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.

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:

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.

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?

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?

However, my mind is cluttered with much less important background tasks. For example, the other day I was chatting with a friend and he was having a particularly dreadful day. “Shoot me,” he requested. I responded that I was all done with killing for the day and he needed to ask again tomorrow, or some such. So, he said, “I didn’t say you had to kill me.” My retort was so unfunny that I don’t even recall what it was. However, unbeknownst to me, a background process started running.

This morning, I’m in the shower and an epiphany strikes me. The proper response would have been, “What? And waste a bullet?” Now, I don’t claim that it’s comedic genius, but it is better than whatever the other line was.

Why the hell was my brain still working on that? It’s not like I can ping the guy two days later and deliver the re-written punch line. Hell, it’s not even that funny: just a minor improvement.

I need some sort of Activity Monitor or task manager for my brain. Or maybe just a command line…

ps -ax  | grep -i "stupid joke" | awk '{print "kill "$1""}' | zsh

(I realize the flaws with the above line, it’s a joke. Lighten up.)

GF: “I need to put my head in a vice.”
ME: “I don’t have a vice big enough.”
GF: “Are you saying I have a fat head?”
ME: “No… I’m saying I don’t have a fat vice.”

If you don’t hear from me after a while, this might be why.

At least she laughed…

I got into an odd discussion about calendars and leap years, so I did a little wiki research on the topic and stumbled across this tidbit: “In the Islamic calendar, leap months are not used. They are forbidden by the Qur’an, which says…”

WTF? Were they running out of shit to ban?!

Mecca, sometime in the 7th century. A wise looking prophet, MUHAMMED, sits with a SCRIBE. MUHAMMAD dictates as the SCRIBE scribes.

SCRIBE

“Ok, cartoons of the prophet. Got it. What’s next?”

MUHAMMAD

“Leap years!”

SCRIBE

“What?”

MUHAMMAD

“I hate that shit. I can never remember how many days in February!”

SCRIBE

“I’m not adding that. It’s stupid.”

MUHAMMAD

“You have to! I’m fucking Muhammad and an angel told me Leap Years are evil! Don’t make me add something about stoning mouthy scribes…”

SCRIBE

“FINE. Whatever. Next?”

The above didn’t actually happen, as the Qur’ān did not exist in book form at the time of Muhammad’s death in 632. It is, however, funnier this way. It would be funnier still as a cartoon.

Have a good ‘un.

I’ve been shopping for a new web host for ages. I found A2Hosting a while back, and liked what the had to offer quite a bit. I was then prompted to pull the trigger when Merlin Mann offered a 20% off FOR LIFE code over on his blog, 43Folders. (I won’t post the code here, you gotta go to Merlin’s blog to get it.) So, here I am. If you are in need of a good hosting service, take a look at A2Hosting’s info. If you want feedback from me, personally, though… come back in a few months. :)

PS: Something is messed up with the install/setup. Many links are 404, atm. Working on it, but it may be later this weekend.

PPS: Awesome. Moshu over at the Wordpress support forums set me on the right track to fix the problem. Bonus fix: My RSS feeds are back.

For the record, there are several causes for the lack of posts here. Primarily, I blame, in no small part, the micro-blogging aspects of Pownce and Twitter. It’s pretty easy to fire off small updates to those services and neglect writing longer posts for the blog. Sometimes, small posts are better anyways. Not every bit of subject matter really deserves more than a sentence or two.

Secondly, I blame a recurring issue: Work. My job has been sucking a lot of time and energy lately. It’s been sucking other things too, but I’ll leave that for another day. The cat is nearly out of the cage, so it should ease up, but then again we re-orged again, so it’s a crap shoot.

Thirdly, I’ve been trying to focus on actual writing projects again. Or, rather, yet again. However, I’ve had an epiphany about a project I’ve been kicking around for years. I’m excited about refining this concept and bring it to life. However, between work and life, it will take a long while. Hopefully, I can keep up my level of enthusiasm, though, and continue to make progress. Focus is hard, sometimes.

Recently, Annette and I took a weeklong vacation. We rented a house on the Russian River and it was awesome. During the trip, we attended a wine club events at Trefethen B.V. vineyards, tasted in the Russian River region, got a massage, and, perhaps most importantly, sat around and relaxed. We bought a tanker’s worth of wine. It was a fantastic vacation.

Last weekend, I went to a family reunion. Those are always really weird for me, because I just don’t fit in. I mean, I love my family. My mom, grandma and aunt are some truly special ladies and I like spending time with them, but the list of topics we have to discuss is pretty short. The unending supply of cousins are nice enough as well, but I know them even less, and despite being closer in age to most of them, I may have even less in common. I avoided interesting topics (like war, politics and religion) and instead we discussed other family members and their ailments. Very, uplifting. >.<

Anyway, I guess I should wrap this up. I’ll try not to be such a stranger.

Oh, and PS: I think I’m having my midlife crisis early. Unless of course I die at 70, because then it’s right on time.

Archbishop Asshole Chimoio is the head of the Catholic church in Mozambique. There are about 20 million people in Mozambique. The CIA World Fact Book has this to say about Mozambique’s population:

Population: 20,905,585
note: estimates for this country explicitly take into account the effects of excess mortality due to AIDS; this can result in lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality and death rates, lower population and growth rates, and changes in the distribution of population by age and sex than would otherwise be expected; the 1997 Mozambican census reported a population of 16,099,246 (July 2007 est.)

The United States Center for Disease Control, has this to say:

Mozambique is one of 15 focus countries of the Emergency Plan which collectively represent at least 50 percent of HIV infections worldwide. Under the Emergency Plan, Mozambique received nearly $37.4 million in FY2004 to implement a comprehensive HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and care program in line with Mozambique’s national strategies. In FY2005, the U.S. is providing more than $57.2 million to support Mozambique’s fight against HIV/AIDS.

A 2003 CIA estimate puts the HIV/AIDs infection percentage at 12.2%. Other estimates have it as high as 16.2% (That one came from the BBC article, I will link to shortly.)

The BBC article also says that “17.5 per cent of Mozambicans are Catholic.” The CIA Factbook says 23.8% were Catholic according to a census in 1997.(Now, please note, there’s no data to correlate those two sets of numbers (percentage of HIV positive vs percentage of Catholic), and I’m not trying to imply any linkage without such data.)

This is just to illustrate that AIDs is one of the worst problems facing Mozambique, Africa and the world. It’s also to point out that Archbishop Chimoio has some amount of sway over at least 1/6th to 1/5th or more of the population.

So, what does he do? He not only continues to wave the idiotic Catholic banner against condoms, but claims that there are two countries in Europe that are making condoms that actually contain the HIV virus on purpose. He is either mentally imbalanced or willfully deceitful. Those are really the only two options I can come up with.

He also claims that the anti-retroviral drugs being used to combat HIV are also infected with the virus. So, not only is he actively enabling the spread of the disease, he’s trying to inhibit the tools that will help the already infected. So, maybe there’s another option? He’s fucking evil?

It’s reprehensible and irresponsible to attempt to stop the use of condoms in the first place. Furthermore, it’s despicable to spread such FUD about condoms and the anti-retrovirals. Lastly, it’s fucking insane to think that two European countries are involved in a conspiracy to wipe out the African peoples.

The Pope should fire his ass. Of course, we’ve seen that this new Pope is no fucking genius when it comes to PR.

So, in closing, I’d just like to say: Fuck you Archbishop Chimoio, and fuck the Catholic Church. Fuck you right in your medieval-pointy-hat-wearing heads.

Well, today a guy calling to offer to refinance her home (like many of the calls) heard the exasperation in my voice with my immediate response of “there’s no Jeanine here” which I punctuated with an annoyed sigh. We chatted a bit and he took pity on me.

He then gave me her e-mail and mailing addresses.

That was pretty cool of him, but I don’t know exactly how I’m to proceed from here. It’s not like she made a typo one day, she’s recently used this phone number according to my inside man at Lending Tree. She’s purposefully giving out my number as her own on forms for stuff.

So, do I just send a polite email, saying “hi, could you not do that?” Or do I send one that sounds more forceful, like a cease and desist letter? Or do I just sign her up for as many gay-midget-animal-clown-porn mailing lists as I can find? Flaming poop on the doorstep?

I must ponder.

I file this snippet of my life under “Best Lines I Never Used“.

Many, many, many moons ago (back when I was 18), I was taking a risk and speeding to work through a part of the South Bay Area sprawl known as Campbell. Campbell was well known amongst my friends for having more than it’s fair share of really dickish cops. We all tried our best to not get pulled over in that town because there was no talking your way out of the ticket. However, I was late.

So, predictably, I got nabbed only a few miles from work. The cop pulls me over and takes his time coming up to my window. When he gets there, I can see that he’s already pissed off about something. He gives me a little lecture, and then asks me if I knew what the speed limit was.

I actually didn’t, but it just so happens he pulled me over right in front of a speed limit sign. I look up at it and say, “uh… 35?”

“Do you know how fast you were going?”

“Uh…”

“53 miles per hour.”

Now, this is what I should have said: “But, officer, I’m dyslexic!”

It only would have made things worse, but what was he gonna do? Write me a ticket for being a smart ass on top of the speeding?

I still kick myself and use it as a reminder to always go with the instinct, because “one time, I said to this cop…” makes for a better story than “one time, I thought of something to say to this cop…”

I was happy to have BossHog, the official B.A.D. Girls photographer and founder of DerbyDude.com, confirm that it was a really hard venue to shoot. I can’t wait to see his shot though. He’ll have made it look easy.

The bout itself was awesome. SF ShEvil Dead vs the Oakland Outlaws. They all skated hard and kicked ass. This might be my new favorite spectator sport. (The fact that it’s played by a bunch of cool, strong, attractive women really doesn’t hurt. Derby girls are badass.) The halftime show by the SVRG was fun too. I look forward to the next bouts. (Too bad we will be out of town for the next one on October 5th, though.)

It’s written with his daughter Lucy (who is an author and journalist) and Christophe Galfard. According to Galfard, they wanted “provide a modern vision of cosmology from the Big Bang to the present day.”

I have three main comments in regards to this news:

1) How fucking awesome is that? A Hawking book for kids? I have pre-ordered mine. I figure if Hawking wrote it for an 11 year old, I should be able to understand it. That’s about how old I feel when I read anything by him.

2) 304 pages? Long for a kid’s book? I don’t recall how long books aimed at nine year olds are.

3) The Amazon page for the book has links to several discussions going on. They have titles like “evolution is a religion (757)”, “Science & Religion (124)”, “Human pathologies: an Incompetent Designer (63)”, and “Fair Treatment of Evolution Begins With Its Definition (2667)”. Those numbers are the number of replies in each topic. These are all in the science section of their forums. Who knew Amazon even HAD forums?!

I skimmed a few of the threads and as soon as I saw the standard poor debate tactics and logical fallacies, I whistled a casual tune and cautiously backed out the door.

r3v for president.
Let’s stir some shit up, America.

PS: Thanks to my wonderful Annette for a fabulous night full of stuff they don’t let you do once you become President. ;) (We celebrated a night early to avoid the paparazzi.)

So, for some reason, I decided to watch Big Brother 8. The season is about halfway through or so, and so the competition is heating up. Two of the girls in the house are fairly religious Christians. They speak of faith and invoke God often. They do this most often in their “confessionals”, which is just them and the camera (er, and America).

In last night’s episode, one of them, let’s call her Whamber, was “on the block.” That means, she’s up for being voted out. She then lost a competition that would grant her immunity.

In her confessional, she’s asking God why he didn’t save her.

No, seriously.

Whether you’re an atheist, Christian, Muslim or devoted Cthulhu cultist, if you are reading this blog then it’s likely you are the sort of person who can see the absurdity in this.

Obviously the reason is that God doesn’t like you and would like you to stop calling. I’m sorry I had to be the one to tell you this, Whamber, but somebody had to.