My personal experience with the Mailhot Ripper

Yesterday I went out to lunch with my wife. Entering the restaurant the headline on the front page of the paper caught my eye 'Ripper' tells Mailhot tale. The detective, Edward Lee Jr, that arrested Jeff Mailhot and convinced him to confess to killing and dismembering three women in Woonsocket has co-authored the book 'Ripper' with writer Linda RosenCrance. Jeff Mailhot was an ex co-worker of mine.

Jeff was a likable guy with whom almost everybody enjoyed working with. I trouble shoot machine problems and when I am called over to a machine it is sometimes common for the people operating the machinery to be frustrated, this was not the case in dealing with Jeff, he would be enthusiastic and helpful in reaching a resolution. I recall having a friendly conversation one chilly fall day as I crossed paths with Jeff. He was dressed in his usual attire a short sleeve shirt, jean shorts and boots. I mentioned to Jeff that it was getting a little cold to be wearing shorts for which he replied “I will only resort to wearing pants when it gets really cold later in the winter”.

Imagine my co-workers surprise when on Monday July 19, 2004 we came to work to hear that friendly Jeff had been arrested for killing a woman, it was unbelievable. As the facts came to be known and a search of the local landfills for body parts ensued, reality sunk in... we had worked and been in the presence of a serial killer. The most disturbing thing for me was less than two weeks prior to his arrest Jeff had strangled and dismembered a woman over the fourth of July weekend. A couple of days later, Jeff came to work as if nothing had happened... just business as usual.

Jeffrey's supervisor Al, corresponded with him while he was awaiting trial. Al received a detailed letter from Jeff explaining how and possibly why he had committed the first crime and what had triggered him to commit the subsequent crimes. So yesterday, as I am having lunch, and reading this front page newspaper article I call Al to tell him that a newspaper article and book has been written about our favorite serial killer. "Al" I say "Did they interview you for this newspaper article or book"? Al says "No".

In the weeks and months after Jeffrey Mailhot was arrested, my friends and family would occasionally ask if I heard any new details about the killings. I would jokingly say: I heard Jeff had a few girlfriends but, once he bled them dry they fell to pieces. In truth Jeff cut, sawed and hacked his victims to pieces. I remember hearing that they found saw and hack marks in Jeff’s bathtub from where he chopped up the bodies. Jeff placed the dismembered parts in trash bags and disposed of these bags in dumpsters around the local area.

The world is a better place with Jeffery Mailhot incarcerated. I now know that the most unsuspecting people could be serial killers.

jquery Photo Collage

I typically post family photos on my website once a month. The work horse for displaying these photos has been a conveyor slide show script. I was creating a photo collage using some free Shutterfly Photo software when I had an epiphany, wouldn't it be neat to have a large center picture surrounded by thumbnail pictures, which when the thumbnails are hovered on would load the selected image into the large center image.

The basis for this jquery collage is to have 28 thumbnail images resized to 106px by 80px and saved into a folder. Also size a version of the images to 640px by 480px and save them into a seperate folder. Set the path of the thumbnail images in the img tags and the path to the 640X480 images in the href portion of the a tags.

Click on this link to see a demonstation jqueryCollage1.html

Disabling Norton 360 Backup

I use Norton 360 and I like everything it does for me with the exception of its backup feature. All my attempts to schedule a backup are unsuccessful. It appears to have a mind of its own. Every time I log onto my pc it trys to run a backup regardless of the set schedule.



I Googled this problem and came across some complaints that this a common problem and reinstalling Norton 360 may help.



I have an alternative backup solution so all I wanted was to disable the backup from running, simple right? I looked for a way to disable or turn off the backup feature under Tasks & Settings/Change Backup Settings, which is where I set the files to be backed up and the schedule, but there is no disable option there.



The Solution: Click on the round backup restore section of the main Norton 360 window.


















Once backup and restore icon is clicked you will find an option to disable backup and restore.

So I give Norton 360 a B+ for protecting my pc from viruses, a F for backing up my files and a D for designing a counter intuitive user interface.


My alternative Backup solution IE the poor mans backup:

Open Notepad and type

XCOPY /E/M/Y "C:\Directory I want to backup" "E:\Directory I want to backup to"

Now choose save as "Backup.bat". Use the double quotes when saving the file. This will save the file as a recognizable bat file.

Now you can schedule this backup to run Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Scheduled Tasks/Add Scheduled Task. Follow the wizard and select your saved bat file and set a schedule for it to run.

The XCOPY command will copy all files and folders in the backup directory. It will also set the archive bit for all of the files it backs up so the next time it runs it will skip any files previously backed up. Pretty slick and simple for something the morons at Norton seem to be unable to figure out.

Orchard Project update

More than three months after I started my family orchard and it looks promising.

My only casualty appears to be one peach tree.

The strongest growing trees that I planted were the asian pear trees.

The one tree which has been a disapointment, aside from the one casualty, was the potted Home Depot tree. I may have made a mistake in not pruning back the branch growth after planting it. I read that this can produce a stronger tree because when the tree is planted and the roots adjust to their new home, pruning the branch growth back results in a stronger tree as it adjusts to its new permanant home. In either case this reaffirmed my decision to purchse root stock for the majority of my trees.

The japanese beetles were having a field day with my trees.

Home Depot did not have beetle bags and I was going to try Lowes but in the process of re-organizing my basement I found three new beetle bag setups. It has been two years since I used beetle bags to control japanese beetles from destroying my garden. It only now occured to me that part of my lawn grub problem is probably related to japanese beetles. I came across a youtube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY9vuFVc3FU) which demonstrates how to increase the trap capacity of the bag trap through the use of a trash bag. This may be worth a try, saving my trees, saving my lawn from grub damage and save some money eliminating the need to use grub control on the lawn.

Teaching my children to read

I am fortunate to have two brilliant children, both of whom have learned to read at the age of five. I am not an expert in early childhood literacy, but I believe that our daily practices have everything to do with our children's propensity to read.

Children need to crawl before they can walk and this holds true for reading. The simple exercise of recognizing upper and lower case letters is a big accomplishment and will lay the groundwork for literacy. Sing the ABCs with your kids. When my girls were between the ages of three and four I started a daily checklist. I listed all the letters in a notebook. Everyday I would ask my girls to identify the letters. This was done in many ways such as asking them to type the letter on a computer keyboard and having the letter appear in a large colorful font in a word editing program. I also used flash cards or used some of their toys which had the alphabet on them. For every letter they identified I placed a check mark next to the letter. A couple of times doing this exercise quickly pointed to the letters they had trouble identifying and we spent extra time on those letter.

The use of a Computer and encouraging children to use the computer is the largest motivation next to books. It amazes me that a large number of parents who will not allow their young children to be online as if they will start their own Facebook or Myspace pages. Set your kids up with their own Limited User Accounts the benefits of this in protecting your pc are beyond the scope of this post to list. Place icons on the desktop so they can access the games that you want them to play.

Let them have a password! The novelty in having a password to get onto the computer and to play game such as Webkinz, is a powerful learning tool. My youngest daughter was four and asked me "why can't I have my own password to sign into the computer". This is a great opportunity to teach them a word. I try to give them the encouragement that they can play on the computer if they can sign themselves in. A simple password such as ball, to get onto the computer, a simple user name and password to sign into an online game such as Webkinz and they are familiar with two or three words and a dozen letters.

Our ability to read is directly related to the ability to phonetically sound out letters. I find our daily practice in this occurs at the dinner table. We have fun discussions such as "what letter does the word cat or kick start with"? Reading the labels on condiment bottles such as Ketchup or Salad Dressing shows that the importance of reading goes beyond reading books and that words and letters are all around us.

Reading with Dick and Jane. I view this as the most powerful tool in my literacy bookcase. Similar to a general holding back his troops before charging into battle, once your children can confidently recognize upper and lowercase letters and simple words introduce them to these books. I found that the simple structure of these books gives children the confidence and fluency to begin reading. Once they gain this confidence and momentum I try to encourage daily reading with wild enthusiasm.

Up until the fourth grade, children learn to read. After that point, children read to learn.
Giving your children a jump start in reading is a gift they will carry with them for the rest of their life.

3 lines of code to make a GridView Row Color Dynamic

There doesn,t appear to be alot of good references for dynamically evaluating column values on a Gridview and changing the row color based on criteria. I am a big advocate of this .net tutorial: http://asp.net/learn/data-access/tutorial-11-vb.aspx. But this tutorial suggests making a database call on every row that is bound, simply to evaluate if you want to highlight the row. This does not make much sense as the information as everything you need exists in the RowDataBound event. The row can be highlighted using just 3 lines of code on the RowDataBound event:


Protected Sub GridView1_RowDataBound(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Web.UI.WebControls.GridViewRowEventArgs) Handles GridView1.RowDataBound
If Trim(e.Row.Cells(7).Text) <> "MyText" And Trim(e.Row.Cells(7).Text) <> "HeaderText" Then
e.Row.BackColor = Color.Orange
End If
End Sub

New Massachusetts booster seat law

It has always been a pet peeve of mine when someone says "it's the law". I want to under stand what the law is and I typically go about investigating how the law reads. I read a couple of articles on Boston.com saying there is a new booster seat law for children. Apparently, both in the Boston Globe paper article and the online articles on Boston.com, the reporters don't feel compelled to reference the applicable M.G.L. laws which are being affected. If you want to read up on how this booster seat law presently reads click this link Chapter 90: Section 7AA. If anyone is interested in how laws are made or amended click this link: LAWMAKING IN MASSACHUSETTS.