Where did the weekend go?

Well, I had a great long weekend, but although I thought it could never end, end it did. Faster than I expected. And now it's already Tuesday. Yipes.

I went on a bit of a shopping spree this weekend, because I was seriuosly in need of some new clothes. Luckily, my need to clothe myself happened to fall on a weekend where all the stuff I wanted was massively on sale at the mall. I bought 3 pairs of capris (with lots of pockets! hooray for functional pockets!), 9 shirts, and a zip-up sweatshirt for a total of $150. How awesome am I? I'm very excited. The most I spent on any one item was $30 (for the capris I'd been eyeing for 2 months, on sale from $56); the least I spent on any one item was $2.99 (for a super-thin pink shirt for layering). Now I should be set on clothes for another 2 years or so. (really, I rarely buy clothes)

Chris is between quarters in school now, so we got to actually spend some time together hanging out. Spending time with the hubby is good.

My overreaching goal for the weekend, though, was to get as much sleep as humanly possible. I've been feeling majorly sleep deprived, so I was determined to remedy that this weekend. I didn't really get to do much sleeping in (Monday morning I woke up at 9:30 on my own, which was strange) but we went to bed pretty early most nights, so I got some decent sleep, then I managed to take a nap EVERY DAY which was the best part. So I was feeling pretty good for once. I'm gonna see how long I can continue to get some decent sleep and see if it lasts.

Last night we went over to a friend's house and watched a very strange Japanese movie called Casshern. I will go on record saying this was the strangest movie I've ever seen in my entire life. The graphics were crazy awesome, but none of us had any idea what was happening most the time, and it really seemed like the creators couldn't decide what sort of style or feel to give the movie, so they used every one they thought of at least once (even what appeared to be claymation for about 8 seconds). Really, really strange. Kind of painful for the last 45 minutes or so because we didn't know how much longer it would drag out, and didn't really know what was happening anyways.

I think it's coming to the US sometime though... maybe they'll tidy it up a bit for us before it does. Let's hope.

ATTN: T.V. Execs

Today's soap box is all about the silly TV Execs and their lawsuits against sites that post links to TV show bit torrents. If you don't know what Bit Torrent is or about the Powers That Be and their absolute fear and hatred of Bit Torrent, and you don't care, go ahead and skip down the page to other less tech-centric posts.

So I tend to watch a few TV shows. Some I'll watch if I have nothing else to do, some I'm a little obsessed with and have to catch every episode of. One of the latter is The OC (I can't help it. I must know what Adam Brody (ie Seth Cohen) will do next). I'll use them as my main example rather than bore you with all my TV shows. When the first season of The OC came out last year, Chris and I started watching it and got hooked. This was Before The Days of BitTorrent (well, before we knew anything about it). We would try and rush home so we didn't miss an episode. Then one day we had to travel down to Lakeland, and try as we did to make it there before the show started, the world was against us, and we missed it. There was no replay, and so we just didn't know what happened in that episode. The OC is one of those continuing dramas, so missing an episode meant we missed some major stuff - we were out of the loop. The next week something came up where we missed another one. At that point we just gave up and stopped trying. We had missed too much, it had fallen off our radar - The End. As far as we were concerned, we never needed to watch it again.

Later on down the line Chris learns of this program called Bit Torrent which is a super-simple file sharing program that makes it easy to download files, and one of the things he found to download were old episodes of The OC. He decided to download the whole last season so we could find out what we missed. So we watched them all, got hooked again now that we knew what happened, and now we were all about watching the next season. So when Season 2 started this past fall, we tuned in. On the TV. Complete with commercials. If it weren't for Bit Torrent, The OC would have lost a couple of viewers. But now, with Bit Torrent, if we missed an episode for some reason (like we had something to do on Thursday night), we could download it and not have to miss it. Rather than falling out of the loop, having this easy source of watching missed episodes meant we were much more likely to watch it when we were home on a Thursday night. Again, TV shows being available on Bit Torrent actually meant that The OC had MORE regular viewers than it would have otherwise.

"Okay," says Mr. TV Exec, "but I'm sure that your case is rare. There are plenty of people who only watch shows they've downloaded, and so they miss all the commercials, and we lose money." Well Mr. TV Exec, I hear you. But think about this. No matter how hard you try to quash this illegal trading of your property, someone is gonna come up with a new way to get around it. You guys thought going after Napster would solve everything, but now file sharing is even more prolific than it was when Napster and Kazaa were your enemies. You're going about it all wrong. People have lives. They aren't all sitting at home waiting to watch your shows. The people with enough money are Tivo-ing your shows and skipping commercials anyways. TV viewing as we know it is evolving whether you like it or not. So rather than fighting it, evolve with it. Here's what you can do.

First of all, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Start making the torrents available yourselves. Right after a show airs, make it available for download on your site. This way you have control over the quality, plus you get a great sense for how popular each show is. Download stats are a lot more complete than those silly Neilson ratings, anyways. But what to do about lost advertising? well...

Start with a little more product placement. As much as I hate it, you do it anyways, so just do it a little more. On one episode of The OC, Alex and Seth were talking about a movie, and Alex said something like "I'll be sure to NetFlix it for you." Hello? That is the perfect type of advertisement for these file-sharers. Who is more likely to sign up for something like NetFlix than a computer savvy person who's media-obsessed. Perfect product placement! Then you get Marissa to come to school with a bag of Burger King and have her say she's been craving a Whopper all day. Now all these weight-obsessed girls say "Well, skinny Marissa Cooper eats Burger King, so I can too!" I know, it's sleazy, but since when have you been worried about that?

But you don't want to over do it with the product placement. If all our favorite shows turn into 60 minute commercials, we'll stop watching them. So you supplement it with ads on the bottom quarter of the screen. Not on top of the show, we hate that. Use the already available real estate. When I download a show from HDTV, there's already a significant amount of black above and below it in full screen mode. So use a bit of that real estate to post ads every now and then. When Alex says "I'll NetFlix it for you" you post an ad for NetFlix, complete with URL, in that bottom portion. When they're driving down the road, post your car ad. Music's playing? Time for an iPod ad. If you're posting the show yourselves, you can even keep the commercial breaks in there, but be aware that we'll skip through those. That's why you just posts mini-ads while the show is happening, and we can't escape them.

I'm sure I'm gonna piss a lot of people off with the mere mention of ways to bombard us with more advertising, but I'm just being pragmatic. When my TV is ruined in an electric storm right before all the season finales, I'd rather be able to download them easily with commercials than miss them altogether. (Hello, I've watched every episode of Lost during its regular Prime Time slot, and you tell me I can't watch the last two hours because my TV shorted out and it's wrong to download media that I watch for free anyways when it's aired? Gimme a break!)

So, to recap, TV Execs, chill out and evolve with the technology. Downloading is big business, if you're not afraid to try it out. Oh yeah, and if you use my ideas, I want you to pay me whatever you're paying those silly lawyers who are trying to stop TV file sharing. You know you'll make more money in the long run my way.

I've got soul, but I'm not a soljah

So, James Brown. Yeah. In case you didn't read Chris's posts yet, James Brown played a free concert down at Forsyth Park (4 blocks from us) tonight for SCAD graduation. So we went. There were a lot of people there, as you would imagine, being that James Brown was performing live in downtown Savannah for free. I wasn't really that excited about going, because I'm not really all into James Brown. I know, shoot me, but just because people tell me I'm supposed to revere an artist doesn't mean that I suddenly do. It's not like James Brown's music bothers me; it doesn't offend my senses like Country music does. It just doesn't rock my world. Besides, I've seen him before, at the Alachua County Music Harvest back in college (affectionately known as "Back In The Day"). And he wasn't all that exciting then. So I was expecting more of the same, and I got it.

But since this is my blog and I can say whatever I feel like here, I will elaborate just a little about the experience. And you can't stop me.

James Brown has a PR Announcer who spent the first 15 minutes before The Man came on stage trying to remind us that we really wanted to see him. Really. He just kept yelling "Are you ready for Ja-ay-yay-mes Brown! Jay-ay-ay-ames Brown!" and other sundry things that always ended in a long rendition of his name. I thought the thousands of people crowded around the stage did't need any more convincing that they wanted to see this guy, but apparently James Brown Himself thought it necessary to pay someone to spend 15 minutes before his set telling us how cool he is. So finally he comes on stage and plays a little music. Then the Announcer needs to remind us that we are, indeed, listening to Ja-ay-aymes Brown, just in case we had forgotten. Then The Godfather of Soul told us he was now (after an hour of playing) going to "Get Up And Do My Thang." After he said about a dozen times that he would, indeed, "Do His Thang" some girl in his band asked everyone a few more times if we were ready for James Brown to "do his thang." I guess he wasn't getting enough encouragement. After 10 - 15 minutes of that, he played one more song. Not even a big song that everyone knows. Nothing major at all. And then that was it. I guess "his thang" is to jam for a few minutes and then get off stage. W00t.

Now I guess I can't really complain since I didn't spend any money for this experience. Well, I'm sure Chris's tuition helped out a lot, and we'll be paying that off for a long time. And when I saw him at Harvest he was about 45 minutes late getting on stage anyways, so I should be happy he started on time. But really, when you're The Godfather of Soul and you're as well known as he is, why would you need to pay some guy to spend 30 minutes of your set telling people how great you are? Shouldn't he be secure in his awesomeness by now? At any rate, because I'm easily annoyed, this whole announcer hooplah and lots-of-hype-without-lots-of-performing just ruined any possible enjoyment of the show.

The End.

Since I wasted a lot of space here complaining about the show, I'll wait til tomorrow to ramble about the other stuff on my mind.

(* the title is from a song by The Killers that Chris was playing in the car today)

Updates from the Bay Window

I realized it's been a while since I last gushed about my plants and my birds, so I thought I would give you all an update.

The tomato plant just keeps getting bigger, but I only have 5 tomatoes growing on it. I was hoping for many more. I guess trying to pollinate it didn't really work. But I don't know what else I could have done. It's at least 7 feet tall now, though. Crazy. And the pepper plant has flowered a lot but hasn't grown any bell peppers, so I guess that was a flop. It's also infested with aphids that I can't get rid of, no matter how much soap spray I attack them with. Alas.

My parsley is still faring well, though, and I've started some basil from seeds and they seem to be behaving, although it will be a while before I know if it really worked.

As for the birds, the baby is now eating solid food, but he's still really picky about what he eats. At least now he's eating other stuff when I don't give him millet. And they're both in the same cage, and they don't fight when they're in the same cage, but they also don't really cuddle with each other. Bubs just tries to stay away from the little one, and that's about it. Unfortunately, I haven't had a lot of time to love on them lately, so the little one doesn't like to be out with me now. I need to work on him some more. And Bubs is back to pulling out feathers, which is why we bought the other one in the first place. So I guess he's either still bored with the other bird in the cage, or it's just a habit he's not going to break. Alas.

And that's it. I probably won't talk about my plants and pets again for a while since they're not nearly as interesting as they were for a while.

ATL Last Weekend

So I never did remark on how the weekend in Atlanta went with the Princeton Review Training. All in all, it was pretty good. They put me up in a nice hotel, my food was comped, and the trainer was pretty energetic, which kept my attention. He was a bit rude to everyone, and demanded a LOT of work from us Saturday night (then after we all lost sleep studying to be prepared to teach a section of the book, he came in Sunday morning whining that he was in a bad mood and didn't get much sleep because he was out partying the night before. Oh yeah, we all felt a whole lotta sympathy for him). But at least he was a good at the teaching aspect of things.

While I was in town, I got to see Brooke for an evening, and we caught up on each other's lives, so that was nice. And my brother-in-law, Sam, met up with me for lunch on Saturday, which was also cool. Not a bad weekend, I must say.

I'm not a big fan of driving long distances all by myself, and 4 hours straight is, to me, a long distance. So I really wasn't looking forward to the trips there and back. But my rental car was very enjoyable, and that made things easier. It was an Elantra, and I really liked how it handled, and how easy it was to set and adjust the cruise control. I also got a couple books on tape for the trip, so I could keep my brain working, and I think that made it a lot easier. I started out with C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce." I really enjoyed that one. I can't for the life of me remember the proper term for this kind of book,* where he's telling a fictional story but throwing in a lot of theology and "stuff to think about" in the middle, much like "The Screwtape Letters." But the second one I tried was "The Abolition of Man." This was NOT a story, it was 3 essays on related topics of thought, and was way too philosophical for me. I would try to tell you what it was about, but I couldn't keep my mind focussed on it, so I really have very little idea. I tried, really hard, through about 3/4 of the book, until I realized that I hadn't been paying attention and really had no idea what he was saying, and finally gave up. Alas.

* Whoever is first to tell me the literary term for this kind of writing will receive my eternal admiration, and perhaps a cookie.

More Cool Websites

Continuing my recent raving over cool websites and web browsers that make life just a little better, I've got two more to add to the list.

Backpack. You can sign up for a free account or upgrade if it suits you, but this is a pretty cool tool. It's really new, so there are some features missing that will be added later, but you basically get 5 pages of space to keep track of your life online. Like I've said before, I use 3 different computers on a daily basis, so it's nice to have a place online to store things that I'll want from anywhere. With Backpack I'm able to keep a page of info about grad schools, freelance projects, Princeton Review training weekends, or whatever all at my fingertips. For example, instead of trying to keep all my info for the past weekend in Atlanta in a million pieces of paper or a few different emails, I used Backpack to keep one page online that listed links to Google Map directions, my hotel info, my food stipend info, meeting times, car rental info, contact information, etc all together on one site. Then I could print it all out together when I needed to hit the road. Super cool.

While we're on the topic of how the internet can help you make plans, AAA has a website where youc an calculate the cost of gas on a road trip. You input where you're at, where you're going, the make and model of your car, and then it will calculate the current price of gas with the gas mileage on your car to give you a good approximation of how much it will cost you to take that road trip. Very cool for budgeting.

I love technology.

Princeton Review and the ATL

Tomorrow I head to Atlanta for the weekend. I'm going to be in training with The Princeton Review to get certified to teach SAT Prep courses. They're paying for expenses for the weekend, and I'll be in class Friday night and all day Sat and Sun. Then I do it again in two weekends. When I'm done, I'll be certified to teach SAT Prep classes, and then Princeton Review will schedule times for me to teach classes or do one-on-one tutoring in the Savannah area, on nights and weekends. I have no idea what to expect, or how many hours I'll get a week for it or anything. But the pay is decent, I'll get to teach, and it will keep my brain fresh.

I've always been really good at standardized tests (that's not to brag, it's just a proven fact that I am good at taking tests), but I haven't had to do math in 6 years. When I was 19 I took Calc II in college, decided that I wasn't going to do chemical engineering, and then never had to think beyond basic math skills again. I don't remember the Special Triangles from geometry, or algebraic equations (FOIL anyone?), or anything like that. It's true, if you don't use it, you lose it. So I'm kind of looking forward to being forced to remember this stuff again. Plus I figure I'll eventually have to take the GRE for grad school, so what better way to get in the groove than to learn how to be a pro at the SAT?

At any rate, I was looking forward to going until today, when I woke up feeling like I've got the flu again. I have never been sick so much in my LIFE. I don't know where it's coming from. I'm sleeping well, eating well, drinking lots of herbal tea... why do I keep getting sick? I feel fuzzy, my head is pounding, my throat hurts, and I'm sluggish. I'm having a hard time thinking, or doing anything. And I have to drive 4 1/2 hours tomorrow and then sit in 3 hours of class, sleep in a hotel room, and then spend another 7 hours in class. Rinse, lather, repeat. I'm just hoping I can make it. If I don't go, I'll never get to go. They only do this training once every 6 months or so, and I couldn't make it in December. Man, I feel like I can never catch a break lately.

So please pray for me. That I feel better, that I have a safe drive, and that all goes well in the training. But mainly that this illness goes away.

Special Two-Part Blog: Kill Your TV and Good Grief!

Okay, last post of the day. Promise.

Unfortunately, this is gonna be a bit of a whiny post.

Part 1: Kill Your TV

Yesterday I made a comment to Chris about how dumb I feel lately. The synapses in my brain don't quite connect, I feel like I can rarely hold my end of a conversation, because halfway through I'll completely forget what we are talking about and what I was going to say. Names and titles and simple words escape my vocabulary. Collegues are almost afraid to talk to me knowing what they'll get themselves into. Why am I getting so dumb? Considering I've never tried illegal substances, it can't be blamed on pot. And I don't drink enough to blame it on liquor. I would blame it on sleep deprivation, but I feel that's only part of it, as I'm at least getting 7 hours of sleep a night (better than High School, when I was pulling all As in AP classes). So it finally struck me. It's the TV. Television is making me into a moron.

For years I hardly watched any TV, if any. It's only been in the past two years that I've started turning it on randomly, to relax and not worry about stuff. The past few months it's reached its peak, though. I get home from work around 5:30 and I have nothing to do for the rest of the night. Chris is gone most the time with school or work. Almost everyone else I know are students, so they never have time to get together (and I got tired of making plans only to have them cancel on me). Plus, I'm usually kinda tired once I get home and don't really care to go back out. So what do I do? I turn on the TV and I work on the computer (usually simultaneously). That statistic about people watching 7 hours of TV a day? That's me. There are about 7 tv shows I really care about seeing in a given week, but I'll watch useless TV if it's my only option. And it's rotting my brain.

Lucky for me, I tell Chris, the seasons are ending. Half my shows have had their season finale... the rest are one or two episodes away. So I tell Chris "As soon as these season finales air, I need to stop watching so much TV." (I cannot state with enough emphasis how much 22 year old Kendra would have scoffed at 25 year old Kendra for her TV dependence).

Today, Chris and I walk into the apartment at the same time after work and school. Something smells really weird. We scour the house looking for the culprit, and can't find anything, but that strong smell is still there. Finally, Chris goes to turn on the TV.

Nothing happens.

We had a storm about an hour earlier. The lights flickered at work. I notice that a couple of clocks are blinking, so obviously the power went out here, too. Nothing else on the same power strip has been affected, though. Just the TV. My beautiful, 27 inch TV is gone.

No Gilmore Girls for me.

Now, believe it or not, I think this is hilarious. This kind of stuff happens to me a little too often, to tell you the truth. Whenever I have an addiction-of-sorts that I can't seem to control, or don't really care about controlling, God steps in and makes it impossible for me to continue. I had a $25/week espresso habit in college. One day it dawned on me that my espresso addiction was a little over the top, but I wasn't concerned about it, and certainly didn't plan to cut back. Soon after I became completely intolerant to coffee. Not just regular coffee, not just espresso, but decaf, too. I shake, my vision goes weird, and I feel like I'm going to pass out. And my veins HURT. I still can't drink much of it... maybe a decaf with lots of milk once a week or so, and that's only after I had to stop completely for 2 years. So when my TV is destroyed a day after I realize it's making me into a dumb sloth, I'm not all that surprised. It's just par for the course.

Chris is taking this a little harder than I am. He's more concerned about the destruction of a good piece of electronics (that should have lasted another 15 years), and the cost of replacing it, especially with our tight budget. Even worse is the knowledge that I have no intention of running right out and replacing it.

Especially considering I can't tell you how many times in the past two hours I've almost reached for the remote.

Part 2: Good Grief!

The second part of my saga is the fact that one other thing has been damaged due to this storm. Our router no longer sends signals through the ethernet cables, but somehow the wireless portion still works. I'm thanking God that my computer wasn't fried, but it's pretty frustrating that now I can't get internet to my Mac. I had some business to take care of, too, and there are all sorts of things on my Mac (emails and email addresses and such) that are on there, and do me no good without internet. So I've had to keep transfering files to my thumb drive and over to Chris's laptop, only to discover that Microsoft's e-mail program for a Mac (Entourage) is completely incompatible with Microsoft's e-mail program for a PC (Outlook). Can you believe it? How is a person supposed to be convinced to switch from a Mac to a PC if they can't even properly transfer their contact lists? Entourage only exports contacts as a Tab-delimited file, which amazingly is complete incompatible with Outlook's "Import Tab-delimited file" command, or ANY OTHER Outlook Import command. I tried converting the tabs into Windows-friendly tabs, I tried importing it into Excel, saving it as an Excel file, and then importing it into Outlook... nothing works. Nothing. So back and forth I go. Stupid computers.

I want to close this sob-fest by pointing out how blessed we are that neither computer was injured in the storm, that at least wireless internet works (and that's what we use 80% of the time), and that absolutely nothing more major happened than a busted TV and a loss of internet to one computer. But that doesn't stop me from wanting to whine about the things that go wrong. I mean really, what fun would that be?

PEZ and Recipes

Okay, so I'm a little blog-happy today.

I am trying to come up with an easy way to keep track of recipes online. Being the domesticated woman I am, I find myself often talking about recipes with friends, and I'm always saying "I'll email you this recipe..." but darnit, that takes alot of work! What I want to do is find a recipe website that will let me put all my favorite recipes into its database, then provide a link on this website to my recipes so that my friends can find them all in one place. I've tried signing up for Recipezaar, Epicurious, and AllRecipes with that in mind, but none of them have anything close! Recipezaar is the only one that lets you post your own recipes, but they have to approve it for their list, so I can't keep private recipes without paying for their premium service. Even then, my recipe list would only consist of ones I've added myself, not of recipes that I've saved to my recipe box from other users. I thought of trying wikipes, because at least there you can make a page from a search, so I could link to a search page of recipes by "kendra skeene", but with wikipes I run the risk of other users deciding to edit my recipe, thereby messing it up. No good. I could make my own database for it, but it wouldn't be as complete, because it wouldn't automagically show nutrition info like many of the other services offer. Bleh.

The point of all this is to say that if anyone knows of another recipe site that would cater to my all-too-specific needs, please let me know. There's a lovely little link below labeled "Comments" where you can tell me your ideas.

Linkability

Yesterday I decided to make a PHP database to manage the links that Chris and I have on our links page. It seemed easier than editing the HTML and uploading every time I wanted to add a link, and although it took a couple hours to create the database, port everything over, and write an admin interface for Chris and I to manage them, I think it will save us time in the long run, AND encourage us to add links, now that it's so easy. What does this mean? Well, it means I went a little link-happy and put a whole bunch of extra links on my side. It's really a reference for me more than anything else, since I am on 3 different computers on a daily basis, and get tired of trying to figure out where I saved that bookmark. Now I still have a million random bookmarks in a million places, but anything I might want from anywhere is there on that page.

One of the new additions to the Reference section is Answers.com. I just discovered this site, and it beats the pants off dictionary.com and thesaurus.com. It's basically your one-stop answer shop. Good stuff. I just had to share.

It's the SPAMiest!

The amount of SPAM mail I receive just increased quite a bit, and I'm wondering if it's something I did or just SPAMmer getting busy. Mainly, I just started getting a whole bunch of SPAM that's all in German. Very odd, but the worst part is that since it's not in english, my SPAM filters don't always recognize it as junk, so some of it makes it into my Inbox. Jerks. Is anyone else getting this stuff, or am I special?

Update: I think someone who works at SCAD stole their database and sold it to some German company, because all the German spam is being sent to student.scad.edu addresses, and they're also sending out mail using my old scad address as the reply-to. I have my scad email configured to forward to my personal email address, so that must be the culprit. Proof that our data is safe nowhere.

Firefox

Anyone who spends any time reading articles about web/tech stuff has at least heard some of the buzz about Firefox, but for those of you that don't read that stuff, I feel it's my duty as a web designer who spends way too much time on the internet to enlighten you about this Internet Explorer alternative. It's a web browser. Big whoop. Why would anyone want a different web browser? Well, some people claim it's got less security bugs than IE does, so it's a safer browsing experience. I also think it's a more ENJOYABLE browsing experience, for a few reasons. I will now expound on those reasons.

Tabbed Browsing. If you spend any time with IE, you probably have at least three browser windows open at any given time. This can get frustrating after a while, especially if you have borderline OCD about organization, like I do when I'm on my computer. The solution? Firefox (and pretty much every non-IE browser) gives you the option to have ONE browser window, with multiple "tabs" at the top to keep track of all your open pages. Want to follow a link from an article or blog post, but want to finish reading the current site? Right-click the link and choose "open in new tab" and it will load silently in a new tab that you can get to when you need it. That's my preferred browsing method. I currently have 5 tabs open, which saves me from 4 extra open windows. I love tabs.

Extensions. This is my second-favorite thing in the tech world. From my Tools menu in Firefox, I can choose "Extensions" and from there click a link to a Firefox hosted web page that lists all the code-lets I can install to make my browsing experience even better. Smart people love making random gadgets that run with Firefox to let you do cool things. Some of them are super-useful to my web work (like widgets to sample colors and measure areas in a web page). Others are just convenient, like the ForcastFox Extension that displays the weather in the bottom right of my status bar. Right now I know that it's Hazey and 75 degrees outside, the high today is 83, and tomorrow will be partly cloudy, with a high of 83. And I didn't even have to go to another tab. It's just magically there for me. I love extensions.

Finally, from a designer standpoint, it does a better job of displaying code the way it's supposed to. IE is really buggy and doesn't display things right. Unfortunately, since most people use IE, that means a FEW pages won't display correctly in Firefox, because the designer coded their site for IE and didn't test it in any other browser. So if you do go to a site that seems "broken" in firefox, it really means the designer didn't know what they were doing. In contrast, some pages will work better in Firefox... such as the Pez page on this site, where the full list scrolls in a smaller area instead of stretching the page, because it knows how to do things that IE doesn't. Little things like that are easier.

So now that I've bored you all with my weird rambling, if you wanna check out the new great thing in web browsing, go ahead:

Happy Birthday to Chris!

Today is Chris's birthday. He is an old man of 26 years. No wonder he's bald.

In case you missed the last time I posted this, or just forgot about it, an easy way to wish Chris a happy birthday is to click this link: http://www.freeiPods.com/?r=8151333 and sign up for a trial of something. (For example, you can sign up for a trial of Blockbuster's mail-in-DVD service, at a cheaper rate). Just make sure you don't use your primary e-mail address. Go sign up for a Yahoo account or something and use that, because you will get spam mail from it (but you HAVE to use a real email address). In case you're thinking "Oh, I'm sure someone else will do this for him..." no one else has, other than Chris's brother, and Shane. So go ahead and click the link and make my hubby very happy.

Things That Don't Exist

In case you ever thought of something and wondered whether or not it exists, you now have a website you can visit to see if it is on the exhaustive list of things that don't exist, and you'll have your answer. Good to know.

Gainesville, part 2

Yesterday we went back to Gainesville for Chris to take some more pictures. It went well, and we got to see the Gearys, and a couple of Chris's friends. Fun, but way too much driving.

Yesterday was also, for me, "TV Advertising Influences" day, because I made two purchases based on TV commercials. I decided for lunch to try Arby's turkey reuben because it looked good on the commercials. Not only did I realize that fast food is ridiculously priced (what ever happened to 99 cent sandwiches??), but I was reminded that things never are as good as they look in the commercials. The "toasted" bread was mushy. Not so good, in general. Then I decided to try the new lime Coca Cola. Again, not that exciting. I rarely drink soda, but this coke didn't taste any different from regular, to me. So I've learned my lesson not to buy stuff from commercials.

Bubs (the older lovebird) is pretty mad at us for leaving him alone all of yesterday, so we've had to pay for it with unstoppable squawking from the eldest lovebird today.

Bloglessness

Well, since pretty much no one I know has updated their blogs in DAYS, I figured I had to post something just to make up for the silence abounding. So let's see... well, the birds are doing well although still not liking each other. The tomato plant has grown another 6 inches since I last reported on it (now about 5 foot 6 inches tall), and has a couple green tomatoes about the width of my pinky on it.

Tomorrow is going to be another day of driving down to Gainesville to take pictures, then coming all the way back all in one day. Chris's teacher told him he should go back and take more photos "in response" to the work he's already done... and tomorrow is the only time in the forseeable future that he can go. Which means I have to go, too. What fun.

Yeah, I have nothing more to say right now. I'm gonna go eat lunch.

PEZ and PHP

I've spent the past week or so writing a script to search our PEZ database, so it's easier to find what you're looking for. I know. SO MANY people come here looking to see what PEZ dispensers we have. It's such a common occurrence. Well, it was more of a practice, writing the search function, and I had the PEZ database already so I figured that was a good place to start. And once it was completed, I figured I might as well actually put it up on the site. So if you click the "PEZ" link at the top of the page, you will notice that you can now search for specific keywords in the PEZ list, OR you can browse by category. So, for example, if you know Chris's birthday is Monday, May 9th, and you see some Star Wars PEZ at Wal-Mart and wonder if we have them, you can choose "Star Wars" from the drop-down list and check to see if what you saw is already in our list. How nice!

With that in mind, there are a couple things that Chris will work on adding to his list in the near future. One thing is adding images, so if you see the new trucks at the Party Store and want to know if we have them, and you view our Trucks list, and you wonder "Were the trucks I saw R4 trucks, or not? How would someone know this stuff?" you would be able to click on the icon to the right of a certain truck to see a picture of it, and realize that no, the fancy PEZ trucks you saw were NOT the ones we have, and, in fact, you would make Chris's day if you were to buy him some of the fancy new trucks. The other thing on his To Do list is to add a "Wish List" of PEZ he doesn't have that are currently available in stores, so you could just choose to view his Wish List to see the PEZ he's currently lacking. But these things won't happen for a little while longer. But for now you can revel in how cool it is that I wrote code to allow you to do AND and NOT searches for PEZ dispensers. Yes, I have entirely too much free time.

Birds

So I'm rather obsessed with my bird situation currently. Having a new one really requires a lot of time and attention... I have to make sure I train him right when he's little, and I'm still trying to make sure Bubs feels loved and becomes friends with the new one. Much energy. The new little one is doing well. He's eating when I feed him, and he's also munching on his spray millet in his cage. And after just two days, he's already getting on my hand when I put it in the cage instead of hiding from it. He's already learning to step up... and I'm working on the potty training, although I expect that to take a while. Right now I just wear a shirt I don't care about whenever I'm home, because with two birds I am pooped on about 3 times as often as I was with just one. But anyways, yes, they're doing well, although still not into each other.

As for the name situation, I'm having a tough time calling him So and So... it just doesn't work for me. I keep calling him "Little one" without meaning to, and sometimes The Littlest Elf. So I thought maybe I'd just call him Li'l Brudder and that would work since it's still a Homestar reference... he's just... little... and requires a name with "little" in it. I don't know. I can't help it. Maybe he'll be one of those pets that has a name no one calls him, and then has a nickname that everyone calls him. ::Shrugs::

I'm done for now.

Chris

Just to add to the digital photo-ness, here are a couple pictures of Chris doing his thing this past Saturday along HWY 301 while I sat in the car.

Oh yeah, and my tomato plant is past 5 foot tall, and budding all over, and my green pepper plant is finally producing some flowers. I can't wait til I actually get food from these guys.

So and so

As promised, here are some pictures of my new baby lovebird, and a couple of the old one. Chris decided he got to name the bird, since it's my bird... don't ask me how that logic makes sense, but he puts up with a lot because of these birds, so I conceded. So, I present to you our new lovebird, So and so Li'l Brudder:

And the old one, Bubs:

For those of you wondering about the names, they are from Homestar Runner... Bubs was already named when we got him, but we decided to continue the trend with So and so, but that may have changed to Li'l Brudder. And that's the whole story.

Busy Weekend

Our weekend included driving all the way to Gainesville, FL, having dinner with a couple friends, and then driving all the way back to Savannah, GA, in one day. The real purpose was for Chris to take pictures along Hwy 301, which he spent a good 3 or 4 hours doing, so we didn't really drive all the way to Gainesville to have dinner.

Our next bit of excitement is that we got our lovebird, Bubs, a new lovebird friend. He's been a bit lonely since Chris and I are gone so much. The new lovebird is a baby, still needing to be hand-fed for a week or so. He's very cute. Bubs and the new baby aren't quite friends yet, though. Bubs doesn't quite know what to make of the new addition, so he's been cranky with it (they're in separate cages for the baby's protection). This will no doubt be an interesting week or two of birdy-drama. Pictures and updates to follow.