While I don’t personally know anyone that hasn’t made it back, thanks to all those strangers heros who didn’t make it back while taking care of us and our country. The same goes to all of you who have (and will) made it back.

Thank you!

Top five songs with food or drink in the titles

Why is is so quick to get takeout at a Chinese Restaurant when it takes SO long at a “fast food” joint?

1. Crowd:: Party

2. Hamburger:: Joint
3. Choker:: Sexy
4. Lights:: Cap On
5. Tinsel::  Christmas
6. Testament:: Old
7. Best part of the day:: Breakfast
8. Election:: Day
9. Clarinet:: Concert
10. Cake or death:: Marie Antoniette(?)

From Unconcious Mutterings.

So the Security Awareness blogger (and who founded The Security Awareness Company) finally got fed up with the insecurity of Windows and switched to a Mac. I read that he switched his whole company over… There are followup posts in the blog (start at the bottom and work your way back uo).

From Dean’s World.

The news reports there is a connection between loss of vision and the use of viagra. The FDA has received information and is looking into it.

Sophocles, the Greek dramatist, in “Oedipus Rex,” originated the theory that if you don’t stop you’ll go blind, although mothers since have twisted the specific acts leading to blindness. This is according to this software review. Anyone know the original origins of the title phrase?!?

So I’ve Implemented Gravatars on my commenting. This means if you have one when you leave a comment it puts your gravatar (avavtar/icon) next to your comment. The best part is if you go get one it’ll appear on all the posts you’ve already made. And of course it’s FREE!

UPDATE (10pm): My head just got approved and I probably just popped up on hundreds of Gravatar enabled blogs around the world!!!

For an example check out this recent post to see how they look. I just registered my Gravatar but as soon as they approve it my head should appear next to my comment!

For those of you that are adventurous — I’m only posting “G” and “PG” gravatars (they have an MPAA-like rating system).

PS – I also changed my commenting so that the comments and pings/trackbacks all appear togetner. Please let me know it you have any problems commenting (leave a comment or an e-mail).

These offers only last so long. Here’s a FREE two year subscription for Family Fun Magazine. It’s a good magazine. The link will just stop working when it’s expired. This is the real deal, I’ve gotten magazines free from these folks (MagsCentral.com) before. Click the image for a link to Amazon reviews.

SORRY THIS LINK IS EXPIRED. (It lasted a whole week though…)

Let me know when you start to get it.

Since I’ve got a high-speed internet connection I’ve always got programs (processes) in the background that are downloading (syncing) files (iSync, iDisk, podcasts) for me. This is great except when I’ve got a slow connection. Slow generally means a cable hooked to my cell phone or dial-in or sometimes it just means an extra slow connection.

Here’s the problem: I just want to connect via some slow method for a minute and the computer wants to start downloading stuff via iSync, iDisk, podcasts and probably something else I can’t think of. All I want to do is very quickly check my mail or the movie listings and it starts synchronizing megabytes of data which is really detrimental as to why I logged on. I need a way to easily turn this stuff off temporarily. I see several ways to do this:

Every time I read this post I get a chuckle out of this part…

“They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq. Why don’t we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it’s worked for over 200 years and hell, we’re not using it anymore.”

I stole this from Lisa at Glimpse of a Grrl.

Here’s a great CSS cheat sheet from ilovejackdaniels .

Whew… For a few minutes there, I didn’t think there was going to be a cliffhanger!!!

So I just got my weekly e-mail from the iTunes Music Store and see that there is a iTunes Originals Sarah McLachlan CD out! (I guess it’s not really a CD but in a few minutes, it will be for me. It’ll actually be two.) As usual there are 30 second previews of all the songs but none of these links will work for you if you don’t have iTunes (Windows or Mac).

An iTunes Original is generally a bunch of tracks consisting of the artist(s) speaking between the songs giving some background, some (possibly unique) live versions and a few more versions unique to the album. You’ll probably want to make two versions, one with just the music and one including the “directors commentary”…
There is also a Wallflowers one out this week And I just realized there is an Aimee Mann one from April that I bought a day or two before the demise of the laptop hard-drive a month ago, I’m 99% sure I backed it up before the demise of my laptop but I’m 100% sure I never listened to it, I’ll have to hunt that down too…

So I’ll burn some CDs for the car while I burn breakfast and it’s off to run around today (up to 70 degrees out!) and hopefully have the roof down…

It’s a beautiful day out and I have the day off. It’s time to get going and moving but I feel like a big blob and I’m not feeling motivated today…

Maybe if I post this I’ll feel motivated and get going so I can do something to balance this “anti-post”…

Have you seen HULK’S DIARY THAT IS ON THE INTERNET? It’s one of the best blogs out there… It’s written as if the Hulk actually writes it. If you’ve ever read Hulk comics as a kid, it’s hysterical.

“Other Hulk” is his reflection, but he doesn’t get it (that’s why he’s Hulk and not the Incredible Brain)…

I really like Patricia Arquette in Medium. I like that the show always starts with a dream. What makes me cRaZy is that they always question that she’s psychic. They know she is but they always question it (and waste the viewers time)….

She’s very low key in what she does but to me she’s a super-hero(ine). She’s gotta go at all hours of the day. In her secret identity she’s a mom to three girls and married to a pretty understanding guy. But she’s gotta go, she’s gotta save the day and stop the bad guy. It’s gotta be really stressful, I can’t believe it didn’t impact her more before this episode….

When he asked for the stuff at the end. I knew why!!! ;)
And since it’s to be continued, I’m assuming it’s the season finale…

PS – She keeps a dream blog journal. Actually Joe, her husband, keeps it for her…

It was the season finale, wasn’t it?!? I don’t see any more episodes in my Tivo, either way it was a very busy episode. Poor George, he’s just the butt of everyone’s jokes and all he can do is stammer if it’s an embarrassing situation. At least he’s the new girlfriend (anyone know who plays her?). Every time I see Isobel I just want to reminisce and pull out the old Roswell DVDs, she’ll always be Isabel to me (oh wait, she still is).

I think “cliff-hanger” at the end will be resolved pretty easily come next season…

BTW, whenever anyone questions your relationship with your boss (and it turns out that you started dating him before he was your boss and/or you knew he was going to be your boss) that should be the first thing you say to them!

FYI, there is a nurse blog from the hospital, it’s a little out of date (but aren’t most of them?).

So I really enjoyed the movie. It really tied together a lot of the loose ends. I’m sure there are a lot of unanswered questions still but it probably wraps up most of the questions. We saw it on Friday afternoon and there wasn’t much of a crowd, I guess the die-hard fans all skipped work/school the day before or when the the midnight show the day before.

It was very violent though. Before I saw it some TV review said the final battle (Obi-wan and the soon-to-be Darth) was really violent (and to take your kids up for popcorn then) but I though the others were more so, especially the implications of the scenes not seen. Anakin has some serious mental health issues, he’d be on some serious meds if he didn’t live so far far away (and a long time ago).

The special effects were awesome, everything seemed very real. Some of the scenes were way too busy though with all the ships and stars and laser beams floating all around.

And I know Natalie Portman can act, so why didn’t they let her?!?

Two minor spoiler: The tiny little globes with the buzz-saws why didn’t they just blow-up instead of sawing. When did R2 get all the extra gizmos and the maneuverability? (Actually the real question is when did he lose it?)

Ask Google, “What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?” The answer actually comes via the calculator so you can probably take a guess at the answer. If you don’t understand the question, you won’t get the answer.

Via Pinkfin.

So I’m at the The Little Cafe’ on the Avenue (Dearborn) and in the middle of my table instead of flowers or a candle or something I’ve got goldfish!!! That’s kinda unique…

They have WiFi too! Plus, I didn’t realize that had food too, I thought they just had drinks and desserts, I would have been here way before now…

The Daily Show had a great segment which pretty much picked on the major 24 hour news networks for their reporting on reading of blogs.

From Lisa via Tim. There are other copies on-line here and here.

I love Two and a Half Men. It’s always worth a laugh or two (or three). Lots of funny Jake tonight; sometimes he’s not so funny Jake. I’m laughing just sitting here writing this. :)

I think it’s them singing at the end (them lip-syncing to their own voices). Although I’m not sure about that last note…

Testing a slight problem concern with posts and dynamic templates in Movable Type 3.16. They don’t seem to be resetting the cache properly. Actually it’s working to some extent, but it does take a while (close to an hour) for some of the pages to update; see below for more information.

There is something odd with cached dynamic pages in Movable Type 3.16, I’m not sure exactly what it is yet. When dynamic pages are created they are supposed to remain in the cache so they don’t need to be created again. But when I view the pages after rebuilding (reposting/updating) a page it seems there is a delay (minutes?) before it rebuilds them. This isn’t a problem (for me) if there is a delay (even if it’s minutes) it’s just hard to see what’s going on with them. For my test it took just over an hour and I don’t know why they finally changed (no pings, comments or attempted spamming in the logs).

WARNING – GEEKY CONTENT FOLLOWS:
I created this post at 6:47 pm and I later modified it (at 8:40 pm and also 8:55 and 9:15) and the changes are not showing up (immediately) on the category or date archives. I even tried changing the timestamp (to 9:18) but it didn’t seem to speed anything up. Eventually they all changed (9:42, 9:47 and 10:07 were when the 9:15 changes propagated through; but that doesn’t mean the other changes propagated around before then).

It didn’t seem to make a difference when I did a new post (I did one 15 minutes ago and it still doesn’t show up on the same date archive pages listed above). Still a delay before those changes propagate around. Last night when I noticed this I did delete the cache and templates_c directories, it didn’t seem to help anything (other than everything rebuilding automatically the next request). This last update is posted around 10:40 pm…

So it’s hard to test when pages rebuild. I’m not sure if it’s with every new post or just with posts relevant to those pages being modified. Anyone know?!?

Another interesting (but unrelated) point with the cached dynamic pages is my pages (used to) say what your search terms were, like “It looks like you came here searching for Veronica Mars” but it wrote it to the cache so even when someone came to the page looking for something else or even by directly clicking it still reported that “fact”. Very interesting. Now all my pages say at the bottom when it was created so if it’s not the current time, I can see how long it’s been cached. This is probably affecting my search results record keeping. But it should still give me a good idea of how people find my site.

Hmm… It just hit me that I do some PHP to make sure non-content related stuff doesn’t go into the search engines (ads, comments and my sidebars) I bet that doesn’t run live anymore (actually if a search engine grabs a page first it’ll look all mucky for everyone else, I’ll probably remove that code). This is not to cheat the search engines, it’s to get them to get the data that this page was published for.

So in the past eight days, MT-Blacklist stopped 1447 pieces of spam headed for my web site. It also prevented six duplicate posts (people hitting submit twice). That’s pretty great!

While I scroll through the logs, it’s still a lot of “stuff” to sift through. My big question is: Has anyone tried to post in the last eight days and the system refused to let you post? Please e-mail me if you’ve recently had any problems.

I’ve been using MT-Blacklist for a while now, but I did the upgrade last week since I had upgraded MovableType. So I’m just worried/concerned about any problems since then.

When placing a personal ad on-line be sure to list the following things to get the most responses.

• Make sure your photos include pictures of all your pets (either alone or with you).
• Speling and grammer aint very imprtant.
• If you could “meet anyone / have lunch with” be sure to list Brad Pitt and/or Tom Cruise (because we can all meet those expectations).
• Be sure to not use any punctuation.
• Be sure to have at least one picture with your ex cut/photoshopped out of the image.
• Use ALL CAPS when possible.
• Be sure to mention your ex at least four or five times.
• Don’t smile in any of your photos.
• List as much of your baggage as possible in your profile (oh, wait! That’s what blogs are for!).

The scary thing is, most of the above comments are from the profiles that I liked…

So clearly I’m checking the on-line personals, any suggestions on any dating sites that have a number of Michigan people signed up?

Since you’re wondering… I am single. I’m looking for an intelligent, employed female who doesn’t smoke and would like kids someday. South-east Michigan is preferable but I’d travel to the ends of the Earth to find the right woman (seriously). If you want to know more about me just ask or read some past entries (stick with the family, friends, holidays, me and meme categories for more the best personal info; the rest just shows what a geek I can be).

So I really enjoyed the final hour (it was really two one-hour episodes) and I really wasn’t expecting that after the first hour. I just watched it (I just love TiVo) and I have spoilers so don’t read on if you haven’t watched it yet (I’m assuming real Star Trek geeks already watched it).

In case you don’t watch it: Enterprise takes place about 100 years before Captain James T. Kirk’s Enterprise (which is about 100 years before Picard’s Enterprise and Voyager). It’s the first warp exploration ship and it takes place about 100 years after the invention of warp drive on Earth.

To make things more complicated the second episode (of the two) starts five years after the end of the previous episode. Then you find out it’s really just a holodeck simulation from another 200 years from the future. It contains a few guest characters from The Next Generation (I’m not saying who, just in case you haven’t seen it yet). And it actually takes place during the middle of TNG series and ties it into another story-line from the series. It’s additionally chronally-imparied because the final scene was shown in an past Enterprise episode during a time-travel trip to the future (and far future). The amazing thing is, it was wasn’t confusing.

It actually tied a lot of the story-lines up very nicely. I would have liked it if a bit more had changed as time went by: someone married or some additional cast members (a few cameos would have been fun) or maybe a hint of some other past future event…

I contributed nothing of any value at all to the world (local or global) today. What a waste of 24 hours…

Science@NASA has a great story about two Friday the 13ths (click to listen). There’s also a text version but Tony does a good read of it so you should listen to him (although the web page does have a few diagrams).

NASA’s got the audio sounding better than it used to and their MP3 tags are much better but they’ve still got to fix the filename (it’s always story.mp3).

From the Friday Forum.

Just so you know. Some (but not all) of my links that lead to items, products or services give me a (very) tiny commission if you buy/subscribe/etc., that’s if you purchase (or add to your cart) while you are there. If it’s something I’m writing about and give it a thumbs up, it’s really something I’m genuinely recommending (and it doesn’t cost more for you to buy it from Amazon or iTunes or whoever from my link then to go there directly so why not get it this way?!?).

If it’s an ad in the margins, it’s probably generated dynamically so I really can’t say much about it. It does help offset the cost of my hosting…

I keep thinking that I’ve never mentioned it, so I thought I should…

“The biggest problem with incompetent people is that they don’t know that they are incompetent.” I don’t know if Sarah got that from somewhere, made it up or she paraphrased it, but it’s so true. I had to deal with several customer service people today (me being the customer) and I just wasn’t getting anywhere.

I just wanted them to listen. And if you can’t listen, at least wait until I finish the question before you jump in with an answer that clearly indicates that you didn’t listen.

For example: I’m supposed to call the pharmacist tomorrow at noon to see if they could get my non-generic prescription (if they can’t I’m happy with the generic, that’s just how it was written). Now they just called me to tell me this, even though they assured me this while I was there (so I guess I actually could have gotten it while I was there). So for fifteen minutes I’m on the phone with them (they called me) and all I want to know is if they have the generic if the other doesn’t come in. They swear they have it, but I should call at noon to see if they received the non-generic. Why? Either way I’m getting something when I go there after work. So I wasted a more than few minutes trying to get them to explain why. As far as I can tell it was just so I’m not disappointed later…

Why would I want to be disappointed sooner?!?

That’s fifteen minutes of my life I’ll never get back…

You scored as Existentialist. Existentialism emphasizes human capability. There is no greater power interfering with life and thus it is up to us to make things happen. Sometimes considered a negative and depressing world view, your optimism towards human accomplishment is immense. Man is condemned to be free and must accept the responsibility.

So I’ve read all five books in the trilogy (yes, I said that right) and was hesitant in seeing the movie. A few people (such as Heather) said it was worth seeing so I went. It was hysterical! You’ve got to remember it’s slightly british humor, it’s not Monty Python or Benny Hill but it’s definitely not American sitcom humor.

Some of the movie was exactly like the book. His response to the Vogon poetry was exactly how I remembered the wording from the book with the same intonation as I imagined it. His memories of Tricia were a little exaggerated if I recall exactly and some other subplots I don’t really remember or maybe they were exaggerated for the movie. But they needed to make a lot of weird stuff fit in a two hour movie. I enjoyed it. If you liked the books and understand that books are not movies (and thus cannot be represented exactly the same) you will enjoy it too.

A deodorant ad but all the characters live in stunt city (so they really need protection). It’s hysterical… (Found at Dean’s World)

Very exciting season ending!!! I liked!

I never suspected who the killer really was.

I want to know what happened on the bridge?

And I’m wondering who was there at the end…

WARNING: Some spoilers are in the comments (I tried to be vague above).

Grey’s Anatomy just keeps getting better and better! I’m not sure if it was a great episode this week, but it had a lot of great sub-parts/scenes. (Sorry no quotes this week)

And speaking of great television Joan of Arcadia comes out on DVD this week!!!! I haven’t been as excited about Joan this season but I’m looking forward to season one again…

And I just wanted to say Happy Mother’s Day to all you Moms and Mother’s to be! There seem to be a be quite a few of you blogging about it.

These photos are (obviously) of my Mom! The one she’s about 10 (I’d guess) and the other (well I won’t say how old she is, but the photo is three years old) is a photo of her in Florida (St. Pete Beach?).

So kellidiane noticed she was in my blogroll so I’m now officially some “random guy” linking to her blog. I’ve been called a lot of things in my life, but this is a new one…

I see it did inspire her to go out and get her own blogroll! And the important part: I’m on it!

You have decided that you should be the one ruling the world. Part of your master plan to take over the world, is taking something or someone for hostage. Who or what do you take for hostage and what do you request for their freedom? (From the new QOD)

After my killer virus destroyed Microsoft (you didn’t think I’d really hurt people, did you?) I’d then take Steve Jobs hostage and demand iPods and PowerBooks for everyone!!! Bwahhahahahahahah!!!!

Steve would actually (secretly) be my co-conspirator in this plan.

We’d let Billy Gates be our court jester as long as he continued to produce Microsoft Office for Mac OS X.

So it was a great day today, the forecast kept getting better and better this week and so did the day! I was down at one of the parks on Hines Drive today and the colors were excellent! This photo does not do it justice…

I’m in the middle of my Movable Type upgrade. So far so good, it was pretty easy to do so far. Comments are in moderation mode, I have to approve them before they appear, once I get the new spam catchers intalled I’ll open them back up to the world for instant posting. If something seems really bizarro is happening you can e-mail me… Thanks!

I think I’m going to upgrade my site (starting tomorrow or Friday). So if there are any technical problems with comments or searching that’s why. It might even cause some viewing problems but those will be temporary since I can at a minimum push the pages (or at least the main page) back on-line.

I’m not worried about the upgrade in general, I’m more worried about some of the plug-ins that I use might not work anymore and that will cause problems with rebuilds.

Does anyone know if I can downgrade back down to 2.661 if it doesn’t work okay? My one big fear is my provider (1and1) doesn’t let scripts run for more than 12 seconds and I’m getting pretty close to that currently and if this runs slower it could be a problem. I think it’s only because I’ve got so many posts in my archives ( I think that’s where it’s choking). Other than that I love 1and1, very configurable and the prices are good.

If you’re a time traveler it doesn’t really matter when the convention is. So an MIT student is scheduling a convention on May 7th, 2005. Listen to a KOMO News story and an NPR story on this topic. So it looks like he’s a quirky college kid, but if it works, he’s famous! Plus he might inspire someone to grow up and build a time machine. Although he sorta got the idea from a comic strip on-line, if it works who should really get the credit?!?

Here’s the problem with this. It’s possible that when we invent time-travel that we won’t be able to go into the past before time travel was invented. It may require some sort of anchor or beacon that we need to connect back to (or maybe something more complex like one end of a wormhole generator or one end of a singularity duct taped to a tree or something).

We’ve guessed how aliens might send us a radio signal from far away and built antenna arrays to recieve the signals. Maybe we need to figure out what kind of a beacon a time traveler would need to jump back to our present (or maybe a radio receiver to get radio signals from the future). The interesting thing is that we can publish the specs so they know exactly what were looking…

I know they’ll never invent time travel in my lifetime because I’ve looked in all the places when I would have hid something for myself to find it already.

So this Backspace article in the May 24, 2005 issue of PC Magazine they decide to look at some blogs to see “is blogging the new journalism?” and “is mainstream media truly obsolete?”

They then proceeded to to quote a dozen different blogs. Most were some really really boring entries from blogger.com and the rest were just mostly boring (I did like a few entries). And that was it! I guess that it was supposed to stand on it’s own to make it’s point. I think this is the first time that I recall Backspace not being a bunch of Leno-ish goofball typos or web/magazine layout faux-paus…

And yes, since you asked, I did just get back from the future…