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I tried to print a page from one website, an IBM developer article I think, and, no matter how I shrunk it, part or all of some of the words in the right margin were cut off. This was in Firefox. I tried IE —same result. Since Opera is now free and I had recently installed it, I tried this browser. Success, all the paragraphs were displayed, however, I should have “print previewed” the whole document as Opera gave me 10 extra neatly numbered, URL titled, marked and dated blank pages!

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Questions:

1. What is a computer sock?
2. Do ladies want to be sliminized?
3. If I already have an embolism would I be interested in socks?

Dear Sir/Madam,

FIRST OF ALL,PLEASE KINDLY NOTE THIS E-MAIL IS SENT BY
OUR "ADVERTISING COMPANY" AND THE E-MAIL ADDRESS 
THEY USE IS NOT "REAL" ,THEREFORE,PLEASE CONTACT US
VIA "FAX"  OR "POST".DON'T DIRECTLY RESPONSE VIA " E-MAIL"
BECAUSE WE CAN'T RECEIVE YOUR E-MAIL.
IF YOU WANT TO BE REMOVED FROM THE LIST,PLEASE ADVISE
YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS & THIS E-MAIL CONTENT OR SUBJECT VIA "FAX" OR "POST".

We are the professional manufacturer in Taiwan & China of 

* Socks(especially computer socks)
* Stockings
* Fishnet & Fencenet stockings & pantyhoses(tights)
* Compression hosiery(medical grade for varicose vein & embolism) 
* Flight socks(wearing for long-distance travel on the airplane to avoid 
embolism &
  decrease fatigue)
* FIR(Far Infrared Ray)products such as
   ankle/knee/wrist/elbow supports to prevent from injury and
   decrease pain and
   ladies' shaping girdle to sliminize the belly to obtain a beatiful
   style.
* Custom(Tailor)-Made(make according to your design/sample)
   ladies' lingerie/underwear.
   Men's & children underwear are also available for custom-made.
* Cutom(Tailor)-Made apparel/garment
* Cutsom(Tailor)-Made ANY textile product.

YOUR LABEL/BRAND IS WELCOME AND 
SMALL ORDER IS OK,PLEASE CONTACT US TO SAVE YOUR COST!

Thank you

Best Regards
Cherng
No.418,Ming-Sern Rd.,Sher-Tou(511),Changhwa Hsien,Taiwan.
Fax: 886-4-8875866 (886 is the country code)


Fax:886-4-8876126 (886 is the country code)

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Hmmm, this blog isn’t so regular anymore. Could it be the hour or so I walk the dog each evening? Probably. Then there’s choir manager things to do. Oh yes, and the washing machine drive belt broke on Friday evening when after it had been filled with clothes and water. My son wasn’t amused.

On Sunday I syphoned and sponged out the water and took a look underneath. I puzzled out the route of the belt, taped it together even in order to experiment on how I would put in a new one. It sure looked to me like I would need to lower the pump and agitator drive assembly and disconnect the agitator shaft. Unfortunately this suspicion was confirmed when I looked it up on the Internet. This “routine” repair would probably take several hours. My wife decided for me: the machine is at least 23 years old and not worth fixing. So, now I have started looking at new washing machines and we’ll be visiting the local laundromat in the mean time.

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1. Leave before 8 a.m. to pick up coffee, drop off wife and dog on the way to parking lot where Peel Region was having a HHW and recycling day. Parking lot was only a short walk from the leash-free park.
2. Got rid of half a dozen almost-full, rusty cans of paint my son “inherited” from the previous owner when he moved in. Also recycled an old 16 MHz computer, a keyboard, 2 computer power supplies and an A/C motor/compressor control.
3. Dropped dog off at house and then went to choir practise in the east end of Toronto.
4. Drive back to Mississauga to pick up my tux. Met son picking up the dog. Dog didn’t miss us at all since my son’s dog was already in the car.
5. Drive to London to rehearse with the FOICS choir. Arrive about 1.5 hours late but the conductor already new that. He was glad I came. Now there were six basses to balance about a dozen tenors and perhaps 50 altos and sopranos!
6. We sang an all Mozart program including the Requiem and Ave Verum.
7. Drive back to Guelph to pick up dog. Drive son and friend to party on the way home.
8. Get home about midnight. Very tired.
9. Very hoarse voice on Sunday and part of this morning.

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I wrote a script to format “per channel, hourly” statuses into an Excel spreadsheet and an html table using variously coloured boxes to show the status (good, fair, poor, no data, etc). It was easy enough to date the “past week” files with the current day-date in the file name. However, after a couple of months, there are a number of these daily files, each with 6 days worth of redundant data. Yesterday I wrote a small function to return the timestamp of the Saturday for the current week’s data. Now I will have only one weekly spreadsheet and html file per week showing that week’s status.

The Perl function is quite short:

# Index of date numbers returned by localtime.
%DATE_INDEX = (isdst => 8, yearday => 7, weekday => 6, 
               year => 5, month => 4, day => 3, 
               hours => 2, minutes => 1, seconds =>0) ;
$_ONE_HOUR = 60*60 ; # seconds/hour
$_ONE_DAY = 24 * $_ONE_HOUR ; # seconds/day
# ...
sub week_ending_time ($) {
  # Given a serial time find the time on the next Saturday.
  my $time = shift || time ;

  # Add number of days until next Saturday.
  $time + (6 - (gmtime($time))[$DATE_INDEX{weekday}])*$_ONE_DAY ;
}

I also wrote a PostgreSQL function equivalent:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION week_ending_date("timestamp")
  RETURNS "timestamp" AS
$BODY$select date_trunc('day', $1) + (6-(date_part('dow', $1)) || ' days')::interval
$BODY$
  LANGUAGE 'sql' VOLATILE;

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I was quite sleepy this morning. I walked to the post office at lunchtime and, just as I was crossing the parking lot, a woman walked by with a Tim Hortons cup of coffee. Well, since it was kind of muggy today, I thought I would take a little detour on the way back to work and pick up and Iced Cappucino. Thanks Lady, for the great idea!

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• On Monday after the Bell’Arte Singers board meeting, I watched a self-erasing video preview of a sitcom called Dads for this market research survey. The show wasn’t very good. Of course I haven’t watched American-style sitcoms since I was a teenager. I prefer the British comedies where I would put Fawlty Towers at the top of the list. Anyway the followup phone call asked me about the commercials I saw during this preview. The emphasis was on the commercial for “ground beef assistant,” an ad I don’t even remember watching. Basically, I panned the show and didn’t remember the “most important” commercial.
• The Oakville Choral Society started its rehearsals last night. I’ll have to talk to the director as I can’t attend and sing at either Christmas concert this year as it conflicts with the Bell’Arte Singers gig.
• I had made a couple of changes to the Postgresql database functions and was surprised that the scripts took so long to execute. One optimization was to move a couple of sub-selects out of the loop. This made the select loop about 10 times faster. Today I found the other slow part was a Perl sub being called in my script but, because the –debug switch wasn’t set, nothing was being printed. However, a large hash of hashes was being built and consuming memory and several minutes(!) of CPU time. I rewrote the sub call so it definitely wouldn’t be used unless I turned on debugging.

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The World’s Shortest Fairy Tale
sscherme(at)adelphia.net (Skid/Jos)
W1TTY/W1UVN
(chuckle, sexual stereotypes, forwarded, heard it)

Once upon a time, a guy asked a girl “Will you marry me?”

The girl said, “NO!”

And the guy lived happily ever after and went fishing, hunting and played golf a lot and drank beer and farted whenever he wanted.

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Perhaps it’s the adjustment from vacation to work or that I’m taking antihistamines for ragweed causing less restful sleep or the dog barking at 4 a.m last night. Though it has been a four day week I feel like it has been six.

I was pretty sleepy yesterday afternoon at work. One of the guys on the canoe trip says it is embarrassing enough to fall asleep at work. It is especially so when you wake up and find there’s a polaroid picture of you snoozing sitting in front of you!

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This run was “calibrated” in that a couple of weeks ago I set the trip odometer on the car and found that from my place to the QEW overpass over Erin Mills Parkway is about 5km. Since traffic was light on this Labour Day Monday I ran the route—normally it would be too noisy. Even with a walk in the middle while I drank some water and stopping for a couple of lights I managed to achieve a better time by about 3 minutes than my usual “hill, dale and trail” route. So, now I’m satisfied that the more interesting route I run is probably over 10km.

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This Labour Day long weekend, at the end of my August vacation (except for being called in 5 days to work!), I wanted to clean up the garage. There are pieces of drywall and birch veneer particle board, for example, that have been moved (and re-moved) from my first house where my oldest son was born. I think that after 25 years, most of this stuff has got to go. That drywall was used to repair a wall in my older son’s nursery and the birch veneer particle board was used for kitchen cabinets in our first house. I’m not sure why I moved three 4' x 8' x 1½”sheets of styrofoam insulation from the last house or why I bought it in the first place. Anyway, I’ve cut it up to put out for recycling and and generated lots of bits of styrofoam chips to sweep up. Through experimentation, I found a hand saw works best. The serrated knife generated too many styrofoam bits and required more effort.

Tomorrow I’ll use my table saw or chop saw to cut the scraps of wood to length to bundle up for the garbage.

No pictures because a) I forgot to take one “before” and b) unless you were the one trying to find something in the junk, the picture wouldn’t tell the story.