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If you're in Indiana you have until October 6th (just 5 more days) to register to vote in order to cast your ballot for this election. Other states are different (I found this list here after a quick google). Everyone should vote regardless of your views and where you live, which way you expect your state to go, etc..

End of my little political plug..

Spam on my blog site had gotten pretty bad in the last month. Drupal's spam module wasn't enough to keep it out, and spammers have gotten smart enough to figure out how to do math on the comment forms.

Enter Mollom, which just released to the public not too long ago. Mollom is a third-party blog/website spam filter. This means when someone posts a comment, your site contacts Mollom with that comment for its approval or rejection. Now, they are not the first group to come up with a service like this and won't be the last. The reason I picked up on it is because I've known Dries Buytaert and got to work with him a bit while at the OSL (he is one of the Mollom founders, also the founder of Drupal which I use for this site). So you can say my choice was due to personal trust, not because of any specific feature one over another.

My site is on the very low-end scale of comments. By that I mean that I get maybe one legit comment a week, moreso when I actually post stuff ;) After one week with Mollom I've already noticed a big difference. I haven't seen a single spam slip through, and legit comments are making it fine. In the administration panel you can see a report of spam and ham:

Mollom offers plugins for Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, and Radiant, along with API libraries for most of the popular web languages. Their service is a freemium model, offering free coverage for up to 100 legitimate posts a day (unlimited spam rejections). For more than that you can purchase a subscription. I think this is very generous compared to other freemium models out there in the web2.0 sphere these days, and is plenty enough for most blog and community sites. If you're in need of better spam handling for your site, give them a shot. (I'm not paid to say this, I'm just happy with the service and since it is new I feel there needs to be a bit of review)

Been a long time since I've shared some kid pics. Well, we went to the Indianapolis Zoo on labor day, and the thought of a holiday rush had not crossed my mind until we were already on the road. Surprisingly it was not as busy as I expected, and we had a really great time.

A lot has changed since the last time I was there (many many years ago). They have added a little roller coaster that Tristen absolutely loved, proving he really is my son. Then of course there is the train which we were all able to go on:

From 2008

From 2008

The boys loved the aquarium portion which has always been my favorite part of the zoo as well. I think they miss the Oregon Coast Aquarium and the Monterrey Bay Aquarium, 2 of the best in the country that we lived close to out west.

From 2008

We finished up the day at the Dolphin show. By this time Trevor was getting tired and the last thing he wanted to do was sit still in the bleachers, which resulted in his binky flying through the air just moments after this picture was taken:

From 2008

As for that dolphin show, it was a LOT better the way I remembered it back in the day. The show that we saw had the dolphins do a couple of jumps and spend a majority of the time splashing the people sitting up front in the "splash zone". There was a story playing along with the show about protecting the environment and what we can all do, and had nothing to do with the dolphins at all. Tell a bit of the story, watch the dolphins jump, then tell a bit more of the story. It was obviously a case where they knew they would have a captive audience to try and convince that we should all switch to CFL lightbulbs. I'm all for that, but I want to hear about the dolphins.

Some of us ended the day a little too tired to eat..

From 2008

Since I'm in an opinionated and vocal mood today...

Our household is a "house divided". I have a deep dislike of Wal-Mart stemming from numerous cases where I was left as a dissatisfied customer. They are not in the customer service business and as a tradeoff the prices are lower. I can accept that as their way of business, and once in a while I forget that only to find myself reminded when I go back. My wife, on the other hand, prefers the low prices and can stand the mad rush of people (I get cart rage easily when people cut me off).. Being back in Bloomington, our wal-mart is on the other side of town from us so with gas the way it is right now its just the same for me to pay an extra dollar for my everyday stuff closeby at Target than to drive far to save a bit here and there. And I find their customer service to be a bit better.

With that disclaimer out of the way, something that has bugged me even more lately is the excess of leftover wal-mart buildings that seem to be littering the country as the company builds their new Super Wal-Mart stores, leaving the original Wal-Mart shells behind to a property owner who hopes for a new buyer in a tough real estate market and tougher retail times.

I just got back from a quick trip to Bedford, just 40 miles away from home. On our way we passed 2 of these shells with "for sale" banners on the side. Similarly we took an 8 hour drive to Iowa a couple of months back and I noticed many of these in the small towns we passed through in Illinois. I noticed one while in New York on the way to visit IBM. All of them vacant. All of them easily identified as a former Wal-Mart, with a bigger store likely around the corner.

I know of one that has been repurposed, the original Terre Haute Wal-Mart building is in use as a Hobby Lobby.

I think this begs for some kind of discussion:

• Why are the properties not being picked up? Overpriced? Low value? Lack of retail demand?
• What can you do with such a shell, anyway? Very few retail stores are big enough to fill that space and not already have space of their own (though there is quite a demand for Hobby Lobby as witnessed by Nicole's crochet skills)
• Why not expand from the space that is already in use somehow? Build vertically if the land is not available next door. Or even split up your offerings to a smaller store nearby rather than packing everything up and moving to a bigger store. I know, single-site convenience and all.

At the end of the day its easy to say "so what, what does it matter?" Well, you end up with a building that goes unused for years... Which doesn't hurt anyone, really.. And at worst it is just an eyesore. So, if the value and market are such that the buildings are not desired, I'd love to see Wal-Mart set up a foundation and work with city councils to turn them into community centers or something where the space can be used and you can help your soiled reputation. They would make a great YMCA annex and in some cases another location for such physical activity that would be a more convenient location. The buildings are already configured as a storefront, so donate them to the Goodwill. The space could be well used by a community college or alternative school, or even a church. I guess if the demand were great enough then this would already be happening, but I see places like these building new buildings just down the block from the empty shells so it tells me that the price isn't right. And they continue to sit unused..

Maybe this isn't even worth thinking about. Maybe its just me. I'd like to hear your opinion on it.

As far as the democratic national convention goes, I only saw Obama's acceptance speech. He took a few jabs at McCain's proposed policies but for the most part he spoke about the people (us) and what we need moving forward. I liked that.

I've favored Obama for a long time so I wanted to give the Republicans a fair chance. Last night I watched quite a bit of the RNC and ended the night totally embarrassed at the tone and the mud slinging. Chris Robb said it best in his twitter: "Political differences aside, nothing is as upsetting as slinging mud to a large crowd that cheers fervently for negativity. it's just creepy"

Exactly.. While the tone of the DNC is a crowd of people cheering for change, the RNC seemed like a crowd of people cheering on a fight. Granted, I only watched one speech on the DNC side so maybe all of the others were just as bad, but in terms of trying to win people over, the Republicans didn't do a good job on Nicole and I last night..

Combine the tone with the hypocrisy, which was laid on pretty thick, and it just left a real sour taste in my mouth. Below are just a few of my thoughts. I've tried to fix up my blog spam to open up comments, so feel free to disagree openly.

- Saw Mitt Romney's speech. Sharing the same faith that he does I was a bit disappointed that his standards fell to taking cheap jabs at others. While talking of renewable energy resources he said "I have one more recommendation for energy conservation: Let's keep Al Gore's private jet on the ground." Come on now, Al Gore isn't even in this race, and he has done more for the promotion of climate change than most republicans combined. He is very open about his family switching to hybrid vehicles (Prius's) and working to offset his home energy consumption with solar and geothermal additions. How about Romney? A 4-car family, he drives a mustang and his wife a Cadillac SUV. As for the RNC crowd, it was a mud-slinging stab against another individual so they ate it up. (disclaimer: I voted against Gore in 00, but follow his climate change promotions and think he is doing terrific things to inspire change on that front... Climate change and renewable energy are buzzwords we probably wouldn't hear on either side this coming election if it were not for him)

- Sarah Palin doesn't bring anything new and exciting to the table like I was hoping for. I was holding out for a good "first impression" in the spotlight, a chance to learn what she is about and why she is there, but instead her speech was a chance to throw some more mud around. Its a much different tone from her hint of complacency with Obama's lead in Alaska before she was tapped as VP pick, an attitude I hoped she would carry on. Sad how that changes people. I was also left scratching my head as her stated position last night on the bridge to nowhere is quite different then I had remembered it, but thankfully people are already picking up on that [1] [2]. Selling a jet on ebay is a nice move but it doesn't quite make up for the cost of that bridge. Obama has flip-flopped on issues in the past (as Rudy made an entire speech out of) but this goes to show that every politician does and that shouldn't be a point of disqualification.

- (Palin) "There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you ... in places where winning means survival and defeat means death ... and that man is John McCain. In our day, politicians have readily shared much lesser tales of adversity than the nightmare world in which this man, and others equally brave, served and suffered for their country." Oh my gosh.. Can we let this thing to rest? Every time it comes up I feel like I myself am suddenly a "second class citizen" because I've never been in the armed forces. Other candidates are not worthy of your vote because they have not been prisoners before, so what does that make me who has never even fought for our country? I love and respect our armed forces, and they provide the sense of security that my family enjoys every day. It is not something that should give you the upper hand in a vote. "There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you".. how cold and demeaning.. My point in all of this: I expect opponents to talk about each other and oppose the ideas and policies that the other brings up, not attack their person.

Well, long ago I decided that I wanted to see McCain's RNC speech and I'll probably stick to that, but after last night I'm not looking forward to it with the same open mind.

Seems like the spammers are getting around Drupal's filters and captchas, so I'm disabling comments for a while until I can figure out a way to filter them. *sigh*

PS - For those of you who are not millionaires and are afraid that Obama might be raising your taxes, visit obamataxcut.com to see how you fare with his plan vs. McCain's.

Cheers!

Found a good deal on an external 750gig Maxtor drive today and picked it up to mount to the iMac (firewire). First of all, if you are about to do something similar, just pass on the Maxtors and buy something else. Will save yourself a lot of trouble.

However, if you already bought it and are in the same boat as I was here is a fix:

The drive would not show up in finder but it would be in Disk Utility. I could not format or repartition the drive no matter what angle I tried, and always got a response of "could not unmount disk". The short fix to this is you have to manually find out where it is mounted and unmount it via the console before you can then repartition (GUID) and reformat (Mac OS) the drive. A quick googling found that everyone has this problem, and Maxtor just seems to be a company who can't simply put out a simple external drive but they have to throw a lot of extra crap into the mix.

Try doing the format via disk utility and get your error. Then open up a terminal, get to root by 'sudo su -' and then run dmesg. Look for an error like such:

0 [Level 3] [ReadUID 0] [Facility com.apple.system.fs] [DevNode /dev/disk2s1] [MountPt /Volumes/Untitled 3] [Path /Volumes/Untitled 3/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/7C3E0BE7-2F06-4CC2-B368-59D0E0604211/indexState] [FSLogMsgID 1667112663] [FSLogMsgOrder Last]

In my case, it was mounted in /Volumes/Untitled\ 3 but was hidden there.

Force the unmount:

umount -f /Volumes/Untitled\ 3

Then go back to Disk Utility and repartition; reformat.

I put this out there in hopes that google will help someone else find this answer quicker than I was able to.

Cheers!

(sorry Coby.. heh)

My brother Coby is a police officer for Ball State university up in Muncie. Now, I'm as proud as can be that he has landed a gig like that, and for those of you who knew him growing up you know why we're so proud. Let's just say his autobiography would be entitled something like "From the principal's office to the squad car".

But I'm proud of him. Now, I'll also note that I will probable never look at a cop the same way again after hearing some of his stories. Not a lack of respect for officers, mind you, but they are all a bit more human now.

Recently, Coby volunteered to take a night shift... on a bicycle.. My opinion is that this is a hidden psychological exam that he is going to fail if he enjoys this setup too much, but hey to each their own. :)

He's the one on the left:

Taking a police gig on a college campus, night shift, on a bike.. He's going to have some good stories to tell I'm sure.

For those of you who know Coby, he has a blog on Blogger but it is not publicly viewable to avoid spammers and such. He's open to adding people who he knows so if you are interested let me know and I'll pass your email along to him.

Keep the campus safe, Coby!

What a great weekend! I spent it pretty much unplugged from the world (internet, email, ham radios..) And it was a nice, welcome break. We spent the 4th up at my uncle Dan's place in Brazil and then went to the St Louis LDS temple on Saturday.

The 4th was a lot of fun. There were a few 4-wheel ATVs and about 26 acres to ride around. What surprised us all is how much Trevor loved to ride, and boy did he throw a fits when it was time to stop!!

From 2008

Trevor got to try it out for himself, but somehow this just isn't the same:

From 2008

We were also able to get Tristen on it for a ride, but he was very reluctant at first. Tristen is our cautious child, while Trevor jumps at anything without hesitation.

From 2008

And of course there were fireworks.. LOTS of fireworks.. We had well over 100 aerial shells and a dozen fountain cakes to fire off, and had fun doing it. My favorite by far were these plastic tube aerials, instead of the brown paper-wrapped shells. The plastic shells flew higher and had a bigger spread. They came with 2 dozen shells and 2 thick plastic tubes (to handle a bigger blast than a cardboard tube).

Unfortunately one of them didn't work quite right. We could tell right away when we saw fire shoot up instead of the shell going up, and knew that the second bang would be coming from the ground. Lucky for us this was a thick plastic tube, and the explosion didn't quite reach Dan and I. I think if this were in a cardboard tube the result would have been a bit more painful.

From 2008

The kids spent Saturday with Grandma and Nan, who got Tristen a haircut while out shopping. I was taking this picture for Tristen's new chore chart but Nicole really likes it for his smile and new hair cut:

From 2008

It was a great weekend! Good to be back home in Indiana and near family..

Times are changing for Amateur Radio.. Easy in-town radio communications have been leapfrogged by cell phones. Data communications and message passing over the air has been leapfrogged by the Internet.

...but there is still a lot of life left in the hobby.

Field day is this weekend. It is a weekend event where amateur radio operators all over the world get together in the outdoors ("field") and set up a temporary operating station, typically on temporary power (generator, batteries, etc). This helps to test and gain experience for emergency scenarios, but it also gives the general public a chance to come see first hand what can be done with amateur radio today. All kinds of operating modes are used and demonstrated (voice, data, satellites, etc..) Its a lot more than morse code.

You can find a Field Day location near you by visiting this url.

Came across this homemade promo video for Field Day (reposted from Calling CQ blog). Its a bit cheesy but overall I'm impressed:

For those of you in Bloomington: we will be operating from Karst Farm Park from about 14:00 saturday to 14:00 sunday. See the K9IU page for more details.