Drinking whiskey clear!
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:
Click to enlarge!
Isn’t that just about adorable?
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.
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.
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!
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!
“Helllllllllllllllllloooo? Wot? I’m at an art gallery! I said, I’m at an art gallery… No, it’s rubbish!”
There are a couple of good editorials out there today for those interested in the Anglican communion.
The first one (subtitled “The Diocese Is Attacking the Faithful”) is about the current situation in Virginia. It has a lot of good background information about the case, if you’re not familiar with it:
It’s a sad day for Christendom when a national church attacks faithful Christians instead of encouraging them in the faith. Typically, churches attack the sins of this world and offer solutions to the world’s problems.
Yet this is the situation that 11 Anglican churches find themselves in since the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia and the Episcopal Church attacked us with lawsuits.
Read all about it here.
The second is from the Church of England newspaper, and it paints a bleak picture of Britain’s spiritual future:
If recent reports of trends in religious observance prove to be correct, then in some 30 years the mosque will be able to claim that, religiously speaking, the UK is an Islamic nation, and therefore needs a share in any religious establishment to reflect this. The progress of conservative Islam in the UK has been amazing, and it has come at a time of prolonged decline in church attendance that seems likely to continue.
Read all about it here.
Wow – there are some cool pictures out today!
The first is a picture of NASA’s Phoenix Lander in its decent to the Martian surface, as taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter:
The second picture is of a rare portrait of Elizabeth I as a young girl. According to this article from the BBC, the portrait was “found in the Duke of Buccleuch’s collection at Boughton House”, and was painted between 1650 and 1680, after a (now lost) original dating to the 1550s. Prior to this find, there were only two known portraits of the Queen as a young girl; now the world has three. Elizabeth is to the far right in this picture, flanked by her father, her brother, and sister (click to enlarge):
And lastly, enjoy another beautiful picture of Amy Winehouse:
Am I the only one that thinks Matt from this season’s Hell’s Kitchen looks a lot like Sam the Eagle from the Muppet Show?
In case you haven’t heard, famous record producer Mutt Lange has left his wife of 14 years… Shania Twain. Here’s a picture of the homewrecker – Marie-Anne Thiebaud – standing next to Shania:
Amazingly, Shania is the older one in this picture. She is 42, while the nasty hussy that broke up her marriage claims to be 37. Hell, she looks old enough to be Shania’s mother.
I myself am 37, and am old enough to know how much truth there is in the old saying “no matter how good looking she is, someone somewhere is sick of her shit”. Perhaps Shania is a giant pain in the ass. Maybe she’s needy or just plain crazy. Maybe that Swiss woman understands Mutt in a way that Shania doesn’t. I don’t know. But still… what the hell, dude? Don’t you know that you’re supposed to trade up, not down?