Christa and I are both having a great white north weekend, albeit in separate parts of Ontario.
Christa will be back in the old ‘hood of Brantford catching up with all those folk.
I’ll be hamming it up further down the 401 with some friends from Ottawa & Toronto who all get together a few times a year. For the 2nd February running we will be staying at a cabin on Big Bald Lake in Buckhorn Ontario – where the population is only large enough for 1 Tim Hortons and a Beer Store/LCBO.
After starting the new year off with a bang of blogging, I kind of fell apart towards the end of January and got lazy again. Nothing overly exciting happened the past few days so I just didn’t feel like writing anything.
So sue me.
Friday night went over to a friend’s house in Royal Oak & made some beats for a few hours, talked about music, and had a few beers while Monty played with Justin’s dog Jersey & Christa watched tv on a 42″ plasma.
Other than the Discount Tire fiasco (read it here), Saturday we went to a 40th birthday party for Brian Bourlier (Bourlier’s Barbecue and Fireplace) and enjoyed some good times, then around midnight hopped on over to IPMradio.com‘s Studio 6 in Ferndale for more good times, tunes, & beer for the rest of the evening.
Sunday was home project day for me! I went to Home Depot and bought a staple gun and some of that expanding foam insulation stuff to try and plug some of the insulation gaps where cold air was streaming into the basement. That seemed the do the trick, so the rest of the day was spent tinkering on small projects here and there downstairs. I didn’t bother watching the super bowl at all last night, so I’ll probably spend the day today checking out the commercials on YouTube since the boss is away.
After spending the past week or so dealing with a car that a) even in 2nd gear has issues getting moving when there is even a hint of moisture on the road, and b) generally has the handling characteristics of a brick, I decided to pull out the ‘ol credit card to replace the bald tires on the Accent.
After repeatedly being dicked around or otherwise screwed with at the Troy Discount Tire location over the past few years, I decided to check out the Discount Tire in Center Line after Christa got tires there 2 weeks ago and was generally pleased with her experience.
I had done the research up front on what tires I wanted. I was all prepared with a backup set of tires on the off chance the ones I wanted were out of stock. I had also perused some of the cheap tires that got horrible reviews just so I could know to avoid them if they tried to sell me a set of those instead. Well as you can probably imagine, the 2 different sets of tires I was prepared to buy were not in stock. Super. So what do they have _IN_ stock that would be a decent all-season? Something I’ve never heard of and don’t remember seeing on the review website. Instead of walking out and trying another store for the tires I wanted I made the mistake of falling for their bait and switch.
What a sucker I am.
So almost 2 hours later (after a 40-45 minute estimated wait time) I was out with the new tires. Not just tires that got a few poor reviews online, but tires that got HORRIBLE reviews across the board online. All-season? They don’t even say that on the tire description. As a matter of fact, many of the reviews said not to purchase these tires if you are in a rainy/wintery climate as they have very poor handling in these conditions.
Awsome, and the Discount Tire return policy?
If you are not pleased with the merchandise that you receive, or you have simply changed your mind, we will provide you with a refund within 30 days of the date of purchase.
…
Tires must not be driven on (used).
Well that works out well, since, well you know, I had to drive off the lot of Discount Tire to get home to read the reviews to get all worked up and pissed off.
The only lining to this story is that I don’t think I want to own this car for more than a year, so maybe the 15-20,000 miles most people were able to get out of these tires will get me through until the time I dump this car.
So the moral of the story? NEVER BUY ANYTHING FROM DISCOUNT TIRE AGAIN. This time I’m going to stick with that.
I wish I could do this with their tires right now:
Myself, Christa & Jacqui went ice skating at Campus Martius in downtown Detroit Saturday night, and it was another of those experiences that makes me feel like Detroit is not dead.
We decided to check it out later in the evening around 8:30pm thinking that it wouldn’t be busy and would arrive to have the rink to ourselves.
Wrong!
The place was PACKED! Despite the cold, despite it being later in the evening, there were kids, families, young, old, all crowded into the park. People were actually excited about coming to downtown Detroit for a change!
It’s exciting to be witnessing Detroit turn around!
I had my laptop out in my lap this morning sitting in my chair with my feet up. Bailey decided that he should be in my lap instead, so I shutdown and closed the laptop to give him the personal time he requested, and he bolted not 2 seconds later.
Christa summed it up best: “He’s laughing at you on the inside.”
Occasionally I come across something tech related that I’m working on which is hard to find documented, so I document it here for myself & for google to index to possibly help others…
I wrote a simple web page hit counter for my website years ago using php & mysql. This worked fine until last year when I had to move my site from a machine I managed to a hosting provider. One issue surfaced where randomly, a string with ?PHPSESSID= would appear in the URLs while users were browsing my site, like http://defunkt.net/?PHPSESSID=1ba1f201361fa4ae2fef8122bec3.
Having the PHPSESSID in the URL is not only ugly, but it’s a security risk as well. If you visit a page that has PHPSESSID in the URL, a malicious admin on the site you click to could gain your privileges on the site you came from.
The Solution
If you are using a hosting provider like I am now, you probably don’t have root level access to the machine serving your pages. The solution in this case is rather simple; if your provider is running Apache (most do) use a .htaccess file.
.htaccess is the default filename of Apache’s directory-level configuration file. It provides the ability to customize configurations defined in the main configuration file.
In this case, all you need to do is create a .htaccess file in your www root, and include the following 2 lines:
I went to my first Red Wings game last night at Joe Louis Arena, and it was a blast. Had a few beers & watched them cruise to a 5-3 win over the Nashville Predators.
Between the 2nd and 3rd periods they tried to bring out a Toyota Tundra pickup for an advertising stunt. The truck made it about 3 feet onto the ice before it was greeted with a deafening boo from the entire arena, followed by a chear as it was rushed off out of sight. Der! Someone over at Toyota didn’t do their homework. I can only imagine the number of out of work autoworkers from Ford, GM, and Dodge that were in attendance last night. I wonder what the Toyota execs would think, watching their truck booed off the ice, and only to be cheered as it was quickly escorted away to safety.
I had to reload my machine this past weekend. I was very proud of the fact that it was going on 2.5 years and Windows XP SP2 was still as solid as a rock. You can imagine my disappointment Sunday morning when I discovered my machine hopelessly infected with some kind of combination popupware/virus. Being the IT dork that I am I spent a good hour trying to clean it up, but the damage was done & all I could do was admit it would be safer just to reload.
The first step was to backup what I need & do a quick list of what I had installed. While I do keep all of my very important data on a separate RAID drive, I did have several gigs worth of stuff on my desktop (including some Jazz selections Christa and I spent hours selecting with our friend Ryan for the wedding) that while I could get away with losing, would just just be a pain to recompile. Things started to get really complicated at this point and required another cup of coffee to mull over… The virus piece started producing automatic shutdowns every 1 minute, and if I aborted that would render the machine hopelessly useless by killing off all kinds of services requires to make anything happen in windows. Safe mode should offer me a method to get in and move the gigs of files I need to a backup external firewire drive, right? BZZZT!! Safe mode by definition only loads up the minimal subset of drivers needed for Windows to operate. So how the crap was I supposed to back my stuff up? Luckily being an IT dork pays off here as I knew I could run a windows repair without having my desktop deleted, and hopefully fix stuff enough to get in & throw everything on my firewire drive.
By now I’ve managed to fight with Windows for almost 2 hours and have only gotten to the point that I could finally reload the machine. Fast forward another uneventful 2 hours of watching Windows XP install configure and prepare to run, having to track down drivers, update to SP2, and then install the remaining 62 critical security updates. So for 4 hours into this little project and all I’ve got to show for it is a fresh reload of Windows. Super! Add another few hours to reinstall the rest of the required set of apps, all my assorted XP tweaks, and other miscellaneous tricks, and you’ve got a full day of doing not much else but waiting for things to happen on my computer.
So it’s now Wednesday morning, and after tinkering around a bit more last night, I’m pretty confidant that I have everything set the way I want it, and the machine is running spectacular. I just hate that I had to forfeit a few days of use to get it that way…
Went to the North American International Auto Show in downtown Detroit last night, and I’ve got to say I was completely underimpressed. We got there at about 7pm last night, and I was initially concerned we wouldn’t have enough time to completely explore the show. We ran the full circle around Cobo Hall in a little over an hour and a half and felt like we missed half of the show, but we had covered all the manufacturers including the Chinese company hidden in the basement.
If the crowd told any story, it mirrored my own feelings towards the American automakers; hello unimpressive mediocrity. The only vehicles remotely interesting were the concept cars – which we all know will never make it to production as they are just ridiculously flashy and gimmicky to catch the eye and make it appear that the company has great new ideas coming down the pipe. Looking out over the floor of Cobo, the highest concentration of people seemed to be at every car company other than Ford, GM, or Dodge. The only exception to this was the Hummer display, but thats only because it was filled with wanna-be-rappers & pretentious-mid-life-crisis-compensaters. None of the display areas really held my attention for more than a few minutes. What happened to the elaborate shows every hour on the hour; the pyrotechnics, the Cirque du Soleil ripoffs?
There were only 3 cars that even peaked my interest, and none of them were American. The Volvo C30, the VW Fahrenheit GTI, & the Scion tC were all pretty nifty, though only the Scion is remotely in my price range.
All in all I left the show very unimpressed & worried about American auto ingenuity. I would have been upset if I had paid to get in.
The first step was to backup what I need & do a quick list of what I had installed. While I do keep all of my very important data on a separate 
