A Small Something

It might look like I’ve given up on this blog, but actually I’ve just been caught up in life. And life has been good. My work is interesting and challenging, my kids are happy and healthy and smart, and my wife is awesome. So, no news is good news, right?

I think another reason I haven’t been updating the blog is because I’ve gotten kind of caught up in the social networking trend, which tends to emphasise short, concise, individualized connections with people, rather than the way I’ve typically used this blog in the past.

But I’m not giving up on it! Watch for updates shortly. And if you can’t wait to get your fix of the Trottiers (ha!), look us up on Facebook.

Work has been very busy lately. I’m trying to do three projects at once. All of them have people urgently clamoring for results. Pretty hectic.

I’ve been working with Jonathan on a science fair project since November. It’s finally done. If you get a chance, ask Jonathan to tell you about estimating travel time for a rescue helicopter and about mapping flight paths in Google Earth. He also learned quite a bit about the Global Positioning System (GPS) and about how latitude and longitude coordinates can be used to identify any point on the Earth. I helped him to write a program in Java for his project.
Jonathan also went on a winter campout last weekend. He managed to survive it, and even seems to have enjoyed it.

Last night Jonathan, David, Rachel, and I went to see Over The Hedge. It’s a pretty cute family film. We all had a good time although it cost the four of us over $45 after you factor in soda and popcorn. Still, every evening I can spend with my kids is a nice evening.

Sarah seems to be having a great time in Guatemala. She is answering email there whenever she can make it to an internet cafe, so drop her a line.

In my last post I mentioned I’m considering a digital SLR camera and a zoom or telephoto lens. After reviewing what money can buy and how useful it is for nature photography, I’ve revised my wishlist to a regular point-and-shoot digital camera (probably something in the Nikon Coolpix line) and a good spotting scope. People who have both are now routinely coupling them using mounting sleaves or brackets to take pretty stunning pictures for much less money than a similar DSLR setup. It’s called digiscoping. Although it will still be expensive, I’m planning on buying the necessary components over time. It’s something I know I’d enjoy for the rest of my life.

Tuesday I identified two of the wading birds we’ve seen this spring over in the farmer’s pond. One is a Snowy Egret, and the other is a Black-necked Stilt. Birds have cool names.

Last weekend Jonathan, David, and I went to a Father and Sons Outing™ at the Heber Camp™ owned by The Church™. We survived and possibly even had some fun. I spent some time talking with my friend Mark who, sadly, lost his wife in an automobile accident a couple years ago. He and his children seem to be doing quite well in spite of what life has thrown at them.

The next morning Jonathan, David and I had some fun with a frisbee and had breakfast before heading back to the valley. That evening, Rachel and I met my Dad and Leslie in Salt Lake for dinner.

Thusday I went with Jonathan to an overnight camp for the sixth grade at Maple Dell. We went canoeing and did some other activities. Friday David and I went to Take Your Son To Work Day at Novell. Sarah left Friday morning for a trip to Guatamala with her school group. One of the teachers on the trip is keeping a travel blog here.

Jonathan and David spent the weekend with me and Rachel. We started making a model rocket that we’re going to launch in a couple of weeks. We also had a nice time at a restaurant last night.

On the health front, Rachel fell down at work a couple of days ago and got scraped and bruised pretty good. My back has been hurting quite a bit this month–symptoms of the car accident in December. I’ve been to the doctor a couple of times, and got some X-rays. The last couple of days the pain has been in my neck. I’m hoping the flare-ups are a sign that it’s healing. Now that the weather is nice, I’ve been walking around the neighborhood more in the evenings.

Rachel and I have really enjoyed seeing all of the wildlife in the wetland area behind our home this spring. We have consistently viewed muskrats, pheasants, a crane, killdeer, and of course ducks and ducklings as well as a lot of other birds I haven’t identified. Seeing all of those birds has sparked an interest in birding. I just ordered a couple of field guide bird books and am contemplating getting a good digital SLR camera with a zoom lens so I can capture some of the birds I see.

I bought a brand new car! It’s my first time buying a new one and my first car puchase in ten years. What’d I get? A Toyota Prius. Yep, one of those hybrid thingamabobs. It’s sweet!

Before anyone accuses me of being a radical environmentalist (actually, they already have) let me just point out that I am a nerd and that this car is crammed full of electronics and gadgetry. Not to mention probably the coolest method ever invented for converting potential energy into kinetic energy and back again. Someday all cars will do this, but in the meantime I’m enjoying mine a lot.

Ten minutes from now you could be browsing the Web without banner ads, sidebar ads, or pop-up ads fighting for your attention. While there are quite a few methods of achieving this goal, I have my opinion of the best way. I have kept up to date on the various technologies for doing this, and as of April 2005 here is what I recommend.

Step 1: If you haven’t already, download and install Mozilla Firefox. This will be your new web browser. Believe me, after you have completed these steps and get used to it, you won’t miss Internet Explorer. When you run the installer, just go with all of the default choices.

Step 2: Download and install Privoxy. This is a program that will act as a filter between Firefox and the rest of the Web, preventing ads from even being downloaded to your computer and making your browsing faster. Again, during the install just go with the default choices.

Step 3: Configure Firefox to use Privoxy. From within Firefox, choose the “Tools” menu and select “Options”. From the “General” tab select “Connection Settings”. Select “Manual proxy configuration” and type 127.0.0.1 next to both “HTTP Proxy” and “SSL Proxy”. The port for both of these is 8118. Basically, just make your connection settings look like the following picture, then click “OK”.

Step 4 (optional): This step does nothing to block ads, but you may want to do it anyway for convenience. One of the things Privoxy will do, besides blocking ads, is block cookies. Actually, Privoxy’s default behavior is not to outright block cookies, but to turn them into “session only” cookies. That means that the cookies a web site sets will be used as long as Firefox is running, but when you quit Firefox the cookies from that session will be deleted. The reason that is inconvenient is that some of the web sites you visit keep your login information in a cookie so you don’t have to login each time you visit the site. If you don’t mind entering your login information every time, you can skip this step. Okay, to configure Privoxy to allow cookies as normal, type “config.privoxy.org” into your browser. When that page loads, click on “View & change the current configuration”. Click the edit button next to “.default.action”. Scroll down to “session-cookies-only” and click on the disable button. Then click “Submit”.

Step 5: Install the Flashblock extension for Firefox. A lot of advertising on web pages is presented to you within browser plugins from Macromedia. Provoxy won’t stop that kind of ad, but this extension will. Unfortunately, it will also stop all other Flash-based content, and some of it you’ll want. But Flashblock makes it easy to play Flash content you really want–just click the play button that you’ll see where the content should be. If there are web sites that you regularly visit that use flash content, you can add those sites to the “whitelist” so that Flashblock will always allow that content. To access the whitelist, go to the Tools menu and choose “Extensions” then click on “Flashblock” and click the “Options” button.

That’s it! You’re pretty much done. Just a couple of other things to cover. The combination of Privoxy and Flashblock will stop most graphical ads from appearing on your computer, but Firefox has a feature that will allow you to block ads that make it through so you won’t see them again in the future. There’s not a lot you can do about text-based ads, but if you see a graphical ad you can right-click on it and choose “Block images from….” If the host it wants to block says something like “ad.someadsite.com” then go for it. The only time you don’t want to do this is if the ad is being served from the same server as the other page content. So, for example, if you are reading news at www.cnn.com and when you right-click on an ad it says “Block images from www.cnn.com” you probably don’t want to do it or you won’t see any pictures with your news.

Just a little more about Firefox extensions. You already installed Flashblock, but there are a couple other extensions you might want to install. For example, there is an extension called SwitchProxy that makes it easy to switch between your Privoxy configuration and no proxy at all. This might be helpful if, for example, you suspect that a problem you are having accessing a web page has something to do with Privoxy. A simple click and you can try it again without Privoxy. Other useful extensions include SpellBound (a spelling checker) and Tabbrowser Preferences which allows you set new links to open in a new tab in your same browser window, rather than in a separate window. Tabs are pretty convenient when you get used to them.

That’s it. Enjoy!

Rachel and I are going to eat a little bit of free ice cream tonight over at Baskin-Robbins. You can too if you already have a Yahoo email account, or are willing to go through a free registration process. It’s the way Yahoo is celebrating their tenth birthday.

How many of you were using the Internet before there was a world-wide-web? (Steve raises his hand.) Usenet was pretty popular back then, as was email. There was also something called Gopher which died quickly when the WWW came along because it did the same thing as Gopher but better. Do you remember the WWW before there was a Yahoo to index all of those web pages? It was a good idea. It seemed obvious at the time, but still, those two Stanford students were the first to do it.

And now they’re giving us ice cream.

Several months ago I began to notice that a certain large green semi-truck was often parked across the street from my house. The driver of the truck, who must live in the neighborhood somewhere, continues to park there to this day when he’s not on the road. The truck itself don’t bother me much, so long as it sits there quietly. The problem is when he starts the engine at 6:00 AM and lets it idle to warm up, or when the refrigerated trailer kicks in to keep the load cool in the summer. The sound really carries right into the house and disturbs whoever is at home at the time.

I’ve never met the driver and don’t know where he lives, so I found a copy of the Provo city code to see what it said about trucks that large being parked in a residential neighborhood. The limit is two hours. There are also limits on the amount of noise that can be made. So, one day when the truck was parked there I called the police. They sent a parking enforcement guy out who marked the tires and then came back two hours later and wrote a ticket. I talked to the parking guy and he said he’d come by regularly and leave tickets as long as it took for the guy to stop parking there.

One night earlier this week, around ten o’clock, Rachel noticed the guy parking his truck there again. I called the police again and they didn’t have anyone doing parking enforcement, but said they’d send an officer to issue a citation. I don’t know what happened, because I went to bed. The next morning the engine and the revving woke me up.

This morning I put a cheap webcam that I already had onto the computer by the window and pointed it out to the street. Now I can check all day long what’s parked out there if I want. And I can make a photographic record. Ain’t technology grand? The photo below should be a live image of the street outside my house right now.

The quality is crappy, but it doesn’t need to be good for this purpose. So, if you see the truck there then I haven’t been successful yet. If it’s not there, I’m winning!

Note: (March 31, 2005) I was having problems with the webcam, so I turned it off, but the good news is NO MORE TRUCKS. At least for the last five weeks or so it’s been very peaceful.