The Most High Tech Shoe Drying System Ever

I am fortunate in that I work with technology and have access to the latest in wet cycling shoe drying systems.

Among several choices I have most recently been favouring the HP 10642 G2 rack with dual HP Proliant DL380 G5 servers, although pretty much any servers will do since they all make heat and include good fans to move it away. In terms of heat generation, the more servers in the rack the better. These particular servers take up 2 rack units (or one shoe width) and the cable management cages at the back can be converted into to the optional shoe drying compartment very easily. Let's look at some pictures of this super efficient shoe drying marvel!

Here's the front view:

As is often the case, the real magic happens behind the scenes. Here's a view of the rack from the back:


My apologies... "cable management cage things" should read "Ambidextrous snap-on cable management arm and quick release levers". Sorry. Anyway, here's how it works:



See? I get to work with some pretty advanced shoe-drying equipment. I do not recommend infiltrating the computer rooms at your workplace and doing something like this on your own. Somebody will probably flip out on you. Ask somebody who is allowed access and is familiar with how it all works, however, and they may well be happy to help you out. Server racks are also ideal for drying wet clothing, but I have always found soaked shoes to be the bigger challenge.

Yer Pal, R A N T W I C K

PS - If you are thinking, "Holy Nerd!" at this moment, might I direct you to the source of my footprint graphic, a web site from a local Comp Sci professor named Stephen M. Watt from the University of Western Ontario?

I have no doubt whatsoever that this dude operates on an intellectual level well above, um, mine. I can also state with some confidence that he is a bigger nerd than I am. A bigger, more successful, smarter nerd that I envy, but a bigger nerd nonetheless.

PPS - I did not take Comp Sci at any time during my academic endeavours and I discovered this local guy's page while simply searching for images of footprints. Go and figger!

Blogger's Automatic Spam Detection For Comments

I hate spam comments and the idea that my readers will have to read any because they were nice enough to subscribe to the comments on any of my posts. As such, I make every effort to delete the little suckers the moment I am aware of their presence. Another thing people using the blogger platform (and others, I suspect) can do is turn on moderation for comments on posts more than x days old. Cafiend of Citizen Rider put me on to this, for which I thank him. To do this in blogger (as it looks right now, November 2010), follow this handy diagram and save your changes:

This prevents people who subscribed to comments on one of your posts from receiving email thanks to spam comments made weeks or months later. Good stuff. But what about the time period before your posts become moderated? That's where a fairly new feature in blogger, "Automatic Spam Detection for Comments" comes in. I saw it mentioned on the dashboard for my blog, but didn't give it much thought until recently, when I received this irksome bit of mail in my inbox:

Its nice Blog.affiliate marketing is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.

I bet I garnered this flattering "Its nice Blog" comment because I was foolish enough to put "Affiliate Marketing" in the post title. Oh crap, I just used those keywords again! I am less concerned about that today than yesterday. Here's why: I rushed to my blog to destroy the offending comment, only to find that it wasn't there! What? Where was it? Given the title of this post, you know what happened, but it took me a little while to clue in and check the Comments tab in blogger...

This is the first spam comment I have received since the automatic detection was introduced. It would seem that at least in this case, it worked just fine! Thank you, blogger!

Now if they could just add a "dashboard" link for when I'm signed in but viewing the blog, I'll be really happy. I keep clicking "design" just to get to the screens where I can select "dashboard"... not that I'm really complaining. I mean, it's free, for Pete's sake! What have I got to complain about?

Don't Stop Riding Your Bike! Hang on just a little longer...

R A N T W I C K