So my phone was up for replacement and for sometime now I've really been wanting to replace it with a smart phone but do to certain business related security circumstances could not have a phone with a camera, which limited my choices. Try walking into a cell phone store and telling them you need a phone without a camera and they stare blankly for a minute then say we have this one or this and and I think we don't have one of them in stock, greeeaat.

Thankfully those restrictions went away recently so I was able to walk into the store and literally have my choice of any phone they had, what a relief. Last November Trish replaced her phone and got a Blackberry Curve, I played with it some and thought it seemed like a good phone, so when it came time to replace my phone I went with the Curve as well. Long story short couldn't be more happy, this phone is a godsend and I'm already beginning to wonder what I ever did without it. With my previous phone I had friends that would sometimes text me and trying to reply with a standard keypad was painful, but with the Curve and it's full QUERTY keyboard and it's so easy. The hardest part was getting it my head it's just a QUERTY keyboard and forgetting the hardship of trying to type a message with only 9 keys.

So some really crappy weather pushed through our area last night, and the winds caused us to lose power several times. At first it was blinking in and out then it just went out period for about 25 minutes. It came back up stayed on for about half an hour, then went out again for around an hour, and finally stayed back on for the rest of the night.

The funny thing is my wife was trying to watch a dvd and the power went out everytime she tried to start watching it. The first time it came back on for about half an hour she waited to see if the power was going to stay on and of course about the time the power went back out she had just decided to try again. Once the power finally came back on for good we waited quite sometime before bothering to try and do anything that used power. The other odd thing that happened was, while my wife and i were playing cards waiting for the power to come back on, I for some strange reason decided to hum the song the dart board plays everytime it gets power back and at that exact same moment the power came back and the dart board started playing its song, freaky.

 

Last night Trish and I went to dinner and to see the movie Push with friends of ours. Trish thought it looked the trailer looked promising and I'm always up for going to a scifi film. If you haven't already seen the trailers Push is about people with abilities such as telekinetic, or the ability to push thoughts into people's minds, and the people or group(s) that want to capture them and harness their abilities.

Out of the four of us I'm the only one who liked it. Nobody could really say what they didn't like about it, but Trish did say she thought the dialogue was poor and didn't like the way the sonic people looked when using their ability. Personally I liked the film and it kept me engaged the whole time, but I did feel it was one of those movies that you have to just let carry you along. If you try and sit there understanding whats going on and where it is headed you'll be thoroughly confused and probably miss the point at the end. I've heard people mention it's similarity to last summer's Jumper, which I liked as well, and would agree it's similar in concept, except Jumper was more of just an action flick while this one had a much deeper plot and was much more engaging than Jumper was.

In the end the movie has been left open for a sequel and I'm hoping it pulls in the money for it, because I would love to see a sequel to it.

This has got to be one of the funniest clips I've seen in a long time, especially if you've seen Star Wars. It's Star Wars told by someone who has never seen Star Wars.

Article summary:

 

 

You can read the full release here [qtsoftware.com].

Until the announcement today Qt was available in GPL or a purchasable commercial license, mostly because Qt was the primary source of profit for Trolltech, the company who originally developed Qt, but since the software was acquired by Nokia with the purchase of Trolltech the need for Qt to be a revenue generator has diminished considerably. Qt is primarily used in the KDE desktop for Linux , and also happens to be the desktop I use. For those unaware starting with Qt 4.x they made it available to work directly in windows making it possible for software written with Qt to run in windows. I really like QT, KDE, and the applications developed with it, especially Amarok, which is by far the best desktop MP3 player in my opinion. I'm hoping this will help propel Qt and KDE farther into the limelight and encourage developers and companies to start using the Qt framework.

I filed this under sports but it probably could have been filed under technology either way this is really cool. Ever wondered how they get the scrimmage and down lines onto the footage for football games? This video shows and over view of the technology behind it.

 

So I just got done reading Hidden Codes & Grand Designs by Pierre Berloquin. The book jacket describes the book as being about covert communications and secret symbols from ancient Greece to the digital frontier, and while it does cover these topics to an extent it's more about the author's obsession with Pythagoras, his brotherhood and their number theory along with the vitruvian man.

While I did learn a few things that I wasn't aware of before, I had to keep getting past his leaps of logic. In his attempts to link almost everything back to Pythagoras or the Vetruvian man he continually confuses correlation as causation. Another stumbling block in reading this book is the decoding exercises. I understand some people probably like those little exercises but I don't read a book so that I can have homework. I also suspect that it helped pad the book. If you take out the decode exercises and the last chapter which just covers pseudo languages created over time the book would probably be lucky to cover two hundred pages.

In summation I'm not sure I could actually recommend this book to anyone, but if you like solving puzzles or are interested in how the templors, free masons, and other secret brotherhoods all unknowingly came from Pythagoreans then by all means read this book you might actually find it of interest.

What a way to start off the new year. As most of you know Trish and I have been getting up at 5am to go to the gym in the morning before we go to work, and I've gotten up to running three miles every other day. Well we got up this morning and went to the gym and I got through almost two miles of my three mile run and all of a sudden there was a pop like something hit the back of my leg and pain shooting up my leg. I was afraid that maybe I tore something because I can put weight on my heal but not at all on the ball of my foot, but after talking with a friend of ours it looks like I just pulled a muscle and I'll need to spend the next week heating and icing my leg.

The spam came back somewhat yesterday, and although I knew it would eventually I was still disappointed when I saw my inbox yesteday.

Most people probably don't realise it, and I didn't have my site up at the time, but several weeks back an ISP in the Northwest, McColo, was taken down by it's upstream providers. This ISP was also the controller for a massive botnet that generated quite a large amount of the spam on the internet. For my business I have one email account that has about two dozen different email addresses pointed at so suffice to say, even with a spam filter that blocks 95% of the spam that those accounts get, I still receive about 75 spam messages per day. Since McColo was taken down I've received an average of 10 per day.

That was until yesterday, I open my email and wake up to find 30 spam messages in my Inbox, not anywhere near what I used to receive but it does herald the return of the botnet that was operating out of that ISP.

So it looks like the spam is starting to come back.

 

First Post! well first post take two anyways. As some of you may know, this is TahutiNet 2.0, and that I originally had this site up back at the beginning of this year. That first attempt at what I wanted for a website was horrible, I tried using Joomla [joomla.org] but it was overkill for what I needed and I never could get around to getting the functionality working the way I wanted much less the design of the site. I think, atleast for me, that they tried to dumb it down so much for people who know little to nothing about web design and development ,that for someone that knows what their doing, it's just to convoluted and takes to much time to get just what I needed.

So forward all the way the present, and I've found a great Content Management System (CMS) that I've already used to build sites for several clients. The software I found was CMS Made Simple [cmsmadesimple.org]. This is a great Open Source [wikipedia.org] product that is simple enough to get a new site up and running fast yet flexible enough to add just about any functionality you may need into a website.

So enough about that already, I'm hoping to start using this site to post about things going on in my life, the world, and whatever else there may be. While I don't hold delusions of grandeurs and think that people will flock to this site just to see what I have to see, I know there are people out there (that means you dad) that will bother to read my postings, and possibly, gasp!, even care.