dead men tell no tales...

Can you eat the whole pie in 15 bites?

I could:

posted by Steve  # 5:22 PM

Over here.

Boy, does that header image need some work. Don't think I like it at all. But that's the starting point, anyway.

UPDATE 3:47pm - Changed the header image. Like this one.

UPDATE 9/30 @ 1:52pm - Changed the location of the test. Decided I would work on Blogger's space just to make sure it will actually work with some of the funky stuff they add after the fact, and to test blogtags. New location is testnotales.blogspot.com.

posted by Steve  # 10:12 AM

I'm seriously considering a complete site redesign. We'll see if that actually happens or not. I'm bugged by the fact that the picture up top is not one of my own, and I think there may not be enough structure to the page as a whole. I may change it all.

Then again, maybe not.

Oh, and as for actual blogging about actual stuff, I hope to begin anew tomorrow. I have a cold. Pity me.

posted by Steve  # 5:10 PM

I just got this page to validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. I'm excited because I'm a dork and I'm teaching myself the mid-step between HTML and XML. Yay.

posted by Steve  # 4:58 PM

About 4am, got woken up by a quake. First quake in the new condo, on the third floor, at the end of the building. Definately felt it. Turns out it was a 3.2 centered 10 miles away. Some times I forget about the Hayward fault.

Hey Russ... do you miss earthquakes? I think I would, actually. No reports of damage, according to the news article, but whoa, I could feel it.

posted by Steve  # 10:39 AM

Been super busy at work. God damn work, getting in the way of all-too-important blogging. Fuck.

FYI, while I was nonblogging, Get Your War On updated with some comics regarding Katrina:

Funny, in my opinion.

More later.

UPDATE 5:14pm - The original comic strip was too wide, and I didn't want to shrink it for fear of killing its line-graphics goodness. Hence, compromise.

posted by Steve  # 9:50 AM

Andy just told me they got the house rental they were looking for!

Let me be the first to welcome Andy & Candice back to Walnut Creek. The W.C. was a lesser place without the two of you! Rock on!

posted by Steve  # 10:20 AM

I've decided to get a new phone.

So, like any good consumer, and especially after almost dealing with shitstains Express Cameras, I did a bunch of research, both on models of phones and on places to buy.

My requirements were thus:

• Unlocked. I don't want a T-Mobile phone, so an unlocked GSM1900 was the only way to go to ensure it will work with my SIM card, and I won't need to lengthen my contract with T-Mobile to get a new one.
• Good speaker and good reception. My current phone is very hard to hear... whether it's reception or just the earpiece speaker, I have to crush it against my ear in order to hear anyone.
• MP3 ringtone capability. It's about time I walked away from fucking polyphonics. Seriously.
• Camera. Because everyone has one these days... even my mother!
• Bluetooth. I'm not sure why. I just know that someday I'll want it.

In addition to all this, the Motorola E398 (pictured above, which I have decided to purchase) comes with a USB cable, a 64MB "TransFlash" card (basically a mini-SD card... 256MB versions are avaialble), stereo speakers (yeah, two speakers, left and right, for ringtons), MP3 player software, and a bigass screen. Fucking sick.

I bought it. $205.98 after shipping, from TigerDirect.com, which got mixed reviews on Reseller Ratings, a 7-out-of-10 lifetime score... not great, but certainly not as bad as those Express Cameras fucknuts, and the price was $50 less than anywhere else.

So yeah, I'm excited. It probably won't get here for a week or two, but that's because I paid for the cheapest shipping possible. I will keep all up-to-date, of course...

posted by Steve  # 4:12 PM

Gizoogle is funny... here is my last post, "tranzilated" by Gizoogle...

posted by Steve  # 10:10 AM

Been tired as heck since getting back from Disneyland. New Flickr set up from the trip. Also got dragged back in with the crazies in the forums at Rooster Teeth Productions. Plus, work's been very busy... I've actually been able to fill my day with work... amazing, I know.

Hope to make it out to the bar tonight, if for no other reason than to finally give Saul the new mix for the jukebox, dammit.

More later, maybe.

posted by Steve  # 1:56 PM

We're on the road. The Grapevine, to be exact. Instead of a Nissan Armada, the six of us are tooling down to Anaheim in a Nissan Quest... A mini-van. Roomy, sure... but frightfully similar to family trips of my childhood.

My dad recently got himself Sirius satellite radio, so we are listening to the Raiders losing to the Pats right now. Vinatieri has already gotten me five points for the one fantasy football team I can still play (a long story which ends with "and thats why I hate Yahoo")...

We'll probably be in Disneyland in 90 minutes or so... at least, I can hope. More later, fo sho

posted by Steve  # 7:24 PM

Less than four and half hours now, as I write this.

Until Sunday evening, you will all have to get your Bush-bashing, Disney-loving, joke-cracking, City Softball Championship Losing (yeah I forgot to mention that) goodness from elsewhere. All, y'know, ten of you or whatever.

In the meantime, here are some sites you should know about, and use. If you don't, you're missing out on the whole "Web2.0" thing that is become a cliche' already. Btw... blogs are part of "Web2.0," so those with them, thank you for embracing the future.

See you folks Sunday!

(oh, of course, there may be some minor moblogging between now and then...)

Shit on the web to explore and love:

• Flickr - There are copycats out there, but Flickr is the largest, most incredible photo sharing community on the web. If you take photos, if you like photos, etc, you owe it to yourself to get a Flickr account and poke around. Even if Yahoo (the fucking shmucks) did buy them recently.
• Bloglines - Ahhh, blogs. We all love them. You're reading one right now. If, like me, you keep up with over two dozen (or, for some people, many, many more), then an RSS Reader (or "Feed Aggregator") is a major time-saver. And Bloglines is unique in the world of RSS Readers in that it is online and available from any computer, at any time. Any website with an RSS feed (here's mine) can be "subscribed with Bloglines." They even have a neat Java bookmarklet (another staple of Web2.0) to easily ferret out RSS feeds and subscribe them.
• del.icio.us - del.icio.us is a "social bookmarking" site... you see something you like, you use a Java bookmarklet to save it to del.icio.us and tag and describe it, someone else sees it because you have it, they like it, tag and bookmark it, etc, etc, etc... very neat. You can search for specific tags by using a "del.icio.us/tag/*" format... for instance, here is the URL for searching del.icio.us for links tagged "katrina": del.icio.us/tag/katrina.
• Technorati - Like Google for blogs... Technorati indexes the "Live Web." See what blogs are talking about right now, search for who links to your blog (or your favorite blog), and find other blogs talking about the same stuff you are! You can find any blog at any time on Technorati, if you know what to look for...

Those are the four biggies, imho... there's also Google Mail (and Talk and Maps and Earth and Google Fucking Everything), Fark (to an extent, though it's been around so long it's hard to say), plus all of the great things that use the APIs of the above services (like the Flickr Related-Tag Browser, and the Flickr Magazine Cover Maker)... plus plenty of other places out there.

Go searching. Discover Web2.0... and most importantly... be excellent to one another...

Until later, then...

posted by Steve  # 8:39 AM

You should all know about this President of ours. There is a story that has been circulating the liberal blogosphere (or, as I and many other residents like to call it, Left Blogistan) about the usage of firefighters in the Katrina-ravaged area of this country. Daily Kos has a good primer on the situation... Bush used the firefighters as human props. Not as firefighters. Not as skilled, courageous men who were willing, as is their duty, to risk their lives to save others. No. A Photo Op is much more important:

This is the man in charge. A cowardly, dispicable politician of the worst stripe: One who professes to love America, while he acts in outright disregard... or worse, contempt... for Americans. And the GOP spin machine, and the mainstream media... they're going along with it. And so is the American Public

Emphases mine. So, 38% of Americans think "no one is to blame" for the response to Katrina... and 63% think no one need lose their jobs over this. This is fucking disgusting. It makes me absolutely sick to think that a job can be botched so damn bad (I'm already ordering my FEMA: Failure to Effectively Manage Anything t-shirt) and yet, it appears, no one will pay. No one will have to answer it.

Conservative pundits, politicians, and apologists the nation over are using the words "Blame Game," spitting them at anyone who dare level a finger of responsibility at the (*gulp*) federal government. Well guess what? YOU'RE GOD DAMN RIGHT WE'RE GOING TO PLAY THE BLAME GAME. Except, Mr. President, it isn't a fucking game. The death toll is well into 5 digits by now. The city will require tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild... not to mention years. You fucked up bad, pal. Where was all of the planning, all of the preparation, all of the good shit we were told your little pet project, the Department of Homeland Security (yavol!) was up to its elbows in since 9/11? We had days' worth of warning that Katrina is coming... if a dirty bomb goes off in a major American city, we will have a grand total of no fucking time whatsoever worth of warning... what then?

What will this President do to protect America? What has he done? As far as these (admittedly liberal, admittedly Democrat) eyes can see... not one solid god damn thing.

We get it, G-Dubs. You fucked us.

UPDATE 3:59pm: This had better turn out to be bullshit...

Please, please, please, please let this not be true. I really want to believe these people are just wrong about this...

posted by Steve  # 2:49 PM

I don't know.

Since we leave tomorrow, and the trip is a bit historic for my family (the four of us, plus girlfriends with both my brother and I... no trip like this has ever been attempted in my family's history...) I've been thinking of taking some notes in the evening and writing a "trip report." Like a bit of amateur travel writing, they are pretty plentiful, and MousePlanet has a whole bunch up on their site.

I just wanted a good feel for how they usually sound, what people usually write about, even if there's some weird unwritten "rules" (more like "guidelines", actually) about tense or anything. So the first one I pick up is a Disneyland Resort trip report from March of this year... the most recent DLR report in MousePlanet's database... and what do I stumble upon, but this magnificent first paragraph (emphases mine):

We got up at 5:00 am to begin the drive from Tucson to Anaheim. We were on the freeway by 7:00 am. Stopped in Phoenix for breakfast at Mc Donald's. Then we drove until we hit the Banning/Beaumont area and stopped at the Dinosaurs and Burger King for lunch. We woke up the kids - Brice just loved the huge dinosaur. I didn't really want to go up into the brontosaurus gift shop. But I'm so glad we did. I noticed that everything looked much nicer and cleaner first of all. Then I noticed that all the evolution garbage isn't there any more. It now tells all the facts about all the "Lucy" and other Neanderthal Men that were found. New owners had bought it and brought in great new merchandise and displays. They also hand out pamphlets and advertise their website so that you can learn the true facts (or lack of) about the Theory of Evolution.

Exsqueeze me?

Baking powder?

These big dinosaurs (in Cabazon, CA) are now owned by a group pushing Intelligent Design as actual, y'know, science or something... their site is here, but it's all the same brouhaha that misunderstands/misconstrues the word "Theory," in its scientific usage, to mean "we're not really sure" (you should know, this isn't actually the correct usage)...

Anyway. Fucking people. I just love this woman's disdain for the "evolution garbage." What a twat.

So if this is normal for Disney fans... oh well. I don't fit in. Even Walt believed in evolution, for chrissakes!

UPDATE 2:23pm: HAHA! Here is another trip report, the next one down from Matthew Harrison Brady up there, starts off as such:

First an introduction. I am JoAnne, a 38 yo SAHM to our 18 month old toddler Ryan who has been to Disneyland quite a few times, in utero and out, lol. My partner Mary is 42, and works as an ER nurse. Yep, Lesbians, lol. We go to Disney as often as we can, are Deluxe AP holders, and live in nearby Riverside.

So I guess the moral of the story is... Disney attracts all stripes... from creationists to lesbians to people somewhere in between. Which I guess would be me, as I'm neither a creationist nor a lesbian.

posted by Steve  # 1:54 PM