Double Tall Iced Mocha, Lite on the Chocolate

A while back when I was gearing up for the STP, I thought it would be cool to update my blog with a picture from my camera. That way I could send pictures during the ride. Then I thought it would be cool if I could send a phone cam picture with an address and have it show a map of where I was. So ended up writing geo-cam to do this.

The funny thing is that I spent a bunch of time writing it the day before the STP and didnt even bother to use it. I had a conversation today that reminded me of it. So I decided to clean it up a bit and post it.

It works like this, I send an email from my phone with a picture, and the address in the message body. I have rule on my mailserver that takes all emails to this email address and feeds them to the shell script which then does the following:

Myself and Matt have had the pleasure of speaking on the topic of Freenetworks and Seattlewireless at a couple of Symposia that Doug Schuler hosted/organized at Evergreen (one of our few paying gigs when we were on the public speaking rampage). Doug is a former chair of CPSR and founding member of the Seattle Community Network. When we first started dinking with wireless and the idea of community wireless networks, it was really nice to meet and talk with Doug, he was very supportive and put us in contact with a lot of people.

Anyways, I just recieved a press release for his new book Shaping the Network Society in my inbox, figured I would plug it here.

Press Release

Note, the book has been out for a while but he just sent out the press relase today.

If you look at the left sidebar of my blog, you will notice a new feature. The random spam subject line.

Tonight I decided to whip out a little bash cgi script that would pick a message at random from my spam trap and display the subject line. So every time you look at my site, you get a different spam subject line to mull over. So go ahead, hit refresh, try for yourself.

You can look at my Inbox vs SpamTrap Graphs (just started graphing this week, so not much historical data) and see that there are currently over 12,000 pieces of spam to select subject lines from. Definitely enough to keep you entertained for hours.

I am not checking for null subjects so it might come up blank every now and again.

The source for the shell script is here.

Shaving for me can quite an ordeal. If I go more than two days without shaving, I end up dulling a brand new razor fairly quickly. The straight razor shave is something that has always intrigued me, however I have yet to find a barber that does them.

I first thought the lack of straight razor shaves was related to people fearing the accidental slice of the jugular. However after some research and talking to a barber, I have found that is not always the case.

I was cruising up the escalator in building on 4th ave, making my way up to the new library. I passed a place called Capellis *A Gentlemen’s Barbershop*. I popped in and decided to ask them about the Straight Razor Shave.

The woman I spoke to informed me that she knew of only one barber shop in Seattle that still practices this lost art: 5th ave Barber Shop. Even then it is by appt. only, and she could not say for certain that just anyone could schedule one. I also learned a little bit about its extinction:

You may remember my Cheese Steak investigations at the beginning of the summer:

Robert Johnson was thinking about a woman when he wrote Walking Blues. My Walking Blues are about my knees. Lately my sore knees have been kicking in as they seem to do every year.

My first knee pain dates back to sometime in my childhood around the age of 7 or 8. I was riding my BMX bike on one foot (both feet on one side of the bike) leaning into a turn when I wiped out underneath a parked car. I had skinned both of my knees so bad that my knee caps were completely red, with hardly any skin left on them. I remember lying in the grass on my back clenching my legs with my red knees pointed towards the sky, screaming in pain.

Since then my knee related ailments have come from various physical activities:

Since its introduction in OS X, I have been using FileVault which automagically encrypts and decrypts your home directory on the fly so you dont have to worry about people getting their paws on your data, say in a case where your laptop got stolen. I really have nothing to hide, but generally opt for more security if its available and practical for me to use. Since I also carry a lot of work related stuff on my laptop I figured it was a good idea.

Well on Monday I get home from work, open my laptop to find that it has shut itself down. Which it occasionally does for no reason. When I turn it back on and log in, I realize that my wallpaper is gone, the dock is not where I normally have it, and it basically looks like a default user profile in OS X. This is not good I think to myself, I immediately remember that I have filevault turned on and figure that might be the cause of my problem. I take a poke in my home directory and see a disk image file with an extension of .sparseimage, I click on it, it prompts me for a passphrase, I type in the passphrase I use for my filevault image, it opens and there is all my data. After reading a bunch of articles to investigate what is going on, I decide to just open the image in disk utility, run a repair and integrity check on it. Reboot, everything is back to normal.

Although nothing happened, I have a read alot of posts online about people having corrupted filevault images, and some not being able to recover from the corruption. I haven’t turned it off yet, but I cant really decide if the security of my data is worth having to recover from a massive problem, especially if it were to happen at work or some other time where I really need my stuff.

FileVault causes data corruption