peanuts don't kill people, people kill people.

Girl with peanut allergy dies after kiss

SAGUENAY, Quebec (AP) -- A 15-year-old girl with a peanut allergy
died after kissing her boyfriend, who had just eaten a peanut butter
snack, hospital officials said Monday.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/conditions/11/28/kiss.death.ap/index.html

the chairman reminds you all to be careful about who you make out with.

changes

my girlfriend moved to another country today. yes, a few other girlfriends have done this already. no, i don't want to talk about it.

my parents are sleeping in my bed. they were thoughtful enough to open up the camping/hammock/cot/whatever that gives me horrible back pain. i can't sleep, so i'm finding enriching material online. here's some wonderful things i've come across:

- i've quickly fallen in love with a new shoe company. keen footwear is a new favorite. i'm sure i'll be getting a pair of their 'blvd' line. hybrid shoes. i'm a fan.

- there are these mysterious urinals in the new building at my old highschool. there's no flush. "no flush?" you ask. no. no flush. you just walk away. there's no closure. i'm not sure how i feel about it. and how do they work? do you wash them down everyday? or is it coated with some kind of special space-aged polymer? what are your secrets, mystical urinal of wonder?! from this slashdot article:

Amazingly simple, the no-flush urinal uses gravity to force urine through a filter containing a floating layer of oily liquid which then acts as a sealant to prevent sewer odors from escaping. Each no-flush urinal is claimed to save over 24,000 gallons of water a year...

- mr miyagi died. depressing stuff, no? at least we have his wisdom:

sand-u floor: left-u, right. smack-u bitch: up-u, down.

- a lot of stuff on global warming. there's a new study that presents data that says we (humans) ARE making it worse. i did some searches on global warming, and the results made me sick. all these horrible sites that tell you that global warming isn't happening. that even if the Earth warmed, it'd be good; it would increase rain and bring much-needed water to drought-ravaged parts of the planet. they even cite mit phd's who allegedly support this quackery.

i went to mit. i studied environmental engineering. i might not know as much about global climate change as the eaps (Earth, air, and planetary science) people, but i clearly remember all of my professors talking about global warming being real. we need to do all we can to make our footprint on this world much smaller than it is.

anyway, i have way more to say about that, so i'll keep it for another post.

maybe i'll try to get back to sleep.

new banners

new banners are up. same randomized rendering. some fun ones from spain (the windmills are a favorite), a few from my home, and another from tahiti. i was planning on using CSS to superimpose the text on top of the images, but i got too lazy to figure it out. so i photoshopped the text into the image. following directions flung about for a while now, i'm working it 'quick and dirty.'

shark encounter

hey guys, i forgot to blog about the 'shark encounter' trip julie took us on last weekend, nov 13. i'll write more about it later.

here's the synopsis:

leave from haleiwa harbor, get boated out a mile or so from shore. one crazy guy chums up the water and gets a bunch of (~30) sharks swimming around the boat. most were the not-so-aggressive types of sharks, but we did run into two tiger sharks. it looked like this, only not stuffed. and a bit more menacing:

there were 10 people, and they put groups of 4 us in the shark cage for 20 minutes each. the top of the cage floated a foot above the water, and the cage went 6-8 feet deep. it was pretty much like what you see on the discovery channel, except we were on the surface (i've seen some shark shows where they're scuba diving in the cage), and we were all just in shorts with our snorkles.

you could pretty easily stick your arms out of the cage to have them get bitten by the sharks, but no one on our trip chose to do that, which was nice. the sharks would occasionally bump our cage and swim by for a quick nibble on the bars, but you felt pretty safe in the cage the whole time.

while we got the trip comp'ed, julie said it probably runs ~$100 per person for the 3-hour tour. and from my trip out there, i'd gladly pay that. i've already added it to the to-do list for when friends come to visit. so, come visit! and bring an extra $200 so we can both go see sharks again.

*i was going to have underwater video of the sharks. it would have been awesome. i checked the camera and batteries and housing and everything the night before. when i tried to turn on the camera on the boat, it didn't work. something went wrong. some mystical force didn't want me to take video, wanted me to just take in the experience. or something spiritual like that. either way, no pics, no video. it's almost like it didn't happen.

smartest man ever

guess what, america? everything worked. the crontab jobs worked, and the web update link works. i am the smartest man ever, and i'm on to the next project. it'll be one of my web sites that will take over the world. wait for it. wait...for...it...

stats!

so for one of my projects, i need to track traffic and stats. what better way to learn it than by setting up traffic and stat analysis on chairmanlau? there is none.

but the win for chairmanlau the blog is a loss for chairmanlau the ego. traffic is low, guys. yes, it's just a blog, so i'm ok with low traffic. but when i see that there were only 11 (eleven) unique visitors in sept, well, i get kind of discouraged.

anyway, here's a quick peek at what i'm talking about:

here's what i did:

setting up AWStats on your 1and1-hosted site

1. since i have 1and1 for hosting, and i wanted to go with AWStats, i followed the exact instructions on this page:
http://thegeekside.dnsalias.org/awstats/index.html. It's a really awesome walkthrough.

2. then i wanted to show some friends the stuff, but didn't want to hand out my username:password to them. (i like them, but not THAT much). so i (following steps from here: http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess.shtml:

2a. created a htpasswd file:

let's say my username was "raul" and my password was "kicksass". my htpasswd file would be:

what the hell is this "Mlzeme7sjjQoo" bullshit, you ask? well, it's encrypted using this "handy-dandy tool" at http://www.tools.dynamicdrive.com/password/

2b. edit your .htaccess file: the important changes are:
- changing the location of the htpasswd file it's looking at (AuthUserFile)
- changing the user (require valid-user). this is so it will allow any users defined in that htpasswd file, though i only had one.
* you can actually just use that "handy-dandy tool" to make it. so yeah, just that.

2c. the only part of this that kinda screwed me up was the encryption part. the "Comprehensive guide to .htaccess" didn't really explain that i needed to put an encrypted password in the htpasswd file.

ok! that's it. now my stuff is secured and i can tell people a password (or even make up new ones!) to let people see the stats. or, i could probably use these new skills to create new passwords to stuff.

**also, this is probably only gonna work on Apache. and with AWstats. and if you're dashingly handsome. like me.

i still don't have it perfectly working. everything's ok for now, but i don't know if the cron tasks will automatically run like they're supposed to. and i still get this error when i try to use the "update now" link on the main awstats page. i get this error:

blah. any ideas? might this error disappear as we go along? or is there something weird with the "pipe"? i've found a few pages related to this, but none of them really solved the problem for me. any ideas?

update!

i figured out the problem with the web-updating. in the instructions i pointed to, there's this one very overlookable section that says:

i think the "not" should have been allcaps'ed. or bolded. or something.

anyway, now the web-update works.

and i found a problem with the crontab file - i was missing a carriage return. stupid vim text editor... so after 4:30am tomorrow, we'll see if the scheduled updates work. (crossing fingers)

something to see

spain pics are still a way off. we took close to 1000 pics. ugh. i'm working on it. keep your pants on.

off the topic of spain:

i came across this and just put it on my list of things i want to go to.

iceland's blue lagoon

Though the lagoon looks like something born from Iceland’s otherworldly landscape, it is actually man made. It was created by run-off from the Svartsengi power plant, which pumps up the geothermally heated water from a full mile below the surface. After being used to generate both heat and electricity, the excess (which is absolutely clean) is ejected into the lagoon.

podcast on engineering

so i just listened to this bbc news podcast on engineering.

the speaker discussed the decline of the status of engineers. businessmen and dealmakers have more respect and power than engineers. engineers have come to represent the people who just do things, not come up with ideas or formulate solutions to complex problems. when elementary-school children are given the task of drawing an engineer, they typically draft an image of a man in overalls, pulling the whistle on a locomotive, showcasing people's lack of understanding of what engineers actually do.

the emphasis was similar to other initiatives i've heard before: putting effort toward attracting students to study engineering. more engineers, they believe, will create a better world. i don't believe it's that simple.

the really interesting part of the discussion came when they brought up companies actually doing great things for the planet. climate change capital is a UK company that aims to "make financial sense of climate change." and while i'm not sure if they are interested in helping prevent climate change, or simply profitting from it, it sounds cool that they're a company that's focused solely on it.

ARUP is an international company that seems to do cutting-edge engineering projects. a project of note is the world's first sustainable city, being built on the YangTse river, near shanghai, in china. they're planning innovative ways to support their own power grid and apparently have their own water supply.

solar century is a UK company with the vision of making solar energy-harnessing products commonplace as a building material. solar roofing tiles, and outdoor wall panels that are straightforward to install are the first step to making solar something for everyone, not just the wealthy earth-conscious of us. they postulate that if every structure's south-facing wall (in the UK) was covered with solar panels, the amount of energy harnessed would surpass the UK's energy usage.

the discussion focused on the idea that revolutionary engineering ideas come with the possibility of effecting changes of "factors of 5 or 10", and not simply "stream-lining" processes. real change by empowering those who can make changes.

i'm not sure i fell in love with engineers from this podcast alone, but i am sending my beefed-up resume to the companies. revolutionizing the construction industry to make solar power pervasive seems like a vision i could get excited about.

happy birthday

the good chairman turns 27 today. it's a time when i must accept that i'm in my "late" twenties. i can't really call myself a "mid" and i probably would have to round up anyway. stupid math.

but in good news, i'm no less mature or responsible or old-feeling. i still like boobies and laughing at video of people taking shots in the crotch (unless it's me). so, keep your heads up, america. " things are still ok." or maybe "things aren't falling apart just yet!" (use whichever phrase makes you feel better.)

so what did i do on my birthday? julie set us up with a ridiculous suite at the hyatt. then booked a day of jetskiing, parasailing, and hawaiian sailing canoe-ing. then a nice dinner with my mom, julie's parents, and kyu and his latest crazy girlfriend. good stuff all around.

and she got me a nano. my downward slide into the apple world is slow, but constant. i spent the day reading up on free podcasts and other fun things to suck up my time. if you know of or have any good audio books, let me know. screw this "reading" thing. i can get other people to read for me!

thanks to all that called or emailed a happy birthday note.

more spain pics will come soon. i took over 1GB. it's too much. too much.

piso mojado!