A rather inhibited engineer finally splurged on a luxury cruise to the Caribbean. It was the "craziest" thing he had ever done in his life. Just as he was beginning to enjoy himself, a hurricane roared upon the huge ship, capsizing it like a child's toy. Somehow the engineer, desperately hanging on to a life preserver,managed to wash ashore on a secluded island.

Outside of beautiful scenery, a spring-fed pool, bananas and coconuts, there was little else. He lost all hope and for hours on end, sat under same palm tree. One day, after several months had passed, a gorgeous woman in a small rowboat appeared.

"I'm from the other side of the island," she said. "Were you on the cruise ship, too?"

"Yes, I was, " he answered. "But where did you get that rowboat?"

"Well, I whittled the oars from gum tree branches, wove the reinforced gunnel from palm branches, and made the keel and stern from a Eucalyptus tree."

"But, what did you use for tools?" asked the man.

"There was a very unusual strata of alluvial rock exposed on the south side of the island. I discovered that if I fired it to a certain temperature in my kiln, it melted into forgeable ductile iron. Anyhow, that's how I got the tools. But, enough of that," she said. "Where have you been living all this time? I don't see any shelter."

"To be honest, I've just been sleeping on the beach," he said.

"Would you like to come to my place?" the woman asked.

The engineer nodded dumbly.

She expertly rowed them around to her side of the island, and tied up the boat with a handsome strand of hand-woven hemp topped with a neat back splice. They walked up a winding stone walk she had laid all around a Palm tree. There stood an exquisite bungalow painted in blue and white.

"It's not much, but I call it home." Inside, she said, "Sit down please; would you like to have a drink?"

"No, thanks," said the man. "One more coconut juice and I'll throw up!"

"It won't be coconut juice," the woman replied. "I have a crude still out back, so we can have authentic Pina Coladas."

Trying to hide his amazement, the man accepted the drink, and they sat down on her couch to talk. After they had exchanged stories, the woman asked, "Tell me, have you always had a beard?"

"No," the man replied, "I was clean shaven all of my life until I ended up on this island."

"Well if you'd like to shave, there's a razor upstairs in the bathroom cabinet."

The man, no longer questioning anything, went upstairs to the bathroom and shaved with an intricate one-and-shell device honed razor sharp. Next he showered -- not even attempting to fathom a guess as to how she managed to get warm water into the bathroom -- and went back downstairs. He couldn't help but admire the masterfully carved banister as he walked.

"You look great," said the woman. "I think I'll go up and slip into something more comfortable."

As she did, the man continued to sip his Pina Colada. After a short time, the woman, smelling faintly of gardenias, returned wearing a revealing gown fashioned out of pounded palm fronds.

"Tell me," she asked, "we've both been out here for a very long time with no companionship. You know what I mean. Haven't you been lonely, too...isn't there something that you really, really miss? Something that all men and woman need? Something that would be really nice to have right now!"

"Yes there is!" the man replied, shucking off his shyness. "There is something I've wanted to do for so long. But on this island all alone, it was just...well, it was impossible."

"Well, it's not impossible, any more," the woman said.

Continue reading "A desert island joke, woohoo"…

An elderly couple are sitting at home watching television and enjoying a cup of tea. After a while, the man gets up to take his empty cup to the kitchen.

"Would you get me a bowl of ice cream while you're up?" the woman asks.

"Yes, okay. Ice cream," he nods.

"With strawberries. Should I write it down for you?"

"No, no, I can remember. Ice cream with strawberries."

"And cream. Ice cream with strawberries and cream. Should I write it down? You won't forget?"

"I won't forget. Ice cream with strawberries and cream. It's fine. You don't need to write it down," he assures his wife.

The man goes to the kitchen and is there for some time. Eventually, he comes out carrying a plate of bacon and eggs. The woman looks at the plate and frowns.

Continue reading "Senior Moments"…

I'm listening to Damn Yankees. Dunno how many people remember them, but the band had former members of Styx, Night Ranger, and also Ted Nugent. It's very 80s hair band type rock.

At the moment I'm listening to Bad Reputation, which is quite overtly sexual in that 80s rock kind of way. No subtlety at all....

I confess, I do rather like 80s hair bands.

It also seems that pretty much none of their lyrics are appropriate for this blog (look, I do try to keep it pretty clean here, with only minimal sexual references, eh?) or just don't really work out of the context of the screaming guitars and headbanging rhythms...

Well, this sort of works.... it's better with the music, but it's your basic hair band rock love ballad, where the guy is begrudgingly admitting that he's in love...

You don't have to love me baby
I don't give a damn
You've got the time I've got the touch
And you know who I am
It's simplified, I'm mystified
A case of hit and run
Ain't no use no more abuse
You are my number one
And I'm in love
I'm mystified, baby
Yeah, I'm in love
I'm mystified, baby
yeah, yeah, yeah
You're my kind of lover
You always keep me mystified

Though, I must admit, I got a giggle a bit later in the song with a lyric that is worthy of Spinal Tap:

Well I get out of the kitchen
When I can't take the heat
What you've got cooking, hun
It's good enough to eat

It's a good album, though (it did go double platinum, after all), if you like 80s hair band rock. Which, of course, I do.

THE Bush administration has finally been caught in its own language trap.
 
“That is not a stay-the-course policy,” Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, declared on Monday.
 
The first rule of using negatives is that negating a frame activates the frame. If you tell someone not to think of an elephant, he’ll think of an elephant. When Richard Nixon said, “I am not a crook” during Watergate, the nation thought of him as a crook.

(Fascinating look at linguistics in politics, a subject I've had some interest in for a while now. Thank you to whomever it was who sent me the link to the article; I'm afraid I don't recognize your email address, but it's a great link!)

We went to USA Foods last week and one of the treats I got was some Welch's Grape Juice. I'm having some right now. Mmmmmmm. Blood of Christ. (Note: I'm not being rude; I grew up in the Presbyterian church and we always used Welch's Grape Juice for communion, and now when I taste it, I'm always reminded of taking communion).

They have grape juice here, of course, but it's not made from Concord grapes, which are, it seems uniquely American (and probably can't be imported to Australia for a million billion reasons having to do with quarantine and such). So the grape juice here is okay, nothing wrong with it, but it's not the same rich, sweet, unique flavor of Welch's.

And on the subject of Welch's, the whole fruit juice industry was pretty much started by Dr. Thomas Bramwell Welch, who, being a Methodist, wanted to find a way to make "unfermented" wine for communion services. The juice is, I believe pasteurised so that it doesn't ferment. (See, you knew I had to have a reason for mentioning the Blood of Christ, didn't you? I had a point - more or less - all along! Amazing!)

Oztion has some radio advertisting in place, and it's quite amusing. I'm particularly taken with the "Just like *BEEP*" one. What one is that, you ask? Well, the one on the PR/Announcements page at Oztion, of course!

Oh, and they're advertising on Vega, my favorite radio station, so how good is that? Let's hope it does some good... I hear that television advertising isn't far off!

"And I ask you this question. Does anyone here today seriously doubt that if the American President ticked off on Kyoto tomorrow, John Howard would do it on Thursday? In fact he’d probably use the same pen." - Kim Beazley, Leader of the Opposition

Two friends, a blonde and a redhead, are walking down the street and pass a flower shop, where the redhead sees her boyfriend buying her flowers.

The redhead sighs and says, "Oh crap, my boyfriend is buying me flowers again."

The blonde looks quizzically at her and says, "You don't like getting flowers from your boyfriend?"

Continue reading "A blonde and a redhead...."…

I've put an RSS feed on my rant site. And a couple of new entries in the past few weeks, so if you're into reading my rants, go have a look.

Brilliant animation. Very disturbing, but brilliant.

Baginski - Fallen Art - video powered by Metacafe

Well, I have been up to my eyeballs in webdev. Yikes. I've been setting up the shopping cart for the Uncommon Touch site, and it's been slow going, because I'm almost completely unfamiliar with the way the system works, which modules to edit to do stuff, etc.

It's looking better now, I must admit, but there are no items there yet and there are some bugs and glitches that have to be worked out still (as usual). I'm also working on how to structure the site, overall. I've pretty much decided that putting the shop as the main page is the best idea, with the blog(s) and other information in sub-directories. Toward that goal, I moved the blog to a sub-directory already, and the main page redirects to it and will until I get the shop there. Arranging that behind the scenes is going to be interesting... I'm thinking I may just make a completely new directory and move everything into that and just point the whole domain there, but that may be more trouble than its worth... *sigh*

Anyway, in the process of moving the blog there I adjusted the RSS feed (the beauty of using a third party RSS service like FeedBurner is that you can do that and nobody has to change their subscriptions or anything, as the subscription URL remains the same), and noted that this blog has subscribers. And guess what? It's more than three! It's even more than four! I was a bit surprised, actually. *waves to the subscribers*

Well, I'm going to bed now, to dream, perchance of PHP (I often dream in whatever geeky thing I'm doing at the moment).

Q: What's the difference between a wallaby and a kangaroo?

Continue reading "A joke for Aussies"…

(Yeah, I have that song from Little Shop of Horrors in my head now...)

Anyway, uhm, because I'm a geek, I've got this ever-growing list of news feeds. And for some weird reason I thought that maybe one other human being in the world might, for some strange reason, be vaguely interested in seeing the OPML of all the feeds to which I'm subscribed. I had a look and it's actually pretty diverse. Lots of stuff about online marketing and such, at least one digital art related thing, lots of funny stuff, quotes of the day (well, c'mon, where'd you think I was getting them?! LOL!), a bunch of news ones, loads of geeky stuff, copyright and IP law stuff, some autism blogs, a weather feed, the feed from the discussion board at a really cool perfume lovers' site, just all sorts of stuff, really. Most of it geeky, but not all of it. Some of the stuff might even be interesting to people other than me, so, well, take a look if you want.

Bonni's OPML (as of 2:12pm AEST Thursday, 19 October 2006; subject to change at random intervals)

Back on May 8, 2005, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology held the first ever Time Traveller's Convention, correctly assuming that "technically, you would only need one". Urging folk to leave details of the convention inside library books and carved onto anything non-biodegradable, the organizers hoped their knees-up would be well broadcast to people of the future. (At the time, I begged every editor I knew to send me there, explaining all I'd need was an air ticket, accommodation and enough alfoil with which to craft a convincing "future suit and hat", but, perhaps foreseeing dark futures off their own, all deferred.) As it turned out, the convention was a "mixed success", with "no confirmed time travellers" in attendance, Tina Fey of Saturday Night Live blaming the poor showing on the fact that "people from the future already know the party sucked". Today, I'd like to give time travellers the opportunity to get involved in the past, without having to do anything so gauche as attend a party (it has, after all, been quite a long trip).

One of the big problems is that contrary to popular mythology, there's not a never-ending reserve of highly-educated, English-speaking workers.
 
Another interesting development is that these firms are increasingly courting employees abroad, including some from the US.

Well, I'm well into installing a new shopping cart system for the Uncommon Touch site. As I'm mostly unfamiliar with the shopping cart, it's fairly slow going, to say the least. However, it's an Open Source shopping cart system (after being greatly tempted to go with X-Cart, which I can get for dealer prices because I know the right people, I did decide to go with Zencart, instead, for various reasons I won't bother to outline here), so there are plenty of free add-ons for it (and some that I'm going to have to pay for, but I can live with that).

It's a bit of a steep learning curve. Well, not steep, only moderate, but there's a lot to learn, so it's uphill for a long way, if that makes sense. I mean, I've got the thing installed, and I've got the basic idea down okay, but it's fiddly to do all the customisations (and to figure out how to do them!) and add-ons and so forth. So I'm just going along at it, learning as I go, and reading my various news feeds in between. It's a good, geeky life. I'm enjoying it, believe it or not.

BT has launched an automated system to identify professional spammers and 'botnet'-infected customers on the BT broadband network.
 
Professional spammers will face account termination, and unwitting spammers and virus transmitters will receive help cleansing their computers of the programs that turn their PCs into "zombies," though there will be a fee for that service. BT has also not made it clear if it will help customers prevent their computer from becoming reinfected.

I can't be around non-geeks. I just cannot cope with certain kinds of people, certain kinds of mentalities, and they cannot cope with me. Not that I'm claiming geeks are all nice and friendly and happy (they're not). I just understand geeks and they understand me. Normal people do NOT understand me, nor I them.

Continue reading "Quiet, geeky things"…

One of the things I hate about webdev is that stuff changes C O N S T A N T L Y. You have to keep up with this stuff 24/7. Security alerts, updates to server stuff, changes in standards, it's just a never ending grind.

At the moment I'm installing a particular shopping cart on another site, and I'm finding that our server isn't configured in such a way as to use it properly. Which means, in this case, that I have to get Andrew to download the updates and re-compile PHP. Which means I could be waiting for days... or weeks.... or YEARS....

“Just get me a f-ing faith-based thing,” eight words attributed to Karl Rove by author and former special assistant to the president, David Kuo.
 
Mr. Kuo is making several explosive claims, among them that, behind their backs, the nation‘s top evangelical Christians were regarded with routine mockery and contempt by White House staffers, called “nuts” and “ridiculous.”
 
Kuo writes that, when Senator Chuck Grassley tried to rewrite Mr. Bush's $1.7 trillion tax cut to include $6 billion in tax credits for groups helping the poor, tax credits Mr. Bush himself had publicly proposed, Kuo writes, “Bush's assistant told Grassley to drop the charity tax credits. The White House had no interest.”
 
In fact, Christians who voted for Mr. Bush based on his religion may have ended up hurting the very people Jesus sought to help: the poor.

San Diego's Qualcomm has announced that the next version of its Eudora email client is going to be released as a free, open source application built upon the same code as Mozilla Thunderbird. Programmers from both Qualcomm and the Mozilla Foundation will work together to develop future versions of the client.

Me, I used Eudora for many, many years. I stopped using it some time last year, when the latest update required me to pay yet again (or be bombarded with advertising). I was a bit sad about that, because I like Eudora and I know it extremely well. But, well, I thought I'd give Thunderbird a try, after all, it's free, right?

I do like Thunderbird, and it's what I use now, but.... Now Eudora is going to be free, too! And under development by the Mozilla team! Woot! Soon, I'll be able to have my Eudora back. Oh, lovely Eudora.... all free, no ads....

By the way, this is going to show both my age and my extreme nerdiness (I'm nerdy in the extreme, whiter than sour cream, look at me, I'm white and nerdy; sorry, just had a Weird Al moment). Eudora was originally developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), along with a whole LOT of other internet software protocols, including the engine that's still at the heart of Internet Explorer (check it out sometime; go to Help: About Internet Explorer and read the copyright notice there).

ANYway, Eudora was originally developed at NCSA and it got its name from Pulitizer Prize winning author Eudora Welty, because of her short story entitled "Why I Live at the P.O."

Now, as it turns out, this fact is on Wikipedia, but I knew it already because not only did I live in Urbana, Illinois for a long time, particularly during the period when a lot of these internet protocols were being developed, I've used Eudora for a long time, and I happen to know of Eudora Welty because, well, I'm edjumacated.

And very, very geeky. And a nerd sometimes, too.

Okay, so in this post I managed to quote Weird Al, mention a Pulitizer Prize winning author, talk about NCSA and UIUC (I didn't mention the Silicon Prairie, though, oh, okay, I just did, whew), link to Wikipedia, reference one of my own previous posts (about being white and nerdy), mention something Open Source, demonstrate just how long I've been on the net, and share an obscure factoid that, it turns out, isn't as obscure as all that. All I need to do now is mention that PINE (the Unix email management program) stands for Pine Is Not Elm and I'll hit Geek Net Trivia Bingo.

BINGO!

It seems that even the once-mighty CNET is having a hard time of it these days. Too much competition, internal difficulties, management problems...

Which reminds me to note that anyone who thinks that a really huge website/company can't go downhill in a hurry and lose their traffic and business really needs a good course in The History of the World Wide Web. The web is one place where little shepherds rise up to take on giants with surprising regularity. In the case of CNET, it's more like many smaller (and better?) sites taking traffic all different directions (which is more like Whack-a-Mole than David and Goliath, but still).

Yeah, well. When you've got the irrits (as Aussies would say; pretty good phrase, methinks) there's nothing quite like punk music to either take the edge off or bring it all to a head so it blows over (I was going to say "until it pops" but thought that was too gross).

I put on some country (Garth Brooks) and that totally did not do it. It just made it worse. I put on some 60s pop (The Monkees) and that didn't help (though the Beatles theoretically might have if I'd tried it). Billy Joel? Right out. So I'm back to Green Day's fantastic American Idiot album.

She's a rebel
She's a saint
She's salt of the earth
And she's dangerous

She's a rebel
Vigilante
Missing link on the brink
Of destruction

[...]

Is she dreaming
what I'm thinking
Is she the mother of all bombs
gonna detonate

Is she trouble
like I'm trouble
make it a double
twist of fate
or a melody that

She sings the revolution
the dawning of our lives
she brings this liberation
that I just can't define
nothing comes to mind

Oh, yeah, baby. That's what I'm talking about....

Oh, and by the way, I know I'm not saying anything new, but.... Stupid people really piss me off.

Afghanistan's fun-loving Taliban have deployed a hitherto unknown tactic in evading detection in their war against allied forces: take refuge in 10-foot high, fireproof marijuana forests.
 
Despite Canadian troops' best efforts to burn down the monster dope plantations, the weed continues to offer excellent cover for the insurgents, Reuters reports.

Apologies to the non-computer-geeks… (those familiar with Unix will find it hilarious, though)

I keep seeing, in a particular online forum, people who are supposedly running a business on the net say, "Well, I'm not very computer literate..."

Okay, fair enough. I get that, some people aren't. It doesn't make you a bad person or anything. There are many things I can't do well, or even do at all.

For example, I'm the most hopeless woodworker you've ever seen in your entire life. I can't hammer a nail straight, I can't put in a screw properly, I can't put together pre-fab shelves or anything else of that sort. I'm really, really, really not good at anything to do with building things out of wood.

So, what do you think, should I start up a business as a carpenter?

Well. This blog has been accepted to BlogBurst, or, I suppose I should say, the BlogBurst network.

I'm not entirely sure why. I only rarely say anything that's particularly insightful (now and then I do, but most of the time I'm just blathering). Still, I applied, they accepted, there you go. My blog entries now have the possibility, however unlikely, of being picked up and syndicated by top-tier online publishers (Washington Post, for example, or the Houston Chronicle, or similar).

Personally, I think for the editors of those fine publications, it's going to be like finding needles in a haystack.

Anyway. There you go. Strange things happen in cyberspace, yanno?

I found this extremely amusing and very cleverly done. WARNING: Has some (sort of) nudity and (strange and cartoony) violence in a very Pythonesque (well, Gilliamesque, to be precise) way.

So, the thing is, I can't find the cable to connect the camera to the computer. In fact, I can't find two cables that connect two cameras to the computer (I kept my older Kodak Digital when I got the new one; it's a good little camera, despite being older).

Today, Andrew got me a USB card reader. This will enable me to read both different kinds of cards for both cameras easily. The Kodak Share Software doesn't auto detect the card, now, but that's okay, because Picassa does (and I like it better than the Kodak stuff, anyway).

I'm hoping that the older camera will have a slightly less quirky automatic whitepoint thingy, as I have a lot of trouble with that with my newer camera when doing product photography. The new camera is good, and I do like it, but the white point drives me NUTS when doing fiddly photographs of jewellery....

Anyway, that's my latest geeky shiny thing. Now that I read this over, it's not all that shiny, is it... ?

Well, I've come to a decision, finally. I've been sort of fudging for a few months now, trying to decide if I want to proceed with this online selling thing or just get rid of most of my stock and move on, etc. After a great deal of research, reading, thinking, and other such thought, I've decided that I'm going to move forward.

Sales are very slow right now for lots of reasons, most of which have nothing at all to do with me, and which are completely out of my control. Retail is like that. Sometimes it's all you can do to keep the shelves stocked, sometimes you twiddle your thumbs a lot. I know this, having worked in retail, and the same thing does apply to e-retailing, too. It's a sales slump. It's not the end of the world.

There are lots and lots of successful online businesses in Australia. I've done business with many of them, and I've come across them in my ramblings. I've got years and years of web development experience, and I know how to find things out (like learning about marketing opportunities, just as an example). I can do this. The retail slump may last a short time or a long one, but e-tailing and e-commerce is certainly here to stay, and if there's one area in which I'm both comfortable and knowlegable, it's the web.

So that's my big ephiphany for the week. Well, that and the fact that I've survived all manner of horrors in my life, including poverty, insanity, physical infirmity, near-death, assault, unreaonable criticism, loss of love, loss of family, loss of pretty much everything that ever meant a damn to me, loss of my own sense of self and my touch with reality....

If I can survive all of that, I can survive anything. Including building an online business in discount retail. And I might even end up thriving... Hey, it's been known to happen...

So, now the United States is really pissed off with North Korea (and well they should be, of course). So why doesn't the United States just invade them and force a regime change and establish democracy there?

Oh, that's right. They only invade countries that don't have any weapons of mass destruction....

Shop at vShop Hub on Oztion and Win a USB Hub

Okay, I've linked it under "Other Blogs By Me" because it sort of is (that is, I choose which links to publish). Anyway, it's just stuff I encounter via various feeds I follow and thought I'd share. Feel free to check it out. You can even subscribe to it if you want.

I just wanted to recommend Google Reader. I've been playing around with RSS readers for a while now, and I was going to go with Bloglines, but recent improvements to Google Reader have made it my reader of choice.

It's free. It works really well. It's pretty intuitive. You can share items (haven't done that yet, but I'll work it out), you can export or import an OPML file. You can add Google Reader to your Google personalised homepage. It's got other good features, as well.

Just thought I'd mention it, in case anyone's after a very nice, easy, free RSS feed reader.

I'm totally hooked on Google Mail, now I'm hooked on Google Reader, and I've been hooked on Google search for ages... Google is my world. That should scare me.

Okay, I'm not really into the stock market. I keep an eye on a couple of things because I have a particular interest in them, but I don't own any stock and don't actually have any intention of owning any stock at any time in the forseeable future.

That being said, I did find The many Beards of Wall Street extremely amusing. It advocates buying stock based on the number and quality of beards associated with the company... (Who would have thought that stock analysts would have a sense of humor?!)

So we went to the National Gallery of Victoria to see the Picasso exhibit. As usual, it wasn't limited to just Picasso, but was more like "Picasso and his posse" (which is what they usually do). The show was limited to Picasso's work from 1935-1945 and included a lot of work by Dora Maar, the art photographer, who was his muse and lover during that period, and a few Man Ray photographs, too.

Anyway, I'm not the biggest fan of Picasso's work. I mean, I certainly recognize how very, very influential he was, and I know how prolific he was, but I just don't like most of his stuff. Now and then there's one that I like for one reason or another, but mostly I don't like surrealism (with the notable exception of Magritte).

Going to a Picasso exhibit is, for me, like eating my vegetables. You may not really like it, but you know you should, and you know it's good for you, right? Brain food and all that (and we're members of the National Gallery so we need to go to a certain number of ticketed exhibitions a year to make it worth our while). Really, I think Picasso is a bit overrated. There. I've said it. You can come round and beat me about the head and shoulders with a fish now if you want.

Which remind me of one of my favorite art jokes:

Q: How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Fish!

Back to the topic of this post. We saw the exhibit and then went to the member's lounge and had a cup of tea and went and had an early dinner at a nice little Italian-style restaurant at Southbank. We were fortunate to get a table outside, overlooking the river, which I love. Southbank is probably one of my favorite places to be in the entire world. I just love it. And dinner was nice, too, yummy chicken cacciatore with fried polenta (to be honest, the polenta was why I ordered that particular meal). I also had a tequila mary, which is a bloody mary except with tequila instead of vodka. Very nice bloody mary mix, I'll have to have it again next time we go there.

We got home in time to watch the season finale of Dr. Who, and I was relieved to see that.... uh... I'd better not say. I don't want to spoil it for people who are Dr. Who fans and who might not have seen it yet. It was good, anyway. And David Tennant is definitely on my Cracker List (i.e., I wouldn't kick him out of bed for eating crackers).

I even managed to pick up a few good used books at the book fair they have every weekend at Federation Square. I got a biography and Think and Grow Rich (which I've been hearing about for years and thought I might as well read) and Chocolat (the one they made into a film with Johnny Depp, another person who is definitely on my Cracker List).

All in all a good day, other than having extremely sore feet, ankles, and knees. My legs have been troubling me greatly of late, for no reason that I can really see, unless it's my new desk chair or something.

Anyway. Tomorrow we might go to a movie, just Andrew and me. I'm a bit keen on seeing The Devil Wears Prada, having read the book (yeah, I'm starting to get into chick lit, so sue me...).

Just got spam through one of the mailforms I hadn't fixed yet (on a different domain). Fixed it immediately. And you know what? Every time I put a CAPTCHA on a mailform, I just feel like raising up my middle finger to the sky and shouting "F**K YOU, YOU SPAMMING BASTARDS!"

Only without the asterisks.

The Onion has an RSS feed! YAY!

This made me laugh right out loud...

Okay. I've got a little blog set up to put links on and fiddle with when the mood strikes me, but mostly to be a place I can post when/if I can't connect to my own server for some reason. Naturally, I've set up an RSS feed for it (I just love RSS, now that I get what it actually does!). It's not customised, especially, and may never be, but it's on Blogspot if you want to go have a look, and I've put a link from the sidebar, too.

Thank goodness. I'm back. Whew. Server was offline for several hours due to a power outage at the hosting location. Back now, though. Whew.

However, this has prompted me to see about setting up a blog of some sort elsewhere, just to have a place where I can post things like, "Hey, the server's down, and by the way, I can't get mail sent to any of my domains, but you can still mail me at the spamcop address."

I'm thinking I might just put it on Blogspot. Blogger has had some amazing improvement in the years since I last used it (that'd be more than five years, so I'm not suprised to see big improvements, of course).

When I get it set up, I'll put a big link here so people who care about this sort of thing (like, where my server has gone) can go have a look if they want (I think that would be maybe three people, which, out of 66.5billion people or so on the planet, isn't exactly earth shattering, eh?).

Anyway. I'm back. Wheeewwww. That was scary. *shudder* I hate when that happens (thankfully, it happens rarely).

The Home Office is an extremely good read. I came across the pages in a serendipitous way, and I'm so glad I did. Excellent advice from a successful business-owing geek. I want to be like that when I grow up...

The contractual legalities of buying and selling on eBay are being tested in an Australian court for the first time in a case that it is claimed could destroy public confidence in the popular online auction site.

Tonight in a forum someone told me to shut my big mouth and called me a jack of all trades and master of none.

Now, I can understand the first bit (it's not like nobody's ever told me that before). I don't entirely get the second though. I THINK they were making the snide implication that because I multi-task and have more than one interest, I'm not good at anything that I do.

Why would someone make that assumption? Why is it so hard to believe or recognize that someone just might be able to do a number of things quite well?

Granted, there are a lot of things I do NOT do well. Mathematics, for example. And physics. And chemistry. And pretty much any "hard" science. I can't program, either, though I can sort of hack up code a little bit sometimes, if it's pretty basic. I can't fix cars, I can't fly a plane, I can't play any instrument with any degree of accomplishment. Can't dance (well, I can bop around like a fool and enjoy myself, but I wouldn't call it dancing), can't ice skate, I mean, the list goes on and on and on of the things I can't do or (and this is an even bigger list) things I know very little or even nothing about. The universe is absolutely full of things about which I know nothing, and about which I would never pretend to know anything, because I know better than to bluff like that (I hang around with geeks; geeks call you out on stuff like that).

I'm just wondering what sort of narrow thinker believes that if you do more than one thing, you can't possibly be good at anything you do?

Two elderly women were eating breakfast in a restaurant one morning. Ethel noticed something funny about Mabel's ear and she said, '"Mabel, do you know you've got a suppository in your left ear?"

Mabel answered, "I have a suppository in my ear?"

Mabel pulled it out and stared at it thoughtfully for a while. Then she said...

Continue reading "Just a slightly rude (but not dirty) joke"…

Well, I was thinking about Weird Al's new song, "White & Nerdy" (which you can listen to for free by visiting his MySpace page. And an alarming number of lines from it actually apply to me (or to Andrew; between the two of us, almost ALL of them apply, eek).

Here are the lines that made me go, "Hmmm":

Got skills, I'm a champion at D&D [AD&D actually, but close enough]
MC Escher, that's my favorite MC
Keep your 40, I'll just have an Earl Grey tea
I order all of my sandwiches with mayonnaise
I'll ace any trivia quiz you bring on
I could sure kick your butt in a game of ping pong (okay, not ping pong, but air hockey for sure!)
My ergonomic keyboard never leaves me bored
Shoppin' online for deals on some writable media
I edit Wikipedia
I memorized "Holy Grail" really well
I got a business doin' web sites
When my friends need some code, who do they call?
I do HTML for 'em all
Even made a home page for my dog [my cat, but same sentiment]
Spend my nights with a roll of bubble wrap [all those online purchases!]
Pop pop, hope no one sees me... gettin' freaky
I'm nerdy in the extreme and whiter than sour cream
I was in A/V Club and Glee Club and even the chess team [speech team and thespian club, really]

Look at me, I'm white & nerdy

Yeah. So everyone's really shocked, I'm sure. Bonni's a nerd! Who would have thought?! Actually, I'm more of a geek, but when younger, uh, yeah, definitely fit the "nerd" profile...

[EDIT] I'm SO nerdy that I came back to edit this entry. Woohoo.

First, read the Wikipedia entry (go on, it's extremely amusing; I'd bet almost any amount of money that Weird Al himself contributed to it).

Now... watch the video, and be sure to keep your eye out for Donny Osmond and Seth Green...