January 31, 2002
Bong Hits for Jesus
15 foot paper banner and some duct tape to make letters - About $1
Testing your first amendment rights during a "school activity" - Free
Getting suspended and becoming national news - Priceless!
Permalink | Comments (7)January 29, 2002
Good Clean Political Fun
The guys over at Spinsanity seem to having a good time debunking some of the more ridiculous spin the comes from our so called political leaders. Although the authors all have impeccable liberal credentials, they are not giving the left a free pass on the issues as they take aim at the left frequently.
Permalink | Comments (0)January 26, 2002
Race Results are in
Today was the big race, the Cub Scut Pinewood Derby. Breck finished 4th out of 5 in our Den, and I would guess 15 out of 20 overall in his age group. That doesn't sound that good, however we were less than a tenth of a second out of first overall, and about .02 seconds from winning our pack. These races are amazingly competitive. The timing system measures out the thousands of a second, and we need that accuracy as the cars are that closely matched. I think its time for the Cub Scouts to think about a longer track, to give the cars a chance to spread out a bit.
Of course, the whole point of a event is to force parents to spend some time with their kids, and power tools.
Web design is not dead
Zeldman has been asking around...and he has stumbled on to the dirty little secret that not every web shop on the planet went down the tubes with Marchfirst. In fact, he found a few in NYC that are as busy as ever.
Now if I could just find one in DC that needs a Director of Sales.....
Permalink | Comments (0)January 25, 2002
More anti-gun bias in the press
You've heard about that shooting at a law school here in Virginia right? Recently expelled student goes postal, blah, blah, blah, and is "subdued" by students.
This won't surprise some of you, but the "subduers" were both armed with handguns that they had retrieved from their cars. Yet, 99% of news stories fail to mention that rather important point.
Permalink | Comments (1)January 24, 2002
An impressive sales effort
A couple of weeks ago a sales guy from Zoots came buy the house and left a coupon. They are a dry cleaner that provides home delivery service for about the same price as the corner dry cleaner. Since I regularly leave clothes at the dry cleaner for weeks because I just don't remember to pick them up...this is a service that appeals to me. Sunday night, I hit their web site with the intention of signing up. I didn't finish the registration process, mostly because I didn't want to leave the garage open for them and I don't have any other sheltered place they could leave clothes.
I was very surprised last night when the sales guy called due to my being on the web site and abandoning the shopping cart. In all the thousands of dollars I have spent on the web, I have never had a follow up from a merchant whose shopping cart I abandoned. As a web geek and sales guy, I'm impressed.
Before I ramble anymore...he covered my fears about wet dry-cleaning and I will be leaving my dry-cleaning at the front door from now on.
Permalink | Comments (2)January 22, 2002
How Archive.org works
This is a great technical explination of how they built the Way Back Machine, which at present is indexing about 100 TB of data. They did it with commodity PC's and open soure source software....
Permalink | Comments (2)January 21, 2002
Alan Keyes on TV
Alan Keyes has a new TV show starting Monday night on MSNBC. I don't agree with everything he has to say, but I love listening to this guy talk. This interview is entertaining too.
Permalink | Comments (1)January 20, 2002
Need help from a web geek...
Can somebody look at VHEA and tell me why two people looking at in with Windows 95/98 and Netscape 4.7 can't read it at all as the text is layered all over itself, and somebody with a high end Mac and IE 5 is seeing only one column?
Netscape 4.7's CSS implementation is very buggy, so that might explain that one. The XHTML validates except for a couple of minor points within an article, and it doesn't like my CSS link, although I can't figure out why. The CSS validates also except for one typo'ed color code. Nothing that would affect layout though.
Any ideas?
Permalink | Comments (2)January 18, 2002
The Truth Shall Set You Free
What ever happened to the truth actually mattering? Ann Coulter weighs in as only she can on the current controversy in NY. In case you've been under a rock or in a casino, NY is erecting a statue of the famous scene where the three WHITE firemen raised the flag. However, the statue will be politically correct and will only have one white guy involved.
If three black guys had raised the flag, what would the reaction be if somebody wanted to make one guy white?
I guess in some sense this is a sign that life is getting back to normal. The liberals are back to doing what they do best - pandering.
I'm hopeful somebody in a position to make a difference will take up the cause here. This is one we can use to make a point at just how ridiculous the liberal establishment has become.
Permalink | Comments (0)January 17, 2002
Back from Vegas
I'm back, or maybe survived is a better word, from the 2002 sales kickoff meeting in Vegas. Here are the highlights, or lowlights depending upon your point of view.
- Stayed at the Bellagio. Very nice...
- Played craps with Senator John McCain and George Carlin. Carlin throws big bucks around, McCain doesn't. Your tax dollars at work...
- Left blackjack table at The Luxor 3 hours after I sat down, and $10 dollars richer!
- Drank $10 martinis and didn't feel guilty about it.
- Hung out at Studio 54 - best described as a human freak show. If you click over to the review, yes, I was there on Tuesday night and saw the snake nymph.
- Payed $2.69 for chapstick in hotel. That did piss me off.
- B-52's were the entertainment for the company dinner. I also got an autographed CD...
- Mike Eruzione (scored winning goal against USSR in 80 Olympics)was the keynote motivational speaker. He was pretty good.
Permalink | Comments (3)
January 12, 2002
Banish Word Docs from Email
Richard Stallman says it better than I ever could
Worse, and my employer does almost daily...sending 2 MB Power Point slides when the actual content is just words. ASCII text people, ASCII text!
Permalink | Comments (3)January 10, 2002
CD Review: Scott McClatchy - Redemption
Scott McClatchy is a Philadelphia based singer / songwriter with a real cool early Springsteen / Mellencamp / CCR with just a touch of country twang vibe hapening in the tunes. The CD includes a very cool cover of The Band's The Weight with Willie Nile, Dion, and Scott Kempner helping out on vocals.
Buy it at Village Records beacause it was their newsletter that turned me on to this artist.
Permalink | Comments (0)Go Red Sox!
I just found the coolest site, all Boston Red Sox, all the time!
Permalink | Comments (0)Armed Pilots
The FAA is taking public comments on the subject of allowing commercial pilots to carry firearms in the cockpit.
Open a second browser before you go past the page to make a comment. You need several ID numbers off the docket. They cetainly didn't make it user friendly.
In case you wondering - I'm in favor of it.
From Ipse Dixit
Permalink | Comments (0)January 08, 2002
Why?
Just when you think the Web can't get any weirder, you find Dereks collection of Wal-Mart receipts
Permalink | Comments (1)Broken Families and School Performance
The government knew in 1966 that school performance was almost 100% correlated with the quality of the child's family life. (Yes, there are exceptions, don't email me with your life story if you are one of them) Can somebody then explain why we keep throwing billions of dollars at the school system in a completely doomed attempt to fix a public education system which is nothing more than a reflection of the public it serves?
Permalink | Comments (1)January 05, 2002
Clueless in Seattle
A couple of complete losers are already standing in line for Stars Wars Episode II. It opens in May. At least they won't be elgible for Unemployment benefits since they aren't actively looking for work. (Reblogged from Michele)
Permalink | Comments (2)Pinewood Derby stuff
The Cub Scouts Pinewood Derby is only 3 weeks away - so I started getting my act together today. Breck and I went to a seminar this morning on how to build the car. My attempt at this as a Cub Scout 20 plus years ago was a total disaster. I remember my car being boxy, ugly, and very slow. Kind of a woodChrysler K car. After the seminar I went to Ryan's favorite store, Home Depot, and spent about $40.00 on tools and stuff that we will need. Breck has decided that he wants to carve the wood block into a pickup truck. I wonder how hard it would be to carve a tiny gun rack into the rear windshield?
My goal for this project - don't embarress Breck with a really slow car, don't lose any fingers in the construction process, and if I do lose a finger, at least don't bleed on the car!
January 02, 2002
Cheatsheet Creator
For the HTML challenged, or just lazy... Web Designer Jason Shellen has developed Cheatsheet Creator. You input a few of your favorite links, press enter, and presto, you have a personal portal page with links to many of the usual destinations, a news feed, your local weather, etc. And it all lives on your hard drive so you don't have to suffer through Yahoo's newest attempt to generate revenue from a free service.
Permalink | Comments (0)January 01, 2002
First hand account of the shoe bomb incident
This is why the web is really cool.
Permalink | Comments (1)From the mouths of Children
Breck: Mommy, can I watch Sportscenter?
Michelle: Yes, but turn it off if any bad stuff comes on.
Breck: Mommy, the only bad stuff I ever see on Sportscenter is Bobby Knight, and he isn't on much anymore.
Unfortunately, a year at Purdue as an out of state student will be running about $43,000 by the time Breck heads to college. In state will be about $23,000 a year. Looks like I'm moving to back to Indiana some time before 2010!
College costs estimates via http://www.hesaa.org/students/aid_tools/college_cost/age_output.asp
I used Private School costs as a proxy for out of state costs at Purdue.