So I think I decided what I want for Christmas... A Scubacraft (I saw it in Wired magazine).

It's basically a boat that you can hit a button, and it will go underwater (up to 100 feet). It would be pretty awesome to go scuba diving and instead of leaving your boat at the surface, just take it under water with you when you get to the dive site. It's not pressurized, so it's not a submarine (you would still need scuba gear of course).

It also has an onboard computer that controls your ascent and descent so you don't go to quickly and give yourself the bends.

I love you, Santa!

It seems Google has quietly raised it's limitations on how deep you can look into search results for the AJAX Search API. It's always been 4 pages (8 results per page), so you could only see the first 32 results.

All of a sudden it was changes to 8 pages (still 8 results per page), so now you can look at the first 64 results. This is quite handy.

Thanks Google, you're swell!

Someone I know uses iPhoto, but the Faces part of it wasn't working. New pictures wouldn't get scanned for faces and the spinning icon next to the Faces label on the navigation bar would just spin forever (and apparently it's always been stuck like that).

I Googled the issue, and came up with hundreds of people having the same problem, but no one seemed to figure out a solution.

After a lot of digging and poking around, I think I found the solution. She imported large folders into iPhoto from her old photo management application, and she had some movies in her photo folders. So this is how I fixed it...

• Quit iPhoto first.

• Then get into the guts of your iPhoto Library (right-click the iPhoto Library file in your Pictures folder and do "Show Package Contents").
• Go to the Originals folder in there and get your movies out of there.
• Delete the face.db and face_blob.db files.
• Load iPhoto up and it will start scanning all your faces and with any luck actually get through them all and be kosher going forward.

Warning... this will delete all your face tags you had previously (so don't do it if you tagged a bunch of people manually and don't want to lose that).

I haven't posted a random email in awhile, so here's a new one...

I'm open to suggestions on how much I should charge these guys to stay at my home... let me know.

So I'd like to put together a newscast... I want this guy to be my weatherman, and the guy from the previous blog entry needs to be my field reporter.

The more you watch this, the funnier it gets... watch it ten times. hahaha

So I found a draft post for this blog from about 3 years ago that I forgot to post (oops). Better late than never, right?

The first Monday Night Football of the season, and it's the Chargers vs. the Raiders. lol

The Chargers play the Raiders twice a year (being in the same division and all), and the Raiders haven't won since 2002. So uh... yeah... If you are a Raiders fan, good luck on Monday.

So the fruitloop that kidnapped an 11 year old girl, held her captive in his backyard shed for 18 years while she bore 2 of his children has a blog.

http://voicesrevealed.blogspot.com/

So here's the deal... Google is really good at determining relevancy of a webpage and what a webpage is about. Maybe they should modify their algorithms a bit to detect crazy people automatically.

Proof that you should have to take some sort of IQ test before having a Facebook account.

I know Alexa data isn't terribly accurate, but for sites under an Alexa rating of 500 *and* within the same market, it's pretty accurate as far as relative traffic to sites you are comparing. That being said, how long do you think before they sell it or shut it down?

Their traffic is almost cut in half from a year ago (and still dropping)...

Here's some wise words for you based on an experience I had last night. If it's 2am and you are getting ready to go to bed, maybe don't drink two Red Bull cola drinks.

Someone was telling me about them the other day and I was like, "gee, okay... I guess I'll try it to see what it's like."

Also, for the record, it's not very good. Tastes like they just mixed Red Bull and Coke 50/50.

Well actually, I'm not exactly sure how because I have Twitter followers since I don't have a Twitter account, but apparently I have have a couple Twitter accounts...

http://twitter.com/digitalpoint/ - 1,127 followers
http://twitter.com/shawnhogan/ - 63 followers

Stupid, but funny. lol

Hey look, my sister had a baby... I'm an uncle.

Okay, gonna go ahead and upgrade the Digital Point Forums to vBulletin 3.8.3... Since so many of you are freaks and are on it 24/7, I made this post to keep you up to date on what's going on (I'll update it periodically throughout the process). You can also use this blog post as the new temporary forum for all your discussion needs while I do the upgrade. hah

• 3:26 am - Reading and posting seems to work... I suppose that's good enough for now (still working on the other stuff, but don't need to force everyone off to do it).
• 3:24 am - Skimming over various areas of the forum to see if things (mostly) work. I could let you guys in before the templates are fully updated possibly.
• 3:22 am - New moderator permissions set
• 3:17 am - Static CSS files located on single server in web cluster and spread around properly (I hate this about vBulletin BTW... gimme a hook location to do it please!)
• 3:09 am - Core upgrade done.
• 3:07 am - Recoded some of the upgrade scripts so they aren't making that change to the reputation table. Will deal with issue this later instead.
• 3:00 am - Stupid reputation table was altered in 3.8.0 to not allow negative userids so it can accommodate 4 billion users instead of "only" 2 billion. Stupid. I used negative userids internally for some stuff. /thinking what to do about this...
• 2:55 am - First problem... reputation table alterations not going well. Going digging in raw database...
• 2:50 am - Running "ALTER TABLE pmtext" on DB servers. That's a big one... going to get another beer.
• 2:49 am - Up to version 3.8.0 alpha 1
• 2:43 am - It's almost 3am. If you are a cute girl reading this, please post your picture in the comments, k thanks.
• 2:41 am - I forgot we have to go through all versions to get to the newest... lol... going through 3.7.0 beta 4 at the moment.
• 2:40 am - Userlist rebuilding
• 2:36 am - Watching DB servers alter thread table for tagging support... (this is really boring)
• 2:34 am - Watching DB servers alter thread table for prefix support... /bored
• 2:30 am - New PHP files in place and synced across web server cluster
• 2:29 am - DB backup done
• 2:27 am - Thinking I might not have enough beer for this...
• 2:25 am - DB backup still running (it's huge... many, many, many gigs)
• 2:18 am - Got beer and craisens
• 2:17 am - Backing up DB
• 2:13 am - Making this post

So I've been waiting for this thing for awhile now, and it looks like Sony is finally going to be releasing it (even $400 cheaper than previously rumored). Yum, yum...

400 discs, serial control, Ethernet port for pulling meta data via Internet, etc... looks nice to me.

I gotta say, iMovie HD is really nice for hacking together quick videos with pretty decent quality. I threw together this video for a friend real quick for her company. Oh darn, I get to look at girls in bikinis while editing video. Sad day for me.

The original video I output was full 1920x1080 high def, but here's the YouTube version...

So I found myself wanting to override a few items in a sitewide CSS file, but only for a single page... Rather than make entire new CSS elements, I figured there had to be a way to override the CSS file with a <style> clause within the page itself...

Sure enough, I finally figured it out... !important...

<style type="text/css">
<!--
.overrideme div.overridemetoo {
  overflow: hidden !important;
  display: none !important;
}
-->
</style>

!important can go at the end of any style attribute and it will override anything that isn't "important".

...well at least I assume so. I can't imagine he would turn me down.

Dave, you have a Shawn Hogan category on your blog... marry me? <3 We can frolic in a sea of code and whatnot.

http://www.dellanave.com/blog/

If I have a pool party in San Diego, will you come?

Okay, so I decided not to blog for 2+ years to see if the spam blocker thing I made would work, and sure enough it did... After 2+ years, not a single spam comment got through... I'd say that was pretty good, eh?

On a better note, I have 2 years of life to write about now... stay tuned...

...so as I'm going through the {cough, cough} 2+ years of comments I never got around to moderating on this blog, I came across one that is freaking me out.

http://www.shawnhogan.com/2006/11/vampire-bite.html#comment-33317

Dr. Finch seems to think I have some gnarley spider bite that needs immediate doctor attention and my life is in danger.

I think he missed this part about this post... lol

Thank God is all I have to say... if it were otherwise, I might be the first person to die from not moderating their blog comments fast enough.

/sbin/reboot -q

I just now turned 1,000,000,000 seconds old. Happy birthday to me!!!!

<?php
	echo time() - strtotime ('Sept 1, 1975 10:17:00 PST');
?>

How about a 96 square foot house?

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2007/04/27/carollloyd.DTL

The comment spam on my blog here was getting to the point of just being silly... around 4,000 spam comments per day (breaks down to about one every 15 seconds 24/7).

I decided to try and do something about it so I don't have to weed through them manually (the time consumption on this task is one of the biggest reasons I don't post as often as I used to).

So let's see how it works... if you see me posting more often, then you know it worked.

The San Diego Padres won their season opener against San Fransisco 7-0. Let's just put that in perspective for a moment. That puts the Padres on track to go 162-0 (undefeated the entire season, which no team has ever come remotely close to doing). It also puts them on track to outscore opponents 1,134-0. The Yankees last year went 97-65 last year, and outscored opponents 930-767 for the season.

Craziness I say...

I don't recall how I came across this image, but I was rather surprised to see it randomly (considering it's me)...

Some sort of heat map where people look at an image, and decide what's the most interesting part of it by clicking somewhere on it...

So people thought my face was interesting I guess... either that or they knew their click would register a red dot and were just trying to cover my face up.

The original image was taken from this blog (over here).

This is one of the funniest skits I've seen on MadTV in awhile...

People crack me up sometimes... Some dude from Iran figured out how to make infinite free energy, and all he needs from me is $1,000/month or else he will close my AdSense account...

Bahahahahahaha... stupid dumb ass. man, that fire hydrant goes flying.

Want to see some crazy stuff? In some areas of the world, you can zoom in to an absurd level. Pretty close to being able to actually identify an individual.

Let's take this scene for example... some people in Africa with their herd of camels and cows, gathered around a well. I mean come on... you can see footprints, and some dude who must have known his picture was being taken, because he's looking right at the camera.

Almost looks fake huh? Well you can see it for yourself here:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f...m=1&iwloc=addr

So like maybe Google could use some of their satellites and computing power to find Osama bin Laden and collect whatever huge reward there is for him... just a suggestion for anyone listening...

One reason I haven't been writing on my blog is that I just haven't had the free time to sit around and look for cool/interesting things all day (ahhh... the good old days when I had nothing to do... hah)

I've been trying to keep up with comment moderation on the blog (doing it once every few days), but check this screenshot out of what I just finished.

That was about an hour of my life wasted with comment spam moderation... fun!!!

So there was that astronaut chick a couple days ago that tried to murder and kidnap someone, and I guess I missed this part the other day, but it makes the whole thing a whole lot funnier.

This is what happens when you piss off a customer who happens to be an engineer.

This is a rather good idea for something to do when a telemarketer calls you.