Blog: Ramblings and Rants

Slashdot | AOL Blocks Links from LiveJournal

Last week, AOL began blocking all HTTP requests with ‘www.livejournal.com’ Referer headers. This is a common practice by image hosting sites to prevent off-site linking of their images and ‘bandwidth theft’. However, in AOL’s case, they’re blocking everything, not just images, effectively breaking all links to any AOL member’s site—but only from LiveJournal. To be clear: nobody on LiveJournal can even make a link to any AOL member site without getting a ‘404 Not Found’ error.

Just a quickie post to catch you up.

Yesterday: Strawberry Blonde and I took the kids to the Oregon State Fair in Salem. We had a blast!

We got old-fashioned pictures taken of the girls and of Strawberry Blonde and me in period clothes. I’ll scan and post in a few days.

Today: I chatted with Chris, who is definitely sounding more alive and like himself.

My new issues of How, I.D., and Computer Shopper arrived.

This Weekend: Strawberry Blonde, her girls, and I going to SB’s parents’ home. It promises to be a lot of fun.

Additional: I’ve been adding over the last week quite a few pieces to my online portfolio. Nothing is up right now, but it’s coming soon. It takes some work to get things prepped for my online portfolio.

More later!

Is it too late to nominate Bruce Chizen for California Governor?

To paraphrase Jack Kennedy, “A PDF on every website, and PostScript in every printer.”

7th Heaven: Questions for Day 38

01. Can you take apart a motor, put it back together, and have no extra parts?
Nope. Uh-uh. No way, José. I’m not adept at auto mechanics, though I did provide the muscle to help a friend replace a Monte Carlo’s transmission many years ago. I hefted it into place and leveraged it when it wouldn’t fit while he tried to attach it. In the end it didn’t work. My friend got so pissed he lifted the transmission Hulk-like over his head and flung it fifteen feet, breaking a chunk of asphalt from the street.

02. Are you for or against the death penalty?
This is a difficult one. I’m conflicted on this point. I don’t believe in taking life, but, as an intelligent person I recognize the need for a system of punishment and a strong deterent in human society. I went through a period in my life wherein I advocated eye-for-an-eye justice (i.e. a rapist is physically castrated, as opposed to the occassionally employed chemical castration), but that was a rather naive notion.

On one hand I feel vehemently that no human has the right to end another’s life unless in defense of self or others, but on the other I have a strong sense of justice. Whether I condone or condemn the death penalty, I have issues with the system by which it is carried out. Keeping an inmate on death row for ten years is excessive, yet appeals must be allotted for lest more mistakes be made.

I don’t have a short—or even very clear—answer to this question. That’s the point of our memes, isn’t it? They make us think.

03. If there was a god and you could ask him/her one question what would it be?
“Why in your name would you allow human beings to create blue Pringles?!”

04. Do you think its possible that there is life on other planets?
I think it is not only possible but a statistical certainty. First, let’s establish the parameter of the question: There is life (e.g. protozoa) and intelligent life (e.g. homo sapien). We have already proven that life exists beyond this planet with that meteor a few years go containing embedded microbes. That piece of space debris was once a planet or planetoid, thus life existed on other planets. With billions upon billions of stars, many of which host several planets, life must still exist. Given the age of those stars and planets, I adamantly believe that intelligent life exists elsewhere in our galaxy. I do not know where their society and technology are in relation to ours, but I believe they have an intelligence capacity within the range of homo sapien or homo superior or beyond. Yes, I believe there is life on other planets.

05. Are you a completely different person when you are in different situations (school, work, with friends, with family)?
No. I learned quite some time ago some fundamental lessons about the similarities of all people and stopped wearing masks. Of course we all show different aspects of our personalities given different situations. For example: I don’t supervise my friends and family like I do people at work, but with all groups—but, of course, not in all situations—my natural leadership ability comes into play.

06. If you could put an extra eye on your body anywhere where would you put it?
The top of my foot. It would negate the need for patent leather shoes. [wink]

07.Are you in touch with the earth, nature, and simplicity?
More than most, yes, however not as much as I once was. This is a personal goal and daily quest.

A Boy and His Bird News reports updates on the fourth The Crow movie, starring David Boreanaz (”Angel”, “Buffy, The Vampire Slayer”), Tara Reed (My Boss’s Daughter), and David Ortiz (”Miss Match”), is the fourth dark fantasy film springing from James O’Barr’s graphic novel series, “The Crow.”

Did you know there were already three films? Most people don’t realize the third was produced and released.

Beginning with the original, The Crow, starring Brandon Lee, who perished while shooting the final scenes of the film, the over-done The Crow: City of Angels failed to approach the appeal and maturity of the first film. The third film, The Crow: Salvation, went straight to cable after test screenings revealed it to be, um, crap. While I wouldn’t say it was crap per se, it did suck. Fred Ward (The Adventures of Remo Williams) is in it, if that helps you picture the quality of the film.

In addition to the three produced films there have been six excellent novelizations by different authors, a horrible television series entitled “The Crow: Stairway To Heaven” and starring B-movie-sinker Mark DeCoscas. There also remains scrapped fifth The Crow film about a gansta rapper and an animated series that is experiencing more setbacks than the original X-Men cartoon.

All continues to go well with the post production of “The Crow: Wicked Prayer”. Confidence is still high in regard to a theatrical release, but it is too early to know for sure which direction Dimension will go. Fans have asked about promotion shots, news items, etc. Now that the film has passed into the post production phase, all of those types of things are under the control of the Miramax/Dimension promotion department. Do not expect to see anything until closer to the time that the film is due out.

Ugh. I did not expect pruning the Memes List to take hours. I doubt I’ll get through all these—or even half—now, but I’m going to try.

Here’s what I have planned to do today:

• Call Chris @ 7
• Laundry
• Dishwasher & kitchen
• Clean bathrooms
• Go TV shopping with Strawberry Blonde
• Meet SB, friend, and friend’s kids for lunch
• Prune Memes List
• Add removal notice system to Memes List db
• Update Saturday Slant Players list
• Update portfolio w/ new pieces
• Change site section “private” to “goodies” or “downloads” or “stuff”?
• Cancel Verizon service
• change categories on blog (”fiction”, “opinion”, “review”, etc.) or (”MIND: Opinion”, “MIND: Review”, “TALENT: Memes”, “HEART: Love Life”, “HEART: Affairs of”)
• Add visual display of categories to blog posts
• Get RSS feed info page built
• Design a site around new fall colors
• Setup Creative Commons License

Holy cow! I’ve had to remove 21 memes from the Memes List today.

Prompted by an e-mail from Tiffany, I have just manually verified each and every single meme on the list. It has taken me hours. Each of the inactive, 404, and outdated memes I found required follow up work. Because I really hate to see memes go down, and because, as the creator and maintainer of the Memes List, I feel a responsibility to the sites I’ve listed, I didn’t just see that the meme was gone or outdated and dump them from the database. I hunted down an e-mail address for nearly all of them, which often entailed running a whois on the meme’s domain name, and sent notices requesting a confirmation of the meme’s demise.

These sites are all currently delisted—21 of them!—but still in the database. Reactivating them is a simple matter of clicking one button. I really hope at least the majority of them will come back to life.

If you know the owner of one of the below memes, please have them contact me at
to relist their site.

Here are the memes delisted as of today:

LuLu’s Lines

NON-FICTION: Topic: This morning as I woke up I thought…

This morning as I woke up I thought: “I’m the luckiest man in the world.”

I did. I am. Of course, had I attempted to verbalize that phrase, it would have spilled from my sleep-weighted lips more along the lines of: “Uhm luhgizt man inna wult.”

There was a perfectly mixed cup of steaming coffee waiting for me, laid upon my nightstand by the pale, slender fingers of the love of my life. Kneeling beside the bed she brushed a wayward lock of hair from my face, her smile filling the room and my vision with radiant warmth. I mumbled something intended to be “good morning,” though my yet sleeping tongue uttered nothing resembling it. Still, my strawberry blonde goddess recognized the sentiment and returned the phrase. Her beauty filled my one opened eye like the Midwest blue sky fills the horizon.

Softly slumbering on the hide-a-bed in the living room were two beautiful little girls well on their way to someday forsaking my name in favor of another: Dad.

I smiled my lopsided sleepy-face grin up at their mother, my girlfriend, my future wife. “Uh wuh wu,” I managed.

I only have a moment—Strawberry Blonde and the girls are here, and the pizza dude just left. Still, I wanted to tell you that my new, unlimited minutes, unlimited long distance, ready to replace both my current mobile and landline service, cellular phone arrived today. It—the Motorola 60i clamshell—is pretty slick. Great reception in my house and around town. I think I’ve finally been able to find the mobile service to become my one phone service for all needs.

I’m so excited!

I’m very interested in, and more than a little amused by, Hollywood’s sudden disillussionment. Read the article (I’ve quoted the entire thing in Continued) and you’ll see the whining of Hollywood studio execs. Waah! Our big-budget marketing campaigns aren’t duping people into spending money on bad films. I kid you not, that is what the article says.

Film companies have been producing schlock for years and packaging it up in beautiful, wallet-opening marketing campaigns. They’ve sold the public on the campaign, not the movie, which often has very little to do with the messages communicated in the television spots, print ads, fast food chain and soda tie-ins, and toy, video game, and cartoon shows. When we go to the cinema, we plunk down 8 bucks for the commercials we’ve already seen, not for the film itself (despite our intentions).

Now Hollywood is whining and crying foul because technology is allowing us to tell our friends what the film is like before those friends pony up their 8 bucks.

I find it astonishing that Hollywood is crying foul. So, we’re not allowed to disagree with their slick marketing campaigns?

They’ll soon start defending decisions to dump scripts and stop productions because they don’t feel “the public will give it a fair chance.” Mark my words. Hollywood won’t consider that the movies have no artistic merit and the studios should improve their quality. Nope.

They refuse to recognize the obviousness of what they’ve stated through spokesperson Rick Sands, COO of Miramax: “You could…overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience.”

In other words, you could make money on a lousy film because you’d have generated sufficient revenue before enough people heard that the movie stunk. Is that right, Rick?

Click “continued” for the whole story.

While Strawberry Blonde’s kids are with Mr. Ex, Strawberry Blonde and I started work cleaning out the girls’ rooms. Oh. My. God. There’s a lot of stuff. There’s dress-up stuff, art stuff, books, stuffed animals, clothes, shoes, dolls, school stuff, and stuff I couldn’t identify.

To get the girls in on the action and to make things easier, we devised a plan for Strawberry Blonde’s household. Here’s how it goes: Seven large bins (about 32 gallons ala RubberMaid), each labeled with it’s intended contents—dolls & stuffed animals, games and puzzles, shoes, general toys, and so on. Each of the bins would contain only one type of item. Then there are two other bins, Broken Toys and Books. These two would be temporary, cleaned out once a week.

Everyone then moves throughout the house grabbing everything of the girls’ and carrying it all back to where the bins are arrayed. Armfulls of stuff are then sorted into each bin. Everything of the girls’ in the house, from every room, gets sorted into the large bins.

Enter the small bins. The small bins are three three-drawered rubber drawer racks. You’ve seen ‘em; transparent rubber bins that slide drawer-like in and out of a simple plastic rack. Two racks are white, the other purple. Each of the two children gets her own white rack—one drawer each for toys, jewelry, etc., however the girl wishes to arrange them. The purple rack is for shared items such as art supplies. These three racks, nine drawers total, will reside in the girls’ room (they share, with the second, unused bedroom being converted for other uses). Most likely the racks will be in their closet.

Once everything in the house is sorted into the nine larger bins, organization takes place.

After an experience earlier this week with T-Mobile (formerly VoiceStream) Customer Service that still has be too incensed to rationally discuss it, I’m shopping for new wireless service. I refuse to give T-Mobile any more of my business. The choices, however, are dizzying.

On this page I detail a viable and proven plan to reduce spam. I help educate people as to how spammers obtain e-mail addresses, provide tips to protect your e-mail address and your friends’, and, most importantly, present a plan I’ve employed for years that I sincerely believe could lead to a dramatic global reduction in spam if only a few people take a few simple steps.

Please, read the plan. Tell others. Pass it around (preferrably as a link as I’d like to keep a live dialog going on this topic). Emply the plan and save us all some inbox space.

I’m so pissed and disgusted by this I need to share it. First, I’ll identify the cast: Strawberry Blonde, you’ve heard me talk about her; Mojo JoJo, the psuedonym I’ll use herein for Strawberry Blonde’s elder daughter, eight years old; Sassy, the five year old younger daughter’s nom de blog, and; Mr. Ex(I’m being kind, I’ll probably change this later), the girls’ father.

Last weekend, while the girls were with Mr. Ex, Strawberry Blonde and I went shopping for a new bicycle for Mojo JoJo. We put it together and, with some well-placed new grips, seat cover, basket, and spoke decorations, spiffed up Mojo’s old bicycle for Sassy. They both loved their bikes. Sassy’s bike still had training wheels.

Computer Cigarette Lighter

The ultimate in decadent geek accessories. I want one!

FrozenCPU.com :: Product :: PC 12v Cigarette Lighter Adapter Kit

Click “continued” for full-sized image

This’s making me nervous. Watching the news this evening I learned that today…
·  Massachusetts got over 5 inches of rain this morning—the film showed people walking knee-deep in water down Main St;
·  Florida’s Palm Beach was crushed under a freak tornado that sprang up so quickly the local weather service had no warning;
·  London hit 95º, the hottest ever;
·  Frankfurt, Germany slipped past 100º;
·  Record highs were set today for Prince William Sound and Valdez, the hottest point in all of Alaska;