked out together the reasons they would give and how they would protect the brand they have built up.” How messed up does your life have to be when your biggest concern in getting a divorce is protecting your brand?

Brad and Jen is somewhat upsetting, but nowhere near the level of Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson or Spike Jonze and Sofia Coppola. How can I expect to find a (hetero) partner for life if Kenneth and Emma can’t work it out? I am still upset with Emma Thompson – I am somehow convinced it is her fault even though I have absolutely nothing to base it on. I know there are one or two other famous-couple-breakups that have contributed to my marriage-pessimism, but I can’t think of them. Suggestions? Am I the only one?