Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today we went to the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Chino. They were having a special presentation about the air war in Italy during World War II. Lucinda wasn’t too interested in hearing the talks, as it was not really geared to a four-year-old. But she did like seeing all the airplanes. They had a lot of planes from World War II. The first hanger had British, Japanese, and German aircraft, including a V-1 buzz bomb and a pair of German and Japanese rocket planes. They also had a children’s area with some small airplanes for the kids to climb into and play. There are pictures of Lucinda in her photo album. Later on, we got a chance to see a P-47 fly. We also toured their B-17 bomber and we got to talk to a fellow who had flown as a ball turret gunner in a B-17 in 1944. He had a scrapbook with all his orders, photos, and letters home the war. It was nice to talk to him, as this is what really makes history come to life. For more on this, see the pages from the other times we got to meet and talk to bomber veterans about their experiences:

Bombers in Burbank – 1998

Bombers in Burbank – 2003

After this, we all went to Cafe Bizou in Old Town Pasadena and had a nice dinner out.

Got a piece of spam from isc2.org [“Your account is now active”] Put *@isc2.org on the blacklist for spamassassin in /usr/local/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf.

We went to the science museum to see the Titanic Artifact Exhibit [http://www.casciencectr.org/Exhibits/Weingart/Titanic/Titanic.php] This was a show of all manner of objects brought up from the wreck, from a big piece of the hull, down to playing cards and hats. It was all very fascinating to see.

Afterward, we walked over the the newly-reopened Aerospace Hall and saw the Gemini 11 spacecraft and other relics of the Space Age.

Finally, we went out to the Rose Garden in Exposition Park for a while before heading home.

Installed the freefonts and sharefonts for Gimp. Untarred the files and did:

mv freefont /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts
mv sharefont /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts
xset fp+ /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/freefont
xset fp+ /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/sharefont
xset fp rehash

No new adventure. Just wanted to put in a new picture of us.

We took Lucinda to the L.A. Zoo today. She played a bit in the cave at the Children’s Zoo. Then we walked through the zoo and looked at the animals for a while. Then she played some more at the playground there. Overall, she said she had a fun time.

Installed Procmail tonight to try and cut down on the spam I’m seeing. Installed it from the ports collection. Below are the .forward and .procmailrc files I started with.

Lucinda’s preschool had a field trip to the Aqarium of the Pacific today. At first Lucinda was excited to be going to the aquarium, but in the end she was disappointed that it was the same aquarium she’d been to before. She thought they were going to a different one. And the field trip meant that she didn’t get to have her regular Share Day.

We did a big garden project today. We moved the front of the planter in the front yard back about a foot. This makes the planter somewhat smaller, so Cathy doesn’t have to work so hard to keep it up. We had to transplant all of the plants in the front foot of the planter, which turned out to be a lot of work. Then we had to reinstall the border and put down some pieces of new grass to fill in the new bare strip.

Implemented a home-made CAPTCHA on our web pages to stand guard on the ‘mailto’ links. This will prevent robots from scooping up our addresses to spam. The CAPTCHA itself is written in PHP, and it uses a MySQL database to store the 700-some challenge words and also a list of email addresses or URLs it is guarding. An example of it in action can be seen here: http://cosmo.pasadena.ca.us/tt.php?id=sms