October 2003 Archives

Well, Paul & Kristi have made it past the fires in SD. Here is an email we received:

We arrived safely in "Bahia de Tortuga" aka "Turtle Bay", on Wednesday at noon after 46 hours of motoring from San Diego in very glassy, calm seas. The San Diego fires were very very bad. Ash covered the boats and entire metro area for 200 sq. miles, I would guess. We hosed off the boat while in S.Diego a few times, but still have ash around. It affected our breathing and scratchy eyes. The sky was very dark all day long, and the sun was an eerie red dot in the sky. S. D. hadn�t had rain for 177 days. We were glad to get out of San Diego.

This village of Turtle Bay, Baja California, Norte, is very neat, with sweet sweet people. The weather is not too hot yet, just comfortable. Shorts, t'shirts and bare feet on board, though, day and night! The surrounding mtns are beautiful,! especially in early am and early pm. The sun went down at 4:45 yesterday afternoon. The pelicans are amazing and fun to watch. The water is only 72 degrees F, but will warm up considerably as we head south, tomorrow am at 5 am, to Bahia Santa Maria, on the outside of Magdelena Bay. The Baja HaHa Rally has about 140 boats, very big. Lots of California boats. We were in the "No Comprende" division, but now got moved to the "Kilo" division. We finished on the top ten for Leg One. Boats range from 29 feet to 65 feet luxury boats worth millions. Mexico is fantastic!. We love it here!

Adios, Pablo y Kristi on board "Forever and Ever", a Kristen 52 foot steel sloop, from Victoria.

Nothing like some useless JavaScript for flying pumpkins.

Here is a logo idea for my dad's band. I drew it by hand using a Wacom Graphire tablet, which I like because it's pressure sensitive and has an eraser on the back end.

Post comments below--

So, if you're like me-- and I mean more than just in the sense of a living, mostly-bipedal, carbon-based mammal-- then you probably sit at a desk in an office. This is all well and good because at a desk in an office, a lot of your choices are made for you. You know when to show up, you know what to wear, you know what to do, and if you're really good, you know what to do so you don't have to do what you are supposed to do. Get it? Well, with all these decisions made for you, you may have, like me, gotten rusty at making decisions. Take lunch for example. You know when you are supposed to go. But where to go? My friends and I can waste many cellular air-time minutes trying to figure out where to go for lunch. A common conversation goes like this:

ME: So you wanna get lunch?
Friend: Yeah, I'm starved!
ME: So where ya wanna go?
Friend: Uhhh, I dunno. Where do you wanna go?
ME: Uhhh, I was kinda hoping you had a good idea.
Friend: Uhhhh.
ME: Uhhh.

And then you probably progress into the stage where you start going through all the types of food. Eventually you might decide on a place, or, worst case scenario here, you might actually miss your lunch break trying to figure out where to eat lunch. If you are one of those people, I recommend you move back into your parents' house and have your mother pack you a lunch with special little messages written on the napkins. Or better yet, just don't call me to go to lunch.

But your troubles are over. I have employed a team of forensic experts and internet search engine gurus to find a solution to this lunch problem. Actually, no. I just found a cool link and thought I'd build it up a little before posting it this time. So, without further ado, here are the results of my astonishingly expensive and time consuming search through all the knowledge of mankind:

Ready?

OK. It's the Magic Lunch 8-Ball. Man, I wish I'd thought of this years ago. Click here to visit it. Simply click the 8-Ball to find a lunch spot for the day. It's foolproof. Even you can probably do it without too much trouble. Really. That's it. You are going to save SOOOO much time. And with the holidays approaching, remember who to thank here.

Actually, I didn't really even have to search for this, I was getting caught up on my Odd Todd comics (available here) and stumbled across the link on his pages.

This is kind of a cross-post, but what the heck:

Jet toilet spray just a desperate duck
From correspondents in Wellington
October 22, 2003

A VERY relieved female duck is being blamed for an intriguing mystery in which a New Zealand house was splattered with a foul smelling substance.

A house under the main flight path into the capital city Wellington was splattered with the material two months ago, prompting the owners to complain to the Civil Aviation Authority, claiming an aircraft toilet load had been dumped on them.

But after a month of investigation, Department of Conservation water foul biologist Murray Williams said the material came from a single female duck.

"She's been incubating on a nest. She will not have relieved herself for several hours, anything up to 12 hours," he told Radio New Zealand.

"The first thing she wants to do when she flies off is void all that material, and she will do it at some distance away as she flies away from the nest."

He said the material was very liquid and delivered by a high flying duck on a windy day, would spread very widely.

"If it hits the side of a house, each little portion is just going to smear itself wafer thin and it will look like a huge amount of material."

About half a cup of "very runny, incredibly smelly, evil stuff" would have been involved "and a little bit, as they say, goes a very long way".

Original article here courtesy of news.com.au. It's the line about "very runny, incredibly smelly, evil stuff" that made me laugh. I think I have some in the fridge... Anyone else notice the typo? "water foul biologist" Har har har!

This morning Corey and Jay picked a link I sent them (see the PETA response from a few weeks ago) to post on their site here. Yay me! Next, hopefully Slashdot will pick up one of my threads.

So, I took the Jung/Myers-Briggs typology test online and discovered what type of person I am: eNTp. Here's a write up of what that means.

Your Type is
ENTP
Extroverted Intuitive Thinking Perceiving
Strength of the preferences %
22 33 11 22

If you want to figure out your Jung Type, go here.

Just because the tardblog hasn't been updated in awhile, I have decided to replace it's link on my site with a link to a newly discovered site: Alton Brown's site from Good Eats. It's at http://www.altonbrown.com/ and I enjoy his show immensely. Who ever thought cooking could be geeky?

Tear down that statue of The Gipper!

(for those of you who follow Fark, this was my submission today in the Photoshop This! contest)

So my mother has a quirky sense of humor. She sends me an email today because she is excited over a new purchase. Keep in mind that she's a librarian in Pullman, WA. and breathes a lot of vapors from binding glue and VCR head cleaning solution. So what did my mother buy, you ask? Click here.

(actually, I think that's pretty cool, too :-)

I've stumbled across a Guardian (UK) article where US hyperleftist Michael Moore asks some pretty gripping questions of the current administration. Now, I don't agree with this guy's politics (in fact, I don't agree with anyone's politics), but I think he raises a few important points. Check it out here if you want. Discuss. Post. Rinse. Repeat.

I've recently been getting a bit of spam on my home email account, and I think it has been from having a link to an email up on this site. I've looked at the spider traffic and none ever seems to get past the front page, and that's probably because everything else is dynamically created.

Well, I had an insight into how to fix the spammers' wagon this morning. Instead of using some bogus email address or not having a link to email me at all, I thought a picture of the email address would work. You'll notice in the boilerplate of my page, my email address is right next to the title. However, if you try to select it as text for copying, you can't. That's because it's a jpeg image of text.

I figure no spammer has a spider that's advanced enough to process images. And if they do, I'll change it to some wacky font only a human could understand. Ha! Who's laughing now, you miserable waster of the world's bandwidth? I blow my nose at you!

Using an ever-widening search pattern, the Texas Rangers, the Treasury Department and the FBI have finally located Nemo; America's loveable little missing fish. To see the first photographic evidence of Nemo's discovery, click here. Remember you heard it here first.

Props again to Janna S. for the source pic

I have upgraded to version 2.64 of Moveable Type. I haven't seen any difference, but the upgrade went well and as far as I can tell, nothing has been lost. The CVS tree shows mostly bugfixes and the like in this version, so perhaps authoring will be even more stable.

From the weather desk...
It's been colder in Little Rock lately which is fine by me-- no need for the A/C! The sky was quite beautiful driving into work this morning with my venti iced latte. Although "red in the morning, sailors take warning", so we might get rain today.

In other news...
Bayly, Emily and I helped tap the first firkin of cask conditioned Octoberfest ale at Boscos last night. Good stuff! The porter was also quite tasty. Now we just need to set up a Humane Beer Recycling program with John Templet (the Masta Brewa) to relieve him of any leftover cask-conditioned beer :-)

From the commerce pages...
I've heard through my nefarious and wide-spread underground contacts that Krispy Kreme doughnuts will be opening a store near my house. Starbucks and now KK? I may never leave the neghborhood again!

Krispy Kreme Comes to West Little Rock
Arkansasbusiness.com Daily Report - Today's Headlines-Front Page - Alicia Stogner - 9/15/03 4:51:51 PM
Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Inc. purchases a store front property at 1315 Shackleford Road in west Little Rock as the company�s first entry into the market.

< queue news theme > In other news, I had my first flat tire with Fujin yesterday. Since the city is tearing up half the streets in downtown Little Rock, we have to go the wrong way up Lousianna Ave. (one way street) to be able to get to our parking lot at work. Yesterday morning I heard a pop and hiss as I was pulling into the lot. After work, the driver's side rear was totally flat and I had to put on the spare donut. Such fun.

I did solve the mystery of the missing tow-hook though-- apparently the rear driver's side tow-hook is in the bag with the tire iron, and it gets real close to the exhaust when it's on the car which is why it's not. Mystery solved.

Anyway, I got the spare on and went to a local gas station with repair bays. They plugged the hole for $8 which seemed pretty reasonable. The objectionable sharp object turned out to be a broken bit of smashed headlight reflector plastic. At least I didn't have to buy a new tire.

Now back to the President's address..... < queue news outro >

I think the fools in PETA have gone off the moral deep end. Their latest stunt was dangling dead animals around some opening in NYC. Therefore I have found the solution:

>

Wow, I managed to find a cool website that isn't gross, won't offend anyone, and probably isn't blocked from your place of business.

I'm so proud of me.

Visit Crash Bonsai and buy me a gift!