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AnnouncementsUnification Church founder Reverend Sun Myung Moon has died. I can remember when, back in the 80s, this guy was a boogeyman of the MSM. He was gonna take over the world and make us all get married at once in a giant stadium, or something. Twenty years later, he's dead and last I checked people were still mostly getting married in modest private ceremonies. Believing what the MSM tells you tends to work out that way, I've found. Which is why I'm so glad they're covering this election!
Now we offered to take him to dinner tonight, instead he wants BLT's. We can do that!
XXOO more each day!
Another installment of Saturn Follies discussed how battles with boredom were fought.
Ten years (more or less) ago a starry-eyed student dragged us all out to watch her dance teacher perform. Did I tell you my teacher spotted me? She also came out after her routine to say hello to the 4 students *out of 20 somthing* that showed up. Sat down next to me and asked why I did not get up and dance. "So my little bambina, how come you did not get up to dance with me?"
Well, AROUND ten years ago, I discovered The Power of Chocolate. It has remained an incredibly valuable tool in my marital arsenal ever since.
Ellen's devil-fish, aka "The Oscar" made its first miscalculated escape attempt. Arrogance does not overrule the laws of physics, but that never stopped the fish from trying. I think that's why they got along so well.
We ruminated on the mind of a 15 year-old. Nina's since gone on to much bigger and better things.
East Coast readers take note: NASA's doing some weather rocket experiments who's results should be visible from North Carolina to New Jersey. They're launching from the East Shore of Virginia, so I'm thinking the rockets themselves won't be visible, but the clouds they create probably will.
One of the very first Saturn Follies was published. Take the introduction to heart. It was amusing to occasionally see people who didn't.
Ellen created her own (as I recall original) take on "how to bathe a cat." Remember, folks, she's a professional!
The link has long since rotted away, but ten years ago we thought a 128mb thumb drive was hot stuff. Hell I think my phone has more primary storage than that, and it's two years old.
The story of Orangie, our first but far from last hard-luck case, came to a sad conclusion.
Ellen got her very first set of zills. "I STILL cant' walk and shimmy at the same time..."
I'm once again deep in the heart of (Yankee) darkness. Posting will be even less regular than it has been previously this week. Or not, you never know...
Cheetah, the chimp star of the old Tarzan movies, has died at the age 80. That's nearly twice the old average for captive chimps, so he's had one helluva run, indeed.
One of the last surviving munchkins has died. No word in the article if he left any family behind, and it's not clear (to me anyway) if there are two or three remaining munchkin actors left alive. Still, it sounds like he had a good time with his fame, and 93 is a great run. Salut!
CBS NewsAndy Rooney, the "60 Minutes" commentator known to generations for his wry, humorous and contentious television essays - a unique genre he is credited with inventing - died today. He was 92 and had homes in New York City, Rensseleaerville, N.Y. and Rowayton, Conn.
Read then entire article here
Dan Weldon, 1978-2011
Tacky? Us? Next thing you'll accuse us of posting drunk videos or something...
Oh stop it. He was a zillionaire before he was 30, and he really did change the world. Hell, at least three times by my count. Very, very few of us will end it knowing our names will be in encyclopedias three hundred years from now.
Andy Whitfield, the British star of US TV drama, Spartacus: Blood and Sand, has died at the age of 39.Whitfield died on Sunday in Sydney, Australia, 18 months after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, his family and manager said.
If you have not had a chance to see the show, we highly recommend you head over to Netflix now and put it on your cue.
Congratulations to NASA & the STS-135 team for their successful final launch of Atlantis!
Family Guy's Seth McFarlane has acquired the rights to "reboot" the Flinstones franchise. As much money as McFarlane has, I'm surprised he didn't just buy the whole thing outright. Will it be something for Nickelodeon in the morning, or Comedy Central after South Park? We'll see...
On that day, I drew money out of an ATM, bought McDonalds and a big bottle of wine, smelling the dust and burned barbeque from the Pentagon. Today, I used cash from the ATM to buy wine and salsa for a completely normal meal at my house. Here endeth the lesson...
Details of the attack on Osama bin Laden are quickly emerging. What everyone (that I've read so far) seems to politely be ignoring is that he was almost certainly a guest of Pakistan's intelligence services. Likely they were keeping him on ice for eventual use against... well, this is Pakistan we're talking about. They never have made much sense. This is one terrorist who's career is definitively over.
Buh-bye! I hope they smeared his body in pig shit before they tossed his body in the ocean.
"It's what the world needed," said Dustin Swensson, who recently served in Iraq and joined the revelers outside the White House. "(I'll) always remember where I was when the towers went down, and I'm always going to remember where I am now."
Read entire piece of history here.
Go Navy Seals Team 6!
Because I got to watch Ellen and Olivia fuss at each other all morning long as Ellen watched... oh, I don't know, some wedding or something, and Olivia kept wanting to watch her TV. Of course, when Olivia's friend Crystal came over, all Olivia talked about was how she got to watch a lady turn into a princess that morning, and how incredible it was.
Me? Oh hell I didn't pay any attention to it at all. Especially not the giant cathedral, or the elfin forest inside, or the brilliant dress, or the handsome...
Ok, ok, I get it. If you keep shouting, "ghey!!!" that loud you'll start setting car alarms off. Sheesh..
NORTHLAKE (STMW) - Elmer Lynn Hauldren, known to millions as the voice for the Empire Man character, has died at age 89, the company announced Wednesday.
Now who am I going to order my new carpet from?
Our very own code monkey is a year older today and much much more grey!
Elisabeth Sladen, who played intrepid reporter and Timelord companion Sarah Jane Smith during the Pertwee and Baker eras of Doctor Who, has passed away at the age of 63.
Read entire geek article here.
"From my vantage point in business and in government, I have become convinced that America has been put on a dangerous course by Washington politicians, and it has become even worse during the last two years. But I am also convinced that with able leadership, America's best days are still ahead," says Romney, in a video to supporters. "That is why today I am announcing my Exploratory Committee for the Presidency of the United States."
Please have this man run, I can't take the Obama Administration anymore. It has been 2 years of nothing but mistakes.
"My mother was an extraordinary woman who lived life to the fullest, with great passion, humor, and love," her son Michael Wilding said in a statement. "Though her loss is devastating to those of us who held her so close and so dear, we will always be inspired by her enduring contribution to our world. Her legacy will never fade, her spirit will always be with us, and her love will live forever in our hearts."
Movie Icon and Silver Screen Legend dies at 79.
Tokyo (CNN) -- The most powerful earthquake to hit Japan in at least 100 years unleashed walls of water that swept across rice fields, engulfing towns, dragging houses onto highways and tossing cars and boats like toys.Local media reported at least 32 deaths, with more casualties feared. And the 8.9-magnitude quake, which struck at 2:46 p.m., prompted the U.S. National Weather Service to issue a tsunami warning for at least 20 countries.
When the birds go silent and the pets tremble you're in deep shit.
Lots of videos!
Scott and I watched Celebrity Rehab with him in it!
$10 it was an overdose.
... and exactly six hours after reconstruction, and less than six weeks after the warranty expired, my laptop's hard-drive went, as the British so colorfully put it, "tits-up." $50 later, a replacement is on the way.
The computer is... ALIVE! And with Windows 7 64-bit, no less. Weirdly, this system is "so old" (2008), Dell won't admit 7 will even run on it. It does, of course. Let the re-installing BEGIN!
Less than four hours after re-imaging my wife's laptop due to festering spyware issues, my own laptop's hard drive glitched out. I *think* I have a fix on the way, but posting will be light until then.
F-1 driver Robert Kubica was involved in an extremely dangerous rally accident yesterday. He survived, but from the accounts only just. The injuries definitely sound like season-enders, but hopefully not career-enders. Kubica is a great talent who's survived more than his share of very severe crashes. Here's to hoping he makes a full recovery!
Rob Patterson, widely credited as the father of the modern Renaissance fair, has passed away. The Maryland Ren Fair has become an annual event for us, "greate funne" for all. Olivia learned to, and will on occasion, shout "huzzah!" because of the jousts we watch there. Apples aren't the only things that stay near to the tree from which they fall. Or "falle," as the case may be.
ZOMG!!!!1! THE SNOW APOCALYPSE IS NIGH! QUICK! RUN TO THE GROCERY STORE AND CLEAN THEM OUT!
That's right! The Obama State of The Union drinking game!
I am going to call out of work for tomorrow right now!
LaLanne died of respiratory failure due to pneumonia Sunday afternoon at his home in Morro Bay on California's central coast, his longtime agent Rick Hersh said.
I have yet to still buy his juicer.
Remember that balloon team who augered in during a storm a few months ago? Yep, they're dead. I think it's pretty amazing they could be found, and, now that they have a rough fix, authorities may be able to salvage the cupola and perhaps figure out what really went wrong. Aside from, you know, two people crazy enough to fly a balloon through a thunderstorm.
It's official, Ohio State, of all places, will face off against Arkansas in the Sugar Bowl. Ellen's idea was to make Ron take a drink every time he shouted about donkeys, poo, genitals, or prostitutes, but Amber turned us down. She wants to make sure he gets to see the second quarter.
The earth is going to continue to spin on its axis.
The sky has not turned purple and the clouds are not raining sulfuric acid.
You will continue to support the economy by spending spending spending (Xmas is coming up!)
None of you are moving to Canada or Europe (it's not any better there, it's worse).
Fish and frogs are not going to rain down from the sky.
Angels are not thundering across the heavens (though I did give a strangely pale horse an apple recently.)
The missiles are still in their silos.
The rivers are not running with blood (well maybe the one with the dead guy in it.)
We have barely seen a grasshopper, let alone a plague of locusts (though if my skink turns up again, I'm taking a picture.)
My Italian grandmother has not climbed out of her grave demanding to see her great-grandchild.
Cats and dogs are not sleeping together! Nor is there mass hysteria!
You can put on your sack cloth, you can dust yourself with ashes. You can whack yourself on your heads with boards just like in Monty Python. If you feel you really need to mourn, let me know. I'll hire you some professional Italian widows. But 2 weeks from now, suck, it up.
You can go about your business now.
Move along, move along.
As appropriate today as it was 6 years ago when Ellen wrote it.
I've been watching elections seriously for right at thirty years now*. I literally have never been so excited. Oh, tomorrow will definitely be "ok, dog, you caught the car, now what?" but tonight, well, tonight I smile.
----
* Yes, mom, I do remember 1980. I've always been a precocious child :).
The blogroll's back. Blogrolling went belly-up about two months ago, and every other service I tried failed to work properly. Now it's a static series of links, and it damned well works properly now! So, apologies if you thought we'd de-linked you. Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by, well, laziness.
Quentin Tarantino's long-time editor, Sally Menke, has been found dead. The causes are not known, but the article speculates it may have been accidental and heat-related. Editing is a big part of what makes Tarantion's films tick, so this is bound to have a negative impact on one of my own favorite film directors. Aside from, you know, his friend ending up dead and all. Damned shame.
The last of the kittens stopped being able to breathe properly this morning and had to be put down, probably a victim of the same disease that took the other five last week. This is the part that isn't very much fun at all. Ah, well...
The rest of the main litter faded away during the day, victims of the same common disease which may have killed their mother. We're now left with the strange kitten from a different litter, who's size said he was as old as the rest but who's development said he was at least a week younger. His eyes opened this afternoon, and he certainly sounds pissed off. Ellen feeds him with a tube, and does it fast enough to make Indycar fuelers take notes. Will it be enough? We don't know.
It was enough for today.
Another one faded out last night, and two of the rest are looking very bad this morning. This is the part that isn't very much fun.
Long-time NBC news correspondent Edwin Newman died of pneumonia at the age of 91. Turns out it happened a whole month ago, but I guess it's the family's business as to when an announcement like that is made. I remember him as a fixture on the Today show back in the 70s. Good luck on the next turn of the wheel, sir.
Ok, folks, you can stomp the ground and cause it to shake more than this. However, since this is after all the second densest concentration of reporters in the country, the reaction was typical:
Hell, even Arkansas earthquakes top 5.0 sometimes. At least that'll knock stuff off the walls.
Be safe with the fireworks, have fun at the bbq's, but remember what the Fourth of July really stands for!
Robert Byrd's efforts to single-handedly move the entire federal government to West Virginia are now officially at an end. That's one less reactionary embarrassment the Democrats won't have to apologize for anymore. It'll be up to us to dismiss the rest of them this November.
NEW YORK — Rue McClanahan, the Emmy-winning actress who brought the sexually liberated Southern belle Blanche Devereaux to life on the hit TV series "The Golden Girls," has died. She was 76.
I need a Golden Girls movie night.
In not quite two hours from now, exactly, Mount St. Helens will be erupting. Thirty years ago, that is. Even after someone CGI'd that famous sequence of photos into something very much like a movie, the devastation is still difficult to comprehend.
"Today my heart is broken," Wendy Dio wrote on the singer's site, adding he died at 7:45 a.m. "Many, many friends and family were able to say their private goodbyes before he peacefully passed away."Ronnie knew how much he was loved by all," Wendy Dio continued. "We so appreciate the love and support that you have all given us ... Please know he loved you all and his music will live on forever."
And now for some Holy Diver.
Need to read the article?
To Ellen, Pat, Suzanne, Cindy, & all the rest of the moms out there!
She's in love with herself
She likes the dark
On her milk white neck
The Devil's mark
It's all Hallows Eve
The moon is full
Will she trick or treat
I bet she willShe's got date at midnight
With Nosferatu
Oh baby, Lilly Munster
Ain't got nothing on you
Well when I called her evil
She just laughed
well cast that spell on me
Boo Bitch CraftYeah you wanna go out 'cause it's raining and blowin
You can't go out 'cause your roots are showing
Dye em black
Dye em black
black black Black no. 1Loving you was like loving the death
Little wolf skin boots
And clove cigarettes
An erotic funeral
For witch she's dressed
Her perfume smells like
Burning leaves
Everyday is HalloweenLoving you was like loving the dead
Goodnight Peter Steele. Life is short, enjoy every moment.
After, what, five years of trying to save disk space on our host, and hoping their bandwidth cops don't notice that we're, oh, at double our bandwidth allowance, lo and behold we have been f-ing gifted an unlimited bandwidth and disk space account from our host, HostingMatters. Old-timers will know, but others may not, that we moved here because one of our for-real pensioned vampire hunters threatened to sue our original host company because... oh hell, I'm not sure why, he still considers himself a professional vampire hunter, indignant enough to accuse us of "Deceit and Calumny".
At any rate, his links have all been rolled up and we're still here, going strong. So, if any of you have a hankerin' for hosting your own website, well, we have a secret. Drop us a line (our email addresses are over there on the left), and we can hook you up with the same unlimited package for an unbelievably reasonable rate. Wtf are you waiting for?!?
The world's most recognized straight man has retired, permanently. Gah. I'm old enough to remember him on TV when he wasn't a caricature (f- me, I spelled that right the first time!) 83's a pretty damned good run, so, salute!
Looks like 6-8" out there this morning, with it still coming down enthusiastically. Neighbors have already cleared side-paths to hook to the main one we've kept clear so we could get to our car. It's starting to feel just a little bit like Little House on the Prairie out there.
Zelda Rubinstein, best know for playing the clairvoyant in Poltergeist, died on Wednesday at the age of 76. She also did a bunch of voice over work for various creepy Discovery channel shows.
YOU voted for him.
Possibly the most stupidest thing to happen with the Obama administration so far.
Asshats.
Glenn Bell, founder of Taco Bell, has died, at the age of 86. A pretty good run, if you ask me, especially considering how many college students and stoners he kept from starving!
Curtis Allina, inventor of the iconic Pez dispenser, died on December 15. Pez was always too sweet for me, and (as I recall) Dumas was too rural to have anything approaching a collection. That said, Olivia already has 6 or 7 dispensers, and loves those silly little bricks. Good job, sir.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Olivia and I are, once again, deep in Indian Country (aka "New York") for the holidays, so posting may be more uneven than usual.
Kim Peek, the real-life inspiration for the movie Rain Man, died on Saturday of an apparent heart attack. From the article, it would seem that after the movie was a hit he spent the rest of his life enjoying his fame and doing good works with it. So may we all.
From the archives, a piece appropriate for the moment, Unknown Soldiers:
I think I was first introduced to this monument some time in early grade school, perhaps as early as 1976, when the country was going bananas over the bicentennial and you couldn't even see through all the red-white-and-blue bunting. Even though I was only 8, it was easy to take to heart the somber, serious attitude of the thing. You knew immediately just by looking at it that it was important.The problem I had was that nobody could really explain to me why it was so important...
So, latest bit to come bubbling out of my underground is that Marchionne's going to shutter Chrysler outright, and bring Alfa forward as its replacement. No, I don't put much stock in it either, but hey, remember folks, you heard it here first!
Congratulations to NASA for their successful Ares I-X test flight. Here's to hoping the next test gets better weather. It's also fun to hear excitement coming out of NASA's manned program again. It's a big bottle rocket, yes, but it's a really NEAT big bottle rocket!
Pat gets a very sad no-prize for bringing us news that Shiloh Pepin, the "mermaid girl," has passed away. We saw her remarkable Discovery Channel documentary a year or two ago. Like all kids, her willingness to put up with what life had dealt her and enjoy it anyway was inspiring. Let's hope when she comes back, it's with all the pieces in their proper place.
"Patrick Swayze passed away peacefully today with family at his side after facing the challenges of his illness for the last 20 months," Wolf said in a statement Monday.20 months is a long time fighting pancreatic cancer.
... for not checking her own blog before posting. I'm moving the office this weekend, and so am less able to error-check than I normally am. Ah well, two completely different takes on the exact same article is still amusing, if not particularly informative, eh?
AMBER ALERT IN OSHAWA, NY - 3 YEAR OLD GIRL TAKEN BY MAN DRIVING NEWER SILVER TRUCK Ontario PLATE # 72B 381.
Contact your local law enforcement if you have details on this alert.
... I've packed up my office for only the second time in thirteen years. Oh, no worries, we're just moving. Up the street even. Zone gets transferred tomorrow night, and then the real fun begins when it's time to move the servers. I'll end up just a block from where Ellen works!
The trick is remembering that "I want low key" in guy-speak is fundamentally different from "I want low key" in chick-speak.
I'm about to face yet another transition of parenthood. Worse than child puke. Worse than the hospital visit. Yes, intrepid reader, you guessed right. I now face... the LITTLE GIRL SLEEP-OVER!!!
Pray to your various gods. I have a feeling I'm going to need it.
Michael Jackson was found dead today at his home in California. Apparently cardiac arrest. Best Fark comment: BILLIE D WILLIAMS, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, FIND SOMEWHERE TO HIDE!
WASHINGTON - One Metro train smashed into the back of another at the height of the Monday evening rush hour, killing at least four people and injuring scores of others as cars from the trailing train jackknifed into the air and fell atop the first.One of the fatalities was a female train operator, Metro officials say. The woman's name has not been released.
The agency says that since 1999, it has received more than 130 reports of loss of smell associated with Zicam Cold Remedy Nasal Gel; Zicam Cold Remedy Nasal Swabs; and Zicam Cold Remedy Swabs, kids size. The products have been linked to long-lasting or permanent loss of smell called anosmia. In some cases, the loss of smell occurred after the first dose.
David Eddings, author of many fantasy series such as the Belgariad, is dead, at the age of 77. While I was into fantasy I really enjoyed his stuff. I know lots of people who still do. He'll be missed.
David Carradine, the star of the 1970s television series “Kung Fu” and the title villain of the “Kill Bill” movies, has died in Thailand, The Associated Press reported. The United States Embassy in Bangkok told The A.P. that Mr. Carradine had been found dead in his hotel suite in Bangkok, where he was working on a movie. He was 72.
I remember quite well watching Kung Fu when I was a kid. I don't know how many rolls of butcher paper I ruined trying to walk without leaving a mark.
Now that I've found this superb real-time regex tester, my spam filters should tighten up considerably. If you find yourself being caught out by something, be sure to let me know. I'm much more willing to delete filters that work but are too general now that I have a tool which will let me reliably make them much more specific. For example, the gmail filter is now gone.
Nothing like having the exchange server quietly filling its disk until it dies to brighten an afternoon. Three disk monitors failed to spot the problem. Logs are cleared now, that gave me breathing room, and tomorrow it'll be fixed permanently. Gah.
After a long, drawn-out battle, my workstation finally lost its fight with spyware. This pause brought to you by the necessary reload. Now the long rebuilding begins...
It would appear Kitten Seasontm is now upon us. Expect Head.Explode(Candy) cuteness from Ellen later tonight. This time, there'll probably be video.
Olivia and I are now deep in Indian Country, surrounded by the Yankee in New York. We're depositing Olivia with Grammy and Grampy for her spring break. Olivia's already informed her grandparents she will be staying for the next "10 weeks." Trying to explain that spring break is not ten weeks long merely results in a lesson from The Princess about how wrong we are.
Kudos to our host provider Hosting Matters who, after breaking out "a bigger hammer" (no, really!), figured out it was actually an overloaded log file causing the problem. In other words, the blog software sitting in its wheel chair on its porch swinging its cane did not suddenly have a heart attack; it was the damned fool kids on the lawn causing the problem.
I'll probably still upgrade it. Maybe.
Pictures of all sorts of things to follow...
And if you're looking for a hosting company for anything, head out to Hosting Matters. They rock!
There was no immediate word on whether anyone was inside the dormitory in the city of l'Aquila, about 100 km (62 miles) east of Rome. The quake registered 6.3 on the Richter scale and struck shortly after 3.30 a.m. (0130 GMT).
There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!
-- Terry Pratchett, The Truth
Today's daddy day brought to you by... a little girl's stomach bug. Apparently lots of kids with it, one of whom (not Olivia, apparently) threw up. Whatever they used to clean it up smells exactly the same as the stuff they used when I was in grade school. Was it a funny, soft, red sawdust-like material in your school too? Made me feel like a tall 1st grader.
A very happy day to everyone! Eat chocolate for breakfast, lunch and dinner!
Flowers are mandatory and so are hugs and kisses.
For your enjoyment I bring you the history of Valentine's Day.
This month AMCGLTD is officially 7 years old! 14,000+ articles, 18,000+ comments. I think I'm going to experience retroactive carpal tunnel or something.
I write this from the depths of Indian Country, where Yankees are common and snow covers the ground. The natives seem to call the area, "Nyoo Yohk," but their language is strange and often difficult to understand (raah-dee-ay-tor?)
We'll be returning shortly, with posts and pictures to follow.
So, on the third of four trips to the downtown Air and Space museum with Olivia during the Christmas break, I made a "geeky snort" cool discovery. Somewhere, and I won't tell you exactly where, they're playing a Monty Python tune in there. To keep the suspense going, there'll be no comments on this one. Go find it!
The year we heard the last one out (Nina), we heard a new generation in (Olivia). Time is funny that way, I guess.
Hillary Clinton plans to accept the job of secretary of state offered by Barack Obama, who is reaching out to former rivals to build a broad coalition administration, the Guardian has learned.Entire article can be found here. *Good thing they did not get all of the Senate seats*Obama's advisers have begun looking into Bill Clinton's foundation, which distributes millions of dollars to Africa to help with development, to ensure that there is no conflict of interest. But Democrats do not believe that the vetting is likely to be a problem.
Clinton would be well placed to become the country's dominant voice in foreign affairs, replacing Condoleezza Rice. Since being elected senator for New York, she has specialised in foreign affairs and defence. Although she supported the war in Iraq, she and Obama basically agree on a withdrawal of American troops.
There's nothing like an extended blackout pranging the network early in the morning to start the day. "I love the sound of staff panicking in the morning... sounds like..."
Well, you know...
... sitting in the basement blogging in one's underwear scratching one's itchy places after a shower after a bike ride.
Well, sure, I have some "thought bleach" right here... here ya go. Scrub hard!
The worst part? Learning your "10/10ths" classic car acquisition was actually more like "8/10ths", and spending most of the rest of said vacation lifting it from the lower status to the higher. Which is why the "hooray for us!" pictures haven't been forthcoming. Hard for it to look attractive half apart in my garage, donchaknow?
But soon. Very soon!
It would seem they've finally found Steve Fosset. Well, they've found his plane anyway; he can't be that far from it.
Ah well, we all gotta go sometime. Doing something you love is definitely not the worst way to go.
It's an ALFA ROMEO MILANO VERDE!
Yeah yeah... Scott has his 2 bitches in the garage. (*ahem*- a bike and a Spider)
This Alfa, this Alfa is MINE! Oh Milano... I have missed you so!
You want videos you say? My 15 second silly clips you say? Why I do have a few!
Perfectly normal, perfectly healthy for a Milano. They all do this. Bastards.
After a long battle with cancer, Paul Newman died Friday at his home in Connecticut. You all remember him as an actor. I remember him as a founder of one of the most successful US open wheel race teams in the 80s and 90s. He will be missed.
Scott and O are on their own till Monday! I'm in Atlanta learning about cat pee!
ps. O, I got you your present :)
Whatever Nazi admin is working for Craigslist just sucks! You cannot post anything there without being flagged and your ad removed.
YOU SUCK CRAIGSLIST!
Pull the scrumple out of your ass and get a life!
One of the other things I'm known for, in a very small and particular pond, is writing a FAQ about Alfa Spiders. I'd let the thing disappear, but due to some truly weird coincidences which will eventually be detailed here, I've decided to bring it back. So, if you're interested in Alfa Romeo Spiders (and really, who isn't?) here's where to start learnin'.
I wrote the thing 12 years ago. Geeze!
Fans of Smokey and the Bandit will be sad to learn that Jerry Reed died yesterday of complications from emphysema, at the age of 71. I'd read somewhere a few months ago he was very ill, so this isn't a huge surprise to me. Doesn't mean it sucks any less.
Ron gets a sad truck-shaped no-prize for letting us know of the passing of this great entertainer.
I was told your real age, but figured you would NOT want that posted!
Let's see who really listens this time around.
"This storm is so powerful and growing more powerful every day," Nagin said. "I'm not sure we've seen anything like this."
At 8 p.m. ET, Gustav's eye was over western Cuba near Los Palacios, about 65 miles (105 kilometers) west-southwest of Havana, with sustained winds near 150 mph.
Get your boat now! I'm sure there is a sale somewhere!
Phil Hill, the first American to win an F-1 world championship, died yesterday at the age of 81. Don't worry, Ellen didn't know who he was either. But I did! By accounts, Newman won't be far behind, so we'll have lost two motor sports greats this season.
Time has a way of marching, even speeding, on.
Watch this space, for in a few weeks her b-day present may show up. Or not, it all depends :).
Relatives found Hayes, 65, unconscious in his home next to a still-running treadmill, said Steve Shular, a spokesman for the Shelby County Sheriff's Department.
Paramedics attempted to revive him and took him to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead shortly after 2 p.m., the sheriff's department said.
No foul play is suspected, the agency said in a written statement.
Read the entire CNN article here
At 11 p.m. ET Saturday, the center of the storm was about 45 miles southeast of Cape Fear, North Carolina, and about 170 miles southwest of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The National Hurricane Center said Cristobal was moving northeast at about 6 mph, with maximum sustained winds of about 45 mph and s some higher gusts.
"The center of the tropical storm is expected to move parallel and very close to the coast of North Carolina for the next day or so," the NHC said. It is expected to dump between three and five inches of rain along the Carolina coast this weekend, it said.
Just got done deploying the very first bit of my very first MVC asp.net application. I got tired of waiting for the @#$% official framework to be released, so I didn't use it. But this is going to be a BIG project*, so I needed something. "Self," I says to myself, "it's just a design pattern. How hard can it be?"
Famous last words. Took me several hours to get my head wrapped around the asp.net page cycle so that my controllers weren't sending my models into update la-la land and locking up my views. Get thee back, stack overflow!
But now I've delivered the first chunk, and not only does it work it seems to work really well. Much better and easier to work with than the way I did it on my last project, with standard ASP.NET coding practices. I can unit test all the way up to implementing the view, and while it's far from trivial to build and test said view**, the benefits of building it this way mean de-bugging the view is at least straightforward and comparatively pain-free.
Oh, and one of the reasons why this seems pretty straightforward to me is I've been building MVC-like applications for years. My CF apps never posted back to the originating page. They always posted to a processor page, which updated the database, and then sent the user back to the screen. Sound familiar? I knew it would.
Hey, it's my blog, I'll write what I want to.
WHEEE!!!!
----
* Meeting management software for an annual convention with 2000+ attendees. Yeah, I know, there's dozens of them, but the only good ones are $$$, and even though you don't believe me this place really does have unique meeting requirements just not covered by anything else.
** One of the ways to tell you're doing it right, apparently, is testing the view becomes "trivial." To which I can only say, "WTF?!? Are you guys designing to 80-line monochrome?!? I got interaction, lots of it, to test!"
And let that be a lesson to you. Never, no matter what you think of your super-awesome sysadmin skillz, turn off a Vista computer before it shuts itself down. Otherwise you end up having to start all over from scratch. Just because you got away with it twice during your XP days...
Well, if nothing else, that nagging suspicion that I might've had some spyware snuck onto this thing is now well and truly laid to rest.
On a lighter note, kudos to Dell for putting a recovery partition on this thing big enough for me to "lifeboat" the vacation photos over just before the TitaniC: went down. The 40 GB of porn... well...
Let the updating begin!!!
George Carlin died yesterday, at the age of 71. While he's best known as a comedian, around our house we'll always remember him as the voice of dozens of animated characters scattered across the various movies Olivia loved to watch over and over again.
Fly away, Stanley. Be free!
As you can see we are on vacation. Hey everyone deserves on at least ONCE per year, and the site is being updated with photos for you all on just how dorky we really are!
We hope to resume normal activity this weekend once we return home Saturday evening.
This year, convention's in Orlando. Unlike last year, Ellen & Co. will fly out Sunday, thereby avoiding much drive-by kissing & staring at the walls. I, on the other hand, will have the joys of 12 hour days spent helping people hook LCDs to laptops. Whee!
Meh. Could be worse. This year I have my gaming laptop! Fragfest!!!
Oh, and if anyone has dining recommendations, leave 'em in the comments. Even if they're downtown or something, that's OK, because we'll have a car after Sunday.
Well, that's what you get when your internet service goes legs-up, causing the "whattabahgain" wireless router to do its own dead bug imitation in sympathy. Yeah, and there was much swearing. We're back now, so the fragfest should resume momentarily.
Thunderstorm cells crashing through the neighborhood does not a happy sysadmin make! Years ago, having the power blink a few times was equivalent to taking a sledgehammer to the network and whacking it a few times. Amusing things would come tumbling out the other side. Nowadays, things are much more robust, but old reflexes die hard. Now I gotta ride metro home. Whee!
"When under the pretext of fraternity, the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who gains from this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating." - Frédéric Bastiat
In other words... well, look at the masthead quote again. It's a thought that's occurred more than once. And, since human nature is what it is, will occur again. A++++, will libertarianate again!!! sort of thing.
When buying Valve video games, do not use the oh-so-convenient steam app to download and install them directly. Buy them from the store, just like everyone else. If, for whatever reason*, they decide your account has been used for cheating and de-activate it, it is much more difficult to get things back in order if you don't have a CD key. As in, effectively impossible.
And I was having such a good time re-playing Portal, too.
---
* I personally think it was some sort of bizarre interaction between Vista and the steam app, since my own troubles started just after a big honking Vista crash, and renewed after a steam update. I just don't have the time to play games online anymore, and have never seen the point of cheating even when I did.
Arthur C. Clarke died yesterday, at the age of 90. Missed it because of my class schedule. 90 is a damned good run, especially considering what he accomplished. He will be missed.
This week marks my triumphal return to Learning Tree's Reston facilities. This year, I'm emphasizing Javascript, Ajax, Expression Studio, and anything else that will release me from the agony that is Visual Studio's web GUI development space. Having now completed half a dozen projects in C# and asp.net, I'm nowhere near as apprehensive as I was last year. Hell I may even end up having fun.
More as it comes in...
One of chess's great characters died Thursday at the age of 64. Yeah, he was a crank, but he was an entertaining crank, so he'll be missed.
A good time was had by all, and we'd like to give thanks to the very generous (and various) Santas in New Yorkville! Pictures will (hopefully, with the correct amount of flogging) follow.
Congratulations to my alma mater Razorbacks for completely screwing up the BCS rankings. Far as I'm concerned, everyone wins here. McFadden starts to be taken seriously again as a Heisman candidate, Houston Nutt gets to keep his job, I finally got to watch the Razorbacks win an important game this season, and we freaking beat the #1 team in the nation! Like I said, everyone wins.
Well, except for LSU. Sorry dudes, nothing personal. It's just business.
SOOEY!!!
Congratulations to Space Shuttle Discovery on the successful completion of its mission to the ISS!
This time around the sonic booms didn't scare me as much, either because I was ready for them or the cheap headphones I'm using now couldn't play them properly. The HUD view is still damned impressive.
Paul Tibbets, pilot of the plane which dropped the first atomic bomb, died today at the age of 92. For obvious reasons, he'd occasionally show up at vintage air shows. Unfortunately never one I attended. Salute!
Took us ten years to go from 82,000 to the rollover, and by some weird coincidence I actually had the Nikon in the car with me when it happened...
Assuming no untimely encounters with SUVs or bits of landscape, our Spider will be going through a major (but not complete) overhaul very soon, perhaps as soon as next winter. Then the engine's time will match the odometer's, or nearly so! Been a fun ten years, it has. Let's hope for ten more, and eventually a second rollover!
We've had Ellen's brothers (13 & 9) for 2 nights now. Went downtown to Nat'ral History. Hence all the pix. Just saying, that's all...
Sign that fall has arrived, #5: made-from-scratch pepperoni bread, fresh from the oven. Local members of the peanut gallery will testify, and verily.
Pardon me while I sit here and burp for awhile.
And did I mention how much I ♥ my wife? Well, there ya go.
Marceau died Saturday in Paris, French media reported. Former assistant Emmanuel Vacca announced the death on France-Info radio, but gave no details about the cause.
Read article here....
Ok, I wil be totally honest. I could give a shit about Mimes. They are annoying, but still it's sad.
Having been informed that it is not, in fact, Friday, I have postponed everyone's favorite weekly feature to its actual day. A vacation spent shuttling one's mother from doctor appointment to doctor appointment tends to monkey with one's sense of time.
A reasonably well-configured comment spammer has been fluttering against our filters for about a month now. None of it gets through, of course, but his activity was filling our logs and distorting our stats. I culled out all the machines he's used in the past 24 hours (about 55) and "banninated" them. However, as is typical when I do these sorts of things, it's possible I've also banninated you. If you find you can't comment, just e-mail me, I'll try to figure it out.
And if anyone running a blog out there which still uses regexps to stop spam needs a really killer list of REs, let me know. About 2 dozen REs on our list stop 99% of our comment spam here.
But last week Alex, an African Grey parrot, died, apparently of natural causes, said Dr. Irene Pepperberg, a comparative psychologist at Brandeis University and Harvard who studied and worked with the parrot for most of its life and published reports of his progress in scientific journals. The parrot was 31.
Read article here.
Due to COX cable having internet issues, (Thanks for letting us all know. Hope you deduct 2 days of internet charges from everyone's bills) updates will be slow to none until this problem is fixed.
It's been a long, hard slog, but my first Asp.net web application is now "feature complete." I've still got some i's to dot and some t's to cross, mostly in the interface, and a few more alpha-level tests, and then I'll release it for production-level testing. Interestingly enough, I had to do some debugging and refactoring of the very last CF app I developed today. In spite of its head-crunchingly difficult differences, the way I do things now is patently better than the way I did things then.
Congratulations to NASA and Endeavor for the successful conclusion of the most recent space shuttle mission. Watched this one live (they literally just touched down, so no link for you!). The HUD view was way cool! No kidding, that thing runs one scary approach. I guess you get used to it. This was also the first landing I saw which provided a higher-fidelity transmission of the shuttle's sonic boom. Made me jump in my seat! Nice to not have ol' Wolf Blitzer chattering away in the background.
Scott's brother and sister-in-law (our family) lost both of their dogs in this past year, (wow and we lost both of our cats). At any rate, they have new members of their family!
WOOOOT!
After a long slog of five months, I'm actually creating production-level C# code. I've used the Adapter, Command, and N-tier patterns so far, and may very well end up using more. What I find absolutely striking is how I can re-factor (re-write to get the same functionality in a different way) big chunks of code, look at it, say to myself, "that should work," run the test, and it works! I hardly ever refactored in Cold Fusion because it never worked when I thought it should. Tons of extra debugging makes Scott an unhappy programmer!
The more familiar I get with it, the more I'm beginning to realize that I've been trying to code like this for ten or eleven years, ever since I completed my first "enterprise" CF app*. Unfortunately, while Cold Fusion is extremely elegant when it comes to hooking databases up to web pages, if you try to do anything else it gets very clunky very fast (IMO).
Which is not to say C# and the .Net "way" are perfect. Far from it. I've been tinkering enough now to find some definite weaknesses. But it's so much better than what I was doing before.
Hell I may end up making a living doing this. You never know.
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* Which, by the way, is still in use, 10 years later, with very happy users. Booya!
Brake'in ur comments.
Not sure what the hell is wrong right now. It's definitely not the old banning problem. I thought it was weird that all the comment spammers all of a sudden went away. At any rate, if you want to say something e-mail us. Will keep you posted.
Update: Found it. Had a line return stuck in the IP blacklist, effectively banning the world. Ah well, I thought the spammers suddenly giving up on us was too good to be true.
Messner died on Friday after a long battle with cancer, CNN said. CNN's Larry King, who interviewed Messner on his "Larry King Live" talk show on Thursday night, said her family had asked him to make the delayed announcement of her death."She died peacefully," King said on CNN's Web site.
Read article on Yahoo .
You can also check out her last interview with Larry King.
Everyone's favorite source of Bat Boy news is shutting down. I only read a few editions of Weekly World News in my time, but the headlines always were an amusing distraction while waiting in the checkout line of the grocery store. They will be missed!
We're semi-grounded due to the Cruiser's convincing imitation of a pot of pasta boiling over. We're pretty sure it's the cooling fans, but the thing won't be fixed until Thursday at the earliest. The Spider's been running well for quite some time, but has some obvious cargo limitations. Ah well, time to improvise!
Being in control of a primitive, somewhat tacky time machine, we are pleased to provide the following retrospective of our very own retrospective. So cue the music, dim the lights, and start the silly cross fades...
Year one:
Year two:
Year three
Year four:
So today is the first day of the last of my classes, .Net Enterprise Development. Already it seems this course will fill in the remaining (and critical) gaps in my programming knowledge, allowing me to finally create applications the "right" way without tearing my hair out or bugging Mike J. to death.
Which is not to say I won't do those things after Friday. I just hope to do much less of them.
At any rate, thanks to this and other various crises, posting may be quite light for awhile.
I've re-worked the comment filters, changing .*'s into .{0,20}'s. This should make the filter less likely to bite on false positives. I think. Regexp's have (obviously) never been my strong suit, so it's just as likely to have broken everything completely. Will keep you posted...
Time to design, develop, debug, and deploy my first .net widget: 3 weeks. Time to design, develop, debug, and deploy my second: 2 days.
Substantial (albeit painful) improvements in productivity are to be expected at this stage. After all, it's pretty easy to double your speed if you're only going 1 mph. Still, it's nice to see this stuff is actually sticking!
And, in alphabetical order, happy mothers day also to:
Cindy
Donna
Didi (Deedee?)
Janet
Judy
Pat
Ree
Suzanne
Wendi
Wendy
And everyone else! :)
Jeff gets a sad no-prize for bringing us news that Wally Schirra, one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, has died. At 84, a pretty good run, all things considered.
I have now officially created my very first ASP .Net web application. It don't do much, but it works. Onward and upward!
Toyota has officially passed GM as the largest auto maker in the world. This was a title GM held for what, sixty, seventy years? Change may come slowly, but it will eventually arrive.
Today marks the start of the last of my training classes. For those who're counting, that's three in six weeks! Oy, my head!
Posting will be intermittent, with scattered silliness throughout the afternoon.
Update Well, not the last, but the last in this sequence. I take a final web development class in June, and that'll complete my training cycle for this FY.
After a recent hardware survey of our equipment at work, I realized I was actually the proud owner of the oldest active system on the floor. This time, because Visual Studio uses up so much screen real estate, I spec'd out the largest monitor Dell sold that wasn't actually a TV screen. I now look out at the world through 32" 24" of 1900x1200 goodness. It's like I'm piloting a starship or something.
NASSAU, Bahamas (CNN) -- Former boyfriend Larry Birkhead was declared the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby Tuesday, and Howard K. Stern, listed as Dannielynn's father on the birth certificate, said he would not fight for custody.
Article and picture of the victory can be found here.
Just got off the phone with my Learning Tree contact. Scored an 85 on 419 (learning C#) and 87 on 511 (.net Design Patterns). I'm now officially 1/2 way to Official Certificationdom. Or something.
Which isn't helping in the actual utilization of the knowledge. I definitely feel like I just completed the training module on a new shooter, and now am taking live fire. Brain smoke is definitely filling the air.
Updates will be very slow this weekend! We are visiting family in NY for the holiday!
Make sure you check back daily to see new posts.
AMCG will resume normal activity on Monday.
The second of my four training courses starts today, this time Design Patterns and .Net Best Practices. Last time, they sent me to four days of learning the rules of football. This week I'm hoping to learn how to coach a team.
Update: Ok, not coaching a team, rather learning how to call a play. Graduating from the guy that holds one of the posts to the offensive coordinator. I'll take it.
Broward County Medical Examiner Joshua Perper said Smith died of "combined drug intoxication" with the sleeping medication chloral hydrate as the major factor.
Read the entire surprising article here.
Ok, not really. Today marks the start of the first of my nearly-week-long computer programming classes. Since the Philistines that run the place don't connect the classroom computers to the internet (attention? Distraction? Speak not of these things!) posting will be rather light. Hell they don't even have chairs in the "internet room!" This represents an innovation I will surely be exploring for the staff computer room come convention time. It may prevent the limpet-like behavior most of them exhibit when they're able to sit down in front of a computer.
Today's mysterious quiet has been brought to you by: Microsoft, who's decision to make the time zone patch a "roll-up" instead of a critical update resulted in none of my users getting the thing automatically sent to them last month. You see, in the Land of Microsoft critical updates are the best-tested, most-important updates. All others (including fruit security roll-ups) tend to have things like "new features" (bugs) or "new software" (beta tests) included in them, so I never bothered to select those categories for download, let alone automatic install.
Discovering why, exactly, the automated install hadn't actually automated or installed, when the auto update widget had been steaming along happily for the past 18 months, took about four hours. Implementing the fix took about 2 more, and now I'm chasing down the broken or somewhat schizoid computers which won't take the update at all.
This time I really do blame the Bush administration, along with busybody congress critters who quite clearly need to be kept much more busy than they are at present.
Next...
And the reason posts have been slow today is... I got my Linux boxen to authenticate users with our Active Directory! YEEE-HA!!! No more "one account common to the whole herd," no more worrying about changing the keys on six different locks if someone who knows that account walks away, no more consultants getting the vapors over two different login structures. It's all-for-one now baby! I even managed to restrict it based on windows groups.
The vital clue? A software widget called SADMS, which appears to be a configuration shell for the disparate things you need to get Samba 3.x to register the machine to AD and use it authenticate users.
Pardon me, I must now go and do a geeky little happy dance...
The very first server I ever spec'ed, purchased, configured, programmed, and managed end-to-end at work was retired for good today. Our original "real" web application server, a Dell poweredge 2300, was provisioned and installed in 1998. It soldiered on through good times and bad, never being re-tasked (a remarkable thing here... servers usually do 2-3 jobs before they're shut down). It was still on its original OS install! NT 4.0!
So raise a glass tonight (as if you needed an excuse) and toast old soldiers who's job is well done. I'll be giving it an affectionate pat as I stick a TRASH tag on it and place it in the hall on Monday for disposal.
Lunar eclipse coming this Saturday. During the last one we got some pretty interesting pictures, who knows what we'll get this time.
Ajax memorial has been configured, as I'm sure you've all now found out. We'll leave it up for awhile. Site updates will be slower, but we're all doing OK.
A placeholder until I get something more appropriate up. Please note the details may change once I get better information.
At about 4:30 today Ajax, the Emergency Backup Cat and easily the nicest cat almost everyone has ever met, had a stroke. He was paralyzed and in a great deal of pain, and so was euthanized approximately one hour later.
Only the good die young...
So trying to teach myself C# didn't work out so well. Fortunately, my workplace finally budgeted some real money for me to take training courses this year, so after ten years of trying, I'm going to get some professional instruction on software development. Gonna learn to do things the "right" way, instead of the (brittle, twisted) way I taught myself. C#, .Net 2.0, VS 2005, here I come!
Happy Valentine's Day to everyone, and happy birthday to my dad!
And thank you weathermen, for the deepest 1" of snow and ice I've ever seen (was more like 4).
(CNN) -- Anna Nicole Smith died Thursday at a South Florida hospital after being discovered unconscious in her hotel room.The reality TV star, Playboy Playmate and former Guess model was 39.
Read the developing story.
Weer in ur hehvunz, trashin up ur purly gatez.
Someone over at my workplace's ISP has blown our zone up. No connectivity for you! Just what I needed on a Thursday. Well, at least it happened in the morning instead of around 4:15 like it usually does. The worst part will be all the angst-ridden meetings this will trigger in the coming weeks. I guess if nothing else I can definitively say this one's not my fault. For once.
Hey, at least I managed to re-structure the network in such a way that this failure doesn't knock the office out as well. Two years ago, that's exactly what would've happened, idling more than 80 full-time positions. Can you say, "cha-ching?" I knew you could.
It definitely suggests some extra steps that need to be taken to protect us from ham-fisted techs and other equipment failures in the future. Spreading the zone out to two different, independent ISPs will most likely be the first step.
Yeah, I know I should've done it long ago, but I'm one guy directly supporting 100 local users and providing at least some support services to at least 3000. I can't think of it all.
Ah... here comes the first peasant with a lit torch...
Update, 10:45 am: Seems we're back up now. No word from the ISP just yet about what went wrong. I'm thinking it was most likely a typo or something in the file itself. Making things more efficient sometimes means you screw up faster.
Microsoft's latest iteration of Office, v2007, cannot be installed via a group policy object. It will not allow you to create the MST file necessary to script the install. This means you either buy their (clunky, awful) SMS server product and pay a per-user license, or you walk to each system and run the install, one at a time.
Which is why we're now in no damned hurry at all to deploy their latest n' greatest.
I am a very unhappy sysadmin right now. Put this up here in the hope that Google will "spread the word."
Feeling down today? It appears you're not alone:
If you are feeling a little down then you can take solace in the thought that things are unlikely to get any worse.Today, say experts, is the unhappiest day in the entire year.
Unpaid Christmas bills, nasty weather, and failed New Year's resolutions combine to make January 22 the gloomiest in the calendar.
Brought to you by the "Making Crap Up to Get a News Release Published" foundation with assistance from the "God it's a Slow News Day and I Have Four Column-inches to Fill" news network.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Sen. Hillary Clinton jumped into the fray as a 2008 presidential candidate with the words "I'm in" posted on her Web site."And I'm in to win," she added in a statement, announcing she has set up an exploratory committee that can gauge opinions and raise money for a presidential campaign.
Clinton's announcement comes on the same day that the next president will be inaugurated two years down the road: January 20, 2009.
Entire article can be found here
Denny Doherty, one-quarter of the 1960s folk-rock group the Mamas and the Papas, known for their soaring harmony on hits like "California Dreamin'" and "Monday, Monday," died Friday at 66.His sister Frances Arnold said the singer-songwriter died at his home in Mississauga, a city just west of Toronto, after a short illness. He had suffered kidney problems following surgery last month and had been put on dialysis, Arnold said.
Read entire article here
Yvonne De Carlo, the beautiful star who played Moses' wife in "The Ten Commandments" but achieved her greatest popularity on TV's "The Munsters," has died. She was 84.De Carlo died of natural causes Monday at the Motion Picture & Television facility in suburban Los Angeles, longtime friend and television producer Kevin Burns said Wednesday.
Read entire article here.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi dictator who spent his last years in captivity after his ruthless regime was toppled by the U.S.-led coalition in 2003, was hanged before dawn Saturday for crimes committed in a brutal crackdown during his reign.
Read entire CNN story here.
Keep an eye out. You know the FULL video will eventually leak out and we will be linking it.
I've put in place a new regular expression in an attempt to stop a persistent sophisticated comment spammer. In spite of lots of tests, there's a good chance it'll either not work, or snag your comment. In the case of the former, well, back to the drawing board. In the latter case, send me a note (and then I'll go back to the drawing board). Oh, and it's not personal, it's the machine.
Parents of toddlers the world over will most likely feel bittersweet at the announcement that Greg "Yellow Wiggle" Page is retiring. Bittersweet because the kids love them, but the shows are repeated so often parents are gradually reduced to a special sort of gibbering lunacy whenever they come on.
Via Siflay.
Microsoft Exchange's Intelligent Message Filter blows big meaty chunks. I'm sure it's bright enough, but it has essentially no management interface. Just a couple of registry hacks. And no site-wide whitelisting! WTF?
On the other hand, Symantec's Mail Security for Exchange (SMSE) seems damned nice indeed. I should've installed it much sooner, but other projects kept getting in the way. Not now. User-defined regexp filters! Woot!
However, I still [heart] MailScanner + ClamAV + SpamAssassin. With this combo, I was doing everything SMSE does four, five years ago, for free. In contrast, SMSE cost us north of eight grand. MailScanner in particular is probably the best open source project I've encountered to-date.
Hey, it's my site, I'll talk about what I want. :P
For the last 14 years, Pongo has been with me. As you can guess, that's a long time. Long enough for me (and later, Amber and I) to have 10+ addresses, get a degree, move through 5 states, and get married. But, today was the day we took our last walk. As of 4:09pm today, Pongo's out running around causing problems (like eating walls, entire brush piles, waking people up at 3am barking, peeing on things, etc.) with those who've gone before him.
"Mommy and Daddy love you and miss you, boy. Guard the house."
"Weather channel says it's clear up there now. Those 80 mph winds, they're long gone. No, really!"
"Ellen, it's eight o'clock."
"But it's clear. If we leave no--"
"We'll be there at four am. If we're lucky."
Long, thoughtful pause... Me, looking over with genuine alarm, "Wait a minute, you've been way too quiet---"
"If we head for Amber's house, we'll get there by midnight, arrive at mom's by seven!"
"What part of four gin and toni--"
"I'm driving! Olivia! Let's go!"
In the distance, upstairs, stage right, unannounced, "Mommay!!! Need binky!!!!"
Me: "Gggrrroaaannn"
So there we have it folks. Neither exercise, nor TV, nor absurd alcohol consumption, will stay these couriers from their mission. I shoulda been more suspicious that she was so completely on the wagon tonight.
Ayup. It's a weekend with The Inlaws. Including an encounter with A Gramma. Starting in about, oh, twelve hours. With someone who is cheerful at 3 am*. But this time, we're bringing pets to them. Two cats. In a car. For, like, six hours.
"No reward is worth this."
Lord help us all.
-----
* All names have been changed to protect Suzanne my mother in law the qween mutha an anonymous benefactor. Get it? Get it? Aiight?
Four years, who knows how many cats, at least one re-location, one homicidal Oscar, four or five valley-girl goldfish, two or three surfer dude snakes, and the occasional pissed-off turtle tortoise later, and here we are. Only appropriate that what seems like the subject of at least 1/3rd of the posts should ring in our 10,000th entry. Yes, that's right folks, there are ten thousand, count them ten thousand entries on the ol' blog now. Here's to manic energy and way too much time on our hands!
And, of course, to another 10k.
God we need a life...
Well, no, not really. Congrats to the left side of the peanut gallery for getting themselves put in charge of at least a part of the government. Personally, I think it'll be a re-run of Reagan's last two years in office (i.e. tons of investigations obscuring what is an otherwise paralyzed government), but I've been wrong about these things before.
Feels sorta like the dog who caught the car, eh?
This bizarre delay brought to you by... a morning's worth of unresponsive server and an hour spent cleaning out the most effective comment spammer I've seen in years. He keeps that up, we may finally upgrade this ancient thing just to stop it once and for all.
Fragfest to continue momentarily.
I'm having to guide a tech through the maze that is this place's network today. Posting will be very light until I'm done.
The great "mother-and-son" aerobatics squad is no more:
A Saturday afternoon airplane crash at Culpeper Regional Airport claimed the life of Nancy Lynn, 50, of Annapolis. A 30-year veteran of the aviation industry, Lynn was killed during a solo acrobatic performance at Culpeper Air Fest 2006.
We've featured several different photos of Nancy's flying in the past two years. She put on an amazing show, and will be missed next year.
Somehow in all the confusion I missed that Orianna Fallaci died last Friday. I guess she really wasn't too mean to die after all. Definitely my favorite Italian female. Well, except for the one I currently live with. Little surprise that reading Orianna's work was sort of like reading Ellen's mind.
Update: This article provides more background and a few links to her work.
Via Countercolumn.
So we both spent the 5-year 9/11 anniversary working our butts off. I came in to two mission critical servers down for completely weird reasons, and then lots of general chaos and commotion left over from our just-completed board meeting. I'm not sure what happened over at Ellen's work, but she was just as busy. So no bombastic essay, no mellifluous memorial. We still thought about it. We just kept motoring on with our lives, that's all.
In a funny sort of way, I think it's the best tribute we can make.
I've re-tuned the spam filters SLIGHTLY, hopefully comments with links will be more likely to get through. If you get snagged, send an e-mail to me and include the link, I should be able to figure out which rule is causing the problem and perhaps modify it.
While it died down noticeably early this year, by May the spambots had come roaring back. The filter stops about 1200 spam comments per day now, so it's not going anywhere.
Steve Irwin, the hugely popular Australian television personality and conservationist known as the "Crocodile Hunter," was killed Monday by a stingray while filming off the Great Barrier Reef. He was 44."He came on top of the stingray and the stingray's barb went up and into his chest and put a hole into his heart," said Stainton, who was on board Irwin's boat at the time.
Read entire article here.
"Being Good and Right doesn't make you Nice, and she isn't." -- Wikipedia article on Terry Pratchett's character, Granny Weatherwax.
There's a reason she's Ellen's favorite character. In a lot of ways, and for most of the same reasons, she's mine too.
We are stuck in the land of DIAL UP!!
Ron will be taking over for the next few days while we are unable to update.
~Enjoy!~
Testing... testing... phfftt phfft phfft... is this thing on? Ok...
Now broadcasting five-by-five from AMCGLTD-south, better known as Mom's house in the evergreen environs of North Little Rock. Using Ellen's laptop no less, which was a bit fiddly. Took me awhile to figure out what my brother set the wireless router's password to, then took me a little while more to figure out he'd set the router to only allow one computer to connect. Pretty sneaky, that guy.
Because of our new location in sunny Arkansas, updates may be sporadic. You may now return to your regular frag-fest.
Well, not exactly "held captive." More like, "am stuck in this @$#@$ hotel because I have to be downtown by 7 am every day from now until Saturday." Sort of thing. Did I mention the monsoon-like rain outside forcing me to eat hotel food?
Something tells me inveterate traveler Ron will have negative sympathy, but them's the breaks.
So right now I'm camped out in the "executive lounge." I got access because my roomie* is the convention manager's son. The broadband access is free but somewhat flakey, otherwise it's a decent enough place. Now if someone will just explain to me how an "honor bar" works?
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* Yeah, roomie. Did I mention my employer is also cheap?
Scott is out of town for the week! Well, he is at a conference 40 minutes away from the house... but still, your regular daily updator will be too busy for AMCGLTD.
Please be patient, I will make sure I get updates in the evening for you all to read!
~Thanks Ellen
Not sure how this one got by us: Harriet the tortoise died last week of heart failure. At 175, she was the oldest living creature around.
And no Ellen, you still can't have one.
The short answer is, I don't know why people are suddenly getting 403 error messages when they try to view pictures and/or the whole site. It works for me at home and at work.
Service is commeasurate with pay, so it may be awhile before I get serious about figuring it out.
And, in alphabetical order, happy mothers day also to:
Cindy
Donna
Didi (Deedee?)
Janet
Judy
Pat
Ree
Suzanne
Wendi
Wendy
And everyone else! :)
Rich, don't forget that number 30 is going to come out of your body and 31 will go in. I hope it doesn't hurt much.
Remember to think where you want to go to dinner tonight! Love ya lots!
Since Google changed their ranking rules about nine months ago, comment spamming has dropped greatly in its variety and sophistication, presumably because it don't pay as well. Since essentially all our remaining comment spam is being caught by half a dozen regular expression rules, I've taken the plunge and greatly reduced our spamlist rules(from 2700+ to 150). You should see little effect (other than, if my luck holds, a great explosion in comment spam), but if you get blocked just do the ol' "paper bag over the mouth" trick to stay calm, send us an e-mail, and I'll fix whatever's blocking you.
Fingers-in-ears time folks, this could be a bumpy one...
Aka "pat", aka "momma smurf".
It's my blog, I'll do what I want with it. :)
Our blacklist had bulged up into bug-causing territory again, so I've culled it with regexp's. Again. If you suddenly find a comment banned because of "questionable content", calm down. It's nothing personal. It just means the regexp's need work. Send an e-mail and we'll fix it.
Yeah, I know. Upgrading will fix it all. Probably break as much as it fixes too. And since this is just maintenance and not actual breakage, "if it ain't..."
A giant aldabra tortoise thought to be around 250 years old has died in the Kolkata zoo of liver failure, Indian authorities said on Thursday.The tortoise had been the pet of Robert Clive, the famous British military officer in colonial India around the middle of the 18th century, a local minister in West Bengal state said.
We saw a blurb on this in the Post, but it didn't have much detail. 250 years is a pretty good run!
Geek admin time: a serious flaw has been discovered in all versions of Sendmail, the popular open source mail server. We've got a bunch of them, and it's so much fun to upgrade them. Gah.
A former TV game show host and his wife were killed Monday morning when their small plane crashed into Santa Monica Bay, authorities said. Rescue crews were searching for a third person also aboard the plane.
Read article here.
Ok this is just a damned shame:
Dana Reeve, who won worldwide admiration for her devotion to her "Superman" husband, Christopher Reeve, through his decade of near-total paralysis, has died of lung cancer at the age of 44.
Hopefully on the next turn things will become a bit less challenging!
Knotts died Friday night of pulmonary and respiratory complications at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills, said Paul Ward, a spokesman for the cable network TV Land, which airs "The Andy Griffith Show," and another Knotts hit, "Three's Company."
Read entire article here.
In spite of our airline's best efforts, we did eventually manage to arrive back in NY last night. We're heading for home home in the next half hour or so. Updates will, therefore, be unpredictable today.
And no, I didn't get alcohol poisoning. The big pink elephant sitting next to me in the picture made sure of that.
Now where's my wallet...
It's vacation time at Casa AMCG. We'll be travelling to NY today to deposit the Princess with her Queen "Muthah" and "greah-papa", and from there it'll be on to Las Vegas. Updates will therefore be unpredictable.
Network admins sometimes say "it's better to put your eggs in one basket, as long as you use a really good basket." Which is all well and good, until the network admin in question gets mixed up and turns that central/critical server off on purpose. During business hours. Because he thought it was a non-production server. Did I mention this particular server takes 20 minutes to reboot?
Oh stop it. Damned things look identical from the console and you know it. The stupid Exchange system takes forever to shut down and boot up. Not my fault!
Well, except for the "accidentally shutting it off on purpose" bit, I guess.
You know you're getting old when...
... you forget the anniversary of your own website.
At 4 years, we're definitely a member of the "Triassic" blogger generation. Some have failed, some have thrived, while we just go on about our loopy ways. Onward and upward!
Aunt Nina is down visiting from Boston! Updates will be slow!
Bored? Read the archives dammit!
What a dog. You will be missed.
The Rainbows Bridge Poem
Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge.
When an animal dies that has been especially close to someone here, that pet goes to Rainbow Bridge. There are meadows and hills for all of our special friends so they can run and play together. There is plenty of food, water and sunshine, and our friends are warm and comfortable.
All the animals who had been ill and old are restored to health and vigor. Those who were hurt or maimed are made whole and strong again, just as we remember them in our dreams of days and times gone by. The animals are happy and content, except for one small thing; they each miss someone very special to them, who had to be left behind.
They all run and play together, but the day comes when one suddenly stops and looks into the distance. His bright eyes are intent. His eager body quivers. Suddenly he begins to run from the group, flying over the green grass, his legs carrying him faster and faster.
You have been spotted, and when you and your special friend finally meet, you cling together in joyous reunion, never to be parted again. The happy kisses rain upon your face; your hands again caress the beloved head, and you look once more into the trusting eyes of your pet, so long gone from your life but never absent from your heart.
Then you cross Rainbow Bridge together....
Author unknown...
WHOOO! Big day for AMCGLTD with photos! We needed a huge update on all the critters in the menagarie.
Perhaps if I am up to it, I will take some photos of the primate later this week.
That's if she is not flinging poo. Potty training is such a bitch!
Making the rounds: the latest "idiot user" virus attack is featuring Mr. Kringle himself:
The IM.GiftCom.All worm has made an appearance on several messaging networks, including America Online, Microsoft MSN, and Yahoo.The worm attempts to dupe you into believing that a friend has sent you a link to a harmless file. If you click on the file, you see an image of Santa. While viewing it, the worm attempts to install a rootkit on your system.
Don't click links, update your anti-v, Ellen will owe me big time if she pulls THIS one down on her system, yadda yadda yadda.
We are in NY this weekend visiting family! Updates will be slow or non-exisitent this weekend. Be sure to check out the archives for fun!
SAN QUENTIN, California (CNN) -- Stanley Tookie Williams -- the co-founder of the violent Crips street gang who became an anti-gang crusader while on death row -- died by lethal injection early Tuesday for the 1979 killings of four people in two Los Angles robberies.
Read entire story here.
Sad, but not unexpected. The guy was really sick.
Pryor died shortly before 8 a.m. of a heart attack after being taken to a hospital from his home in the San Fernando Valley, said his business manager, Karen Finch. He had been ill for years with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the nervous system.
Read entire article here.
I just added a new filter (technically, a regexp) to our spam filter. Any time I tinker with those, sometimes things go wrong. If you suddenly experience comment problems, e-mail me using the address on the left.
LOS ANGELES - Actor Pat Morita, best known for helping teach a boy martial-arts mastery through household chores as the wise Mr. Miyagi in "The Karate Kid," has died. He was 73.
Read entire article here.
This long pause in posting brought to you by: a cut fiber-optic connection between here and Philly.
The more you complicate the plumbing...
We are in NY for the weekend visiting family and my sick grandfather. Site may be updated slowly this weekend!
This pause in posting brought to you by...
A failing hard drive on the host server.
Your regular circus will resume momentarily...
On Sunday, Parks becomes the first woman to lie in honor in the vast circular room under the Capitol dome.
Read entire article here.
Ellen's heading to Richmond today for her very first photography show. All proceeds from anything she sells will be going to a local animal shelter. Here's to hoping she makes a splash and they get a big fat check! Good luck, Ellen, love ya!
Our antiquated blacklist system topped out at 3995 banned entries. Rather than, you know, getting off my lazy butt and upgrading everything, I instead de-gunked the blacklist with a bunch of new regular expressions (regex's). This should properly allow comments while denying scumbags the ability to comment, but the reverse could also be true. Let me know via e-mail if you run into comment trouble.
Looks like we may just need an upgrade after all...
We hope #18 didn't hurt rising out of your body when 19 sqeezed in!
Mid-Hudson School Study Council's Award for Excellence in Support Staff Service is awarded to Mrs. Suzanne Hichak
Congratulations to Mrs. Suzanne Hichack as she has been selected by the Mid-Hudson School Study Council to receive this year's Award for Excellence in Support Staff Service. Suzanne will be recognized at an Awards Dinner at Anthony's Pier 9 on October 19, 2005.
See entire announcement here.
Go Mom!
We at AMCGLTD just want to let our readers know that we did not forget that it is the anniversary of 9/11. Our thoughts and prayers go out to all of the readers that lost family and friends in that event.
This time, instead of vacationing in the remote (and broadband-less) wilds of Arkansas, your intrepid duo is heading down to Virginia Beach. Since our equally intrepid blogsitters are ass-busting busy prepping for a big move, we've decided to take our laptop down with us so as to keep you plebes happy with bread and circuses*. Or, if you will, keep The Grammas happy with various pictures of a cavorting grandchild. Regardless, posting will be sporatic, then (probably, depending on how cheap wine is down there) relatively steady once we settle in. See you there!
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* The fact that the laptop also has a DVD player which will be inflicted with used to play various Barney, Wiggles, and Elmo DVDs is merely a bonus. Yeah, bonus.
Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who quietly advanced the conservative ideology of the Supreme Court under his leadership, died Saturday evening. He was 80.The justice, diagnosed with thyroid cancer, had a tracheotomy and received chemotherapy and radiation as part of his treatment.
Read entire article here.
As noted in the comments (and over at Lair's site IFOC), animals in the path of the hurricane also need your help. The Humane Society has a special disaster relief fund to help support their "Disaster Animal Response Teams".
So don't just sit there, donate something!
Since the day is stacked with typical "weekday off" errands, posting may be light.
Nearly four months to the day since he announced in a hoarse voice on his evening newscast that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer, longtime ABC "World News Tonight" anchor Peter Jennings died Sunday, according to the ABC News network. He was 67.
Read entire article here.
Since it's now official, I can tell all... Ellen and Olivia went up to suprise Grammy (aka "tha Queen Muthah") at their family reunion. I was left with the classic "honeydo" list, which included:
Well, the list is already done has just one or two items checked so far*, so I might be able to do a metric century tomorrow. We'll see...
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* What? You think I've been married this long and haven't learned "victim of your own success"? You have any idea how long the next list might be?!?
Guess what got purchased today!?! Hopefully we will have pixes either by the end of the week or next week when it arrives.
Grandmas take note. There is a special sheet with which to cover your fear.
And it has cats on it!
Because my mom's visiting, we took Olivia out of daycare, and Ellen had to work, that's why.
I'll try to get Ellen to post some pixes up. Good enough?
Today's the party day for all the folks who couldn't make it to Olivia's New York birthday party. Pictures should be coming tonight and/or tomorrow.
Yes, she gets two birthday parties. And you people wonder why one of her nicknames is "monster". Spoiled milk looks at this child and thinks, "wow!"
More as it happens...
Since "baby" is becoming less and less relevant as Olivia continues to imitate a weed planted in a sack of fertilizer, I've added an eponymous category for her. Since they didn't have drawings of demons with binkies in their mouths and Elmo dolls in their hands, I chose something a little more subtle and hopefully longer-lasting. Look for the latest "O-monster" updates there.
"Paul Winchell, voice of Tigger in 'Winnie the Pooh,' dies at 82" and then the fact that he was a pioneer of early television, the most admired ventriloquist of his time and the inventor of the artificial heart are kind of like bonus, "oh, by the way..." details. I know reporters are supposed to look at every story and ask themselves what about it will relate most directly to the readers, and I agree that Tigger was better known today than most of Paul's other accomplishments. Still, it does seem to trivialize his more important achievements to rank them that way. Paul was a genuine superstar of 1950's TV and his artificial heart hastened the invention of a more advanced one that has saved lives. Somehow, the priorities seem a bit askew to me.
Read article here.
AMCG would also like to wish Olivia' sister in spirit, Alexis, a very Happy Birthday too!
Yes, yes, pictures. We will get to those soon enough.
Very Cool!
Following up on the most spectacular royal tour ever, nearly 30 years ago, the wondrous tomb artifacts of Egypt's ancient boy King Tutankhamun returned to America on Wednesday, coming to Los Angeles with his own entourage, fanfare and the hype of a modern-day rock star.
Read entire article here.
They need to come to DC!
Scott is away for the week on buisness. This means the site is mine! ALL mine! BUWHAHAHAHAH!!
Instructions per Scott:
1. Despam as needed
2. Post at least 5 articles
3.No tattoos, no piercings
He didn't say no snakes...
This sucks.
NEW YORK - Anne Bancroft, who won the 1962 best actress Oscar as the teacher of a young Helen Keller in "The Miracle Worker" but achieved greater fame as the seductive Mrs. Robinson in "The Graduate," has died. She was 73.She died of uterine cancer on Monday at Mount Sinai Hospital, John Barlow, a spokesman for her husband, Mel Brooks, said Tuesday.
Read entire article here.
To put a little more structure on the chaos that is your favorite weblog (right? right???), we've added a new category, "Flowers". Right now there's just a single entry, but that should change as soon as Ellen gets home and I teach her how to re-categorize things. Now you'll have all that fresh pollen-y goodness in one easy-to-get-at spot!
About 2 pm yesterday some sort of bug came down on me like a ton of bricks. Been fighting fever and chills ever since. However, that does mean I get to tinker with more of my airshow pictures! So let the noise begin!
Salaam Pax, the original grandaddy-of-them-all Iraqi blogger, has started a new blog. He was always a little more optimistic than Riverwind (with her, it's hard not to be at least a little more optimistic), and a little more pessimistic than the guys at Iraq Now. Maybe if we read all three we'll get a better handle on it all. Yeah, right...
Via site-essential.
Colonel David Hackworth, highly decorated Vietnam vet and one of the US military's most prolific gadflies, died Wednesday, age 74, apparently from complications relating to cancer. He is scheduled to buried in Arlington National Cemetery at a date to be announced.
I didn't always agree with him (like that matters), but I always took him seriously, and he was most definitely an asset to the country. He will be missed.
It would appear that the latest comment-spam lamprey to attach itself to our site is a small-time thug with about a dozen zombies at his disposal. If your MT activity logs have suddenly become filled with poker-related denies, the list below may be of some service. Just add it to the deny section of your .htaccess file.
I know most spammers have legions of zombies to do their bidding. Our two god-like regex'es seem to be taking care of those. But if I can knock just one small timer out, I feel I've done the community a service. Tell your friends!
deny from 200.46.39.105
deny from 202.134.0.137
deny from 80.248.7.130
deny from 211.114.68.60
deny from 212.64.210.199
deny from 200.31.206.91
deny from 163.28.4.1
deny from 168.12.253.67
deny from 219.117.201.235
deny from 202.175.182.167
deny from 211.184.27.161
deny from 210.139.250.191
deny from 200.67.5.171
deny from 65.110.38.40
deny from 216.250.207.8
deny from 202.128.68.58
deny from 80.53.113.150
In-laws are up, complete with children and pets, so it's going to be pretty quiet around here for awhile. Will keep you posted...
Just ginned up another regular expression that will hopefully prevent a new kind of comment spam from getting through. This time, we take advantage of someone who seems rather lazy about their random e-mail address generator. However, as with all reg-ex's, it might catch someone legit. If you suddenly find you can't comment, e-mail us and we'll fix it.
Power blackouts at the office are fun. Each one gives the network the electrical equivalent of a kick in the crotch. So far we've had 3 today. Primary casualty: a RAID controller that had to be re-seated in its slot to start working again. Not bad for a network that's mostly bailing wire and duct tape. However, it usually takes 2-3 days before all the problems manifest, so keep your fingers crossed!
Pat gets a mitered no-prize for being the first to tell us a new pope, German cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, has been elected. At age 78, conventional wisdom seems to have held... the hierarchy has elected someone that (presumably) will not become the next "longest reigning" pope in history. Then again, John XXIII invoked Vatican II at the ripe old age of 76, so you never can tell.
So there you go. Now, no more "is the pope Polish?" jokes for you!
We've updated our comment spam filter, creating a more sophisticated "dash trap". Instead of looking for "a dash, then anything, then another dash, then anything, then another dash", it looks for "a dash, then 2-15 characters with no spaces, then another dash, then 2-15 characters with no spaces, then another dash, then 2-15 characters with no spaces, a period, and at least two alphabetic characters."
This already seems to be catching the massive amount of "dash trap" comment spam we get every day, and it should stop snagging you folks who just happen to like writing comments that contain 3 dashes in a single paragraph. Please let me know if you find you're still getting trapped.
I'll post the actual regEx once I'm sure it's working as advertised.
The Holy Father is deceased this evening at 9:37 in his private apartment," Archbishop Leonardo Sandri said in a written statement.
Read entire announcement here.
Don't for get to check out the BlueLens gallery for new photos every day! We hear there are some National Arboretum pictures were taken yesterday.
Schiavo passed away nearly two weeks after doctors removed her life-sustaining feeding tube and less than 12 hours after her parents' final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was rejected.
Read entire article of Terri Schiavo at CNN.
"Mrs. Schiavo died a calm, peaceful and gentle death," Felos told reporters.
Since when is dehydrating and being starved peaceful and gentle?
Terri Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, had begged to be with their firstborn while she drew her last breath but police denied their request, said Brother Paul O'Donnell, the Schindlers' spokesman and spiritual adviser.
This is when the parents kick down the door and beat the shit out of the husband for being such a prick for the past 15 years.
The autopsy report about the cause of death may not be available for several weeks.
Oh I guess the already forgot they starved and dehydrated her. *Here's your sign...*
The Spider passed its alignment test just fine. The camber is frozen about 1 degree negative right now, about .5 degrees out of spec, because the alignment guy didn't want to hurt anything freeing up the frozen adjuster. Not a big deal at all, considering how little I drive it... just adds a bit of understeer. I'll break the adjusters loose next winter and get it re-aligned next spring.
Ferget that... now I get to look forward to 9 months of sweet sweet Alfa Spider driving. Bruum-Bruum!
Famed attorney Johnnie Cochran, 67, perhaps best known for his defense of O.J. Simpson, died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles.
Read entire article here.
We still think OJ is guilty. I'm sure Cochran will find out.
No-Prize to Rich who notified us of the news break.
The spider has officially emerged from winter hibernation, with six new tie rod ends and two new upper control arm ball joints! Thanks go out to everyone on the Alfa digest, who's "yes, that was kinda dumb, but if you do this you'll be fine" comments kept me from getting too nervous, and to Ellen, who's last minute assistance ensured the front wheels weren't pointing in different directions.
Oh it still pulls a little to the right, and the steering wheel isn't quite straight, but I was expecting that. One trip to the alignment shop should be all it needs for a full season of driving. Improvements? Oh I only thought the steering was responsive. Now that all the worn-out stuff has been renewed, you can nearly feel the texture of the asphalt through the steering wheel. It's a good thing.
~Love,
"Baby O".
*make sure you bring Bud the dog with you in April!*
John Z. DeLorean, the innovative automaker who left a promising career in Detroit to develop the stainless steel-skinned, gull-winged sports car bearing his name and was acquitted of charges he planned to sell $24 million worth of cocaine to support the venture, has died at the age of 80.
Read entire article here.
The family is now officially "on vacation".
"Gee Scott, does that mean you're actually going to leave the site alone?"
"You're obviously mistaking us for people with lives..."
We're up in Baltimore for one of Ellen's VT conferences. Ironically, this is the exact hotel we spent our first "away" vacation in, for the (I think) 1997 Balticon. Except now with high speed wireless.
Hmm? Oh go look it up. See? Told you we were nerds.
It took Olivia exactly thirty seconds to disappear underneath the bed, her location revealed by a slow "hee hee hee hee hee". Sort of like our very own curly-headed troll. Only cuter, and in diapers.
So now I'm putting alcohol into Ellen to settle her down (any sort of logistical move usually winds her up like one of those "monky-and-cymbal" toys) and playing "NoNoDon'tTouchThat" with Olivia.
I wonder if the outdoor pool is open? The film on the website said it was heated...
P.S. Hotel water is cool, especially when you can walk around in your socks and diaper gargling it. Olivia's a very special child you see.
Ok, it's like this. Toddlers with fevers suck. She's fine, saw the doctor and everything, this is just a cold. Oh, and never ever ever give your child Robitussin or anything like it... once they taste one nasty liquid medicine, all liquid medicines are nasty, even the ones that are basically sticky grape juice.
Oh, and that sound? That sound is my mom cackling away saying "revenge! I have my revenge!" You see, I had, well, a reputation for being... difficult... with medicines*.
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* It's not like it was undeserved. My parent's motto regarding NyQuil was "anything that tastes that bad must be good for you." They used it both liberally and gleefully whenever my brother or I was sick. Imagine my sister-in-law's surprise at my brother's reaction the first time she brought some home for his cold...
There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.
--Thomas Edison
I'd post a "gender-neutral*" version on my door at work, but for the puzzled and offended looks I'd get from the peasants.
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* My workplace is infested with lefty lawyers and social work majors. They had a wake when Kerry conceded. I am not making this up. I discovered the one other conservative there in a whispered conversation during our last convention.
No, the quote has nothing to do with politics. Ok newbie, do a search for "Welcome to My World."
Toldja.
~ I don' wanna work / I jus wanna bang on de drum all day ~
This announcement brought to you by: a super-flakey e-mail server, who's reconstruct utility is taking 4 hours longer than it should because the peasants who infest my network make packrats say, "damn people! Hello? Delete key?!?"
Many thanks to all of our readers for continuing to read AMCGLTD.
Ellen's long-suffering, oft-abused laptop has finally given up the ghost. With apologies to Cleese et. al.: 'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This laptop is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! 'Is electronic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-LAPTOP!!
Which was just an excuse to go get another. One trip to Circuit City later (in the driving snow. The lizard-blink I received when pointing this out was matched only by the long, slow silence that followed. "Oh" was the best I could manage), and Ellen is now the proud owner of some HP thingy that fairly blows your hair back as it whooshes around*.
Of course, now she wants to stick a big skull sticker on the front of it. Normal on the outside, Goth on the inside. Gotta love 'er.
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* No, not quite as fast as the Rusty Beast downstairs, but you can definitely see it from here.
Congrats go out to our blogfriend JimSpot, whose family just welcomed a new edition... a baby boy! 9 lbs 10 oz. no less. Let's all hope his wife is a very forgiving person!
[Enter, if you dare, the mind of a Beltway Commuter as they look out their office window...]
"What?!? What is going on here?!? There's this... stuff... I don't know, it's like, like that other scary stuff that falls from the sky, that gets me wet and makes me drive five miles an hour on the freeway and slide into other cars anyway.... but this... this is... frozen!!! My God! It's white... frozen stuff!!! And it's falling from the sky!!! I have to drive home right now!
Good thing I have my ChevroFord ExpidientRammer SUV! Why, I'll be able to drive right home just like nothing is wrong. Hey, I'll even be able to speed a little bit. The salesman said that 'four-double-yoo-dee" button on my dash meant I could go anywhere I wanted!
At least until I get on the highway. Then I'll be sure to drive 5 mph again. All that salt might scratch the paint!"
Yep, it's snowing outside. As the lemmings confront a sky that actually is falling on them, our commute will extend from its normal 35 minutes to perhaps 2-3 hours. We'll let you know how many "dead-bug" SUVs we see upside-down on the median as we head home.
Last year the record for a single snow was 14 SUVs.
Computer viruses are so much fun, especially when they're so new they get "under the radar" of your virus checkers. Two and a half days later and we're now in the final stages of clearing it. I'll try to do a writeup in the next few days (it's funny now that it's nearly over with).
The good news? Management has finally realized that "hey, you know, we haven't spent any money on the network in three years, maybe it's time to..."
Don't forget folks, today is the day P. Wolfowitz et. al. are going to blow up Houston. Be sure to call your best friend and confess what you and his bride-to-be did behind the alter before it's too late!
We are here in NY for the weekend, updates may be slow!
So far we have so many presents to bring back for O our car is going to be quite full and half are not even opened!
AMCG has sponsored a cat for the year from the Blooming Grove Animal Shelter! (Go us!) I will post a pix later as soon I get to see who we get as our sponsor kitty.
Hopefully we will get some pictures on here soon or our weekend trip!
Because we got a new floor put in downstairs and I had to dismantle the network while they did it, that's why. Now I'm sitting inside a big, echoing, empty room with a pretty floor, getting high on glue fumes. OOOoo... these colors smell so cool!!!
Enjoy some AMCGLTD cats eating a turkey neck!
It's going to be a very long 4 years for you all.
The earth is going to continue to spin on its axis.
The sky has not turned purple and the clouds are not raining sulfuric acid.
You will continue to support the economy by spending spending spending (Xmas is coming up!)
None of you are moving to Canada or Europe (it's not any better there, it's worse).
Fish and frogs are not going to rain down from the sky.
Angels are not thundering across the sky (though I did give a strangely pale horse an apple recently.)
The missles are still in their silos.
The rivers are not running with blood (well maybe the one with the dead guy in it.)
We have barely seen a grasshopper, let alone a plague of locusts (though if my skink turns up again, I'm taking a picture.)
My italian grandmother has not climbed out of her grave demanding to see her great-grandchild.
Cats and dogs are not sleeping together! Nor is there mass hysteria!
You can put on your sack cloth, you can dust yourself with ashes. You can whack yourself on your heads with boards just like in Monty Python. If you feel you really need to mourn, let me know. I'll hire you some professional Italian widows. But 2 weeks from now, suck, it up.
You can go about your buisness now.
Move along, move along.
The alert remains at a Volcano Advisory. Overnight the seismic energy level increased slightly and remains elevated with a rate of 3-4 events per minute and now include events as large as magnitude 3.3. All earthquake locations are still shallow and in or below the lava dome. In addition, initial data from the GPS instrument on the lava dome that was repaired Monday morning suggest that the site moved a few inches northward Monday and Tuesday, but has since been stable. Such movement is not surprising in light of the high seismicity levels. A USGS field crew continued their deployment of GPS equipment yesterday in order to monitor any ground movement on the lava dome, crater floor, or lower slopes of the volcano. A gas flight yesterday morning measured no significant volcanic gas, as was the case on Monday. Another gas flight will occur this afternoon. Press conferences will be held today at CVO at 9:30 am and 2:30 pm to update the media. Today's field work includes further GPS data collection and a gas flight.Are ya scared yet??The current hazard outlook is unchanged from that outlined in yesterday's Volcano Advisory. Updated wind forecasts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration coupled with an eruption model indicate that the wind direction are out of the northeast. Therefore any ash clouds produced today will drift southwestward.
Found here.
VANCOUVER, Wash. - Scientists raised the volcanic activity level at Mount St. Helens to a level two 'Volcanic Advisory' Wednesday afternoon. Earlier in the week the mountain was at a level one 'Notice of Volcanic Unrest'Read entire article here.
Scott: "Thats not fair! They have a great race track there!'
Me: "Buh-bye Portland! Buh-bye!!"
Get even cooler information here.
Just got a call from our blogsitter Ron (of "Ron & Amber" fame). They're at tonight's game, less than 20 feet from the end zone. Yeah, the end zone. "Well, it'll be exciting every once in awhile" was the exact words I believe. At any rate, according to Ron if you look at the helmet in the middle of the field they're on the end zone it's facing, on the left side (as it faces). If you see a big goofy looking guy with Cowboys logos all over him waving like mad at the camera and a shorter, puzzled looking blonde staring at him with a "WTF?!?" expression, that's them.
Yeah, I know, like you care. It's our blog, so there!
We mundanes here at AMCGLTD would like to wish our good friend Carrie of The City Morgue a Very Happy Birthday!!!
Aaron Hawk, author of UppityNegro.com, was found dead recently, victim of an apparent suicide. When he chose to be funny, he could be laugh-out-loud funny, and that's why I kept track of him. I was also deeply intimidated by him, because he could seem so damned angry sometimes. Looks like it may have gotten the better of him, which is a damned shame and a terrible waste. Not much you can say at a time like this, we can only express our deep condolences to his family.
So if any readers have a family member who gives birth in the next... oh, let's see... the next week or two, and the kid has strange hair and a glint in their eye, say hello for me, eh? And here's to wishing the next time around gets him closer to the peace we all strive for.
Tomorrow is the start of my workplace's annual convention. Today was the setup, hence the posting gap. Slacking is nearly impossible with thousands of quirky attendees wandering around and an excitable staff exploring new and distinctive methods of destroying computing gear at a remote location. Blogging will therefore be on the light side until it all wraps up this weekend.
Are we having fun yet?
Indian Larry, a master motorcycle mechanic and stunt man, passed away this morning following an accident while performing Saturday at the Liquid Steel Classic and Custom Bike Series show at Cabarrus Arena and Events Center in Concord. He was best known for his appearances on Discovery Channel's "Great Biker Build-Off" show.
Read entire article here.
Branigan died of a brain anuerysm Thursday in her sleep at her home in East Quogue, said her brother Mark Branigan. He said she had complained to a friend of a headache for about two weeks before she died, but had not sought medical attention.
Read entire article here.
Ah, the joys of network administration. I'm one of those people who knows all about knowledgebases, usenet groups, hell I even have a bookshelf of reference materials I go to at times. I'm a phone tech guy's worst nightmare... not because I'm a moron, but because by the time I actually pick up a phone I've already tried all the easy stuff.
My problems are either me just not seeing something or they're flat-out bugs in the software systems I'm using. I don't mind a little patronizing from the phone guy for the former, simply because it usually takes about 5 minutes for them to shove my nose into the spot that's screwed up and we're done. It's the other type of problems that make my stomach knot up as I lift the phone, because I know I'll spend a half hour orienting the tech to my problem, a half our doing the crap I've already done, and then fifteen minutes of hemming and hawing until I get a (usually nice) "don't call us, we'll call you" before they hang up. Leaving me, of course, no better off than I was before.
Guess which type of problem I'm having today?
As Ellen's mom is wont to say (in a Fran Drescher accent) "Tuhdayy, twentee-[censored] goes owt of ya bahdy, and twentee-[censored] goes in." Happy birthday to my sweetie:
It's cheesy to say,
But like fine wine in a way,
You get better and better each year!
Ha! I should go work for a greeting card company! Happy birthday sweetie!
Julia Child, the celebrated cook, author and television personality who elevated the nation's culinary standards, died in her sleep early Friday morning at an assisted living home in Montecito, Calif. She was 91. As America's gastronomic guru, she had no peer. She taught us to relish food and wine as a way of appreciating life's bounty. From this brave new world of food, there is no turning back.Read entire article here.
When taking a road trip in a convertible in high Virginia summer, sunscreen is strongly advised. Because, you see, even though you leave really early in the morning when everything is cool and nice, you'll still be coming back at noon. 95 degrees (35C) with no shade means never having to say you're sorry, sort of thing.
I've owned one of these damned things since 1988. You'd think I'd learn by now. Oh, and Ellen? Touching my ears and making frying noises is only funny on the inside. Mmmkay? :)
Going to take a road trip in the Spider this morning. Regularly scheduled blogging will continue some time this afternoon.
Ah! Cats who don't run! Web sites that don't take 20 minutes to load! A roof that doesn't sound like the second coming when it rains! 'Tis good to be back, verily we say.
More extensive reports to come.
All - just to let you know, Scott and Ellen will be returning today, so expect your regularly scheduled blog to be back to it's old self by tomorrow.
Also, bug them for redneck pictures of Olivia!
All - my cable modem has been down, so I haven't been able to post. I've broken down now and am sitting here in my kitchen with my work laptop plugged into the phone line so I can finally get something posted.
Damn cable companies...
Well, our buddy our pal, Lance Armstrong has won the now has the record for Tour de France wins.
PARIS (AP) - Lance Armstrong rode into history Sunday by winning the Tour de France for a record sixth time, an achievement that confirmed the victory-hungry cancer survivor as one of the greatest sportsmen of all time.
Go Lance! However, he doesn't know if he's going to go for the seventh win. Since he already has the record, does he really need to?
BESANCON, France - Too strong. Lance Armstrong capped his most dominant Tour de France with a crushing win in the final time trial Saturday, all but guaranteeing him a place in history as the first six-time winner of the 101-year-old race.He said hard work is the secret of his success.
Read entire article here.
*I'm sure France will some how come out with new rules of how many times one can win the Tour De France*.
Just wanted to let you know that I'm having a bit of fun getting any messages and fun articles you might have sent. I'll be trying again tonight so hopefully there'll be some more posts up then...
Damn blog-sitters...
We're going "on holiday" for a week, starting on Friday. To keep the rabble happy with bread and circuses, we've actually had some folks dumb enough unwittingly left holding the fuse graciously volunteer to take over duties at the ol' ranch.
Please to be welcoming Ron and Amber. Amber is Ellen's long-time friend and fellow future-crazy-cat-lady-all-the-kids-are-scared-of. Ron is the her fiancee, who is only now realizing the horror that all women become as The Date approaches... Bridezilla.
Tonight and tomorrow are "training wheels" days, where we'll both be posting stuff at the same time. On Friday, they're on their own. At best, they'll be our second "blog children" (after Daffodillane, who's words were, as I recall, "Jesus, if they can do it...") At worst, well, they've got seven cats and a dog, they can't run away that quickly.
[Homer voice]I, for one, welcome our noob masters....[/Homer Voice]
FORT WORTH - A veterinarian was convicted Tuesday of felony animal cruelty for bludgeoning a neighbor's miniature dachshund to death last year with a log-splitting maul after the dog got into his back yard in Colleyville.Volosen faces a maximum of two years in jail and a $10,000 fine.
In September 2002, he killed a black Labrador retriever, Coty, with a blunt object after the dog killed several rabbits and chickens, according to a police report filed by Volosen.
An official with the Texas Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners in Austin, which licenses veterinarians, said the conviction does not mean Volosen's license will be automatically suspended. Volosen has no history of disciplinary action, according to the board.
Read entire article here.
Free reg blah blah blah...
TEE-HEE!! Go to jail you bastard!
Yeah yeah, comments are closed on this one so CrAzY Texans don't comment.
Well, ok, not really, but we are in New York (deep in Indian Country for native southerners Scott and Olivia) visiting relatives. Posting therefore will be rather light.
For all of you out there using firecrackers tonight, here is some information from the CDC on firecracker related injuries for you.
CNN) -- Marlon Brando, the stage and screen actor whose performances in "A Streetcar Named Desire," "On the Waterfront" and "The Godfather" earned him plaudits as one of the greatest actors of all time, has died, his attorney said. He was 80.Read entire article here.rando's agent, Jay Cantor, said the actor was admitted to UCLA Medical Center on Wednesday evening and that the cause of death was pulmonary fibrosis, a condition that involves scarring of the lungs.
Brando had suffered from congestive heart failure and was overweight.
Just wanted to take a moment to congratulate Nina, Ellen's sister, on her graduation from High School today! Enjoy your summer while you can, college starts soon enough!
Well, at least now I know why it croaked. Spare parts, here we come...
So, while I watch the entire press corps bend over backward posthumously kissing the ass of a president they hated, I figure I'd take a bit of time to dig through the archives and post our own memorial:
Reagan inherited a shattered and weak military, incapable of even rescuing a few hostages in the desert. He inherited an economy weakened by inflation and recession. He inherited a press corps and international community happy for American weakness that made their jobs easier. Most of all he inherited a people who had sunk into despair and self-loathing over a stupid war in a stupid place that sent all too many sons home in boxes.Reagan would have none of it. A charismatic man, someone you literally could not help but watch speaking, who had a mind like a razor and a love of country from a simpler time. He decided appeasement would not work, communism was a danger to the entire world, and only through confrontation would it be defeated. He rearmed, rebuilt, and reaffirmed America. For the first time in a very, very long time someone was standing up in front of cameras saying this country was the best country in the world, and you could be for us or against us, but you didn't want to be against us because we were going to win no matter what it took.
It's an essay more about how our perceptions of nuclear war have changed, but most readers took it as a tribute to Reagan himself. So be it.
Don't try this at home folks, I'm a professional.
Today, the dread blue screen,
Workbox was dead, now alive
Brother will laugh again
Just wanted everyone to know that Ellen has not actually quit AMCGLTD. She just hasn't really been able to read computer displays for the past week. I had to set her display up to "old people huge" just so she could read e-mail (gotta have that e-mail, ya know). Expect weird/naughty/outrageous stuff and more O & cat updates within the week, as her eyesight returns to normal.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled fragfest...
There are a new series of paypal scam e-mails making the rounds. I almost got snagged by the first one; it was just dumb luck that those thieves didn't make their "home" site look enough like paypal's. The second one I got I had fun with, telling them all sorts of hokey stuff.
At any rate, if you receive any e-mail notices about paypal irregularities, strange activity, security confirmation, etc., no matter how legitimate it looks just discard them. If you're a little worried (I was), go visit paypal directly (type in the URL by hand) and check your account.
Under no circumstances should you ever give your account info out because of an e-mail notice of any kind, no matter how legitimate it may look
This public service announcement brought to you by AMCGLTD. You will now be returned to your regularly scheduled fragfest.
Those of you (*cough* mom *cough*) who complained about Olivia's pictures disappearing during the move will be happy to know we've finally got them all back. I'd saved them to the hard drive of the "old" computer, and only just now got them back. Enjoy!
Email this Entry should be working. Now I have to get "tell us about it" up again. I triple-checked our template list and still managed to miss the only two custom templates on the whole site. Gah!
One of the advantages of our new host is we're finally able to add a search feature to the site. Therefore, on the right you'll now see a SEARCH blank. The one on the main page is obviously pretty limited, but the ADVANCED SEARCH link will take you to a page that lets you specify just about anything in any combination (even regEx's!)
With more than 4500 entries and over 6000 comments, even we've needed a search function of some sort occasionally. Hopefully it will be even more useful to all of you. Enjoy!
Mail is being extra-flakey, probably because I tried to outsmart myself this afternoon. Sometimes flexibility can be a bad thing.
At any rate, those who know us well already have alternate methods of contact. Those who don't, well, you'll just have to chill until the DNS records update and/or I get our new hosts to help me un-do whatever the hell it was I did.
Note Ellen lost about 12 hours worth of e-mail during the move. If you sent something to her between 8 pm last night and about 10 am this morning, you'll need to re-send it.
If you have directly bookmarked any story or discussion (such as the Robin Hood's Grave stuff), you've probably already noticed the link is broken. When we migrated the site, all the entries got assigned different numbers. To find your favorite discussion, you'll need to first visit the CATEGORY archive (science, etc.), then search or browse to your favorite entry.
Google searching won't work, at least for awhile, because it's keyed to the old site.
Apologies for the inconvenience.
Ok, moving from a "conventional" movable type installation to a "MySQL" MT installation is officially now a major hairy pain in the ass. What follows will make sense only to those relatively fluent in the SQL database language. Those who are not: in my experience, there is a significant bug in the import process to do this conversion. I was importing entries at about 100 per pass. Each pass required zortching the successful entries, and re-uploading the rest. Each upload took about 4 minutes. Big deal you say? We got 10000 entries and comments!
How I solved it is below...
PS... email this entry is still broken... working on it...
MT-Entries has the mt-entry-author field set not to allow NULL. This is normally a Very Good Thing, as nulls cause all sorts of headaches when running queries. Unfortunately, it would appear that a bug causes the import process to hand a NULL value in this field to this table, on irregular occasion. For the life of me I could not figure out where or why, and I'm sorry pouring through a 10k entry dbase backup looking for a single null is beyond my abilities (and probably wordpad & notepad's too). Those of you with shell access and the ability to run regexes through bash or whatever will probably smirk, but I did what I had to do.
At any rate, by changing the mt-entry-author field to allow nulls, everything imported just peachy. When I was done, I ended up with, oh, two dozen or so bizzare entries in the STORIES area, and a whole bunch of errors besides. Zapping these fixed everything, and now it all seems (seems) to be working fine.
So props to Hosting Matters for giving me the ability to directly tinker with mySql databases. Otherwise I'd've been here all frikkin night.
Anyone else wants to do this I'm happy to help, but you'll owe me a case of beer in the morning!
We're going to be moving the site to a different host provider today, so the site may get flaky or fail completely while all the records get moved around and updated. Will keep you posted as things progress.
Alert readers (and we all know you're alert, right? RIGHT? Hey, wake up!) will note we've added two new sites to our blogroll:
Mahmood's Den is written by a Bahraini, a family guy who runs his own A/V business. He writes about everything, with a wry sense of humor that, according to western stereotypes, should've gotten him arrested years ago. Let's be grateful it's just a stereotype
Consider this [about Saudi Arabia]: the north of the country habitually gets snow, there are forests in the south-west, green and temperate climate in Ta'if, immense palm groves in the eastern province as well as in Qasim, beautiful and bountiful beaches on the the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf, huge sand-dunes and desert just about everywhere else, and you marvel at such a vast country which I think is as big as the eastern sea-board of the United States up to the Mississippi river. It is huge.
Speaking of, Instapundit lead us to The Religious Policeman, an honest-to-God (Allah?) Saudi weblog. He has the same sense of humor as Mahmood, as evidenced by this prediction of what it'll really take to have a revolution in The Great Kingdom:
When the Saudi people finally rise up in revolt and throw out the House of Saud, it won't be for democratic reform, and it won't be for an islamic republic. It'll be about mobile phones.
...
So will the muttawa try and ban all phones in Saudi Arabia? It'd be like trying to take an American's gun, or an Englishman's dog. Arabs in general, and Saudis in particular, live for their mobile phones, in a way that other parts of the world would not understand. And we are physically incapable of ignoring our phone when it rings.
Sounds a lot like someone I know.
The Bellydance Superstars are comming to the area!! WOOHOO!!!
Thursday at 7:30 p.m. Class at 5 p.m.
The professional touring dance company performs with local troupe Raqs Sahara. Learn how to dance at a class with a live drummer.
At the Birchmere, 3701 Mount Vernon Ave., Alexandria
Tickets are $20-$25, class $40. (703)549-7500; for class reservations, call (301)404-1037
*sigh* and NO O-sitter in site. Oh well.
NEW YORK - Martha Stewart was convicted Friday of obstructing justice and lying to the government about why she unloaded her ImClone stock just before the price plummeted — a verdict that could send her to prison and cripple the homemaking empire built around her vision of gracious living.The charges carry up to 20 years in prison for both Stewart and Bacanovic. The judge could potentially sentence the pair to time in a halfway house or home confinement, but legal experts have said the term would probably be reduced to roughly a year in prison under federal guidelines. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of five years and a $250,000 fine.
Read entire article here.
Well, we lost the opening round in the BlogMadness tournamnet, but while we weren't looking we won the next four rounds in the elimination bracket (Jeff pointed it out on Saturday.) If I'm reading the brackets right, we're now in the final four!
So, when you get the chance, go do the right thing:
That's it! Thanks a bunch!
On February 2nd, 2002, a tiny corner blog opened up its doors with this rather piquant entry:
Hello!FINALLY!!! a new fucking web site!!! Its only been what, 2 years?? BOUT TIME!
~(BlOG-bLoG-BlOg-bLoG!..bloggity blog!!!!)~
I have no clue how to operate this thing, hopefully cat photos will be posted soon.
--Ellen
From such humble beginnings the internet powerhouse soon to be known world-wide as AMCGLTD was born. Well, ok, more like the internet shack in the back yard where you keep the mumbling people who amuse you was born.
Two years, not quite 4000 entries, and more than 5600 comments later, and look at us now. Still the shack where you keep the mumbling yet vaguely amusing people, but with icons!
So what have we managed to do for these two years? Aren't you going to be sorry you asked that question. Quick, director, cue the montage! Music! Sound! Action!
And tell Janet to put her boob back in her dress. Flopsy is not an attractive style!
Well, we scandalized my mom so often we had to put up a special category to warn her, which promptly became the most popular part of the site amongst her nurse friends.
We learned that Scott can cook, eventually, as long as he doesn't try to toast bread on a cast iron skillet.
We explained to the world the true Power of Chocolate, exposing a secret for which the author continues to pay a heavy price (in thin mints).
Ellen made our first deposit into the "Send Damion to Drag-Race School" account when we got her Cruiser done up somethin' special. And no, those are not dinosaurs, they're cat skeletons. Little did we know the last-minute decision to place the URL on the back would result in our advertising the site to perhaps ten thousand surly morning commuters a day once we moved out to the 'burbs. We don't know how many folks read us because of that, but there are definitely a few (poor bastards).
Scott wrote an essay that one of his friends thought was extremely pro-war, and another one thought was extremely anti-war, when all he set out to do was explain why people were sometimes pro-, and sometimes anti-war. This has lead him to decide none of his friends have any idea what they're talking about, and if they'd just listen to him we could end this destructive conflict and Bring Order to the Galaxy. Scott needs to get out more.
Ellen got a tiny trout wanna-be that terrorizes her to this day. Browsing through the archives she even discovered he's secretly plotting to destroy the world.
She also related a cat sitting incident and introduced Scott to the joys of "waxing". He only thought she meant the car.
Now let's see... what else happened....
Wha? Nah, nobody cares about tha--
Ok, ok, ok. Mom, put the pan back in the oven next to the pizza boxes where it belongs. We conclusively proved socially-challenged geeks do in fact know how the 'birds and bees' work.
So ends our little highlight reel. As the credits roll, we'd like to thank:
Well, enough weepy thank-you's, the band is playing the "get the hell off" music now. Here's to you all, thanks for taking the time to make our silly little site a part of your day!
We registered "The Great Exploding Watermelon" over at the blogmadness tournament, and got put in the "sports" category somehow. Now, I was just going to let it run itself out without comment, but it would appear the competition has done a little rallying for itself.
Therefore, please feel free to vote for us in the tournament. That'd be our entry over on the bottom-right side. Click VOTE, then choose the "correct" entry on the left-hand side. Tell your friends! :)
Update: A more direct link to voting is here. Again, the voting form itself is a little hard to spot at first, on the lower-left of the screen.
Conservative ballot stuffing... Joshua's gonna be so proud of me!
I'm not staying home today because of 4.5 inches of snow. You can't even make a decent snowman with 4.5 inches of snow on the ground. I've driven with 2.5 feet of snow on the ground delivering pizza in a rusted-out rear-wheel-drive Italian sports car before. Compared to that, our PT Cruiser is an f-ing mountain goat. I can drive in this.
I'm staying home today because of the titanic numbers of "I didn't pay $60,000 for this SUV just to be stopped by the laws of physics" morons clogging my commuter route. The last time I tried to fight the moronitude it took 2.5 hours to get to work (normally takes about 40 minutes.) We counted 22 wrecks, most of them SUVs on their sides or backs in the median or stacked up on the shoulder. No thanks. Time to break out the hot chocolate...
At least Jeff gets to play in his truck, and Damion gets to try out his snow tires!
Jan 23 1812
A huge 7.8 magnitude earthquake shakes New Madrid, Missouri. People think that earthqakes strike the West Coast, but the New Madrid series of quakes are some of the largest in America's history.
Just wanted everyone to know that the Speed Channel program, "Victory by Design", is featuring Alfa Romeo this Sunday. But of course, you already knew that and had your VCR/TiVO set for it, right?
Right???
Lots of LOVE,
The Baby "O".
Happy Belated Birthday to our good friend Kris (we won't mention the age).
Some people get champagne, others party hats and buzzers. Us? We get a kid with "Rohdodendron" virus (or something like that). Projectile puking started exactly at 6 pm yesterday, and repeated every fifteen minutes almost like clockwork. 9 pm saw us in the emergency room, and we celebrated new year's watching the doctor take her pulse.
Well, everything's going to be fine. They're keeping her under observation for 48 hours, which means we're doing shifts between the hospital and home. Tonight is Ellen's overnight shift (mine was last night's), hopefully everyone will be home by tomorrow.
There's probably plenty of funny in what happened, but I'm just too tired to cook it up. Maybe tomorrow...
Ok, Olivia's had a cold for the past three days, so between us Ellen and I have had about, oh, four hours of sleep in 36 hours. Therefore, I just don't have the energy to hook up and configure the scanner to get you guys the "real" Christmas card picture we had made. Instead, we've got the Poor Man's Version:
Yes, that's your's truly in the, umm... "outfit". No, the one with the hat. The black hat. It's a very long, strange story. Just wait 'till we post the picture of Olivia with Candypants the Elf. No, really!
Christmas is all well and good, but personally I'm happy that yesterday was the shortest day of the year. Let's hear it for biking in the daylight again! Well, soon anyway.
SMART: Riding your bike up the hill bike trail across what might be black ice as straight and quick as possible.
STUPID: On the third and last lap testing if it's actually black ice by snapping the handlebars sideways a bit.
VERDICT: If it looks like black ice, assume it is. Your knees will thank you.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- After eluding coalition forces for months and vowing never to be taken alive, a disheveled Saddam Hussein was found hiding in a hidden hole near a farmhouse and was captured without firing a shot, coalition authorities announced Sunday.
Read entire article here.
Those of you in foreign climes probably neither know nor care that tomorrow is Thanksgiving. And for that, you should be grateful! The rest of you probably already know what's going on. I lost the coin toss this year, so am being held by radicals from the GLF*, in-law branch, where you are treated to Wonderful Holiday Dinner Conversation (note: done in Brooklyn accent):
Grandpa: "Have some gravy, Scott."
Scott: "Nah, that's ok, I'm fine."
Grandpa: "What? What? You want some wine?"
Scott: "No, I don't need any gravy."
Grandpa: "What's wrong with the gravy?"
Ellen: "Pop-pop, he said he doesn't want the gravy."
Grandpa: "Everyone should have gravy!"
Dad: "What, who doesn't want gravy?"
Ellen: "Scott doesn't like gravy on his potatoes."
Grandpa: "Hmm? What? Who wants potatoes?"
Dad: "Nobody wants potatoes old man, would you listen for once!"
Ellen: "Leave pop-pop alone!"
Dad: "What? He can't hear a thing! He never wears his hearing aids!"
Ellen: "That's no reason to yell at him!"
Dad: "Of course it is! He can't hear!"
Grandpa: "An ear? You want some corn on the cob?"
Dad: "Goddamit pop, nobody wants corn!"
Grandpa: "Whaa... what are you talking about? Every time I turn around someone's yelling at me in this house! Hey, Scott, want some gravy?"
Scott: "Absolutely."
Next stop, grandma's house, where the rule is "leave the window open when you shower [in November, in 30F/-2C tempratures] so it doesn't mess up the wallpaper!"
Blogging will therefore probably be somewhat spotty until Coalition forces arrive.
I'm sure it'll zip all over the blogosphere very soon, but just in case... Blogrolling seems to have been hacked, and everyone who uses it now has "laura's blog" as the only link in the thing, thousands of times over. I've turned ours off for now, for obvious reasons. Here's to hoping they can get it all sorted out and back on line! It's a free service, so we can't complain too much, but it'll be a bear to put it back together. Ah well.
Let that be a lesson to you kids. Be sure to log back in as yourself whenever you're done editing someone else's posts. All posts done so far today are from me (Scott) and not Ellen. Well, that's only the second time in nearly two years, so I guess we're Ok.
Bobby Hatfield, half of the Righteous Brothers, died yesterday. People over 35 or so will go "damn", while most people under 25 will go "huh?" Damned kids....
TOKYO (Reuters) - The oldest person in the world, Kamato Hongo, died on Friday aged 116, a spokesman for a hospital in southern Japan said.Hongo's death comes a month after the world's oldest man, Yukichi Chuganji, passed away at his home on the same Japanese island aged 114.
Read entire article here.
Arkansas wins longest game in NCAA history in 7 overtimes
Arkansas stopped Kentucky on a fourth-down play in a 71-63 victory Saturday night.The game was the longest in NCAA history, matching the seven overtimes in Arkansas' 58-56 victory at Mississippi in 2001. The game lasted four minutes shy of five hours.
Read entire article here .
Happy Halloween everybody! Work pressure, visits by relatives, and trick-or-treating with my nephew may cause blogging to be light today. The regularly scheduled fragfest should resume tomorrow. Don't just sit there, go eat some candy!
Just added Healing Iraq to our blogroll. Another Iraqi blogging from their own ground zero. He's almost a mirror image of Baghdad Burning... more skeptical, yet more optimistic. Go take a look.
Fred "Rerun" Berry Dead
Berry, who portrayed the beret-wearing, suspender-clad teen known as Rerun on the 1976-79 series and was rarely without his signature accessories during the nearly quarter-century since, was found dead in his Los Angeles apartment Tuesday, E! has learned. He was 52.
Read entire article here.
Congratulations to a good friend of mine, Elizabeth and family and their new baby!
"Riley Patrick
was born Saturday, October 11th at 5:50 am, weighed in at 7 lbs 1.2
ounces, and was 19" long. Mom, Dad and baby are all doing really well and
loving our first days together as a family!"
~Elizabeth
Hopefully her 3 cats Buffy, Polly and Riley are adjusting well!
Because a dippy Kazaa user let a virus into my heavily-guarded-but-not-well-patched network, that's why. Out of 80 systems, 20 were weak enough to get zapped by the W32.BLASTER worm, and it's taken me 2 days of bug hunting to squash them all. Ironically, the amount of time it took me to clean things up is probably LESS than the time it would've taken to make sure all 80 systems were patched up all the time.
God I love Microsoft.
Kazaa is now blocked up tighter than one of Ellen's "hasn't-pooped-in-4-days" cat patients, the dip is now chastised, and things seem to be settling back in. Your regularly scheduled fragfest should pick back up very soon.
And Ellen? She wore out the power supply to her laptop.
Sometimes it never ends...
Jeff gets a no-prize for letting us know Gordon Jump died yesterday. The name might not be familiar, but the face will be. He was best known for his role on the TV show WKRP. Others might know him from the Maytag commercials or the numerous other roles he had in his long career. Sounds like he'd been ill for some time, so let's hope the next time around he makes folks laugh just as loud.
Arrrrrrr!!!!! It's Talk Like A Pirate Day!
Ye'll be only wantin to talk like a pirate today. Yarrrr...
If ya don't be talkin like one, you all be Sons of a Biscuit Eater! YARR!!! Be sure you be talking like a pirate all day. Yarr..arrr..arrr!!!
They're rolling up the carpets and screwing down the windows all around the DC metro area as I type this. I thought this place went wacko during snow... hurricane-crazies make the snow-crazies look like Ben Stein on downers. I fully expect it to rain like hell all night, flood three block's worth of Old Town (like it always does), and then clear out by morning. Lots of people will be left with garages full of bottled water, batteries and flashlights.
When the feds close we close though, so I get a free day off. Predictably, the internet connection is fritzing, so blogging may be light, heavy, or moderate. Geeze, now I sound like a maxipad commercial.
Screaming baby time... back in a few.
Meetings meetings everywhere, and not a thought to think. Postings will be few & far between as my job actually makes me work today.
Does anyone out there know of a book that contains translations of ancient Egyptian heiroglyphic inscriptions and/or texts? I'm trying to research an essay, but have run into a blank wall while searching the internet.
Yeah, I know, library. So happens I live within driving distance of one of the largest in the world. Only problem is they don't let you take books home from that one (unless you're a Congressman, and really, how useful is that?), and you have to wait 2 hours or more for them to bring your book to you. Much easier to just order something from a book store.
Of course, something this obscure will probably lead to some $75+ academic tome with a print run measured in the dozens. Still, it'd be good to know the title.
On this day in 19XX (ha! I'm not that stupid!) my sweetie was born. Love ya girlie!
Now to fetch the presents...
Update: This marks our 3000th entry on AMCGLTD. WoOt!
WOOOO!!! We are back from a family reunion this weekend! Not to worry, your daily screwball news and updates will resume all normal activity tomorrow (Scott has to slack somehow)!
Hopefully, you will all get an 'Encounters' entry from Scott as a treat! (ask nicely and ye shall recieve)
*ps- Richie, the pickles are really really good... *CrUnCh!*
Hope died late Sunday of pneumonia, his longtime publicist Ward Grant said Monday. Hope's family was at his bedside at his home in Toluca Lake.
See entire article here.
I was up until midnight fixing the mess my work made of some stuff that affected the entire nationwide organization, so they're in time out right now. No e-mail, no contact for... well, until I feel like messing with them again. If you need to contact me use the e-mail address on the left there, otherwise it may take a day or two for me to get back to you.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A wild red fox was the likely predator that got into a bald eagle's enclosure at the National Zoo and killed the bird, zoo officials said this week.
Ok, the media is being really stupid now. A 'wild' fox? Aren't all or rather 99% of them wild? Or are there domesticated foxes out there lurking the quiet neighborhoods at night?
Read entire article here.
Yeah, we know, lack of updates again. We're not dead yet! Just having trouble finding the quality slack time required to write stuff up.
Oh, and Outlaw Volleyball is the raunchiest thing we've seen in a video game in a long time.
NEW YORK (AP) - After years of saying she'd wait until she was married to lose her virginity, Britney Spears is acknowledging that she had sex with her ex-boyfriend, Justin Timberlake.
Ok, who out there did not know she was obviously not a virgin?
See entire article Posted by Ellen at 04:53 PM | Comments (2) | eMail this entry!
(CNN) -- Two conjoined adult Iranian twins have died following unprecedented surgery to separate them, officials at Singapore's Raffles Hospital say.
See entire article here.
The hospital paid for pre-operative fees and the medical costs involved in operation. The operating surgeons waived their professional fees. The government of Iran said Monday it would pay $300,000 for post-operative care.
Tragic, but it always amazes me that these medical oddities get free medical/surgical care, yet everyone else needs to fight with their HMO or pay out of pocket.
Buddy Ebson, of Beverly Hillbillies and Barnaby Jones, died yesterday at the age of 95. Well, that's one less thing Ellen can make fun of me over. Yeah right.
LOS ANGELES - Velvet-voiced R&B crooner Barry White (news), renowned for his lush baritone and lyrics that oozed sex appeal on songs such as "Can't Get Enough of Your Love, Babe," died Friday morning, his manager said.
See entire article here
What will the Biscuit listen to now? (Ally McBeal)
Congratulations to my sister, Nina, who passed her drivers license test today a little before 2pm.
From what I was told (inside information from Richie) 6 people failed before her.
Now all she has to do is get a job to pay for her car insurance. :)
Yeah, I know, lack of updates. Most parents out there probably think this is because we're too busy with the baby. You're wrong. We're too damned busy with the relatives right now. There are tons of people with advice for dealing with baby, but where were you people with advice for dealing with grandma?
Updates will follow as soon as we get everyone out of our freaking house!
P.S. If any of said in-laws and/or relatives are reading this, please note that we sincerely appreciate all your efforts. Now would someone please wake up Richie... my Mother, Mother-in-Law, Aunt-in-Law, Sister-in-law, wife, and baby need to sit down.
Olivia Rachel Johnson premiered to rave reviews today at 11:17 AM. 7 lbs 4 oz., 20" long. Delivery was challenging but ultimately everything turned out just fine. Both mother and daughter are resting comfortably at the hospital now. Homecoming will probably be sometime in the next few days. Blogging will, of course, be somewhat light until then.
Pictures and details to follow soon. Thanks to everyone for your well wishes!
Hoooray! Another blogging chick bitching about pregnancy!
Thanks to Meryl at Yourish.com for the introduction to this blog!
Hey everybody, it's Jimspot's birthday! Go over and wish our favorite "regular joe (jim?)" a happy bloggiversary. Maybe we should send the lizards a box of crickets or something...
Ok, not that anyone cares, but it's our site and I can talk about whatever I please.
I've decided to quit dabblng in the kiddie pool and jump straight into the deep end. I am now Micro$oft-free on this computer. Yup, bought the propeller-head hype and switched it to Linux. For the non-computer folks out there, about the closest thing I can say to relate it to you is imagine switching from your PC to a Mac. Only not as pretty. Or friendly. But a lot cheaper (free!) Potentially a helluva lot more powerful too.
Some observations so far:
Do I like it? Well, yeah, there's the geek factor of getting to play with a completely different kind of computer. It's also a poke in the eye of the Borg. I should also be able to play with a ton of new software (as long as I'm willing to compile it.) Would you like it? Well, if you like tinkering with computers for the sake of tinkering with computers, probably. If you've got someone who can set it all up for you, and don't do much gaming, maybe. If you want it to "just work", well, IMO it's still not ready for prime time.
Update: Just got "WINE" sort-of working. WINE is a package that (supposedly) allows the installation of windows software onto linux machines. Took two days to get rid of all the error messages. My first shot? Windows Media Player (for watching ... cartoons, yeah, that's it, cartoons). Result: "This Player is Meant for Windows Only."
Well, it was a windows error this time, not a linux error. Back to the drawing board...
Carrie gets a no-prize for bringing us this website detailing the latest changes in CafePress's user agreement. Just for fun we set up a shop over there about a year ago. It never really took off, but it was fun to tink with, and the people who did buy stuff seemed quite pleased with it.
However, CP has now changed their user agreement, giving themselves exclusive royalty-free rights to our works (and yours too, if you own a CP store). This is unacceptable, we've closed the shop. We'd like to thank all of you who bought some stuff. Hang on to it, because it's a collectors item now!
There are other services which we'll be exploring. It's a nifty logo, or at least we think it is!
Ellen says: wait for the DVD. I say: go see it, go see it NOW.
Oh, and if you do see it, stay through the credits, you get a trailer for the next one if you do.
Remember the "internet toilet"? Turns out it was all a big hoax:
Microsoft Corp. said a company news release that it was developing a portable toilet with Internet access, called an "iLoo," was a hoax perpetrated by its British division.
The Borg has a sense of humor. Whodathunkit?
Happy Mother's Day to any lady out there with kids, pets, a husband that acts like a 2 year old ect...
For all of you that do not know, he is some 'history' on why Mother's Day is celebrated.
The earliest Mother's Day celebrations can be traced back to the spring celebrations of ancient Greece in honor of Rhea, the Mother of the Gods. During the 1600's, England celebrated a day called "Mothering Sunday". Celebrated on the 4th Sunday of Lent. "Mothering Sunday" honored the mothers of England. During this time many of the England's poor worked as servants for the wealthy. As most jobs were located far from their homes, the servants would live at the houses of their employers. On Mothering Sunday the servants would have the day off and were encouraged to return home and spend the day with their mothers. A special cake, called the mothering cake, was often brought along to provide a festive touch.As Christianity spread throughout Europe the celebration changed to honor the "Mother Church" - the spiritual power that gave them life and protected them from harm. Over time the church festival blended with the Mothering Sunday celebration . People began honoring their mothers as well as the church.
In the United States Mother's Day was first suggested in 1872 by Julia Ward Howe (who wrote the words to the Battle hymn of the Republic) as a day dedicated to peace. Ms. Howe would hold organized Mother's Day meetings in Boston, Mass ever year.
In 1907 Ana Jarvis, from Philadelphia, began a campaign to establish a national Mother's Day. Ms. Jarvis persuaded her mother's church in Grafton, West Virginia to celebrate Mother's Day on the second anniversary of her mother's death, the 2nd Sunday of May. By the next year Mother's Day was also celebrated in Philadelphia.
Ms. Jarvis and her supporters began to write to ministers, businessman, and politicians in their quest to establish a national Mother's Day. It was successful as by 1911 Mother's Day was celebrated in almost every state. President Woodrow Wilson, in 1914, made the official announcement proclaiming Mother's Day as a national holiday that was to be held each year on the 2nd Sunday of May.
While many countries of the world celebrate their own Mother's Day at different times throughout the year, there are some countries such as Denmark, Finland, Italy, Turkey, Australia, and Belgium which also celebrate Mother's Day on the second Sunday of May.
I found this little article on Gcards.com, but I did not make a direct link to it. Too many *pop up* ads!!
There will come a day when I shall give up and resort to dealing with idiots by brandishing a pointy stick.
Getting closer and closer...
Pat gets a no-prize for letting us know Salaam Pax is back. Since it's been a long time, there's a lot there. I'm still working through it myself. Great look at what it was like "on the ground." Very glad to see he's not blown up!
The US Alfa community lost a dear and valued member yesterday. Fred Dimatteo, one of the founding members of the Alfa Romeo Owners Club, passed away last night due to complications from angioplasty. Fred lived to a ripe old age, the far side of 90 as I recall, and by all accounts lived it as fully as anyone could hope right to the very end. He was crotchety, did not suffer fools, but was willing to do whatever he could to help people keep their alfas on the road (as long as you were willing to be called "stupid" when you were.) On more than one occasion I was simply stunned speechless when some alfa digester posted a weird and vague problem was answered by Fred with "look under the passenger side rear access panel. There's a blue wire that's come loose. Tighten that and it'll fix right up."
So raise a glass, light a candle, burn some incense, or whatever else you do to remember a life well lived, because by all accounts his was.
And always give a wink and a nod when you see those funny little cars with the cross-and-serpent logo, because all of us in the Alfa community will know you're waving at our silent passenger, grumbling in the ether about our corroded electrical connections.
Just wanted you all to know that a Hoover upright vacuum will suck a pair of thong panties off the washroom floor, through the hose attachment, and neatly deposit them in the dust canister without any drama whatsoever, faster than you can think "I better check around this corner before I stick the vacuum wand around it."
Or... well... ahem... so I've been told anyway.
You've been warned.
Ok. I figure we've got enough commentors out there who use names & links & such that turning off "anonymous" won't scare away won't make the blog go all crickity-quiet. From this point on you'll have to put a name and an e-mail address in the blanks to get a comment to go up.
Please note you don't have to use a real name or e-mail address. Feel free to make one up if you like, or if you must. If possible, though, please be consistent so we'll know who you are.
Ok, I just wanted everyone to know that cleaning 30-year-old dried glue from a convertible top frame using naptha and xylene is probably one of the most annoying jobs on the planet.
Ok, ok, yeah, it's probably not the most annoying job on the planet. How about in this country?
Yeah, all right, there's lots worse jobs. How about in my city?
Godammit. How about this:
Ok, I just wanted everyone to know that cleaning 30-year-old dried glue from a convertible top frame using naptha and xylene is probably the most annoying jobs in my garage
HAPPY?!?
Literalists...
Sometimes we take forever to get around to things. Added an "email" sidebar that features my new e-mail address and more prominently displays Ellen's. Those of you who have my old address, that still works just fine. Those of you who don't, well, use the one over there dangit!
Scott's favorite movie chick is knocked up! Good thing they finished making the last 2 movies.
Several of you have already noticed that two nights in a row we ended up with a weird message completely blanking our site. Apparently this was caused by a security hole in MT allowing some mouth breathing sister-sodomizing script kiddy morons to zap the main page of our site. I've (finally!) upgraded us to the latest version of MT, so all that should stop.
Didn't even have to run any scripts this time. If I'd know it was this easy I would've done it months ago.
What are you waiting for?!? Head out right now to Dr. Dremo's(Purgatorio on Wednesday nights) in Arlington, VA for the 7th issue of the City Morgue. The best thing is if you go to the magazine party, you get it for FREE!!! Party starts at 9 P.M.
Happy Anniversary!!!! We at AMCGLTD hope your second year is twice as better as the first!
If you can't make it, contact TCM on how to get YOUR copy!
Today is my brother's ... 33rd ... birthday. Everyone wish our favorite gun nut and big-iron fan a happy one!
Happy Valentine's Day everyone, and happy Birthday dad!
Thanks to everyone who has commented on Quiet Man too... that's exactly the kind of debates we're looking for. Special mention to Sesh, who sticks to his guns without getting personal.
You all seem to have voted that essay a home run, and I'm very grateful. While I'm working on the next one, you may want to peruse the archives by hitting the highlights on the left of the main page or just trolling through the essays. Last I checked there were more than a hundred of them in there, so there's bound to be something to like.
Again, thanks for visiting and don't forget to come back soon!
Possibly the only time I really watch dogs on t.v.
I love to watch the yearly Westminster to see who wins. The past few years, small poodles have one, a Dandy Dinmont (who was very cute) one, but this time a Kerry Blue Terrier won the Westminster.
If you missed the Westminster, USA(tv channel) tends to replay it the weekend after it first aired.
A HUGE thanks to Damion and Kris (Who hopfully isn't hurting too badly from last night. Scott woke up feeling shitty.) over at Demon Wurkz for being nice enough to scan Olivia's pixes and burn them on a cd for us!
Thank You, Thank You, Thank You!!
Happy GroundHogs Day!
Acoording to that rodent, we are going to have 6 more weeks of winter.
Ok, one of my co-workers got slapped up on Hot or Not.
So, the plan is this. Everyone click the link and rate her a 10 so we can boost her scores.
Boy, doesn't it just suck. You go into the hospital for an intesitnal blockage (who knows what caused that), then you suffer a heart attack and die.
My faith in hospitals goes even further down on my list.
Today is Amish Tech Support's 1 year anniversary! Be sure to go over there and wish everbody's favorite tasteless blogger a happy 1 year. :)
Hey You!! Yeah You!
You need to go check out Blue Lens.
OK, OK shameless plug for some of our friends, but it's a neat site to go check out some pictures and another very twisted mind! We call it "cats, rants, and pixxies!"
Tell 'em AMCGLTD sent ya :).
As you probably have already noticed, we've added a tip jar. Yes, I know, that takes us down a notch or two in the politics of blogging, but hey, our site, our stuff. If you don't like it feel free to ignore it!
And thanks in advance to anyone out there who wants to jingle some silver at us.
Special thanks to Rachel for giving me the step-by-step on the deeply buried instructions for setting this up!
Nominations for Bloggies are open right now... [hint-hint].
I know I know, "this is just for fun why care what other people think if you really need outside approval just pack it in wow does it even count if you have to ask people to nominate you", kind of thing. GO NOMINATE US ANYWAY, DAMMIT!
:)
Happy New Year from AMCGLTD.com!!
Scott and I have our bottle of champagne to open at midnight and then go to sleep! I have to be up at 6-730 am to a white cat stepping all over me for food! (yeah, you people who THINK you can stop the white cat from comming in the bedroom, think again!)
Ok, figured out the small glitch. Ya need NETSCAPE to see the pix. Not Explorer.
Sorry for the bug!
Sorry people, the world is just NOT very weird today!
So, NO NEWS! (at least from me)
Message to the world from AMCGLTD: We need more weirdness! More cats shooting ping pong balls out of their asses!, More small children being eaten by large reptiles in colorful ways!, More martians disguised as Wal-Mart greeters!
Dammit world! We need more news!
We here at AMCGLTD would like to wish all of you out there seasons greetings & happy holidays. It's snowing like crazy outside, so of course we're going to get on the roads and drive around. If any of you see a purple PT Cruiser with weird bone graphics on its sides on the TV that'll be us! :)
FYI: If you're going to piggyback off my (admittedly insecure) wireless LAN, at least have the decency not to give your machine your name. It makes it way too easy to spot. One of my four neighbors has some 'splainin to do!
Hah. Cut 'em off, take THAT!
There's another e-bay scam making the rounds, so you all be careful out there. What was the GI Joe saying? "Forewarned is Forearmed", or something like that... Anyway, be careful!
I'm out a training for our new jiffy-pop web management system. We've got at least two "anvils" coming to this training, so I may actually be able to do updates while the teacher explains what double-clicking is to them. We'll see...
The confusing "Scott voice/Ellen Signature" posts below were brought to you by Mr. "doesn't look closely at the posts". They're all mine (Scott). Sorry for the confusion.
The gas guys came by at 3 am to finally turn our heat on. I didn't hear it, but Ellen jumped up and ran downstairs saying "THE DOORBELL RANG!" in the same pitch and tone a small child would say "SANTACLAUSE!"
Ok, house is at 60 degrees, and the gas company says we may not have any heat or hot water till sometime tomorrow.
But..they did say, "Oh, there is a shelter set up at the Herndon High School if you are that cold." It's not just the cold, it's the not having hot water or being able to cook anything except for microwaveable food that's uncomfortable. What about a shower tomorrow for work? Not going to happen. The gas company has to go house to house to turn your gas back on, and I'm sure they don't want to do it tonight. Plus, they won't give all the details excpet there is a major gas leak in our city.
Brrrrr.....thank god for space heaters.
The latest Carnival of the Vanities is up. A self-selected set (ha!) of highlights from across the web, it's a great way to find good reading. Enjoy!
So what happens on one of the coldest days of the year? An f'ing gas break that knocks the heat out to the whole neighborhood! So I'm at home waiting for the repair guy to arrive, sitting next to the heater that was supposed to just keep the garage warm. Updates may be infrequent, as I have to periodically hold my hands over the thing to keep them warm.
Greeblie's put out a call to all bloggers with space to spare to adopt some folks, and we're happy to oblige. Any readers sick of blogspot or just looking to start their own little wingding, just let us know.
Jim has finally bitten the bullet and converted to movable type. He seems to be quite pleased with the results, and it certainly looks and behaves much better than before. Check him out if you haven't already.
Having sub-blogs is actually pretty straightforward with MT. It never ocurred to me to offer a similar service, but if anyone out there is interested use the "tell us about it" widget on the left and we can talk.
I also do full-blown site setup (see valvt.com), but I do charge a bit of $$$ for that sort of thing (although my rates are very reasonable!) Again, if you're interested, use the widget and I'll get right back to ya.
Happy Turkey Day to all US readers! We're having a big family day over at Ellen's mom's house, so posting may be light today. Don't just sit there,eat something!
Need the puurrfect x-mas gift for that friend you DON'T know who to buy for?
Check out the store! Lots of stuff on sale this week!
You can NEVER give enough coffee mugs stuffed with some candy for a present. Just think of it! An AMCGLTD mug with candy! What a cool gift!
So get to the store and buy your x-mas pressies!
As some may have already noticed, we've changed our blog list and linked it up to blogrolling.com to make it easier to manage. From now on, your spot in the ranks will be determined by when you last updated. Nothing personal!
We've also added the following blogs which we like to visit regularly:
So there you have 'em! Please be sure to visit each one at least once (along with all the others we already link to), you'll be glad you did!
Also, I know I'm leaving some folks out. This is not a slight, it's just because I'm an old fart and can't remember things properly. If you link to us and you're not on this list, please e-mail or use the feedback thingy and we'll put you right up. Links for all!
Apparently, there are 13 Commandments not 10 as origionally thought. Perhaps Moses did not like the last 3, perhaps the stone was too heavy to carry down the mountain? Either way, christians have been missing out these several thousand years! (Scott says 3 thousand)
See the article here!
Sometimes you discover the darndest things digging around in peoples' comment sections. Now I know what Aaron looks like (of uppity-negro.com fame). All guys reading this article should visit his blog and give him a big round raspberry for cavorting with half nekked women while we have to slog around with our normal lives.
Found via Heather Corrina's very interesting site and blog. Her other photographic work is here, but please note some examples are not safe for work!
We have Mama (Pat) over this weekend. So you see. Updates may be slow for the weekend.
I am supposed to tell you all that we have been assimilated and got ourselves Sam's Club cards, makin chili ect... Lots to do. Lots to do!
Larry has posted the latest twice-per-week daily funny. Lots of good stuff there. I think blogs should be used at least as much for giggling as for long winded diatribes about whatever you're feeling anxious about today. Certainly I appreciate the funny ones more, and read them more often. And I know from experience funny is a lot harder than serious. Enjoy!
All of Sunday's entries were brought to you by Ellen, not Scott. I was the last one to use her computer on Friday, and neither of us checked closely enough yesterday while she was posting. All complaints/compliments/fart jokes about yesterday's entries should be directed to her. :)
Hello all! We are officially back from Cape May,NJ. 4 hour car ride-YUCK!
Anyway, we got lots of piccies to share, but we are going to write up an encounters with pictures on it. So it may take a few days.
We will be out of town as of today 'till Sunday. Scott and I are going to Cape May, NJ for my cousin's wedding. So this is sort of a mini vacation for us since we have a 2 night stay.
So no posts till Sunday!!!
My cats? - well Miss Amber is going to come by 2x's per day to feed and medicate them! See! Special! They have their own personal cat sitter.
BTW- thanks for all the congrats. I appreciate it. This is a big step for us. 5 cats and a jelly belly (as my southern mama calls it) right now. :)
See you all Sunday!!! I know we will be itching all weekend to put posts up! If you still want to check us out, check the archives! :) Guaranteed to keep one busy for hours.
UPDATE: Don't forget, mom's watching, so behave yourselves --Scott
It's now official, Jim has called off the strike. As with all good labor disputes, both side claim victory and resume going about their business :).
This article, sent by Pat, finally triggered me to act on something. I just wanted to take some time out to let you all know that Australia in particular is taking the Bali incident really hard. I mean really hard. See Tim Blair's blog for a look at what it's like near their own "ground zero". Should look familiar.
It's a damned shame that the US has got a maniac running loose next to the second-largest concentration of journalists in the country (if he were doing this in Debuke we probably wouldn't even be hearing about it), because it makes us look like we don't care. Not true, not true at all. It's just that when people start shooting at places where pressmonkies actually live, well, they get distracted.
Just wanted to say that we here over at AMCGLTD are behind you guys all the way, and wish to send you our deepest condolences. Tell us what we can do to help and we'll be there with twice as much. We're funny that way.
Cafepress is having a sale to mark its three year annivesary, so over at our store you can now get t-shirts, mugs, and mouse pads at $3 off! WHATABARGAIN! So don't just stand there, buy something!
Ok, Scott says I must mention how awsome he is. ( ALL HAIL SCOTT!! For he is good to us cats!)
We bought a digital camera today. So piccies of the car WILL be up this weekend. It's just shitty outside at the moment and the pictures will not look good. Oh yeah, got to learn how to use the camera too. 4.0 mp I may add.
So I PROMISE, piccies of the car will be up by sunday night.
Now get off strike Jimspot. :p
Today is final moving day! All the big stuff goes out today (we're paying movers... don't want to shlepp big stuff up 3 flights of stairs), and this should be the last time we need to haul stuff out of the place. We'll finally be able to put the back seats in the cruiser again!
Updates may be a little light today, so behave yourselves. :)
I found Kuro5hin via, I think ATS (who neglegted to mention how awesome we are on his little mini-review of his 'best of the best'... *sniff*). It's a different sort of community-driven website. Unlike slashdot, the whole thing is run by the readers, not just the comments. And so you get a lot more, and different, types of stories posted up to it. But, as far as I can tell, it's damned near as big as slashdot.
So on a lark I took what you guys seemed to consider was one of the best things we've put up on here, "Historical Forces", cleaned it up, and submitted it. The K5 people are right... their "pundit to troll" ratio is really high. Most, albeit not all, of the critiques were very helpful, and danged if the thing didn't end up on their front frikken page just a few hours after I posted it.
Really, I did it mostly as a stunt to promote our site. I didn't expect the essay to go anywhere at all. We're deeply complimented over here that the K5 community thought enough of it to not only post it, but post it to the main page, from an author fresh out of the box. It gave us a much needed ego boost after the asshats over at FARK were done with us (we bought an ad over there). Maybe now our next big hurdle, instapundit, is finally within sight!? :)
Thank you, regulars, for picking out the essay for us, and welcome K5s and Farkers... hope you like our show!
Yeah, I know you're too smart to fall for this, but it never hurts to spread the news.
After digging through many boxes and being threatened with bodily harm from my spouse, we now have internet connectivity at our new house. As soon as Ellen quits being manic about her e-mail, I'm sure she'll update you guys on stuff I've left out. In the meantime, I would like to send props out to linksys, whose stuff literally "just worked" when I plugged it in. If you want your own cable modem, or want to build a wireless lan (both highly recommended), buy their stuff!
Well, we made the move! Thanks to Jeff & Cindy (brother & sister-in-law) for helping out with it all (trucks come in handy some times) on Saturday.
Some notes:
Those are the quickies I can think of right now. I'll have more later, and Ellen should be on as soon as I get the computers unpacked and hooked up.
Today is "big stuff" moving day. We'll be taking the PC down in order to move it to the new place. Updates will probably stop for most of the day. Be good and don't break anything while we're gone! :)
FINALLY!!! We are homeowners!!! (everyone showed up including the mortgage broker- Community Mortgage*link pending*). Apparently our loan was being looked at and revised down to the last minute- as we were signing papers!
We'll be sure to get a link to our mortgage broker soon. Our realtor was great, but our broker was incredible, going the extra mile and then some putting up with prissy loan officers and my husband's wrecked credit rating. And she still got us a 5.8% loan with 0 down and no mortgage insurance! WOO HOO! Diane Wessing RULZ!
At least it is all over. Scott and I have made a truce and deducted all points aganst each other and started over new. (yeah, we were pissy with each other)
We started to bring stuff over to the new house to let us breathe a bit in the apartment. Yes, we are going to work on the house this weekend a bit. Including getting our cable modem set up with the tv.
Thank god it is all over. Now all we have to do is move in.
Scott: "You are so much more sexy now that you are a homeowner" *snog*
After pulling my hair out for the past 36 hours, we get to close today, but not until after 4pm.
But hey, we get to close.
I got an interest rate of %5.87, and my mortage will be LOWER than my rent. WOW.
Finding the house was ok, getting all of the paperwork and doing the 24 hour scramble to find the information needed and play detective sucked. At least my lender said if I did not get involved we would not close today.
I find it amazing that certain people/companies will not give you a faxed recipt unless it is a home fax. OK, I learned to say, 'why yes! thats my home fax number'. (send my my damn reciept!-heh, to my work fax!)
My living room is stuffed with boxes that will finally go to their new home today. I get to have my cable guy arrive at my new house tomorrow and have tv installed. I must remember to bring a roll of toilet paper with us. Cause, ya know, can't use the bathroom (well guys can) if you don't have TP!
I'll keep you all posted
Made a minor change to the layout today, added a light blue line between each entry. The goal is to make the entries a little more distinctive, help them stand out, and make the site easier to read. I'm not completely sure I like it though, so your comments are appreciated. Stole the idea from Rachel, but coded it myself.
To take advantage of the current "drinkware" special, we've added several new mug-like objects to our store. $3 off everything that can hold fluid! Would've done it yesterday but the store management system was frelled. Buy one today!
And thanks to everyone who's bought stuff so far!
For a limited time only, both size coffee mugs are on sale at the AMCGLTD store. $3 off each item. WHATABARGAIN! Buy yours today!
The People's Republic of Seabrook has shown both an excellent sense of humor as well as questionable taste by making us their "TPRS site of the day!" Yourish says TPRS proves "[Amish Tech Support] isn't the only nutcase in Texas", and after a brief perusal I think she's probably right.
Thanks and enjoy!
As noted, mom is up this weekend. We'll be carting her around the city most of the day (complete with her mismatched shoes), so updates may be a little light today. Why not browse in our on-line store while you wait? :)
Per Jimspot's request, have tinkered with the "submit story" function a bit to allow you to scroll and adjust the window. It looked good on our screen, but as usual IE and Netscape don't see things the same way some times.
Thanks for the feedback Jim (sincerely!) If you guys have any other suggestions (other than to get Ellen to calm down and/or me to shut up), please feel free to make them!
On requests, we have added a "tote" bag and a golf shirt to our spiffy on-line store. Want something with our logo but don't see it in the store? E-mail us and/or give us feedback and we'll try to add it ASAP. Don't just stand there, buy something! :)
Our web host is experiencing "DOS" attacks. Basically, some mouth-breathing chimpanzee of an 18 year old is using a widget to block access to the web server we use. First time it's ever happened. Web service will be spotty for awhile. Gah.
You'll notice a new sidebar on the right, "Active Disucssions" (if you don't see it let me know, means there's a bug!) This will help you keep track of which stories have, well, active discussions going on. Should greatly help in finding replies to your posts on this fast-moving website.
It also finally reveals one of the really weird quirks of our site: several months ago Ellen posted a one-off quickie story about 'El Clon', a Spanish soap opera. To this day it has the highest number of comments of any story we've posted, and represents something like 50% of all search engine hits we get every month.
Special thanks to The News, Uncensored for providing me with the code for it. I'd been wanting to do something like that for months, but didn't have the stamina to push through the code to figure it out myself.
Everyone go to Melbernai's page and wish her a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!
All of us (2 humans, 5 cats and one nasty fish) at AMCGLTD wish you a very happy birthday!
Significantly (well, by 4) expanded the offerings in our store. Added a sweat shirt, a gray T, a baseball jersey (with 3 different sleeve colors to choose from), and a "baby doll" size for the boobie-equipped crowd. Don't just stand there, buy something!
Houston, we have merchandise. We just got our own examples in of the T-shirts, and they look great! Nice, high-quality stuff with a logo you just can't help smiling at. We have mugs and caps and mouse pads available too, and if you're interested in anything else, let us know. We can put our logo on all kinda stuff (probably do sweatshirts for the winter soon, for example).
Perfect for Christmas gifts! Excellent for birthday presents! Protects against athletes foot, premature baldness, wrinkles, aching joints, builds muscle and helps you lose weight!*
So help support AMCGLTD.COM and get a cool and fun T-shirt ta boot. Don't just stand there, buy something!
Providing direct support for 70 social work majors and indirect support for about another 1200 means I get three to five e-mail hoaxes mailed to me per week. I get just an eensy bit of a giggle from the ones who get the "your antivirus scanner won't detect this, so do that" and actually perform the procedure. Yeah, I know, very bad karma. But sometimes it's the only joy I get administering this cabbage patch.
Anyway, to make sure none of you fall into any of these traps, I present to you the Top 10 Computer Hoaxes of August. Please read at your earliest convenience, and always remember to Don't F*cking Open Me!
Phew!! I got a call from my realtor that the people we are buying a house from OK'd the needed fixes to the house.
In case I did not fill you in, we needed to have a few things fixed.
1. 2 small gas leaks. One to the hot water heater, and one to the meter outside the house. *yay..I have a chain smoking neighbor 2 houses down* I don't LIKE gas leaks. I don't like the idea of a gas run house either. But hey, I compromised. Scott moved to the burbs, therefore I will live with gas heat ect...
2. 2 attic tresses were damamged. HELLO! my roof will one day fall in if not fixed.
The only thing that did not bother us was a small lack of insulation in the garage. Scott and I can fix that with no problem. Spray insulation is a good thing.
So just to let you all know. We are set to close on the house September 20th! We will FINALLY be home owners, and my cats will get 3 levels!
I failed to announce last week that I stumbled upon a really cute cat talker called the Cat Arena. (click on the award to get to it)
So I went ahead and singed the guestbook and stating that I only care for *sick* or *special needs* cats. I got a personal email back from Catarina saying that it was still nice to see people like me out there, and to please chose an award template for my site to annouce what I do is special. * I got a warm squiffy * There are several styles of the award. Including some scantily clad sci-fi type women dressed as cats. (yeah, thats what Scott wanted). I wanted the one that is up because it remindes me of Ted and Ajax.
Anyone can get an award from the Cat Arena. Its called the "Labor of Love" award. You can obtain one by caring for cats in a special way.
We've decided to link up two new blogs in our "blogs of note": Amish Tech Support and The Norwegian Blogger.
Amish Tech Support is run by Lawrence Simon, an MIS guy with a cracked view of the world. I mean, anyone who's willing to put up this picture of himself on the web has to be able to laugh at the world, ya know? Like our site, a collection of quickies interspersed with occasional essays, it's a funny look at life from a Jewish cat lover in Houston, TX. I mean, if the words "Jewish", "cat lover", and "Houston, Texas" don't give you a sympathetic chuckle you must be made of stone. He's not quite as angry as Ellen, well ok I don't think anyone's even vaguely as angry as Ellen, but some of his stuff seems to come from the same place. I know he makes me laugh, and we all need a good giggle every once in awhile.
The Norwegian Blogger claims to be the Jerry Springer of Norway. That's not a typo, and yes it makes my eyes cross too. I got the impression after seeing a piece on that oh-so-objective source of information, 60 minutes, that Norwegians were this bunch of polite, rational people who party a lot so they don't shoot themselves or each other during the long, dark winter months in their home country. His blog hasn't (yet) proven this impression wrong, but I only discovered it today (via, again, yourish). He provides a refreshingly different viewpoint on just about everything under the sun. See Diplomacy 101 for his take on how Americans should really talk to Europeans, and why.
Give both a try today! Tell 'em we sent ya :).
Ok, thanks to all for your generous feedback (sincerely!) We've tweaked the layout a little bit, and included what I think is a genuine improvement in the readability of the site. The big font and line spacing stays, but the margin gets thrown a lot further out. The "introductory" text stays in (or at least near) its original form, making it *much* easier to figure out where to start reading once you click MORE.
We have to go drop a cat off, so the posts may be a bit light today. As always, comments/feedback/suggestions welcome!
Ok, on the advice of one of our commentators and yet another editor, I have tinked with the "extended" template (what you see if you click MORE on an essay), and the category archives. Please examine and comment as to whether you like it, don't like it, or "would like it better if you..."
One of the things we're good at is taking constructive criticism. Our fans are the whole point. If you let us know about it, we aim to please!
P.S. Neenah et. al. -- you don't have to read the whole thing all at once. If it's interesting but just too tiring, please feel free to come back later. And yes, we'll try to be a) funnier and b) shorter in the future.
Scott and I got our first REAL house today! WOOHOO!!
Actually the cats got a bigger domain to dork around in. They even get thier own bedroom.
Take a virtual tour of the new place. FYI-We don't close until september.
Today is Ellen's birthday! Everybody say "woo-hoo"! Or as Ellen's "Ma" would say:
"You should feel numbah twentyfive goin OUT of ya body, and numbah twentysix goin INTA ya body"
Yankee inlaws are so entertaining :).
So everybody be sure to wish Ellen a happy one. Love ya sexy!
Well, yourish does anyway. Check out her blog. I especially liked the story of the encounter with the "statue aligator" next to a canal in southern Florida.
JessaJune gave us a nice writeup. She apparently thinks my semi-hazardous forays into the world of cooking are at least a bit amusing. Ah great, another cat chick... :):):)
Thanks and welcome to the site!
On the advice of my wannabe editor, I've revised "fanfare" somewhat, made it a bit shorter and a little less opaque/florid/thesaurus-like. If you got 1/3 through it and then fell asleep, might want to go give it another shot. Probably fall asleep again anyway, but hey, at least you tried!
Armstrong does it again!
Who says cancer slows you down? This goes to show you that if you have the determination, you can overcome anything.
Hey everybody, it's Jimspot's birthday! Go over and visit his site and wish him all the best!
Now that I'm linking to a bunch of blogspot blogs, I'm noticing that blogspot is down a lot. Like, 10% at least. Just wanted you guys to know that you can get hosted with our bunch, logjamming.com for $5/month ($60 per year) and not have to deal with all the funky downtime. If you're using blogger as your management system, you just point it to your new domain, publish, and viola! it works.
Comment below or use the feedback widget on the left if you have technical questions as to how to get this done. This is what I do at work all the time, and can help you make the transition if yer interested.
Nope, not a paid advert, just a satisfied customer trying to get the blogs he reads more reliability.
Added some more "blogs of note" and re-worked the way that sidebar looks. To try to make it a little different from other "blogs we read" lists, I've tried to add three-word descriptions of each one. If you want a different three word descrip, just comment below.
I'd put logos on for everyone, but not everyone has them. Let me know if you want me to gin one up for you. Will be "free as in beer", when I get around to it.
I got the positon at the cat hospital!!! :) I start August 12th! Cool right! I am going to pass out. I have always wanted to work excusivly with cats. This is a good thing. Now all I need is a body peircing or tattoo to celebrate my new change in life!
We got yer pipin' hot reviews right here! A 5 and a 4.75! ~ cabbage patch dance ~
Thanks to Wendy and Ropejumper for your very kind words (however, I prefer the term "pompous gasbag" to "long winded", thankyouverymuch *grin*). And if you've decided to become regulars, welcome! We do this for our growing legion of fans (all, what, eight of you now? ;) ), because without you guys the whole thing wouldn't even be worth doing.
Now comment some, dang you! :)
I put my 2 weeks in today at work. It only took me a year to do it. But I finally found my niche and swiped at the opportunity.
I am going to work at a "cats only" hospital. Yep, only feline medicine. Like I always said, "cats rule, dogs drool'.
I have always wanted to work with cats only. Dogs have always been too big and messy for me. Cats are so nice and dainty. yet they can turn into this evil being in less than 2 seconds. But I still find them fascinating.
Once again I am branching off into a different area of veterinary medicine. Last time I did this, I was in a research lab with some primates trying to understand the tests and research for HIV, SIV and hepatitis.
I think this will be an exciting adventure for me.
This hospital I will be working at is right by Scott's work so I have a nice walk everyday, plus it's right in between 2 metro stops too. It's a house. 2 levels. You walk in and it's very quaint, quiet and clean. Not a hospital at all. More comfortable. 4 cats walk around the place. 2 of them are British shorthairs. They own the place. Surgery, treatment and the cattery are all located upstairs *more exercise..yay*
I really like that place. I felt comfortable and welcome. You know when you are in an interview and you just feel like you don't belong, but this place was totally different.
Hopefully I will enjoy myself. Scott is surprised that I have not gone into a coma for just walking into a hospital with only cats in it.
I will let you all know how it goes once I fully start there.
Wander-lust seems to be having some troubles today, so I've removed that graphic so our page will load properly. I'll put it back soon.
Just when you thought we couldn't cram any more sh*t onto the margins, we get clever and do it anyway! On your left, you'll notice a new "tell us about it" section. Use it if you find something you think would fit amongst all the other "science fiction, cats, and anger" stuff we put up, want to propose a "guest author" gig (we do it sometimes), or if you just want to give us some feedback that may not be appropriate to a particular story.
On your right, we've got "other cool sites", currently linking to our favorite goths (who have not yet stopped coming up with clever ways to get Ellen to spend my money), and also the "blogs of note" section got spruced up a bit.
You can also "havabutton" of ours to use if you choose to link to our site (hint, hint).
Now you've got two two two ways to tell us how full of sh*t we are! :)
Wow! Check out the review we got! Wow!!! If you feel like it, let us know if that led you to us.
I really don't know what else to say, except thank you very much and it'll help us keep providing (wait for it...) some of the best damned content on the web. Phoxxe rox!!!
Hey, maru, how's this for a banner:
Comment below with what you think. All (well, many) things are possible, like re-sizing, color changes, etc. This one was a quickie, so feel free to take shots at it. :)
P.S. Don't swipe it directly from here. This is the "small" version for our link to you (it's going to get a lot smaller). I've got a 640x(something) version if you want to put it on your site.
Moved the monthly archives to the bottom of the page, mainly 'cos I felt like it, and added a new section on the right, "other cool sites". We're going to try to put up "logo-buttons" like that on our "blogs of note" section, but Maru doesn't seem to have one right now. Hey Maru, mind if I gin up a quick logo for your blog? Free! :)
The "new metal created" post marked our 500th entry, the site is now 6 months old, we're getting 141 visits per day, have had nearly 9,000 visitors since March, and served more than 36,000 pages in the same period. June was a record-breaking month and we're on track to beat that one in July.
We'd like to thank all of you who take time out to visit us every day, and hope to bring you more of the best damned content on the web as we climb toward our first anniversary.
Want to help us break our previous records? Send one person a notice about our site, or e-mail a story to someone. If you run your own weblog, send an email to us and we'll talk about cross-linking.
We'd be nowhere without our fans, so thanks to all of you again for stopping by!
I am so proud of myself. I am tan! I did not fuck up! - mind you that I needed stronger soap to wash my hands, cause they are somewhat tan now too.
Now mind you that I am a nice 'golden' color. Not some polynesian dark ass tan. I am not orange or striped. It came out pretty darned good. :)
I totally recommend the Coppertone Endless Summer.
I AM TAN!!!!!!!!! I look like I have sat out in the sun for weeks! I have suceeded in my mission of a fake tan w/out the harmful effects of the fire ball that we worship called the SUN!
Ok, so it has only been 30 some odd minutes since I applied it. We shall see how it is in the morning.
The price of stamps for snail mail goes up this sunday from 0.34 cents to 0.37 cents. You can read the entire story here.
Yeah, I'mnot happy either. This totally makes me want to go all internet to mail all bills now. It's not worth it anymore. I just bought 100 stamps last week. Now not only do I have to buy 1-2 cent stamps to cover the rest of my postage, you can't return stamps you have already bought.
The U.S postal service has increased the rate of stamps 3 times since 1999. I can remember stamps at 0.25 cents. I'm sure there are more of you out there that remember them cheaper.
The post office WILL go out of buisness for snail mail if this keeps up.
Today's weather in Cincinnati, Ohio
Don't I wish it was only in the 80's here. We are code 'orange' today for air quality. That means, you can still get cancer from breathing, but not as much as a red day. That was sunday and monday.
Yay, my suffering of looking at her daily article has ended! Now I will only have to suffer reruns of it.
Ann Landers, syndicated advice columnist dies at 83 from multiple myeloma, a malignant tumor of the bone marrow. *from the Washington post*- who might I add wrote up an article of her being witty, humerous, honest ect...
Ok people, face the truth. She gave out shitty advice. It was not thunk through before she published it. Half the time her column was filled with appoligies for giving the wrong advice to a person.
Like I said, only have to suffer through rerun columns.
We got a really nice writeup over at Maru's WTF Is It Now?? blog. Maru was one of the first (but not last) blogs I found that wasn't all about the internal workings of the angst-ridden 30-something female. She's a virulent anti-Bushie, which my brother and mother should appreciate, and is darned funny. Ok Maru, I can see the Pentagon from where I live, I'll be sure to let you know when the black helicopters take off to come get you! :)
So I've started a "blogs of note" section, other blogs that we read that you might find interesting. As noted earlier, if any of the rest of you run blogs of your own and like ours, let me know. Let's talk!
I just wanted to thank you all for the support about the kitten. It was Faye that decided to get reincarnated. Ein and Edward are doing well. They are very messy kittens, but doing well so far. *keep your fingers crossed for me*
Also- an update on the friend dating that internet guy. She broke it off. She is horoscope superstitious. She feel it wouldn't work out cause she is a scorpio and he is a taurus. He is of course crushed.
We've added an "about us" section because that seems to be important to all those weblog reviewers out there. If it's not in ABOUT, it's probably discussed somewhere in the site itself. Enjoy!
Update: "about us" is located on the right-side column, just under the belly dancing stuff (updated 'cos someone asked me where it was).
Instead of your normal blizzard of morning quickies, I took some time out to neaten up the category pages, putting them more in line with the "new look". Date-based archive will be next. Enjoy!
~o/ Ding Dong the Vacuum's dead!!/o~
Coconut is rejoycing that the dragon has finally died. She has told me that we should toss it out the window into the pool and kill it some more by drowining it.
This means I need to go get a new dragon this weekend. I really should of tested it before I put carpet smelly good down.,
Please be sure to check out the link on the right to Bonita's Belly Dance Extravaganza soon!!! More information is going to be put up along with an article. Hopefully the minor adjustments will be made this weekend. *depends how good I can bribe scott*
Bonita has told me she will send me an article to put up on the site too!!!
KEEP LOOKING!!!! I WILL POST THE ANNOUNCEMENT ONCE ITS UP AND CHANGED!
Ok, I got Ellen to agree to adding a new topic, "Naughty Bits". This is where we'll try to post the raunchier stuff so that those of you checking from work won't have to worry about stumbling onto something that'll get you in trouble, and those in the audience with more... delicate ...constitutions won't be quite so regularly offended (by the raunchiness, at least).
So, if you see any post with an "XXX" beside it, safe to assume it's probably a) not safe for work b) probably outrageous and offensive and c) usually darned funny.
Ok, so what I've done is categorize everything, all 300+ (!!!) entries, into 13 different categories. Each category has it's own icon, and the icons will be next to the title of the story. This will hopefully give the site a lot more structure and make things easier to find. It also looks cool.
Next up: Banner. But I'm going to write some stuff before then, so the boring banner may be there for a day or two.
Yes, yes, if you're using Internet Explorer you'll see that there are some funky things wrong, mostly margin errors. This is because (surprise surprise) IE doesn't conform to all the standards properly. I'll keep tinkering, but in the meantime you may just want to get a real browser instead. :)
As always, comments/questions/complaints welcome!
Ok, so instead of writing an essay like I was supposed to I decided to go ahead and re-work the site itself. Ta-da! New look, new feel, same dipwad authors! I'm not quite done yet. There'll be a re-worked banner and I'm also going to add some small "topic-y" icons to spruce things up some more.
I have to quit now because Ellen brought home the rugrats and it's hard to type with one kitten crawling on the keyboard, one bitching at your feet to get up to walk on the keyboard, and another climbing up your ankles.
May was a tremendous month for us! Thanks so much to all of you for not only visiting, but coming back again and again. We had more hits in May than we did in the three months before combined. 67 visitors per day! We finally passed Mellie, whom I'm not even sure reads this site any more (update yer damned diary Mellie).
I'd still love to get discussions going, but we need more people. Tell you what. Howsabout you tell one friend about our site, just let them know we exist. Use the "email a friend" link to send a few stories out, and maybe reply to one story, or just send http://www.amcgltd.com to one friend. We're small enough right now that it would make a very real difference.
I know I end up sounding like a NASCAR driver, but we really do all this for you guys. It's the fans that keep us going!
And, again, thanks for visiting!
For Memoria Day, a few from the archives "on war":
Doctor Strangelove
War and Peace
Collateral Damage
Enjoy!
Happy Mother's day to all mothers out there! Sure, it's mostly just a commercial ploy, but god help you if you forget. Don't mess with mom. Head over to hallmark.com or bluemountain.com right now!
Today is also "MARRIAGE" day... the bloody friends' wedding is finally here. Not sure if we'll have too many updates because of that, but we'll see how it goes.
Cheers!
Update: Ok, ok, ok. Today is not Sunday, it's Saturday. Mother's day is Sunday moron, not Saturday. This existential chronological excursion brought to you by: a wedding-crazed wife!
After consulting scriptygodess, who pointed me to DavidGagne.net, which lead me to this entry, I finally managed to get an "email this entry" widget working for the main page. Please test & enjoy!
Ok. Now that we're actually past 200 entries I've given the archives a little bit of structure by filing them into categories. I've also added a "highlights" section that features what we consider the best of the best of what's on the site right now. There's a little bit of funny, a little bit of serious, and a little bit of rant over there.
Ellen doesn't have anything over there right this second because she's not around right now. I'm sure that'll change. I also want to add a "mail this link" thingy like scriptygoddess has, but it's turning out to be kind of a booger to get it working.
And of course there's a re-work of the whole site in the offing, I just have to find the uninterrupted time required to get it going. Maybe I can recruit my artist cousin. Hey Adam, you out there? Wanna help yer freeloadin' cuz make his website pretty? :)
As always, enjoy!
Just upgraded the movable type system to 2.11, the latest version. You folks won't see much (at first), but boy does it look different from here. I'm going to try to give the whole thing a facelift in the next few days, so look out for major changes.
Upgrade was, as always, a booger, but it seems stable enough now. No promises though!
This is just way too cool, and predictably we don't get DIY network on our basic cable system. Anybody else out there have it? Got a VCR? Need a tape?
Saturday was our best day so far, with 145 people visiting the site. The clix stuff is really starting to pay off (HI CLIX FOLKS!), and I managed to get a comment over on slashdot modded up to 5.
I'm not sure why we're so interested in growing this site... it's not like we're making money, or have careers that need restarting (more power to him, btw). We're mostly just interested in entertaining you for a few minutes every day.
Of course, you could talk back more, ya know. We have two or three regulars right now, who I'm grateful for. Let's get the discussions going! :)
Yesterday was my birthday, got busy and forgot to announce it. Wanted to thank all for their best wishes. I got my favorite meal (Chicken Parmesian) at one of my favorite restaraunts (Mangiano's), a flower bouque cake, and some nice cards and calls. Again, thanks to all!
This gives me an idea. We're visited from folks all over the world, sometimes a lot ( we're popular in Japan this month for some reason). Wish me happy birthday you lurkers! Don't have to leave your name, but location would be nice. It'll let us see just who's watching on our 3-month anniversary of the site. Thanks again!
Just added two areas on the right, what I'm reading and what Ellen is working out to. If you're interested in either, click through and buy! Our very first advertisements... *sniff*... how we have grown!
Also re-worked the CLIX thing to make it clearer what is going on there. Clix drives pretty much all our new traffic, so by clicking there a lot you'll boost us in those ranks. The top chick only has, like, 30 votes, and we get that many visitors in a day right now. So click click click!
I think that most clix visitors are other blogger/journal folks. If you like us and have your own blogger, let us know and maybe we can work out a cross-link deal.
If you have any other comments or suggestions, please feel free to make them. However, things like "get Scott to shut up" or "get Ellen to swear less" may not be implemented ;). Enjoy!
Apologies for lack of updates. Last week we were in New York. This week my mom's here. Updates should start happening more frequently once life gets back to "normal"
We are finally home!! YAY!!!!! Made good time too! 90mph is the way to go on the Jersey Trnpk and Parkway.
Overall on the average out of 1-10, I give the trip a 5. It was good. I got to see my family and get some new clothes for dance class and such. BUT, I missed my cats. I did come home to cat wizz on my entertainment center that seeped into one of the cabinet doors under the bottom of it...yes, it got onto the DVD's. I'm not happy about that, but Oh Well, they are only things and I can get more of them.
My friend's wedding that I am in is turning out to be more money than I expected to contribute to stuff. I'm spending about 400 bucks here. NEVER EVER agree to be in a wedding OK!? The shower was ok, it was a typical wedding shower. Of course I forgot my 'special gift'. I was on the Deleware Memorial Hwy when I let out a "FUCK!" Looked at Scott and said, "No, no, keep driving. We lose 3 hours if we turn around." I'm actually GLAD I forgot the gift. Too many old ladies there. Someone may of gotten offended or we may of started to hear old sex stores. YUCK!!! I am going to send her gift up this month. My friend decided she wanted to have a bachelorette party at the end of the month and I cannot go. I can't afford it. So she will get the package then. :)
MMMMM.....beer!!! Nice and cold too! Scott got a case of beer from my mom and step dad for putting their wireless connection together along with the new Star Wars puter game. How nice!
Other than that, nothing else happened. I did get to see my grandfather a bit in NY too. That was good.
Right now, I think I'm going to head out to unpack, do laundry ect... Tomorrow is work. BLEH!!! I should write up a story on how I hate my work.
We're at Ellen's parent's house for the weekend while she spends tons of money on someone else's wedding. Updates may be sporadic, or they may be heavy, it all depends. This is the first time we've been "out of town" with this web site. Hope it can take care of itself... :)
Not much to post today. I work every other Saturday and then take the subsequent Monday off. That Tuesday is always fun because a) something like 30 people have been hired here in the past 3 months and b) I'm the only support person for a 70 user LAN. All the new people run into walls and nearly everyone blows stuff up all the time. On Tuesdays they've had an extra day to do it.
Anyway, just wanted to note that we had more than twice as many people visit us in March as in February. Thanks to you all for taking some time to visit, please be sure to come back, and also please feel free to comment on whatever stories you feel like. We love hearing from people.!
Wanted to let everyone know about this one. Living near downtown DC means that we won't be able to see it, but maybe my brother will finally get to put that monster (10", I think) telescope he has to good use.
A really good guy, Joe Connolly, who until recently was a complete stranger, sent me this in appreciation of my half-baked NASA stories. I just wanted to say that the print finally came in and it looks great. Thank you very, very much!
Now I just have to wheedle Ellen into hanging it somewhere. There's cats everywhere right now.
One cheesy plug in a comment + 2.5 million geeks = 130 people visiting our site in a day. God I love you guys! We'll keep trying to bring you the finest, strangest rants on the web, so keep telling folks about us.
New NASA story should be coming along in a few days.
Now if I could just get you bastards to talk a little more...
(except for mom & mellie. They write) ;)
A word of THANKS! for all you out there that check out this site on a regular basis!
We have been getting hits from all over the world! Keep it comming people! Tell your friends, have their friends tell their friends ect...
Keep comming back to visit. Please also email us for ideas on articles YOU want to see posted on here!
THANKS AGAIN!!!!
How's this for your banner? Sorry it took so long. Dimensions are 467x59. Maybe this'll be worth a mention of our website on yer diary? :)
2-15-2002 Update Changes made per your request. Click the link again.
Woo-hoo! New logo! If I could figure out how to convert hex colors into CMYK, it'd match the background of the banner too. Probably some time on Monday, when I have a better set of tools.
Too late tonight for an essay (and there was much rejoycing), so here's a quick one:
Grow some balls people! I didn't go to all this effort to allow you to comment just so's you could ignore the feature. I'm full of sh*t and I know it. Ellen rants until you can pratically see her foaming. This is the internet, not the bible. What you write here won't be set in stone, and won't be held against you in a court of law. We require a name and an e-mail but if you don't want to give us your real one make one up. WRITE US BACK DAMMIT
Except for Mellie. She writes :)
OK, where the hell are my f**ckin cats? I like the color pink. Scott changed it and got mad at when I asked him where my cats went.
I need some cats on it.
There'll be a lot more changes to come. Ellen hasn't got home yet, so she doesn't know what the thing looks like now. She'll almost certainly want cats on it again. Maybe I can talk her into something a little less pink.
Hrmmm... where to start.
I'm currently totally obsessed with Belly Dancing. I dunno why, but I am(maybe its my J-lo booty?). I'ts just sexy! I'm currently taking a class on it monday nights. Keeps me busy, what can I say. Perhaps one day I'll quit my professional job (licensed veterinary technician/veterinary dental technician-yes!!! I clean cat/dog teeth for a living!) and become a professional belly dancer.*SHIMMY!!!!* I'm actually good at it. You don't need lots of room, and I haven't fallen down yet!...did i metion yet? PLUS.. you don't have to wear shoes! WOOWOO!! The costumes are pretty damn elaborate and cool too. Take a look at some of the Belly Dance links I set up, they are pretty informative if you are interested. ** its the art of the dance..not the way your body looks...I already have a self-esteem issue on that (working on it..working on it)**
FINALLY!!! a new fucking web site!!! Its only been what, 2 years?? BOUT TIME!
~(BlOG-bLoG-BlOg-bLoG!..bloggity blog!!!!)~
I have no clue how to operate this thing, hopefully cat photos will be posted soon.
As for a web cam? You pervs can go whack off somewhere else... persiankitty is FREE!
