December 2006

About a week ago I caught one of my co-workers, a very nice guy named Tawan, eating these Zotes sunflower seeds during a management meeting. I have an abnormal addiction to seeds and nuts, so I was forced to steal some from him. He said he found them in a gas station convenience store and was nice enough to grab me a container of the beer-baked ones a few days later. They also make tequila lime, spicy nacho, and dill pickle-flavored varieties. They are quite delicious, and the packaging is genius.

There is something pathetically ironic about being stuck in twelve lanes of 15 mph traffic in Los Angeles while driving to court to deal with a speeding ticket. Late at night back in May I was doing about 65 mph in the center lane of this same freeway when a maniac came flying down the road behind me. I gunned it to get out of his way and the maniac turned out to be a cop who proceeded to give me a speeding ticket. When I explained that I was only trying to get out of his way he laughed at me.

Traffic on the 405 at 3pm on an average Thursday in Los Angeles.

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A little while ago I cobbled together a tagging system here on the site. The tags appear at the bottom of each post and you can use them to find related content. For some reason, though, they aren’t being caught by Technorati. I’m pretty sure I followed their specs exactly, but no dice. Every time I checked, the only tags that would display for a post in their summary were the categories associated with an entry.

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I was listening to Colin Cowherd’s “The Herd” on my local ESPNRadio affiliate while I drove to work this morning. Colin was talking about the fact that the vast majority of cable companies are not carrying the NFLNetwork. Apparently the Rutgers bowl game is going to be on the NFLN and that means that most of New York and New Jersey viewers will not get the game. He said that he thinks ESPN (the television network) should be worried about the NFLNetwork penetrating basic cable because it represents more competition for viewers. I completely disagree.

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If you’re interested in displaying an RSS feed from an external source using PHP, you simply must grab RSS_Fetch by Drew Phillips. It is by far the easiest implementation that I have found. The readme file is very detailed and the code is well-documented. I highly recommend it.

Contextless Content: A portion of a conversation, usually from an instant messenger platform.

Josh says:
if me and you were in a dark alley in Compton or a haunted mansion and you said, hey this is pretty scary, let’s split up. I would say, I have a better idea, no

David says:
1. I would never be with you in either of those places.
2. I would never suggest splitting up, either.
But if you had a bullet wound and were bleeding to death, I would probably have to say, stay here and I’ll go get help.

Josh says:
you never know when we could just be visiting some haunted mansion behind a dark alley, in Compton
after I was just shot

David says:
that’s what’s amazing
I do know
March 3rd
be prepared

Josh says:
k
i’ll bring a bullet proof vest

David says:
it’s too late

David says:
it’s a leg wound anyway

Where does the year go? This one is almost over so it’s time to start doing some wrap-ups. Thanks to TiVo I have gotten to watch a ton of the tube this year, and there has been some excellent stuff to see. Here’s my picks for the top ten shows of 2006. Feel free to argue, but remember that I’m always right.

Wife Swap / Desperate Housewives (ABC)

Don’t vomit just yet. If you haven’t given either of these shows a chance, I’m telling you that you’re missing some of the best “scream at the television” action there is. Both shows are essentially hour-long exercises in watching women act like complete and total retards. There has not been a Wife Swap yet that didn’t have me at some point shaking my head and wondering seriously about the viability of our species. Are there really moms this stupid on our planet? And I am completely done with any Terry Hatcher plotline they can throw at me, but otherwise Desperate Housewives is seriously embarrassing, addictive fun. It’s a bummer that they killed the slutty-hot ex-lover in the supermarket fiasco.

Grey’s Anatomy (ABC)

Now that E.R. has finally gone off the … what? It’s still on? When will that show die? Good Lord! It jumped the shark ten years ago! Grey’s Anatomy may never achieve the excellence of the first two seasons of E.R., but McDreamy and McSteamy and the gang are way more fun than even the Clooney days of NBC’s doctor show were. The writers got us to care about Meredith’s slutty little existence and — with the exception of one exploding-man episode — have been able to avoid the repeated helicopter-train-earthquake-stuck-in-Africa “must see” hijinks of E.R. We all feel bad about Denny, but Alex is a good guy at heart, right?

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Now that is an awesome headline! As my friend Kelly, who sent me the link, said, “Only in Florida …” This is one hell of a story to read. You can file this one as “Reason #419 Not to Get High on Crack and Fall Asleep Next to a Lake in Central Florida”. I love the line, “It was not clear why Apgar was in the lake.”

“A 45-year-old man was hospitalized after four sheriff’s deputies rescued him from the jaws of a nearly 12-foot alligator Wednesday, while he was naked and high on crack cocaine.”

I can tell you from personal experience that there are few things in life as scary as being confronted with an alligator in the dark. There were probably a half-dozen times while I was in college that I came within three or four feet of a gator while on my morning runs. Crew practice started at five a.m. and Lake Newnan is in the middle of a swamp. I remember one time my crewmates and I had to sit in the boat on the water for a good half hour while we waited for a nasty-looking gator to get bored with sunning himself on our dock …

After several years of mostly neglecting my Flickr account, I have finally started uploading the tons and tons of photos I’ve taken. Flickr is — if you can stomach the missing “e” — an incredibly cool site. Everything is intuitive and as far as I can tell, they haven’t done anything “wrong” anywhere. It’s everything a good website should be.

I particularly like the way they do their best to determine the camera model used to take each photograph. The majority of mine were taken with my PowerShot S500. So many, in fact, that my battery has started to fade away. A full charge used to last days and days, but now it barely powers a day’s worth of snaps. Luckily I have the internet at my command.

It took me about five minutes to find a replacement battery on eBay for only $5.00 (with free shipping!) from a company called iTrimming. Their site isn’t brilliant, but they do have a ton of inexpensive cool little geek accessories. My battery arrived in three days and, as a “bonus”, they included one of those silly cell phone antenna boosters. Now, I’m going to guess that this thing is absolutely worthless. (How can a little sticker with some metallic ridges on it possibly improve my cell phone’s reception?) It was worth it to open the package, though, if only to read the Chinese instructions. “THE ANTENNA WILL WORK MOST EFFICIENTLY WHEN INSTALLED PRORERLY,” it exclaims.

I dig how the package lists “Elevators, tunnels, buildings and more” on its feature list. It doesn’t say that the antenna improves reception in these places or anything; it simply has those words in the list. The “Validity” section of the instructions is the best part. It states, “The Cell Antenna is generally not affected by extreme heat of moisture, however, users ate advised to protect the antenna from physical damage such as scratches. Under normal use, the Internal Antenna will have a 18 month lift span.”