He’s having financial difficulties
He has been a party to past fraudulent or questionable lawsuits
He either currently has, or previously had, tax problems
He’s an aspiring reality star
He’s attempted other “attention grabbing” things in the past
His story changes on whether or not he attempted to put car in neutral
His story changes period

Normally, I’d give him the benefit of the doubt – but something about this guy and his apparent zest for media coverage is making me very skeptical……

Tonight he fractured a knee cap against Houston and he will miss the rest of the season. That’s 2 seasons out already. It’s not looking good for the big guy. The Trail Blazers have already stated that he’ll be undergoing surgery.

Oden hit the floor grabbing his left knee and wincing in obvious pain. I knew immediately that it was a bad one. He was driving against the Oregon alum point guard, Aaron Brooks about halfway through the first quarter when he went down.

Trainers and physicians stormed the court. The Rose Garden crowd got on their feed and starte chanting “Oden! Oden!” It took about 10 minutes and he was finally moved to a stretcher and wheeled from the court.

The big guy with mismatched legs missed his entire rookie season after undergoing microfracture surgery on his right knee. Last season, he missed six games after injuring his right foot in the season opener against the Lakers. He looked average after coming back and then missed 14 games after the All-Star break with a bone chip in his left knee. He finished the season averaging a not-spectacular 8.9 points and 7 rebounds.

Supposedly, Oden dieted in the off season and lost some weight to alleviate potential injury problems. It didn’t matter and he’s going to miss another season. He was averaging 11.7 points and 8.8 rebounds this season as a starter.

He could mature into an impact player, but the injury odds appear to be against him. It’s too bad, he was great to watch in college.

Rating and Review of Tiger’s Mistresses (so Far)

Rachel Uchitel – oldest of the bunch so far. Sounds like she is going to pocket somewhere between 1 to 3 million. She played it pretty shrewdly by denying right off the bat and retaining an attorney. I thought she was scooped by Jaimee Grubbs, but I don’t think Jaimee got as much money – even though she beat Rachel to the punch – from US WEEKLY. She is the best looking so far, so it’s probably for the best that she pocketed the most money.

Jaimee Grubbs – a skeezer, somewhat haggard looking, aspiring reality starlet… wow… Tiger, c’mon. Pick someone with at least something to lose…. Amazing that Tiger was either that stupid (I doubt, he’s a Stanford guy…) or that arrogant to think this wouldn’t come out. I hope Tiger put a bag over this girl’s face.

Kalika Moquin – a magazine cover proclaims that she is one of the top 31 most influential people in Vegas nightlife… Apparently, being on that list doesn’t pay the bills – so she came forward to catch a ride on the Tiger gravy train. I’m guessing she doesn’t have the arsenal to back her up. Silly girl, she probably deleted the lurid text messages. Rumor has it she’s been chasing down Verizon trying to get them back… She’s a distant #2 in looks, but she’s a longshot to break 7 figures on this deal.

So now we wait on the Orlando girl to pop out. I don’t understand how these girls can wake up and look in the mirror after this, but I guess they can…

Tiger’s Medicine

Just out of curiosity, I’d like to know what medicine he was on? Anyone know?

Anyway…

society is judged by how it treats its least fortunate amongst them……

Spike Shooter Energy Drink

Unfortunately, this one may be a bit over the top. 7-11 has even pulled this stuff off the shelves, but I was still able to get my hands on a few of them at GNC. They have about the same amount of caffeine as 3 Starbucks coffees all packed into a can.

Spike Shooter Tastes…Predictable

Well, it seems like there is a fairly predictable taste for all of these drinks lately. They all seem to taste very synthetic. I get this weird, “I shouldn’t be drinking this stuff – it can’t be good for me” feeling every time I pour one of these synthetic concoctions down my throat. They don’t taste remotely natural. Before drinking Spike, I thought it might be a little thicker – kinda gummy. It wasn’t. In fact, it was very “thin” tasting (as opposed to Redline – which tastes a little denser).

The Spike Energy Rush

This stuff was on par with Redline, but (for me) I didn’t enjoy the feeling as much as a Redline. Redline is still the king in my mind. This just felt jittery like a mega jolt of caffeine (cuz it is!) and I wasn’t as productive as I am on a tank of Redline.

Wise Man Say, “Drinky With Caution!”

Technorati Tags: energy drink, redline, spike energy drink

General recommendations for liability minimums are $50,000 bodily injury liability for one person injured in an accident, $100,000 to cover all people injured in an accident and $25,000 property damage liability (that is, 50/100/25). Obviously, car insurance rates vary from one provider to another. Another issue to consider is that the limits of any uninsured and/or underinsured motorist coverage that you purchase cannot exceed the limits of your liability coverage. Such coverage, he said, can be valuable, as it will cover lost income if you’re out of work for several months after being injured in a major accident.

If you’re seeking low cost auto insurance, your driving habits may also be a consideration. If your past is filled with crumpled fenders, if you have a lead foot or a long commute on a treacherous winding road, then you should get more comprehensive coverage. Keep in mind that you don’t have to buy collision and comprehensive coverage. If your vehicle is older, if you have a good driving record and if there is a low likelihood that it would be totaled in an accident, but a high likelihood of it being stolen, you could buy comprehensive but not collision.

Disclaimer: I absolutely do not advocate splogging of any kind. This is simply a way to get your existing data into a Wordpress blog. This same method could be used for chapters in book, recipes, or whatever other kind of data you may have. Rather than taking the monumental effort of manually creating a Wordpress site based on your work, you can use a little creativity to come up with a fast, easy solution that is surprisingly robust (this article creates a Wordpress blog website with over 31,000 posts).

I’m a big fan of native file formats – as they say, “when in rome”…. Yeah. Anyway, this is a quick article to illustrate how to set up Wordpress Import using an Excel spreadsheet. I’ll try to cover this from point A to point Z and even provide the download files and set up a sample URL so you can see the results.

The Wordpress 2.8 Import File screen lists fifteen different file formats including: Blogger, Blogroll, Blogware, Bunny’s Technorati Tags, Categories and Tags Converter, DotClear, GreyMatter, Jerome’s Keywords, LiveJournal, Movable Type and TypePad, RSS, Simple Tagging, Textpattern, Ultimate, and WordPress. I would be lying if I claimed to know what any of these formats actually are, so I’m going to go the easy route and export a file and use it as a template.

The Wordpress export file saves out as a .wxr file. This format is called the WordPress eXtended RSS file format and contains posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags. After performing a Wordpress Blog Export from another blog, I can see that what I’m primarily concerned with is the “item” section which corresponds to a post. I’ll chop out the “item” section and save it as its own file. This will be a template that I’ll use later on from VBA. (I cut a couple elements from the bottom as well which I doubted were required by the schema – flying fast and loose on this one. You’d want to make sure your file conforms with any applicable XSD or DTD, but I’m fairly confident this will work.)

I’m inserting some placeholders in the template sample Wordpress Import file. These placeholders will be search and replaced as we create the actual import file(s). Here is the XML snippet of the template and here is the file available to download (coming soon).

<item>
    <title>[propertitle]</title>
    <link>[link]</link>
    <pubDate>Fri, 12 Jun 2009</pubDate>
    <dc:creator><![CDATA[admin]]></dc:creator>
    <category><![CDATA[[category]]]></category>
    <category domain=”category” nicename=”[category]“><![CDATA[[category]]]></category>
    <guid isPermaLink=”false”>http://www.biblewack.com/[testament]/[category]/[hyphen]/</guid>
    <description></description>
    <content:encoded><![CDATA[[content]
<p align=”center”><span style=”font-size: x-small;”>
<a title=”[backtitle]” href=”[backlink]“>&lt;&lt; [backtitle]</a> || <a title=”[nexttitle]” href=”[nextlink]“>[nexttitle] &gt;&gt;</a></span>
]]>
    </content:encoded>
    <excerpt:encoded><![CDATA[[content]]]></excerpt:encoded>
    <wp:post_id>[postid]</wp:post_id>
    <wp:post_date>2009-06-12</wp:post_date>
    <wp:post_date_gmt>2009-06-12</wp:post_date_gmt>
    <wp:comment_status>open</wp:comment_status>
    <wp:ping_status>open</wp:ping_status>
    <wp:post_name>[hyphen]</wp:post_name>
    <wp:status>publish</wp:status>
    <wp:post_parent>0</wp:post_parent>
    <wp:menu_order>0</wp:menu_order>
    <wp:post_type>post</wp:post_type>
    <wp:post_password></wp:post_password>
</item>

Programming the Wordpress Upload

So, I wanted to create a big Wordpress site for this example – really big. I struggled to think of what kind of freely diseminable data I could come up with to create a massive Wordpress Import sample. I found a good source of data with the Bible. Free to distribute and in nice text file format. Each line numbered (think “unique identifier”) and each line with a hard return after it. A perfect data structure for import into Excel (and eventual import into Wordpress). I’ll digress from the Wordpress Import briefly to illustrate how I sliced and diced the data to get it ready.

1. Import into Excel without delimiters. 1 column
2. Chop out Line Numbers with For-Next Loop and instr(function). 2 columns
3. Derive Chapter Name with Lookup function on alpha characters in previously created column. 3 columns
4. Assign Old Testament or New Testament with manual drag in Excel. 4 columns
5. Figure out what the URLs will be and make URL column. 5 columns

The reason I wanted to figure out the absolute URL for each post is I wanted to include “back” and “next” links in the body of each post so one could traverse throughout the entire book from post to post. This is accomplished simply by looking at the previous row (x-1) and the next row (x+1) while executing the loop.

Here is the entirety of the routine to create the .wrx Import file. You may need to split your file up differently depending on your import limits. You can easily do this by saving out a file every XXXX-th time or whatever you need. The code is very simple to understand. I loop through every data row in the spreadsheet (31102 rows and a header). Variables are assigned to the cell string values. A string variable “S” is assigned the result of our Text2String function. As I’m thinking about it now in retrospect, rather than call that code every time – you could just call it initially and create S once. Then you could assign another variable to the value of S every time rather than going through the readfile process, much more efficient…..Oh well… Lastly, I append the contents of S into a file using Print.

Sub makeWordpressImportFile()

Next x
End Sub

Finally, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that we haven’t yet created a well formed XML file – there is no root node. We’ve essentially concatenated together a bunch of nodes, but there is no root. I doubt very seriously this would import into anything. You could write something to open each file and paste in the root node and matching end node – or you can manually open and save your files out. I chose the latter as I didn’t have many files to work with. I used the following as my root node:

<rss version=”2.0″
    xmlns:excerpt=”http://wordpress.org/export/1.0/excerpt/”
    xmlns:content=”http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/”
    xmlns:wfw=”http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/”
    xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/”
    xmlns:wp=”http://wordpress.org/export/1.0/”
>

…and obviously my closing node was simply “</rss>” which indicated the end of file. Once you have your file(s), all you need to do is import it and Wordpress will handle the rest. The categories will be created and the posts will be created. You could obviously fine tune this by working with the dates – future dating posts does work (you can make it look like you’re working when you’re really not!). The sample site that I created is at www.biblewack.com (very hard finding an available URL with “bible” in the title). Good luck.

Anyway, the hand wound Crawler 21.5 Brushless motor features sensor/sensorless operation and neodymium magnets. It has a built-in Hill brake, but that isn’t needed with the worm gears in the Losi Comp Crawler, but I’d like it in my Axial AX10. The ESC also has no reverse delay and 4 unique crawler throttle profiles.

Driving the LRP Brushless Motor

Wow. I have not run brushless in a crawler before. I had that same ’special moment’ when I powered it up as when I threw the Monster Max in my eRevo. I don’t know if it has more to do with the out-of-the-box quality of the the Losi or the LRP combination, but I REALLY like this setup.

I’m reading a lot of people in the crawler community mentioning “wheel speed” lately. It is nice to have a little bit of “blast” on reserve to power up tough sections when you need it, but I also like driving super slow. The LRP setup is great for both. It easily packs more punch with a 6 cell NimH battery than a comparable Novak 55 turn brushed setup on Lipo.

LRP Slow Speed Crawling

Where things really get interesting is at the super slow end. This thing is buttery smooth…unbelievably silky smooth…..super slow….(words can’t describe) My Axial has a Mamba Max with the Novak 55t and I can almost feel the revolutions of the motor if you know what I mean (not literally, but that “chug chug chug” feeling when going slow). The LRP setup is just totally smooth – unbelievable low end. You become intimately intertwined with the Crawler as it responds to the trigger. Inching up something is fun. It’s hard to describe until you do it.

Four thumbs up for the LRP setup – well worth the money!