Daniel Von Fange

Sticking your pictures places.

I've recently learned a new way to eat up time: put my photos on Wikipedia articles. Waxhaw, NC, Black Rat Snake, and Helio Courier, to name a few, now have some photos I've taken.

(As an aside, Mediawiki's image upload support is great - wiki software making photos easy to include is a rarity.)

Today I found another place to stuff my pictures in front of an unsuspecting public - 43places, an addictive travel site (coded in ruby on rails, BTW). Now Hamilton, Bermuda, Dockyards, Bermuda, The Colosseum, Rome, and others have my photos on them.

Don't feed the Apes.

But nobody said anything about not giving them drinks...

(on the Rock of Gibraltar, 2002)

Not a cat photo.

Here's the B-Dog, chilling in the shade.

Fast Fixes.

A while back a coworker was in the process of convincing another coworker that open information systems could work, and was showing wikipedia as an example. "And if someone messes a page up, someone else comes along and fixes it," he said. So the skeptical coworker immediately went to a page on the site AND WIPED OUT EVERYTHING. A few minutes later, the page was fixed back again by a random strange and they were believers.

But how did it get fixed so fast? Turns out there is an IRC channel with bot that alerts on suspicious edits. All you have do is join the channel, and beat other channel members to reverting back the stupid stuff people do.

Accident at Crowder's.

This weekend, a friend of friend took a fifteen foot accidental dive off some rocks.

{The people who found him, and called 911.}

{Just got a neck brace on}

{Lot of work to put someone on board, when the ground is uneven and you don't want to hurt him further.}

{ Approaching an access road, where a pickup truck will take him out to an ambulance. At this point we've been traveling down the mountain dealing with yellow jackets ("a genus of very aggressive social wasps.") and over rocks. }

{ Members of the Gastonia fire department - and park rangers - goof-off while waiting for their ride out. (Great guys) }

He's now at home and recovering well.

Black Rat Snake.

I found a Black Rat Snake in our yard this morning. Many years ago, my mother reached for one of these snakes while gardening, mistaking it for a black water hose in the bushes. The snake was named "Crinkles" because of the way he looked that day, and through the years our family has referred to all Black Rat Snakes as "Crinkles".

It turns out that Black Rat Snakes actually "crinkle up" when people they feel stressed. For a long time I just though that only "our" snakes looked like that.

The marketplace expressed as games.

The Game is Afoot is an excellent essay on marketing and competition for software developers. (And it's funny throughout too - the mark of an artist.)

Chinese Quotation.

"If you have a vendetta, dig two graves."

or

"He who seeks vengeance must dig two graves: one for his enemy and one for himself"

From the Pragmatic Programmer List oddly enough.

Random Links of the Day.

Here's some favorite Wikipedia articles I stumbled onto while randomly flipping through pages.

• Mao (the game) - Where it is forbidden to tell new players the rules - they must learn them by being penalized for breaking them.
• White Tie - the highest level of dressing up. I didn't know this.
• Tsar Bomba - the biggest nuclear bomb ever exploded. Jar-Jar had nothing to do with the name.
• Five Charter Oath - Japan's move over night from full on feudalism to more modern government.
• Davy Crockett and AIR-2 Genie - Brilliant things to do with nukes.