According to a reliable source Digital TVs are now the only variety that are allowed to be imported into the US. That’s right: analog, the beauty that brought us the 1984 Olympics and I Love Lucy – is going away. We’ve been discussing remodeling our downstairs area (with the $20.00 budget we have) and one of the blockers has been that we’ll want to get something flat screened, and HD. But it looks like Congress is going to help us out this time and force us, and the rest of the United States to switch to HD/Digital for 2009. Get ready: 0b1010011010 [that’s a 666 in binary as a joke – I kill me]
Category Archives: News
Close Shave Part II
Having just loved using the shaving oil, shaving cream, badger brush and after-shaver lotion from ‘The Art of Shaving’ that I mentioned around Valentines day I went into the store again tonight and bought a safety razor. I couldn’t help it. I have been enjoying shaving 7 days a week (on average) for the last month and just had to go to the next level. I’m a junky. I even bought shaving soap (and a cup) last weekend to see how that differed from the shaving cream.
Gilmore Girls
Jessica told me this evening that Gilmore Girls is being cancelled. If you don’t know who or what Gilmore Girls is… you’re lucky. Its one of the weirdest television shows since the X-Files. But instead of being freaky they go for quirky comedy but end up coming across as a combination of having the flu and Groundhog’s Day (the movie) combined. Each episode is exactly the same. Sure, the ‘plot’ changes, or at least re-orders the events a little, but each episode is about a mom and a daughter who are both ADD/ADHD and who have the emotional stability of a woman in labor. I take that back. Women in labor are more stable than these two gals. To top it of there are men [MEN!] on the show who are also emotionally unstable. The upshot is that the humor on the show (I’m not making this up, they actually consider it humor) is entirely non-sequiturs. Entirely. Completely. Fully. Monotonously. Here I will attempt to give you a script (pulled out of my scary imagination) that represents this show:
Scene: Inside of the house the mother is on the phone with the daughter.
Mom: “Rory, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a kabillion times I’m fine.”
Daughter: “Mom, I’ve lived with you since I was in your womb, I know when you’re not fine.” [to be said with a straight face because its not a non-sequitur]
Mom: “Rory, it was my womb, and you still owe me rent.”
Daughter: “I didn’t have any money at the time, but I think I can sell pictures of myself like that Barba gal from American Idol…”
[End Scene before I throw up in my mouth]
Its not good writing, and the acting is dry, but not funny dry like the Brit-coms.
Good-bye Gilmore Girls. I hope all of the ‘actors’ find other ‘roles’ that ‘suit’ them but are not type-cast as mannequins.
Interweb Outage
I have not been online so much since last Friday at noon because the fine people at Qwest decided that helping customers with their connection needs to be delegated to people in foreign countries with no actual technical skills other than being able to read scripts off of computer screens. I have pictures of the kids to post, a short story to tell… but since I’m at our friends, the Doyle’s house, I’m going to be moving along to the rest of my actual work duties.
All-in-One
I got a new printer last night. The reason that I might need a printer is that data trapped inside of a computer is often useless unless you can gather a large amount of people around your computer, get them their own computers with the same data, or transfer it to them over the Matrix. Since I can’t afford a connection to the Matrix I took the cheap way out.
My old printer wasn’t old, it was barely over one year old when it stopped working. I don’t believe it was an equal rights thing, it just quit working because the fine employees at HP computers worked their backsides off and still didn’t produce the printer that would have worked its backside off. I have to now find a place that will allow me to recycle the printer so that folks can disassemble it and turn it into lawn clippings or some such nonsense.
The new printer has fax capabilities built in. I feel so 1988.
WordPress 2.1 Update
I have updated this installation to the very latest WordPress. Its faster for sure. You probably will not, and shouldn’t, see any difference to the site other than it behaves faster. Let me know if you find anything. If you are running WordPress on your own site, you can get the update here: wordpress.org.
My number one reason to upgrade so far? Re-scanning comments for spam. If you come back from a trip and find yourself having 200 comments to regulate, you can re-scan them with Akismet in case others have contributed to the akismet comment spam database.
Mandolin
I don’t play the mandolin. However, I’m going to learn (like the unicycle I have yet to finish learning how to ride – but its hard to practice in the snow we’ve been having). I got an inexpensive mandolin online. But its bridge was more warped than Pauly Shore. That is to say that its very, very much like a human being, only not quite right. Wait, mandolin bridges are not like humans, but they are like shaped pieces of wood. Shaped pieces of wood that should probably not be twisted like licorice. Twisted pieces of rosewood that shouldn’t look like this:
I ordered a new bridge from some online music store (which hasn’t arrived yet). Total money spent? $37.00. Yeah for cheap learning instruments. Once I get familiar with it, I’ll have to save up and get a top dollar mandolin. One like one of these.
Taxes
So today (a day late) we sent in our quarterly taxes to the IRS. Fortunately for them we’re not one of the huge number of federal employees who are giving them headaches by not filing their taxes… from last year or before. You can read a little about it here. I love a good tax story as much as the next person, which is to say not at all. Taxes are possibly more certain than death because some people have been frozen and aren’t technically dead. Of course the other side of it is that I’d rather pay taxes than die right now. To be honest I find that as my finances turn more and more into digital transactions taking place off in the ether of the interwebs and telephone lines on computers run by mega-corporations I don’t think about money like I used to when I was dealing with cold hard cash, so paying taxes has turned into part of being inside of the matrix. I hate it, but its what makes me feel alive. And I like this steak – even if it isn’t real.
Pray for My Friend
I have a friend who will remain nameless due to my not having asked for permission to publish any information, but he was one of the ushers in my wedding in 1998. He is 28. Last November or December he was diagnosed with cancer in his man-parts, they cut that out and then discovered that he had it in his lymph nodes. Friday they discovered it had spread to his chest and into his lungs. Pray for this anonymous guy. He’s married and has three children. God knows who he is and what he needs, but in all of this I also know that there are real emotions, real hearts and real lives being effected. Thanks.
ET Would Be So Jealous!
So Apple announced the iPhone yesterday. Its not much of a phone, in fact more than anything its a mini-computer that happens to do telephony. Its the most amazing device – I predict that soon it will work as a remote control for my Apple TV device. And by ‘my’ I mean the one that I lustfully wish that I would own. Some day maybe. But I think that the new iPhone is truly one of the most innovative devices because it does integrate so much more than any other phone, it has an interface that blows me away, and frankly, for the power that it offers, is worth the $499.00 price tag (or $599.00 if you get more storage capacity).
If Apple lets developers write applications (and I think they will) then we’re going to see people doing amazing things on that phone. My inner-geek is on overdrive. Jessica is tired of hearing me talk about it. I want to be able to surf the net, chat on the phone, text message and listen to music all on the same device – and have the interface look good, too. RIM (who makes the blackberry) is really probably dreading June when the device will be available on the market.