An elderly man in North Carolina had owned a large farm for several years. He had a large pond in the back, fixed up really nice, along with some picnic tables, horseshoe courts, and some apple and peach trees. The pond was properly shaped and fixed up for swimming when it was built.

One evening the old farmer decided to go down to the pond, as he hadn't been there for a while, and look it over. He grabbed a five gallon bucket to bring back some fruit.

As he neared the pond, he heard voices shouting and laughing with glee. When he came closer, he realized it was a bunch of young women skinny-dipping in his pond. He made the women aware of his presence and they all went to the deep end to shield themselves.

One of the women shouted to him, 'We're not coming out until you leave!'

The old man frowned and replied, 'I didn't come down here to watch you ladies swim naked or make you get out of the pond naked.' Holding the bucket up he said, 'I'm here to feed the alligator.'

Moral of the story: Old men may move slow but can still think fast.

I added a new feature to 'teos' today-- it now displays 'links' along with 'posts' from sophia and 'feeds' from demeter.

'vulcan' is the subproject of 'eros' that handles the 'links' or 'bookmarks' database. the web front-end is currently the same as ever, but eventually vulcan will have it's own subdomain.

using a tool within the vulcan project, I approved several links that needed it, including an item that was submitted back in 2008.

to lessen the spam/trash/junk submissions, I plan to add a better CAPTCHA to the submission form. if these measures completely prevent your use of the site, please leave feedback and let me know.

"sophia" was requiring a username and password because I screwed up and had the htaccess file for the dev site installed on the production site. I am not sure how long this has been an issue, but it is now fixed.

demeter now has a search feature. while it is not very sophisticated, it does search "feed" and "entry" records for the entered phrase.

also, a feed from vfw.org has been added to the system.

constructive feedback appreciated.

'sophia' is a combination of features from "blogs" and "forums" that I have used over the years.

a new release of 'sophia' is now available for download from the sophia project page.

I am using sax-n-dotty show presenter[1] as part of the tunebox project. showpresenter has an "audience screen" which is a simple window with a right-to-left scroll that can be set to whatever text the host wants, with replacement for "trackname" and "singer" ala printf. the 2nd component involved is the "MP3+G" plugin[2] for winamp[3].

during the show, the plugin's window must be "on top" (or at least always visible)-- the audience screen cannot cover it. as it turns out the plugin I am using has an "always on top" option in the right-click (aka "context") menu. turning on this option forces the lyrics window to stay "on top" of other windows on the display.

I also had some good results from resizing the audience screen's window to be a little larger than the scroller text, and resizing the lyrics window and moving it so it is just below the audience screen-- that way when the song is playing the audience screen is visible, and the "next person" scroller will be visible even during the song.

1. http://sax-n-dotty.co.uk/index.asp
2. http://sax-n-dotty.co.uk/download/mp3g_plugin.exe
3. http://www.winamp.com/

mom forwarded this to me...

The only survivor of a shipwreck was washed up on a small, uninhabited island. He prayed feverishly for God to rescue him. Everyday he scanned the horizon for help, but none seemed forthcoming. Exhausted, he eventually managed to build a little hut out of driftwood to protect him from the elements, and to store his few possessions.

One day, after scavenging for food, he arrived home to find his little hut in flames, with smoke rolling up to the sky. He felt the worst had happened, and everything was lost. He was stunned with disbelief, grief, and anger He cried out, "God! How could you do this to me?"

Early the next day, he was awakened by the sound of a ship approaching the island! It had come to rescue him! "How did you know I was here?" asked the weary man of his rescuers. "We saw your smoke signal," they replied.

The Moral of This Story:

It is easy to get discouraged when things are going bad, but we should not lose faith, because God is at work in our lives... even in the midst of our pain and suffering. Remember that the next time your little hut seems to be burning to the ground, it just may be a smoke signal that summons the Grace of God.

for the "tunebox" project, I needed to allocate some unused space on my workstation's hdd. I was dreading the process (and the "risk") until I got some help from gunn (owner of dataslab).

• pvscan
• lvscan
• lvcreate
• mke3fs
• edit /etc/fstab
• mount

a new release of projectflow is now available.

• grepproj is now a useful tool
• projmon had a bugfix regarding timestamp formatting. it's now much more consistent (thank goodness).