We’ve been “childless” for a while now. The time was right for a new critter so we looked and looked until she found us.

Welcome home, Natalie.

Born in July, adopted today from the Whitman County Humane Society in Pullman. She has her shots; she’s had that little, ahem, operation and she’ll meet her new vet tomorrow.

We’re going to hold her back a year before starting school. She’s young for her age.

Meow.

[Photo Credit: Jeff Sexton]

My friend Jeff repairs and cleans Elgin pocket watches. Recently he posted some high-quality photos of an Elgin Grade 367 pocket watch at various stages of disassembly (and reassembly).

Tiny machines built to such close tolerances scare me. I’m afraid I’d break it just by looking at it.

Go check it out.

I tried doing this with season one of Babylon 5. It took me six hours to tell.

Evil death elevator to the sky.

A friend pointed me to this article at CNN about plans to build a space elevator. The idea behind the space elevator is to build a really long cable out of some exotic material that has yet to be invented (probably nanotubes and snot), fling one end of it into orbit with a counterweight and to attach the other end to the ground or, say, your house. Once the cable is in place, it would be simple to attach a climbing structure that would work its way up and down the cable. This would eliminate the need for rockets.

Now, I’m no astrologist, but it seems to me like this is a really bad idea. Everyone knows that in the future we will have rockets. Getting rid of rockets is, in my opinion, a step backwards. I’m forward-looking; that’s why God put eyes in the front of my head. Secondly, what happens if there is a fire? Are we supposed to take the stairs? And lastly, you know it’s only a matter of time until some joker takes the thing half way up and then pushes the emergency button. Space pranksters!

I, for one, have chosen to fear the space elevator and all that it stands for. However if for some reason I am forced to use it, I will remember to stand in such a way as to take up as little room as possible and to avoid eye contact with those around me.

Um… could someone press “Mars” for me? Thanks.

My gut feeling (and I do always go with my gut) after watching those two go at it is that Joe Biden is much more adept at dodging questions that is Sarah Palin. Don’t misunderstand me, I though they both did marvelous jobs at avoiding the questions and moving quickly to the ready made talking points, but I still think Biden won on style. Given enough time and practice, I’m sure that Palin will be just as smooth and slippery as the rest of them.

Also it seemed to me as if maybe Biden tried just a little harder to seem like he was answering questions whereas Palin made it clear that she wasn’t there just to answer questions but to speak to the American people. Now that’s Maverick: Agree to a debate format and then — wowzer — totally not participate in the debate format. See? That’s change. That’s going forward. That’s moving in the right direction towards whatever it is that is that … I … was … … and that’s why you should vote for our ticket in November.

As Joeseph 2Pac once said, “Four more beers!”

Good luck, lady and gent. Still voting ‘no.’

Best if used by May 1809.

I don’t eat breakfast cereal that often so it came to me as no surprise that one or more boxes in our pantry would have slipped beyond its “use by” date. I was, however, surprised to find this rather old box of Raisin Bran among our food stuffs. 

Being the curious sort (many people tell me I’m “curious”), I did some digging on the interwebs and this is what I discovered after drinking a bunch of cough syrup.

Late in 1808, the Western Family Trading Company issued a special series of packages to commemorate the Treaty of the Dardanelles in January of 1809. Raisin Bran, as you probably know, was a staple commodity, popular with both British subjects (and their protectorates) and peoples inside the Ottoman Empire (and among the less known End Table Assembly of IKEA). The treaty was established to allow free trade of both breakfast cereals and bran muffins (also quite popular among the regular) between nation states to, “promote the health and well being of breakfast eaters everywhere… except for the French. <spit>” 

I have no idea how one of these irreplaceable and priceless pieces of history ended up in my pantry, but I have to say they were delicious.

The More You Know! You’re welcome.

Have you ever read a blog post at your favorite site that, for you, really hit the nail on the head? Did you read it and think, “Ah ha! That is the perfect argument/analysis for this particular topic,” only to find the most sperious, rediculous and possibly also bigoted follow-ons in the comments? Occasionally I’ll want to link to an article only to find that I’d be embarrassed to do so because of the “helpful” comments below it. I’ve seen examples of this twice already this morning and, well, it’s just kind of depressing. 

Examples of these comments might include:

• “You got it just right and I hope that will teach those [over-generalized segment of the population] a lesson!”
• “Well, if it weren’t for those gosh darned [liberal, conservative, Christian, Muslim, Atheist, Mt. Dew drinkers] acting like [communists, socialists, neocons, Fascist Nazis (as if there were any other kind), couched racial slurs], this country would be in a better place.”
• “I say, kill the [expletive] [expletives] before they end civilization as we know it!”

…and so on. I just want to say to those folks, “Thank you for your support of the author’s (humbly, correct) position. Now try the same thing while not engaging in ad hominem and hyperbole. kthxbai.” 

Only Hitler would post comments like that! (There, I just Godwin‘d myself. It’s over.) =D

Big assumption: this software will handle HD. That’s a deal breaker or maker.

I’ve been hacking on my blog page (a sure sign I’m bored to tears) today. In a previous incarnation of the blog, I included Google’s Reader widget that did a great job of rolling up all of the stuff (and things) I had shared from that application. Unfortunately it missed the stuff I had added to Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. I just couldn’t let you, gentle readers, miss out on that much action. You’ll thank me later on when you’re older.

So, to make things all the more complicated, I’ve removed the Google Reader widget and have included the Friendfeed widget. It rolls up just about everything I’ve posted just about anywhere. Yeah, I’m that vain, but that’s why you like me so much.

Making the Friendfeed (FF) widget look like the rest of my blog was a bit of a challenge. For those of you who also run Wordpress and who want the FF widget to look less fugly than the default, I’ll just pass along a few geeky facts I discovered along the way.

The FF widget is a javascript element that brings along its own CSS reference. You can’t actually see what that file is unless you dig and, I’m sorry, but the “hints” on FF’s site are less than hintful. I’m sure whoever wrote them knew exactly what they wanted to say, but until I could actually view the CSS and see the structure, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the snippets they provided.

To override their markup, I copied the elements I wanted to change from their CSS file and pasted them to mine. For each element you wish to change, append the line with “!important“.

For example:

.friendfeed.widget,
div.friendfeed.widget div,
div.friendfeed.widget span,
div.friendfeed.widget img,
div.friendfeed.widget table,
div.friendfeed.widget tr,
div.friendfeed.widget td {
  position: relative;
  background-color: inherit !important;
  color: inherit !important;
  padding: 0;
  margin: 0;
  border: 0;
  text-align: left;
  line-height: 1em !important;
  width: auto;
  float: none;
}

The example above forces your browser to ignore what FF set for the background and foreground colors and the line height. I made similar changes to the link attributes (a, visited, and hover) so that their stuff would look like mine. Hopefully this will help someone else who finds themselves in a similar bind. (And, yes, before anyone points out that I’ve made too many broad changes with the example above… I know. I’m still hacking on it.)

While I was searching around, I did find a plug-in for Wordpress that will tame the wild FF widget. I haven’t tried it but you can find it here.

One reason (among many) that I haven’t been blogging regularly is that I’ve been having computer issues. I bought a spanking new HP Pavilion 17″ notebook in March so that I could keep one foot in the virtual world and keep the other in the actual world. Being able to move (lug) my computer from place to place in the house has been very liberating. I’m no longer tied to a fixed desktop location and I like that.

Problem is that my new fancy-pants laptop (where “lap” means “surface area of an Olympic running track”) runs hot when it is busy. I’m talking “hair dryer” hot. I’ve had to return it for repairs twice now: the first time for a noisy, clicky fan and the second time because it fried itself even with a good fan. Keeping it adequately cool has been an issue from the outset and, honestly, I think maybe HP put too much stuff into too small a space. I’m told that MacBook Pro users experience this kind of problem too: powerful, pretty and subject to the laws of physics and heat transfer.

Enter the NZXT Cryo LX aluminum notebook cooler. This thing is a monster with three 120mm fans and a USB extender on the back. It draws its power from one of the notebook’s USB outlets so there’s nothing extra to plug into the wall. Although the cooler does fold in half for transportation, I wouldn’t exactly call it portable. It is, after all, sitting beneath a 7.8 lb notebook which isn’t very portable either. But, HEY, it stays put on nearly any surface if it doesn’t also collapse said surface.

So far I’ve been more than pleased with the cooler’s performance. I’m able to run the notebook at full power with all the goodies turned on and have had Second Life™ pounding away at both processor cores. The notebook fan comes on but it no longer sounds like a jet taking flight. The whole setup is just a touch noisier because, you know, it has fans in it, but it’s not an unpleasant sound at all. I’m old and I can’t hear very well anyway.

No one paid me for this review (if you want to call it that), I’m just happy with this product and I thought I’d tell you about it. I should add that, while the Pavilion has made a couple of trips home for repairs, HP’s customer service has been excellent.

Stay frosty.