Jeff Russell's STARSHIP DIMENSIONS

I had to blog this interesting site of images of starships. If you like hard science fiction then check this out.


Jeff Russell's STARSHIP DIMENSIONS

Mom is on the Internet

Martha Graham, my mom, may actually start using email!

Mom's email is 19Vine@gmail.com. Please send her a message saying hello.

I set up a very nice computer in the spare bedroom at 19 Vine. It is sharing the neighbor's wireless (with her permission). She needed internet access for a money making scheme that involves being paid to shop as a Mystery Shopper. I am skeptical, but she is over 21. I will talk to her about what to do and not do on the internet. The daughter of a friend of hers makes a few dollars every month being paid to buy stuff.

I did a search on ShopUntilYouDrop and other mystery shopper sites. They certainly seem like scams to me.

There is an online questionnaires that will help you determine if an opportunity is a scam. I suggest that you click on the link above take it before responding to any of these positions.

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Trying out new Blog Templates

I stole this look from my page www.cthreepo.com. I wanted the center div to scroll, but I couldn't get it to work right in both IE and Firefox so the whole thing scrolls. I am going to javascript it to relocate the left and right divs at the top, perhaps. The alternative was to do frames, which I hate.

CThreePO.com Tuned up

10 years ago I had a program that would go out and do queries against the internic whois database to find expiring domain names. In the course of running this program I registered AudioCD.com and CThreePO.com. Neither one has made any money for me.

CThreePO.com is a variation on the Star Wars robot character C3P0. I figured that someone would want to buy it and I've listed the domain for sale cheaply in several domain auction sites, to no avail.

I put a bunch of Science fiction resources on the site and this Blog lives there (probably a mistake).

Recently I mentioned in my blog that I was getting clicks from my Britney Spears Nude faux links, but that nobody was clicking the ads on the site. This upset my advertising service and they asked me to fix it. I deleted the two links about clicking ads. I will name no names here. I was never encouraging anyone to click ads, I was just lamenting that the Britney Spears surfers did not click ads.

I went back and cleaned up the CThreePO site, fixing a few broken links. I found a few spelling mistakes and typos and I changed over to using CSS on most of the page. I also put a comments script on the bottom of each page. If you look, though, you'll see that the comments page has put the advertising links back into CThreePO.

Browse the tuned up Science Fiction Essays site and report problems, please.

iPod FM Pollution

89.1 FM is WFDU, a local college radio station out of Teaneck, NJ. I can usually hear this in southern Rockland County, NY and all the way across the Tappan Zee Bridge into White Plains. Reception depends on the weather. On Monday and Wednesdays, the station features Blues music in the mornings.
This morning, the station kept on fading out and was replaced by a James Taylor concert. I figured out that it was an iPod FM transmitter in a neighboring car. When my lane moved, I got my Blues station back. When I stopped and the lane to my left moved, I would lose the station to Sweet Baby James.
This is the first time this has happened to me on 89.1, but I notice it frequently when I listen to the venerable Newark Jazz station WBGO 88.3. FM transmitters usually are configurable for stations in the low or high end of the band. The cheap ones blanket the low frequencies and it is not unusual for me to be listening to some cool Jazz and have a rap song take over until a beat up old Nissan passes me.
I have an FM transmitter that I bought for $10 at a computer show. I will set it up with an MP3 Player so that it blasts Muddy Waters to everyone on the TZ bridge and get my revenge.

Harry Potter and Wal-Mart

I pre-ordered the Harry Potter 6 tapes from Wal-Mart last May. I did not get them on the 16th and I did not get them Monday and I did not get them Tuesday. They guaranteed delivery on the 16th. I mailed off a nasty email and they are not going to do anything. Their attitude is “oh well�. Never buy anything from Wal-Mart. Leave it to the trailer park crowd.
The USPS tracking number shows that I might receive it today.
In the mean time, I listened to the second tape of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. It was better than the first tape, but I still think the music was distracting.

Update: The tapes didn't arrive by Wednesday 7/20 so I went out and bought them from a local discount store. I paid very nearly what wal-mart charged me because I didn't have to pay shipping. Screw Wal-mart. If and when I receive the tapes they will be returned immediately.

Update: Received it Friday - 6 days late - I returned it Saturday morning unpened. Wal-mart makes you pay return postage.

On a happy note, I am on the 4th tape of book 6 and I am enjoying it very much.

Scott Adams Adventure - JavaScript-AJAX

I have created a JavaScript interpreter for the Scott Adams Adventure games. It uses AJAX to load the games and you can save games in a cookie. The games play very well. Since Ajax requires XML, I wrote a VB app to convert the flat games files to XML format.

There are issues with one of the games not loading correctly, so that game is not included. I have yet to play to the end of a game, so I don’t know if I’ve translated everything correctly from the C code.

Log Spam

Log Spam is a fairly new penomenom. Starting a couple of years ago, every once in a while I would find occasional odd entry in the web server logs. I realized that these were spiders from spam sites. They drop an entry with an HTTP_REFERER header into the Apache logs with the hopes that alert web masters would check it out. It is probably more effective than email spam in that it is less likely to be blocked.
For the past couple of weeks, though, my Blog has been getting 500 hits a day from online casino websites. Here are the stats for July 1 to July 10.
The Table with data refuses to format correctly so scroll down a little to get to it. (I got rid of the table)

1 pokeXr-boulevard 604 12.71%

2 casinXo-startup 578 12.16%

3 allkinXds-pills 455 9.57%

4 pokXer-4all 442 9.30%

5 favoXrite-casino 413 8.69%

6 thesXmart-casino 308 6.48%

7 texasXholdemcenteral 298 6.27%

8 lizsXcottrawson 165 3.47%

9 strXega 158 3.32%

10 unitedinXchristchurch 158 3.32%

11 westXvalleyhigh 158 3.32%

12 wkelleyXlucas 155 3.26%

13 alwaysX-credit 146 3.07%

14 pokXer-24x7 142 2.99%

15 pokXer-24x7 141 2.97%

16 pokXer-places-4u 139 2.92%

And the list goes on. All of these URLs refer you to same site. (I took out the .coms, .nets. and .orgs and added an X here and there so as to confound, a little, some of their nefarious purposes.)

I am not angry. The traffic is small and doesn't effect my operations technically or economically. I think it is an interesting idea and I am going to make a crawler that points to one of my sites to see how it works.

We'll see what happens if I can find time to write one.

Gracie, the Dear Stalker

Deer and Canada Geese are the new vermin. The deer eat everything in my yard and the Canada Geese and their droppings are everywhere, so I seldom take pictures of them. When I was a boy, hunting was allowed in Rockland County and a deer or a goose would have been shot on site for dinner. I don’t like animals to suffer from hunting, but these animals now suffer terribly from over population.
My cat Gracie, who has appeared often in these pages, has taken it upon herself to rid the yard of deer, but hunting them down and eating them. She does not know that the deer are very much larger than she is. She stalks them and jumps out at them chasing them away.

These photos were taken in the late afternoon with a telephoto lense. The shutter speed was very slow and I did not have a tripod, so they are a little blurred.


You can see Gracie in the grass on the right, stalking the deer.


Only a cat can show this intensity.


The deer is smart enough to keep an eye on her. Gracie's Dangerous.

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Martha Graham's 78th Birthday Party - a photoset on Flickr

I sent the pictures that I took last night up to Flickr. These pictures are resized by the uploader to 1600 pixels wide and much smaller thumbnails are used to display the image. You can zoom on the image to see a larger one and if you need a full size image, I have them on CD.

Martha Graham's 78th Birthday Party - a photoset on Flickr


MOM!!! CLICK THE CAKE TO SEE PARTY PICTURES