Fingertoe.com

Bus riders get gifts from Secret Santa - Yahoo! News

Pretty cool eh?

Posted by Josh Reighley at 7:16 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

My friend Barry, (the math guy) has been invited to march in the Rose bowl parade with the grand marshal, George Lucas.

He has been a long time Star Wars fan, and is going to be marching in his X wing fighter pilot costume seen here:

Posted by Josh Reighley at 7:34 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

The Mondok Blog is running a cute series on "I am a Mac, I am an MD"

Took me a minute to figure out the Parody, but I get it now.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 4:43 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

This is the best reason I have seen in a long time to stop using Internet explorer:

IE Clipboard Plunder | ScriptingMagic.com

Basically websites can lift the contents of your windows clipboard without asking. So lets say you copy something out of quicken, or you online banking website, then you visit some sports site you like. If the webmaster is evil, he can collect that data that you just control-C Control-v ed someplace else and use it for whatever he wants.

In I.E. 7 it prompts you before divulging the data, but it prompts you for a lot of other things as well, and sometimes it is easy to click through without paying enough attention.

Firefox and Opera are sane enough not to include this "feature" Download firefox. You won't be sorry.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 11:25 PM | Permalink | Comments ()

Mars hill now has embeddable sermons. This one was one of my favorites from the current series. The last 5 minutes or so blew me away.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Idaho sports fans are pretty riled up about the loss of Dennis Erickson as their head football coach. Most of us where not surprised, but almost everyone was disappointed. There is a lot of pressure on the Athletic Director to get a coach that will stick around for a few years. Most of the names being tossed around are pretty safe plays, as he doesn't want to get burned again.

I hope that Rob Spear is talking to Doug Nussmeier. Doug was a four year starter at Quarterback for Idaho between 1990 and 1994. He put up some huge numbers, and won the Walter Payton Trophy for being the top 1-AA football player. He went on to play 5 seasons in the NFL with the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts. He also played for one season in the Candian football league. In 2001, Nussmeier began coaching He was the QB coach for the BC lions. In 2002, he was the offensive coordinator for the Ottawa Renegades.

In 2003 he joined the Staff of his college coach John L Smith, as their quarterback coach. While at Michigan State, Nuss's Quarterbacks, Jeff Smoker and Drew Stanton, performed very well, putting up school record numbers.

He left Michigan State this year to join Scott Linehan's staff at the St. Louis Rams. Marc Bulger is also putting up career numbers this year under Nussmeier's coaching.

Michigan State's fan sites seem to indicate that Nussmeier's departure was part of the downfall of John L's offense this year. They missed his calming effect on the other coaches. Nussmeier's recruiting is also highly praised by the Michigan State loyals.

Eventually Doug Nussmeier is going to make a great head coach. Idaho would be an ideal place for him to get his start. At his level of age and experience, he is not a safe bet, but he is somebody we can wholeheartedly rout for. Dennis Erickson was a safe bet to be a good coach, and that didn't pay off for too long. Mike Kramer is a safe bet to stick around, but not really a safe bet to win games.

The truth is, there are no safe bets in football. Your best bet is to take the talent that is yours and develop it to it's full potential. Without a doubt, Doug Nussmeier is a full blooded Vandal who has had significant success. Let's give him a place to fully develop his potential, and fully develop Vandal football!

Posted by Josh Reighley at 1:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It seems like the Spokane area has more than it's share of bizarre murders.

In 1999, Robert Woods Killed his son Christopher. He set fire to their house, blamed the missing kid, and tried to claim the insurance money. He was busted in part because a local photo processing shop alerted authorities to the before and after insurance shots on the same roll of film. Mr Woods hung himself in jail, avoiding trial.

Also in 1999, Brad Jackson killed his daughter Valiree. He buried her in a rural area. Police suspected he was the murderer. They tipped him off that they had narrowed down the location of her grave. Then they tracked his truck's movements as he dug up his daughter, and relocated her body.

Robert Yates hunted prostitutes on the streets of Spokane between 1996 and 1998. He is convicted of 15 murders, but is suspected in several more. When he plead guilty to several of the murders, he agreed to lead the authorities to one of the missing bodies. Which was buried right outside his bedroom window.

In 1996, Tom DiBartolo, a Spokane County Sheriff's deputy shot and killed his wife, Patti. He also inflicted a superficial gunshot wound on himself in order to substantiate his story that they where mugged in a park. He had taken out a life insurance policy on his wife, and he moved in with his girlfriend shortly after the murder.

Last year, Joseph Duncan kidnaped two children Shasta and Dylan Groene, after murdering their mother, brother and their mother's Boyfriend. He later murdered Dylan Groene in the Montana mountains before being captured eating a midnight snack with Shasta in a Denny's resturaunt in Coeur d'Alene.

Last week, Richard and Teresa Kim where murdered by their 18 year old son, Bryan. Apparently Bryan strangled his mother with zip ties, and stabbed his father to death. When the parents employers reported them missing, police went to their home and found their body's in the bucket of a Bobcat.. Bryan was apprehended at his high school.

So, is there something in the water here? Or is this normal?

Posted by Josh Reighley at 12:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, I can't quite say I told you so, but close:

Fingertoe.com: Parade in Moscow...

John L. Smith indicates that he is interested in the job. He is a great coach. I don't think he it is likely to work out in the wake of Dennis Erickson's departure. It looks like Erickson has done nothing to rebuild his credibility. It is being reported that he outright lied to David Vabora. From everything I have seen, John L Smith is an honest man, probably to a fault.

The local media is hyping up Mike Kramer to be the front runner. He was the coach at Eastern Washingon, and he bolted for Montana State. I don't think this was a real promotion, as both teams are in the Big Sky conference. So, I am not sure he has resume of loyalty.

Jess and I where thinking of dark horse canidates. I proposed St. Louis Rams QB coach Doug Nussmeier. Jess proposed Purdue RB coach Joel Thomas. Both are UI football alumni who have some coaching experience.

I think you have to take a pretty big chance to find a coach that will both win games, and stick around for more than a year or two in a small town like Moscow Idaho.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 12:43 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

So today, I noticed the "WE SPIED ON DIANA" headline on Drudge, and it made me wonder...

Does the United States have the capability to retroactively spy on somebody, after an event of interest?

We have radio telescopes pointed at the sky, recording everything that they hear for further analysis later. This analysis is the goal of projects like SETI@Home. Doesn't it make sense that we could use the same recording technology to record all of the radio transmissions from a place like Paris, or Afganistan? Then if a world event of interest happened like 9-11 or the possible assassination of a world leader, we could unleash supercomputers on those recordings and reconstruct the transmissions that originated from certain devices or locations?

It doesn't seem to far fetched. The intelligence benefit would be profound.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 12:18 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

I just installed the Firebug firefox extension. That is the coolest extension I have seen to date.

I have built several Cascading style sheet driven websites, and it has always been a bit of a trial and error process for me. I just can't see where all of my classes and borders and stuff go... Firebug instantly eliminated all of the confusion. I can now go over the HTML it will highlight each division of the website!

It's like I was blind, but now I can see.

I am actually a bit scared to go examine my work.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 7:19 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

Dreamhost just sent me an email letting me know I am on a new server now!

Woo Hoo! It I can tell already that my applications are running a lot faster!

I am a darn happy customer!

Posted by Josh Reighley at 4:40 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

I hope I don't bore everyone by becoming a chess blogger. I am homing my HTML skills... I thought I played pretty well in this game. You should be able to browse it by clicking on the frame and using your mouse wheel, the arrow keys, or the navigation buttons on the bottom of the frame.

I have been on a losing streak as of late. This game was an exception, I think I played quite well, and premeditated my actions by 3-5 moves most of the time.

Well, I failed. I couldn't get the fancy Iframe chess box to show. If you really want to see my game, you will have to click this link... Drats...

Posted by Josh Reighley at 5:30 AM | Permalink | Comments ()

If you are having trouble with Movable type comment spam, Or any other blog spam for that matter, this trick might help you out.

A year or so ago, My very happy webhost, emailed me to notify me they had to turn off my mt-tb.cgi script because it was getting spammed to the point where it was bogging down the server.

There are Movable type settings and plugins that prevent junk trackbacks on old entries, but these work by having the mt-tb.cgi script look at the trackback, analyze it and then discard it. The analysis is costs processing power on the server. I came up with the following solution, which seems to work fairly elegantly

I added the following code to my .htaccess file:

RedirectMatch permanent mt-tb.cgi/([0-4][0-9][0-9])$ /mt/errorfile.html
RedirectMatch permanent mt-tb.cgi/([0-9][0-9])$ /mt/errorfile.html
RedirectMatch permanent mt-tb.cgi/([0-9])$ /mt/errorfile.html

Now, whenever anyone sends a trackback to mt-cgi/1 through mt-cgi/499 It gets redirected to an error page which is rendered. There is no analysis done, so I believe the load on the processor is significantly reduced. If you send a trackback to entry 500 or higher, the trackback goes through the regular script.

I will have to edit this periodically, but I do think this significantly limits the damage that spammers can do.

Posted by Josh Reighley at 2:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Been hit with a lot of trackback spam in the last few days. I am going to try to re-implement my .htaccess hacks to redirect the spammers to a unreal site. This worked on my last MT installation as I pointed out in this post. I don't get many legit trackbacks, but just in case, I have to make sure that they still work!

Posted by Josh Reighley at 1:56 AM | Permalink | Comments ()