I’ve always liked Keith Olbermann, even when he was just a ESPN Sportscenter guy (he still is on ESPN Radio on the Dan Patrick Show now and again), and wish basic cable here had MSNBC so I could watch his show. I’ve never liked Bill O’Reilly, as he’s a ranting idiot. So I had to say that I laughed quite heartily when I saw this video of Keith ripping into Bill
Month: February 2006
Back Online
If you’re wondering where I’ve been, I’ve been nursing a bit of a cold, chopping a bunch of wood so we could actually keep warm during this nasty cold weather (I think we might have gotten up to 17 degrees today), and been recopying data back to my laptop that had to be repaired. The laptop’s all back and happy and nice, the wood’s been chopped (and I got some ordered, too, as we’re basically out, and our furnace sucks), but my cold’s still sticking around. I’ll be getting some Nyquil down, and then I’m off to bed.
Meanwhile, I have been adding some new features and cleaning up some stuff over at BendBlogs, so be sure to check some of those out (and I have found some more sites that I plan on adding over there at some point).
Tom Cruise Cruises Fark?
Tom Cruise is off his frickin’ rocker. We all know that, and obviously the people at Fark know that, just by reading the comments on this post which plays on Tom’s Scientology beliefs. Apparently he was so angry at the comment, he allegedly wrote Fark’s owners a ranting and raving e-mail. Read the contents here.
The $1000 Sundae
You won’t find this one at Dairy Queen:
Made with “5 scoops of the richest Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream infused with Madagascar vanilla and covered in 23K edible gold leaf, the sundae is drizzled with the world’s most expensive chocolate, Amedei Porceleana, and covered with chunks of rare Chuao chocolate, which is from cocoa beans harvested by the Caribbean Sea on Venezuela’s coast. The masterpiece is suffused with exotic candied fruits from Paris, gold dragets, truffles and Marzipan Cherries. It is topped with a tiny glass bowl of Grand Passion Caviar, an exclusive dessert caviar, made of salt-free American Golden caviar, known for its sparkling golden color. It’s sweetened and infused with fresh passion fruit, orange and Armagnac. The sundae is served in a baccarat Harcourt crystal goblet with an 18K gold spoon to partake in the indulgenceserved with a petite mother of pearl spoon and topped with a gilded sugar flower by Ron Ben-Israel.”
Expensive, and probably tastes like crap. I’ll take my peanut-butter cup Blizzard, thank you. Link from BB.
Real World Million Dollar Homepage
While there are a lot of copycat sites of the million dollar homepage, the Fill My Room project is the most original I’ve seen.
Weapons Against Hard-To-Open Packaging
One of my biggest pet-peeves is when I get computer parts or supplies (or even toys for my kids) that they put them in those impossible-to-open, hard plastic clam-shells that you can’t cut through with anything less than a chain saw. Finally, there’s some good weapons that can be used to get the things open. Thanks Barn for the link.
Lego Suicides
Nothing like combining a morbid sense of humor with Legos to start your day. Thanks Pat for the link.
An All New BendBlogs.com
Nearly a year ago when I started BendBlogs, I had grandiose dreams of a great site with timely information, great speed, searchable, RSS feeds, etc…. Unfortunately, that never became much of a reality because of the limitations of working with the software I chose, and really not able to find time to replace it or hack it to make it work how I wanted it to. The site has grown to over 130 blogs from around Central Oregon, and with its growth the limits of the previous software were starting to show.
Then yesterday after thinking about the site, I decided to search around again for solutions, and found a great one. So it gave me a chance to clean up totally dead feeds and rebuild the thing. Obviously it still needs a bit of work (as it’s mostly the stock template with some hacks, and I need to implement a few other features), but here’s the all new Bend Blogs. Among the new features:
- AJAX-Powered so things load quickly and intuitively.
- Full text search (soon — fixing something with that, but look for the form on the top of the page soon).
- RSS feed for not only the entire directory but for every page on the site (click on the “RSS” link on the bottom of the page for the URL).
- Cached archive of local blog posts.
- Ability to tag entries (with RSS feeds for those tags). For example, I just tagged Shannon’s latest post, and it’s instantaneous (and you guys can submit tags, too).
- Nice, clean URLs that Google will love.
- Clean code that is standards compliant.
- Updates cleanly every hour (with a much better caching system).
- Totally MySQL powered, giving me the ability to manipulate the data if need be.
- And a large community of developers and resources.
Obviously, I still need to do some work on the site, and many features on there are totally messed up in Internet Explorer 6.x (I haven’t tried the 7.x beta, but I know it works fine on a real browser). On my to-do list:
- Get the search bar on there.
- Get navigation figured out and added (as I just temporarily commented out the system that came with it, as it gave the general public a bit more power than I wanted).
Shrink down things just a tad, especially in the feeds source list and the main header <H1> text, so it’s not so big.- Adjust the color scheme so it’s a bit easier on the eyes.
Get Google adsense ads on there (gotta pay for hosting somehow, folks).- Get some photography as the background of the header area (similar to ORblogs.com’s city page for Bend). I’ll be e-mailing a few of you for submissions, and credit will be given, of course.
- Edit the template and stylesheets to pieces to fit future needs.
- Fix the time so it reads in non-24-hour time (I prefer AM/PM, thank you).
- Re-implement some trimming code so that long titles such as this don’t screw up the page.
Figure out why some URLs are using mod_rewrite, and some aren’t (see the links on this page).- Sort feeds list by latest updated.
- Add a “Submit” and a “Removal” request forms, as well as FAQ, About, Contact, etc…. (which was on my previous to-do list for the site).
- More to come, I’m sure….but it’s late, and I’m braindead…
So go check it out, and comment here if you notice anything or have a feature/bug that should be added to my to-do list (or notice any blogs that I’m missing).
Ordering Pizza in 2008, Redux
Over a year ago, I posted a joke about how wiring everybody up to a national information registry will make pizza ordering a pain in the butt. The joke’s been around in various forms for years, and it looks like the ACLU has taken the joke, made it visual, and rolled with it a bit. Funny, but sad, all at the same time.
Prius As Powerplant
This would be fricking sweet to actually have a Toyota Prius as a backup generator and battery backup for your home.