Jessica Simpson… Cool?

I never really thought much of Jessica Simpson before. To be honest, I always thought she was… a waste of human flesh, really. But then I saw her in this AWESOME t-shirt:

Jessica Simpson Meat
Damn... that's sexy!

hehehehe!!! That’s awesome, Jessica! For some reason, I’m craving a steak now!

RIP: Jim McKay

Add Jim McKay to the list of the recently departed:

NEW YORK – Jim McKay, the veteran and eloquent sportscaster thrust into the role of telling Americans about the tragedy at the 1972 Munich Olympics, has died. He was 86.

McKay died Saturday, said ABC, the network with which he was long affiliated. The cause of death was not immediately given.

McKay was host of ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” for decades. The influential weekend series introduced viewers to all manners of strange, compelling and far-flung sports events.

But he was suddenly placed in the role of a newscaster in 1972 when Israeli athletes were kidnapped in Munich. As viewers followed the gripping story, McKay told how the hostages were killed in a commando raid.

McKay was the father of Sean McManus, president of CBS News and Sports.

I was too young to remember the 1972 Olympics, but I’ve seen McKay’s coverage in documentaries… and wow! McKay covered those horrible events with a sensitivity, humanity and grace that barely exists in the sports world these days. Oh, who am I kidding – it was a sensitivity, humanity and grace that barely exists in the world at all these days.

On a happier note, I’ll always have the voice of Jim McKay saying “… and the agony of defeat” permanently seared into my head!

RIP, Jim and God Bless!

COOL BAND: The Daysleepers

The DaysleepersSo… it seems I have a thing for “80s mash-up bands” lately.

First, I wrote about Blondfire, a band that sounds like early Pet Shop Boys with Sarah Cracknell of Saint Etienne as lead singer.

Just a few weeks have passed since then, and now I’ve stumbled upon The Daysleepers, a band that sounds like a cross between the Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me sound of The Cure and the Cocteau Twins!

There isn’t much else to say about the band, other than that they were founded in Buffalo, New York in November of 2004. So I guess something good – other than hot wings – can came from Buffalo! The Daysleepers MySpace page is here, and their official website (under heavy construction) is here.

Have a listen to “Lovesparkles”, a track from their newest album Drowned In A Sea of Sound and tell me what you think!

[audio:daysleepers.mp3]

EA Game Crash

As I mentioned in the “I’m Back” post from the other day, I went to Asheville this past weekend to attend a family wedding. On the drive home, Lisa and I stopped to pee at a convenience store somewhere in the sticks. As I walked in the store, a video game caught my eye. I stopped to look at the screen and saw this:

Console Error

(Click to enlarge)

There are hundreds of websites out that that have pictures of Windows error messages on ATMs, airport arrival\departure screens and giant billboards (think Times Square).

I’ve always wanted to be able to post my own picture… and now I can!

And BTW, you might notice the EA logo on the side of the console! 🙂

The Littlest Baby

We have two stray kitties that come up on our back deck. One of them – a female I named “Cindy” because she has a white face with a grey spot near her mouth that reminds me of Cindy Crawford’s mole – became pregnant. We finally saw her baby last night, when she brought her 8 week old kitten to our deck:

Littlest Baby

Click to enlarge!

Isn’t that just about adorable?

Celebrity WTF?!?

What’s the dealio with all the celebrity deaths and other bad news lately?

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been kind of busy for the past few days. I’ve marked certain posts about celebrity deaths, heath scares and arrests in my RSS bucket to post about here, but then I got busy… and now the marked posts are really piling up!

Here’s the list so far:

Martin Kelly (husband of actress Natascha McElhone, died of heart failure)
Bo Diddley (Blues musician, terrible health in the past few years)
Yves Saint Laurent (French designer, died of a brain tumor)
Ted Kennedy (Liberal jackass and bad driver, has brain tumor)
Kelsey Grammer (Actor, had “mild” heart attack)
Tatum O’Neal (arrested trying to buy crack cocaine)

What the hell?

As an interesting side note, if Ted Kennedy eventually dies of natural causes, he’ll be the only son of Joseph Kennedy Sr. to die of natural causes. Their oldest son, Joe, Jr., died in a plane crash in WWII, while John and Bobby were (of course) assassinated.

Time Warner Begins Capping Test

Well, folks, it’s official: Time Warner has officially begun testing bandwidth caps on new subscribers in Beaumont, Texas. As expected, the caps are terrible: customers that have “basic service” can get a 768kbps connection with 5GB of bandwidth per month, while heavier users can get a 15Mbps connection with a 40GB limit per month. Any bandwidth exceeding the 40GB/month cap will be billed at $1/GB. This news is a disaster not only for Internet addicts like myself, but for almost any family that makes use of the Internet on a regular basis.

40GB seems like a lot of bandwidth at first glance. After all, 40GB is around 120,000 web pages or 600,000 emails without attachments. But the Internet is used for much more than browsing the Internet and getting emails these days. Online backup services like Mozy use bandwidth to copy files for your computer to Mozy’s servers. VoIP services like Vonage and VoiceEclipse use bandwidth to place phone calls via the Internet. Game consoles like the XBOX 360 make heavy use of Internet play, which (of course) uses bandwidth. And games like World of Warcraft are, by definition, online only. People get a lot of their entertainment from (legitimate) online sources, such as iTunes and Hulu these days (to say nothing of YouTube, MySpace and Facebook). Updates and security fixes for Windows, Office, iTunes and Acrobat (to name just a few) can sometimes run in the hundreds of megabytes. And let’s not forget that a lot of people work from home, connecting to their corporate networks via VPN or Remote Desktop.

For a single person using the Internet only for surfing the web, getting emails and using instant messaging products, a 40GB cap is not that big of a deal. For a family of four – with dad watching videos on Hulu, mom working from home via VPN, son playing Xbox Live as much as humanly possible, and daughter seeing what’s new at YouTube.com and spending hours talking on an unlimited Vonage plan – a 40GB bandwidth cap is laughably tiny, especially since HD video is making its way to the web. A downloaded iTunes or Netflix HD movie can run up to 8GB/hour… so if you watch two HD movies on these services in a month, you’ll have used 4/5 of your bandwidth!

What’s more galling is the pricing structure: a 768Kbps connection with a 5GB cap… for $29.95 per month? In case TWC hasn’t checked, BellSouth AT&T offers DSL Internet in my area at the same speed with no cap for $19.95 a month. Why the hell would anyone pay $10/month extra for the same product?

And speaking of AT&T, the telcom giant will be rolling out U-Verse here in Gaston County “sometime later this year”.  In fact, they installed one of the giant U-Verse boxes in my back yard back in March. If TWC implements caps in my area, I can promise you that I’ll switch in a heartbeat.

No news on Life On Mars

Apparently no one has any idea what’s going on with the American remake of Life On Mars.

This post over at TV Squad and mentions that David E. Kelley has left the series, and that it’s moved production from LA to New York. Other than that… no one knows. Even the LA Times can’t get any information about the series.

It’s not looking good for old Sam Tyler… in the US anyway. Although ABC *did* run a promo for Mars during the season finale of Lost last week. I hated it, but at least it’s a sign that there’s life left in the series.

Also, I saw a promo for Pushing Daisies last week too… and that made me happy! I can’t wait to get back to Coeur d’Coeurs this fall!

New Look\I’m Back!

Hi Everybody!

I apologize that it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, but I’ve been busy for the past few days. Late last week, I had some work to do for a client, then Saturday and Sunday I had to go to Asheville for a family wedding. And today the missus and I caught up on a bunch of errands we’d been needing to run for the past couple of weeks – going to the cleaners, picking up a few things at the grocery store, returning a few items to Old Navy and Bed Bath & Beyond, etc.

But I’m back now… and can finally comment on the site’s new look! I’ve been using WordPress for almost a year now, and during this time I’ve used the “default” theme (well, except for the Madonna pic at the top of the page). I’ve looked for other themes, but I’ve never found one I like as much as this one: Hanami (available here).

On top of that, I’ve also upgraded to TinyMCE Advanced, an upgraded WordPress text editor that supports tables (and a lot more). Hopefully, this will allow me to do more interesting stuff in the future.

If you’d like, leave a comment and tell me what you think about the site’s new look!