August 2006 Archives

What to do about Jiggle? That's been the question plaguing me lately, and is also responsible for the deafening sound of silence from here. I've enjoyed doing it but I'm not sure there's a point The Internet certainly doesn't need Yet Another Diary blog, where I blather on about what I did over the weekend. And it isn't like I don't have enough other places to write:

• Daemon Dancing in the Dark : My FreeBSD and Linux blog. I started it May 2003 in order to keep track of the mountain of information needed to keep one of these alternative operating systems going. I love working with FreeBSD and I keep lots of notes. It gets plenty of hits and is reflected in a few different spots. I go through spurts of effort on it, depending on how much I use my BSD boxes. I have a big backlog of posts I should get to for it, and plenty of other things I want to try. It's a nice, focused, personally useful site, where I keep all my BSD notes.
• The Game Chair : a group effort, sort of a high end amateur web site where I write video game reviews and other musings. We specialize in what we call "Progressive Reviews", where you write up three or four reviews as you play through a game. I contribute bits and pieces and am due to dive into a new game. I might be getting Lego Star Wars II for review, which should be fun. My girls and I have have a great time playing Lego Star Wars.
• Wanderings of a lost [game] mind : This is my video game diary blog, hosted on Gamespot.com. I use it to keep track of my video game playing habits, just to track what I play for how long, as I don't usually play to the end of anything. It too has sunk into disuse.
• Incredible Brightness of Seeing : My movie blog, where I used to put up lengthy reviews and log my movie viewing habits. I still watch plenty of movies, but I haven't been keeping up with it, either.
• In Absinthia : My drinking buddy and I have started up a new blog about all things absinthe. It's a fascinating subject, and a fascinating drink to boot. Again, I have a big backlog of articles I have to put up for it.
• A Trifle One-Sided : a new blog I started in order to play with Six Apart's new community blogging site, Vox.com. I was experimenting using it as my culture commenting spot, talking about movies, books and music. There's some pretty nice Web 2.0 features on it, like dropping in thumbnails of movies, and book covers from Amazon, and the like. It's got some shortcomings, not surprising in a beta product. It will only list like the first 10 hits of a search string, so you have to play around to find your stuff sometimes. And you can't use HTML, and there's only a few schemes available. By the way, if anyone is interested in trying it out too, drop me an email as I have two invitations I can hand out. I'm not exactly sure how far I'll go with this, but it has been fun dabbling in it.

So, as you can see, I don't lack for creative writing outlets. So Jiggle's purpose in life has come into question. I could continue to use it for posts that don't naturally fit into these other places, like my cocktail postings. I have always felt that a blog should be useful to someone, even if just the author (like my FreeBSD blog). If others find it useful, so much the better. And a personal diary blog like Jiggle just doesn't offer that. So, while Jiggle will remain online, I'm not exactly sure if I'll be posting much here in the future.

This was played a couple of weeks ago, and I never got around to posting it. Started off great - a par on the first hole is pretty amazing. Then it went downhill fast and I struggled for most of the rest of the round. I've been hitting my drives off the tee pretty well, but my irons were shaky at best.

Probably my best round of the season so far. My drives continued to be solid, ever since I decided to cut way down on my back swing, keeping my left arm as straight as I can. Sometimes, I slice it off to the right, if I don't follow through. But I generally get it out there, which makes things much more easy. Michael has been having problems off the tee, so his score is actually pretty damn good, especially if you take away one or two disasteruous holes. As for me, my putting was abysmal. I three putted the first 4 holes and missed plenty of other short ones. With even an average putter going today, I could have had a round for the ages, easily cutting off 5 strokes. My short game was glorious, especially on the par 5 6th hole. I even mis-hit that one but it skipped off the fringe and came to rest about a foot from the cup.

The Ring

Watched "The Ring" the other night, in my quest to watch the Top 50 Scariest Movies of All Time. I'm stepping backwards through them, from number one to number 50.  A nicely scary movie!

Cleaning out the inbox leads to this discovery:

1) When I die, I want to die like my grandfather--who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car." --Author Unknown

2) Advice for the day: If you have a lot of tension and you get a headache, do what it says on the aspirin bottle: "Take two aspirin" and "Keep away from children." --Author Unknown

3) "Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar." --Drew Carey

4) "The problem with the designated driver program, it's not a desirable job, but if you ever get sucked into doing it, have fun with it. At the end of the night, drop them off at the wrong house." --Jeff Foxworthy

5) "If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there is a man on base." --Dave Barry

6) "Relationships are hard. It's like a full time job, and we should treat it like one. If your boyfriend or girlfriend wants to leave you, they should give you two weeks' notice. There should be severance pay, the day before they leave you, they should have to find you a temp." --Bob Ettinger

7) "My Mom said she learned how to swim when someone took her out in the lake and threw her off the boat. I said, 'Mom, they weren't trying to teach you how to swim.'" --Paula Poundstone

8) "A study in the Washington Post says that women have better verbal skills than men. I just want to say to the authors of that study: "Duh." --Conan O'Brien

9) "Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant?? I'm halfway through my fish burger and I realize, Oh my God.... I could be eating a slow learner." --Lynda Montgomery

10) "I think that's how Chicago got started. Bunch of people in New York said, 'Gee, I'm enjoying the crime and the poverty, but it just isn't cold enough. Let's go west.'" --Richard Jeni

11) "If life were fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead." --Johnny Carson

12) "Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography." --Paul Rodriguez

13) "My parents didn't want to move to Florida, but they turned sixty and that's the law." --Jerry Seinfeld

14) "Remember in elementary school, you were told that in case of fire you have to line up quietly in a single file line from smallest to tallest. What is the logic in that? What, do tall people burn slower?" --Warren Hutcherson

15) "Bigamy is having one wife/husband too many. Monogamy is the same." --Oscar Wilde

16) "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress.. But I repeat myself." --Mark Twain

17) "Our bombs are smarter than the average high school student. At least they can find Afghanistan." --A. Whitney Brown

18) "You can say any foolish thing to a dog, and the dog will give you a look that says, 'My God, you're right! I never would've thought of that!'" --Dave Barry

19) Do you know why they call it "PMS"? Because "Mad Cow Disease" was taken. --Unknown, presumed deceased

20) "Everybody's got to believe in something. I believe I''ll have another beer." - W. C. Fields

Cute little video showing how to rubber band two chopsticks together and make it easier to use for kids. It becomes like using a giant pair of tweezers, so it is cheating a little bit, I guess. It reminded me that we had gotten a couple of rubber thingies from our local sushi shop that are specifically for this job - to tie them together and make them easier to hold. I wonder where they went?

In fact, here are the little things to connect the chopsticks: Fun Chopsticks

And here are ZooSticks found at SillyGoose.com

These links all come courtesy of ParentHacks.com

DEMOCRATIC
 You have two cows.
 Your neighbor has none.
 You feel guilty for being successful.
 Barbara Streisand sings for you.
REPUBLICAN
 You have two cows.
 Your neighbor has none.
 So?
SOCIALIST
 You have two cows.
 The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
 You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.
COMMUNIST
 You have two cows.
 The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
 You wait in line for hours to get it.
 It is expensive and sour.
CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE
 You have two cows.
 You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.
BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
 You have two cows.
 Under the new farm program the government pays you to shoot
 the other, and then pours the milk down the drain.
AMERICAN CORPORATION
 You have two cows.
 You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one.
 You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows. You are
  surprised when one cow drops dead. You spin an announcement to the
  analysts stating you have downsized and are reducing expenses.
 Your stock goes up.
FRENCH CORPORATION
 You have two cows.
 You go on strike because you want three cows.
 You go to lunch and drink wine.
 Life is good.
JAPANESE CORPORATION
 You have two cows.
 You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow
  and produce twenty times the milk.
 They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains.
 Most are at the top of their class at cow school.
GERMAN CORPORATION
 You have two cows.
 You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give
  excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour.
 Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.
ITALIAN CORPORATION
 You have two cows but you don't know where they are.
 While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman.
 You break for lunch.
 Life is good.
RUSSIAN CORPORATION
 You have two cows.
 You have some vodka.
 You count them and learn you have five cows.
 You have some more vodka.
 You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
 The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have. 
TALIBAN CORPORATION
 You have all the cows in Afghanistan, which are two.
 You don't milk them because you cannot touch any creature's parts.
 You get a $40 million grant from the US government to find
  alternatives to milk production but use the money to buy weapons.
IRAQI CORPORATION
 You have two cows.
 They go into hiding.
 They send radio tapes of their mooing.
POLISH CORPORATION
 You have two bulls.
 Employees are regularly maimed and killed attempting to milk them.
BELGIAN CORPORATION
 You have one cow.
 The cow is schizophrenic.
 Sometimes the cow thinks he's French, other times he's Flemish.
 The Flemish cow won't share with the French cow.
 The French cow wants control of the Flemish cow's milk.
 The cow asks permission to be cut in half.
 The cow dies happy.
FLORIDA CORPORATION
 You have a black cow and a brown cow.
 Everyone votes for the best looking one.
 Some of the people who actually like the brown one best accidentally
  vote for the black one.
 Some people vote for both.
 Some people vote for neither.
 Some people can't figure out how to vote at all.
 Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which one you
  think is the best-looking cow.
CALIFORNIA CORPORATION
 You have millions of cows.
 They  make real California cheese.
 Only five speak English.
 Most are illegals.
 Arnold likes the ones with the big udders.