Korey Atterberry’s Idle Chatter

Tonight we went to Walmart for some necessities, and while we were there we got Evan a little treat. It’s an Aquadoodle Mini Mat with Thomas on it. It’s just a little pen that holds water along with a couple of coloring book pages. When you get the pages wet, the black and white pages turn colors.

Well, when we got home I tried to get it set up so Evan could play with it. All I had to do was fill the pen with water, which shouldn’t have been too hard. Evan was standing by waiting, patiently for the moment. According to the printed instructions on the pen, I just had to “twist cap to remove.” After several minutes of grunting I eventually resorted to a couple of pairs of pliers. Even then, I had to stop just short of shattering the plastic. Eventually, I discovered that they used right-hand threads… Turning it the other way quickly solved the problem.

I’ve been fooling around with web development for quite some time, but I’ve never been all that serious about it. I wrote a photo gallery plugin for Wordpress in PHP, but I didn’t really know what I was doing.

This evening I’ve been working on the AJAX portion of my plugin and I finally decided to look for a tool to make debugging the Javascript easier than adding message boxes. I quickly found Firebug, a plugin for Firefox. It does everything I need. Troubleshooting Javascript using an actual debugger is something I should have pursued long ago…

A couple of weekends ago some buddies and I took a weekend trip to Starved Rock for a men-only camping trip. There were five of us: me, Jeremy, Dave, Eric and Colin, but the camper wasn’t all that crowded. Parking was, however, since most of us had to drive separately.

Jeremy and I headed to camp early Friday afternoon. We dropped the camper off at the campsite then drove to Ottawa in the rain, where we played a round of disc golf in the rain. Afterwards, we drove back in the rain and set up the camper in the rain. See a pattern? Dave showed up around 7pm and the rain continued pretty heavily until about 8:30pm. Around 9:00, Colin and Eric showed up.

On saturday, we hiked most of the trails at Matthiessen State Park. The weather was very cooperative, but the previous rain made most of the trails in the lower dells very muddy; Colin found himself knee-deep in the mud at one point. I fell in the pool at the bottom of the falls (apparently wet slanted rock is slick). Colin was attacked by a salamander at the same pool (okay, it just climbed over his foot).

Dave and Jeremy had to leave around mid afternoon, so Colin and Eric and I headed out to Starved Rock afterwards. He hiked up St. Louis canyon followed by heading up Starved Rock itself around sunset. On top of the rock we ran into a group of amateur “ghost hunters” looking for “orbs” in their digital photos.

Sunday morning, we ended up sleeping in pretty late, so Colin and Eric had to leave. I took the opportunity to winterize the camper. Now it’s time to wait for spring… Actually, I’ll likely try to plan a tent camping trip like last year if I can swing it.

I posted the pictures from our excursion on the photos page. In case you’re wondering about the pictures, I’d just gotten a new camera, so we did a lot of fooling around trying to get interesting action shots.

After several weeks of testing, I’ve finally completed my analysis of all my rechargeable batteries.

I know I’ll probably catch a little grief for spending my time on a seemingly pointless endeavour, but using the results of these tests, I’ll know which of my batteries I can trust. I’ve also learned a little bit about what brands of batteries to buy next time I need them.

To see the results of my testing, visit my NiMH Battery Testing page.

Last week at work, the topic of toys from our childhood came up. One toy with many shared fond memories were the AA-powered 4×4 trucks called “Stompers.” Apparently they’re still made, at least according to these enthusiast sites:

http://www.route21.com/stompers/

http://www.stomper4×4.com/

Here’s a short video of one in action. See if it brings back any memories:

Stomper Hill Climb

Even though they’re still manufactured, I haven’t had much luck finding them yet. I’ve heard they cost around $3, and finding one would bring me way more than $3 worth of joy!

For another project, I run a simple bulletin board using phpBB. Over the past several months it’s basically been unusable due to spam. I think the bots are able to defeat the standard captcha that phpBB provides. I tried a number of solutions (increased requirements for posting, hidden fields, reducing the reward for spamming, etc.), but nothing seemed to work very well at reducing the spam volume.

Thankfully, I think I’ve got it licked now, at least for the time being. Anti-Spam ACP seems to be doing the trick. It’s showing in its logs around 150 spammer registrations per day that are being denied. It’s nice not having to manually delete all that junk!