Monthly Archive for April, 2004

They finally got him

Published
by
Mark
on Friday 23rd April 2004
in News
. Closed
So, Melissa told me last night that the photography studio the yearbook used in high school finally fired the creepy photographer that they regularly sent out to CHS. Apparently, the photographer to a shot of a girl in school "for the yearbook." He then found out this girl’s name, e-mail address and a fax number, to which he faxes her the photo. Attached to the photo is some note saying something like, I thought you might like this photo. Obviously that would creep someone out. She reported him to someone, and he was fired from the studio. When Hersch, Jamie, Lynn, Chris and I did yearbook in high school, I always thought this photographer was a little on the perverted side. We would always get plenty of shots of tennis players and cheerleaders showing their spankies, or a group of girls nearly exposing themselves at dances. At the time, I was a high school boy, so I didn’t think much of it except that I knew we couldn’t use most of those pictures in the yearbook. As an adult who now works in a high school, and will one day have kids, I’m glad they finally took this guy out of high schools. I just wonder how many girls he’d done this to in the past. Discuss here.

Fun with the G35

Published
by
Mark
on Monday 19th April 2004
in Uncategorized
. Closed
So, Michelle brought Melissa home tonight in the G35. Of course, me being me, I had to jump in and give it a try. The catch was that she’s got a manual transmission in her new ride, and I’ve only driven two other cars with manuals: Adam’s Ford Cobra SVT and Roll’s Mitsubishi 3000GT. What’s even funnier is that I think I’ve only gotten worse as I spend more time with my hands and feet on a manual tranny. This occaision was no different. As I backed out of the driveway in neutral, I started running out of KE at the bottom of the driveway and I had to put it in reverse. Then, as I tried desperately to ease into first gear and get going, the car just suddenly jolted. I finally kind of got my bearings straight and was able to get the car moving at a decent speed with a couple shifts that weren’t all too bad. So I took the car all the way out to Jamie’s house via the Summit Drive, with a few bad shifts along the way and plenty of cruising. I told Michelle that she’s gotta bring the car back next weekend. I’ve gotta keep practicing with the thing until I get the hang of it. Then I shouldn’t have any problems jumping into someone else’s MT ride :-) Anyone have any suggestions for me on making it easier to drive stick?

Fun night

Published
by
Mark
on Sunday 18th April 2004
in Uncategorized
. Closed
Tonight we went to the Double Door for the YesMen CD release party. Here’s part of the review I posted in the forum:
Overall, the show was great due to the loud, kick ass music; the excited crowd (there was a party bus from Arlington Heights that ensured the fans came all liquored up); and the presence of FOX32’s Michelle Leigh (apparently she’s Chicago’s sexiest meteorologist).
After their set, we left to go home. Unfortunately, the remainder of my Caramel High Rise from Caribou Coffee ended up in the cup holder after it tipped over from one holder to the other. So much for keeping my car clean so I can live with it for seven years :-( And I can’t afford to have it detailed just yet, either. I’ll have to figure something out before the sticky gets icky.

Congratulations, Bob

Published
by
Mark
on Friday 16th April 2004
in Work
. Closed
So, the short story is that I was passed up for two possible promotions in a matter of minutes this morning. I was told that Bob was offered the NT job and accepted it. Then, when I asked when Bob’s RT position would be posted, I was told that the position wouldn’t be posted. Instead, someone from the ADC was going to be brought over to fill it. I’m happy for Bob. Honestly. I look forward to continuing to help him with the network jobs, including blasting. I’m a mature enough person to get past this. I just might need a little time to reflect on the past two weeks. I should be good by Monday. Continue reading ‘Congratulations, Bob’

Michelle’s new car

Published
by
Mark
on Thursday 15th April 2004
in Uncategorized
. Closed
So, Michelle went to the Infinity dealer last night. From what my mom was saying on the phone to Mel, Michelle traded in her Beetle and bought herself a brand new 2004 Infinity G35 Sport Leather Coupe, with all the options. The thing that is difficult for me to wrap my head around is that my sister can afford this car with very little assistance from my mom. Whereas I have never had anything to do with the financial part of purchasing my own vehicle. Heck, even now I couldn’t afford to toss a car payment on top of the rest of my monthly payments. Gotta love how ironic life is: I go to a private 4-year college and get a Bachelors (in 4 years) in Physics and Computer Science, my sister goes to a 2-year community college and gets her Associates (in 4 years) in Nursing, and she’s going to have a job that pays her $5-10 per hour more than mine! There’s a lesson in this for all you college-bound students: choose wisely because what you think might be great isn’t always so.

NT interview

Published
by
Mark
on Monday 12th April 2004
in Work
. Closed
So, I had my interview this morning for the Network Technician opening left by Adam. For whatever reason, I was feeling queasy in the morning, and my palms were sweaty. I kind of got past the queasiness with my grande carmel machiatto and bagel from Starbucks, but the sweaty palms stayed with me all day (damned gene pool). The interview was shorter than I had expected, but being an inside man, they knew my qualifications pretty well. I won’t bother with the details of the interview, mostly because it’s boring, but also because I am not the best at recalling the details for a story unless it’s of no interest to anyone else. There are seven or so other applicants being considered, many within the district. We’re supposed to find out sometime next week who gets the job. Here’s to hoping it’s me, although I wouldn’t mind losing out to a more qualified applicant. It just better be qualifications that make the decision, and not anything silly.

Now that’s time well spent

Published
by
Mark
on Friday 9th April 2004
in Uncategorized
. Closed
During my daily geek news browsing today, I came across this little tidbit of information: there are more than 1 sextillion ways to spell Viagra. Of course, if you’re already using simple mail filters like the ones that can be easily created in Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook, you probably wouldn’t even see this message in your inbox if I had e-mailed it to you (the first sentence included "Viagra" and "sex," and now this sentence does, too). So, the moral of the story is that no matter how well you make your filter rules, at least one of these 1,300,925,111,156,286,160,896 ways of spelling Viagra will seep through. Now, if you decided to be bold and filter out every one of the combinations of Viagra in this set, the list itself would take up more than 83 zettabytes of space, assuming 8 bits per character and at least one byte as a delimiting character between each word. However, since any ASCII character can be inserted into the word Viagra, a single delimiting character probably wouldn’t be realistic, so you can multiply this last number by at least 8 for a second delimiting character: 666 zettabytes (I know, weird, eh?). For those of you still with me and keeping score, a zettabyte is 1×1021 bytes, or a thousand million million bytes, or simply "a lot." I just e-mailed this news to a few people, and I am just now realizing just how many more combinations are possible with HTML-encoding. For example, to encode a double quotation mark in HTML, I use ". This is six times as many characters as just the " by itself. An ampersand is encoded as &, five times as many characters as the & by itself. I don’t feel like actually figuring out the average number of characters used to encode a single character, so I’ll just make the general estimate that it’s five characters (the ampersand, a three-letter code, and a semicolon). There’s a possibility of at least twelve characters in the spelling of Viagra (besides the six letters in the original word, a character can be inserted between any of the letters or some of the letters can be created with multiple characters, such as a backslash-slash for the ‘V’). It is then possible to have at least 512 more variations of the word Viagra when viewing an HTML e-mail, assuming each character uses only one encoding. And that’s 3.176×1029 ways to represent the word, and 1.626×1032 bytes! “A lot” is now an understatement. So, as you can see, HTML-encoded versions of Viagra make it an even more mind-blowingly huge number of ways to spell Viagra.