Author Archives: docwhat

msnbot: the stupid bot

Generally, most people with websites want to have their sites indexed so that people can find them.
However, if the bot is really really stupid, then maybe it isn’t in your best interest.
My experiences with msnbot have been pretty much negative.

Crazy beliefs means crazy behavior

If someone hears voices that tell them to do something, we call them crazy.
If someone reads a book of fiction and tries to act as if it is talking to them and telling them what to do, we call that crazy.
How is this not insanity?  How is this called anything but completely fucking bugnuts?

12 years!

I have been married to Robin, my wonderful wife, for 12 years.  I am very lucky and married my bestest friend and boy have we had fun.
I love you Robin!

unappealing taxes

Unquestionably, there is progress.  The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
— H.L. Mencken

So, I went to the my property tax appeal yesterday.
No, this isn’t the start of a lame joke and no, I didn’t appeal my property taxes.
The City of Pittsburgh appealed my taxes to [...]

Mac Tricks: Shell Script Dialogs

A mini-HOWTO showing how to create pop-up dialogs and get the results back from a shell script (or anything that can run a command) in Mac OS X.

LEGO guns!

Broomhandled Mauser
I like LEGO and have since I was a little kid. As an adult, I’ve gone through phases of enjoying LEGO and just keeping it safe in storage. However, now that I own a house, I think I’ll make space for my LEGO collection so I can play with it.

Verizon ineptitude

My server has been down for about a 6 days. The short story of why my site has been down is because Verizon sucks. The long story however…
I discovered on Thursday (Feb 7th) that my server, gerf.org was down. I went home to check it out and discovered the dreaded blinking DSL [...]

X-UA-Compatible and IE8

There is a new META header being proposed called X-UA-Compatible. It was thought up by Aaron Gustafson and has been added to IE8.
This is a flag for browsers to change how they render the web page, not by standards that are being followed, but by the browser that it is known to work with.

Cathy Ferguson

I had this idea of this huge post I’d write about how I went about getting a house and the paperwork and all that stuff.
Well, it turns out I really don’t want to write that. Instead, I’m going to write about one of the people that I can really recommend; Cathy Ferguson our “mortgage [...]

Bang! Bang!

So, me and my wife got home from Ikea with a new Billy bookshelf for the dinning room (aka, book room #2 — book room #1 is the living room). We lucked out and found a spot nearly in front of our house, right on the outside of the curve that our house in [...]

No Laptop

My laptop has died a horrible death and I’m not happy about it. I bought it about 3 years ago from Linux Certified, way back when Linux laptops was a novel concept.
Currently, it just flat out won’t power up. There is power from the power cord (checked it with a multi-meter), but the [...]

First House!

So, I haven’t been blogging much lately. Part of the reason is that Robin and I have been working on buying a new house.
This is very stressful and scary. We’re almost done. We close on November 16th. I plan on blogging about the people and companies that provide excellent service during [...]