MarkPappas.info

A 3 day weekend! A well needed 3 day weekend!

Got today off with a pretty good start;

-Finished off at work a little early. Most people were out on vacation anyhow so it was pretty slow. Was able to get caught up on a lot of random work though as nobody was around to interrupt me.
-Got home and worked on the Pergola a bit more. Had to stain some more boards. Revised my plan to attach the cover, went from about $50 to $3 to attach it securely.  The cover arrive earlier this week. It goes up tomorrow!
-Helped push a stalled car out of the Northland/Mead 4 lane intersection. An elderly man and his wife stalled out during rush hour. He was able to call AAA, but physically unable to push a car. I pulled into a nearby parking lot and with help from some other people that also stopped we moved him into a packing lot nearby.
-Mowed the lawn (I think I’ve mowed it more this year already than I did all last year…)
-Cut down some branches on the pine tree that so low they were borderline hitting cars in the neighbors driveway if they were wet.

Going to be a busy 3 day weekend.

Before:

After:

Entire project took us about 2 weeks to complete – and it looks fantastic on our deck now!

It’s a 14 by 16 foot pergola that makes out backyard look 10 times nicer already.

Now we’ll have to get started on the other yard related projects.

I don’t think it’s stopped raining for about 2 weeks now – except while I’m at work of course.

That figures though, The backyard pergola is about 80% done and we haven’t been able to put out or new patio furtunature…
Where’s the sunny days?

Going to go find my Hyperstatic Union CD and listen to Song 6 – “Praying for Sunny Days”
It’s not pretty – but it sounds great.

Jonah, our dog, passed away a few weeks ago.
He was 13 and less than a week from being 14 – and acted like he was 2. He was a puppy jumping around with me the day before when I had him all worked up throwing toys all over the house – after chasing snow balls.

You were a great dog and we miss you Jonah!

Here are some of the photo’s I have of him-

Jonah with his favorite toy

Jonah with his Christmas Present (2008)

Jonah's Christmas Present (2007)

Waiting for the toy to get tossed! I'm pretty sure that he was barking and Angie was yelling at me to toss the toy...

OpenDNS is a free service that perofmrs and action many people end up paying for – internet filterting.

How it works:
When you type in a web page, like “www.google.com” you are actually typing in a shortcut to a place on the internet. Your internet provided has a a DNS (Domain Name System) server that then tells your computer the real address of the webpage – 208.69.36.230 for our example of www.google.com (click on it if you don’t believe me!). Google paid for the web shortcut of “google”, just like I paid for www.markpappas.info.

Your internet provider has that DNS server – but you can override it. Here’s the slimplicty of OpenDNS. You set your computer or router to look to openDNS instead of the one your internet provided has. OpenDNS then gives your computer the real address of the webpage. However – once you have an account with opwnDNS you have other options.

When a new web page is added to OpenDNS it is catagorized in up to 54 different catagories. With your account at OpenDNS you can selectively block any selection of them in addition to a few other features.
This means that with a simple click of a mouse button in your settings window you can block Pornography.

Here are the current categories OpenDNS has-

• Adult Themes
• Adware
• Alcohol
• Auctions
• Automotive
• Blogs
• Business Services
• Chat
• Classifieds
• Dating
• Drugs
• Ecommerce/Shopping
• Educational Institutions
• File storage
• Financial institutions
• Forums/Message boards
• Gambling
• Games
• Government
• Hate/Discrimination
• Health
• Humor
• Instant messaging
• Jobs/Employment
• Lingerie/Bikini
• Movies
• Music
• News/Media
• Non-profits
• Nudity
• P2P/File sharing
• Parked Domains
• Phishing
• Photo sharing
• Podcasts
• Politics
• Pornography
• Portals
• Proxy/Anonymizer
• Radio
• Religious
• Research/Reference
• Search engines
• Sexuality
• Social networking
• Software/Technology
• Sports
• Tasteless
• Television
• Travel
• Video sharing
• Visual search engines
• Weapons
• Webmail

One stop internet filtering. And it’s free.

On a side note, I love stumbleupon, specifically the photography catagory.
I didn’t like the people that submit nude photos under the ‘photography’ catagory.
OpenDNS has solved that issue for me. I now end up looking at a generic OpenDNS page stating that the website was blocked for being catagorized into XYZ catagories which have been blocked by your network administrator.
I’ve been using it now for over 6 months without any issue.
Did I mention it’s FREE? OpenDNS