(Climategate) “e-mails show that a close-knit group of the world’s most influential climate scientists actively colluded to subvert the peer-review process … manufactured pre-determined conclusions through the use of contrived analytic techniques; and discussed destroying data to avoid government freedom-of-information requests.”

“Viewed collectively, the CRU e-mails reveal a scientific community in which a group of scientists promoting what has become, through their efforts, the dominant climate-change paradigm are at war with other scientists derisively labeled as ’skeptics,’ ‘deniers,’ and ‘contrarians,’”

From the New York Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/01/13/13climatewire-insurance-group-says-stolen-e-mails-show-ris-91554.html
This references a letter sent by Robert Detlefsen, the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies vice president of policy.

The edge of a kelp bed

Sunfish off a kelp Patti. This lumbering fish just stayed right next to the boat.

Ocean sunfish in San Diego

This Sunfish was probably 200+ pounds

Ocean sunfish in San Diego

Yellowfin Tuna in San Diego

Day 3. We called up the guy at 976Tuna and asked for help. He gave us some tips such as water temperature to look for (68 degrees) and where to head. He provided lat/lons that we plugged into the Garmin 4212.

He also told us to listen to channel 72 on the VHF. Bingo! All the rest of the Tuna ‘fleet’ was on this channel, recreation boaters like us. We had some fun listening to the chatter. Some obvious locals were being very secretive … other boaters (guy from santa cruz)  were asking everyone what the water temperature was and exactly where the fish were. Very few answered the guy, but it made for some comedy on the high seas!

We were at 32.2203 117.5043 in 65.7 degrees of water when we had a hit on a deep diving rapala. I reeled up a nice Yellowfin Tuna on a trolling rod. Not much of a fight, but a beautiful fish! Immediately after reeling it in we chummed the water with sardines and plunked a few lines over. Both Donald and I hooked up for a double. I caught mine on a very light spinning rig which made it a lot of fun.

Don gets one

Me too!

2nd Tuna of the Day for me!

A good day! We are both no longer Tuna -Virgins!

Porpoises off the Coronado Islands in Mexico

We left at 7:00 AM and decided we would find our own fishing with no help from anyone else. We headed straight towards mexican waters  – to the Coronado Islands. These Islands are about 15-20 miles south west of San Diego in Mexican waters. The Islands are surrounded by water about 100 feet deep which rapidly becomes 300 plus. We traveled west of the islands and found ourselves in 2000, 3000, 4000 an deeper water.

The first thing we found were tons of porpoises. They were smaller than the usual ‘flipper’ gray one’s I am used to seeing. These were small, grey and had white stripes on the side. They were every where and I had heard that where there are porpoises there are Tuna, so we started fishing! Fortunately porpoises are too smart to grab lures or even live bait on a hook. But we had zero bites.

In with the porpoises were these strange birds that popped up out of the water like fish but then immediately flew away. They were swimming under water like fish. Several actually bit Don’s lure and he had at least 2 on for a few seconds. Fortunately they let go.

Later we saw a whales spout on the horizon, so we decided to investigate. We came upon a big whale, perhaps 50 feet long. We kept our distance.

Agressive whale was attacking the boat

Next we knew, the Whale decided we looked interesting. It surfaced about 40 feet behind the boat and was headed toward us. We motored up, but Shamu, the retarded whale just kept coming. We moved further away and then slowed again, but there was the whale again, right behind us.

viciously agressive whale about to attack boat

Goddam whale! Probably wanted to kill us! Fortunately we escaped with our lives.

Later we tried fishing around North Coronado Island, but there were too many sea lions. As soon as we threw a delicious anchovy over the side they would deftly remove it from the hook and eat it. So much for fishing here!

Our final run-in of the day occurred when a lone speed boat came flying directly over to us. It was a Mexican gunboat – law enforcment of some kind. They asked us what we were doing. “Fishing Sir”. Do you have a license? “Yes Sir”. I proceeded to read my license number to the kind english speaking gentleman. Satisfied that we had procured our licenses before entering his sacred mexican waters, he departed. We found out later that if you didn’t have a Mexican fishing license and they caught you … they might well take your boat if they want! I was really tempted to say “License? We don’t need no stinkin’ license!”

It’s Monday and yesterday I picked up my friend Don Green from the airport and with boat in tow we proceeded to drive 10 hours straight from Half Moon Bay to San Diego. Our goal is to catch Tuna off the coast of San Diego.

We are staying on Shelter Island which is in Point Loma at Humphrey’s Half Moon Inn which is on the water and has a marina. It is conveniently located near the mouth of San Diego Harbor. I contacted Brad the manager of the marina and he set us up with a slip for the boat. When we arrived we checked in to the hotel and put the boat in the water using the ramp conveniently located across the street. We then went to a local tackle shop called Angler’s Choice which has great stuff for catching Tuna.

After spending huge amounts of cash we proceeded to sleep since we had none the night before. We were tired!

On Monday August 25th I road tripped to Mt Vernon, Washington to pick up a new Hewescraft Alaskan from Tom N Jerry’s Boats. Lee & Kelley were awesome! They’re pricing was far lower than clemens in Oregon. I then turned around and raced back to Menlo Park.

The trip took about 14 hours each way. It sucked ass! I used to enjoy driving like that but now I am too damn old. Seattle is an amazing town – as far as I could tell at 75 mph. Everything else sucked.

So I was recently shopping for a gps chartplotter for a boat. I researched it and compared pricing using the usual – google. I mean, all I ever use is google. For the most part, microsoft can kiss my as if they think I will even look at any of they’re garbage .. I fucking love google.

So anyway I am comparing prices on the garmin gpsmap 4212 & 4210. I figure the 4210 is the way to go because it is about $1800.00. The 4212 is around $$2200. I figure a 12 inch screen isn’t worth $400 more than a 10 inch, I’m cheap. So I am just about ready to purchase the 4210 … and the thought goes through my head, maybe I should try that bing shit.

So I try bing.com. I get similar results except they have this silly ‘cashback’ crap next to the top results. I figure that’s a bunch of shit, microsoft is resorting to marketing tricks to try and sell stuff. What a bunch of assholes. Steve Ballmer looks like Uncle Fester. Of course, being the sucker that I am – I look closer.

It appears it is not a trick. What they do is give you some percentage back based on the store. In my case, the garmin gpsmap was $2249.98 from eangler.com (about $50 more than the cheapo sites) but bing is giving me back 20% – $450! They seem to be doing some double reward bullshit during the month of august. So the price after this magical ‘cashback’ from bing will actually be  about $1800. And there is no tax and no shipping from the site.

Are you kidding me? That is less than the lowest price I could find on google for the garmin 4210. So I got the 4212 worth $400 more for the same price as the lower end 4210.

I have a feeling that this reward trickery is just an attempt by microsoft to drum up business for bing. Well it works for me! I bought some other shit this way too and saved another $54. If you are purchasing stuff on the internet, it may be worth your while to check out bing.com.

I began getting the IE error message:

“Stop running the script? A script on this page is causing Internet
Explorer to run slowly. If it continues to run, your computer may become
unresponsive.”

Which was scary as I thought this was due to the amount of data I was loading into javscript arrays and my dynamic DOM events. The errors were continuous and appeared to occur after one or more of the YUI panels were displayed in modal mode. When I limited the amount of data being processed, the errors continued. I figured there must be something wrong with my code.

After many google searches on the error message, I found this link about a bug in the YUI panel in modal mode with complex pages:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1884118&group_id=165715&atid=836476

It appears that the YUI panel in modal mode is not scalable:

“The currently implementation, which attaches focus handlers (which blur) to all focus'able items on the page when modal, definitely has scalability issues.”

Thanks for letting me know guys! I just spent hours trying to figure out what was wrong with my code! It would be nice of them to put a note about this on the YUI webpage for the panel object.

The solution is to unsubscribe the listeners

dialog.showMaskEvent.unsubscribe();

dialog.hideMaskEvent.unsubscribe();

This degrades the modality a bit by still allowing the user to TAB into the page behind the mask and launch links, but they cannot click with the mouse. Good enough functionality for me.

I also had issues where events were being fired when the enter key was pressed. It seemed that the event from a closed dialog was being launched along with the currently open dialog’s key event. Unfortunately, it’s hard to pin down how this was fixed or why it was happening. I fiddled a bit and it seems fine now.

The final issue I had was when to initialize the panels. I started by using the YUI suggested method of using the YAHOO.util.Event.addListener method. The problem was that I already had a function running <body onLoad() which would sometimes call the panel routines. This would cause an error if the panel had not been initialized. I could not find any method for prioritizing when the events would run.

I finally just called the routines in my <body onLoad() routine to ensure that the panels were initialized before they were needed. This seems to work fine.

I was sending the form by using a javascript function to get each field, concatonate a url (using escape) and use the YUI connection manager with a GET method. This caused intermitten errors on firefox including one like ‘the server did not understand the request’ (or something like that). What was happening was the escape was creating a series of chars that triggered a mod_security rule. The rule was blocking access to the rails server.

ModSecurity: Access denied with code 400 (phase 2). Pattern match "%0[ad]" at REQUEST_URI. [id "950910"] [msg "HTTP Response Splitting Attack. Matched signature <%0a>"] [severity "ALERT"] [hostname "dev.removed.com"] [uri "/aSubmitContact?name=john%20johnson&email=john@removed.com&phone=123455&msg=this%20is%20a%20test%0Athsi%20is%20only%20a%20test&subject=general"]


I did some digging and discovered that YUI has a sweet function to fetch, prepare and send the form fields for me:

Connection Manager can automatically harvest HTML form data and prepare it for either a GET or POST request via the setForm method. When you call this method before initiating the transaction, Connection Manager constructs a GET querystring or a POST message from the form and submits it to the specified URL.

You simply hand the element to YAHOO.util.Connect.setForm(formObject, true); and the connection manager takes care of the rest. SWEET!

After that, another issue came up with rails. It seems that rails expects you to utilize it’s built-in form generator. When I submitted the form I built with javascript using the DOM, I got the error:

ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken

This appears to be due to a new feature in rails that attempts to stop cross-site-scripting by attaching an hidden identifier value to the form. I had to disable the feature for my javascript created form. To disable it I used:
protect_from_forgery nly => [:update, :delete, :create].
I realize that it is a nice feature, but it would be nice to see it as optional instead of default.