Barnson.org

Like many of my friends, I switched from Internet Explorere to Mozilla Firefox in hopes of avoiding the mess of pop-ups, un-closeable windows, and other associated crap with that web browser.

All it took was one experience, really, in 1998. I had been looking for some drivers for hardware. I was really digging hard. I came across a site that I thought had what I was looking for, and clicked the link.

Pop-up after pop-up for hard-core pornography popped up on my screen.

My boss chose exactly that moment to show up at my desk. She was not impressed with my explanation, nor my inability to close the windows when I tried.

I knew I had to find a way to stop the insanity, and began using early versions of “Mozilla”. Eventually, that segued into Firefox, and here I am.

After living several years in popup-free bliss, I’ve recently found that sites had begun being able to pop ads up on me again. It was really annoying! Finally, a few nights ago, I decided to research how they were doing it. It turned out, they were embedding the pop-up commands in Macromedia Shockwave Flash animations.

A lot of ads use Flash. It gives you nifty animations, small file sizes, and tends to disable the right-click functionality a lot of users use with various “ad-blocking” software. The thing I’ve always hated about these is how much CPU time they use up. I use a laptop, and when I come across a site with really Flash-heavy advertisements on it, I can hear my fan come on to try to put up with the heat generated by rendering these ads over… and over…. and over again.

Pop-ups were the last straw. I found the PERFECT extension for Firefox. It makes one simple change: Flash animations load, but do not automatically play. You have to click them to play them. Well, if they can’t play, they can’t issue the command to your browser to pop-up a window on you. They can’t start spouting gibberish at you when doing research on the web at your place of work. They can’t suck up CPU time playing the same boring, yet eye-catching advertisement over and over.

Download it here: http://flashblock.mozdev.org/.

Remember that, to install it, you may have to tell Firefox to allow this site to install software. When you go to the installation page and click the download link, a little bar will appear at the top of your browser window, indicating that Firefox stopped a program from installing. Click the bar, and follow the instructions to allow “flashblock.mozdev.org” to install software.

Now when I go to one of those Flash-animation-heavy web sites, I don’t worry about popups anymore. I don’t worry about Firefox sucking up 100% CPU and wearing out the fan on my CPU. And I don’t worry that my computer will suddenly start talking to me because advertisers thought it would be cute to have a talking ad. There’s just a little “play” button on every Flash ad, and I can still play my favorite Flash shows.

Overall, good times. Flashblock: it’s good for you.

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: And we heard him exclaim As he started to roam: “I’m a hologram, kids, please don’t try this at home!'” — Bob Violence

Matt came home from work this morning (he works nights) quite wound up. He couldn’t sleep for anything. After much frustration, he figured out what was bugging him…a million and a half homeless flood victims sitting around tent cities and in stadiums with little food and nowhere comfortable to sleep. And here we sit comfortably in our homes grateful it didn’t happen here.

Then the dilemma once he figured that out was what can he do about it? He stewed over that for hours and finally called our dear friend Paul with an idea. Paul had been stewing over the same thing and decided to do something about it. So here’s the scoop: www.homeflood.org. Help Flood Victims.

Matt has spent all day creating a site where people may offer housing or transportation to flood victims. There are three options: invite victims into your home to help them until they can get back on their feet, offer assistance transporting victims to homes (not working yet), and registering as a relief worker in order to peruse the database and determine if the victim with you is a suitable match for the family offering assistance.

We need your help, too. Paul sent out press releases, and is busy calling news stations to air the story. Getting the word out will help a lot. If people natonwide can see that in a little way, they can help someone, the victims can be well taken care of. We also want it to spread across the internet fast; New Orleans will take 9-10 weeks to pump out, and the sooner we can help, the better. If you have a blog or know someone with a blog, please link this article to your blog. Once www.homeflood.org is linked to about 25 blogs with the same text — “Help Flood Victims” — it’ll come up higher in the Google rankings and more people will be helped by Matt and Paul’s efforts. Please spread the word to all your friends and neighbors and tell them they can find a way to help.

(Just no chain letters about it. I hate chain letters! — matt)

Why not sit down with your family and decide what you can do to help? Every little bit counts.

Ok.. I like my Xterra alot. Its alot of fun off roading and in the snow. Compared to some other SUVs, the Xterra getting about 20mpg isnt too shabby. (can anyone guess what my complaint is about to be?)

I got gas last weekend for $2.54/gallon in Baltimore. Today the same gas station is up to $3.09/gallon and the station across the street is at $3.19.

I realize that the gas stations are trying to charge extra so that they can “afford” the next shipment which will be at a higher price.. But OUCH!!

I was reading today that gas prices are expected to go up 50 cents over the next 3 weeks. At this rate I may have to trade it in and get a Insight in order to be able to afford to go to work each day.

— Bryan

How do you prepare for a disaster?

For a long time, Christy and I have been in the habit of keeping a modest amount of “food storage” in our basement. It’s enough to last us about three months, with supplemental water and some fresh food (eggs, milk, etc.) We have a pair of fifty-gallon water barrels, with fresh water inside (and a once-every-six-months chlorine tablet regimen) in the backyard. We’ve actually lived off our food storage several times when I’ve been unemployed, and it’s been a lifesaver for the budget during those stressful times.

Yet as we’ve watched events in the American South unfold, as Lake New Orleans grows and swallows the city whole, I wonder:

How the heck do you prepare for a disaster like that???

I have no flippin’ idea. Except maybe turn into one of those whack extremists out in the boonies, living off meat you hunt yourself or something. If your food storage is seven feet under a river of sewage, it’s not much use to anybody. If your water barrels blew away in a hurricane, they’re not going to keep you from going thirsty.

For several years after the Northridge Earthquake in 1991, the epicenter of which was a scant two miles from the garage I was living in at the time, I kept a bag packed with my important belongings right next to the front door. Guess that habit has stuck with me; thanks to the efforts of my spouse, we have one last contingency: a briefcase full of important papers, parked in the front closet near the front door. It’s the thing we’ll grab right after grabbing our kids on the way out the door. It contains account numbers, passports, IDs, and other information we’d need to make a new life and settle insurance claims. That’s definitely a last-ditch resort, but (for instance) if our house burned down around us, we’d be able to grab it and get out of the home. With any luck.

What preparations have you made for disaster?

And a last question about Katrina: At what point do you just write off an entire city as a loss, and give to the ocean what she wants to claim? Or do you rebuild and keep your tenuous peace with the ocean through a series of dikes and dunes like one “>famous country?

Just a thought for the moment.

Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have… the course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.”

–Thomas Jefferson

I’m sure we can all agree that the most important times in one’s life are those in which a fantasy football roster is selected. If you can’t agree with this, then you are a lemming and should recuse yourself from further participation on this blog. Because it is obvious that spending many hours sitting around a table with a bunch of other guys and selecting a bunch of unknown players, tournament style, based on a bunch of ranking articles from arcane magazines, is far more important than mailing out invitations to my wedding, especially considering that there are sixteen weekends in the fantasy football season and only one weekend for my wedding.

I picked third out of ten teams. The 13th pick came in a bonus round.

1. Peyton Manning (QB) 2. Stephen Jackson (RB) 3. Tiki Barber (RB) 4. Darrell Jackson (WR) 5. Drew Bennett (WR) 6. Alge Crumpler (TE) 7. Michael Bennett (RB) 8. Lee Evans (WR) 9. Jake Delhomme (QB) 10. Marshall Faulk (RB) 11. Keenan McCardell (WR) 12. Washington Redskins defense (DST) 13. Nate Kaeding (K)

My surprise move is my second pick. I predict Steven Jackson is going to have a monster year. I bucked the advice of all the fantasy draft moguls and went for this guy based on my own observations.

You know how, growing up, there are all these little stories you hear about or read about that stick with you? One of those, for me, was the “eye of the needle” story, based upon this passage from the Bible:

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” — Matthew 19:24

The explanation, which I heard in Sunday School several times, went something like this: Jerusalem would shut their gates at nightfall, and the only door through which people could pass after dark was very small, referred to as “the eye of the needle”. If one wished to take a camel through it, one would first have to strip the camel of all baggage, and have it kneel and crawl through the person-sized hole. Thus, to “go through the eye of the needle” meant to metaphorically strip oneself of all worldly belongings and enter into God’s presence on your knees.

Poetic, no? Unfortunately, though very nifty from a “teaching a religious principle” perspective, it’s a complete fabrication. I received this little blurb from my acquaintance Ken Clark about this topic:

When we were in Jerusalem a few years ago we asked several different tour guides (Christian and Jewish–LDS and non-LDS) about the door in the gate named “Eye of a Needle;” and they were unanimous in declaring that the eye of the needle is not named after a door in the city wall. I hated to hear that because I used to use the “camel on the knees” interpretation all the time and thought it was cool. After I took a little Hebrew at a synagogue I learned that religious hyperbole (exaggeration) was common with the Semitic people. Rabbis used it because it made a point so plain that listeners couldn’t misinterpret his meaning. For instance, when Jesus said to first remove the beam from your own eye, before looking for the mote in your brother’s eye, it was intended to be a gross exaggeration; much like the camel through the eye of a needle.

I thought he was wrong, at first. So I looked it up, and sure enough, there’s a page on biblicalhebrew.org, among others, about this very topic. So now a useful little piece of sermon material — right up there with the “how to boil a frog” urban legend, and the fastest growing church legend — has now joined many peers in the “well-intentioned falsehood” pile in my brain.

Small things, tiny things really, seem to make so much of a difference in life. I mourn the little losses sometimes. I mean, it’s better to be informed than remain ignorant.

I think.

But still, sometimes I miss being ignorant. You can’t un-learn what you’ve learned just because you want to. You can’t believe something true which you know to be false, just because someone you respect told you it was true.

— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: God is the tangential point between zero and infinity. — Alfred Jarry

In case you haven’t heard, Hurricane Katrina made landfall today at 7:15 AM Eastern time. New Orleans — all 1.3 million people — has been ordered to be evacuated.

Apparently, only a little less than 1 million made it out in time, leaving about 300,000 hunkered down in various places in the parish.

Good luck, Louisiana and Mississippi. You’re gonna need it.

The Title of the first book of Orson Scott Card’s “Shadow” series of books “Ender’s Shadow” is well deserved. This series will be forever compared to the 1980’s novel which spawned their universe “Ender’s Game”, and rightly so. “Ender’s Game” is an amazingly complex novel written at a third grade reading level, until you reach the end and realize, no, its not. The trilogy that followed, “Speaker for the Dead”, “Xenocide”, and “Children of the Mind” were captivating, although sometimes bizarre metaphysical stories, but they always had the heart (Ender and Valentine).

Having just finished “Shadow of the Giant” tonight, I can tell you that the second series of books is better than the first. Still READ ENDER’S GAME FIRST!! “Ender’s Shadow” takes place at the same time as Ender’s game, but from a different point of view, and it is as good a book, if not a little better, a little darker, a little more adult. (There will be no spoilers here, and Ender fans, you know what I don’t want to spoil). The trilogy of books that follow “Shadow Of the Hegemon”, “Shadow Puppets”, and “Shadow of the Giant”, play out like a big game of Risk, with major military moves played out on a global scale.. yet underneath it, like the “Ender Series”, there is heart, in the characters of Bean and Petra.

I closed the cover of “Shadow of the giant” tonight and my wife was asleep, and I was choked up and had to tell her I loved her. It is that kind of storytelling, and it is heartwarming, and heartwrenching (from th every beginning). For Ender fans, the supporting cast of “Ender’s Game” is all here.. the Wiggins, Peter, the whole Jeesh… but you will soon want to spend your time with the other characters, mostly bean and Petra, and the vile Achilles, from the first moments of “Ender’s Shadow”.

For the uninitiated, here’s the best order to read the books..

Ender’s Game Ender’s Shadow Shadow Of the Hegemon Shadow Puppets Shadow of the Giant Speaker for the Dead Xenocide Children of the Mind

This is also the chronology of the books, although not the order they were released. You could also read them in the release order, but either way, pick up Ender’s Game, and if you “used to be a fan” but got lost in the Piggies and the Ansibles.. then come back, start over with Ender’s Shadow (which you can totally do and skip the Ender series) and go from there. Its worth it..

Okay.. time to finally crack “The Half Blood Prince” and see what everyone is talking about.

Thanks to Jen Gagne’s post for pointing this out: Are you a nerd, geek, or dork?

Me? Well, here I am…

Outcast Genius 65 % Nerd, 73% Geek, 69% Dork

For The Record: A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia. A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one. A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions. You scored better than half in all three, earning you the title of: Outcast Genius. Outcast geniuses usually are bright enough to understand what society wants of them, and they just don’t care! They are highly intelligent and passionate about the things they know are *truly* important in the world. Typically, this does not include sports, cars or make-up, but it can on occassion (and if it does then they know more than all of their friends combined in that subject). Outcast geniuses can be very lonely, due to their being outcast from most normal groups and too smart for the room among many other types of dorks and geeks, but they can also be the types to eventually rule the world, ala Bill Gates, the prototypical Outcast Genius. Congratulations!

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 71% on nerdiness You scored higher than 94% on geekosity You scored higher than 98% on dork points

Link: The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test written by donathos on Ok Cupid