Drinking whiskey clear!
You remember Shane McGowan, right? Lead singer of The Pogues… sings that “Fairytale of New York” tune which is quite popular this time of year… one of Kate Moss’ good friends? You know – THAT guy? We always knew he was a drunk and not very attractive to begin with, but MY GOD has this man gone downhill or what?
And what’s with his teeth?
Shiver.
Israel’s Ministry of the Interior recently released a bunch of passports with “Ministry of the Intrerior” stamped on the front of them. The ministry wanted to alert Israelis of the error, so it placed an ad in the Jerusalem Post, an English-language newspaper. The ad read (in part):
“Due to a technical error in some of the Ministry’s stampsthe document you received may have been stampedwith an flawed stamp.”
Awesome!
What’s with all the news stories about people changing colors lately? First, there was this story about Lee Thomas, an entertainment reporter for Detroit’s Fox affiliate. He was born a black man, but due to a disease called vitiligo – the same disease that Michael Jackson reportedly has – he’s slowly turning white:
Lee’s story is “newsworthy” because he recently decided to stop applying a thick layer of makeup every day and go au naturale on TV. Which makes sense, when you see how much makeup they have to use on the poor guy. Be sure to check out the slide show at the link above to see Lee’s transition from “black guy” to “half and half”.
Then there’s this story about a man named Paul Karason. Apparently Paul either read something in a nutty “holistic medicine” magazine or saw an infomercial or something, but the fact is, he’s been drinking colloidal silver – silver dissolved in water via an electrical current – for the past 14 years. And it’s turned him blue:
Apparently, some think that colloidal silver will cure anything that ails you. But apparently it turns you blue. Let the Papa Smurf jokes begin!
In the computing world, an “appliance” is a computer that is “dedicated to a single task, and has limited configuration ability”. If you have a router in your home, you have an appliance. If you work for a medium to large-size company, they might have an “anti-spam appliance”: a computer that sits between the Internet and your email server, removing spam. Although appliances are usually dedicated to a single task, what really makes a “computer” an “appliance” is the limited interface. Although your home router is basically a small computer, you cannot click a couple of things and turn it into a file server, or play Solitaire on it.
With the rise of software virtualization, people have started referring to some virtual machines as “appliances”. Although this isn’t, strictly speaking, accurate – most virtual machines run a traditional desktop operating system instead of one dedicated to the task at hand – they can be appliances in the “dedicated to a single task” meaning. In this article, I’ll show you how to create a “Bittorrent appliance”.
But first… why have a “Bittorrent appliance” in the first place? Well, there are several reasons why you might want to run Bittorrent as an appliance:
Compatibility: Many Bittorrent applications don’t work at all in Windows Vista, and many don’t work nearly as well in Vista as they did in XP. By creating an XP-based virtual machine, you can use Vista and still enjoy all of the BT programs that work better in Windows XP. Also, if you have a computer that dual-boots between XP and Vista, you can use the appliance in either OS with minimal disruption. If you’re in XP but need to reboot into Vista and have several downloads going, simply shut down the appliance, reboot into Vista, then restart the appliance! You’ll be back where you left off in seconds!
Portability: The appliance can be installed on (or easily moved to) a portable USB hard drive. So if you have a friend with a crazy fast Internet connection, you can shut down the appliance on your computer, remove the USB drive from your system, drive to your friend’s house, connect the USB drive to his computer, and restart your downloads immediately. Or let’s say you have a desktop computer in your college dorm room, and want to take your downloads home with you to Mom & Dad’s house. Just shut down the appliance, remove the USB drive and hook it up to the desktop PC at your folk’s house – and you’re instantly back where you were at school!
Security: I know that someone’s going to jump on me for this, but I don’t care! Let’s pretend that you’re a heavy downloader. One day you get a letter in the mail from a law firm that states that you’re being sued by the music industry. By having all of your downloading apps on a virtual machine, you’ll necessarily have no downloading apps on your physical machine. If your hard drive were to be seized in a lawsuit, forensics investigators wouldn’t find any evidence of downloading on your computer… because there aren’t any “illicit” programs on your computer!
“The original title of this book was ‘Jimmy James, Capitalist Lion Tamer’ but I see now that it’s… ‘Jimmy James, Macho Business Donkey Wrestler’… you know what it is… I had the book translated in to Japanese then back in again into English. ‘Macho Business Donkey Wrestler’… well there you go… it’s got kind of a ring to it don’t it? Anyway, I wanted to read from chapter three… which is the story of my first rise to financial prominence… I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street… many days no business come to my hut… my hut… but Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no. I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo… dung… Glorious sunset of my heart was fading. Soon the super karate monkey death car would park in my space. But Jimmy has fancy plans… and pants to match. The monkey clown horrible karate round and yummy like cute small baby chick would beat the donkey.”
British singer Kirsty MacColl died seven years ago today. Some say she died in a tragic accident; others say that she was murdered. Read the section on her death at Wikipedia and decide for yourself.
In any case, the world lost an incredible talent that day. MacColl’s hits included the rockabilly romp “There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis”, the 60s inspired “They Don’t Know” (made popular in the U.S by Tracey Ullman’s cover), her enchanting cover of Billy Bragg’s “A New England”, and, of course, her single “Fairytale of New York” with The Pogues – which has topped VH-1 UK’s “Greatest Christmas Song” chart three years in a row. The song also came in at number 1 in The Hits “The Nations Favourite Christmas Song” countdown in the UK, number 11 in Channel 4’s “100 Greatest Christmas Moments”, Number 27 on VH-1 UK’s “Greatest Songs Never To Make Number One”, number 23 on VH-1 UK’s “Greatest Lyrics” list, Number 83 in Q Magazines “100 Greatest Ever Songs”, and number 84 on BBC Radio 2’s “Top 100 Greatest Songs of All Time” poll.
You are missed, Kirsty!
I first laid eyes on a CD burner waaayyyy back in 1996. At the time, even a lowly 2x burner cost around $499, so I couldn’t afford my own. Thankfully, my ex-girlfriend’s mother had one, and she let me borrow it whenever I wanted.
That year I made my first “Christmas CD”. As you might guess, it was a CD full of Christmas music. But not just any Christmas music – it was “cool” Christmas music from bands like The Ramones, Cocteau Twins, Sting, XTC, Captain Sensible, and other New Wave\Punk\80s artists I love.
As time went on, I downloaded more and more of these tracks, and the “Christmas CD” became an annual tradition. Last year, I even put together a “jimcofer.com 10th Annual Christmas Compilation”, but with one twist – I didn’t put it on CD. So many people have iPods and other portable players these days that putting out a CD image for people to download seemed much more complicated that just mixing it all together into one huge MP3 file. That way people could burn it to CD if they wanted, or just dump it to an iPod… or whatever they wanted to do, really.
I’m sad to report that there will be no CD\MP3 compilation at all this year. Why? Mainly because I haven’t found any “new” Christmas songs I like. I’ve completely tapped the store of 80s\New Wave Christmas songs. If there’s a Christmas song by an 80s performer that I don’t have… well, I’d be shocked. And although I’ve looked in to songs by 90s\2000-era performers, I’m just not feeling them. These songs seem… well, “sacreligious” isn’t perhaps the best word for it. But they seem to have a “let’s see how screwed up we can make this song!” vibe to them. It’s like they’re not taking it seriously. And that leaves “traditional” Christmas songs by Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby… which are fine, but it’s just not me.
Maybe next year I’ll find some new material. Or maybe I’ll feel inspired enough to choose from the same 126 songs I’ve been using for the past 10 years. Or maybe not. This year, at least, the Christmas CD just isn’t going to happen. My apologies!
The Charlotte Observer newspaper recently ran a story about local radio personality and author Sheri Lynch. Lynch and her family purchased a 4,000-square-foot home in Charlotte’s Myers Park neighborhood back in 2006, and the Observer article was all about the trials and tribulations of the family’s renovation of the house. At the end of the article, the author posts a quick list of Sheri’s favorite places to hunt for bargains in the Charlotte area… one of which is Lisa’s work! Sheri says:
For more great deals on high end furniture, accessories, fabric, you name it: A. Hoke Ltd. 725 S. Cedar St., 704-358-0277. “(It’s) a very fancy to-the-trade interior design company that periodically throws open their doors to the public for a scary-good sale,” Sheri says. “This is a mailing list you want to get on.”
How cool is that, huh? And not only is my honey “the glue that holds the company together” (my phrase), guess who does their IT work? Yep – Belmont PC!
The following picture appeared in last week’s issue of The Sporting News with the caption “Yes, this is an actual picture from a Florida Marlins game”. Even with that caption, I thought it was a joke. Maybe it was a picture of batting practice, or of some special event (a school field trip, maybe?) and the Sporting News guys were just being funny?
Come to find out, they were being serious. It’s an actual picture from September 12th, 2007, when the Marlins hosted the Washington Nationals. Florida won 5-4 in 12 innings, and this page about the game at Yahoo! News says that “[t]here were about 400 fans on hand when the game started Wednesday afternoon and the announced attendance was 10,121. The Marlins have the smallest total attendance in the majors.”
400 people? That’s sad. Even sadder? Ushers wouldn’t allow people to move up to better seats, even though there were thousands of empty seats available.
I’ve been using WordPress for a few months now, and while I really like it so far, it’s not perfect. Upgrading certain plugins can be a royal pain-in-the-ass. Manually editing PHP code to get some plugins to work gets on my nerves. And creating complete backups of the site is a multi-step, manual process.
But these are occasional irritants. One thing that bothers me on an almost daily basis is the WordPress text editor. You normally enter posts into WordPress by logging in to the “site admin” portion of the site and clicking on Write > Write Post. You are then taken to a page that contains a small text window, a category list, an upload editor and a few other authoring widgets. The text window has a toolbar which allows you to click a button for basic tasks, like changing text to boldface or italics, or adding a link or picture, or indenting a paragraph.
The problem with the text editor is that the text input window cannot be resized. So one is forced to type a post – however long – into a box that’s 659 pixels long by 166 pixels tall. You can get a feel for what this is like by opening Notepad on your system, resizing the window to a small rectangle on your screen, and typing away. You can never get a good feel for how long a post is overall (since you have to scroll up and down to see your complete post), and the constant scrolling sometimes drains my creative juices as I become more worried about technical aspects of my post than creative ones. And to make matters worse, the WordPress text editor toolbar is achingly limited. In many cases, one has to click the “Code” tab at the top of the editor window to see the post’s markup code and enter certain codes (like block quotes) manually.
There are replacement editors out there, but sadly they either cost money, are a huge pain to install (requiring substantial manual hacking of WordPress’ PHP code)… or they simply aren’t much better than WordPress’ own editor. So where can you find a good editor for WordPress? An editor that works offline, works in full-screen mode, and has a plethora of editing tools built right in? If you have Word 2007 installed on your computer, you already have it!
Open Word and click on the “Office” button in the upper-left corner of the window. Click on” New” and select “New Blog Post” in the window that appears. Click on “Manage Accounts” and choose “New” to set up your blog on your system. A drop-down box will appear that lets you choose what type of blog you have – currently, Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, SharePoint Blogs, Community Server, TypePad and WordPress are supported. Click “Next” and enter the details about your blog requested on the page that follows (this varies depending on your blog type, but usually the box will want your blog’s URL and your username and password).