My Brain

As you can see from my previous post I made it to New Orleans.
I'll be honest I went there somewhat naive, hoping and expecting an old fashioned
southern style place. With men dressed like Colonel Sanders, drinking ment julip, on baloneys
and ladies talking with southern accents calling you 'cherie' every second sentence.

Instead I found damn near everything in my guide books pointed towards Bourbon Street, probably
the most hedonistic street in the US. It was one block from my hotel, impossible to miss, despite how
much you try. There is a city ordnance that requires Bourbon Street to be sterilized every morning.
Not washed, but sterilized! So a truck with disinfectant lightly sprays it's contents over the street
to at least relieve it of some of it's YUCK-iness. I've seen worse, I've been to worse, but not in the US.

Anyway, despite the guide books there is a lot more to New Orleans than Bourbon Street, but it's hard to find. I stayed in the French Quarter, which is an 8 x 13 block district full of multiple 18th century buildings. Most of which looked closed, but you have to take a second look.

A lot of the buildings are despite the name are Spanish in design, several hand overs, colonial purchases,
and city fires have forced diversion upon the architectural styles. Spanish houses at the time were designed in reverse, the back of the house faces the street, which the front of the house faces a well kept modest court yard. So the majority of the buildings you see are the backs of the buildings.
With flaking paint, darkened windows and hardly a sign of life, its easy to mistake somewhere for being closed.

Do read the guide books but don't rely on them.
Things you've got to do:

1) Take a paddle boat ride on the Mississippi!
-- If you look it up on line, the likely hood is you'll find the Creole Queen, avoid it. It's a small boat, and has been on limited service for ages. I had booked it, and went down to the dock at boarding time, to be told it wasn't running. Left me a little pissed, as the alternative had just left at the same boarding time.
The alternative, and one I recommend it the Natchez boat, available from Gray Line Tours. I know it's gray line, but despite being a big company, they've outsourced their tours to local dependable operators ! You will not be disappointed, and they have selected the best operators to manage your experience. Also their prices are competitive.


2) Take a swamp tour !

-- Again go with gray line, it's a quick pick up at the dock, avoid air boat tours, they may look like fun, but they cost more, and you see less... Why? well it uses more fuel thus the cost, and because your flying all over the place at high speeds, with a loud engine behind you, most of the wild life avoid the boats. So you actually see very little. A simple tour boat, with a good local skipper, can't be beaten, and the one offered by gray lines is pretty good.

Oh yeah bring marshmallows for the alligators ! Or simply anything that floats, the skipper on our boat had marshmallows and the alligators liked it. Who am I to judge, majority of alligators were average to small, about 5-6 feet, however there was one big sucker who was probably 12 feet in length. A huge son-a-bitch.


3) Cafe du Monde, and benigets.
-- You just have to, dear god these things leave you craving for them every night. Even though I've been back a couple of weeks, I still crave them. A beniget is a doughnut style pastry deep fried and doused in confectioners sugar, served here with cafe au lait, is just so damn good !


While these are just a handful of the things a I got up to, they are certainly the best. August is both the most humid and stormy time of year to go there, another thing I didn't actually check on before I booked my ticket, the heat isn't so bad, but damn the humidity is a killer. It was so humid, my lens on my camera fogged up every time I took the lens cap off during the morning.

But morning especially Sunday / Monday morning is the best time to walk around the Bourbon Street blocks, little to no chance of bumping into drunks. Evening time is the best time to go down around the shore or moon walk pier. And night time is the best time for Cafe du Monde, no queues, and it's perfect for people watching.

So am on vacation, went to new orleans. This place seems interesting
Just saw the Mississippi
Ate a po'boy
Sitting in a bar drinking a sazerac
Tomorrow going to the swamp on an air boat to feed alligators

Sweeeeeeeet :-D

8:45pm CRT New Orleans


Update sazerac nice but too sweet
Trying a rob Roy hmm mixed the vermoute is a little
Hmm taste killing

In fact I have several dreams or ideas I really want to work on. Its a little difficult
to find time to do it though.

But one idea I'd thought I'd share.

Actually you know, maybe not, but watch this space........
This one could be special :-D

I caved, I wanted it, it was now 3g, and pretty.
So this morning I got up, went to Tysons Corners Apple store, and got in line.

Yes there's still a line, you have to get there early. But Apple seem to be relishing
a little too much in their own success. There were 30 people in front of me, but
it still took 2hrs 45mins to get to the front of the queue....

Why? because Apple decided that all phones must be activated inside the store, yeah
I'm not kidding. We were being served 1 at a time. The store had more assistants than
customers at that hour in the morning, but they couldn't speed it up. I was beginning
to fail towards the end of it. Knees were killing me, the poor guy behind me was suffering
while trying to support himself with a walking cane. This was just terrible.

One of the assistants came around handing out tickets, a pre-qualifer thing, when he took my
details, he said their was a problem I had to call AT & T, why? no idea. But I am a current AT & T
customer, and on auto pay, so what the hell could the problem be. Called their 611 number, and
after another 5 mins waiting, got through to their business customer numbers... ????

Well turns out there was some "foundation number" attached to my account, that gave me a discount..
Eh? I didn't get this phone through any work discount, I bought it from the store. Well anyway she removed
the discount, told me if i had gone to an AT & T store, this would not be an issue, it only happens
when I but my phone at apple. Emmm yeah, AT & T ran out of phones love, just click your buttons and sort this shit out, I'm standing in line...

That got sorted, I got pre-approved and continued waiting. Finally I got in, got my phone, got a case, and
was done in a few mins. So what the hell was everyone else doing??

Shhhs, I've never had to wait for anything that long.

Recently I've been putting together a site to complement the Locallucene and Local Solr
projects, www.gissearch.com. The aim of the site
is to provide articles around how to use locallucene and local solr, as well as how to tap into
the GIS world.

The world is local, and many people and companies are attempting to tap in to this. For the average
person, it's not easy terribly easy to get accurate detailed information on how to make GIS work
for you, without spending a fortune on companies offering custom services.

GIS Search is designed to try and break down those barriers. Please take some time to go check
it out, and don't be afraid to click on a few links, (including the ads) ;-)

Thanks
Patrick

There are a things I must lay claim to having created

1. A kick ass chicken BBQ marinade (It's a secret, but damn good)
2. A religion on face book ! (Just check out the religion 'chicken', I was the first, and now there are 11)
3. A phrase that I'm slowly introducing into the place, a parody on the six flags ad
"No flags fun!"

Yes I know, I need to get out more....

Sitting at my vista desktop, looking at vmware going..... maybe I can develop on it
but I need a linux box, I need more hardware.

To my left is a p3 sony vaio laptop running UBuntu, not enough ram, or disk space for
my needs. Next to that is a dead P4 that a friend of mine built, replacing CPU, mother board,
and ram, would cost less than buying a new machine.

VPS? emm, nah, ram is expensive on those boxes... use my amazon ec2 cluster? Prehaps
I don't have access to their beta persistent storage yet, so I don't want to put my latest
on a volatile system....

I'm going to have to bite the bullet, and pick up something new, bugger, don't want to spend
money right now.

Here's a quick snippet of code to walk a solr index, for use with localsolr.
Running this requires obviously changing the code to point to your solr instance, and
also to add all the solr libraries dependencies to your class path.

This is probably going to leave my google adsense showing java for the next 2 months.
Yes google ad's those things that you would hopefully be clicking on if you weren't using
an rss reader :-( oh well, I guess I was never destined to become rich.... :-)

import java.io.BufferedWriter;

import java.io.FileInputStream;

import java.io.FileWriter;

import java.io.IOException;

import java.util.Iterator;

import java.util.Map.Entry;



import javax.xml.parsers.ParserConfigurationException;



import org.apache.lucene.document.Document;

import org.apache.solr.client.solrj.util.ClientUtils;

import org.apache.solr.common.SolrDocument;

import org.apache.solr.common.SolrInputDocument;

import org.apache.solr.core.SolrConfig;

import org.apache.solr.core.SolrCore;

import org.apache.solr.schema.IndexSchema;

import org.apache.solr.search.SolrIndexSearcher;

import org.apache.solr.update.DocumentBuilder;

import org.xml.sax.SAXException;





public class Foo {



	

	SolrConfig cfg;

	SolrCore core; 

	String solrBase = "/Users/pjaol/tmp/solr/tmp/apache-tomcat-5.5.26/solr/";

	String solrDataDir = solrBase+"/core0/data/"; // your probably not using multicore so you'll have /data/

	String solrSchema = solrBase+"/core0/conf/schema.xml";

	String solrConfig = solrBase+"/core0/conf/solrconfig.xml";

	public static void main(String[] args) {

		Foo f = new Foo();

		try {

			f.init();

		} catch (ParserConfigurationException e) {

			// TODO Auto-generated catch block

			e.printStackTrace();

		} catch (IOException e) {

			// TODO Auto-generated catch block

			e.printStackTrace();

		} catch (SAXException e) {

			// TODO Auto-generated catch block

			e.printStackTrace();

		}

		

	}

	

	public void init() throws ParserConfigurationException, IOException, SAXException{

		cfg = new SolrConfig(solrBase,"foo", new FileInputStream(solrConfig));

		core = new SolrCore(null,solrDataDir , cfg,

							new IndexSchema(cfg, solrSchema, null));

		

		SolrIndexSearcher searcher = core.newSearcher("foo");

		int mxdocs = searcher.maxDoc();

		

		BufferedWriter writer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("index.xml"));

		writer.write("<add>");

		

		for (int i = 0; i< mxdocs; i++){

			Document luceneDoc = searcher.doc(i);



            SolrDocument sdoc = new SolrDocument();

            DocumentBuilder db = new DocumentBuilder(searcher.getSchema());

            sdoc = db.loadStoredFields(sdoc, luceneDoc);



            Iterator<Entry<String, Object>> it = sdoc.iterator();

            SolrInputDocument sidoc = new SolrInputDocument();

            while (it.hasNext()){

            	Entry<String, Object> et = it.next();

            	if (et.getKey().startsWith("_local")) {

            		continue;

            	}

            	sidoc.addField(et.getKey(), et.getValue());

            }

            ClientUtils.writeXML(sidoc, writer);

		}

		writer.write("</add>");

		writer.close();

		System.exit(0);

	}

	

}

This will create an index.xml file you can use solr's post jar or sh files to reindex back on solr.

Scooter my 2 year old dachshund hasn't been feeling well recently.
As a puppy he had a lot of digestive problems, every couple of months
he used get diarrhea pretty bad, and we kept going back to the vet.
Each time we got a temporary solution, so I did some investigating and changed
his diet to Royal Canin Dachshund specific food, and it worked miracles.
He's been incident free for the past year.

That is until Wednesday, where it started with diarrhea again, but then Friday, it
was really bad, as he started vomiting as well, the only thing to change was I got
a new bag of his food. I contacted the store, who said they've had no issues, Friday
I contacted Royal Canin, who said the same thing, but recommended that to get
a sample for testing. I was actually impressed how personal they were and willing
to respond and take the matter seriously.

So I took scooter to the vet Friday, and it shuck me a lot, the vet said he was concerned
about the number of incidents that scooter had this problem in the past, and was concerned
that this was a chronic issue. Scooter was dehydrated, so they gave him fluids under the skin,
something to try and stop the vomiting, and then Metronidazole tablets to take home.

The vet said if it continues or reoccurs, he wants to test him for pancreatitis and IBS.
Both of which threw me, I was never really expecting him to have some thing that could be chronic.
He's improving slowly, he's still sick and he wasn't able to control anything, today though he didn't
throw up and there were no accidents. I've spent the day looking after him and trying to clean
up the apartment. Poor little guy, I've got to do all I can to get him back on track.

So got my HDMI cable from monoprice.com and plugged it in.
First DVD I played was a Universal studios DVD, the opening sequence put me off.
The logo of the planet with the word universal looked crap, I began to worry.
It honestly looked like something a 5 year old on LSD with crayons would do.
But then the movie started, and everything became right, everything looked superb
it turns out that the universal logo hasn't been updated in years, and the image remapping
was crap on it.

I notice the same thing on a lot of web sites when I browse with my 19'' LCD monitor.
Most logos are designed to be small and look ok at small resolutions.

However back to the main point, the movie, and everything else I put played was superb!
Cheap cables rock, go to monoprice.com, BB monster cables are a rip off.