My new site is now officially up and running. Come check out how your team compares to the rest of Division 1. You can find it here Bracketizer.com

New features will also be released soon.

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I went to the county government surplus computer auction last night. It was the first time I have been to an auction and I was surprised at just how much I enjoyed it. There was the guy who just kept giving “the nod” every time he bid. There was the classic head shake to tell the auctioneer no more. The auctioneer himself was a classic old guy with suspenders, white beard and rapid fire speaking. It took a few items to go before I felt comfortable with what was going on before I started bidding. It was amusing because I could see some people getting caught up in the excitement of the auction and bidding on prices that they shouldn't. Like when a computer identical to the one I paid $15 went for $45 dollars just a few minutes later. Weren't they paying attention?

Some people got some good deals, but I don't really know if they got “smoking deals”. Some of the newer computers (P4, 80GB HD, 512MB RAM) went for $120-$165. There were some P4, 40GB HD, 512MB RAM with the smaller form factor that I really had my eye on but they all went for about $40 each. I ended up with two P4 computers with 256MB RAM and monitors, two 8mm backup tape drives and a UPS battery backup for $35. Not too bad I think. I probably could have gotten them for even less if I had been thinking right. When I bid on the UPS I opened the bidding at $1, a guy immediately went to $5 so I raised my card to bid again and the auctioneer upped the bid to $10 when he saw me. He did the right thing and asked me if I was okay going to $10 and after thinking for about a second I said sure. I should have said no and gone to $6 instead but I still got a deal I think so I'm not upset. The same thing probably could have happened with the $15 computer I got. In retrospect, I probably should have since some of the older PIII's went for just $1. With two or three of those I could have cobbled together a pretty decent computer. One guy there bid on everything and I think he must have walked away with 20-30 computers and other miscellaneous items.

At the beginning the auctioneer told us that everything had to be sold so for example, if the item in lot number 1 didn't sell it would be combined with the item in lot number 2 and so on until there was a winning bid. Some people got some decent deals that way. That is actually how I ended up with the tape drives.

The next time they have the auction I am definitely going. It would have been worth it just to see the people. Some of the things I learned were, get in on the bidding early. You never know just when something will go for a song. At the same time, exercise a little patience. If you know what you want wait for that item so you don't end up going over your budget before you get to the items that you actually wanted. Always have a budget and know what that budget is. This wasn't a problem for me, per se, but I could definitely tell when people weren't thinking about what they had to spend and they probably ended up with some computers that were overpriced and will be hard to resell.

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I apparently seem to be having some stylesheet issues with this site. I'll get that figured out tonight.

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I was curious about how many animals I could have on my property so I made a quick call down the the city office as was told that there is a point system in place used to determine the limits. There is a 100 point baseline for a 1 acre lot. The points break down like this:

• 20 pts - Houses
• 50 pts - Pigs
• 25 pts - Horses
• 25 pts - Cows
• 10 pts - Goats
• 5 pts - Small Animals^*

Using this formula, with a half acre lot, I start with 50 points for the lot and subtract 20 points for the house. Now I have 30 points to work with -- or in other words I can keep up to six chickens on my property. The combinations are nearly endless! I can even legally have 2 ½ houses! Search me to figure out what ½ a house looks like.

^* Small animals are chickens, ducks, geese, pigeons, and rabbits. Dogs and cats are apparently "domestic" so they don't fall into the point system. I would be important to note that the county does requires a kennel license for over dogs yet there are no restrictions on the number of cats you can have.

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“

It's reverse racism to vote for Sanjaya just because he's of Indian origin.

”

Now that's just silly. What in the world is that supposed to mean? With the recent brouhaha involving Don Imus and the Rutgers University Women's Basketball Team and with the final good bye to Sanjaya from American Idol, I have been hearing the term "Reverse Racism" bandied about.

Let's be frank. When I was in high school one of my best friends was a bright guy by the name of Kungu Njuguna. When we graduated from high school we both ended up at the same university for a semester. While we were there we attended a sensitivity something or other that a mutual friend of ours was putting on for one of his classes. There was a discussion period afterward in which Kungu said something poignant that I never forgot:

“

There is no such thing as reverse discrimination. There is only discrimination. Whether it happens to be white people directing it towards black people or black people directing it towards white people it is the same. Discrimination is discrimination.

”

-Kungu Njuguna

Going back to Sanjaya, why would it be reverse racism to vote for him because of his origin? Going by that logic it would be wrong to vote for an American Idol contestant because of their kinship or friendship for that person. American Idol does strive to have talent be most important. But we all know that American Idol is as much a popularity contest as it is a talent show. And that's not a bad thing. American Idol is a for profit organization. Whether the person with the best talent or the most popularity wins, American Idol still get their money.

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I just discovered that I have been tying my shoes incorrectly the past 23 years. I just bought a new pair of dress shoes and I was interested in finding some lacing styles to make them a bit dressier. In process I stumbled across this site 'Ian's Shoelace Site'. There are some interesting styles there and some great diagrams. Surfing around his site led me to this page: Tying Shoelaces.

In the two weeks since discovering this flaw I didn't even know I had I haven't had to re-tie my shoes once where I used to have to re-tie my shoes almost daily because they would become loose or completely undone.

Happy Lacing!

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I finally got Apache working.

I was having a terrible time getting the index page to display if just the domain name or any other directory name was specified in the URL. if you tried to go to http://brian.thebuckpasser.com Firefox 2.0 would just return a blank page while IE7.0 would return a very generic "something is wrong" error.

It turns out that I was too smart for myself. I figured that in order to have BlueDragon be set as the default handler for .cfm files that I would have to explicitly set it like this:

Apparently when you set the handler explicitly Apache2 dutifully dispatches the index page to BlueDragon which then just loses the request (or something, maybe it just throws it out into the ether?).

By removing the SetHandler directive from the virtual host everything just works. This also makes the additional SetHandler None directives unneeded since they were in there to counteract the effect of sending the .cfm files to BlueDragon thus I really didn't need any of the <Location> tags in the setup at all. I only wish it didn't take me so long to try it out!

-later

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This is the first post from my new server running in the basement. Its not the speediest little thing; Just an old PIII 700Mhz with 256MB of RAM but it does do quite admirably. I'll post some of the details about getting it set up in a bit.

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