Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Building blocks
After spending several hours wiring up a few customers to our network, Smirk and I ended up at Denny's (funny how no one ever sets out to go to Denny's, but inevitably end up there) and the topic of Coral Castle and how Edward Leedskalnin, weighing all of a 100 pounds, could build such a structure by himself (where some of the blocks used weigh as much as nine tons).
I mentioned to Smirk that I came across a possible technique which basically uses leverage, counter weights and pivot points but that I didn't remember the actual details. So imagine my surprise when I found a video of the technique while reading Jason Kottke's blog.
It was then that I remembered that I mentioned this technique two years ago.
So there you go Smirk—a way that Edward Leedskalnin could have built Coral Castle (secret message to Spring: maybe this is it, and maybe it's not).
Something else I might need to code around
For those that read the LiveJournal feed of this site, I apollogize for sending a flood of entries your way.
It's something I have to remember—that the <title> element of the RSS feed cannot contain named HTML entities since RSS is messed up that way. I need to use the numeric versions.
What happened is this—I titled an October 7th entry “A Møøse once bit my sister …” and used øø in the title. The LiveJournal RSS parser rejected the feed because of that. And because of that, my entries since the 7th haven't been showing up.
I just became aware of the situation and fixed the title (by replacing øø with øø) which means a sudden influx of twelve (or thirteen if this gets in with the current batch) entries.
Sorry about that.
Notes from a conversation about various and sundry things between myself and Smirk
“We need to set up a server running Cacti on SXXXXXX's network because they're having major network problems. I put the Fluke on their network and it found broadcast storms up the wazoo.”
“SXXXXXX? Are you sure it wasn't NXXXXXXXXXX? They're the ones with the networking problems.”
“Nope, it was SXXXXXX.”
“Wait! Let me guess … they run Windows?”
“Full Windows shop. Flat network.”
”Of course!”
