I finally got a chance to watch my LOTR:FOTR:SEDE (Lord of the Rings: Fellowship
of the Ring: Special Extended DVD Edition). Freaking awesome. The additional
footage was well worth the wait. They managed to make an EXCELLENT movie even
better. Amazing. Anyhow, I won’t go into detail because I hate spoilers. ;)

Ok, to accompany the Blosxom addition to my homepage, I’ve changed the layout a bit. The news.from.the.front section is now a little more prominent and easier to read. I think.

To the left of the bloggy goodness is the main menu and below that, you have probably already noticed, are some button ads. Please note that that’s free pimpage. I’m not making any money on that space. (Like anyone would pay money to advertise here?)

It’s just that the stuff I am pimping there is so exceptionally cool, it deserves it. Check ‘em out. I’ll probably add a couple more sites, and then auto-rotate the buttons.

Anyhow, feedback on the design is welcome, as always. Negative feedback will be responded to with bitter sarcasm and bad karma.

PS: I hate how different browsers render differently, btw.

Ok, I’ve decided Blosxom r0xx0rz enough to keep it around. It’s simple, elegant, powerful and really easy to use. That’s a combination that’s really hard to beat.

I’m going to try modifying the source a bit so that it displays the time posted as my time zone instead of the webservers. Right now, all my post timestamps are off by a couple of hours. Time to dusty off my Perl In A Nutshell book.

PS: Excuse the 1337-speak. I think I’m infected or something. :P

A piece of spam slipped through my filter. It was advertising “How To End Popup Windows!” Maybe it’s just me, but I thought that topic was kind of ironic.

One evil advertising method is telling me how to (supposedly) defeat another evil advertising method. I wonder if those pop-up ads might tell me how to end SPAM? Is the enemy of my enemy my friend?

No. Screw you both! Chimera blocks popup ads perfectly on my Mac and my built in Mac OS X Mail client has the best living, evolving anti-spam filter I’ve ever seen. (On my Windows box, Opera fufills the same pop-up squashing duties.)

-0= ad-monkeys.

TiVo is the greatest thing ever. Being a grown-up, or at least being old enough to pass for one whilst buying liquor, I don’t watch Saturday morning cartoons much anymore. Really, it’s mostly because I wake up too late on Saturdays to enjoy ‘em. :(

But this week I got a bright idea and TiVo’d a bunch… so I woke up this morning to Looney Tunes, (2) Animaniacs, X-men and Spider-man cartoons all waiting for me! It’s sort of like when I was a kid, except I’m not laying on the carpet in my pajamas with a bowl of cereals. Instead it’s a comfortable chair, coffee and my iBook. Still in pajamas though. ;)

My favorite performer of the minute is Bif Naked. She’s exceptionally cool and has her own record label which has signed LiveonRelease.

I have to thank Buffy the Vampire Slayer and TiVo for me finding out about Bif Naked. Bif and her band were performing in a rerun of Buffy that I was watching and the tune was so infectuous, I paused TiVo so I could read the banner behind the band. :) Thanks TiVo!

So, I downloaded a couple more songs, just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. Turns out that Bif Naked just plain ROCKS. So, next day I went out and bought I, Bifficus. My fav record shop was out of the newer album, Purge. I think I will have to hit Tower or Rasputin this weekend.

More fun than AmIHotOrNot.com and it’s Gothic little sister site AmIGothOrNot.com is my latest discovery: http://www.amiannoyingornot.com.

Unlike the other two sites, you don’t rate regular folk… you decide whether or not particular celebrities or the odd historical figures are annoying. It’s an odd site, and I’m not quite sure why I felt compelled to sit there and rate 4 or 5 dozen celebs, but I did…

Anyhow, check out their rankings. Sal the Stockbroker is the 7th most annoying person on the list. Can’t argue with results like that.

A New York Times article: Teenagers’ Suit Says McDonald’s Made Them Obese Um. OK. Let’s see. Where to begin? How about: WHAT?!

A spokesman (sans big shoes and makeup) said “No one cares more about kids than McDonald’s.” Now, I don’t quite buy that, I mean… it’s a giant megacorporation. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the little guy. HOWEVER, I still gotta side with Ronald and the gang on this one. Who DOESN’T know that eating a steady diet of McDonald’s (or any other fast food) is bad for you? It’s common freaking knowlegde. (I mean, have you SEEN Grimmace?!)

Where are the parent’s in all this? “I always believed McDonald’s was healthy for my children,” one of the father’s is quoted as saying.

<blink, blink>

What is this guy?! Stupid or lying? Or both? Either he’s a greedy bastard and caught a whiff of a potential lawsuit OR he’s just too stupid to be a parent.

He complained that “he never saw anything in the McDonald’s restaurants he visited providing information about the ingredients in the food”. As if he would have read it. As if he was looking for it BEFORE he had litigious thoughts.

No, this guy apparently needs a sign that reads: “ATTENTION: Eating crappy food every day for your entire life MAY have an adverse effect on your health.”

McDonald’s and all other fast food chains make their (lack-of-)nutrition information available. You just have to freaking ASK for it.

Ok, now that was one of the best episodes of Angel I’ve seen in a while. The
fight scene was quite cool, despite Angel and the crew having their asses
handed to them. Conner and Cordelia’s thing at the end bugged me a bit, but
still… an excellent episode.

I used to really hate Wesley, btw. He was really annoying. And he
became a regular about the time Doyle (funny, funny character from the first
season) left. However, he’s recently turned into a rather dark character and
I’m finding him very interesting. I thoroughly dug his pistolero action in
the above-mentioned fight scene.

I still miss Doyle though.

I’ve tried a few weblog and journal solutions, but most of them didn’t quite fit the bill. One of the main options I was looking for was hosting it myself. I also like the idea of categorizing the entries. The other requirement was that it was easy to update.

So, recently I came across Blosxom, written by Rael Dornfest. It looks like it fits the bill.

Installation really was done in under 15 minutes, just as Rael claims on her site. It’s a single Perl cgi with all of the settings contained within the script itself. Very clean. Then, when you want to post news/blog/journal entries, you just create a new text file with the title on the first line and the content following it. Drop the new file into the directory structure following your own organizational bent, and voila… yer done. Pretty nifty.

So, I’m testing it a bit more, but it looks like we have a winner.