If you're a Poser user or have considered taking up the hobby, go read this news release from DAZ 3D.

Patient left short by 'botched' penis operation.

I found this site particularly entertaining, partly because I lived in a predominantly Black neighborhood for a number of years. Oh, and be sure to check out the letters people have sent. There are a few clueful folks there, but a lot more stupid people who Just Don't Get It™...

It's Australia Day, in case you weren't aware. That's Australia's "naitonal day", like American Independence Day, Cinco de Mayo, Bastille Day, and so forth. The tradition here for Australia Day is generally what you'd expect. Parades, barbeques, going to the beach or other recreation spot, and fireworks (no fireworks this year on account of the dry timber and bushlands).

It also happens to be my mother-in-law's birthday.

So happy Australia Day and Happy Birthday, Lyn!

Yesterday was a really good day. Zoë was very pleasant all day, and while Miranda was kinda cranky, she wasn't too bad so long as she had plenty to drink and eat. It was cool in the house in the morning, got hotter as the day went on, but never really got to "intolerable", I don't think. Still, Andrew brought home stuff to make nice cold sandwiches (veggies, pickles, cold meat, etc.) so no one had to cook and we still got a nutritious meal.

I also got an unexpected commission to do a custom blog setup with one of my existing templates. Custom title, and set it up on Blogger (and BlogSpot). I actually had fun doing that, and I very much enjoyed "meeting" the young lady whose blog it is (Tatiana, a Russian living in Texas).

AND with that unexpected commision (which was paid promptly, thank you), I got something I'd been wanting for a while from a particular online store. The commission was just enough to cover the cost of it, how cool is that?

So all in all, it was a very good day, despite the sinus pain and itchy eyes and nosebleeds. The rest of the day quite made up for the minor annoyance of allergies to all this smoke...

Last year, I wrote a rant about fat people suing McDonald's (and I stand by that rant, although the link to the original story doesn't work now, so I'll have to fix it).

Well, it seems I'm not the only one who thinks that suing McDonald's because you ate too much of their high-fat food and got fat is stupid. The judge in one of the several cases thought so, too.

Maybe, hopefully, possibly, we're coming the end of the era that says that it's always someone else's fault, and that you're not responsible for anything that happens to you, anything you do, or anything decisions you make. I mean, yes, sometimes people are genuinely victimized, and then there definitely should be some sort of redress, but, ya know, no one makes you eat at McDonald's or munch Cadbury Chocolate or drink Jack Daniels or whatever... Maybe we all need to be responsible for our own decisions and actions, eh? What a revolutionary thought...

Craig Schaffner, 46, a Fayetteville-area computer consultant, has earned the pity of friends and acquaintances for his tragic reluctance to embrace the unverifiable, sources reported Monday. *snerk*

Wow, this guy really IS a jackass.

Ooooh, Gary Robinson also blogs about spam (although on a much broader level than I do).

Thanks to Suzanne for the link.

I used to live in a neighborhood that wasn't very nice. Well, when I moved in, it was okay. Then the management of the apartment complex changed and things went downhill really quickly and eventually the place got a really bad (and well-deserved) reputation for being rough and dangerous.

When the apartments were nice and didn't have a reputation for housing a lot of drug dealers and gang members, we used to get lots of people of various sorts coming around to try to convert us to whatever it was they were evangelizing. I always took their literature and would sometimes chat with them about what they believed (even if I knew I'd never convert).

The worse the apartment complex got, the fewer people came around. Eventually. NO ONE did. Even the pizza delivery guy would make me come downstairs to the parking lot to get my pizza (he was too afraid to come into the stairwell). The religious sorts who had been around trying to convert us and save our souls just scurried off to some other neighborhood.

The thing that struck me about this is that I would have thought the people living in this bad neighborhood were the MOST in need of salvation and hope and spiritual enlightenment...

This experience taught me something about the nature of human beings. If it's convienient and not too troublesome, they'll try to help (and they genuinely do believe they're helping when they try to convert you, no matter how annoying it may be), but the moment doing so puts them into any personal discomfort, danger, etc., they're off "helping" other people who live in nicer neighborhoods (literally or metaphorically).

Small wonder martyrs are made into saints and revered. Most people won't even go up a stairwell to convert the unsaved, so dying painfully for what you believe really does make you stand out in a crowd...

I saw this in a tagline:

All truth goes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Then, it is violently opposed. Finally, it is accepted as self-evident.

Just because something is ridiculed and/or violently opposed doesn't mean it's truth. It could be bullshit that deserves to be ridiculed and violently opposed. The only difference is that instead of eventually being accepted as self-evident, if it's bullshit it's (hopefully) eventually rejected.

See, the thing isn't that it's "truth" or not. The thing is that when you introduce comething DIFFERENT, it frequently generates a lot of hostility, ridicule, controversy, etc. This is not because it's true (or because it's bullshit) but because it's different, and it challenges people. People react badly to being challenged, and in my personal opnion and experience, it doesn't really matter what you use to challenge them...

Just reported a spam with this subject line:

How to Generate Leads & Enhance Sales Using Direct Email

I think perhaps it would be a bit more truthful to say:

How to Generate Complaints & Waste Bandwidth Using Direct Email

Then again, no one ever claimed that the sleazy morons who spam people are truthful...

I helped finance terrorism by driving a gas-guzzling SUV...

I feel pretty okay of late. My mouth is finally healing and I'm not in constant pain now (which probably means it's time to do something like get a tattoo or break my arm again or something). It's amazing how much better a person feels when they're NOT in pain...

I've also lost some weight. Don't know how much because I don't know what I weighed before, but I'd say it's about ten pounds. My clothes fit better and last night Andrew went to give me a hug and ran his hand along my back and said, "Hey, you have lost some weight" (not that my weight bothers him one way or the other). The weight loss is mostly due to the oral surgery, because I've had to change my eating habits. I eat much more slowly now out of necessity, and I take smaller bites because I don't have a choice. It's kind of frustrating, but it's something that I've needed to learn for a while, anyway.

Oh, and I've cut out chocolate (which has a very definite addictive cycle with me) and given up most junk foods. The changes are fairly minor, but I can see and feel a difference. Next I need to work on eating more fruit and vegetables, although we've already moved toward more salads, which is a good thing.

My first Poser product is near completion. I'm working now on the final tweaking and confirming a few things I need to know about how a couple other versions of Poser handle a few things, and I may need to re-render the promo art, but otherwise, the product itself is pretty much done. Many thanks to my beta testers, Lady Jaiven and Diane of Birklea.

I've already got plans for expansion packs and for another product. My creativity in this area is really flowing.

On other fronts, the little girls are doing well, and Andrew and I are doing well, in one of our more harmonious phases. These things come and go in our relationship, where we get sort of out of sync with each other. Well, we're in sync now (but not, thank goodness, N'Sync, that woudl be just too scary to think about), and that's good. He's still annoying as hell, of course, but I knew that about him long before I married him, so I guess I can live with it...

I'm fairly burned out on web design of late. Well, not burned out, more just, disinterested. I'm keeping up with the usual client maintenance and other concerns of that sort, but the independent web design and/or graphics creation is on a back burner. Eventually, I'll take some of the characters I've been generating in Poser and put them into graphics sets, but just at the moment I can't be bothered with HTML or anything that looks like it. Blah. I went through a big fit of redesigning a few months back and spent my design creativity and now I'm onto something else for a while. This is entirely normal for me.

Haven't been taking a lot of pictures lately, mostly just the kids. Mostly, I've been occupied elsewhere, but also, I haven't been going on any photographic expeditions. It's too bloody hot most of the time to be gallavanting around the city with a couple of kids and a camera. I tolerate heat pretty well, but I'm not silly enough to go out when it's over a certain temperature. I'd rather go to an air conditioned shopping center, and there aren't usually a lot of great photo ops in a place like that.

So that's the size of it, and that's why I'm not very talkative in this here weblog thingy. I'm just exhausting my creative thought processes elsewhere. It'll come around again eventually and I'll be much more verbal and then I'll be filling up this blog with all sorts of inane junk, as usual.

Miranda is one year old today! She's got five teeth, she's crawling (sort of; she does a funny sort of scooting, and she also creeps around on her belly), she makes word-type noises, she feeds herself, and she's damn cute, but then, she's always been.

Happy birthday to Miranda Joy!

I never thought of an old-fashioned typewriter as being particularly ergonomic, but if you preferred it, and you wanted to use it for your computer keyboard... Well, that's just what happened in this family. Pretty interesting stuff.