Eat at Joe’s

I often find myself with a phone number, but no other information. Whether someone called my cell and left no message, or I scribbled the number on a Post-It® with no identifying information, I’m stuck. Of course, there are reverse lookup searches available on the web, but I never have much luck with them. Now, I’ve found something better.

FakeCaller.com lets you call any number (your own) and send any caller ID info (the number in question) and play a recorded message (anything you want). So I had it call my house with the nameless number and there it was.

The bad thing about that service is that it’s a demo, so it’s not always instant, and you’re limited by the number of calls you can make in a day. Also, if you answer and accidentally press 3, it blocks your number (in case you’re being harassed), and I can’t find any way to unblock it.

So I bought a $10, 60-minute card from SpoofCard.com. Now I can do the same trick without worrying about limitations, and I don’t have to use a computer to use it. No, it’s not free, and it charges you for the first minute even if you don’t answer, so you can use your $10 for a maximum of 60 ‘lookups.’ That’s 16⅔¢ each, so if that’s too steep, stay away. Otherwise, I find it incredibly useful.

Two caveats: One, you’re giving your home number to a third party. Spoofcard says they’ll never share your data, but who knows? Also, there’s legislation bouncing around Congress right now trying to outlaw CallerID spoofing. So these services could go away soon. It’s worth the risk, if you ask me.

Color me excited. Google Maps just announced a new feature, whereby you can grab your nice little blue line and drag it wherever you want, and the directions will update themselves. I can’t begin to count the number of times over the years that I’ve had arguments with people over which route was better. I would always think, if only Google Maps (and Mapquest before that) would let me choose my own route, I could easily compare them.

My wish has been granted.

So I’ve done what I’ve wanted to do for years now. I compared the routes that I’ve argued about. And you know what? They’re so negligibly close, there was never any reason for argument.

From Thibodaux to Baton Rouge:
Route 1: LA20 to Vacherie, Veterans Memorial bridge, Airline through Grammercy, onto I-10.
Distance/time: 66.7 mi, 1:22
Route 2: LA308 to Napoleonville, LA70, Sunshine bridge, LA22 to I-10
Distance/time: 63 mi, 1:28
Conclusion: Sunshine bridge is shorter, Vets bridge is quicker, but the difference either way is negligible.

From Thibodaux to New Orleans:
Route 1: LA20 to Vacherie, LA3127 to I-310 to I-10
Distance/time: 53.4 mi, 1:09
Route 2: LA308 to Raceland, US90 to I-310 to I-10
Distance/time: 51.4 mi, 1:12
Conclusion: Raceland is shorter, Vacherie is faster, but the differences are negligible.
(Note: the speed limit on 3127 is 55, which I’m sure Google is using to calculate the time, but the reality is usually more like 75-80, so Vacherie is probably the better bet.)

From Thibodaux to Lakeside Shopping Center:
Route 1: Veterans Blvd exit
Distance/time: 54.8 mi, 1:09
Route 2: Causeway exit
Distance/time: 58.4 mi, 1:14
Conclusion: Vets is apparently better, but the longer I can stay on I-10 and off Vets, the happier I am.

From Lakeside to Esplanade:
Route 1: Vets to Williams
Distance/time: 6.8 mi, 0:16
Route 2: Vets to I-10 to Williams
Distance/time: 6.5 mi, 0:13
Route 3: Causeway to I-10 to Williams
Distance/time: 7.2 mi, 0:13
Conclusion: Just like I prefer, staying off Vets is the best option here. I’d rather get on the interstate sooner rather than later, though, so I’ll hop on at Causeway, avoiding Vets altogether. Then again, we often want to go to Toys R Us or Barnes & Noble or Dunkin’ Donuts, so Route 2 is how we end up going.

*Notes: All of the directions involving Thibodaux are measured from the intersection of LA308 and Canal Blvd. Baton Rouge is measured to the College exit, and New Orleans is really only measured to Kenner.

We had a plan for Saturday: my mom was taking the kids to the 4:55 show of Surf’s Up, while Meghan and I went to do something else: maybe see a movie, maybe dinner, maybe both… We were thinking about Ocean’s Thirteen, so we went to check the showtimes. Unfortunately, the available showtimes didn’t meld with our proposed schedule. So we looked to see what else was playing, and, strangely, Ratatouille was listed with a single 7:00 showtime. Wait, we thought, Ratatouille doesn’t start for a few weeks yet, right? We imdb-ed it, and sure enough, the listed release date was June 29. Surely the listing was not just a misprint. So we wiki-ed it.

There it was: “There will be 843 preview screenings across the United States on June 16, 2007.”

So wow. Why had we not heard about this? We have the opportunity to see the new big Pixar movie two weeks before anyone else! So we canceled the Surfs Up plans (which the kids weren’t too happy about, but oh well).

Fearful of long lines, we showed up almost an hour early. That was a waste. The theater was still playing Pirates, so we had to sit and wait until that was over, then wait for the cleaning crew to do their thing. Wrangling two young kids for forty minutes with nothing to do is no fun.

When the second person arrived, I asked her how they found out about the show. She gave me a very confused look and said, “Uh, I went online, and I ordered tickets.” She had no idea that the show was anything special. After I told her, there were a lot of Aha’s. So that’s why there was only one show. That’s why no one was talking about it. And so on.

The theater ended up being only a quarter or so full. I wonder why they didn’t advertise it more.

So the movie. How was it? It was good. Don’t be expecting Cars or Finding Nemo, because this one’s not as kid-centric as those. Ratatouille is closer to The Incredibles in its presentation than to any of the other Pixar masterpieces. (And come to find out, both movies have the same director.) Plot-wise, it was a very good take on the classic “Elves and the Cobbler” storyline. The visuals were phenomenal, as Pixar’s always are; the food especially stood out in that department. Meghan was in love with the Django music, but I, honestly, didn’t really notice it. In fact, Meghan was in love with the whole movie. Liam said it was “awesome” (his new word). Molly’s comments are simpler: “I like ‘rat-a-tootie’.”

Of course, Pixar gives us one of their great shorts before the movie. This one’s entitled “Lifted,” and it’s about an alien abductor in training. More info here. Unfortunately, we missed the promised Wall-E trailer, but it’s now available here for everyone to see.

Also, Jason Kottke has a nice review here.

I was on my way back from dropping the kids off this morning, feeling rather sleepy. I was fine to drive, but drowsy nonetheless. The car in front of me was a previous-generation, blue Nissan Sentra. I wasn’t tailgating; there were a few car lengths between us. I noticed her brake lights light up, but she wasn’t really slowing down yet, so I watched to see what she’d do. She then pulled off the road, but she did so rather suddenly and recklessly. “Crazy girl,” I thought, and proceeded past her.

But just before I met up with her, she jerked back onto the road to make a U-turn. Thankfully, she had decided to look at least one direction before doing so, which meant that the oncoming lane was clear of traffic. Good thing, too, ’cause I was all over it.

As soon as I realized what was going on, I entered survival driving mode, which had me swerving into the oncoming lane to avoid her. Of course, I turned way too much, so I swerved back, at which point the back end swung around. After barely missing a sign on the opposite side of the road, I was back in the proper lane, still struggling to get those rear wheels straightened out. Four swishes of the fishtail later, I was back in full control, and I proceeded along my way. Boy, do I miss the days of rear-wheel drive.

So aside from the fact that I probably could have died, I came away with a very thrilling experience, and a bit of manly driving confidence. See, I almost rear-ended someone a couple of months ago, but I successfully avoided that crash as well. Yay me.

We were in the backyard this evening, and it was getting dark. But we were letting the kids have a few more minutes on the trampoline before calling it a night. One of our neighbors stuck his head over the fence to inform us that the old lady that lives there stopped him and asked him what all the racket was about. “Oh it’s just the kids playing on the trampoline.”

“Well, someone’s gonna have to call 911, because I’m about to have a heart attack!”

What? Are you serious? Now, our kids were certainly making noise. But it was not an unreasonable amount considering their ages and the fact that it was 7:30 PM, not 9 or midnight.

As a courtesy to the old coot, and because it was pretty much dark anyway, we went inside. Not ten minutes pass before the cops show up. I stop the officer before he tells me why he’s there. That kinda caught him offguard, but I explain that an elderly neighbor reported us because–heaven forbid–my kids were playing outside. He chuckled, radioed headquarters saying that “there’s no disturbance, it’s just kids playing in their backyard,” took my information and left. But not before saying, “Well, that’s old people for you.”

No one cares about their passwords. A study conducted by the BBC found that 34% of people stopped on the street volunteered their login credentials with no qualms. And amazingly, over 70% were wooed by a mere candy bar. Shouldn’t people care more? Granted, some passwords don’t matter. If someone maliciously logs in to your messageboard account, what are they going to do? Post defamatory remarks about others and tarnish your name? Depending on the community, that should be easy enough to clear up. But what if you use the same password for your email? Your banking? What if someone gets your password for the office? Could they steal employee or customer information? Trade secrets? If so, I hope you’re protecting yourself.

In an ideal world, everyone would be able to remember random strings of data, every password would consist of 63 random characters, and no one would mind. But if that were the case, we’d all be in trouble. So we simplify. We choose easy passwords, and we use them over and over. One day, it’ll bite us.

What we need is an easy way to use a different password for every login, but still be able to remember them. Seems impossible, right? I’ve gone through several password policies over the years. First, it was one password all the time. Then, it was a ‘secure’ password, and an easy one. The easy one was for messageboards, one-time accounts, etc., and the secure one was for email, financial sites, and so forth. Then I found GenPass by Chris Zarate. (There’s also SuperGenPass now, but I haven’t used it enough to comment on it.) GenPass is great, because you choose one password that you never give out to anyone or any site. Then you use the GenPass bookmarklet to hash that password with the domain name of the site you want a password for, and it gives you a nice alphanumeric, seemingly random password. The beauty of GenPass lies in its use of the MD5 one-way hash algorithm. I won’t go into what hashing is or how it works—it’s a bit complex. What’s important is that even if someone gets your password, and they know that you used GenPass to generate it, there is no way for them to reverse the MD5 and get your master password. Nice, huh?

So I’ve been raving about GenPass. While GenPass is nice, and it’s convenient with optional one-click password entering, it’s not perfect. You never see your passwords! So if you go to a friend’s house and want to show her an email, you can’t log in to your account without going to Chris’s site, typing your master password and the domain, copying and pasting the password into the box… it’s a pain. I’ve dealt with it for the past year or two, and it really is a pain.

So I’ve really been thinking of a way to make a personal algorithm more secure. And I’ve finally got it. Here’s what you’ll need:

• A stem, which will always remain the same, that contains at least one punctuation mark.
• A keyword for your password. For most websites, this will be the second-level domain, e.g. ‘yahoo’ for Yahoo.com.
• A simple substitution cipher. Examples below.
• An understanding of modulo. (optional) It’s a rarely used math function that basically means, “find the remainder.” For example, 16 mod 3 = 1, because 16 ÷ 3 = 15, remainder 1. The remainder is the only thing we’re looking for with mod.

A substitution cipher can be as simple as you’d like it. A one-letter shift where A=B, B=C, etc. is okay, but a 13-letter shift is harder to spot: A=N, B=O, etc. That particular cipher also reverses so that N=A and O=B. You could also use the keyboard as your translator, shifting your hands one key to the side, or trasposing rows, swap keyboard layouts, or whatever you can come up with.

Now choose any or all of the following things, in any order you want, to create your algorithm.

• Your unique stem
• The first x letters of the keyword
• Every xth letter of the keyword
• The first x [vowels/consonants] of the keyword
• The number of letters in the keyword (optionally mod x)
• The number of [vowels/consonants] (optionally mod x)
• The numeric value of the xth letter(s) (A=1, B=2, etc.) (optionally, add the digits of 2-digit numbers)

Here’s an example algorithm for you to see:

[3] + (#L mod 3) + v[3]-CAPS + #C + STEM

In English, that’s the third letter, then the number of letters mod 3, then the first three vowels (in caps), then the number of consonants, then finally the stem. If the stem is ;jkl, then the password for Yahoo.com would be:

h2AOO2;jkl

Nice? Looks almost random to me, which is the idea. Play with it, have fun, and let me know what you think. I’m probably going to try to develop this into a php script that will generate a random algorithm for you, then make you a bookmarklet to automatically fill in your password fields. It’ll take some work though, as my php skills aren’t very good at all.

My mom called me last week and told me that her neighbor had moved out and left a 20-gallon aquarium, complete with stand and fish, behind. The new tenant fed the fish for a couple of days, but she was sick of them. (Not that I can blame her after seeing the new shade of green that the water burned into my brain…) Well, I went to go pick it up, and my goodness, that thing redefined “disgusting” for me. Then I found out that it had been sitting outside for four days, during which time the temperatures dipped below freezing overnight. Not a healthy environment for tropical fish. I suppose the thick layer of scum acted as an insulator. Anyhow, I brought my mother-in-law’s boyfriend along, because he’s a bit of an aquarium expert, and he took care of most of the stuff. We siphoned out almost all of the water, leaving just enough to keep the fish alive, then we brought the thing to our house, cleaned the inside, set it up, and put about 17 gallons of dechlorinated tap water back in. That night, we lost four fish, and there were only two dead when we first got to it, so I’d say it went amazingly well. There are about 35-40 fish in the tank right now, most of which are very, very young. We had a pregnant fish until today, but we can’t seem to find her babies. Perhaps they’re too small to see, or maybe they were eaten. We’ll see, I suppose.

Besides cleaning, it was desperately in need of a new pump filter, and I wanted to get some air pumping in there too. While I was at it, I added a background and a couple more fish. Here’s the end result:

On an average day, I use Google probably two or three dozen times. While that doesn’t quite qualify me as an expert, I’m at least an advanced user. If you’re still just typing a couple of keywords and crossing your fingers, you’re missing out. There are tons of articles out there that catalog every search feature Google supports, but those are too overwhelming for the average searcher. Here are five tips that you can actually use on a day-to-day basis.

Use quotes. I see a lot of people who search for things that beg to be put in quotes: movie titles, names of people, error messages, etc. When a phrase in enclosed in quotes, Google treats it as a single search term, so you only get pages that have the exact words you’re looking for, in the precise order. Another option is to delimit your words with period, but you get exactly the same results.

Let’s compare no quotes versus quotes versus periods. Say you have a piece of a song stuck in your head. You can hear the melody, but the only lyrics you are getting are the four-word phrase, “over, sideways, and under…” hm hm hmm hm hmm… This is really bothering you, so you pop on over to Google and search for [over sideways and under] (with no brackets). Check out the results and you’ll see that almost all of them refer to an album by the Yardbirds entitled “Over Under Sideways Down.” Not helpful at all. Now put quotes around your phrase and you immediately realize that your song is “A Whole New World” from Disney’s Aladdin. Compare the search results with quotes to the results with periods and you’ll see that they’re identical.

Use OR (and parentheses). Probably less than 1% of Google users know about the OR operator, which is a shame, because it makes Google a lot more versatile. See, by default, Google performs an AND search with the keywords you enter. In other words, anything appearing in the results contains every word you typed. While this is fine in some cases, there are many where it is not. Enter the OR operator, and its twin, the pipe (|). Just like quotes vs. periods, OR and pipe produce identical results. (To type a pipe character on most US keyboards, type shift-backslash. If you can’t find your pipe/backslash key, it should be either just below backspace, just to the left of backspace, or just to the right of the right shift key.) The most common situation where an OR search is appropriate is when you’re searching for information about something that is known by different names, like PlayStation 2 or PS2.

Here’s a real-world example that I ran into last week using quotes and OR. I encountered a problem involving using Outlook Web Access on Internet Explorer 7. Both of those products are commonly known by their acronyms, OWA and IE7. So what do I search for? If I search for [owa ie7], then my results would not include a very well written article in which the author referred to “Outlook Web Access,” but never to “OWA.” A search for [owa “outlook web access” ie7 “internet explorer 7″] would not be ideal either, as it would also not include the hypothetical article. Granted, both searches would generate results, and they would probably be sufficient in this case, but if I were looking for something very specific which I may find on only a handful of pages anywhere, I’d be in trouble. Instead, I should construct my search to include either the acronym or the full name of both products. In this instance, I searched for [(owa | outlook.web.access) (ie7 | internet.explorer.7)]. The parentheses aren’t necessary here, but they are required with more complex searches; I use them because it discourages ambiguity.

Dash means NOT. Google can also remove pages from your search results if they contain a certain word. If you’re looking for coffee information, you may use the word “java” in your search. Of course, your results would be filled with information about the Java product from Sun Microsystems. By changing your search to [java -sun], you get rid of almost all of it. (Now, if you’re looking for sun-dried java beans, you’re on your own!)

Forgot a word? Use an asterisk. Asterisks can replace any word in a quote. If you can’t remember a full quote, or if you’re not sure of the exact word to use, substitute an asterisk. Example: [“* score and * years ago”]. (This is apparently not the best example, as a group called Relient K seem to have a song entitled “Five Score and Seven Years Ago.”)

Search just one site. Most websites, at least those with a significant amount of original content, have a built-in searching mechanism. But sometimes those engines are poorly implemented. You may get better results by using Google for your search and restricting the results to one site with the [site:] operator. A good example (for me, anyway) is Lifehacker. I can search for an article I saw yesterday, and it will be on page four of the results, with stuff from 2003 way before it. So I do my search on Google instead, adding [site:lifehacker.com] anywhere in the query. The same works for top-level domains like com, net, and the newest ones like pro and travel. [site:pro] will restrict your search to just the new .pro sites.

I’m no master, but I think I’m pretty good at rhythm games. I started playing DDR 3 years ago, and even though my playing has been very on-and-off, I’ve been able to keep my skills up. At the beginnig of last year, I bought Guitar Hero, after hearing that many people were saying it was one of the best games of 2005. It’s tough to decide to invest $80 in something you don’t know if you’ll like, but it was definitely love at first sight.

Guitar Hero II’s been out for a couple of months now, and I picked it up last weekend. It’s all the fun all over again; I just wish I had two guitars.

Then, sheerly by accident, I got Elite Beat Agents from Gamefly. It’s a touch-screen-based rhythm game for the DS, and while it’s no DDR or GH, it holds its own, especially since it’s the only game in the genre for that platform.

I found a torrent with all the music from both Guitar Hero games, and I’ve been listening to it. Meghan thinks I’m stupid for it.