Blog
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Free milk!
This family used to drink roughly 3.78 liters of milk a day. We are down to about 7.56 liters every 3 days. I used to buy our milk at Weigel’s because of those wonderful square milk jugs. Wonderful is a bit double-edged. The milk was impossible to pour unless you bought a special spout and for a time the spouts were unavailable because the factory that produced them burned down. The spout also did not seal the milk leaving it exposed to air in the refrigerator which apparently just doesn’t matter. The good of the square milk jugs was primarily the fact they recycled. You’d return one jug for a discount on your next milk purchase. That program ended and Weigel’s Farms started using the same yellow plastic disposable jugs that the rest of the world uses. To retain customers, they issued loyalty cards so that after every 17th milk purchase, you receive one free and each 17 milk purchases gets an entry into a drawing for a year’s supply of milk…er, 52 milks…a year! bah. Frankly, this card kept me as a Weigel’s milk customer. For that matter, most of my Weigel’s shopping can be directly attributed to that card.
They’ve done away with the punch card and now use a magnetic swipe card. I no longer can glance down and see how close I am to a free milk although it is printed on the receipt. Today I walked in to buy 2 gallons of milk and receipted both free! It was a very odd feeling to walk out of the store having paid nothing. Thank you Weigel’s!
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I juggled last night
I enjoy entertaining with juggling. I also enjoy teaching juggling. Last night I had the pleasure of doing both for a small group of wonderful people, about 15 or 20. The audience makes the show as much as the performer. A tough crowd can be an awkward show. This audience was very receptive as such the show sped by. I normally watch the clock to time the show just right. This time I failed to look at the time. I had a good time that at the end of the show, I became concerned I’d spent to little time performing (which wasn’t the case). I finished by teaching two children to juggle. The joy and happiness from the eight year old girl at learning to juggle is beyond description. Her smile and hug brought this season’s spirit to my heart.
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Evil Child
It’s as if Evan can detect that I’m nearing my breaking point so he’s going to extra effort to try to push me over the edge.
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From the mouths of babes
Dad: "Have a good day!"
Noah, walking to the door: "Will do."
Dad, noting that Noah is wearing a thin long sleeve shirt and no jacket: "Stay warm."
Noah: "I hope so."
Dad: "You do understand that staying warm has less to do with hope and more to do with attiring yourself appropriately in layers, right?"
Noah, continuing to walk to the bus stop: "Yup."This feels familiar almost like an 8th grade winter ritual.
If you’re gonna to be dumb, you gotta be tough. [Source]
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Dear Dharma and Evan…
Dharma, I know you are a dog and I recognize that your brain may have a short circuit or two so let spell this out for you. Pooping in the walking path is not allowed! You are very funny and obviously have figured my gait out perfectly because your landmines are batting 1000. See if your doggie mind can read my human mind because the mental image I have right now is of a cold, outdoor kennel. Molly knows where to poop in this yard. Follow her!
Evan, I know you are four years old…four and a half to be fair…and the antique, crank out windows in this house have a particularly rewarding feeling to their almost steampunk mechanical opening action. However, when the temperatures at night are dropping to -1.6°C*, sleeping with the window open is inadvisable and does not lend to a friendly electric bill. If this behavior continues, I will have to increase your rent to offset the cost of heating this house. Oh, and you may catch a cold.
*Temperature conversion provided by Onlineconversion.com.
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Of Grasshoppers
Student: If I think of all the tasks I must do, I cannot move.
Master: Instead of thinking of all, do one task. -
Tis the season…for stress
I understand why Santa Claus’ hair is ghost white. And that belly is obviously from stress eating. The stress of providing for my own family in December is ridiculous. I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like to provide for the whole world! I think on December 26th I’m going to break down and turn it a bowl full of jelly.
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Maximum length of an email address is 254 characters, not 320
I work in a business of constant learning. Technology is continually evolving and being revised. Somethings are rather constant but, being human,
weI tend to develop habits occasionally rooted in wrong assumptions. Perhaps a deadline forced a decision without having time to look up the specification and over time, our mind took that unresearched decision as fact. I’ve made numerous databases over the years based upon just such a wrong assumption. My error has been in the acceptable maximum length of an email address. My number is irrelevant but I am in good company with being incorrect on the length of an email address as many people mistakenly believe it to be 320 characters.An RFC is a request for comments which "is a memorandum published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) describing methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems." (Wikipedia) RFCs set the standards that define how the Internet works. RFC3696 and RFC5321 explain that the maximum length of an email address is 254 characters.
There appears to be some confusion over the maximum valid email address size. Most people believe it to be 320 characters (64 characters for the username + 255 characters for the domain + 1 character for the @ symbol). Other sources suggest 129 (64 + 1 + 64) or 384 (128+1+255, assuming the username doubles in length in the future).
This confusion means you should heed the ‘robustness principle’ ("developers should carefully write software that adheres closely to extant RFCs but accept and parse input from peers that might not be consistent with those RFCs." – Wikipedia) when writing software that deals with email addresses. Furthermore, some software may be crippled by naive assumptions, e.g. thinking that 50 characters is adequate (examples). Your 200 character email address may be technically valid but that will not help you if most websites or applications reject it.
The actual maximum email length is currently 254 characters:
"The original version of RFC 3696 did indeed say 320 was the maximum length, but John Klensin (ICANN) subsequently accepted this was wrong."
"This arises from the simple arithmetic of maximum length of a domain (255 characters) + maximum length of a mailbox (64 characters) + the @ symbol = 320 characters. Wrong. This canard is actually documented in the original version of RFC3696. It was corrected in the errata. There’s actually a restriction from RFC5321 on the path element of an SMTP transaction of 256 characters. But this includes angled brackets around the email address, so the maximum length of an email address is 254 characters." – Dominic Sayers
Every day I learn something new! (even when I should have known it for a couple of decades)
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We used to call it The Internet…now it’s just Google
We’ve been living in the Wild West of The Internet. The Internet used to mean Gopher, Veronica, Archie, Usenet, MUDs, IRC (Fall ’88), and telnet, none of which used a graphical interface. Everything was done from the command line, UNIX’s equivalent of the DOS prompt. Today my children, as most people, live on a tamer Internet and feel that The Internet is something you look at with Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari. Chrome users know better. In the past, using a search engine did not mean using Google. Google. How about that Google? Google is doing so well that we have started to aggregate all our services into Google. I know I have. I use GMail, Google Voice, Google Wave, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Reader, and so on. All my data is slowly finding its way to a single company, one which I don’t control. That should scare the pants off of us!
In today’s world of collaboration and information sharing, url shorteners are all the rage. A URL shortener takes a long web address and shortens it to as few characters as possible for sending in SMS messages or making the address easier for someone to type. Bit.ly is the forerunner having secured the default url shortener position with Twitter and Seesmic. 3.ly is my favorite. Despite being essential tools, Dave Winer makes a good argument for why these URL shorteners are bad for the Internet and offers a fix to their inherent problem. The concept of a URL shortener is simple. You could make your own URL shortening service and WordPress users could make a URL shortener plugin. If you made your own, you’d be in control of your data; a principle I highly encourage despite housing so much of myself in The Cloud.
Today, Google enters the URL shortening scene with http://goo.gl/ Expect this to take off. Expect some struggling shortening services to close doors causing waves of link rot across the Internet. As Google consumes another popular activity, url shortening, do we take one more step to losing The Internet to The Google in the way that online activity prior to The Internet used to be known as CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL? In 5 years, will there still be An Internet or will we simply connect to The Google?
Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends. The core goals of this service are:
- Stability – ensuring that the service has very good uptime
- Security – protecting users from malware and phishing pages
- Speed – fast resolution of short URLs
Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use.
The Google privacy policy applies to the Google URL Shortener. Please note that Google may choose to publicly display aggregate and non-personally identifiable statistics about particular shortened links, such as the number of end user clicks.
Update: Interestingly enough, yesterday, Bit.ly announced Bit.ly Pro, a service to use Bit.ly’s software but with your own domain name. Take note, this is still giving your data to a 3rd party (The Cloud) but it is a proven service, with a system with very interesting feedback (statistics), and probably far more scalable than something you could build from scratch. Dave Winer revisits his concerns with Bit.ly in Build to Flip?.
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Noisy Bleeping Sheep
It’s 1am and I’m fighting a bout of insomnia. I had a friend years ago who was an insomniac. Sounded great! Stay up all night learn, juggling, and doing. It wasn’t until years later that I learned insomnia doesn’t mean energy. Insomnia can be zombie. Too tired to do anything yet still unable to sleep. That’s pointless because nothing gets done at night nor during the day. I’d rather be awake and alert…all the time. Now where’s my rejuvenation pill that substitutes for a good night’s sleep?
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Doug’s Mantras
File this under things I thought I’d never say.
Clothing belongs in one of three places: on your body, the laundry, or folded up and put away.
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Sunday – Coding
Last night, Cathy and I joined friends in celebrating a good friend’s birthday. It was a lovely celebration in a Knoxville (Fountain City actually) landmark. The evening was a welcome break from bits and bytes. I even allowed myself to sleep in something morning. Now 9:30 am, I must return to programming.
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Day of Coding
I’ve been wrapping on the keys since 6am. I need a break from this 8 hours of coding. Doing something to make the wife happy then back to code.