From the ‘Weird Video Files’ comes this one. It’s a bit long but oddly fascinating.
Thanks to the very cool BotJunkie site for sharing this one!
Category: Pointless Ramblings
Windows Live Skydrive enters beta
The title pretty much says it all. Microsoft’s Skydrive service has entered beta. It’s free and you get 500 megs of space for uploading files. You can set folders to private, public, or shared (as best I can figure, public folders anyone can read, but not change, and shared folders can be read and changed by a selection of friends).
I’m not often one to beat the Microsoft drum, but it seems like a handy way to keep a small number of files backed up remotely, or to collaborate/share with friends. To be sure there are other similar services* out there, but for me this is an alternative to gmailing files to myself. I already had a “Live” account, so it was just a matter of clicking a button to sign up. 🙂
* Here are a few that offer free plans:
http://www.box.net
http://www.snapdrive.net/
http://www.xdrive.com/
http://www.mediamax.com/
http://www.omnidrive.com/
Caveat Emptor: I have no experience with any of these. I wouldn’t store anything very private in any of these without doing some research first!
MRI tale from Jason Slater
I’ve never had an MRI, and neither had The IT Manager’s Journal blogger Jason Slater before today.
After reading his tale, I hope I never have to have one!
I wasn’t ready for the face clamp as it shall henceforth be known nor was I ready for the tiny hole they were rather optimistically hoping to stuff me through. To get an idea of my plight imagine trying to push a plucked, but rather fat and juicy, chicken with an american football helmet on through the holes of a series of polo mints.
Chore Wars
Thanks to Penny Arcade for pointing this out. Chore Wars has to be the geekiest idea I’ve seen in a while. Ok, maybe since yesterday. Here’s how it works (I surmise, personally I’m much too lazy for something like this). You and your fellow house or office mates sign up. You create lists of household or office chores and assign experience points to each one. Then as you do chores, you mark them off on the Chore Wars site. Rack up major experience points and level up!!
I mean really, who needs World of Warcraft when you have Chore Wars!!?
A new one for Websters
I’m pleased to announce a new word that I just invented: editoring.
Editing, as we all know, means to edit something. But an editor does a lot more than just edit things, right? Editors – in particular magazine editors – manage freelancers, create and maintain editorial calendars, discuss layouts, plan issues, and so forth. None of this can be considered ‘editing’ really. So what is it? It’s editoring.
Please help spread this term around by using it at least twice a day in casual conversation. Thank you.
I’m pretty sure I’ll end up wildly rich and famous thanks to this contribution to the English language. But don’t worry, I’ll remember all the little people when I’m on top of the world.
20 must-have Firefox extensions
Sorry I haven’t been posting lately. I haven’t been doing much worth posting about. I’m in a big gaming phase right now. 🙂 And I’ve been digging through huge piles of backlogged magazines rather than reading books.
I did get another article published, though: 20 must-have Firefox extensions. I’m told its doing well and the editors at CW seem pleased with it, so maybe I’ll get more assignments out of it.
A friend of mine made me a new logo. Like it?
Gamesroundtable.com
Hopefully some of the GRT regulars will think to look here…
OneWorldHosting offered to move GRT in light of all the problems we’d been having this week. I was told downtime would be 10-15 minutes. So I said “Sure, let’s do it.”
That was about 4 hours ago. As of now, the site isn’t back. I called OneWorld and spoke to the person who offered to move it. She said there was a problem with the script that moves sites, and that she’d handed it off to an admin who is supposed to be working on the problem now. She said she would *like* to get it done today so the site is up for the weekend!!
End result…I have no idea when the site will be back up. If it isn’t restored by OneWorld by the end of the day I’ll try and get a new host for it, but that’ll mean DNS changes which will increase the amount of time it’s down. The worst part is, I’m going away on Sunday, so if it isn’t back by then, it won’t be for another week. And at that point I don’t know if it’ll be worth bringing back online, as people will have gotten out of the habit of visiting.
If anyone ever asks your opinion of a quality place to host a website, PLEASE tell them to stay far, far away from OneWorldHosting. They used to be excellent, but it appears that times have changed.
Happy New Year
Well, 2006 is behind us now, thank the gods… I can’t think of anyone for whom 2006 was a really good year. I’m sure they’re out there, but among my small circle of friends it was a year of upheaval at best, and just a bad year at worst. Perhaps 2007 will be better for everyone.
I spent New Year’s Eve watching the extended versions of The Two Towers and The Return of the King. A nice, quiet evening (I’d finished watching Fellowship yesterday). Somehow these movies are trying their best to become a holiday tradition with me.
Anyway, here’s wishing everyone who reads this a happy, healthy and prosperous 2007!
A nice Callie card…
Today a card arrived in the mail, from where I’d been taking Callie:
Dear [DC],
We are very sorry for your loss of Callie. We understand that Callie was truly a part of your family, and we know that you must miss her very much.
We hope that it may offer you some comfort to know that a donation has been made, in Callie’s memory, to the hospital stray animal fund. Callie was very lucky to have had you to care for her.
With deepest sympathy,
Dr. [Callie’s doctor] and staff at
Marlboro Animal Hospital
I thought that was an awfully nice gesture, and on the off chance you’re in the Marlborough, Mass, USA area and in need of a vet I’d confidently point you to the Marlboro Animal Hospital.
I sure do miss the little furball. I’ve been re-arranging my house a bit to kind of fracture the memories a little. I still find myself looking for her, and I lose track of the time every afternoon because no one is curling around my ankles reminding me its dinner time.
At the same time, the acute pain of loss is already fading, which is good I suppose. I regret not having taken more pictures of her… I had a lot on my old cellphone but never transferred them off and the phone is long gone now. And I tossed all her toys and kind of wish I’d kept one as a memento…
My friends have been very supportive and that’s helped an awful lot.
Callie (????-2006) Rest in Peace
I lost a friend today, after about ten days of trying one cure after another. My strange little cat, Callie, who came into my life about two and a half years ago, was put to rest at noon today.
I am overwhelmed and startled at how sad I am over this. I’ve lost grandparents and my father and a step-brother and a step-father and I don’t remember ever being quite this sad…and its over a cat. Strange, and probably not really true. I’m sure I’ve just buried the old griefs so that I don’t remember them as being as bad as they were. Or maybe its just that she was so totally dependent on me.
Callie was a wonderful creature, though she wasn’t much of a cat. She was a street cat that wound up in a shelter somehow and I don’t think she spent much time with her mother learning to act cat-like. We think she’d had some kind of head trauma, because she couldn’t walk very well and seemed constantly surprised by the world. She was a total mess of a cat who had trouble eating and so wound up with food in her fur constantly. That said, she’s often decide my beard needed grooming when I picked her up. She was sweet and good natured, but she hissed when she wanted attention (other than a quiet purr, hissing was the only sound I ever heard her make). She seemed happiest with a warm lap to nap on, or failing that, to stretch out alongside a reclining human. When I brought her home she had ear mites so bad that I think she was mostly deaf. She couldn’t see very well, either. Couldn’t walk very well… though she ran fine. And her lack of grooming talents extended to both ends of her, and more than once I had to plop her in the bathroom sink to bathe her. When this happened she’d quietly accept it, but she’d just look at me with this totally puzzled expression.
Today was her 4th trip to the vet in ten days and she wasn’t getting any better. She’d been mostly sleeping for almost a week and we decided that the best thing for her was to end her misery. I knew it was coming so we spent a lot of time together over the past couple of days, her sleeping in my lap while I watched endless tv while petting her and giving her scritches under the chin. At the vet I kept on petting her and keeping her comfortable while she drifted off (they give the animal two shots. The first puts them to sleep and the second actually kills them). I kept on petting her while she got the second shot. The vet checked her heart. It had stopped. He told me to take all the time I needed and left the room. I kept on petting her for a good while longer even though she was beyond feeling it. Then I left her body laying on the examining room table and came home. I chose to have her cremated; I’m not big on burials.
When I got home and saw her toys all over, and her favorite box (she *loved* cardboard boxes, as most cats do) waiting for her, I lost it all over again. I quickly gathered up all her things and removed them. Then I went out again. When I came home the house felt empty and silent, even though she wasn’t a ‘greet you at the door’ type of animal usually. I still opened the door carefully, though, just in case, because she wasn’t really smart enough to get out of the way if she was there.
I have no idea how old she was, but she was only with me for about two and a half years. When I adopted her they told me she was two, but the vet felt she was much older, and I tend to agree. She was pretty much a lap-cat and it took a lot to get her motivated to play. She clearly led a rough life before she came to live with me. I think she was happy to end up with me. I remember the day I saw her picture on PetFinder.com and just knew she was the cat for me. Oddly, I’d wanted a big cat and she was tiny. That laptop she’s sitting on is a 12″ iBook, just for a sense of scale. I went to the shelter and they opened the door of the cage she was in and she just climbed up into my arms like she’d always known me.
I’m really going to miss that little furball…