Sorry to all, if you have been trying to add posts / comments to this site. I have had such an issue with content spammers, that I installed a captcha program for wordpress. Captcha is an acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”. It is that graphic you see on sites like Ticketmaster or below this comment that is an image with words in it. What it does is stop automated programs from trying to write or add spam to your comments. I was getting about 20 spam comments a day, most for online poker. I finally decided to go with a plugin for wordpress called authimage. So far it has been a great little plugin, when I have had it working. When I upgraded to wordpress 1.5 the plugin stopped working, as did my theme. But, that is for some later discussion.
No more spam for me.

I was driving from Holland, MI to Grand Rapids, MI yesterday and started realizing the number of towers along the highway. For some reason I started to count the number I saw from I196. Heading East twards grand rapids, I counted 17 towers. Of the 17 I think that at least 15 were cell phone towers. This got me thinking of what the regulations were on towers, and also what kind of frequency (number of) towers are needed for good cell phone coverage. Were all 17 towers used for Nextel, or cingular or any other carrier?

I have not done much research on this, but it did get my mind wandering. So I did a quick google for cell tower placement. What I found was a cool tool that lets you find all the tower locations. I am not sure what good this information is but you can check out the tool here (http://www.berkana.com/tower.php3).

I have been a huge gmail fan since I got my first account. Now that gmail is up to 2 gigs of space how can you resist. I have been thinking of ways to utilize my gmail account other than an aggregator for thoughts, files, and other email accounts. I finally decided to try and use the system for email relaying. I have posted earlier my gadget setup, but I had not found a great way to get company email. Now, by utilizing my gmail account, I am able to pickup my email via wap, on my cell phone.

To do this I found two systems that would possibly work. One is a hosted service called
Gmail Wireless - http://www.gmailwireless.com/. The other is an application called
Gmail-mobile - http://sourceforge.net/projects/gmail-mobile/.

The first, Gmail Wireless is a site that you enter in your Gmail info and then access that site for your mail and information. The one thing I did not like about this solution, is that you have to enter your information into an unknown system. Not that I don’t trust the gmailwireless.com group, it is just I did not like that idea.

I finally decided to use the second option, Gmail-mobile. Gmail-mobile is a php application, that you install on your server with libgmail - http://libgmail.sourceforge.net/.

You can access it here http://www.jimiz.net/gmail. I can now forward email from the office to my gmail account and access via this wap enabled link. I did have this all wrapped in an ssl, but there seem to be issues with ssl and some versions of wap.

During my searching I found a few other interesting gmail links.

GMAIL API - http://johnvey.com/features/gmailapi/
Gmail-Lite - http://gmail-lite.sourceforge.net/

I am currently reading Touching the Void A great Book about 2 climbers facing danger and the great outdoors. It is Joe Simpson’s account of a near-death experience in the Peruvian Andes.

I will update you on the status of this book later on.

Follow up entry on my experience on riding public transportation. On my second day riding the bus I was up to speed on how to figure out the schedule, pay and get a ticket, how to inform the driver I want to get off, and where to sit. Even with all this knowledge the second day was still very interesting. I started to realize there is some type of stigma that follows people who ride the bus. As I looked around at the people on the bus with me I realized that they are just normal people. In my mind I figured that people who rode the bus were just down and out. But that is not true at all. So far I have seen some of the same people on the bus, I am starting to enjoy this bus thing. These people are construction workers, nurses, and students. I did notice a large number of students taking the bus to school. These are the kids with the headphones on.

As I was waiting for the bus to pick me up, I started to realize the strange perception that people have when riding the bus. I had mixed emotions. On one hand I was really excited to try a new experience and use our mass transit system. I was also excited to only pay 1.30 to get to work and save on gas. I started to get the feeling that I was in a big city and just commuting. On the other hand, as I was waiting for the bus, I realized that all the people that I may know on this side of town and the people who we go to church with would be seeing me waiting for the bus. I started to wonder what they would think. Why is jim riding the bus? are they having money issues? Do they not have a car? etc…? All these things were going through my head, it was the strange sensation that riding the bus was not cool. Or that riding the bus was some type of underclass means of transportation. I could not shake this thought, why would we see mass transportation that is cheap, reliable, cost effective, and good for the environment as lower class.

Well enough babble. I have to say I am enjoying riding the bus. I have not missed the Car so far.

Last week I had some service done to my car. I decided it was time to take on the task of riding the bus (City bus). I knew that my car would not be available for 3 days so that ment I had three days to ride the bus. So on Sunday night I googled for the Grand Rapids, michigan bussing system (www.ridetherapid.org) After 45 min of trying to figure out where to get on the bus and what time. I decided I was ready Monday to ride public transportation.

When Monday morning arrived, I had my $1.30 in hand and was ready for the bus at the nearest stop to my house. I live about 200 yards away from a bus stop. Not that I could tell from the web site or the schedule on the web site (we will get to that later). When the bus finally stopped in front of me and I got on. I had to fingure out how to pay. So I dropped my money in the machine and coin slot and took my seat. I then watched the next person get on and when they put in their money they took a ticket. It was at that point I realized that I had made a mistake and did not / or forgot to take a ticket. I was hoping this was not an issue. I then had a chance to watch people as they got on the bus. I knew from the bus schedule on line (if that is what you can call it) that the bus made a stop close to downtown, infact near where I would park my car if I were driving. However, when on the bus, no one got off they kept riding, so I did not know the procedure to get off. And the bus kept going past the stop I thought I would get off at. So at this point we are getting on the highway and heading way from downtown where I work. Not knowing what was the next stop I just decided to ride it out. So we eventually came to the bus depot and I was remembering that this bus (route 7) did go back downtown. However, everyone got off the buss at this time. I did not know if this bus I was on would actually still stay on route 7 or go to another route. So I decided to just walk from there, since it was not too far from the office.

My first day of riding the bus was an adventure. I was able to get from my front door to my office in 20 min. That’s with going to the incorrect stop and also being early to the bus stop. I will write more later on my experience.

I love to see people using technology. I recently read an article in the New York Press about podcasting. I love the fact that the press would actually acknoledge some new type of media such as pod casting to it’s readers. I have also had a lot of discussion at work regarding RSS and Blogs (web logs for those who are confused)

It is great to see new technologies and ideas start to be used at the work place and for other individuals than us geeks.

One of the developers I work with has just launched his new blog. You can read it here (www.merhl.com/webdevblog)
Joe is a Macromedia developer who can write wicked code for Flex, flash, and other macromedia products.

I noticed his blog had the same issue with FireFox. The style sheets (css) will need to have the rendering code added, < ? Header ("Content-type: text/css");?>