Dom DeLuise, what a cool guy. We weren't tight, so I'm not all broken up about his passing, but we can always use a few more like that.

This video below does not even have Dom DeLuise in it, but I kinda don't care. This always gets a big laugh from me, and it makes me think even more fondly of the three people being portrayed, as well as the three people actually in this sketch:



Here's something that actually features Dom DeLuise that's just great too:

If you have a motorola DVR unit with your comcast or fios service, you might be able to get yourself a 30 second skip forward button:

http://www.whatheck.com/2008/02/comcast-30-second-skip-ahead-button.php

It worked for me!! wooo!!

WATCHMEN SPOILER ALERT
(for the book moreso than the movie)
( dslfkj )

If you want to see something cool, and don't mind installing some new software for it, check out photosynth, and then take a look at these sweet cacti from japan:
http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=b38fd47f-e865-4182-a4d7-12afccfafefc
That is really gorgeous, and I think I get a bit more out of it than if I were just looking at the same stills in a flickr gallery.

Also, Foamhenge:
http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=d1f6c149-bc85-4978-8a60-afadfbdadba9

Gentlemen, Behold! Beretta shot guns:
http://www.berettausa.com/product/product_field_guns_main.htm
I was just watching the daily show make fun of Joe Biden for threatening to shoot Obama with a Beretta shotgun, which is funny because "a beretta is a handgun." Still funny anyway, because you're not supposed to shoot the president*, but anyway it's wrong since Beretta definitely does do shotguns. I had to look it up to doublecheck, but I thought beretta shotgun rang a bell (in addition to the handguns). They look kind of fancy and expensive, in an "east coast elistist" kind of way, hur hur.

* just kidding, there is no footnote

kim$ mailstat .procmail/log

Total Number Folder
----- ------ ------
1391939799 233271 /dev/null
45169794 4072 /var/mail/kim
9499410 1855 maybe-spam

Has anyone heard of a reason why someone (Kim) would be getting hundreds of thousands of bounce spams continuously, after months and months? She got 233,271 in a month. I get some among my other spam, but I've never had anything close to that. Maybe I'm just spoiled. All the headers, as far as I can tell, indicate that the true originator of the spams is someone's bot net, and not malware on one of our computers; For some reason, they just keep using kim's email address on the From: line, and she gets many many bounces. The messages are getting procmailed to /dev/null, without bothering with anything sophisticated like spamassassin (although that does happen for the remainder). I just can't imagine why they would focus on a single target for such a long time. I'm sure a large percentage of the original spams reach the victims named in the "To:" line, and I would never see any trace of those, but it still seems very strange to me.

I feel kind of sorry for the Roku guys, because I was seriously thinking about buying one, but the xbox just got a lot more attractive to a dude like me. Considering the Roku is $99, it feels like $99 off an xbox, now, in my mind. If I were a true geek/hacker/AV nerd, I would already have a box doing all this crap connected to my TV, but I guess I just know my limits. It's not real, yet, so maybe they'll find some way to sour the deal, but this could be pretty sweet. I guess I should see if there is a 2nd or 3rd game for xbox that I would want to play, too. Well, I could talk myself into and then out of this purchase several more times during this blog post, but I think I'll cut myself off here.

I have a crap-ton of passwords, and I have been kind of irritated by my bank website. I use firefox's master password, but my bank has finally outsmarted me and prevented firefox from using it to save the login & password. *Both* the username and the password are long strings of unguessable gibberish, and since they're not entered in the same form, Firefox can't figure out that there's anything to remember. It drives me crazy every time I have to log in & check a balance or something. At least I can get it to autocomplete the username when I use an add-on to change the "autocomplete" setting for form. Anyone have a way of getting around that? The bank is PNC, if that helps.

I saw this video while reading discussions about ICANN's change to the domain name system:



And here's the most amusing thing I've seen at work, recently:

From: HR person
To: Intranet website administrators
Subject: FW: RQ 11112/Employees:Do not allow employees to change their name in Intranet System:Update
 
Good Morning,

Please remove "Crazy Glue" as some dude's middle name "The Muscle" as Russell XXXXXX's middle name.

It's not a laugh riot like some other peoples' workplaces, but I'm having a good time.

My mind: blown
Wired article about how to remember stuff

Behold! "Pancakes" from Eli "Hostel" Roth's Cabin Fever
MUST SEE

Kim & I are going to Califoooooornia to see my sister. What else we see while there is less certain. Sure, we have some ideas, but because I am involved, that means nothing has been nailed down. So, here, in poll format, I am soliciting last-minute ideas. We'll just see how it goes; We'll only be there Saturday through Tuesday (and flying from early on wednesday).

Poll #1164884 Los Angeles
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

A trip to Los Angeles would be wasted without . . .

I am interested to hear what you have to say about:

1) The Irish Republican Army
2) Your Individual Retirement Account
3) who would win in a fight between the Irish Republican Army and your Individual Retirement Account. Assume your IRA has the element of surprise on its side, and standard rules: no biting, no eye gouging.

I'm especially interested in #2, because I have an old 401k that needs to roll over. Extra points are awarded for being easy for a dude (used pejoratively, in this case) like me to get set up & maintain, especially considering that I have never ever ever in my entire whole life thought about my bank accounts, retirement funds, or where my life is going before 6 PM. I have to stay up all night to make a trip to the bank for anything I can't do with an ATM. It's glandular, I can't help it. So all my financial planning gets stuck at "well, they're closed right now, so I'll have to deal with it later."

I have a feeling I may have done this poll before, but I didn't want to search through my old journal entries, or I'd never get back to work. I'm just curious.

Poll #1153011 Virus / spyware checking
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Which of these best describes your usage of malware protection software in your home:

I was just looking around Digg and was directed to this really great collection of photos at the Smithsonian's website, which are all worth looking at:



bonus: An Ox Pecker, I mean, an Oxpecker.

I just realized that tomorrow is the 10 year anniversary of when I started at DIGEX (just barely not Intermedia yet, although the money had already changed hands) and really started becoming a real professional. I was lucky to get the real job first. :)
I was doubly lucky to have gotten one where I met so many, or that led to meeting so many, of you. But of course, I'd already been pretty lucky, because I had such good friends that helped a punk like me get his foot in the door (t1tdave, prakriti, meercat, falkonne, devolutionary, and I'm sure I'm forgetting to list people, but I wanted to finish making the post before my moment of sentimentality faded into my more common close-mouthed self consciousness.

Special shout-out to chaosrunner because we started on the same day, and had such a blast working together, along with Jim K, who is not on LJ to my knowledge. Another special shout-out to franklyn, Rick W & Mike G for hiring me.

I technically met Dan on the day I interviewed, which was slightly earlier, and soon after, Josh, Eric, Imam, and more good friends. And of course, my special lady, snidegrrl. I've been very fortunate.

I'm definitely doing really well now, as a result of that, among other things.

I'd also like to thank God, because He knows I sure didn't do anything too special to get where I am. As to why I have been treated so much better than billions of others, I don't know, but I try to appreciate that. (there I go, ruining a perfectly good post with god talk)

Thanks, to everyone, for making my life very good.

From the behind-the-times dept:
Hey! I was just looking around amazon, and saw that the killers had a "new" (to me)* album out, and I was all excited for a minute. I previewed the tracks, and now I'm heartbroken to realize that that "When you were Young" song, and "Can you Read my Mind"** are them. Damn!!! Talk about a bad follow-up. I didn't even recognize them, and I've flipped the station away from "When you were Young" about 40 dozen times in the past few months. I can now recognize that it's the same guy singing, but he sounds all messed up, and those songs are Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwful.

* Sam's Town - Released Oct 3, 2006 . . . dang
** I imagined this song could be some kind of joke for a phony "Songs from or inspired by Superman 2" album.

While I have been busy working on computer programs and web sites, a blog and many LJ comments have been published under my name (well, pseudonym) that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. Since 5 seconds ago, or better yet, let's say 2002, I have publicly taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name.

Any advice on getting rid of* a P4 2.6ghz computer, 1GB ram, with no hard drive?
It's got 1 unused AGP slot, onboard video; EIDE; DVD reading, CD writing, maybe 48x. Of possible interest is that it's got a very quiet CPU heatsink, and i'd throw in a quiet AGP aftermarket heatsink (yeah I can hear people already lining up for that) for the AGP card that does not exist.

* if it looks like my best bet is disposal, I do know where to take it for recycling

Item! Amazon now sells DRM-less MP3; I grabbed a song and found it is encoded at 256 (I guess from the number that its a constant bit rate) and had album art pre-embedded in the file. Sweet! Prices vary - it looks like $0.89 and up.

Sorry about the Deja-vu
Poll #1047635 1047618 mandatory training... Is this commonplace (v2.0)?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

my workplace has put me and my coworkers through training on

EVERY YEAR, my workplace seems intent on training us on

edit: The old poll was busted (but short lived). I trashed it, since having no "None of the above" pretty much ruined it.

For anyone has been angered by illegal warrantless wiretapping, you can relax, because now, warrantless wiretapping is legal!! :(

It was not quite a partisan split -- a lot of D-people voted for it, and a small number of R-people voted against it. From where I'm standing, in PG Co. MD, I give special thanks and a virtual poke in the eye to Barbara Mikulski for that one. Cardin & Hoyer did the right thing & voted no. Now I feel like a jackass because I called Hoyer's office but not Mikulski's. I am happy to pretend that I had some sort of influence.

Dan Froomkin with the news
Another useless petition

A young woman on the Norwegian equivalent of "Beauty and the Geek" has a hard time learning how to change a CPU, and to use prepositions [youtube]

also, I was looking up some specs for my hard drive and saw Ando. That's a big leap from web-page stills to TV, assuming it was in that order.

Does anyone have an AGP video card with two outputs (DVI or the old standard is fine) lying around, that perhaps you've been thinking "I should sell this on ebay" that I could buy off of you? I've been looking around ebay myself, but it's so time consuming.

A couple weeks ago, my video card died, so I can't run two monitors at once until I replace it, but I don't want to replace it because getting something new and good in AGP is a nonsensical move. I don't want to do a complete system replacement yet, either.

The Decemberists, and an orchestra, at Merriweather:

http://www.decemberists.com/tour.aspx

I'd like to go, even thought the cheap seats are $40, well, maybe, but Kim is out of town that weekend, and I don't want to go by myself. Is anyone else interested?

While I'm encouraging people to fill out online forms, here is another. Filling out online forms doesn't do much, but ... but what? I give up.


ACLU's Habeas Corpus Petition

The AFA are such dicks. I'd like to see this poll go in the other direction from where it is now.

http://www.afa.net/petitions/businesses/businesses.asp
(it will put you on their mailing list, and I imagine you can unsub later though)

It amuses me that people are still trying to imply that gay people and non-christians don't have families.

I got glasses today. I'd post pics, but my hair looks dirty, even though I just took a shower a few hours ago. Maybe I was half asleep and missed with the shampoo. Maybe it's just the lighting and my cheap camera phone. Anyway, these things are simply not safe. I can't see shit. I should just black out everything but a tiny circle in the middle of the lens, because the rest is very disorienting. I seriously doubt that my eyes are much safer having the plastic film removed from them than they will be when I am smashed to pieces from crashing my car.

If I were a highly skilled programmer, I would write a program that would shift the image on my monitor to reverse these crazy glasses lenses of mine.

Because I have been watching "Heroes" and love Mr. Bennet, I thought I'd entertain the idea of Horn Rimmed Glasses and making everyone call me "HRG" like they do in the director commentaries. Then I would start kidnapping people and erasing their memories. I visited two stores, Hour Eyes (who has to special order anything worse than a -7.5, making them Two-hundred Forty Hour Eyes to me), and LensCrafters. Either I am blind (actually . . . I am blind) or there were no Horn Rimmed Glasses in either store. Not one. I probably just looked past them . . .but I expect they wouldn't look right on me anyway.

In other news, This RPM documentation, including how to write a decent spec file for use with rpmbuild needs a higher pagerank. It also needs to become a better document . . . baby steps.