I posted a very ranty anti-vax rant over on the new blog.

I’m blogging at SquareSpace now, and until I point my domain over there, you might want to visit r3v.squarespace.com.

@Suterman tweets: @r3v Thanks very much brother! I really enjoy your blog page. though, you need to write more.

Doh. He’s right though. I’ve been meaning to write a lot more this year. 2008 was the scarcest year for blog entries in a while. I blame this on a few things: Twitter and Life. When things are busy, it’s much easier to microblog. Of course, that’s no excuse for someone who’d supposedly rather be writing than doing most other things.

So, I planned to write more in 2009. I even had plans for a second blog, of sorts. Talk about over ambitious. I haven’t tossed either of those plans, but they definitely fell by the wayside for a bit. Same problems as last year, namely that life has been super busy.

Oh yeah, and we turned the “busy” dial up to 11 when we started house hunting in December. In January, several houses and offers later, we found our new home. In February, we settled on a price. In March, we closed escrow.

Ever since, we’ve been rushing to get it ready to live in. Foundation work, drywall work, electrician work, new floors, paint… the whole thing. Some pics of the process are up on Flickr. I’ll upload more as the work progresses.

We move next week.

I hope.

Boo, our beloved (and often annoying) cat, died in the wee hours of Xmas morning. Annette found him and I awoke to her reaction. I immediately knew what it was without asking. I was also immediately somewhat relieved that Liam had spent the night at his Nana’s house.

A couple years ago, Boo had a heart attack. We spent a lot of money and energy to save his life then. It was a sum of money that I won’t go into here, but to say it was a lot and it was worth it. He had to be given heart meds twice a day, which became a routine neither he, nor we, seemed to mind because we were able to restore him to a good quality of life.

Recently, he lost his appetite, and eventually we couldn’t coax him to eat at all. We took him into the vet, where they suspected it was his liver. Tests later confirmed that to be the problem. It wasn’t the first time he’d had a problem with his liver. We took him home and began a new regime of pills and antibiotics. We had to start force-feeding him. (In case you’ve never force-fed a cat, just let me tell you right now that it’s not as fun as it sounds. Even if you are good at it, some of the food isn’t going down the gullet. Some of it is coming your way, and nobody wants to smell like cat food all day.) I even learned how to administer fluids. IV bag, with a needle going under the skin just between the front shoulder blades. Fun stuff.

Boo looked like he was bouncing back to a small degree. His appetite had not returned, and so neither had his strength, but, he seemed much more alert. Our vet assured us that he was in no pain, and that was very important to me.

So, I take some comfort in the thought that he died peacefully, probably just going to sleep and never waking up.

I will point out, however, that only Boo would choose to kick the proverbial bucket on Christmas Day when everything is closed. We’ll have to deal with that tomorrow. Anyways…

You will be missed, Boo.

You were a damned fine cat.

This video has been around a while, but I finally watched it after DrHorrible twittered it. It really is pretty fuckin’ cool:

(PS: If you go to YouTube, you can select the High Quality version.)

Just a quick test of the Wordpress for iPhone app. Pretty slick so far. Seems like it’s really easy to add photos to the post straight from the phone, but I’m not sure how to control where they will display. (The preview, which is quite nice, indicates the pics will be at the end of the post.)

So far, my only other complaint is that there are no tools to affect font style and hand typing tags is a bitch. (It also makes linking a real PITA.)

I like the idea of a Local Drafts vs Drafts on the server. Seems pretty easy to post a draft, and then touch it up on a desktop before publishing, if necessary. Let’s see how well the phone app handles editing a draft on the server, if it’s been modified after the phone app posted it. The answer is Not Bad. The pictures convert from being detached objects to urls to the now posted images… And if you add a pic to a draft, the same thing happens. Moving the location of the image is nigh-impossible on the phone (ok, now I really want copy n’ paste), but is pretty easy to do online.  It makes me glad that the WP admin interface got an overhaul.

Now, I need to check out the WP mobileadmin plugin, and the WP iPhone Theme plugin.

One of my favorite people of all time, George Carlin, has died. He’s had his share of health problems, so while it’s not the biggest surprise ever… I feel a bit like I’ve been hit by a truck. Seriously. George Carlin was one of my heroes. No exaggeration.

I’m glad we got a chance to see him a couple years ago in Vegas. I had never seen him in person before, so it was really a lifelong dream come to fruition. I’m not generally affected by celebrity deaths, in fact… almost never. George, though… fuck.

So, to remember him, I leave you with the Seven Words You Can’t Say On TV:

Bill Maher’s got a documentary coming out in October called Religulous. The trailer is out and it looks pretty good. Maher’s typical quick wit and no-holds-barred commentary look like it will A) make for an interesting movie and B) possibly get him killed.

I will be there on opening day.

On the trailer page, there is also a link to DisbeliefNet, a site which I had never heard of before. Actually, the site looks like it’s put together to support the movie (a quick whois on the domain reveals it to be owned by Lion’s Gate), but has some pretty interesting and humorous content itself.

I especially appreciated the article on The Evolution of The Burkini. Hot stuff.

I followed an Amazon link from one of my favorite webcomics and stumbled across this Justice League movie, pictured on the left. (If you must know, the link I clicked on was for a He-Man animated movie. No, I’m not some sort of closet He-man fan. It’s just that I can’t believe he’s still around. What? No, it’s true. Whatever. As if you’re so perfect and refined.)

The Justice League cartoons tend to be pretty decent kid’s shows and I haven’t seen this one. So, I’m casually observing the scene on the cover. All the heroes who can fly are taking off up into the air. Behind them are spaceships blasting off. It looks like something serious is going down. Like a huge space war or incoming alien armada. Very dramatic.

Wait… what the hell is Green Arrow doing? He’s aiming his bow into the sky. That’s just great. Shooting an arrow straight up is against the SECOND RULE on the Augusta High School’s P.E. Department’s website for archery safety. Didn’t Green Arrow go to High School? Or camp? Or hear of gravity?

Plus they’re launching SPACE SHIPS at whatever the threat is. YOU HAVE A BOW AND ARROW. We don’t need to call the Mythbusters to find out what happens when you fire an arrow at something in the upper atmosphere.

A little out of your league, so to speak, dontcha think, Greenie?

Recently, I’ve been getting a lot of “adds” on Digg. I’m pretty active on there, I guess, so a couple, I understand. Whenever another digg user friends (only the web could turn that into a verb) me, I receive an email. It looks like:

Hey there! Stonehenge360 is your latest fan. He became your fan because he likes what you are up to on Digg and wants to see what you think is interesting. You can either leave him as a fan or add him to your own list of friends. Check out his profile here:

http://digg.com/users/Stonehenge360

Cheers,

The Digg Team

Control what emails you receive from Digg here:
http://digg.com/settings/email

So, then I go look at Stonehenge360’s Recent Activity on Digg, and I see:

Stonehenge360 has added Steven Schlottman, Erin, J, pkulak, Vote #1 Moojj, digitalgopher, dadof2, Mr. Baby Man, JoeyC, Spencer, Mihr, Gazerock, xoogie, Curtisnot, Vonkhan, phillip torrone, Chris Gray, Daniel Šimko, PAWEL FLAGA, Edward Alexander, johnlandes, Ralph, Steven Safak, Lord_Mizaru, Dane Kenney, zovi, hugesaks, bluedragoon, Ankush Dhiman, Phil, glass junky, Frank, you, Dennis, lese, bunny607, Leo Laporte, Aviar, Wayne, Rich Tannehill, Prakash, dabneyd, Jesse Jones, Dan Huard, Ralphy, Nathan, bambinette, Josh, Joe, selphishnerd, Celsius032, tyrstephen, Amar, Furious.Styles, purrp, diskazz, will4042, TrainingName, UCBearcats, Tyson H. , Carson, james estrada, Chelsea, johnsmith118, powersaber89, Ian Mansfield (a guy!), Chris Taran, Zaibatsu, Ken, UnlivedPhalanx, Noah, Rick Schmidt, Mike Z, tljff9, Alex H., Sarah Lane, Joe Biden, ricktoid, mike, Wil Wheaton, Roberto Villarreal, typ44q, P9, Diggnation, sahaskatta, boober86, hammydude, dpk87, justinvt, quokkapox, Flabbadabba, Troy E, DanThePainter, Christopher, iching, Miguel Lopez, verge, Bwack and CLIFF W. to his network.

I refer back to the mail that said he “became [my] fan because he likes what [I am] up to on Digg”.

Really? I think you, Digg, should stop guessing at his motives for adding me. I don’t think he knows me at all and I don’t think it’s very nice of you to play with my emotions like that.

PS: Stonehenge360 is just the most recent example of this. I’ve gotten a bunch of mass adds recently. I don’t get the point of having a huge number of ‘friends’ on Digg that you don’t actually know. It waters down the effectiveness of the Digg features. In other words, who cares what my friends are digging, if I don’t even know their tastes?