Welcome to radinfo v3!
The new radinfo server is now up and running, and should be considerably faster than the old one. I think everything should work, but if anybody happens to notice any breakage, just drop me a line.
Imablog Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
Hardware: ugh
Today was one of those very frustrating days dealing with hardware. I hate dealing with hardware.
Radinfo's been without a backup solution for the last few months now ever since the DLT drive I was using went belly up. I was planning to use an LTO drive I scavenged to do the tape-to-tape transfer project on the new machine. For some reason it wasn't cooperating though and just sat there flashing it's LEDs at me. Futzed around with it for a couple of hours getting nowhere before I decided to call it a day.
Then the home computer decides to crash on me and on reboot, finds no drives on the on-board IDE. Fantastic. Heard one of the drives making a whir-clicking sound during boot-up. When I cracked the case open, I discovered it was the ancient 3GB drive that was causing the problem and making those funny noises. Good thing I was only using as a swap drive. Fortunately when I took it out of the chain, everything booted up nicely again. *whew*.
Did I mention I hate dealing with hardware?
On a much better note, the 120GB drive I put in the wife's laptop is working away nicely. Managed to get most everything restored off the old drive (which somehow magically started working again). Now it's just the laborious task of getting Windoze all up to date and reinstalling software. I think I've got it back to a mostly operational state with just a few more things to reinstall.
Since that other hard drive decided to start working again, I figured I'd hit Newegg.com and pick up an enclosure for it so it could be used as an external drive. No point in having a potentially good drive sitting around doing nothing after all.
Speaking of Newegg, I'm a total convert now. A great selection to drool over and fantastic prices to boot.
Testing, testing...Anybody in here?
My 20 year high school reunion coming up this year had me Googling the names of some of my former classmates, just for fun and to see if I could find anybody.
What surprised me was how few people I found. The names I did find had such a small Googleprint that it was difficult to tell if it was the person I was looking for. Most of what I did find were just names in press releases or news stories, but not much else.
A few explanations come to mind:
- The vast majority of my old classmates are not as computer or Internet saavy as I am
- The ones that are have never bothered to create much of a Net presence
- Any classmates that do have a significant Net presence don't use their real name
- I'm just a freak and spend far too much time on-line
By Occam's Razor, the real explanation is probably #4.
KISS
The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience - Albert Einstein
April blogger gathering
The polls are still open for the April gathering and so far in the location department 10-17 is ahead with April 22 for the date.
If you're planning on going, go make your selection if you haven't already. The first two dates on the list are quickly approaching.
Pet Fest weekend
Pet Fest is coming up this weekend at Palmetto Islands County Park. It's always a fun event to bring the dogs to and lots of things to check out and see. The variety of dogs is interesting to see too. If you have dogs, it's worth checking out.
2007 Hurricane forecast
The Tropical Meteorology folks over at Colorado State (the Klotzbach and Gray group) are forecasting another busy season this year with 17 named storms, 9 hurricanes (5 of which will intense hurricanes). It's similar to their forecast this time last year but with fewer hurricane days.
According to their summary of last year's season, last year's season turned out to be a dud (thankfully) because of El Niño. With it dissipating, this year could turn out to be a busy one. I hope the storms continue to stay away from here though. They also predict a 73% probability of a tropical storm making landfall along the east coast, 66% for a Cat 1-2 hurricane and 50% for a Cat 3-5 hurricane. The probabilities in the Lowcountry area are much lower though.
The NHC forecast will probably be similar, although it'll be a few more weeks before that one comes out.
Information obtained through March 2007 indicates that the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season will be much more active than the average 1950-2000 season. We estimate that 2007 will have about 9 hurricanes (average is 5.9), 17 named storms (average is 9.6), 85 named storm days (average is 49.1), 40 hurricane days (average is 24.5), 5 intense (Category 3-4-5) hurricanes (average is 2.3) and 11 intense hurricane days (average is 5.0). The probability of U.S. major hurricane landfall is estimated to be about 140 percent of the long-period average. We expect Atlantic basin Net Tropical Cyclone (NTC) activity in 2007 to be about 185 percent of the long-term average.
This early April forecast is based on a newly devised extended range statistical forecast procedure which utilizes 40 years of past global reanalysis data and is then tested on an additional 15 years of global reanalysis data. Analog predictors are also utilized. We have increased our forecast from our early December prediction due largely to the rapid dissipation of El Niño which has occurred over the past couple of months. Currently, neutral ENSO conditions are observed. We expect either neutral or weak-to-moderate La Niña conditions to be present during the upcoming hurricane season. Tropical and North Atlantic sea surface temperatures remain well above their long-period averages.
Decisions
It is pointless to worry about whether you have made the right or wrong decision. Instead focus on figuring out how to best live with the decision you have made.
Why can't MS Excel do...
Now that I'm starting to do a little more research and submitting things for publications, I'm learning just how utterly useless Microsoft Excel is for graphs that aren't destined for screen or online presentations.
Totally and completely useless.
I'm sure this is nothing new to fellow scientists out there. This of course begs the question: Why can't Excel create publication quality* graphs and charts yet? People have been using Excel to do analysis, number crunching and graphing for years and years now ever since it came out. So why doesn't Excel support exporting graphs as a vector based graphics file like EPS (and not just a bitmap rendered as a bunch of PS commands either).
Excel is still an excellent tool for crunching numbers and doing analysis. Lots of functions, easy to do quick data visualization and other things. The graphs it does make are usually pretty decent looking, but when it comes to creating publication quality graphs, fuggedaboutit.
This leaves me with hunting for (free) alternatives to my graph making like R, Octave or Gnuplot . I'm currently using R and Gnuplot for my current project, although climbing the learning curve for both programs is making the going a little bit slow. They are becoming quite useful though.
*Publication quality generally means 300-600 dpi, 7-10 cm long, black/white or grayscale (colour if you can afford to pay for it) or some kind of vector based graphics format like EPS.
New digital mammo hitting the road
MUSC has a brand spankin' new Mobile Health Unit (operated by the Hollings Cancer Center) offering among other services, digital mammography with our 5th digital mammography unit. The MHU travels to different places around the area (mostly rural locations) offering various screening services to people that might otherwise have a hard time getting these done.
The MHU is going to be parked in the horseshoe on campus on April 18, so if you're in the area stop by and check it out. I'm told the new van is pretty swanky and posh inside. It's also going to be visiting the Family Circle Cup Tennis tourney for an open house on April 14 (tomorrow).
Flash drive go *poof*
My 256MB flash drive has stopped working. It was plugged into a knee-level USB port and I fear it may have gotten bumped while I was getting up out of the chair, causing a connection inside the flash drive to get broken. It's not acknowledged by any computers I stick it into so I think it's dead.
This is bad, because the most recent versions of the talk and paper I'm working on were on the flash drive. However, not fatal because I also have copies of everything scattered about on my desktop computers. So at best I've only lost a week's worth of changes which were fairly minor and easily recreated.
There were several other things on the flash drive, but they were just copies of stuff already on my other computers and nothing critical.
Sucks to lose the stuff on the drive, but at least it's only inconvenient rather than really bad.
Pet fest weekend
Today's nice and warm afternoon was spent over at Pet Fest at Palmetto Islands County Park. Forgot to grab the camera on the way out so no pictures this time.
This year's event was much bigger than last year (which was bigger than the year before) and stretched out to cover more of the park this time around. Plenty of vendors and dog rescue groups showing off their things. The dogs had a good time meeting other dogs, walking around sniffing the sights/scents and getting treats at the booths. There were doggie contests to show off your pooch. Simba and I entered the musical sit contest and even managed to win a cool prize basket from Palmetto Paws!. The basket had some really cool things that both dogs will enjoy, along with a gift certificate to get more things for the dogs to play with :).
The K-9 division of the Charleston Police Department put on a neat police dog demonstration that was cool to watch. Those are some well trained dogs, I tell you. There were frisbee dog demonstrations that were fun to watch (those dogs can jump and catch like you wouldn't believe). There was even a flyball track where they were doing demonstrations and giving short intro lessons. Flyball looks like fun, but I don't think I could get Nala and Simba into it. Nala only goes after the ball when she feels like it, and Simba only goes for the ball if you kick it for him.
Caught up with Susan at Purely Positive to ask about the new off-leash class at her new Dolittles location. That'll be the next class for Nala and Simba to do. I'll have to start practicing some more with Nala again and get her to start paying more attention to me before class starts.
Great way to spend a Saturday afternoon.
Toy aggression
Simba's got some toy aggression issues I need to deal with. What started out with just some growling whenever another dog wanted to play with whatever toy Simba was playing with has escalated to full out snarling/barking/charging/fight-about-to-break-out aggressive defensive behaviour.
He and Nala will play with the same toy just fine together. It's only when another dog comes by and wants to join in. Then he turns all Jekyll and Hyde on me. Going out on walks and meeting other dogs, he's fine. Throw a toy into the mix and he's like "it's all mine and nobody else can play with it".
I'm always watching out to break anything up and to take the ball away from Simba. The leash goes on and playtime is over for a while for Simba. It doesn't seem to be having much of an effect though. It's getting to the point where the dog park experience is getting ruined for me, Nala and the other dogs. Nala doesn't get as much play time as she used to because I always have to keep an eye on Simba, and it's no fun for the other dogs who just want to play.
Not sure how or where to train it out of him, because he doesn't do it at home, and I don't want to have him going after dogs at the park all the time to correct the behaviour out of him there. I'm going to have to consult with some of our dog trainers to see if they have any suggestions for me.
Persistence
Checked with one of the guys from Charleston School for Dogs and he says I'm doing the right thing with the time-outs and taking away Simba's toy. A strong and reliable 'Leave it' would help too if Simba and another dog started to face off over a toy. He also said that resource guarding behaviour is tough to train out of dogs and takes a lot of work, so I'll just keep at it.
A surge in fake bounced emails
My work email is being deluged with a flurry of bogus bounced mails this morning. I've had 10 of them come through my inbox in the last 15 minutes, all of them with attachments.
Tip: If you get an email bounce (typically has the subject 'Returned mail' or 'Unexpected delivery failure', always check the From address. Generally authentic bounced mail only comes from the mail server that your outgoing mail goes through. If the From address in the email doesn't look like one of the servers you configured your email client with, odds are it's bogus and you probably shouldn't open it. If the bounce also has an attachment, odds are even greater that it's a bogus mail. None of the mail server software I'm familiar with send out bounced email notifications with attachments.
Consider for example my regular netcom.com email. My email client is configured to fetch mail from Earthlink's POP server, , and send outgoing mail through their SMTP server. If I get a bounce that doesn't come from a netcom.com or earthlink.net server, that's an immediate red flag so it gets flagged as junk and into the bit bucket it goes.
These bogus bounced emails are no doubt an attempt to take advantage of most people's general lack of knowledge about how email is ferried around. The ones I got today were particularly obvious because the From addresses weren't even valid emails.
Keep an eye on your email and never blindly open anything with an attachment. Spam filters are getting better, but they're still not foolproof.
Dogs and lawns
Why does dog pee kill the grass, but not the weeds?
LCB's first blogiversary
According to Dan, today is the first blogiversary of LCB. It's grown up to be quite a collection of area blogs, most of which make for pretty good and varied reading. I've enjoyed watching and participating in the evolution of LCB.
I bet the next year on LCB will be fun too.
Dog quote
The reason why a dog has so many friends, is that he wags his tail instead of his tongue...
Found in a signature in the Lab Retriever forum
Weekend happenings
Lots of stuff going on this weekend to keep me and the dogs busy.
Most of Saturday will be taken up with CSCLRC's Spring Fling Match out on Wadmalaw Island. Should be a fun time with lots of dogs to play with. Following that is the club's board meeting and planning for the next event. It's going to be a long but fun day I think.
Sunday is the next blogger gathering over at Ten-Seventeen out in West Ashley in the Quadrangle shopping center (next door to the Piggly Wiggly over by Citadel Mall). They make a great goulash there. Looking forward to seeing fellow bloggers again. Should be a good time.
Then there's the ever present talk I have to finish up for the SIIM 2007 annual meeting and the accompanying paper that needs to be submitted to JDI. There's not too much left to do for the talk so I should be able to wrap that up well before the meeting. Don't want to be one of those people that are finishing up their talk in the speaker ready-room just before they give their presentation.
It's birling down, a-down white water
If you're any kind of Canadian and spent any amount of time in the 80s, this should bring back memories.
Happy anniversary to us!
Been married for 6 years now. Doesn't really seem like it's been that long.
Spring Flinging with the Labs
Yesterday turned out to be a great day for CSCLRC's Spring Fling match. Not too hot, nice breeze to keep most of the bugs away and plenty of dogs.
The event was open to all dogs, not just labs, so we had a few show up, like this Portuguese water dog (one of two)
a few Great Danes
and even a pair of Staffies
There was even an Australian Shepherd and a Saluki out to join in the fun.
Naturally there were Labs, and where there are Labs, there are Lab puppies!
The biggest part of the match was conformation, but since it was a B match, it's less about showing off the best dog and more about getting dogs used to the ring and having fun.
Actually, it's all about having fun, so there was also a costume contest to wrap things up (along with other fun events like fastest biscuit eating, dress up and ball and spoon races)
Laptop hard drive update
It's been a few weeks and the new hard drive in the wife's laptop still seems to be working fine. Did I mention hardware really drives me nuts sometimes?
So after putting the new hard drive into the wife's laptop and having it not being recognized for some reason, I popped it into my work laptop where it worked just fine. Formatted and installed Windows, got it booting and software installed. Then I stuck the drive back into the wife's laptop where by some strange circumstance, worked and booted up perfectly. Never could figure out why the drive wasn't recognized the first time. Flaky connection? Bad connection? Who knows.
The old drive suddenly decided to work again once I had it in an external drive enclosure ($10 from Newegg.com). Why, I have no idea. It wouldn't work in the wife's laptop and wouldn't work in mine either. All I did was stick it into the external enclosure, connect it to the USB port and presto, one 60 GB D: drive on the system. So thankfully, instead of having to lose all that data all the wife's stuff was recoverable and copied onto the new drive.
Not sure what magic spells or incantations I stumbled on during the process (aside from a few curse words), but now I have a 60 GB external drive that I'll be able to wipe clean and use as a potential backup device.
More new projects
The Nuclear Medicine Supervisor wants to look at putting the procedure manual online in something more searchable than just a collection of Word documents. I've proposed a a few different possibilities, including wiki, CMS and blog format. Now I have to create some demos to show off and let them pick which one they want to go with.
After proposing to the other CSCLRC board members that we consider using a CMS for the website, I've been 'volunteered' to take over as the group's webmaster. Funny how things like that happen. I suppose I should have expected it. Should be an interesting task to take on though.
What Tarot Card are You?
You are The Wheel of Fortune
Good fortune and happiness but sometimes a species of intoxication with success
The Wheel of Fortune is all about big things, luck, change, fortune. Almost always good fortune. You are lucky in all things that you do and happy with the things that come to you. Be careful that success does not go to your head however. Sometimes luck can change.
What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.
The Dog Food Project
Came across The Dog Food Project via a comment left on a past entry where I was talking about the food issues I was having with Nala a while back.
After going through a bunch of pages, I'm impressed with the quality of information on the site. With all the dog food recalls in the news lately, there are a lot of people struggling with what to feed their dogs, lots of rabid BARF/RAW advocates pushing raw feeding as the only real food choice and generally a lot of confusion.
There are several pages that talk about and define the various ingredients you'll find listed in dog foods, what ingredients to look for and what to avoid and common dog food misconceptions.
There's a lot of good information on the site, without pushing any particular feeding method. It should be a good read for any pet owners out there who want to know what they're feeding their pets.
