JDPFu.com 2025

This morning an email was waiting from a travel friend. It was this link – http://www.galeriaelcuartito.com.ar/ – lot’s of FLASH, sorry.

I think that this week is 2 years since we visited this fantastic pizzeria in Buenos Aires. We enjoyed it enough to eat there twice – including the last night in town.

Since returning from that trip, I’ve had pizza, but only about 5 times. I’ve been ruined because I thought that I knew good pizza. I was wrong all these years. None of them compare. To me, El Cuartito has THE BEST PIZZA IN THE WORLD …. so far. It is cheap too. Primera buenos!

The story is a little old, but it was new to me and I figured many people here would also be interested.

The presentation is by Mr. Rutan, famous aviator and aerospace engineer. Here’s an overview. The full PPT presentation isn’t without flaws, but using longer term temperature and CO2 data, it shows how the presentation that Vice President Gore and other we’re all gonna die people has been selected for effect.

Today the roofers are here putting up a new roof. I had a leak, but only when it rained REALLY hard – perhaps once a year. The old roof was 16+ yrs old, so it was about time. About half the neighborhood homes already have new roofs.

The guys were all here before 7:30a and ready to go. The weather today is going to be a perfect day for this – clear, sunny, highs in the lower 80s. No rain expected until after midnight. Perfect.

I’ll try to take a few photos during the day to capture some of the progress. As the day goes on, I’m learning about more leaks and bad design than I already knew. The leader is explaining how and why they happened. I trust him. I’ll explain below.

Let’s assume you are middle class and would like to retire as middle class. How much money do you need to support that lifestyle? What is the annual amount of that lifestyle today? $40K, $60K, $80K per year? Let’s assume $60K/yr buys you the middle class retired life. You won’t be jetting around the world every year, but you can afford to eat out and have a few hobbies.

I hope the tables turn out readable.

I have a TiVo connected to a digital box from the company and a Windows7 Media Center PC with a Hauppauge ClearQAM tuner. Today I planned on catching up on a little TV that should have been recorded last night, but wasn’t.

See, now that my VCRs are worthless since Comcast went 95% digital and requires a tuner box to get all but 5 network channels (ok, they also give 15 shopping channels and 8 community access channels too – great huh?), I use the 7MC PC to record programs when there’s a conflict with another or when I really don’t want to miss a specific show due to a screw up with the channel changing on TiVo or QAM tuner.

Be certain to check the comments for updates as I learn them.

I read lots of news every day. This morning, this story was found and after reading the headline, my first thought was …

I don’t claim to understand how US government agencies determine what a reasonable fine is for companies found of wrong doing or impeding solutions, but is $53 per incident enough? Serious? I’ve never been impressed with fines from the government. They aren’t even enough to remove profits from the infraction, IMHO.

According to this BBC article, Toyota is fined $16.4M for something that impacted at least 2.3 million vehicles. So, $16.4/2.3 = $53. Nice. I don’t think that is much of a deterrent to prevent the behavior for Toyota OR any other manufacturer in the future. Is my math wrong?

I’d think somewhere between $500 and $1500 per vehicle would be a more appropriate penalty to correct future behavior. It needs to hurt a little. I’ve worked in large corporations and know that while $16M is a bunch of money, it isn’t really that much. Heck, I’ve worked a laptop replacement project that was $25M.

I also understand that Toyota is an excellent automobile company and we don’t want to unjustly penalize them, their workers, or future customers. Like many of us, the managers involved didn’t know how serious the problem was and down played it for as long as they could. Being completely open concerning any issue with a consumer product isn’t part of any corporate culture that I’m aware. I’m reasonably certain if more than a few actual incidents happened and anyone were hurt, then Toyota would have been up front. When I worked on public impacting systems, I always pictured how my family would be impacted if there were any issue with the work. I believe the Toyota engineers do the same with their issues and fixes. Doing the right thing is easiest when you are close to the issue. The spin team is what concerns me – both the government AND the company spinners.

We all know that companies don’t pay any taxes OR fines with internal money, right? The fine paid will probably become part of the cost of every vehicle going forward when pricing is determined. I would add that to my checklist if I were on the accounting team and marketing team setting prices.

Another way to choose the fine amount may be to base it off the CEO + President complete annual pay packages including bonuses. Just a thought, I dunno. I read that the Toyota CEO earns less than $1M annually, while the GM CEO earned over $14M, so perhaps that isn’t a good idea for underpaid CEOs. Of course, my data was just found with a google search, so it could be wrong.

Blog Spam

I’ve noticed the number of blog spammers have increased significantly in the last 2 months. They use general “good job” or “nice work” comments, then leave their email and commercial weblink. I assume these are spam-bots – automatically doing it.

Moderated Comments

Since all comments are moderated here, I’ll do my best to weed them out if they aren’t related to the posted article. Only on-topic links will remain and generic posts will not be allowed. It isn’t like there are hundreds of spam posts daily. I know this will reduce the number of comments, but that is the price for non-spam comments today. Sorry. If you’re comment is on topic, it will be posted. Basically, any comment that is remotely on topic will be posted. Just those that are commercial or links to unrelated content will not be posted. For example, if the post is about virtualization and you provide a comment with links to an online vitamin store, that will not be posted. OTOH, if links in comments are to other articles on virtualization or even commercial virtualization products, then it will be allowed. The decision of moderators leans towards posting comments when in doubt.

Test Messages

I guess some people don’t want to bother writing a longer message if it won’t be posted. I get that, but a test message is not on topic either and won’t be posted. How does that comment add to the conversation?

Further, I’ve disabled comments for older articles. I don’t recall the actual cutoff day. It is probably 90 or 120 days, so it won’t impact the few, loyal, readers. Those articles do not have any way to enter any comments. If there is a comment field displayed, then your comment will be seen by the moderators.

Hello, Nice Article and other non-related comments were allowed previously, but are not going forward. Sorry. Those do not add to the conversation.

English Only Please

This is an English language blog. While we like worldwide viewers and understand that not everyone reads English, that is simply a limitation of our skills. I have translated some non-English comments previously. None were on-topic to the post. We may attempt to translate comments again, but you can visit translate.google.com just as easily as we can.

No Sign-up Required

We do not require any sign up to post comments. Heck, we don’t really want your email address either. An alias is preferred. If you leave an email address or web address, it will probably be included in the comment and publicly seen. That seems to be the way this software works. Our systems do log IP addresses, just like every other system out there does.

Example Blocks

A few of these spammers have been blocked at the router. Sure they can come from a different subnet, but I bet they won’t.

The financial planning and foreign internet diamond sellers are the funniest. Blocked.

Automatic Moderation

I’ve looked into viable solutions to allow non-moderated comments here and didn’t find one that I was willing to implement.
Here’s a site from 2005 with specific ideas to reduce, if not eliminate internet marketing on blogs. About a year ago, I came across another site where the blogger had placed a static Captcha with an simple arithmetic problem inside the image. The answer was always “42.” He never changed it, Never, yet it prevented 100% of the blog spam. I may introduce that here.

If I were running MT or blogger or some other highly popular blog tool, then I’d have a bigger issue. Since I’m running a little used Ruby blog with few internet users, I’m fairly safe just like Linux and Apple are safe compared to Microsoft.

Today, we are manually moderating comments about once a day.

Comment Edits

Occasionally, comments may be edited by a moderator to remove offensive content. We will say in the post that it was edited. Cuss words will probably be removed or exchanged for #$#%. Keep it clean, please.

Exceptions

We are people and regardless of the statements above, there will be exceptions for posting and not posting. Friends who post can say almost anything.

About 100 people attended Outerz0ne Con yesterday in south Atlanta (near the airport). This was my first hacker conference ever though I have attended DC404 and other industry meetings. It appeared that many people had a really good time without attending many of the talks. Below I’ll provide my impressions and key things learned from some of the more technical talks. The last talk contained extremely helpful information for anyone running a web site.

Maintaining a computer with all the patching and updating required these days is tough. It is almost impossible to keep everything patched on the most popular OS out there, even for nerds like us. For non-computer people, it is impossible. Often, software updates have costs to get the new version too. That’s just another barrier for Grandma.

Which Programs does Grandma Use?

First, we’ll create a list of the computer tools our fictitious Grandma probably uses today.