I just upgraded WordPress to 1.5.1.3, and it went pretty smoothly.
Except it broke my categories (edit: looks like permalinks in general). When you click one, you get ye old 404.
I’ll have to dig around to find out how to fix it.
update: How very odd. After deleting everything and starting from scratch, I simply restored my .htaccess file (which I did not delete), and everything’s back to normal.
This site is where you get filters for your Adblock plugin for Firefox.
Highly recommended.
Updated: URL Change
So, “What the hell is an ASBO?” An ASBO, or “Anti-Social Behaviour Order,” is the UK’s answer to help deter people acting like dumbasses.
Let’s say you get mad at your neighbor’s kids for throwing rocks at your siding. You’d go over and have a chat with their parents, right?
Well, there are some people who would rather mow their lawn at 3:00am every day for a month rather than having a civil discussion. Among other things… While it was clearly wrong for the kids to stone your siding for no reason, it certainly doesn’t make it right for you to be grooming your yard at “Oh Dark Hundred.” If we were in the UK, it would be entirely within my neighbor’s right to apply for an ABC, or “Acceptable Behaviour Contract.”
You can read all about it here.
Properly enforced, I think this would be an outstanding way to crack down on dumbasses with their souped up stereos in their rusted out shitboxes. I’ll get you, DJ Jazzy Trevor. Oh, yes. You will rue the day.
“Hoodies,” or hooded sweatshirts, have been effectively banned in the UK.
After reading about it in The Times of India here, I decided to poke fun at our cousins across the pond. Here’s the result:
I posted it upon b3ta’s message board here. Imagine my surprise when Rob Manuel (one of the founders of b3ta) responded that I should sell the design.
After briefly thinking about it, I set up a cafepress.com merchant account at http://cafepress.com/asbo. 50% goes to b3ta.
We’ll see if it gets any hits.
There’s a couple of authors that I’ll read just on the the strength of their name on the cover. However, one stands out: Leo A. Frankowski.
I’ve always been a fan of the “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” genre, but he takes it to a new level with the “Cross-Time Engineer” series. Most authors have their protagonists gently mincing though time, afraid to step on a bug for fear of somehow altering their futures.
Bah. I say, “Bring it on.” So does Frankowski.
I’ve always had a pet theory that time is like an infinite amount of possibilities where everything that could have occurred did occur. Therefore, a misstep by a klutzy time traveler wouldn’t affect causality. Getting back to where you left would be problematic, as you would have to navigate a finite — but nearly infinate — amount of subjective “futures” from which to choose . But, I digress. When my inner geek is faced with a problem, he starts to get sidetracked with potential solutions.
Anyway, after reading the adventures of Conrad Stargard for the umpteenth time, I decided to see if he’s put out anything new and stumbled upon his web site. I was able to get in touch with Leo, and he was kind enough to send me “Conrad’s Crusade” — the as-of-yet unpublished 7th book in the “Cross-Time Engineer” series. My jaw dropped. Needless to say, I spent the next couple of hours tearing through it.
So, not only is he one of my favorite authors, he’s also a hell of a guy.
I was on my way to work the other day. As it was after 9:00am, and none of the NPR stations carry “Morning Edition” past that, I switched over to Bob and Tom.
They had Kevin Pollock on — apparently, he is a gifted impersonator. Not a “wow, that sort of sounds like so-and-so” impersonator like Rich Little, but a “wow, that IS so-and-so.”
I had just taken a sip of coffee when they had him do Christopher Walken being interviewed:
Frankenstein never scared me. Marsupials do. ‘Cause they’re fast.
Every surface between my shirt and the windshield was sprayed. I had done this once before, but it wasn’t on 270N going 65+ (it was on Teri just prior to both of us going to work — we had to change).
I don’t know why I found this particular bit to be so amusing, but there it is.
I’ve had one cigarette in 57.3 hours. Yay, me.
Huh. A couple of Canadians patented the incandescent light bulb and Edison bought them out to further his research, but a German watchmaker named Henricg Globel (passing strange irony there) invented the first one.
Mysteries of Canada’s page describes some of it.
I googled Globel, and didn’t really find much. I’ll have to dig into it later.
The Sclafani~FamilyConnection is a Yahoo! group that deals with the “lineages and surnames” of folks with an even vowel to consonant ratio. Heh.
My keyboard tray died last night. It was one of those underdesk sliding, articulating thingies that was built entirely out of steel.
Entirely out of steel, excepting, of course, where the tray mechanism attaches to the rail mechanism. This was made out of fine, Corinthian plastic. One would think that this would be an ideal failure point and reinforce it accordingly, but one would be wrong. I think the term is “planned obsolence”. Bastards.
Kensington has one that looks pretty sweet: Underdesk Adjustable Keyboard Platform