Drinking whiskey clear!
Jerry Reed, country music and film star and an Atlanta native, has passed away at the age of 71.
Reed, a talented guitarist, was best known for his movie roles in the Smokey and the Bandit films and Gator, as well his country music hits like “East Bound and Down” and “When You’re Hot, You’re Hot”.
Yahoo! reports that the star died of “complications from emphysema”.
Goodbye, Snowman! You’ll be missed!
Weave is an extension for Firefox that allows you to back up and synchronize your bookmarks, open tabs, passwords and form entries across multiple computers. It’s a nifty little plug-in that takes up the slack for the much loved (and dearly departed) Google Browser Sync. Unfortunately, the Weave extension and service are in beta testing mode, and the backend servers that Mozilla uses to make Weave work are usually overwhelmed, making synchronization as slow as molasses. To make matters worse, the Mozilla servers are frequently taken offline for various reasons, so not only is synching slow, it doesn’t even work much of the time.
In this post from a couple of weeks ago, I linked to an article that showed you how to set up Weave on any WebDAV enabled server. Unfortunately, I was never able to get this working on this very server; apparently WordPress and WebDAV don’t play well together, and I was never able to find the Apache settings I needed to tweak to get it to work.
However, I recently came across this “easy as pie” method for setting up Weave using the free “online disk” service MyDisk.se:
Former Pittsburgh Steeler Ricardo Colclough was arrested for DUI here in Charlotte at 2:35am Saturday morning.
Colclough, who won a Super Bowl ring as part of the 2005 Steeler team, was released by Pittsburgh in 2007 after playing three games. He was then picked up by the Cleveland Browns, who kept him for the rest of the 2007-2008 season. Released by the Browns, Colclough came to Charlotte, where he seemed to be assured a spot as a backup cornerback and kick returner for the Panthers.
Unfortunately, the arrest couldn’t have come at a worse time for Colclough, coming on the very weekend when all NFL teams have to trim their rosters from 76 to 53 players. The Panthers have apparently released Colclough, and mainly because of the DUI. Interestingly, the arrest came less than a day after Colclough recovered a fumble in a preseason game against… the Pittsburgh Steelers. Perhaps he was out partying with old friends? Couldn’t someone have picked up the tab for a taxi?
If you’re bored today, why not head over to this Mecklenburg County website and look up his arrest record, complete with the mug shot shown above. You can search using his name, or PID #: 0000364673 JID #: 08-069265
If you’re like me, you spend an awful lot of time moving back and forth between a certain group of folders in Windows Explorer. I spend a lot of time in my “Music” and “Video” folders, in addition to server shares and temporary “download folders”. Going back and forth between them can be a pain, and that’s why I just love this new program I found called Folder Guide:
You simply install the Folder Guide software, then right-click on any whitespace in a Windows Explorer window. Choose the “Folder Guide” option and then choose “Settings”. From there, you can choose any folder on your computer (and an alias for it) to add to the Explorer context menu. Once you’ve added a few folders, all you need to do is right-click on a whitepace and choose Folder Guide > FOLDER to switch directly to the folder alias in question.
If you think that Folder Guide works a lot like the “Save Image in Folder” extension for Firefox, you’d be correct. Moving from one folder to another is as easy as pie with Folder Guide. Best of all, the program is free and doesn’t have a tray icon. In fact, Folder Guide only runs as a separate EXE file when you have its “Settings” window open.
I’ve been using Folder Guide for almost a week now and I love it! I especially love that it works within the “Open\Save” dialog box too… just right-click a whitespace in the dialog box and choose your folder with FolderGuide, then save the file just where you want it!
Read more about it (or download it) here.
Just over a year ago, I wrote this post, which talks about some of my favorite Firefox extensions (plug-ins). A year has passed and Firefox 3 has come out, so let’s take another look at some of my favorite extensions:
AdBlock Plus – My all-time absolute favorite extension, AdBlock Plus blocks 99% of the ads you’d see in your web browser. Unlike a lot of other ad blockers, AdBlock also re-renders the page without any kind of “placeholders” for the ads, so all you get is the content you want. It also has an automatic list update feature, which keeps new ads at bay. I’ve gotten so used to this extension over the years that it’s jarring to use a browser that doesn’t have AdBlock.
Save [Thing] In Folder – These are the handiest Firefox extensions ever! There are two versions of this extension, “Save Image In Folder” and “Save Link In Folder”. Both work the same way, but on different objects. For example, you normally save image files in Firefox by right-clicking an image and choosing “Save Image”, then selecting a folder using the standard Open\Save box. With “Save Image In Folder”, you choose which folder(s) you want to save your pictures in. You then give each folder an alias, like “Default”, “Data Drive” and “Server”. When you see an image you want to save, simply right-click the image and choose Save Image In Folder > Default or Save Image In Folder > Server to save the picture. Save Link In Folder works the same way, but with hyperlinks. You simply right-click a link and choose Save Link In Folder > Desktop or Save Link in Folder > Server to save a linked file. It’s so much faster than the default way of doing things that I can’t believe that this isn’t the default way of saving files in Firefox!
LinkAlert – Firefox (still) doesn’t play nicely with PDF files. Clicking on a PDF link can slow Firefox down to a crawl. Thankfully, this handy little extension changes the cursor in Firefox when you hover over a certain type of hyperlink. Although it was originally created solely to warn you about PDF links, LinkAlert has been updated to include all kinds of icons, such as icons for music, image, compressed and script files. It’s not a vital plug-in, but it sure is nice.
How bad are things in the airline industry? So bad the regional Canadian airline Jazz has decided to ditch life vests as a cost-saving move. Jazz can get away with it because Canadian regulations say that seat cushions are sufficient if the planes stay within 50 miles of the shore.
Jazz spokeswhore Manon Stuart said: “We used to carry both the flotation device, which is the seat cushion, as well as life vests. The nature of our operations doesn’t require that we carry both”. But Newfoundland politician Woody French disagrees: “They are going to save about 50 pounds [per flight]. Taking off 50 pounds is not going to make a hell of a lot of difference to the fuel consumption”. Mr French has been trying to get the Canadian parliament to pass a “passenger’s bill of rights” for beleaguered travelers in our neighbor to the north.
I can’t say that I disagree with him on this one. I just hope the American carriers don’t hear about this. The next thing you know, they’ll be taking out the oxygen tanks too!
Read the sad, sad tale here.
“Muphry’s Law” states that “if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written”. It is, of course, based on Murphy’s Law. It’s also known as Merphy’s Law, Skitt’s Law, Hartman’s Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation, The Law of Prescriptive Retaliation, Bell’s First Law of Usenet, Tober’s lor, Gaudere’s Law, Naruki’s Law and Greenrd’s Law.
I bring this up because I was going through my archive of World Wide Words RRS feeds yesterday when I found a dilly of an example of Muphry’s Law.
On July 8th, Stephen J. Dubner posted this article entitled “Dept. of Oops” on the New York Times Freakonomics Blog. In it, Dubner discusses the inevitable typographical errors that pop up in publications, especially online ones. His first example is this:
The Economist is, almost inarguably, a great magazine.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t make the occasional mistake. Consider this lead from a recent article about a huge Mexican mining company called Fresnillo, which was recently listed on the London Stock Exchange:
In the hills north east of Mexico City it is not uncommon to find Cornish pasties for sale.
They meant to write “pastries” but, considering that miners work really hard, they might also be hoping to encounter the kind of people who go shopping for pasties.
Ummmm, no. As the majority of the 88 comments left for the article have pointed out, Cornish Pasties are a very real food. They’re a type of handheld pie that originated with tin miners in Cornwall, England… hence “Cornish”. They are usually filled with diced meat, sliced potato and onion, although sweet varieties do exist as well. In fact, the miners would sometimes get a pie that was “half and half”: beef and potato on one side for lunch, the other side filled with jam or apples for dessert!
The good folks at The Economist were apparently amused by Dubner’s error, as they went him a genuine Cornish pasty so he could taste the deliciousness himself.
I just wanted to post a link to this cool article on the Mad Men blog about some of the women’s fashion on the show. Although most of the post wonders what modern designers characters like Bobbie Barrett and Betty Draper would wear today, there’s some interesting stuff near the end of the post about Joan’s wardrobe:
– The bras that Christina Hendricks wears on the show are based on an actual 1960s bra found at a thrift store in New Orleans. The costume crew bought the bra and, once they knew it fit Christina perfectly, carefully took it apart, and used the “bra parts” as a pattern to make several new ones for the show.
– Most of Joan’s clothes are genuine vintage dresses. However, the costume team usually buys dresses that are five to six times too large for Christina. This gives them a lot of extra fabric that they can play around with while altering the dress.
Breaking news from The Consumerist:
Steve Warshak, the founder of the company that makes (made?) Enzyte, a male enhancement “drug”, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison and fined $93,000. Additionally, Warshak’s company has been ordered to refund $500 million to consumers ripped off by the company.
Everyone I know assumed that the product didn’t work. After all, if it did, they’d be selling it at every convenience store and pharmacy in the United States. The thing is, Warshak knew it didn’t work from the very beginning. It was an out and out scam, and Warshak and company made it as difficult as possible to get a refund. According to a former VP that testified against Warshak, the company would go so far as to require notarized documents from a doctor proving that the customer had small genitals in order to get a refund; knowing that few men would willingly go to a doctor and ask them to sign a note saying they had a small penis, the company was able to bilk millions of men out of millions of dollars.
It’s too bad Enzyte doesn’t work. Steve will need it where he’s going!
Read all about it here.