All The Info

Interesting article in the local paper about my hometown, Loveland Colorado.

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If you don’t listen to Coverville, you should start. If you do listen you should become a Coverville Citizen. $40 a year, bonus tracks, T-shirts and DVD archives. What a deal!

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So how is it no one told me about this? This weekend, May 27-31, there is going to be a 824 mile yard sale along US 40. The sale runs from Baltimore, Maryland to St. Louis, Missouri.

These type of highway sales have been running for years, but I’m just finding out about it now. Probably because I’m a westerner. Around here and 824 mile yard sale would consist of 100 miles of prairie between each sale.

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So it looks like NBC’s quirky Action/Comedy show about a geek turned secret agent will be back for season 3, with some concessions.

Sidreel.com is reporting that Chuck has been renewed, but with some concessions from Warner Brothers. NBC only wants 9 episodes, and production costs must decrease. Hopefully the quality of the show won’t drop off too much.

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I don’t watch Grey’s Anatomy, but some of the buzz this morning on the season finale is about a cover of “What a Feeling” from the movie Flashdance. This cover was performed by Hollywood, Mon Amour, the new project from Nouvelle Vague producer, Marc Collins.

Visit the Hollywood, Mon Amour Myspace page to listen to the Flashdance cover as well as covers of Eye of the Tiger, Footloose and Prince’s When Doves Cry.

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When converting documents from customer word format to html it seems inevitable that there will be extra characters provided by Microsoft. Unfortunately this expanded character set is not supported by many web browsers and email clients, so we have to go through and clean all of this out of our html files.

I normally use vim to edit all html files, and I have finally found a reliable method of locating these ‘bad characters’ in vim.

The process consists of two steps:

1) Make sure the ‘file encoding’ is 8-bit

:setlocal fenc=latin1

2) Use the 8g8 command in Normal mode (see “help 8g8″)

This process allows the bad characters to be identified and converted to utf-8 characters that can be displayed in all web browsers and email clients. If anyone out there has a better/easier way of doing this, please let me know.

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This week I’m sharing the new track from Manchester Orchestra, I’ve Got Friends.

Manchester Orchestra is a band out of Athens Georgia, and this song is from their second LP “Mean Everything to Nothing”

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While poking around in an Oklahoma Antique store, a man named Bill Waters found a journal that may contain the Original Dr. Pepper recipe from 1885.

The writing on the journal is hard to decipher, so Mr. Waters hasn’t tried the recipe, but the book is from the original Waco TX drugstore that ‘invented’ Dr. Pepper. Dr. Pepper execs have confirmed that the recipe in the book is not anything like what they currently use - of course that recipe is TOP SECRET.

The book is going to be sold on Ebay. I home someone shares the recipe, it would be amazing to make this and see how it compares with today’s soft drink.

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In the bizzarre news story of the week, Austrailian politician Hajnal Ban admits to having leg lengthing sugery.

The 31 year old woman just went public with an admission that she had a surgical procedure to lengthen her legs and increase her height from 5′1″ to 5′4″. The procedure took nine months where Russian doctors broke her legs in four places and lengthened them 1mm every day. She was 23 at the time.

Her reason for completing this procedure? To ‘be more credible’ in her profession. As sad as it is, I’m guessing it has worked for her, and her height has helped her career. This is an interesting trend, and validation, for many kinds of cosmetic surgery these days. Improving your appearance has gone beyond vanity and is making an impact on the workplace. We’ve seen older people get facelifts to get better jobs, now people are being made taller to get better jobs. Individuals can’t be faulted for using every available technique to succeed, but it does make you wonder where it will all end.

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This morning, after a software update and reboot, one of my LCD monitors went all white. This is the second time since 2009 started that this has happened to me. Both monitors were 2 years old or more and had almost daily use, but it seems strange that they have both failed within a few months of each other.

Both have failed since I installed my new EVGA 256-P2-N751-TR 8600GT 256M video card, and since I’ve been running a dual monitor linux setup. The monitors have been tested in multiple environments, so I’m confident it’s a monitor problem, and not a graphics card or other issue.

If this is just the natural lifecycle of the monitor, this is a serious step back in technology. CRTs would last many years. If LCDs fail in 2-4 years, they aren’t exactly an improvement.

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