Dan Mayer's Blog

I am here and I am alive, and guess what I am 25!

Yeah no posts for awhile but my life has been running in crazy circles for awhile and I still feel like I am behind. Most importantly thought I do have internet in my house again, ending my half living at two places and no solid internet period, which was driving me crazy.

I am in my new house, which might sell soon so we might be gone quickly, and I still haven't set everything up. There are plenty of items that I can't even find, so I just slowly unpack and try to organize and put things away and I hope to have everything kind of set up and ready in about a weeks time.

I am trying to catch up with stuff from work, home life, and other little tasks so for a little while I am sure I won't be around the most, but I assure you we will start to have some fun again soon... I need to figure out some of my finances and other things before I can start running around going out on a nights notice again.

I wish all my friends and family a happy new year, and I say 2007 is going to be a wild and crazy ride that hopefully will be as amazing and exciting as 2006, which was a pretty great year.

I ask one simple question, where is the best albums of 2006?

I know where the best albums of 2005 are, but what no updates? Has the musical world come to a halt. Until I hear otherwise I declare that K-tard and Paris Hilton, made the best albums of 2006. Hopefully they will get together and make a mega super great album in 2007.

So what are some of your favorite songs and albums of late?

As for me I don't think I was listening to as much music in the last year as I have in the past.

My Christmas traditional head butt:

Hanging out at the first old crew home owner's house:

I read a bunch of interesting things this morning that I guess I should share with you.

A little bit of little man syndrome:

The Height Gap - If you haven't heard many advantages come with being tall. More interesting is entire societies have height trends depending on how they are doing. Many times height is tied to a growing economy and our income gap could be partly to blame...

I should be learning new things:

Want to learn new things and spend some time on self improvement, a list of some of the best free educational resources online, for almost any topic, including learning new languages... Free Online Education

Relationships require learning too:

Relationships are always wonderful, but not without challenge, and this is a good little read about the parts of a relationship that probably aren't worth wasting time fighting over... everyone has things that bother them more or less, and just because your line is different than someone else's doesn't mean you can force and expect them to care about something, or at least so I read in the interesting, Marriage is not always 50/50

Musing on the oddness of society:

A interesting and twisted look at the trends and causes of the shrinking thin models, and how thin now is a sign of money Body Image from Botticelli to Britney.

"Today, worrying about extra poundage is a chic neurosis everywhere from network television to Bridget Jones' Diary. We associate extra weight with things that we consider low-class: fast food, dietary ignorance and lack of gym membership. The rich, on the other hand, can shop at Whole Foods, go on the South Beach diet and cultivate enough Protestant work ethic to deny themselves dessert. If an archaeologist digging up a Barbie doll some 40,000 years into the future hypothesized the artificial Aphrodite was part of our religion, he wouldn't be far off the mark."

The article in its entirety I don't know if I agree with, but I think it would be an interesting area to research more as it is something I have thought and written about in the past. A paper I wrote years ago played with some similar thoughts, Deriving the Beauty of Women.

All work and no play, makes Dan a dull boy:

Besides all of the interesting reading out on the web, there are always great books and things to learn, but sometimes you need a break to just enjoy the simpler things, and with all of that I will leave you will a simple flash game that I enjoyed for about 20 minutes, Tower Defense

Well I have on many of my sites had to deal with and fight the onslaught of spam bots, but I still find them amusing some times. After a bug occurred on a production machine, I was looking at the logs and ran into many errors looking like this:

2007-01-11 18:15:05,938 [TP-Processor4395] ERROR com.realestate.search.core.SearchController - java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: "http://val
trex-gs.****.com"
2007-01-11 18:15:05,980 [TP-Processor4395] ERROR org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].[/].[jsp] - Servlet.service() for servlet jsp
threw exception
java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: "http://valtrex-gs.***.com"
at java.lang.NumberFormatException.forInputString(NumberFormatException.java:48)

It seems this was a pretty dumb, but probably mildly successful bot. It started some search and found tons of web pages, every time it encountered a form, it would attempt to fill out the majority of the fields with the URL hoping to make it into generated pages, most common search terms, comments, user names, or anything that would possibly link to the URL and increase the sites page rank. I found it hilarious, because somewhere on our site it was trying to fill out number, date, and other fields with the URL which we threw errors on format exceptions and probably returned them to the form with an error about that field. The bot hasn't given up, but hasn't slammed us very hard. Either way it is another amusing tale, of spam bots running amok on the web.

At least they can make me laugh sometimes...

Today
Mostly Sunny
36° | 13°
Sat
Chance of Snow
35° | 16°
Sun
Chance of Snow
27° | 6°
Mon
Mostly Sunny
27° | 11°

So again snow only on the weekend all weekend long... Seriously why why would you do that weather. Seriously if you mess up one more weekend before February I will not be your friend anymore. So consider this a warning, you may snow mid week during January, but not on the weekends.

Thank you...

my dog Butterscotch is very sick, she is a 14 year old Yellow Lab who I had a great deal of fun playing with over Christmas. She is really old for a lab, but I am still sad.

This was the first dog that I had from puppy on I took the dog to obedience school and trained her. She was always a good dog even if she was really whiny about when she would go in and out. She never did stop loving to steal all of my socks to sleep on or eating my chap stick.

I love you my pup Butterscotch.

I am apparently pretty good a managing projects and coders, but I definitely like coding more than managing... So I will have to learn to loose some control and delegate more. With that said, at least I will get to read up and learn some more new things. So off I go to finish reading the World is Flat. Which while I find interesting and mildly depressing, overall it makes some good points. So if you have a job and you wonder if it will exist in the next 5 to 10 years it might be worth a read.

I love white boards. I like bulletin boards. I cough at and around chalk boards.

A romantic weekend for two is always a great way to really put all the reasons you love someone to the front of your mind, which is a good thing to do once in awhile. Yippee for nice hotels, and money to blow.

Should I introduce categories to my blog, so people can ignore certain types of posts?

Well I guess Erin is ready to announce to the world her own little place online. For xmas I gave Erin a blog that she wanted (among other things I am not that nerdy). So now she has gotten it set up the way she wants it and started posting to it. If your interested this will be a great way to see what Erin is up to while she is in Honduras, so I wish you and your new website the best of luck.

I now give you the writings and musings of Erin Miller.

Bonus she actually can write unlike myself.

Well I guess the work I have been doing is at least getting noticed. I got a promotion, nice deal. So that should be a good thing in a little while.

Shawn might come to med school here, it is still pretty unknown but he interviewed and I would be excited to have him here. It would be pretty sweet if Shawn and Doc moved to Denver, then if Matt and Julie decided to head this way as well...

I just like getting all these cool people I know in and around Denver, good times.

It looks like my EFF donations continue to do some good protection the little guy and privacy rights...

EFF wins blogger case against Apple.

Nice!

This is a pretty cool project you can use via the update manager you just tell it the type of development you want to do (java swing/j2ee/java webapps/c++/ and others).

Anyways it is pretty good and gets a bunch of plugins together and manages them for you, so if newer versions of one thing still require an older version of another plug in it deals with any incompatibility issues.

You select what you want and then it will say you need other dependencies click the button that says get required.

That seems to be it.

Callisto

peace,
Dan