Paulus’ Blog

While working at my last job I’ve come across this a lot. Windows simply stops connecting to the internet when you try to open IE (Internet Explorer) or Fire Fox. This really isn’t an issue anymore since most people have broadband internet.

Under the Control Panel:

• Double Click ‘Administrative Tools‘
• Double Click ‘Services‘
• Double Click ‘Remote Access Auto Connection Manager‘
• In the Startup type: pull down menu, select ‘Automatic‘
• Click the Start button.

The next step is to make sure that you have a connection already configured and that it’s set to autodial:

• Start->Settings->Network and Dial-up Connections
• Ensure that there is a dialer or create one if there isn’t
• Select the Dialer
• Click the ‘Advanced‘ pull down menu
• Select ‘Dial-up Preferences…‘
• Under the Autodial Tab, enable the ‘Enable autodial by location‘ checkbox

Optionall, if you sometimes connect to a network and use dialup:

• Start->Settings->Network and Dial-Up Connections
• Click the ‘Advanced‘ pull down menu
• Select ‘Advanced Settings…‘
• Under the Adapters and Bindings tab, in the Connections: window, choose the order for DNS to use (LAN or dialup adapter)

The other day while I was modifying a client’s site I saw that his contact form was in PERL. Recently I just got a Mac Book Pro. I’ve set up XAMPP and Eclipse on it to do my PHP programming, but I didn’t count on getting into any PERL. As a challenge I thought it would be fun to do some PERL programming.

I first installed XAMPP. Right out of the box I was able to do PHP programming and access MySQL databases which saved me some time configuring and trouble shooting issues. Or so I thought. I’ve written PERL scripts before, but never done anything that would run on a web server. When it comes to writing pages in PHP, just write the code and it works. That’s because the headers are sent for you. As a test I put the following into my script:

#!/usr/bin/perl

print(”Hello!”);

Expecting it to work. However I would get an error message saying Error 500. I looked at the log file /Applications/xampp and saw that the script was ‘exiting prematurely’ which did not make any sense at all. I could run the PERL script just fine on the command line.

After doing some digging around, about an hours worth I finally found what I was looking for. I needed to print the headers. In order to get my PERL script to work with Apache I needed to add the following:

use strict;
use CGI;

my $cgi = new CGI;

so now the script looks like:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use CGI;

my $cgi = new CGI;

print $cgi->header . $cgi->start_html . “hi” . $cgi->end_html;

The key to this script is the $cgi->header function call. With out it, you will get an internal server error. There are other functions associate with the CGI class. The start_html and end_html are the beginning and closing HTML tags.

Back in May I joined the Southern Wisconsin Paranormal Research Group. This group, unlike so many other groups relies heavily on scientific data. In the case of EVP, we don’t just use one recorder that we’ve been running around with, but we use multiple recorders while sitting down. When we believe we have an EVP, we go back and look at the data that we collected for the night to try to explain it away before labeling it an EVP.

Last night, the group hosted a public event at the Miramar Theatre in Milwaukee. We normally don’t run around in the dark, but since it was a public event and we all wanted to have a little fun and break from tradition, we had most of the lights off. Anything that we catch will be in question as the Lemon Lounge was open until approximately 2 in the morning.

Even though I can not prove to you my personal experiences, I can at least share them with you. At 21:25, I was sitting in the theater listening to the presentation that we were giving the public. My location in the seats was the South East corner of the theater. I heard a womans voice talking, thinking that there was someone behind me, I turned around but saw no one. I then waited for someone to come out of the bathroom that was right outside the door. After a few minutes of waiting I went into the Lemon Lounge to talk to the bartender and ask if anyone left. To my surprise it was just the bartender. The only people that were in there before I came in were the owner and his girl friend. Yet they left by using the door of the Lemon Lounge.

Around two, two of our guests said that while they were on the second floor passing two dry erase boards, one of the guests saw a dry erase board fall back to the wall and make a bang while the other actually saw the board come away from the wall and fall back.

Three other investigators and myself were doing an EVP session in one of the sound rooms when all of a sudden my hand felt really tingly. Also upstairs, in another one of the sound rooms, I felt particularly drawn to a corner. I grabbed an EMF meter and found that the heater was giving off a 2.4 milligauss reading.

While doing another EVP session in the basement, 4 investigators and myself were standing around while in complete darkness. During the session, I felt the presence of someone standing next to me. I asked the question if anyone was next to me, and when the session ended, another investigator asked why I asked that question. He too, also felt as if someone was behind him, which would have been next to me.

Around four in the morning, while everyone was in the theatre watching videos on the projector two lights suddenly turned on. We all got excited but after some playing around with the controls for the lights, we found that contacts were bad and were able to recreate the event. Our EVP specialist was in a room sleeping on a couch while this happened. During the time while we were trying to figure out the lights we heard foot steps upstairs. Some of us ran upstairs to check it out. Our EVP specialist also heard the sounds and also checked it out

The decision was made to do one file EVP session. Everyone but myself and two other investigators took part in the EVP session in the theater while we all sat in a room that over looked the theater. While we were sitting there watching the session, we all heard a banging on a drum. We couldn’t figure out what it was, until we came to two dry erase boards, the same boards that two of our guests had an experience with.

We have a lot of video to go over. We had four IR cameras running for 12 hours, I don’t even know how many voice recorders were running and for how long. I personally have an hours worth of audio and video.

I had a blast at the Miramar Theatre and look forward to going over the video and audio.