Luke Gedeon

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I am so excited! I have been working on this project for several months now. The whole time I have been working exclusively on the back end, which is 95% of this project, but I have basically been working blind.

Saturday, I finally got to see the results of all this coming together. I still have some work to do on it, but it is so exciting to see something, anything, good come out after this much work.

I got so excited in the final push I forgot I had a blog and went five days without posting. Did anyone notice? I guess my three year trend of posting every day has been well broken, but I learned a lot from the disipline of daily posting. More on that later. I will probably mix it up a bit from here on out.

For now, I am back to work. Anything exciteing happening in your life?

Ever wondered how to find a blogging job? I have. Most of my work has found me… hunted me down, so I really never took the time to look. But, I ran into this list today and decided to share.

Problogger: Darren Rowse’s blog about blogging is one of the best places to find paid blogging jobs.

Indeed.com: Performing a search for ‘blogger’ or a similar search tool on Indeed.com will provide a list of results culled from various websites.

Freelance Writing Jobs: Deb Ng provides a list of links to blogging jobs found by searching the Internet each day.

Performancing: Performancing.com has a forum that allows people to post blogging jobs.

Authority Blogger: Authority Blogger has a section within the site’s forum where people can post blogging jobs.

About Freelance Writing: Ann Wayman lists a variety of blogging positions found by searching the Internet.

BloggerJobs.biz: This site provides a good compilation of blogging jobs found on the web as well as some that are hard to find.

Writers Weekly: Writers Weekly is a site dedicated to helping writers. The blogging jobs listed on Writers Weekly include paid classified ads as well as a compilation of original market listings that are received from the editors at each publication.

Media Bistro: Media Bistro occasionally includes blogging jobs in their job listings.

Blogher: While this site is primarily for women bloggers, it does include some blogging job postings.

Craigslist: Many people post blogger jobs on Craigslist.

Freelance Blogging Jobs: A blog that compiles blogging job listings from around the web.

Anyone know of other sites that should be on this list?

We saw a many beautiful moutains on our trip. This was not one of them. I decided to go ahead and post this picture, though, in order to give fair coverage of the whole trip. This picture is a summary of southern California. If you ever wanted to know what it looks like, here it is.

I heard a story long ago about the invention of the depth charge. Supposedly they were inspired to make them by a suggestion to boil the ocean to get rid of U-boats. Obviously they could not boil the whole ocean, but with depth charges they were able to boil the parts of the ocean that they needed to.

I looked around and could not find the story anywhere online, so I decided to fill the void.

As for who made the suggestion the only reference I can find is to Will Rogers, but it may not have been original with him or he may not have been the only one with the same idea since the depth charge was invented by the British. Anyway here is the Will Rogers quote:

When asked by a reporter what to do about U-boat sinkings during World War I, Will Rogers is said to have responded: “Boil the ocean”. “But how would you do that?” the reporter continued. Without a beat Rogers replied, “I’m just the idea man here. Get someone else to work out the details.”

The phrase “boil the ocean” is used now to refer to attempting the imposible, which is funny given the fact that it has actually been done.

Who says learning Chinese can’t be fun?

This tip was tested in Microsoft Access 2007 but should work in all versions of Access and with slight variations in any flavor of SQL.

If you have hung around Access long enough, you have probably done a “Find Unmatched” query, and if you looked at the SQL view it probably looked something like this:
INSERT INTO ProductLists ( Description, LinkField, LinkText )
SELECT Static.ATTRIBUTE, "ATTRIBUTE", Static.ATTRIBUTE
FROM Static LEFT JOIN ProductLists ON Static.ATTRIBUTE = ProductLists.LinkText
WHERE (((ProductLists.LinkText) Is Null))
GROUP BY Static.ATTRIBUTE, "ATTRIBUTE", Static.ATTRIBUTE;

Admittedly, a lot of this can be ignored. The key here is the JOIN which lets us find a match for everything we can and then the WHERE clause which selects only the non-matches.

But that all falls apart if I have matches that should not count for some reason. For example, I frequently find a match in one category and I need to know for sure that I do not have a match in different category.

If you simply test for no match like I did above, you miss everything that has a match in the wrong category. If you test for Null or a match in a different category, you get false positives if it is in both categories.

I have, in the past set up a seperate query to filter down to my test value and then done an “unmatched” against that. Doing that frequently, though, leaves you with a lot of extra queries to keep track of, and I really never liked that option. So instead, I just added a second requirement to the ON statement in the FROM clause, like this:

INSERT INTO ProductLists ( Description, LinkField, LinkText )
SELECT Static.ATTRIBUTE, "ATTRIBUTE", Static.ATTRIBUTE
FROM Static LEFT JOIN ProductLists ON (Static.ATTRIBUTE = ProductLists.LinkText
AND (ProductLists.LinkText) = "ATTRIBUTE")
WHERE (((ProductLists.LinkText) Is Null))
GROUP BY Static.ATTRIBUTE, "ATTRIBUTE", Static.ATTRIBUTE;

A few weeks back I was hit with hundreds of really great comments from people using the names of friends who comment here frequently. The problem was that the URL associated with the comment pointed to sites I had never heard of.

I have talked to a few of these friends and they were not the source of the comments so in fairness to my friends I am going to remove their names from the comments and the offending URL. I will leave the comments though since I do not want to set a precedent of deleting other people’s work even if this case involved deception. There is a principle here.

That leaves a few sticky comments though, because a few names are quite common and it is possible that some of these are legit. What I am going to do is visit the site and see if the name shows up there. I am also going to check if the referred site has comments enabled. Then I am going to guess. If you have commented since July 1st and notice that I anonymized your comment, let me know and I will fix it.

I was teasing Phillip (5yo) about something and he totally got it, but Peter (7yo) wanted to make sure, so he has ask Phillip, “You know he is just kitten, right?”

As we got closer to LA we saw a little bit of smog, but I did not think it was too bad. Of course, we were still miles out. By the time we got into the valley, I found out what real smog is all about. We didn’t get a single picture worth keeping. At least with fog you can get some fun lighting effects. With smog it just looks like you have no idea how to use a camera.

Then we sat in traffic for hours. We had planned to arrive at city center by 5-6am and be headed outbound during rush hour. We had trouble getting the rental car, so we were headed in-bound at about 7am with about 60 miles to go. I thought, “Well, I have driven rush-hour NYC, so I can handle this. Plus, it will give me idea of what real traffic is like.” Well, it was a learning experinence.

I really wonder why anyone would want to live in or near LA. Good clean dirt looks better by comparison. At least you can see what you are looking at. And, what is the point of parking your car on the highway for two hours? One time for the experinence, maybe, but people actually do that everyday? They must be insane.

At about 20 miles from LA, we were sitting 4 lanes wide at a dead stop. Motorcycles had been passing us for a while going in-between the lanes. Then suddenly, peices of glass and plastic went flying everywhere. A motorcycle hit my driver’s side mirror with his handlebar. The amazing thing is that he did not actually hit more than just the mirror. Since it was his handlebar you would expect that to make him swerve right into the car, but he did not.

He didn’t stop either! He swerved very slightly and kept going…. fast enough that his tag was out of sight before I realized what happened. I pulled over while Tabetha called the police and then I picked up the glass out of the floor-board of the car. After filing the report, the police officer suggested we skip LA and gave us directions out to a loop around the city. We gladly took his advice.

You thought you were going to see more pictures from the trip today, didn’t you? I did too, but I just found an article on “thought experiments” and decided to share a fun one with you. You can find out about thought experiments here.

This ‘experiment’ comes from Galileo’s book Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche (1628):

Salviati. If then we take two bodies whose natural speeds are different, it is clear that on uniting the two, the more rapid one will be partly retarded by the slower, and the slower will be somewhat hastened by the swifter. Do you not agree with me in this opinion?

Simplicio. You are unquestionably right.

Salviati. But if this is true, and if a large stone moves with a speed of, say, eight while a smaller moves with a speed of four, then when they are united, the system will move with a speed less than eight; but the two stones when tied together make a stone larger than that which before moved with a speed of eight. Hence the heavier body moves with less speed than the lighter; an effect which is contrary to your supposition. Thus you see how, from your assumption that the heavier body moves more rapidly than ‘ the lighter one, I infer that the heavier body moves more slowly. “Galileo on Aristotle and Acceleration“. Retrieved on 2008-05-24.

Wouldn’t it be nice it all arguments were this easy to resolve?

This was the first sunrise of the trip. We were on Interstate 15 approaching LA. We never did make it to LA though.

Yesterday, I mentioned that the applications built on top of Twitter are the life of Twitter. Today, I have four new Twitter tools to tell you about.

The first one, TwitterFone, provides a number that you call and it turns your voice message into text. It is still in beta and I have signed up to test it. If it is as simple as it looks, it will be the easiest way for people who are not surgically attached to their computer to update their status on Twitter and (if you set it up) on every other social network out there, including arch-rival FaceBook.

The second is called TweetPromote. Seems like a strange name to me, but I guess eventually you run-out of good names. Anyway, this is the best and easiest to use site I have found yet to discover who is following you that you have not gotten around to following back… and vice versa. It gives you lots of info about your followers too.

The third is Hootsuite. HootSuite is a full feature Twitter user interface. It handles multiple accounts, puts your followers in groups, and makes RT’s easy. The only thing it does not do, that TweetDeck and maybe others do, is work with FaceBook. Not a fatal short coming, but it sure would be nice if they added that.

The fourth Twitter User Interface certainly cannot be called a tool but it is still fun. 140Army is a web-based game that uses your Twitter account for verification and post updates on your progress. If you have a few minutes, and want to try it, please click on this link so that we can be partners in the game. http://140army.com/invite/direct_link?uid=1000158685. This really is just the tip of the iceburg of what is possible for games using Twitter, but it is a really cool first step.

What Twitter tools do you find most helpful/fun?

Well, things are looking mighty tough for old Twitter. Facebook has FriendFeed, and now “real-time updates”, Google is building the Wave, and Microsoft is about due to announce it’s own version of Short Messaging for Interconnected and Overlapping Network Communities (MS-SMICONC).

Still, Twitter usage is growing like crazy and new tools for Twitter are built every week. Those Twitter User Interfaces (TUIs) are what makes Twitter so powerful and popular. They give you many choices for input methods, provide filtering and searching, make managing large amounts of contacts easier, and in some cases act as a full communications command center.

Together they give you the ability to bring together all the information you care about and only the info you care about. Unless… some of the information you want is trapped inside Facebook.

Facebook applications are nearly the inverse of TUIs.  With Twitter, the information is centralized but the applications are not so the information flows out toward the user wherever they are. In Facebook the applications are centralized so that the only place you can go to get access to your information is inside Facebook.

Facebook will let you store any type of information you want but you can only input and access that information according to their rules. Twitter only stores one kind of information (a string of 140 letter and numbers) but gives you hundreds different ways to put info into and get info out of it.

Now, I love Facebook for helping me get back in touch with hundreds of long lost friends, but it is frustratingly difficult to get the kinds of info about those friends that I want without all the gangsta-stock-love-poke. And if anything ever happens to Facebook, I will lose contact with those friends all over again because it is against the rules to copy contact info.

So which would do you think will survive longest? Or what do you think will replace both of them?

Once you get to a certain number of favorites, the word “favorite” loses meaning, but maybe I can get away with this a few more times.

Passin’ the Faith Along is another of my favorite songs. This version lacks the bass that really makes the song, but it was the best I could find.

Enjoy.

Well, I didn’t learn anything from the spinach literally, but I did learn a bit while biting on a bit of bitter … uhm … ran out of b’s. Oh well, you get the idea.

How do I know?

Uh, cause I said so.

Yup.

Anyway, back to the spinach. Funny how easy it is to get distracted when you trying to avoid something unpleasant, isn’t it? And if anything is unpleasant, it is spinach.

At least that is what I thought for many years.

Then I tasted fresh spinach leaves in a salad. I think the secret to learning to like the stuff is that I had no idea what I was eating the first several times I ate it. I just assumed it was little pieces of romaine lettuce. Plus it was served with oranges in it. I love oranges.

Well by the time I found out what I was eating, I was hooked.

A few years later we started mixing frozen spinach in with scrambled eggs. We call them green eggs – like in the book Green Eggs and Ham. It was another way to get dark leafy greans into our diet. That is particular for me and a few others in the family that are allergic to milk. Dark leafy greans are high in iron, calcium, and other nutrients that you miss when you can’t drink milk.

Just like Sam’s friend in Green Eggs and Ham, I learned to go ahead and try new things. I still do not like boiled spinach. That texture is really tough to swallow, but I have found two ways that I like spinach and also found that I like smoked asparagus, and several other veggies I despised as a kid.

I do like green eggs, Sam I Am. I do.

NOTE: This is my entry in the current What I Learned From… project. The topic this month is the World of Plants, and there’s still time for you to join in, just follow that link, but you better hurry – it is over tomorrow night, August 9!

Okay? So where is Travel Pics 1? Here: For Purple Mountain Majesties . I just forgot to number it.

We had a lot of fun with our new camera. A lot of the early pictures did not turn out well but eventually we got the hang of it.

These three were taken from the Pacific Coast Highway – US 1 about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

A friend from college asked me today what I had been doing for the last several years. My first thought was, not much, but since we had not talked for several years I figured I should give him a little better summary. So I started typing, and came up with this:

Helping out in a small missions church, running a non-profit, rearing five children, building databases and websites, and learning Chinese.

After I thought about that for a minute I added:

And in my spare-time, I complain about how I do not have time to get it all done.

When I was in college, I prayed that God would never let me be bored again. I guess this is one prayer that got answered in the affirmative, and how!

• 3YO: Oops, No pigs at the table. #
• RT @RobertHruzek: Check it out, via @bradshorr: New post – Content Optimization Checklist for Human Readers and SEO http://ow.ly/j0Hj #
• @RobertHruzek I found a few of those lbs for you. I went off-diet for vacation. in reply to RobertHruzek #

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• 3YO: Oops, No pigs at the table. #
• RT @RobertHruzek: Check it out, via @bradshorr: New post – Content Optimization Checklist for Human Readers and SEO http://ow.ly/j0Hj #
• @RobertHruzek I found a few of those lbs for you. I went off-diet for vacation. in reply to RobertHruzek #

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• 3YO: Oops, No pigs at the table. #
• RT @RobertHruzek: Check it out, via @bradshorr: New post – Content Optimization Checklist for Human Readers and SEO http://ow.ly/j0Hj #
• @RobertHruzek I found a few of those lbs for you. I went off-diet for vacation. in reply to RobertHruzek #

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