LaserBlog.com

It actually used to be EASIER to find free stupid clip art for websites, i.e. “new” buttons, “updated” buttons, etc. Now all Google finds is bait sites full of links to other bait sites. No luck. This sucks.

Dear Diary,
Today I slept, got up, did housework (found the long-lost tv remote-control in the dirty whites bin along w/ nasty dirty underwear and such), made hot dogs, watched TechTV, ate peeps, took a nap, took a shower, went to board meeting (homeowner’s association), went for wings and wine, came home, surfed, and am now thinking about going to bed.

I want a hot dog.

I started this blog last January (last year), but I didn’t start using Movable Type until a year ago February. To see what I was up to this time last year, check out the March ’03 archive.

I am tired. Sleepy.

Super Mega Linky Listy!

I Spent the whole weekend glued to TechTV on Satellite w/ Tivo watching current and reruns of techtv shows. I wrote down links to stuff that caught my ear from various techtv shows. More info is most likely found at TechTV.com. Perhaps the first one is the best…

CLICK BELOW TO READ MORE…
(more…)

Ugh, I’m wiped out. Running on 5 hours of sleep and had to get up early and BE at the dentist by 8am, got a cleaning (NOT fun), then putzed around town ’till the Photoshop seminar I was going to. I headed south early in case of traffic, went for a mocha and barely got to the place on time. The shopping center was PACKED. I had to park across the street from the shopping center just to get a mocha and check email.

This state SUCKS! Construction everywhere, even where roads are NOT blocked you still can’t get anywhere. It’s just gridlock, it’s just bottlenecks. Just too many cars and not enough road. Not enough alternate routes. Not enough lanes. It’s awful. What normally takes 25-30 minutes took an hour and 40 minutes. I averaged 10mph on the city highway (sometimes 5mph, sometimes 0). At one point the traffic broke and I lead-footed it to the interstate only to find THAT at a COMPLETE stand-still. Stop-go-stop-go, topped out at 2nd gear for most of the time. The 25 minute drive took 4 times as long.

By the time I got home all I could do was fall over. I went to bed and was asleep after 3 deep breaths. When I finally woke up I felt like I was made of stone. I felt like a corpse.

The traffic here is enough to make me want to turn in my 5-speed GT for an automatic Prius or Honda hybrid. I mean, I rarely get to open my baby up and my clutch foot and leg were SO sore. M wants to get either a Nissan 350z or a Mazda RX8. We may wait for the new Mustang to come out and hold out for a Cobra. But why? To drive it in second gear at 5mph on the highway? I know today was unusual… (although the guy at Crispers told me that no, that “parking lot” out there on the highway is like that every day) [I had not driven that part of town in a long time] …but for the most part, driving in this down while the sun is up is impossible.

Maybe I’ll get a job at the big post office sorting center and work nights. Then I can drive fast at 3am. I’m up late anyway.

Busy today, see moblog! Dentist, photoshop seminar, etc.

Wheee! I ordered one of these tees today:

http://dailychaos.textamerica.com/?r=470726&_go=ep.3

Too cool!

(I still need to order one of these too.)

M broke the lid to the sugar bowl.

I am now on a quest to find either the most unique sugar bowl I can find, the funkiest, or even the tackiest one (ebay?) I can find. Might as well make this fun.

UPDATE: Haha, maybe this one:
link

I guess I’m all blogged out from Friday. Not much to say. It’s the weekend and we are tearing the house apart re-organizing and cleaning… building new computer desk and shelves which’ll make cleaning the family room easier (a home for all computer stuff and other crap laying around)… I tore apart the pantry which’ll make cleaning the kitchen easier (room in the pantry means groceries can acutally be put away). Stayed up ’till 5am lastnight working on the house and watching TechTv.

I bought this soap at Target and it smells sooooo good I just want to keep my hands to my face until the smell wears off.
Method “French Lavender” Hand Wash

This story at slashdot has me SO MAD I can barely SPEAK!

quote:
“Tha_Big_Guy23 asks: “According to this article, a man who created a website for his local Sheriff’s department is being charged with extortion. This was caused by taking down the website after repeated attempts to get compensation from the county to cover the bandwidth costs. As a result, all his personal computer property, and company computer property was seized and he was jailed.

“While the end result of this situation is a shame, let this situation serve as a warning for those of you who work, without a contract in place. While it is the general hope that people will behave in an honorable manner, sometimes this is just not the case, and contracts exist to protect both parties, when things go sour.

This is ^%$#@! You can’t send the manager of the power company to jail for 50 years when he charges you more money because you used more power and when he ultimately shuts your power off when you don’t pay your bill! And there’s no contract involved there either! You can’t do that to the water company! This is complete and total bullshit! Bandwidth costs money, you have to charge more if the customer uses more. This is too unreal. I really am beginning to hate my country. Maybe I should get out of the web-design business.

Save Angel!!!

Send the WB a blurb telling them not to cancel!
http://www.saveangel.org/index.php?p=signup
Check the box to sign the petition as well.

ALSO: sign this seperate petition which is here:
http://www.petitiononline.com/ai5d0162/petition.html

You can sign both, they’re seperate.

You read this kind of post and you wonder, is this post for real or is this person just trying to shock the world w/ a ficticious post? If it’s real, is anybody helping her?

The thing that I don’t get about the article I mentioned below, is that these high-school kids seem to think it matters where their blog is hosted. One had an “isolated” blog at blurty.com, then moved to livejournal.com where most of his schoolmates were, and then ultimately moved to Xanga.com “to branch out” because livejournal attracts a certain crowd.

I don’t get it. I mean, is there some sort of networking going on on these sites that I’m not seeing? Why does it matter where your blog? I have an MT blog hosted at my own webspace using a custom domain. Does that make me an uber-loner? Is that necessarily bad? I don’t think anyone reads this reguarly, so maybe I am making some sort of mistake. I get alot of passers-by from Google, people looking for specific stuff. Sorry to disappoint them. But I don’t have a regular readership (that I know of). Maybe one or two.

I could start a livejournal, but how many blogs does a person need? I love this blog, I really have no need to start another one.

Hmm.

This article about blogging uses this phrase: “generation of compulsive self-chroniclers”. Although their definition says “a fleet of juvenile Marcel Prousts gone wild”, and I’m not juvenile (at least not so in age), I think that’s a great phrase to describe myself, especially considering my moblog.

And then yesterday I saw this gizmo:
Microsoft Gadget Keeps Record of Your Life
(via slashdot)
… and I thought it was mighty neat! I would want to have control over where the info went, etc., but it might be the ultimate moblogging tool, or blogging companion, or something.

Compulsive self-chronicaler. Yeah, that’s me.

Anyway, u should check out that article about blogging, it’s pretty good.

I love it! A computer that makes coffee!
http://thebroken.textamerica.com/?r=220557

I was shopping Drugstore.com for a hair products and happened upon the Beginner’s Bondage Fantasy Kit. Really, I was just looking for hair stuff.

EEEEEEE! There goes what little life I had. We finally got a tivo-based Direct TV setup and so we have satellite back! That means tons of movies and Tech TV! I love Tech TV. Call me a nerd, I don’t care. Our local cable co. doesn’t have TechTv, the jerks. We love satellite. Last year we watched the leafs every chance we got, it was great. Well, that season’s about over, but at least we can get movies and I can get my TechTv fix, and maybe a bit of porno.
(kidding)

If we do indeed get satellite working tonight, I won’t be blogging, photo-ing, writing, shopping, sushi-ing, sleeping, or bathing for days on end. I have not seen TechTv in a freaking year.

Dear blog,

How have you been? I am fine.

Life has been uneventful, but uneventful is better than filled-with-bad-stress. I guess this is a welcome reprieve after the end of ’03 and Jan ’04 w/ my brother’s serious illness and subsequent passing. I guess I should not curse the boredom.

I should be using this spare time to work on my writing and prepare for a writing contest whose deadline is in May. But I find that I stay up late reading and surfing and watching Tivo, and then I sleep half the day away, and then I go for sushi and then run errands.

I also want to work on my photography as well. I met a really nice professional photographer this weekend at an art fair, and it made me want to focus on the art of photograhpy a bit more.

I stumbled on some blogs written by high-school students and I thought how fun it would have been for me to have been online and blogging way back when. I wonder if these bloggers will keep it up. How fun it would be to have a blog that is quite old. Mine is only about a year old. I don’t even have diaries from back then. If I could find them, it would be just a bunch of “Oh gosh, so-n-so that I like actually LOOKED at me today! Oh my god!” Boring. I keep thinking that I ought to put my old website up here and put a link to it on the sidebar. I had the ol’ classic static home page for years, I loved it. I think it first went up in ’96. or was it ’98? I don’t know. It would be fun to put it back up just for shits and giggles.

M’s parents are due to visit in a few weeks. That means panic-time for cleaning the house and about a week of essentially being offline once they arrive. All we do when they are here is run run run run run. Everything’s a darn rush, and the list of “places to go” is insane. I get about 5 hours of sleep a night when they are here, and get crankier by the day. During that week I’ll probably be moblogging more than anything else. (BTW, I heart Textamerica! Everyon should get a moblog!)

My sunburn from Saturday is peeling, my forehead, right in plain view, and in my hairline where I can’t get to it at all and it will eventually just look like very bad dandruff.

Tonight is the Astronomy Club meeting. Astronomy is not boring, but this club is. Last time I kept falling asleep. Maybe this time I’ll crawl into the back room (I used to work there at the planetarium) w/ my laptop or book and just goof around.

Well, Blog, it was good talking to ya. I hope all is well. Keep up the good work, you are a good blog.

Take care,

Me.

Now that I’ve had my Fujitsu P1120 for a while now, I have to say, I still LOVE LOVE LOVE it! I fell in love w/ it when I first got it, well, before I got it I fell in love w/ it. But having it is just beyond words wonderful. I have no life, I know. But this laptop is just too cute. It’s so small and light I take it literally everywhere I go. People come up to me in cafes and ask “Is that a real computer?” I tell them yes, it’s a full computer running full Windows XP. People have me write down the model number so that they can look into buying one (my sushi chef bought one after seeing mine). You get over the tiny keyboard so fast it’s hardly a drawback. It’s about 2 pounds, even w/ the extended-life battery. It has built-in WiFi and a touchscreen. The only thing that would make this better would be if it had built-in bluetooth and was a tiny bit faster. If I were rich, I’d buy a second one, and maybe even a third one, and leave it unpacked, and put away for when this one gets old.

I always thought that as a laptops got old and things broke you could just replace parts. But I have this huge Gateway laptop w/ a screen larger than a 17″ monitor’s screen, and it’s great (but dog-heavy!). As it aged, things broke, but they could not be replaced. The battery died. I ordered a new battery, and within a week, the battery was dead. The floppy drive died, and so I ordered a new one, and within a few weeks that drive was dead, too. So, replacing parts is obviously not a solution.

So, when my P1120 gets old and starts to die, what will I do? Technology gets better and better but that doesn’t mean that what you want will be available. The general public may decide that tiny laptops aren’t worth the trouble, and companies worried about the bottom line may stop making them, but lil’ ol’ me will still want one. I swear, if I get one more big sale in my business, I may buy another one and put away for later. I really do love this laptop that much.

Quote from diet-blog:
“Last February, Morgan Spurlock decided to become a gastronomical guinea pig. His mission: To eat three meals a day for 30 days at McDonald’s and document the impact on his health. Scores of cheeseburgers, hundreds of fries and dozens of chocolate shakes later, the formerly strapping 6-foot-2 New Yorker – who started out at a healthy 185 pounds – had packed on 25 pounds. But his supersized shape was the least of his problems. Within a few days of beginning his drive-through diet, Spurlock, 33, was vomiting out the window of his car, and doctors who examined him were shocked at how rapidly Spurlock’s entire body deteriorated.”

His film made it to Sundance.

via Keith Oblermann’s countdown on MSNBC.

I never thought otherwise:

“Soft drink is purified tap water”

via nala

From fark:
“Jon Stewart is the news source for most young Americans“

Damn straight! I can’t stand regular news souces. John Stewart tells it like it is, but doesn’t keep a straight face. How CAN anyone keep a straight face w/ the shit going on?!?

Someone broke the windows on an office building that had taken on a supposed image of the virgin mary (best pic I could find).

Click here for live image of broken windows: www.shepherds-of-christ.org/radio.htm updated every 30 seconds.

I don’t know if the Mary image was a miracle or if it was from a broken sprinker head that sprayed sulfur water on the glass (my theory)… (ever seen how high those can spray?) … but either way it’s sad that someone broke it.

“Realize your dreams with MIND CONTROL.”

I was reading this story and I found it a bit… weird. I think it’s flawed.
“Study: Very few bloggers on Net”
This “study” finds that there are really not alot of bloggers and most don’t update regularly. Get this:

“The Pew Internet and American Life Project, in a study released Sunday, found that somewhere between 2 percent and 7 percent of adult Internet users in the United States actually keep their own blogs.” “The study was largely based on random telephone surveys of 1,555 Internet users taken from March 12 to May 20, 2003.”

Ok, for one, if June Cleaver answers the phone and says “no dear, I don’t blog“, whose to say that her two kids Beaver and Wally don’t? Wally and Beaver could be college students. Also, if the phone rings, whose to say that the person who answers is the head of a family household? It could be an apartment shared by 3 twenty-something-ers who all keep blogs.

And also, most people who are tech-savvy enough to blog are tech-savvy enough not to talk to telemarketers: the use the zapper, sign up for state-level no-call lists, use caller ID, and slam up the phone when they do mistakenly find themselves talking to a telemarketer.

So, I think this study is flawed, and merely shows that 2-7 percent of bloggers were caught by telemarketers.

(Yeah, I know they’re “tele-surveyers” or whatever, but “telemarketers” is a generic term now.)

Ack! I typo’d in this entry. I listed ICQ twice, but one is Yahoo Messenger. The one in red is Yahoo Messenger. I’ll fix that later tonight, off to dinner now, though!

UPDATE: OK, it’s fixed. The “IM me!” link @ the top of the page has correct info now. It’s a pop-up, by the way.