I finally got my photos up from the Minnesota 1000. You can view them here.
Kevin Wynn took some photos too and I’m hosting them here also.
I’ll see if I can get a ride report whipped up soon.
DefCon America
DefCon is an online grassroots movement combating the growing power of the religious right. We will fight for the separation of church and state, individual freedom, scientific progress, pluralism, and tolerance while respecting people of faith and their right to express their beliefs.
While I agree with what they are doing, I’m afraid they are going to be confused with the Hacker Convention.
DIY Mobile Projection Theatre System
This is a really cool project. You can build a mobile projection theater system for supposedly around $1000.
Just the projector itself intrigues me.
The Root of All Evil?
Religion. That is truly the Root of All Evil.
PZ Myers points out some really good material discussing religion, including links to Richard Dawkins’ two-part series The Root of All Evil?
Part One: The God Delusion and Part Two: The Virus of Faith.
These are both about 48 minutes long, so I’ll have to watch them later (not at work) but I plan on watching them, and then probably watching them again with Stephanie.
Minnesota 1000 Highlights
I ran the Minnesota 1000 rally this weekend. Here are the quick highlights. A more detailed ride report (with pics) will come later.
- Drove the sidecar
- Lots of rain Friday
- 785 stairs
- Spam!
- Broke down
- Trailered home – arrived at 2:00am
- Rode the K bike to the finish – taking the 10,000 point hit for changing bikes
- Almost beat Tim Conway!
- Final score – negative 8,047
- Took third place in the Sport Bike Class!
- Tired
More details later.
Lost My Monkey
The Minnesota 1000 motorcycle rally is this weekend. Stephanie (my 13 year old) and I were going to run the rally together in the sidecar.
Last night I started to talk to her about what she should bring along on the ride when she said “Wait, the rally is this weekend?”
She had gotten a birthday party sleep-over invitation from one of her best friends. The sleep-over is, of course, this Friday.
She was crushed. She really wants to ride in the rally, but she really wants to go to her friend’s party.
I figured I had two choices:
- I could be a hard ass and make Stef honor her previous commitment to me and make her come along. This will make the MN1K most unpleasant for both of us.
- I could be a nice guy and let her go to the sleep-over. Since we are going on vacation for four weeks starting on the 25th this will probably be the last sleep-over until Aug.
We talked about the possibility of me picking her up after the sleep-over, but the rally starts at 7:00 in the morning and there is no way she would be ready – or rested enough.
Stef did write me a nice note about how conflicted she was about this. She’s not totally happy with either choice. Besides (and this was in her note) there will be sushi at the sleep-over. It’s hard to compete with sushi. 🙂
I totally understand her wanting to sleep-over at a friends house instead of riding with me, but we were both looking forward to riding in the MN1K together. The look on her face when she realized that the rally was this weekend and not the next was so sad.
So it looks like I will be riding the rally by myself. Unless I can talk someone else into being my monkey.
What to do about the Right Wing Kooks?
Ignoring Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly doesn’t work, because too many people believe all the lies they are spewing…
PZ Myers has a good post about it, but he doesn’t have any specifics about what we need to do…
Go read it, then leave a comment here, or there, about how we should deal with these scary people.
Useful mod_perl Articles
We run mod_perl on Apache at work. We are having a small issue with some long-running requests and I’m doing some Googling to try and figure out what’s going on.
I ran across this 8 part series of O’Reilly articles about “Improving mod_perl Sites’ Performance”
They are a little old, but they still have plenty of relevant information. So I figured I’d list them here so I can find them again.
- Part 1: The Big Picture
- Part 2: Essential Tools
- Part 3: Benchmarking and Optimizing
- Part 4: Shared Memory
- Part 5: Shared Memory (cont.)
- Part 6: Forking
- Part 7: Tweaking Apache Configuration
- Part 8: Tweaking Apache Configuration (cont.)
Looks like I have some reading to do.
Free Data Recovery Utilities!
Way cool.
TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery utility! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally erasing your Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.
PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost pictures (Photo Recovery) from digital camera memory and lost files including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom. PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it’ll work even if your media’s filesystem is severely damaged or formatted. PhotoRec is safe to use, it will never attempt to write to the drive or memory support you are about to recover from. Recovered files are instead written in the directory from where you are running the PhotoRec program.
Time to start downloading!