Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger was involved in a motorcycle accident around 11:30am

Living in Browns’ country every browns fan has come up to me with a half grin on their face asking if I’ve heard the news…
Of course that was before the exact details came out…

The Pittsburgh Tribune Review* is reporting: “Roethlisberger lost most of his teeth, fractured his left sinus cavity bone, suffered a nine-inch laceration to the back of his head and a broken jaw, and severely injured both of his knees when he hit the ground, police said. A plastic surgeon has been summoned.”

UPDATE: BTW, I read on a sports forum that had linked to my post, that another Steeler had reported that the surgery was specifically for the broken jaw and was expected to heal enough for him to play early in the season. The Steeler was un-named. So take that for what it is worth.

From KDKA:
“Witnesses tell KDKA he was not wearing a helmet and appeared to have head and facial injuries.”

From me:
PA is NOT the state to be riding in without a helmet. The road conditions (repair + gravel) not to mention the curves and hills just add too many variables. That’s even before you start thinking about the cars pulling out in front of you… Nebraska, that’s a different story. Plus no helmet on the 10th street bridge??? That’s just plain stupid. The buses in Pittsburgh deliberately (almost) try to take out motorcylclists. They assume you don’t need the whole lane and that they can take the right hand turns wide and swing their tails into the next lane over. The DO NOT do that when there are cars there or they would take out the passenger side door and window.

And can you imagine the poor people from Maine that go on vacation and take out the QB that won the last superbowl???

Predictions:
The lid law in PA will come under intense scrutiny but remain as is.
Riders in the NFL and other professional sports will come under an intense scrutiny (AKA the Cleveland Brown’s Kellen Winslow times 10) and some bylaw will be passed preventing riding without a helmet.
That law will provoke do gooders accross the country to revisit state helmet law legislation. Should be a fun year.

More from KDKA PITTSBURGH: Pittsburgh Steelers Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger is
Continue reading Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger was involved in a motorcycle accident around 11:30am

[Advair] more than tripled users’ risk of asthma-linked death

I caught this news article last week and it definately raised my eyebrowse as this is a medicine i’ve had perscriptions for both Serevent and Advair for the past two years. I haven’t taken Advair at all this year nor much of the latter half of last year, since my symptoms have decreased. Still…

A friend of my wife had an asthma attack last year while on vacation. She’s preped herself for a month before hand – dilegently taking her battery of medicines. Near the end of the vacation, the family left giving her a couple days on her own. That’s when she had what I understand was her first and only asthma attack during the vacation. It was bad enough that a woman in a nearby room heard her and called for an ambulance. By the time the paramedics got there, her heart had stopped. Flatlined – dead…

With drugs and physical intervention, they revived her, only to have her OD on the stuff they revived her with. This caused her heart to stop again. Once again they revived her again. This time it stuck.

She’s alive and well and part of the knitting group Denise attends on Tuesday nights.

Advair was one of the medications she diligently used to prep herself for the vacation.

http://health.yahoo.com/news/163034

Asthma Inhaler Type Could Boost Death Risk

June 8, 2006 08:47:39 PM PST
By Randy Dotinga
HealthDay Reporter
Yahoo! Health: Addiction News

THURSDAY, June 8 (HealthDay News) — Adding to the ongoing controversy over a popular class of asthma inhaler medications, a new data review suggests the drugs may be dangerous.
Continue reading [Advair] more than tripled users’ risk of asthma-linked death

A horrible, horrible time suck…

Whatever you do, if you’re at all obsessive compulsive about puzzles, DO NOT click on any of these links…

http://www.TheCodeCave.com/swf/hapland.swf
http://www.TheCodeCave.com/swf/hapland2.swf
http://www.TheCodeCave.com/swf/hapland3.swf

Hapland is a game that is sort of like viewing a complete “incredible machine” that you must figure out how to activate in the right sequence… You must look at the cause and effect of everything on the screen and figure out the right sequence to light the torches and activate the portal at the end of each level.

My 10 and 8 year olds (and my wife and I) have solved Hapland1. Now we are working on 2. We’re kind of stuck at the moment… but we’ve made some progress…

Anyway, these games were written by the fine folks at foon.co.uk. I recommend that you visit them; there’s a link inside the game. I’m hosting locally since it downloads much faster and I want to play it at near full screen. At foon.co.uk, it is a fixed size.

wp_error is an excellent tool

Rob Miller wrote an excellent article on the use of wp_error in WordPress plugins…
http://robm.me.uk/2006/06/11/wp_error/
I’d suggest suggest that every WordPress hacker/plugin author, that is not familiar with this realtively unknown bit of wordpress lore, should go and read it!

If nowhere else, it will be indispensible when writing validation routines. You can call some VerifyPostVars routine and have it return a variable. If the variable causes Is_WP_Error() to return true, then you can display the results. The neat thing is that the WP_Error structure can contain multiple results. So, you can say
X is required, but was not supplied.
Y was not formatted correctly.
Z is not valid with the sellected options.
All at once, rather than having the user try to submit a form multiple times. Sure you can build other structures to handle that, but if everyone starts using WP_Error, plugins will all be consistent.

How to unlock your LG vx 5200, 6000, 8100, 9800

One of the major problems I have with my vx5200 phone is that it takes hundreds of pictures of the inside of my pocket…

Right now I only have one solution for this: Lock the keypad.
However, I was expecting it to unlock by pressing Menu * like my old (I-didn’t-know-how-good-I-had-it-when-I-had-it) Nokia phone.

Now however, with the new Verizon menu system on all of their LG phones, my lg5200 did not unlock the same way… After trying all logical four digit number combinations I could think of in 15-20 minutes, (1234, 4321, 1111, 2222, 5432, 6543, 0000) I stopped and thought “OK – if it is not a number pattern, it is a specific number. What specific number is associated with this phone…”

Well the answer is obvious… The unlock code for Verizon phones is….

Drum roll please……..dddddddddddddddddddd

The answer is The last four digits of your phone number.

Bad Image Finder Updated….

I’ve updated my earlier post about “How to find bad JPEG files in a directory – via Delphi (Source Code)“. It now includes a routine to do extra corruption checking if the image is a JPEG. The problem is that I don’t fully see/agree with the logic in this routine… but it seems to work better the person I wrote it for…. I just need some non-artificially corrupted JPEG files to test it on…

Anyway, see if you can make better sense of this…
[delphi]
while (Cardinal(pB) < pE) do begin if (pB^ < $E1) then begin Result := TRUE; Break; end else begin inc(pB); if (pB^ >= $E1)
then begin
inc(pB);
if (pB^ >= $E1)
then begin
Result := TRUE;
Break;
end;
dec(pB);
end;
dec(pB);
end;
inc(pB, 16);
end; [/delphi]

It goes backwards through the last line of the image and checks to see if the color (I believe) is less than the constant $E1. If it is, then result is changed from FALSE to TRUE and the routine exits with IsValidJPEG returning TRUE. Otherwise, if all the pixels in that line have a color greater than or equal too $E1 (labeled suspect blue),then the result remains FALSE and IsValidJPEG returns false…

So… basically it makes sure that there’s at least one valid colored pixel on the line and then it is assumed the jpeg is valid? That seems kindof sketchy to me… but if it works…

Any thoughts?

How to play MP3s on a Verizon LG vx8100

Verizon tries to force you to only play WMA files on your phone. But because they’ve left their security menu open, you can reenable mp3 files.

Here’s how:
1. First Press Menu
2. Look at the menu if you want, but we’re gonna a hidden option: 0
3. After you press 0, you get asked for the service code password. Enter 000000.

Your now in the “secret” service menu. Be careful – you CAN screw up your phone from this menu..
4. Scroll down to and select “11. Music Setting” Note that this is specific to the vx8100 service menu. On the vx5200, this is Battery test.
5. Then select mp3 enable,
6. Press OK and your phone will probably reset.

You can now play MP3 AND WMA music files…

My wife will be very happy when she sees I’ve “fixed” her phone…

Two Secret Verizon Phone Menus – LG VX5200, LG VX6000, LG VX7000, LG VX8100 etc phones

This one is pretty straight forward but is the key to doing a lot of stuff that Verizon has disabled by default for their phones…

1. First Press Menu
2. Look at the menu if you want, but we’re gonna chose an option that isn’t available there: 0
3. After you press 0, you get asked for the service code password. No problem, it is all zeros! Enter 0,0,0,0,0,0 for the service code.

Your now in the “secret” service menu. Be careful – you CAN screw up your phone from this menu..

And there is another secret menu from here!
4. Press #, another hidden option, and you will enter the TEST MODE menu and from there you can do all kinds of cool stuff!

Bad etiquette! What have I gotten myself into?

Well, I responded to a post on my wife’s blog http://www.knitchat.com, but it turns out that her post is what’s called a “meme” which means I MUST post my response on my blog and refer back to hers and include the original meme. So, I am doing so now.

BUT WAIT!!!! It turns out that this meme thing is REALLY interesting… I always thought these things were called “Me! Me!”s…

They’re not. According to the Wikipedia , it’s pronounced as Meem and it’s a term that refers to self propagating knowledge that is passed down from generation to generation. For instance, the tune “All around the mulberry bush”, a song about spinning yarn is a meme. How Continue reading Bad etiquette! What have I gotten myself into?