Hero Inc.

In 13 days (September 11th, 2010), I will be participating in the Alzheimer Associations’s Memory Walk in San Francisco, California. This will be my fourth Memory Walk, but first in San Francisco. I originally started participating in the yearly Memory Walk as a way to raise money and awareness for Alzheimer’s.

Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease and one of the worst in my eyes. It certainly affects the one infected in negative ways, but it also impacts all of the loved ones around them. My grandmother was diagnosed with this disease while I was in my late middle school, early high school years. Since I was unable to drive during that time, I would go to my mother’s school after the day ended at mine. From there we often would drive to the nursing home where she was later placed in order to check on her. These visits didn’t have the effect on me then that they have on me now. Maybe I was too young to really let it all sink in, but after her death it hit me the hardest. I soon realized that the woman who I had seen in the last years of her life was no where near the woman that I had known for the first many of mine.

She’d probably kill me for posting this picture, but I love it.

Sure during those bad times, my family tried to find a way to laugh and we did, but that was only as a way to get through those times, such as when my mother had to retell the death of her father to someone who was expected to remember it. Alzheimer’s is a disease that many fail to understand until they have someone close to them be affected by it. The memory is one of the most powerful things that we have. To have it all disappear almost makes you think that life may not be worth it. In everything that you do and with every memory you make, you assure yourself that you will remember this for years to come. What if you don’t? What if you forget those very special memories that make you you?

This is the real reason I do the Memory Walk. This is why raising money and awareness is so important to me. My biggest fear is that I will end up like my grandmother and many others. That I will forget all of my friends, family and loved ones. That I will essentially let all of these important people down and not be able to look them in the eyes later in life and remember who they are or anything about the times that we had shared. This is not how I want my life or anyone else’s to end.

Now I’d love to end this post saying that’s it but I can’t. With a fund raising event such as the Memory Walk, I must advertise it. I must tell as many people as possible that I have a goal that I want to reach and I have 13 days to meet it. However, I want to state something even more than that. If you have the time, find a Memory Walk near you. If you have the funds, donate to the cause. It doesn’t have to be the Memory Walk, mine, or anyone else’s. Just find a way to donate or spread the word to others who may be interested in the cause. If you want to learn more or share how you have been impacted by Alzheimer’s leave a comment or send me a note. I’ve finally found that talking about it has helped me more than those years I kept to myself.

For those interested in donating towards my participation in the Walk, please use my personal Memory Walk page. Thanks to the generous support of many, I’ve already been able to increase my intended goal from $1,000 to $2,000. Hopefully I will hit this secondary target before the Saturday of the event.

Recently I wrote a post about the state of social media in my eyes and somewhat on the potential of many of the most popular outlets that exist for presenting many of the most mundane and daily activities.  Within this post I didn’t paint a picture of love or anything stronger than basic like for Twitter.

Well since that time, I have actually signed up for an account on twitter and my thoughts have changed.  But why have they changed?  Simply put it is because of the following:

• Let Twitter be my Facebook status update – I don’t like logging into Facebook because I’m lazy and often I just want to post a quick update without getting sucked in to seeing the latest updates from random people.  I’d rather see updates from specific people instead of my entire Facebook social graph.
• I can follow those interest me – As I stated above, I want to have the control of who will provide updates to me.  It can almost be compared to having a speed dial for life updates.
• Shortened Blog Posts – I have many ideas running through my head but never enough time to write them down for a complete blog post.  Hell, I have about 10 ideas in draft for my site but haven’t sat down to finish them.  Forcing me to stay under 140 characters makes things fast and easy.
• Connection to many regardless of status – I can connect to friends in the same way that I “connect” to celebrities.  My celebs range from Leo Laporte to Conan O’Brien to Brent Grimes.  By following them, I can stay informed on those that interest me without requiring them to approve my access.
• Access is granted where otherwise its blocked – I recently began following the Atlanta Falcons and I’m certainly glad that I did.  I receive the latest updates regarding the team (injuries, stats, trivia, etc.) but I also stay informed during games.  Now that I’m on the west coast, I can’t always enjoy watching my team play, but the twitter account gives me fast in-game updates that are greatly appreciated.
• Information from strangers – While recently attempting to troubleshoot a computer issue I was facing, I decided to reach out to complete strangers via twitter.  If my updates are already entirely public, what’s it matter if I reach out to someone I don’t even know?  Therefore, I performed a real time google search on my topic and replied to another user who was just installing the same application.  Within a few hours (time difference I’m assuming), I received a reply.  Didn’t solve my issue but provided me added information.

Having myself enjoy twitter might still be weird for some, but I’m enjoying it.  Feel free to follow me if I don’t bore you too much with my lame tweets.

…or at least I think how I was able to vote multiple times for a Polldaddy, erm, poll.

Quick backstory, a friend of mine was recently in a contest that required a community to vote on the best. Most votes wins the contest. Therefore, of course we wanted to vote as many times as possible but the contest was using Polldaddy which allowed only a single vote per day. That’s no fun and I assumed there had to be some other way.

My first step was to see how votes were being blocked. I cleared the cache and cookies.  Well that didn’t work as that would have been just too easy for anyone to do.  Therefore, I began to assume it was IP based as that’s probably the best way to ensure a single vote for users, but it also prevents say a house of roommates for voting.  It’s a single vote per household and not the more accurate single vote per person per day.

I setup to research the tools that I would need and came up with the following:

• polipo – Polipo is a small web proxy to funnel my requests through.  This was my first time using it.
• iMacro for Firefox – This is an easy tool for scripting tasks within a browser.  I’ve used in the past to vote daily in contests where I’m too lazy to navigate to the site myself.
• Firefox – If I’m using iMacro for Firefox, then I have to use Firefox.
• Torbutton for Firefox – This is another Firefox extension that I had not used before.  It allows a browser to use Tor for online anonymity.
• wmctrl – This is a command line tool for interacting with X Window Manager.  You’ll see how this is used in my bash script below.
• Bash – I am using linux and not the best programmer so I just used what was available to me.  Please no jokes about my terrible scripts.  Everyone’s learning here.

Now that I have the tools, I need to write two scripts.  The first script is the iMacro which is really easy to do.  The second script is the one to integrate the various components.

Upon installing iMacro, open the command window for it within Firefox.  It should open by default after installation.  You will find a record button.  Once pressed, anything you do in the browser will be recorded for playback or “automated browsing.”  Here’s my script for polldaddy:

VERSION BUILD=6700624 RECORDER=FX
TAB T=1
URL GOTO=http://polldaddy.com/poll/[INSERT POLL ID NUMBER HERE]
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:RADIO FORM=NAME:formPoll ATTR=ID:[SELECTED VALUE FOR POLL]
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:BUTTON ATTR=VALUE:Vote!

Now that the simple script is out of the way, its on to the more “difficult” one because my real scripting skills are beginner at best. But armed with the internet, one can do almost anything.  I needed the bash script to do the following:

1. Start Polipo
2. Start Firefox
3. Initiate the iMacro script I wrote above
4. Close Firefox correctly instead of just killing the process
5. Kill the Polipo task

Well, here’s what I did with comments to state what each line is doing:

#!/bin/bash

echo "#####################################";
echo "###     VoteOnPolldaddy Script   ###";
echo "##   created by Benjamin Trice   ###";
echo "###         July 06, 2010        ###";
echo "####################################";
echo;
echo;
echo;

echo "START SCRIPT";
#echo "Clear cahce for polipo";
#gnome-terminal -e "polipo -x";
#echo "Sleep for 2 seconds";
#sleep 2;
echo "Start Polipo";
gnome-terminal -e polipo;
echo "Sleep for 10 seconds";
sleep 10;
echo "Start Firefox";
gnome-terminal -e "firefox http://www.google.com";
echo "Sleep for 5 seconds"
sleep 5;
echo "Start Firefox with iMacro"
gnome-terminal -e "firefox http://run.imacros.net/?m=[INSERT IMACRO NAME].iim";
echo "Sleep for 75 seconds"
sleep 75;
echo "Close Firefox correctly"
wmctrl -c firefox;
sleep 5;
wmctrl -c firefox;
sleep 5;
pkill -f polipo;
echo "END SCRIPT";

Here’s a few extra notes about setup.

• Not sure if it helps or not, but go into Firefox and set the preferences to clear the cookies and cache when Firefox is closed.  This option is why I had to use wmctrl to properly shutdown Firefox.  Killing the process, in my limited testing, seemed to not clear the cache and cookies properly.
• Setting up Polipo with Tor and Firefox is simple.  The Tor Project even has a great guide for that.
• Setup a cronjob or other automated task launcher to run the bash script every 10 minutes or so.  I ended up using kalarm (yes, in Ubuntu) as my cronjob didn’t seem to run and I was getting aggravated at this point and went the lazy GUI route.  I did have some issues with the script not starting properly, but I attributed that to kAlarm and not the script itself.

Now before any potential readers who care about this subject start attacking me, I know this solution isn’t perfect nor does it vote an infinite number of times.  It seemed to be limited by the IP addresses that Tor masked me as and as Polldaddy learns what anonymous IPs exist they will begin to block them.  My original goal was to figure out how to vote an infinite number of times in a day.  That goal failed but I was able to at least get the 5+ votes in a day that Polldaddy was blocking for myself and roommates.

Anyone have a better solution?

I have a laundry list of posts I want to make but I’m being lazy at the moment (shocker there) so something quick and simple of an overall update might just work out better….mainly for me anyway.

New Face
Ok, that header isn’t exactly accurate but it works. After trying to order more contacts, I had to make an appointment in an effort to update a prescription that was well over 2 years old. Well, in the appointment I heard the usual speech about my eyes and the blood vessels within them. For those that don’t know, if you wear your contacts too much, your eye will create more blood vessels in an effort to bring more oxygen to the eye. That’s great unless it keeps getting worse. Long story short, you could end up needing a cornea transplant.

Since I didn’t want to have that, I decided to just update my glasses and stick to just them for a few months in an effort to reduce those pesky blood vessels. And of course in San Francisco, you just can’t buy normal eye glasses. They have to be a fashion statement. Well, here’s my fashion statement of “I’ve got to see.”

Pencak Silat
Thanks to my roommate, I’m trying out a new form of martial arts. New in the sense that I’ve never done anything like this before. I’ve only ever worked out via weights, sports, or simply not working out at all. Pencak Silat is an Indonesian form of martial arts that, according to my knowledge thus far, is centered around the use of weapons. Hey, anything sounds awesome if I will be taught how to wield the coolest weapon of them all. I have many years (and years and years) before anything like this.

I’m not into this for the true self defense or fighting aspect. I just wanted to try something new that would also offer me a great way to workout.

MLS
With the World Cup coming to a close (and on such a terrible finale), a friend of mine and I have decided to adopt an MLS team in an effort to follow the American soccer federation. After a brutal decision making process of about 5 minutes (probably much less), we settled on the newly formed Philadelphia Union. I’d love to state that we chose them because of great players or supreme talent, but I can’t. It was more of “Hey, they are a new team” from David and “Those uniforms are awesome” from me.

Besides, who can resist the tagline of JUNGITE aut PERITE or for those non-Latin speaking readers (and myself), JOIN or DIE.

Athens Half Marathon
Speaking of “JOIN or DIE”, I’ve decided to join up with my old roommates in our old town of Athens, GA to run the Half Marathon. I have never ran a full marathon or a half marathon or probably not even a quarter marathon. But you have to start somewhere and I guess this is where I’m starting or at least I’ll be starting here. I only have a few minutes to train so hopefully I train well enough that I don’t embarrass myself too much. At least the workout regime has helped me find a new tool in mapmyrun.com and even comes with a cool Android app.