Recently in Miscelleanous Category

In doing my morning reading, I ran across a blog entry where someone who belonged to the Google Adsense program got a Google fridge for his high level of activity. He's giving it away to someone who writes an entry that he likes the most about what they would do with the Google Fridge. So I thought I'd take a stab at it - hence this non part of the story intro for those reading my blog. :)

First off, I've always thought these little fridges are cool, but have never brought myself to actually buying one. I work at a game company, and the fridge would be a great addition to my gaggle of toys in my office. That's one thing the fridge wouldn't be. It wouldn't be lonely. It would be loved. In fact, it would get more love and attention than that scourge, the weighted companion cube.

When I am here, it would be revered, loved, and given the respect it would deserve. It's a Google fridge - a special kind of fridge. It's not just a boring old mini fridge. It's "cooler thinking"!

It wouldn't be lonely when I wasn't here, it would have a ton of toys to be friends with. Look at all the buddies the Google Fridge would get to play with!

So in closing the Google Fridge would be a most welcome addition to my humble abode. It would be loved, cared for, used, and would immediately go to the top of the food chain over that stupid companion cube.

I most CERTAINLY would not toss the fridge into an Aperture Science Emergency intelligence incinerator, that's for sure.

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Test post to check some stuff I've upgraded on the server.

Normally I don't get into political stuff, because it tends to just be combative - most people can't discuss these things logically. I'm also not one to just pile on the President because of unpopular things. I thought Dubya made a pretty decent governor, but not a terribly great President. I was sent one of these "Fwd:.." things in email. Normally I delete them, because 999 out of 1,000 of them are stupid and pointless. But for some reason I looked at this one. The tone of this is written from a Dubya supporter. I didn't vote for him, but again, I won't just dump on him because of that. The whole reason I'm posting this is that I like the angle this piece takes about the majority of the people in the US are lazy ass slobs who don't care to look at the "big world picture", and just want cheap gas and watch garbage like Survivor and American Idol.

So I wanted to pass it on, because I enjoyed the writing, not because of any support of Dubya. I mean he traded away Sammy Sosa, what more do you need? :)

If Bush resigned today, this is what his speech would be.....

Normally, I start these things out by saying "My Fellow Americans." Not doing it this time. If the polls are any indication, I don't know who more than half of you are anymore. I do know something terrible has happened, and that you're really not fellow Americans any longer.

I'll cut right to the chase here: I quit. Now before anyone gets all in a lather about me quitting to avoid impeachment, or to avoid prosecution or something, let me assure you: There's been no breaking of laws or impeachable offenses in this office.

The reason I'm quitting is simple. I'm fed up with you people. I'm fed up because you have no understanding of what's really going on in the world. Or of what's going on in this once-great nation of ours. And the majority of you are too damned lazy to do your homework and figure it out.

Let's start local. You've been sold a bill of goods by politicians and the news media. Polls show that the majority of you think the economy is in the tank. And that's despite record numbers of homeowners, including record numbers of MINORITY homeowners. And while we're mentioning minorities, I'll point out that minority business ownership is at an all-time high. Our unemployment rate is as low as it ever was during the Clinton administration. I've mentioned all those things before, but it doesn't seem to have sunk in.

Despite the shock to our economy of 9/11, the stock market has rebounded to record levels and more Americans than ever are participating in these markets. Meanwhile, all you can do is whine about gas prices, and most of you are too damn stupid to realize that gas prices are high because there's increased demand in other parts of the world, and because a small handful of noisy idiots are more worried about polar bears and beachfront property than your economic security.

We face real threats in the world. Don't give me this "blood for oil" thing. If I were trading blood for oil I would've already seized Iraq's oil fields and let the rest of the country go to hell. And don't give me this 'Bush Lied; People Died' crap either. If I were the liar you morons take me for, I could've easily had chemical weapons planted in Iraq so they could be 'discovered.' Instead, I owned up to the fact that the intelligence was faulty.

Let me remind you that the rest of the world thought Saddam had the goods, same as me. Let me also remind you that regime change in Iraq was official US policy before I came into office. Some guy named 'Clinton' established that policy. Bet you didn't know that, did you?

You idiots need to understand that we face a unique enemy. Back during the cold war, there were two major competing political and economic models squaring off. We won that war, but we did so because fundamentally, the Communists wanted to survive, just as we do. We were simply able to out spend and out-tech them.

That's not the case this time. The soldiers of our new enemy don't care if they survive. In fact, they want to die. That'd be fine, as long as they weren't also committed to taking as many of you with them as they can. But they are. They want to kill you, and the bastards are all over the globe.

You should be grateful that they haven't gotten any more of us here in the United States since September 11. But you're not. That's because you've got no idea how hard a small number of intelligence, military, law enforcement, and homeland security people have worked to make sure of that. When this whole mess started, I warned you that this would be a long and difficult fight. I'm disappointed how many of you people think a long and difficult fight amounts to a single season of 'Survivor.'

Instead, you've grown impatient. You're incapable of seeing things through the long lens of history, the way our enemies do. You think that wars should last a few months, a few years, tops.

Making matters worse, you actively support those who help the enemy. Every time you buy the New York Times, every time you send a donation to a cut-and-run Democrat's political campaign, well, dang it, you might just as well FedEx a grenade launcher to a Jihadist. It amounts to the same thing.

In this day and age, it's easy enough to find the truth. It's all over the Internet. It just isn't on the pages of the New York Times or on NBC News. But even if it were, I doubt you'd be any smarter. Most of you would rather watch American Idol.

I could say more about your expectations that the government will always be there to bail you out, even if you're too stupid to leave a city that's below sea level and has a hurricane approaching.

I could say more about your insane belief that government, not your own wallet, is where the money comes from. But I've come to the conclusion that were I to do so, it would sail right over your heads.

So I quit. I'm going back to Crawford. I've got an energy-efficient house down there (Al Gore could only dream) and the capability to be fully self-sufficient. No one ever heard of Crawford before I got elected, and as soon as I'm done here pretty much no one will ever hear of it again. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to die of old age before the last pillars of America fall.

Oh, and by the way, Cheney's quitting too. That means Pelosi is your new President. You asked for it. Watch what she does carefully, because I still have a glimmer of hope that there are just enough of you remaining who are smart enough to turn this thing around in 2008.

So that's it. God bless what's left of America. Some of you know what I mean. The rest of you, piss off.

As most who have looked for this info know, the 1-800 phone number for Amazon.com has been around for years and years. It's existence is not listed in the Amazon help area, but if you googled for Amazon 800 number, you could find it.

That number is 1-800-201-7575

I've called that for years, I almost NEVER go through email, because if I have a problem, I want some sort of immediate resolution, I don't want to wait for an email to maybe get responded to in a timely fashion, bounce back with a response, etc, etc.. So I called the 800 number.

Well, I had to do that this morning, got a nice guy on the line, and we spoke about Amazon, ordering, help and all that. Anyway, he told me the phone number above is being phased out, and a better number to call is this one:

1-866-216-1072

He did also tell me that they've added phone as an option in the help area recently. I can verify that this works, as I used it this morning to get a hold of this guy.

If you go to any help page, you will see the following button, you can click on it to get to the contact us area.

When you click that, you'll get an area where you can make a choice as to how to contact Amazon.

Click the tab that says "phone", and you'll get a page that looks like this. (You'll need to click the large image to see what it looks like).

You get to put in a phone number, and it immediately connects both you and an Amazon.com customer service agent. This has the benefit of getting you past all the recordings like "Please press 7, please press 2". It's a "direct line". It actually works pretty well.

But if you want to make a call yourself, they recommend using the 866 number. I had a problem with an order I placed Friday, so I had to call them and deal with it. Found all this new stuff out this morning, which was cool to know.

This month brings another new revision. I've started moving towards the new 4.0 version of Movable Type, the software that powers this blog/site/fiasco. As such, there's a lot to be gained from the new back end stuff in the new version, so I decided to start from scratch and redo my templates and themes.

This is actually a hybrid look of two defaults. I was going for as much default as possible, as I'd like to make it easier when they release new versions of the software. The purple comes from a theme they had which was entitled "Cityspace Miami". However, I took the header image from the "Cityscape Philadelphia" theme, as i'm not from Miami. :)

You know how it is when you get songs stuck in your head, and you can't get rid of them, right? Sometimes you luck out and you get a song you like, and it's not so bad. Most of the time it's something you don't like, and the only way I've found to get rid of THOSE is to actually put the song on to get it out of there.

Then there's a third - where you get something in your head, that makes you sing it out loud. That's what happened to me this morning. As I have a two year old, we see a fair share of kid's TV. We don't let Samantha watch any old thing, there's only a handful of shows that we let her watch. They are Little Einsteins, Blue's Clues, and Blue's Room. Blue's Room is a "spinoff" (more accurately an evolution) of Blue's Clues. But, being a kid's show, they do things that are meant to catch your attention, and there was this one episode where there was a robot that kept saying "Take you to the number four - Take you to the number four".

That's what the screenshot is above. For some reason "Take you to the number four - Take you to the number four" is stuck in my head this morning, and I kept saying it over and over again, at one point prompting my kid to say "Daddy is silly!".

My company has had a pinball machine in its offices for about a decade. It's a really great machine called "Scared Stiff". The theme is based around the character "Elvira: Mistress of the Dark". As with most pinball machines, you can't really get them anymore. Shame that they're becoming such a rare thing.

Anyways, since we've had this machine for so long I've gotten pretty good at it, and know the machine's "shtick" pretty well. Back in the day I was conversing with one of the designers, a guy by the name of "Cameron Silver". Cameron was a fan of my company's work, and had asked me for a logo for my company, he was going to send over a custom rom with our logo in it, and some requests I had. Again, when you play the same pinball machine a lot, the jokes and whatnot got somewhat old, so he put in some skips and aborts for us. It was quite cool what he did.

Then Williams stopped making pinball machines, and Cameron told me that he no longer had access to those materials. D'oh! The machine is still cool, but we lost the custom work.

Anyway, I'm writing this entry as a sort of "message in a bottle". Cameron, if you're out there and happen to see this, please give me a shout. I've long since lost Cameron's email, and I'm banking on the fact that he might have a Google news alert for himself, and would see this thing - Lord knows he wouldn't come to this blog for any other reason. :)

Anyways, if you are a pinball collector, look into this one, it's a rather fun machine - so I think.

You ever get so tired that your eyes hurt, and your body is aching, and your mind says "Look fool, go to sleep", as your brain registers that it's 2:30AM?

But you're not in the least tired? That's where I am now. I should be asleep, but I just can't bring myself to do it. I paid the mortgage, wrote a little for my Texas Rangers site, and sat here listening to the rainstorm outside, and the flipping dogs next door barking their fool heads off - stupid neighbors.

Gah - what's wrong with me? I get a "full" 8 hours of sleep once, maybe twice a month. I tend to average around 5hrs a night, and I'm normally good with that. But getting to sleep can be an issue.

Unless it's 7:45PM, and I'm in the post dinner coma, and pass out on the sofa. That's easy.

For some reason my father seemed to love taking pictures of trash cans in the 70's. Never could figure out why. My brother has been scanning in some old slides he took in the 70's into digital format, and I found a bunch of trashcan photos. And this picture of rags hanging on the laundry line out back. It's quite odd.

And in a small way it's ironic that his two boys have combined to bring these 30 year old trash can photos into the digital age. Humankind has evolved and produced such technical marvels just that I can post 30 year old pictures of trashcans on the Internet. Gotta love mankind's intelligence sometimes. ;)

Trash Cans and other fun

As you can see by reading this, I've had a major overhaul to my blog. While I was happy with the old look I had, there recently was a contest by Six Apart (the people who make the blog software) for folks to make new design layouts for the software. This contest is over, and they posted the winners. I looked about 7 or 8 of them, and considered several, but decided to settle with one called "The Late Show".

This theme was the overall grand prize winner in the contest, but that is not why I chose it. I picked this one because of two things.

• It was one of the few "dark" themes I liked that weren't too "busy"
• It used 100% of the screen

For some reason, blog software designers love to leave lots of dead empty space on either side of what they're doing. I can never understand that. That wasted space just screams for content or for some other usage. That is the primary reason I chose Late Show over the others. A couple of the others that I almost went with were "Top Secret", "Curves in Red", "Parchment" , and "Road to October". Road to October wasn't a serious candidate (too thin), but it was Baseball themed, so I wanted to point it out.

It's slightly modified, the Popcorn bag from the original has been replaced with a cup of coffee that has spilled over. Thought about a regular cup of coffee, but that's been done, a spilt one is somewhat more interesting. Plus the CD subsection of the blog has it's own custom graphic up there, one of compact discs, as that's what that section is all about. Thanks to RedSplat for all the help in getting that done. I owe you - again.

I did drop one thing from the blog when I did this. My old links page. I never updated it, most of them are out of date anyway, and I just didn't feel like messing with it. So it's gone.

But this new style is here, and is one I'm pretty happy with. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment, eh? Thanks. :)

I don't normally watch net videos, most are pretty stupid and aren't worth my time, but this one was pretty entertaining...

It seems that no matter what I do, my iPod earbuds always end up looking like this. Anyone have any decent ideas on how to stop this from happening? Do I need to get something else other than the earbuds, which sometimes have a hard time staying in my ears anyway (and sound fairly flat, too)?

As I sit here waiting for UPS to show up with my packages (all three of which are marked as "out for delivery"), I think this..

Why can't we have real tracking information? Their existing tracking information should be able to tell which truck a package is in. Slap a GPS machine in each UPS truck. Relay that information to their system real time, and let me see on Google Maps exactly where that package is at any one time.

This technology already exists - make it happen, UPS!

Steve Martin joke aside, two days ago, we got a bunch of new phone books delivered to the house. That's no big deal, I've been seeing phone books at the house for as long as I can remember (and even one disasterous time Lynn and I delivered them, too!). Anyway, I left them there because I knew tonight was a recycling night, so I'd sort them out tonight and put the old ones out for the City of Garland to take away with all the other recycling we put out there.

So after dinner tonight I went into the coat closet, and started to drag out the phone books that were in there. Much to my horror I discovered we had THIRTEEN phone books in there! Now some of them are my fault, as they're old, but even still there's way too many. To make matters worse, the bags I brought in from the front porch had duplicates! It was the AT&T Yellow Pages (used to be SBC Pages), and it's companion "mini" book. But I got two copies of each. Exact same thing - so I got four new phone books! Here's what I got new tonight, you can see the new January 2006 AT&T Yellow Pages with it's mini version sitting on top of the main one:

OK, I can let that go, someone dropped off an extra copy, but given how many I already have it just made the discard pile larger. Speaking of the discard pile, here's an inventory of what phone books I had after putting them all together.

Area Wide Directory:
2002-2003 Edition
2005-2006 Edition

Verizon:
Greater Dallas: April 2005
Garland - Mesquite: 2002-2003
Garland - Mesquite: Sep 2005

SBC:
Mesquite - Seagoville: May 2005
Greater Dallas: Jan 2005
Greater Dallas Mini: Jan 2005
Greater Dallas Residence White: Jun 2004
Greater Dallas Business White: Jun 2004
Richardson - Garland - Plano - Jun 2004
Mesquite - Rockwall - Terrell - May 2004
East Regional - May 2002

AT&T:
Greater Dallas - Jan 2006 x2
Greater Dallas Mini - Jan 2006 x2

Why do we need so many local editions? The regular "Greater Dallas" one is pretty darn huge to begin with. They might as well have one mega edition with all the silly little local ones incorporated in there, and split it from like A-L and M-Z. They could also make more money on cover ads, which I'm sure are a big deal to them. Granted, a few of these are my own fault for letting sit around (2002?), but even without those old ones, there's too many "current" editions. Here's my discard pile (L-R: Verizon, Area Wide, SBC):

That's a huge pile of phone books. All of the ones in the picture above are now sitting in the recycle bin out in our back yard, so the City of Garland truck will pick it up tomorrow morning when it comes down my alley. Out of all that stuff, this is all I am keeping (the one down front):

After talking to my wife, we never use the white pages books, we never use any of the non SBC (now AT&T again, but that's a rant for another blog entry) books, so I decided to keep just the main Greater Dallas one from AT&T, but not the mini, which appears to be the same thing except in smaller print. So three of the four books dropped off on our doorstep two days ago are already out in the bin.

I also contacted Verizon's Superpages and Area Wide and asked how you can stop them from sending books. Anyone know of a good way to stop phone companies from sending you books? There doesn't seem to be a way to do that that I can find.

What a waste.

BTW, a special thanks goes out to my wife for getting me to do this. I was sitting there in the foyer sorting the books and complaining about all of them. So I hear from the other room "I smell a blog entry", to which I replied "Good idea, there hasn't been any rants on my blog lately - it's been too happy". However, I think the real reason she said that was to get me to stop complaining and move the rant to the blog instead of in her ear. :)