Category Archives: News

Things, Goings On, and Stuff I write

ACLU and Spammers Join Forces to Stop Blacklists

The American Civil Liberty Union has joined forces with various spammers around the United States to try to close down various so called ‘blacklisting services.’ Attorney M. Jackson, Esq. was quoted as saying, ”This is outrageous that bigotry against people of color and people who send emails is tolerated in this country. Especially since this technology has been developed after the civil rights movement, much of it within the last five to ten years! We will stop these propagators of racism and bring freedom to email senders as well.” An un-named representative of the spammers, going by the pseudonym 5p@//.//.R has publicly released a statement on aclyou-and-spammers-untie.valium4all.ebay.phishingscam.com stating:

“Why do system admins have to be haterz? We just want to make money like everyone else. We are joining forces with the ACLU to help stop racism and bl@cklisting as a whole.”

Links to other sites from that page included ‘Asian women’, ‘Black Teens’ and various other sexually oriented content involving various races and live stock. Apparently this is to show support for the people of color in the nation that the ACLU is promoting as well as the spammer’s bank accounts.

Representatives of the blacklisting sites were unable to reply due to DOS attacks coming from IP addresses in the China and zombie AOL user machines.

The Circus Is Over, Now What

So Michael, besides being a robot, is apparently not being convicted and prosecuted for various attempts to turn a minor into a robot, too. Who cared? Who Cares? Who will care? The Media had their circus, the fans were photographed, Michael’s robot was photographed, and the Jurors are going to have to go go rehab for Jurors. Speaking of which: who pays the jurors after these extremely long periods of jury duty? The answer is that they get paid almost nothing for their time yet the attorneys get paid millions of dollars. That’s just plain stupid seeing as how those on the Jury might just have mortgage payments, car payments and if they’re like most of America, they’ve got a lot of debt, too. After this ‘juring’ they’ve surely got more debt than when they started.

Sheep Urine Futures Skyrocket

OK, so check this out. That is brilliant. I took an environmenalism class in college (wherein I was supposed to become outwardly upset by the fact that as humans we’re bad stewards of what we’ve been given – oh, and become an environmentalist. It kinda worked, but not completely) and at that point in time they were using water for this. As the title predicts we’re going to see sheep milked and ‘pee-ed’ and the byproducts of the latter will be valuable in a new way.

Reproducing Legalese

It is now an important American tradition to require labels to restate the obvious. Obvous things like the ingredients of food products and that gluttony is probably a bad choice. With that in mind, I give you the label of a health food product made in Boulder, Colorado:
[Click to see the Nutballz wrapper, by reducing the size of the image to fit on this site I lost clarity].

For those of you who won’t click on that link out of fear or laziness or the fact that the name sounds naughty I’ll pass this along:
There are two warnings on this wrapper:

  1. There are 9grams of xylitol in Nutballz(TM), a sweetener derived from plant cellulose. (It is generally recommended that you do not exceed 50 grams of xylitol a day unless you want to poop!)
  2. Alert! This product contains nuts (duh)!

I had to buy just one package to prove that this was real. They don’t taste great, but they don’t taste bad either. They’re a rather typical ‘health’ food flavor. Bland.

The Piano Movers are Coming

The Piano movers bring with them an old piano from the year 1372 and a half, predating all other pianos by several hundred years. Actually, it’s not that old. It is however the piano I composed quite a few original tunes on – none of which I can play any longer because its been so long since I had a piano in my possession. The piano was given to my parents by Christopher Columbus upon arriving in California. They traded it to him for some corn, wheat and fish. He said, “Though canst have mine pinano [SIC] if thine food doth sustaineth me.” Which, for a Italian was pretty good English. My parents, being 20th century metropolitan folks said to each other, “This guy must have been hanging out with all of the other hippies – I can’t understand most of what he is saying.”

And so the piano became a family heirloom.

I am looking forward to having this piano in my home until my parents get another dwelling that they can store such things in. It will give me a chance to polish up my chops so that I can sound like ‘Fats’ Waller, ‘Fats’ Domino and many other Adkins diet inspired piano players. I also hope to play a little Tchaikovski, as Victor Borge said, very little.

You see, I’m a lazy bum when it comes to playing sheet music. My sister-in-law Becca plays very well and is quite accomplished. I measure my accomplishments differently simply because if I look that far up in the piano world I get a kink in my neck and I have to go immediately to Boardwalk, pay $200.00 passing ‘Go’ and then head straight to the Chiropractor. So, I play, I have fun, and I mash up my favorite Beatles Piano hits with the mirriad Beasty Boy piano hits until no one recognizes it… then I call it Jazz.

I’ll try to record some of this ‘so called’ music some time.

Update: It’s hear, and in as sound a coundition as this piano can be. The movers were quick, courteous, and tried not to make fun of this shabby old ‘pinano’.

Post Script: Abby calls it a ‘pinano’.

You Might Be a Web Developer If…

From an IM exchange I had with my buddy Tony:

TNuzzi: Hey what was the design web site. You have the book.
TNuzzi: Sorry to be vague
Randy: Pardon?
TNuzzi: Not stopdesign
Randy: The design web site?
Randy: Eric Meyers?
Randy: meyerweb.com
TNuzzi: Not
TNuzzi: no
Randy: Jeffrey Zeldman?
TNuzzi: His name was Jason somthing
Randy: Zeldman.com
Randy: Designing with Web Standards
TNuzzi: 38 design
TNuzzi: design
Randy: 37signals
TNuzzi: yeah
TNuzzi: LOL that is it

By the way, these are the books:


I recommend all of them heartily.

Ice Cream Blog

I am about this far away

One Inch

from starting an Ice Cream Blog. Yesterday, on Good Eats, my all time favorite cooking show of all time [yes, that was on purpose, grammar people], they dedicated the show to ice cream. Holy Cow [to borrow a Hindu phrase]! I didn’t know that much about Ice Cream, but I want to learn more. I’m determined to become an ice cream snob so that I may help the world understand that Generic Ice Cream is from the Devil and that good ice cream probably has only a few quality ingredients.

This weekend we shall attempt to make Coffee flavored ice cream with Craig Kaes‘ famous home roasted beans. Taking what I learned from Good Eats I’m going to do the following:

  1. Look Up a coffee ice cream recipe or seven
  2. Assuming it uses a base of Vanilla I’m going to try the Good Eats recipe for Vanilla
  3. I’m going to make the base on Saturday [not the ice cream, but the dairy mixture] and let it sit in my fridge over night
  4. Sunday afternoon we will hand crank the ice cream for as long as humanly possible, or longer, and then freeze the ice cream further in the Kaes’ freezer (which means I should really make sure they have room in said freezer) with plastic wrap on the surface of the ice cream to prevent the air on the surface ice crystals from going away tarnishing the otherwise delectible ‘scream’

Oh, and then I’m going to blog about how we all were silent out of awe for the flavor. Or I’ll write how lamentable this experiment was and see if gooder stuff can be made next time.

Wheat

As many readers of this blog know, I’ve dealt with allergies to wheat for some time and that it has limited my diet tomake me look like an Adkin’s fiend [I was “hold the bun” before Adkins was cool – Randy Parton]. This is now behind me… the wheat allergies are gone (for now, I must keep up my exercises to keep my body strong). This morning we did a muscle test and I’m now wheat tollerant. Corn will go next and I’m hoping that by my trip to Texas at the end of the month I’ll be able to eat like a man who’s not had a burrito in 7 years 🙂

I’ll have to have self control so that I don’t blow up like a balloon 🙂

Belly Buttons

I’ve heard various twists on the statement, “Like Belly Buttons, everyone’s got an opinion.” Some of them have been cleaner than others, but I digress. In short I want to throw something out in regards to the latest news that Apple will be switching to Intel Chips in about a years time. I haven’t read all of the articles on the subject, but there have been way too many, and most of them full of speculation. Here’s my thought in regards to Microsoft and Apple’s progress going forward.

First, Apple’s Intel chip orders are supposed to be x486 chips. That’s right, 486. Microsoft, I’d like to ask you why a Pentium 4 is required to keep your OS running smoothly without hicups while I will use a 486 on an Apple? This is rather frustrating because it shows either a superiority in design or that Apple’s picked the wrong chip. I’m not too worried though because the jump is not one that appears to have any performance issues. Steve Jobs would not be switching to 486 type chips if it was a problem.

Which leads me to my second point: Intel has already got Pentium 1, 2, 3 and 4 technology. Imagine what would happen if Apple made the (not so huge) leap to pentium chips? Imagine running OS X ‘Liger’ [the next version of OS X, poor Napoleon] on a Pentium 4. It would probably be an embarassment to Windows. Then imagine running OS X with a Pentium 4 with several gigabytes of RAM. This would cause Windows to cry and lament the power of 486s dissipated by its gluttonous OS.

Man-ual Labor

It would be tough to look at this picture and not think…
Randy Roofing
Where does he work out? Look at those Pecs!
or
My goodness, what is he doing with a shovel on the roof?
or
Is he not wearing any eye protection? He’s going to lose an eye! (I was safe mom, really)
or
Just because you wear your hat backwards doesn’t mean that you’re young and cool looking. The cool look these days involves a 35-45 degree angle of the bill off of straight forward with the bill not bent.

Or, if you’re me, you’d say: Self, put some sun screen on or your going to burn like a neglected burrito!