OALM 3 - Dues Paid Check

In the updated version of the Order of the Arrow "LodgeMaster" membership database, there are new ways of looking for information. One we struggled with in prior versions was checking on dues paid status for individuals, whether in a unit, or in a Lodge position.  Below are the results of a query where I altered the "dues years to include" to cover the range 2010 through 2012. Not shown is the advanced filtering condition where position is not empty.

You'll notice there are dues paid records for 2013, though one might expect these to be outside the range specified.  The reason these appear is that these members also paid in a prior year, so they match the rules given.



To view only those records in the range requested, you will need to add an "exclude" year condition so that the current year does not match.

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OALM 3 - Possible Election Data Entry

@jspath55

The following views of OA LodgeMaster 3 should be close to the version others will see once the release happens and our database is upgraded.  These screens are from the web version, which can and probably should be used for future election entry.

I'll show how to limit the view to one unit, as someone would when entering election results from one unit.  The date for the Youth should be set.

Figure 1 - a basic roster view, with all dues year, as well as "non-Ordeal" added.

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figure 2 displays the "column chooser" - I added unit number, election date, etc.

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figure 3 shows a single unit, after adding a match in the "Advance Filtering" menu

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figure 4 is the same unit, with Ordeal and other honors removed.

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figure 5 - clicking on "Add" member gives a basic personal data entry screen, as in the desktop version for 2.x. Only first and last names are mandatory, but many more would normally be needed for each Candidate.

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figure 6  - one fictitious member mostly created. The OALM ID is still 0, and the Contact tab has been glossed over.  I added Callout information, which may or may not be ready, if ever, for any who are elected.

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figure 7 - a more filled-out member information tab.

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figure 8 is back to the primary (multiple) membership record list, with one additional election record than previously. If several were elected, they would be added after this, one by one.



The web version saves regularly, so there should be no "synchronization" required.

Top Ten Movies at The Bengies Drive-In - 2012

Top Ten Movies at The Bengies Drive-In - 2012

The Bengies closed out their 2012 season in November. I missed the last few weeks due to traveling, and though I was hoping for movies up to Thanksgiving it didn't happen.  I put together this list of my favorites from 2012, as I have in prior years.

From tenth to first Countdown

10. Brave

9. Dr. Seuss' The Lorax

8. The Pirates! Band of Misfits

7. Men In Black 3

6. The Dark Knight Rises

5. The Amazing Spider-Man

4. John Carter of Mars

3. Lawless

2. The Avengers

1. The First Annual Bengies Drive-In Scout Camp-in - ParaNorman, The Odd Life Of Timothy Green, Premium Rush

 Yes, the top 1 movie is three movies, but the event was such an experience that I could not resist rating that evening as the best of the season.  It rained like mad before the shows even started. I didn't get much sleep, and neither others in the crowd, and I'm looking forward to the second annual drive-in camp-in.

Also Rans:

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island
Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
Total Recall

Special Mention:

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (during the Labor Day Dusk To Dawn Show)

Links to prior reviews:

• Bengies top 10 2011
• Bengies 2010 top 10 and more
• Lists of movies that played at Bengies
  
  

 

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Spectate this

This past weekend, I attended Order of the Arrow training at Broad Creek. In between sessions, and, yes, sometimes during a session, I looked at email and other online doings. I've followed the twitter account known as "@BaltoSpectator" for over a year, ever since I saw the man's bio listing his occupation as "urban combat correspondent". He's shown himself to be complex, confrontational, and, yes, wanted to make a spectacle of himself.

We had a spirited, intelligent discussion about fire station closings (and site locations) in Baltimore City, after I piped in about computer models used for public service spending decision making. It's not an easy topic, and breaking things down to simply numbers can turn life-and-death decisions into mere budget line items.

Saturday night, @BaltoSpectator used my name to tweet a link to one of his blog posts (see image below), and it was interesting enough that I re-tweeted it. I knew at the time he wasn't just sending this to me, since it came out of the blue, yet as with many memes, it had a great hook. Little did I know how many people got similar messages (nor have I researched it), but apparently his volume of posts during that time window got his account temporarily suspended for violation of Twitter rules.

Not long after my retweet, I got a DM from the good doctor, thanking me for, well, I'm not sure what. I could sense something was happening, but I wasn't clear what.

I'll include a few links below, for those who stumble on this story without the background.  As I occasionally viewed the succession of messages on the topic (searching Twitter, and other web places, while still at camp), I could see the possibility of a bad ending, as we've seen with other cases where a citizen exhibits unpredictable behavior in the context of a police setting. The Doctor is wily, though, so I held out hope he didn't to anything to martyr himself, which one could derive from some of his posts.

http://www.afro.com/sections/news/Baltimore/story.htm?storyid=76865

"He is reportedly being held without bond." - the Baltimore Afro

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2012-12-01/entertainment/bal-barricaded-man-tweets-broadcasts-police-standoff-from-basement-20121201_1_jason-yerg-tweets-web-radio

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bal-video-live-blogger-being-taken-into-custody-20121202,0,7174579.htmlpage

Do I feel used?  Yeah, a little.  Do I feel this man should be in jail?  No, I don't think so.

Did he plan a sensational confrontation?  Yes, but it was entertaining.  Not too educational, in my books, but definitely a distraction from life's little problems.

Clever phish, I got away

I saw an email supposedly from LinkedIn today, but it seemed just the tiniest bit odd.  Too odd for me to click through the included link, yet so close to an actual LinkedIn communication.  A very clever forgery.

The first clue was the sender, showing "confirm @ depost.be".  That didn't seem right.  I had to look at where they normally originate, which was "messages-noreply @ linkedin.com".  Then, besides the "click here" baited trap, there was the unusual grammar.

... You have more than one email address, and you need choose one to be your primary email address.

 They left out the "to", for one thing.  The trailer looked different too.  On closer inspection:

The first one is the fake, and just contains my email address.  The second is from LinkedIn, and has my name, most recent title, company, and no obvious email.

Digging into basic debunking tools, I looked at the message headers carefully.  Here's a few fields from the junk mail:

X-Forefront-Antispam-Report: CIP:72.29.86.223;KIP:(null);UIP:(null);IPV:NLI;H:server.sampafotoclube.com.br;RD:server.sampafotoclube.com.br;EFVD:NLI
X-SpamScore: 21
Received: from server.sampafotoclube.com.br (72.29.86.223)
Content-Type: text/html; charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

And fields from a legitimate email from LinkedIn:

DomainKey-Signature: q=dns; a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws;
    s=prod; d=linkedin.com;
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
    boundary="----=_Part_4797115_600833603.1350649326567"
X-LinkedIn-Template: tickle_yphanj
X-LinkedIn-Class: TIK

An email purportedly from an address in Belgium (".be"), transferred through another server in Brazil (".br").  Um, not thanks, not today.

The links in the email didn't go to the right place either.

Later, phish.

It's very plane.

I was looking for a local restaurant (OK, the closest with Indian food) and checked out directions with Google maps. That's the place up in the top left corner (or northwest) with the "A" symbol. Not too hard to get too, though once I got there all the buildings looked the same.

But what caught my eye was a silhouette of an airplane, seemingly parked right next to Interstate 95. I've been on that road (Cowenton Avenue) many times, and if there was an airplane sitting on the someone's driveway I certainly missed it. Perhaps it was because of the winding roads, or maybe it was a recent acquisition of some eccentric neighbor. I don't know, and I needed to find out more.

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As I zoomed in closer, virtually speaking, I realized this plane was not parked, it was in flight. The ground surface showed trees beneath it, and if a plane had been pushed or dropped there somehow, it probably would have made the local news. I was curious as to how that happened, with the Google satellite imagery capturing an airplane at some lower altitude. Perhaps someone with better fuselage recognition and good math skills could compute the height of the plane during this photo capture. I'd say it was probably on descent, most likely to BWI, not Martin State Airport.

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The highest zoom level shows interesting color gradations on the wings and tails. I've somewhat morphed them by shrinking the number of colors to get the image as small as possible for blog viewing under network bandwidth conservation rules.

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Since Google regularly updates imagery with new versions, I've included a couple links below so you can see if the plane shot is still in the catalog or not. The first is an embedded Panoramio clip, with someone else's shot from I-95 of the nearby Joppa Road overpass in the center. That was a fairly simple way of grabbing the closest coordinates to the image.

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<iframe height="450px" src="http://www.panoramio.com/plugin/?lt=39.397645&ln=-76.430792&z=1&user=1197306&k=2" width="450px"></iframe>

https://maps.google.com/maps

https://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=39%C2%B0+23%27+51.52%22+N++76%C2%B0+25%27+50.85%22+W&aq=&sll=38.804821,-77.236966&sspn=2.114625,3.213501&vpsrc=0&t=h&ie=UTF8&z=17

39° 23' 51.52" N  76° 25' 50.85" W 

Finally, if you look at the first shot above, you'll see the same plane is visible twice. At least, I hope it's the same plane, and not some kind of airplane game of tag. It's in the ballfield near "Autumn Glow Way." No, not that kind of glow.

Eye Pad Candy

Eye Pad Apps

Screen/Row/Column

3/1/1 : Google Maps. Useful, though Apple provides a similar tool in the base distribution. I use the maps on my phone or home PC more often than this one.

3/1/2 : Time zones. Basically a short cut to the http://everytimezone.com/ site. "Never warp your brain with time zone math again."

3/1/3 : Twitter. Yah. It works, though this implementation has some strange quirks. The swiping takes getting used to.

3/1/4 : Netflix. Good enough for most movies, and the Instant Queue search picks can rapidly appear on my larger screen unit.

3/1/5 : Kindle Reader. Was better when the catalog could be seen directly on the eye pad. Have gotten used to getting free tomes via Amazon, and from Project Gutenberg / http://www.gutenberg.org/

3/2/1 : Dropbox. Pretty slick, especially for moving eye pad screen shots onto other places, given the standard claustrophobic Apple approach. I used it for these screens.

3/2/2 : AccuWeather. Last update made it harder, not easier to use, but still a fast short cut to forecasts.

3/2/3 : Google Earth. Works, as long as the connection speed is good. Dismal in copying data for use anywhere else, compared to the PC edition.

3/2/4 : Google+. The last big update made the interface "slicker" in the sense of slippery, not functionally. It's tied for #2 with FB, behind Twitter.

3/2/5 : Skype. Again, a recent upgrade moved stuff around, and you can see more ads creeping in. But it does what it is supposed to.

3/3/1 : Vtok. Nice, free, multifarious comm app. Fills in the gap of G Mail not working so hot with Safari. A bit crash prone, but it's free.

3/3/2 : Briefing. A leftover SAP Mobile Demo. Close to useless.

3/3/3 : Public Radio. Dead simple interface to bring in what it says. Easy bookmarking of favorites.

3/3/4 : FTP Client Pro. The second app I bought. Works well, except for odd limits. Recommended if you need it.

After filling the first (really the third) panel with apps, I tried to split 3 and 4 between most used and less used, though I may revise which are where again.

4/1/1 : LOL banner generator. Good when meetings run too long.

4/1/2 : TIOD. Um, I forget.

4/1/3 : Speed Test. Every electrician should test their circuits regularly. Use this one at home and on the road.

4/1/4 : Free Ping. Simpler version of Speed Test. Does what it says.

4/1/5 : Spreadsheet. Used when showing youth how computers work. Won't replace Excel or OpenOffice, but has basic elegance.

4/2/1 : Quick Sketch. Lke the above, does basic drawing. Good for quick signs, etc.

4/2/2 : MW Dictionary. It sits there.

4/2/3 : Timer+. A countdown clock. Handy for filming SCNotties 30 second videos. Not so handy for boiling eggs.

4/2/4 : NSLookup. Again, does what it says. Handy when you're in a strange network and unsure which way is up.

4/2/5 : Calculator. One more basic app a computer should not be without.

4/3/1 : VNCViewer. The first app I bought. Using more now, but without a 3-button mouse and a decent keyboard, it's like building a ship in a bottle.

4/3/2 : Adobe Viewer. Guess I can live without this one.