Random Thoughts

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Oil and Water

Effect:

This is a classic oil and water effect, where four red cards and four black cards are interlaced, then shaken and shown to show that they have separated back to four red and four black. This is repeated three or four times. The for a climax, the shuffled deck is picked up and shaken. Then it is spread to show that all of the cards have separated into red and black. There are many methods published, I don’t remember where I found these, but you can find a list at the conjuring archive1.

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Fortunes

Early in my career, when I was working on Unix systems I started collecting fortunes, quotations, etc and put them into a “fortune” program. Click the button below to see a new fortune.

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Web pages never die

In 2013, when I was working with HB Design, I had my personal website hosted on a company web server. That server that was used for hosting employee websites has long since been decommission, and between that and my retirement the HTML table generator web tool that I wrote disappeared.

Now with my new site up I found that the link to the table generator was broken. After looking through all of my backups and archive files, and not finding the code, I decided to try the Way Back Machine and I found the code. Which illustrates how hard it is to lose a web page on the internet.

I was able to copy the source code off the Way Back Machine and, with some simple edits to remove code that the Way Back Machine inserted into the archived page, was able to recreate the tool on this web site.

You can play with the table generator at https://robertjwallace.com///tablegen

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Resetting mariadb root password in aws

In a linux terminal on the awm ec2 VM, enter the following commands:

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop
sudo mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables &
mysql -uroot
use mysql;

update user set authentication_string=PASSWORD("mynewpassword") where User='root';

flush privileges;

quit
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Bluff Shift, bluff center

Effect:

Four aces are displayed on top of the deck. They are turned face down and inserted (and left protruding) in the front of the deck in different locations. The deck is turned face up to display the aces, then turned face down and the aces are pushed flush into the deck. The deck is then cut and shuffled once. The four aces are back on top of the deck. An alternative is a faux demonstration of a center deal.

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