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This guy managed to catch a burglar on a motion activated camera. How cool is that.

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Weather in Northern Colorado has been bizarre all spring. We haven’t had the typical nice weather that makes spring in the Rockies so great. Today was just the cap on the spring weather.

Six tornadoes were spotted in Northern Colorado. The biggest starting in Johnstown moving north through Windsor and on to Wellington.

I have lived in this area my whole life, and this is the first time I remember a tornado actually causing damage. In fact, I don’t remember much for tornado warnings since I was in elementary school.

This morning, I was working away and the power went out. I got a call from a girl I work with who’s mother lives in Windsor. She said they just had the worst hailstorm she’d ever seen. I started making phone calls to make sure everyone new what was going on, little did I know that within a few miles of my home a tornado was cutting a path of destruction.

If you are looking for pictures, the Coloradoan has two nice photo galleries
Windsor storm damage pictures
Photos by Windsor Beacon freelance photographer Carol Hirata

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A federal appeals court panel ruled on Tuesday that the United States discriminates against the blind because the country’s paper currency is the same size regardless of a bill’s value.

This ruling, if upheld, could potentially cost the US economy $3.5 Billion in both printing costs and retrofitting of vending machines, supermarket automatic checkouts and any other machine that processes paper currency. Just what we need in a slowing economy and skyrocketing national debt.

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The Court of Arbitration for Sport, world sport’s highest tribunal, has ruled that 21-year-old South African Oscar Pistorious can run in the Beijing Olympics.

Oscar is a double amputee, born with out fibulas. The controversy here is not if a disabled person should be allowed to compete, but if his Cheetah Flex-Foot prosthetics give him an “unfair advantage” over able bodied runners.

I am completely in favor of Oscar running in the Olympics, even if his prosthetics give him an advantage. What this decision does is further the controversy in athletics on performance enhancing substances (I hesitate to call them drugs since many of them are produced by the human body), medical procedures and prosthetics.

I’m about as likely to run in an Olympic event as a double-amputee. Being 5′6″ tall with a body like a potato pretty much eliminates any possiblity of me being a athlete at that level no matter how hard I trained. Does this make me as ‘disabled’, in relation to athletics, as Oscar? If I could take steroids, have medical procedures and attach prosthetics to my body and trained every day in order to compete would it be OK? If not, why?

Athletic success at a level like the Olympics is not only a matter of training and discipline, but a matter of genetics. If your body is not capable of completing the task, no amount of dedication is going to get you there. A great example of what I’m talking about is the movie Rudy, the story of an undersized, underathletic guy that wanted to play Notre Dame football so bad he dedicated 5 years of his life to it, and got to play in one game. While his tenacity is to be admired, he was not really what anyone would call a successfull football player. Why? Because of genetics.

At what point do we decide what is normal and what is an ‘enhancement’? What if, and I can’t really imagine this, an able bodied runner decided to have his legs amputated in favor of prosthetic limbs that made him run faster? Would this person be allowed to compete? What if an athlete had surgery that allowed him to perform at a higher level? With this ruling, the lines of what is an acceptable modification in an athlete has been further blurred and a controversy that is already at the forefront of popular culture has been extended.

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Any of you who were Friends fans (and who hasn’t been at some point in the last 15 years) will remember the episode where Chandler wants to ‘quit the gym’. The episode is a bit over the top with extremely attractive membership personnel who keep everyone from successfully canceling their membership. While this doesn’t really have any basis in reality (at least not in my experience), but changing Gyms is a bit of a traumatic experience.

About a year and a half ago I changed gyms. My old gym was a long time local establishment. Great facility, but it had it’s drawbacks, mostly in the service area. The pricing was a bit high, there were lots of days the facility was closed and the staff spent the last two hours of the day vacuuming and cleaning. I typically went from 8-10pm, which were always the hours they were cleaning. I finally got tired of paying a premium price to listen to vacuums and get sprayed with bleach, so I changed facilities.

My new Gym is a 24 hour facility, lower priced than the previous place, but it has it’s drawbacks. First off it’s small, only about 10 cardio machines and a handful of weights and machines. That’s not really so bad, but they also don’t have locker rooms. There are two unisex bathrooms, so if you want to show up without your workout gear on, you have to wait for one of them to be open. The other thing I don’t like, and this may sound funny, it’s not very busy. Back when I was working in an office, I liked it when the gym was quiet. Now that I’m self employed, work from home, and just hang out with the dogs all day long, I kind of crave human company. Not nearly as much fun to go to an empty gym.

So here’s my dilemma. The city I live in offers some very good facilities. They include a pool, great workout facility, basketball courts and locker rooms. Pretty much full service, and actually $5/month cheaper than my current membership. Downsides? I don’t know how busy they are. That might be annoying. Also, it is about 5 minutes further away from my house than my current gym. The other thing is it’s a public facility. There has been a recent debate about how the facilities are losing money and have to have tax dollars to stay open. So is it evil of me to join the cheaper, tax funded location than to support the independent (well franchised) facility? Is it fair to independent facilities when the city provides a better service at a loss so they can be cheaper than their competitors? Is it right that independent businesses have to compete with these publicly funded gyms?

I don’t know, but I think I’m going to change.

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Recently had a situation where we have a website in progress and I wanted to password protect the site. Nothing major, just to keep casual visitors from poking around.

Thing is, I had a ad server installed in a subdirectory, and I wanted to use that ad server for other sites. I soon realized that my general .htaccess password requirement also extended to this sub directory and was causing the site displaying the ads to prompt visitors for a password. Not great functionality.

So I went in search of some way to exclude the subdirectory from the .htaccess security. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a way to do this that seemed to work, but I did hit on a different solution.

Using the Files parameter I can limit my authentication to a single file, namely index.php

<Files index.php>
require valid-user
</Files>

This allows subdirectories, or any other file to be accessed without being prompted for authentication, but there is one additional issue.

If the file name is included in the url

http://www.foo.com/index.php

everything is fine. When the site is accessed by just the domain

http://www.foo.com/

and Apache attempts to load the default page (index.php) it doesn’t work. In fact the system displays the following error

Authorization Required
This server could not verify that you are authorized to access the document requested. Either you supplied the wrong credentials (e.g., bad password), or your browser doesn’t understand how to supply the credentials required.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

If anyone out there can explain why this happens, I would be very interested to hear it.

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Found this today, thought it was pretty slick

ExRx.net Exercise & Muscle Directory

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The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial today entitled Internet Says: ‘Me Want Cookie’ by L. GORDON CROVITZ.

This article basically brings to light a security hole in web browsers, the cookie, a concept that has been around since some of the first versions of Netscape over 10 years ago.

Crovitz, who is no technical neophyte and oversaw major changes in the WSJ both print and web version, wrote this piece as some kind of warning to websites and advertisers.

Even those of us who are enthusiastic about using the Web for what it does best, including access to highly customized information, agree there’s something potentially creepy about cookies. How are personal data used? Are our names, addresses and financial and health records really secret? Is anonymity permanent? These questions come just as what technology can do is changing our expectations about what information remains personal.

The bottom line is all the lies and fear around cookies are just that. Cookies are relatively benign. In fact, anyone with questions about them and how they work should just spend a few minutes and use Google for some answers. Sites like this All About Cookies article can give some good information and put some of your fear to rest:

Myth #3: Disabling or deleting cookies results in a safer, more enjoyable Web experience.
Fact: This is not true - in fact, cookies are what make the Web a more enjoyable, personalized experience. Without cookies, Internet users would have to remember all the passwords to all the different sites they visit. They would not be able to receive customized content, such as news, stock prices, sports scores or weather, and online shopping would be very cumbersome - if not impossible! Instead, consumers would receive irrelevant information and content, such as advertising that fails to correspond with their personal interests and needs. In addition, disabling or deleting cookies does not make Web users safer from viruses or other similar online threats.

The point of the article seems to be to discuss the possibility of regulation from politicians on the whole issue. While this would be unfortunate, it’s pretty much ridiculous. Regulating cookies, proving that their use was in violation of some law, proving that it was actually set by the offending website and establishing jurisdiction over the server that set the cookie would be a monumental and futile task. The bottom line is that a cookie can only include information you have submitted to a website. If you ARE going to send sensitive personal information to a website, make sure it’s a reliable party and you have a secure connection. Also make sure your system is behind a firewall and virus free. These are a much higher security/privacy risk than Cookies could ever be, but are ignored by millions of people across the country.

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You may have heard, but the latest campaign issue is support of a summer “Gas Tax Holiday”. The idea is that the government would stop collecting it’s 18 cent a gallon gas tax for three months over the summer to help the common man pay for his fuel.

This was an idea that seems to have surfaced from the McCain camp, but has been wholeheartedly embraced by former First Lady, Hillary Clinton. She is supporting this ‘tax holiday’ on the premise that it will help the common man, the idea that taxing the oil companies is more intelligent and blasting Barack Obama for not supporting it. Barack is a little more reasonable and sees this for the bait and switch that it is:

“There is not a single economist or editorial that I’ve read that says that this is a good idea, and the reason is, is because it’s not being honest with the American people,” Obama said on NBC’s “Today” show. “People don’t need symbolic relief, they need real relief.”

It’s understandable that Obama’s opinion doesn’t carry much weight with ol’ Hil, but neither does any of the economists who say removing the tax will just cause the gas prices to rise and make the oil companies more money.

Why doesn’t cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

Hillary, of course, has a witty response to this

Sen. Clinton has been undeterred by the outcry. “Well I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to put my lot in with economists,” she said over the weekend. “We’ve got to get out of this mindset, where somehow, elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans.”

Being the “man of the people” she is, she just isn’t going to trust all of those crazy scientists with their numbers, figures, calculators and such.

Hmm… so let’s take a look at this as your average guy who is NOT an economist.

In the last year US Gas prices have risen $0.559 to a nationwide average of $3.613 per gallon. The federal gas tax rate is 18.4 cents per gallon. This means that, on average, right now, even if we get a ‘tax holiday, and even if the price of gas doesn’t increase to absorb this tax, you and I are paying $0.374 more per gallon of gas than we did last May. In the mean time, the economy has been slow and we are not making any more money than we did last summer. If we DON”T go on vacation, and buy, say 15 gallons of gas a week, and we have a tax holiday, our summer is going to cost us $67 more than it did last year. If we don’t get the tax holiday, the difference will only be $33.12.

Remember, the average price of gas is $3.613 per gallon, reducing the price by $0.184 is only a 5.1% discount in price. Heck, I can get almost that much by using my Safeway card.

All of the math, figuring, analysis and speculation aside, what I really love about this is Hillary’s disdain for the educated people. The democrats have spent the last eight years for Bush’s alleged low intelligence, and generally ridiculing conservatives in general for skepticism about Global Warming, belief in Intelligent Design. Now one of their two chosen candidates, arguably an elitist intellectual herself, is telling us we shouldn’t listen to these elitist intellectuals. She’s saying that she, as a lawyer and politician, knows more about what’s going to happen than trained economists.

The whole thing reminds me of a joke from the old Soviet Russia days:

Why do policemen always walk the streets in teams of three?

The partners in the police team are always chosen in such a way that one of them knows how to read, the other how to write, and the third one, naturally, has to keep watch over those two intellectuals.

Thankfully, Hillary Clinton is here to keep us safe from those educated people.

Popularity: 9%

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Friday night we watched 3:10 to Yuma, the 2007 version.

I’m not going to write a complete review, if you are interested in that, Movie Habit has a great review. I’m just going to give this movie a hearty endorsement. Russell Crowe was outstanding, Christian Bale was stellar, the scenery was beautiful and the story was engaging. It’s got to be the best movie I’ve seen this year.

One detail that I thought was just amazing was the sound. So often gunfire in movies has a weak Hollywood sound. Anyone who’s ever actually fired a gun knows what I mean. Rifles have a very distinctive crack, and a pistol is typically so loud it makes your ears ring without ear plugs. In 3:20 to Yuma there is a great scene where there is an ambush. Not only does the rifle fire have a good sound, you can here the echos reverberate off the canyon walls just like they would in a real environment. I was very impressed.

I few plot flaws I would like to discuss, and there are some potential spoilers here, so you were warned.

A decoy is sent out in a ‘prison’ stagecoach to ward off the gang in an attempt to get to the local army post and get help. When the gang catches up to the stage there are three problems. First, the guy inside the stage only has one weapon. You would think you would bring a couple pistols, maybe a scattergun. Second, the guy in the stage is alone. You would think you could have hidden two or three guys inside to ambush the gang. Third, the stage was actually locked. Why lock the guy in so he can be brutally burned to death.

While the decoy was being sent out, the party left Dan’s ranch under cover of night, traveled an unknown distance and built a huge fire for the whole world to see. Why not travel all night and camp in the morning. They had already been fed by Dan’s wife Alice at the ranch, why build a fire at all. They were in Arizona, surely they didn’t need a huge fire for warmth.

Once the gang had discovered the decoy the comment was made that Contention City was eighty miles away. A tremendous distance by horse, but the party escorting Ben Wade to Contention City was still close enough to see the stage burning in spite of the stagecoach having traveled all night at a high rate of speed and the prisoner escort having traveled part of a night and part of a day toward Contention City.

When the party reaches Contention City, their first order of business is where to hide their prisoner. They choose the local Hotel. Now this just seems silly to me. Who would hide a prisoner in a hotel for two hours while waiting for a train knowing that his friends were going to rescue him. Not exactly easily defensible or very inconspicuous. Seems like the train station , the local jail or some random place where people wouldn’t look would have made much more sense.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the film, but the writers could have made a few adjustments to let us know Dan, the Pinkerton and the Railroad Man were a little more savvy.

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