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BeardMe results

thatjoshguy — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 23:22:54 +0000

The beard came in rather nicely if I do say so myself, but all good things must come to an end. The results are in, and the winning beard was the “Guy Fawkes”.

Here, then, are the resulting (revolting) photos:

Beard Me!

thatjoshguy — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 21:24:01 +0000

So I woke up this morning feeling like hell. I had three day stubble, and the remainder of my “chin strap” beard peeking through. Once again, I didn’t feel much like shaving, so I made a judgement call. I grabbed the trimmers and blended the old with the new, into an even three day stubble I’m so manly, it hurts.

This got me to thinking… What should I do with this? Go all out and grow a beard? I’m not sure I could pull off the mountain man look, so I had to go with something with form… but what?

Enter my latest distraction: Beard Me!

Head over to http://thatjoshguy.com/beardme and cast your vote. As soon as the forest of facial hair is lush enough to support it I’ll grab the razor and sport the style with the highest votes.

Wake up and smell the USDA & FDA approved coffee…

thatjoshguy — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 12:45:52 +0000

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power “monopoly” regulated by the US department of energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launch by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US Department of Agriculture inspected food, and taking the medications which have been determined safe for use by the Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time (as regulated by the US Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the US Naval Observatory) I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration approved automobile and set out to work on the roads built by the local, state, and federal departments of transportation, stopping to purchase fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency using legal tender as issued by the Federal Reserve Bank. On the way out the door, I deposit my mail to be sent out via the US Postal Service at the drop-box beside the local public school.

After work, I drive my NHTSA car back home on DOT roads, to a house which is still standing and structurally sound due to the state and local building codes as well as the fire marshal’s inspection, and which has not been robbed thanks to the protection of the local police department.

I then log on to the Internet which was developed by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration and write a long post on Facebook about how SOCIALISM in health care is bad, and the US government can’t do anything right…

New Healthcare Bill: Summary

thatjoshguy — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 12:05:07 +0000

I usually stay out of politics, but as this affects everyone I thought I’d contribute. Here is a summary of what the newly passed health care bill will mean to you (courtesy of Reuters):

WASHINGTON, March 19 (Reuters) – The U.S. House of Representatives is heading for a Sunday vote on a sweeping overhaul of the $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare system.

House Democrats are confident they can overcome solid Republican opposition and pass the bill. Leaders are using a two-step process where the House approves Senate-passed legislation and then votes for a separate package of changes to satisfy concerns of House Democrats. The Senate is expected to approve those changes as well and President Barack Obama plans to sign the bill into law.

Here is what to expect if the bill becomes law:

WITHIN THE FIRST YEAR OF ENACTMENT

*Insurance companies will be barred from dropping people from coverage when they get sick. Lifetime coverage limits will be eliminated and annual limits are to be restricted.

*Insurers will be barred from excluding children for coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

*Young adults will be able to stay on their parents’ health plans until the age of 26. Many health plans currently drop dependents from coverage when they turn 19 or finish college.

*Uninsured adults with a pre-existing conditions will be able to obtain health coverage through a new program that will expire once new insurance exchanges begin operating in 2014.

*A temporary reinsurance program is created to help companies maintain health coverage for early retirees between the ages of 55 and 64. This also expires in 2014.

*Medicare drug beneficiaries who fall into the “doughnut hole” coverage gap will get a $250 rebate. The bill eventually closes that gap which currently begins after $2,700 is spent on drugs. Coverage starts again after $6,154 is spent.

*A tax credit becomes available for some small businesses to help provide coverage for workers.

*A 10 percent tax on indoor tanning services that use ultraviolet lamps goes into effect on July 1.

WHAT HAPPENS IN 2011

*Medicare provides 10 percent bonus payments to primary care physicians and general surgeons.

*Medicare beneficiaries will be able to get a free annual wellness visit and personalized prevention plan service. New health plans will be required to cover preventive services with little or no cost to patients.

*A new program under the Medicaid plan for the poor goes into effect in October that allows states to offer home and community based care for the disabled that might otherwise require institutional care.

*Payments to insurers offering Medicare Advantage services are frozen at 2010 levels. These payments are to be gradually reduced to bring them more in line with traditional Medicare.

*Employers are required to disclose the value of health benefits on employees’ W-2 tax forms.

*An annual fee is imposed on pharmaceutical companies according to market share. The fee does not apply to companies with sales of $5 million or less.

WHAT HAPPENS IN 2012

*Physician payment reforms are implemented in Medicare to enhance primary care services and encourage doctors to form “accountable care organizations” to improve quality and efficiency of care.

*An incentive program is established in Medicare for acute care hospitals to improve quality outcomes.

*The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the government programs, begin tracking hospital readmission rates and puts in place financial incentives to reduce preventable readmissions.

WHAT HAPPENS IN 2013

*A national pilot program is established for Medicare on payment bundling to encourage doctors, hospitals and other care providers to better coordinate patient care.

*The threshold for claiming medical expenses on itemized tax returns is raised to 10 percent from 7.5 percent of income. The threshold remains at 7.5 percent for the elderly through 2016.

*The Medicare payroll tax is raised to 2.35 percent from 1.45 percent for individuals earning more than $200,000 and married couples with incomes over $250,000. The tax is imposed on some investment income for that income group.

*A 2.9 percent excise tax in imposed on the sale of medical devices. Anything generally purchased at the retail level by the public is excluded from the tax.

WHAT HAPPENS IN 2014

*State health insurance exchanges for small businesses and individuals open.

*Most people will be required to obtain health insurance coverage or pay a fine if they don’t. Healthcare tax credits become available to help people with incomes up to 400 percent of poverty purchase coverage on the exchange.

*Health plans no longer can exclude people from coverage due to pre-existing conditions.

*Employers with 50 or more workers who do not offer coverage face a fine of $2,000 for each employee if any worker receives subsidized insurance on the exchange. The first 30 employees aren’t counted for the fine.

*Health insurance companies begin paying a fee based on their market share.

WHAT HAPPENS IN 2015

*Medicare creates a physician payment program aimed at rewarding quality of care rather than volume of services.

WHAT HAPPENS IN 2018

*An excise tax on high cost employer-provided plans is imposed. The first $27,500 of a family plan and $10,200 for individual coverage is exempt from the tax. Higher levels are set for plans covering retirees and people in high risk professions. (Reporting by Donna Smith; Editing by David Alexander and Eric Beech)

Two companies that are getting it right (finally).

thatjoshguy — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 21:43:59 +0000

Over the last week or two, for reasons not important here, I’ve upgraded two PCs to Windows 7. Let me start by saying that normally, I dont’ do OS upgrades. I usually just wait until my PC explodes or melts or catches fire, then I just get whatever OS the new one comes with. I am not, as they say, an “early adopter”,

That being said, the first PC to get the upgrade was my work PC (thanks Mr. Virus man!). Amazingly, the install went incredibly smooth, and all of my old files remained intact. Many programs had to be reinstalled, sure, but that’s par for the course. Very nicely done though, as I didn’t even have to consider where to get my drivers as the install took care of that all for me. Good job, MS, good job.

Net was my new home PC, the Acer Aspire Revo 3610. I could go on for days about how cool this little box is, but I won’t right now… that’s for another post. Sure, this box came with Win7 already on it, but it was bloated as all hell, so I wiped the disk clean and installed a fresh copy. Glorious.

To top it all off, the Windows 7 interface is nice. I like it. It makes sense, and most importantly it works. I never had the problems with Vista others had, and I’m not having any problems now. Must be my awesome personality. I don’t get bugs. (HA!)

Shifting over to anti-virus programs now: TrendMicro is ace with me. It’s not like I kept the install disk around all these years from when I first got Internet Security 2006, but who cares… you don’t need it.

I got a 3-license kit back in the day, and TM knows this. I can log into their site, download the software (personalized with a slipstreamed serial key! w00t!), and install it in a matter of minutes. “OH NOES!” I hear you say… “WHAT IF YOUR 3 LICENSES ARE ALREADY ACTIVATED?!?” Well, first off stop showting, and second: that also doesn’t matter. Once the install completes, you can transfer the license to your new PC from your old without ever bothering to turn on the old pc. This is a great idea, and it works very well.

Mini Review: 7da Zombie Hunter

thatjoshguy — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 23:42:57 +0000

Let’s face it. Most iPhone games suck, especially the free ones. Long story short, 7da (no, that’s not a typo) Zombie Hunter is 100% ronseal. It’s full of action, zombies, and hunting. And it has seven levels (days). Yes it’s short, but that’s the idea here. If you have time to play for hours on your iPhone, then you’re probably missing something important (aren’t we all?).

The game is simple. Left thumb moves, right thumb shoots in traditional 2d “Smash TV” fashon. Arenas are small, and zombies are plentiful, as is the blood. Rock. It’s free for a while, so why not give it a shot?

PDF to EPUB (or any other eBook format)

thatjoshguy — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 21:50:18 +0000

So i’ve come across a large collection of ebooks in PDF format (I won’t say from where) which is awsome, except for one thing. There is not an ebook reader in the world (besides Adobe Digital Editions, but meh…) that reads PDFs. So I sat about on a journey to find a decent way to convert PDF to the popular EPUB format. Why epub and not something else like amazon kindle’s mobi format? Because, I have an iPhone, and iphone has Stanza (teh best ebook reader on the platform) and Stanza uses epub.

Long story short, there’s a lot of software out there that claims to do this all for you, but a lot of them jsut don’t cut it when it comes to images. The books I’m interested in are of a technical nature mostly, so there will be diagrams.

After testing out all of the free alternatives, I cam across Calibre. Calibre is an open source ebook management program that reads just about every format you can imagine, and can convert from one ebook format to another. It’s also free and open source, so woot!

Calibre CAN do PDF to epub, but you lose a lot of formatting and all of your bookmarks. In other words, no table of contents. That sucks.

To make a long story short, I tried a few combinations of softwares to get this working, and here is the most reliable way I have found to convert PDF to epub while retaining the table of contents, images, and MOST of your original formatting (some will still be lost, but if you’re a freak about stuff like that you can always fix it before the last step).

First, the requirements:

Adobe Acrobat – $300.00 - No, not Acrobat READER, that’s something else. You need to have Adobe Acrobat, or some other program that can export PDF’s as compliant HTML 3.2. I’m sure there’s something free out there, but this is what I used as I had it at work
Calibre – FREE
Notepad++ (optional) – FREE – this is used for some code cleanup if needed (for you formatting freaks)

Process couldn’t be simpler really:

Load the PDF in acrobat
FILE > EXPORT > HTML > HTML 3.2
Click on “SETTINGS”
uncheck “Generate Bookmarks”
check “Generate tags for untagged files”
check “generate images”
uncheck “use sub-folder”
click OK
Save
OPTIONAL – Edit the exported HTML file in Notepad++. get rid of any style tags in the body element, and any font colors, as they will mess with some readers (like stanza)
Open Calibre
Click “Add Book”
select the exported html file
Right click on the imported book and select CONVERT E-BOOKS > CONVERT INDIVIDUALLY
Input format will be ZIP, output will be epub
edit meta info as needed
On the “Structure Detection” tab, set “detect chapters…” to //h:h1
On the table of contents page, set level 1 to //h:h1, level 2 to //h:h2, and level 3 to //h:h3
Click OK

That’s it. the PDF will be converted to an epub that you can view in Calibre, or save to another location and read in another reader, or send to a device.

Note that all PDFs are not created equal, so some of these settings will need to be tweaked for different books, but this is what worked for me with a quality I was happy with.

Firewalls for dummies

thatjoshguy — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 13:46:08 +0000

Word to the wise folks. When you’re installing a firewall on your server due to mysterious login attempts, make sure that you know what IPs you’re blocking.

I ended up driving out to where my server is colocated at 8pm last night because my server wasn’t reaponding. I had recently installed APF (advanced policy firewall) and BFD (brute force detection) and wad confident in it’s functionality. Note: I installed and tested it while away from home.

Geeky stuff: APF is a CLI Frontend for iptables. You can deny/allow IP addresses with simple commands. Pair it with BFD and what you have is a nice little security system that scans server logs every few minutes looking for repeated failed logins and other suspicious activity and automatically blocks access to the offending IP (and tells you what it’s done in a nicely formatted email. End of geeky stuff.

Once I had it up and running I walked away confident in the security of my server. I knew of a few IPs that had been hacking away at me for months, so it was only a matter of time before the emails came telling me they were blocked. I added a few manually just to get the feeling for it. Happy with myself I went out with my lovely wife for dinner and a movie.

Then I tried to access my website from home…

No http access, no ssh, no FTP, and no reply on pings. Shit. I call the office and have them reboot my server. Nothing.

I only live about 10 miles away so I drove out to take a look. Looks like it’s running… Better reboot again to make sure it was done right. A few minutes later and we’re back in action! I head home.

Wake up at 6am. No response on my site or email. No FTP. No ssh. DAMMIT!

After a few cups of coffee it dawns on me to try something. I Vpn into my desktop pc at work and pull up my website. Works fine. Try it again from my local browser, fail.

A feeling starts to nag at me.

I use my remote desktop to SSH into the server. Success.

The feeling gets stronger.

I disable the firewall…

Everything magically works again.

The feeling begins to redden my cheeks.

I check the firewall rules.

Out of the eight IP adresses I manually denied, my home ip was first on the list.

The day before I installed the firewall I had forgotten that I had changed my password. There were several failed login attempts due to this.

That feeling? Stupidity. I has it.

Ferber Baby

thatjoshguy — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 12:02:10 +0000

Having a son means losing sleep now to sleep all night later. Let Isaac cry it out last night. It was like he knew it was my idea because he started crying for me in particular. Ouch.

When that didn’t work he started crying for mama but HA! I had given her earplugs! After a grand total of 45 minutes we all got back to sleep. Up at 6:15 to start our day. We’ll let mama sleep in today.

Daddy 1, Isaac 100.

I’ll catch up some day, right?

Facebook for iphone 3.1.4

thatjoshguy — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:10:31 +0000

Facebook for iPhone has been updated once again.

This version supposedly fixes a bug where friends were incorrectly matched with contacts. Also something about push notification.

Grab it now in the app store!

UPDATE: It’s still buggy.