Reisun.org

I’ve lately gotten very interested in RV’ing. While my circumstances do not permit me to own one yet, I am learning as much as I can right now about RVs and intend purchase one when the time is right.

Sportsmobile is a very interesting company that allows you to custom-design your own RV on a van chassis. They even have a nice on-line tool to do so. Here are some results of my dreaming and playing around with the tool. All use the Dodge Sprinter chassis.

• RB (Regular Body) Design. Very bare and minimal but at a little less than 20K (not including the price of the van)  the most practical and most likely one I will get.

Sprinter EB Design

• EB (Extended Body) Design.
• LB (Long Body) Design.

I admit I am sometimes very lazy to get things done. I have been ignoring the solutions that are available to prevent wordpress comment spamming, and had effectively turned off comments.

Having taken a second look, I see that Akismet should do for now, and I have activated it and commets again. I’ll see how many spam comments I get before going further.

For those non-bot commenters, thanks very much for your comments! I promise from now on to be more responsive.

I took the State Dept. Foreign Service Officer Oral Assessment again yesterday, and passed. This time I received a lower score than last year (5.6 vs. 5.7), but I will chalk it up either to old age or because I had watched Mr. Baseball until 1AM or so the night before. In anycase with the way the Register is looking these days, I have a good chance to being called up when I am ready in the Fall.

It appears the language points (.17) I received last year are good for 5 years.

I recently had an MRI done. I will post more pictures later, but this one was particularly cool because you can clearly tell my eyeballs.

Unfortunately for my critics, who undoubtedly think I am somewhat brain-dead, everything checked out fine.

Like most people in the IT field I have been experiencing pain in my hands and arms when typing and especially when using the mouse. I have up to now been dealing by taking breaks and using two mice, moving one with the right hand and clicking on buttons with the left hand.

Recently I was playing with a linux laptop that had an interesting feature called Dwell Clicking, which clicks the mouse for you automatically when you hover the mouse over something. I thought that was a great feature, and google’d for something equivalent in Windows. There are a few, but the one that came  up first and I like is the following: http://www.oatsoft.org/Software/dwell-click

It takes a little bit of time to get used to, but after a while it becomes natural. I originally set the delay before automatically clicking to a really small value, but that was affecting a lot of menu selection operations, so I have set it to a more moderate value and have trained myself to be more patient.

rtmpdump is a utility to save to file video streams using the rtmp protocol. Hulu.com does, although recently they have changed their site to encrypt PIDs to easily do this.

Found on a gps forum post.

• Icon Editor IcoFX
• AVI Video Converter Prism
• DVD to MPEG-4 Converter HandBrake