Author: Tony

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Do you fund terrorism?

Everyone knows that America’s involment in most of the Middle East conflicts is all about one thing – oil. Back in Desert Storm, we weren’t protecting the people of Kuwait, we were protecting their oil. The same thing is still going on today. Whenever war with Iraq is mentioned on the news, someone always brings up how it’s going to affect gas prices.

This is why I think it’s so strange that most Americans are infatuated with giant SUVs. It seems like if you aren’t driving a suburban, or something even bigger like a hummer, then you just aren’t cool anymore. People brag about the fact that their new SUV gets less than 10 miles to the gallon like it’s something to be proud of.

Now someone has set up a website to try to convince people that this might not be the best way. The site is called Americans for Fuel Efficient Cars. There you can read news articles and watch their commercials. I think they have a pretty good point.

Paige and I both drive Hondas, which are some of the most fuel efficient cars in the world…

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Stick it to me

After I got past all the war with Iraq, war with North Korea, and war with anybody else whose name George W. can’t pronounce stories, I found an interesting article on CNN about Manual vs. Automatic transmissions. The article itself wasn’t all that great, it was pretty much the same old arguments of sticks are more reliable and get better gas milage vs. automatics leave your gun hand free. The part that caught my attention was this:

Prior to the 1974 endangered species act, automatic transmissions were filled with fluid that was 95 percent sperm whale oil…

I’ve never heard anything like that before, and I worked for an oil company for over 5 years. Oh well, live and learn.

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GeoURL Down

If you haven’t read my previous entry about GeoURL then go read it and come back here.

As is often the case with new websites, they’re now down for maintenance. If you want to try it out and see websites for people near us, check back tomorrow. Oh well, it was fun for a few minutes this morning, hopefully they’ll make it even better.

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GeoURL

I just read about an interesting new website called GeoURL. They can give you a list of websites for people that are near you geographically. You sign up for their service by giving them your web address (URL) and location (longitude and latitude). Once you’re in their database you can get a list of sites near you.

Anyway, I signed us up for it and added a button (at the bottom of the right column) to the site so you can see websites for people near us.

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Lookin’ Good

I think I’m through with all the changes to the main page for now. I still need to edit all the other pages and update them to match. I’ve tested the layout in Internet Explorer 6 for Windows, Mozilla 1.3b and 1.2.1 on Linux and Windows, and Konqueror 3.0 on Linux. It looks good to me in every browser I’ve tested now. Hopefully it will look OK on a Mac also. If you see any problems with the layout of this page, let me know.

Here’s what the updates did in case anyone’s curious. First, I changed the way the comments work so instead of popping up a new comment window, it opens a page in the browser where you can comment. I think this is much better. Pages that popup everywhere drive me crazy. Next I upgraded us to the latest version of Movable Type, 2.51. Also, while I was updating I decided to try some of their other features like TrackBack and Syndication through RDF files. These features make it easy for other people with blogs to link to our site.

These changes required a few modifications to the layout of the site, so I just went ahead and reverted back to Movable Type’s default layout. Of course then I had to tweak it a bit to make it look how I like it. The default font is a little bigger now, hopefully that’ll make it easier to read. It was extremely small before in some browsers.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the changes.

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Don’t Panic

Words of wisdom from the late, great Douglas Adams.

I’m making a few changes to the site right now, so things may look a little funny. Rest assured everything will be back to normal soon.

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My Christmas Break

I remember whenever we’d get back from a long holiday in school, we’d always have to write a paper about what we did. I’m not sure if they still make students do that today, but just in case, here’s mine:

The two weeks started off pretty wild. It’s a lot of work getting ready for Christmas – cooking, wrapping presents, keeping the cat and dog out of the tree, etc. OK, so Paige did most of that stuff, but watching her work really wears me out sometimes…

After all of the family visiting and stuffing ourselves silly on turkey and ham and everything that goes with it, things calmed down a bit. I feel like I finally got caught up on some sleep. We then started trying to organize ourselves a little better. I’m pretty much a pack rat, so for me organizing means going through all the things I haven’t looked at in years and throwing them away. I hope nobody needed a copy of Turbo Pascal for DOS, because I just pitched one in the dumpster. I think I made some real progress.

Of course, we also set aside some time for fun. We finally managed to defeat Baal on Nightmare in Diablo II. We took a trip to Sherman for shopping and Red Lobster. Geoff stopped by for a while. We also finally got around to seeing The Two Towers with Ben. It was even better than I expected, very impressive. The movie that is, not Ben, he’s still the same as always…

So after two weeks off I’m back at work, and next week I’ll be back in school also. It sounds like a bummer, but actually I’m excited about it. I’m taking three classes this semester. After that I’ll be just three classes away from graduating. I’ll even be able to take one of those classes online. So after this sememster I’ll only have to sit through two more classes. There’s a light at the end of my college tunnel and it gets a brighter every day. This time next year be living in a whole new world.

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Fits

I’ve been working hard lately on my Fill in the Site program. I’ve uploaded a new version, and added a lot of information to the web site. If you’re a network admin at a school district, and you’re interested in setting up web pages for all of your teachers, you might want to check it out.

This is all being done in anticipation of the upcoming article about me in The Paris News.

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Christmas, Geek style

I just saw a funny link over on Slashdot.org, LinuxWorld.com has a page with several classic Christmas songs rewritten with a “tech spin”.

Here’s a few of my favorite lines. This one’s to the tune of Silver Bells.

Dim the hall lights, use the street lights,
Gotta save all our green
We’ve run out of all our unemployment.

It’s the big crunch, we’ve a good hunch
That our 401K
Will be empty by early next year.

And how could you not love Microsoft is Coming to Town?

You better watch out
You better not cry,
“I don’t know where all my licenses lie!”
Microsoft is coming to town

You paid for it list,
You paid for it twice;
You paid even more for legal advice.
Microsoft is coming to town

They know when you run Windows
They know when you use Word
They treat a loyal customer
Like a lying, thieving turd.

If this doesn’t get everyone in the Christmas spirit, I don’t know what will.

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Grades

I just remembered, today is Wednesday so grades are out. I made A’s in all three of my classes last semester. That makes my cumulative GPA 3.909. That one B is going to haunt me forever…