Wednesday, May 30, 2007

When stories collide: Dog edition

A mystery in Westchester.

Did Wild Coyote Snatch Vanessa Williams' Dog?

The pet Yorkie belonging to actress-singer Vanessa Williams is missing. Enzo disappeared from her Chappaqua yard Monday, becoming the second pooch of a high-profile owner to go missing from northern Westchester since Mother's Day.

While Williams raised concerns that there's some sort of dognapping ring, Mount Pleasant Police Chief Louis Alagno suggested another theory: Coyotes are snatching the bite-size pets.


Never mind, we figured out what happened to Enzo.
LONDON - A British artist has eaten chunks of a Corgi dog, the breed favored by Queen Elizabeth II, live on radio to protest against the royal family's treatment of animals.

Mark McGowan, 37, said he ate "about three bites" of the dog meat, cooked with apples, onions and seasoning, to highlight what he called Prince Philip's mistreatment of a fox during a hunt by the Queen's husband in January.

"It was pretty disgusting," McGowan said of the meal, which he ate while appearing on a London radio station on Tuesday. Yoko Ono, another guest on the show, also tried the meat.

Sunday, May 27, 2007

Herb's Market

I dropped by Herb's Market to pick up lunch today. As they finished making my sandwiches, the woman said "Wait, you're the guy who wrote about us!"

Confused, I said "Uh...no I'm not."

She replied, "Yes you are, I never forget a face."

I thought back hard. "Did I say something nice?"

The woman shook her head and said, "No. You called us stupid."

It dawned on me that she had probably seen my critique of their long-gone fried chicken sign, which said "4 pieces, $4.00. 8 pieces, $8.00. 12 pieces, $12.00" on up to something like 47,200 pieces for $47,200.00. I pointed out then that the sign could've been shortened to "Fried chicken, $1.00 a piece."

Well, let me set the record straight right now. I apologize for anything I said that might've implied anything negative about Herb's Market in any way. Herb's is not stupid. Herb's is a great deli.

One of the things I like about Montauk is that the food isn't just an afterthought, and it's not just because I'm grotesquely obese. Life's too short to waste on crappy meals from Burger King, which is why I enjoy places like Herb's. I get sandwiches there almost every day when I'm out here.

To prove that I love them, and to provide pointers for others looking for good food in Montauk, here are the top ten things I like about Herb's.

1. Their fried chicken is reeeeeeally good. It's exceptional, with just the right salty touch in the batter. You can get it from the hot bar or order your own for big picnics. It's worth $5 a piece, which is what they'll probably charge me next time they see me.

2. They make really good BLTs. Tons of crispy bacon, fresh lettuce (not iceberg!), and plump tomatoes. You know when you get tomato on a sandwich and you end up taking it off because it's pale pink and chewy? We've never had one like that at Herb's.

3. They have homemade potato salad and macaroni salad that's about an order of magnitude better than what you'll find at a place like the IGA.

4. They sell Tate's cookies.

5. They always have good crunchy snacks, like Salsitos, and more importantly they have Irish crisps.

6. They have a bunch of good marinades, which work well with the prime meats they sell.

7. They hand-trim the meat that you get from their counter, even trimming the gunky membrane stuff off boneless breasts.

8. Every sandwich I've had there has been thick with meat. They don't skimp on anything, and their cold cuts are never weird-tasting or fatty. It's like the opposite of Quizno's. I suggest the chicken cutlet with swiss, lettuce, and tomato on rye with Russian.

9. They make really good smoothies in the back, near the hot bar. And unlike most places, not all their smoothies have banana in them.

10. They let me buy the sandwiches today, even though I evidently called them stupid once. Which I didn't mean to.

When you want to pick up sandwiches for the beach, or meats for the BBQ, nothing's better than Herb's Market in Montauk. They go great with an afternoon at Gin Beach.

Saturday, May 12, 2007

When you outsource headline writers...

You get headlines like this:

Royals To Get A Taste Of Angels' Colon

(Sports Network) - Bartolo Colon attempts to win his third consecutive start off the disabled list tonight for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, who will be aiming to continue their recent dominance of the Kansas City Royals.

Friday, May 11, 2007

Roger that

So anyway, there's like this guy, Roger, who craves attention and who named this, like, the most useless blog in the universe. I'm not going to link to him to encourage him but just remember - I have YEARS of unread content, while he has like three things on his blog.

The throat hole

You know, I don't even smoke. I've never smoked. I will never smoke. And yet every five minutes, I am subjected to an ad where throat cancer victim Ronaldo Martinez tells me to stop smoking or I'll end up talking with a voice box like he does. OK, I GET IT. If you smoke too much you'll end up with a cool Darth Vader voice.

So this morning, I'm in the shower as my little morning radio blares next to the sink. I hear the ad come on. Not again - I'm so sick of listening to Throat Guy talking. (No offense to Throat Guy, but I'm not the target demo.) Then I step out of the shower. It's not even his voice on the radio - it's a talking didgeridoo from Outback Steakhouse. I guess there's at least one positive about having a hole in your throat - if you do find yourself accidentally eating a rapidly congealing platter of Outback cheese fries, they have a shorter, more direct evacuation route.

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Next, wrestling my router to the ground

Another step towards victory.

After getting SharePoint 2003 nice and cozy on my server, I decided to upgrade to the latest, greatest version, 3.0. Woe is me.

I ran the installation, and it hit a couple of minor glitches, but ended up working OK. hen I ran the configuration wizard. Uh oh. It was a 12 step process, and it crudded out on step 10 every time.

I looked at the logs: NullReferenceException. Every time. The logs also contained the trace of where the problems occurred, in great detail. Helpful? Maybe, but probably not so much.Plus, it's a huge file because the SharePoint setup logging is quite verbose.

03/2007 14:15:38 11 INF Retrieved the content service and content service instance, now enum the web applications to see if there is a match with template STS
05/03/2007 14:15:38 11 INF Site with uri http://myurlhere.com/ and port 80 and template STS could not be found
05/03/2007 14:15:38 11 INF The site http://myurlhere.com could not be found in the Web application SPWebApplication Name=MY URL HERE Parent=SPWebService.
05/03/2007 14:15:38 11 INF Site with uri http://cynicor.com/ and port 80 and template STS could not be found
05/03/2007 14:15:38 11 INF The site http://cynicor.com could not be found in the Web application SPWebApplication Name=Cynicor Parent=SPWebService.
05/03/2007 14:15:38 11 INF Cannot find a site matching template STS
05/03/2007 14:15:38 11 INF Leaving function SPEvaluatorModeProvisioning.TryGetIsSiteProvisioned
05/03/2007 14:15:38 11 INF Leaving function SPEvaluatorModeProvisioner.IsProvisioned
05/03/2007 14:15:38 11 INF The default site url is http://myserver/, port 80
05/03/2007 14:15:38 11 INF The owner account for the default site is mydomain\administrator
05/03/2007 14:15:43 11 INF The owner email for the default site is someone@example.com
05/03/2007 14:15:43 11 INF The db server for the default site is myserver\Microsoft##SSEE
05/03/2007 14:15:48 11 ERR Task evalprovision has failed with an unknown exception
05/03/2007 14:15:48 11 ERR Exception: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPConfigurationDatabase.CreateSite(SPWebApplication application, SPContentDatabase database, String originalPath, Guid id, Pairing pairing, Uri redirectUri, Boolean useHostHeaderAsSiteName, Boolean bypassExistingSiteCheck) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPConfigurationDatabase.CreateSite(SPWebApplication application, SPContentDatabase database, String path, Boolean useHostHeaderAsSiteName) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPSiteCollection.Add(SPContentDatabase database, String siteUrl, String title, String description, UInt32 nLCID, String webTemplate, String ownerLogin, String ownerName, String ownerEmail, String secondaryContactLogin, String secondaryContactName, String secondaryContactEmail, String quotaTemplate, String sscRootWebUrl, Boolean useHostHeaderAsSiteName) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPSiteCollection.Add(String siteUrl, String title, String description, UInt32 nLCID, String webTemplate, String ownerLogin, String ownerName, String ownerEmail, String secondaryContactLogin, String secondaryContactName, String secondaryContactEmail, Boolean useHostHeaderAsSiteName) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPSiteCollection.Add(String siteUrl, String title, String description, UInt32 nLCID, String webTemplate, String ownerLogin, String ownerName, String ownerEmail, String secondaryContactLogin, String secondaryContactName, String secondaryContactEmail) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPSiteCollection.Add(String siteUrl, String title, String description, UInt32 nLCID, String webTemplate, String ownerLogin, String ownerName, String ownerEmail) at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPEvaluatorModeProvisioner.Provision() at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.EvalModeProvisionTask.EvalProvision() at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.EvalModeProvisionTask.Run() at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.TaskThread.ExecuteTask()

What could be causing this? I had no idea, but staring at the log for a few minutes made a light go off: my router was failing me. It was obvious!

A couple of years ago, I got a Belkin router/wireless station. It worked decently, and had a nice Web interface that let me set up everything I needed. However, it wouldn't let me get to my own sites by name. If I went to www.cynicor.com from inside the firewall, it would redirect me to the router's administration page.

I finally figured out that there WAS no way to repair this problem. Any request coming from inside the network would go out to the router, who would figure out that it was coming from inside the network and redirect port 80 calls to the router. I asked Belkin what to do. They said "just set your Web site up to use a different port, or call it by IP address internally." The problem with configuring that is that I have multiple domains that live on my server, and calling by internal IP won't allow Windows Server 2003 to filter the requests by header.

I wrote back to Belkin and asked if I could change the admin port on the router. They said no, and I would need a router with port address translation to make this work. Instead, I bought a LinkSys router at Best Buy. The LinkSys router lets you change the administration port it uses, and it defaults to 8080. This solved my port 80 problem! Now to test SharePoint.

I ran the configuration utility again, and it worked like a champ. No more exceptions. I went to bed and slept like a baby.

When I got into work the next day, I wanted to look at the server a bit more, so I tried to use Remote Desktop to get in. Oops, I'd forgotten to open that port. On the Belkin, I foolishly set the server to be the DMZ, which allowed port 3389 (and everything else) to pass through. I had enabled remote administration on the router last night, so I was able to access the port settings from work, through port 8080. Two minutes, a couple of clicks, and I was RDCing again.

Thursday, May 3, 2007

Great shot!

Hey, let's go lens shopping.

This wide-angle lens looks nice! Let me click on the "enlarge" link to see a high-res version of the product shot.