Terminally Incoherent

The first person who tries to tie Virginia Tech shooting to violent video games, movies or music is a despicable publicity whore. Anyone willing to exploit this tragedy for media face time, or use it to support their agenda to censor media content is a pathetic excuse for a human being. Every time something like this happens, all these disgusting slimy turds crawl out of the woodwork and demand media face time to preach to us about the evils of this or that.

If I hear even a pip out of Jack Thompson about this, I will personally roundhouse kick him in the nuts. Seriously!

Sorry, had to get that off my chest.

I added Gravatar support to this site. If you don’t have a gravatar account, go sign up. You give them your email, and upload an image. Nice part is that this pic will not only display here but on every blog that supports gravatars. If you want to see samples just look around in the comments. You should see my picture on all my posts.

I also noticed that several other regular posters here also use them so this should be nice!

Btw, Miloš - if you are interested, there is a Blojsom plugin avaliable.

If you are following me on Twitter you probably know this already. If not let me tel you - I got flooded. Not much mind you, but only because 6 people were working on stopping the watter, and carrying buckets outside.

Initially it was fine. We have a pump dug into the ground below the floor level. When the water rises to a certain level, the floater triggers the pumping mechanism, and the excess water is dumped into the shower drain. My dad constructed this contraption after we got several feet of water here few years ago during the hurricane. Ideally it should be dumping the water outside of the building but the shower drain usually works…

Unless of course we are dealing with a Storm 2.0 Beta which pours water on you like there is no tomorrow. I think the drainage system got so full that it could not take it anymore. If you would flush the toilet, the water would rise, and wouldn’t go down. In this scenario, our pump was actually making things worse. Since the drain was backed up, the pump water had nowhere to go.

So we would collect the pump water into buckets, and carry it up the stairs and out the door. We had 2 people on the bucket drill all night, one person minding the pump, and scooping the water out of the shower and the toilet when it was getting to high, one person changing the towels in the areas where the water was leaking, and one person manning the washing machine and running a spin cycle on the soaked towels, 1 person acting as a towel gopher (collect wet, bring back dry) and one person to rest and/or attend to new leaks as they sprung.

Anyways, we won. Around 1 am the drains unclogged themselves, and we were able to stop running the bucket line. Around 3 am we managed to stop most of the leaks and clean up enough to catch some sleep.

Fun times.

As it is right now, my floor smells like sewage, and wet towels while and most of my possessions are hoisted on top of the furniture. The only good thing about this is that I will finally have a chance to get some cable management done. There is a tightly tangled knot of electronic cabling underneath my desk and I always wanted to clean it out and make it neat, but I was always to lazy to disconnect everything. Now I have a chance to do it.

One of the most annoying context menus in Windows is the stupid Send To menu which lets you send the clicked file to various programs, or special folders. Personally I never use it. Some of you may find it extremely useful, but for me it just wastes time. And over the years it grew so big that it actually takes 2-3 seconds to load the whole list. This means that if I accidentally touch that entry while manipulating files, I have to sit there and wait for it. That annoys me to no end. So I decided to disable it. It is relatively easy - you just need to tweak a single registry entry.

Simply copy and paste the following text into your favorite text editor and save it with a .reg extension. Then double click on it. After you do, Send To should be gone from the context menu.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Se nd To]
@=""

Make sure that the “Send To” is on one line. If you ever decide that you need that menu back, here is a file to re-enable it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AllFilesystemObjects\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\Se nd To]
@="{7BA4C740-9E81-11CF-99D3-00AA004AE837}"

I figured I’d better post that second one, because it is anything but intuitive. Just a long registry D-Word value that might as well be completely arbitrary. I simply obtained it by exporting that reg key on my WinXP home machine before removing it. I tested it and it does restore the menu properly, at least on my system.

For safety I recommend that you export your own key before you remove the menu - although I don’t see why my d-word value wouldn’t work on most systems.

What I tell you right now may save you hours of extensive debugging, cursing under your breath, commenting out custom code dealing with figure layout and much frustration. Whenever you use figures, always (and I mean ALWAYS EVER FOREVER ALWAYS) put \caption first, and \label second like this:

\begin{figure}[htp]
 	\centering
 		\includegraphics{image.eps}
 	\caption{Some Image}
 	\label{fig:some-image}
\end{figure}

If you put the \label above \caption you will run into trouble when referencing figures inside subsections. In my case, the caption underneath the figure would say Fig. 4.2 but the output of \ref would be 4.3.10 because somehow it was picking up the section numbers wrong. The whole damn chapter 4 had the caption/label pairs flipped - but the rest of the document was fine. I have no clue what possessed me to write it this way.

Now I know better. This is the 3 hours of my life that I will never get back. All because I put label before a caption. Do not do that to yourself!