April 2007

MTV completely redesigned their site. They switched from all-Flash to (gasp!) all-HTML. Brilliant.

I bought a CD today. It was a little bit strange. I can’t remember the last time I bought an actual compact disc. I’m sure this isn’t the first one I’ve bought since I moved to LA seven years ago, but I know that since I got my iPod the number of CDs I’ve purchased is in the single digits. That is somewhat incredible.

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I uploaded some gnarly photos — of the sudden, random eye infection I got this morning — to my Flickr page. I’m fine now, thanks.

Commissioner Bud Selig announced Tuesday the discovery that Hall of Famer Hank Aaron had in fact accumulated 50 previously unaccounted-for home runs … bringing his once record total of 755 to an even higher 805 and putting the all-time home-run record perhaps forever out of reach.

Renowned cat veterinarian and beloved Cornell University professor James Richards died Tuesday from injuries suffered in a motorcycle accident that occurred on Sunday.
Richards, the director of Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine’s Feline Health Center, was thrown from his motorcycle when he attempted to avoid a cat in the road.

What happens when a real celebrity has a real blog? There are a few mediocre celebrities that have pseudo-real blogs. (Zach Braff comes to mind. Aside from the fact that you can clearly see he’s high every now and then, he’s about the least controversial guy in Hollywood.) Few truly famous people are out there creating honest-to-goodness blog entries. Mark Cuban is one. Curt Schilling is another.

Schilling is a rock star in the baseball universe, and he has been since even before he helped pitch the Red Sox to the most amazing win in baseball history. He started a blog a few months ago and he writes from the heart, not just marketing drivel or media propaganda. It’s great reading. He writes about Spring training, about his team, about his life. He basically keeps a blog just like I keep this blog.

Right now Schilling’s under a bit of a media attack. Some jerk reporter has accused him (and his team) of doctoring “the sock” — exaggerating the amount of blood by adding ketchup or some nonsense like that. But Schilling — unlike most people who find themselves the subject of media scrutiny — has a blog. His reply to the issue is brilliantly-written and well worth a read. Here’s a snippet:

If you have the nuts, or the guts, grab an orthopedic surgeon, have them suture your ankle skin down to the tissue covering the bone in your ankle joint, then walk around for 4 hours. After that go find a mound, throw a hundred or so pitches, run over, cover first a few times. When you’re done check that ankle and see if it bleeds. It will.

What is an appropriate metaphor for Dick Cheney?

Colbert: Dick Cheney is a lioness protecting America’s cubs from the laughing hyenas of the left while the poachers of internationalism sharpen their guns … knives.

Penn: Dick Cheney is the spinster left at the altar looking out her dirty window at the happy lives of the laughing girls in their calico prints, knowing that her only pleasure will be the evening bath she draws from the moisture of George Bush’s soiled and blood-soaked underwear.

from Sean Penn v. Stephen Colbert in a Meta-Free-Phor-All

From the Department of Inexplicable Corporate Decisions: Pocket PC integration discontinued with Microsoft Money 2007.

On my desk right now is a football-shaped bowl of Willy Wonka’s Everlasting Gobstoppers. I poured three entire boxes into the bowl a few days ago and am now in trouble. You see, I’ve been methodically eating them by color. I started with red and then went to orange. The problem is that now there are only purple, yellow, and green remaining. I had been planning on eating the green ones next. If I do that, though, then there will only be LSU colors left in the bowl. They are an SEC rival, so I just can’t do that. I can try to think of them as the Lakers, but I just don’t care enough about basketball … and the Tigers will still be in the back of my mind. I can’t eat the purple ones because that would leave yellow and green and that’s just hideous. I can’t eat the yellow ones because then there will only be green and purple and that’s even worse. I’m thinking that the best course of action in this situation is to just put the whole bowl on Molly’s desk.

Vote Nathan Petrelli for Congress

Is Spider-Man 3 the most expensive movie ever made?

At the top of a tall, round building casting a shadow on the highway — right where Sunset meets the 405 — is a restaurant called West. I ate there Friday night with my girlfriend fiancée and her mom. The view of the city is just incredible and the bone-in New York strip was one of the top ten steaks I’ve ever had.

Looking for a way to clear some of your computer’s clutter? Getting rid of empty directories is a good start. I was looking for a file and realized that my machine was spending a long time searching through folders that I knew had nothing in them. A quick Google search returned a handy DOS trick to zap them all. It took me about one minute to delete just over two thousand empty folders. There’s nothing like a little command-line scripting to get something done.

We’re running a Belkin Wireless G router in my office. I had to rummage in my garage for a few old wireless USB dongles, but it’s much nicer than having to string CAT-5 all over the place. (I hate cables.) Some of us were suffering deadly latency and frequently-dropped connections, which was annoying as hell. I flashed the firmware and tweaked every setting on the thing, but the problem persisted.

Then I had lunch with a friend this week and he suggested that I switch the router from Channel 11, which I had thought was the best, to Channel 6, which is actually the strongest. Blam-o! Now we all have a much stronger signal and no drops. Brilliant.