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REVIEW: DiGiorno Ultimate Pizza

I am a sucker for food descriptions. When I go out to eat and am handed a menu, my brain instantly clicks off and I’m almost unable to decide between the “juicy USDA Prime ribeye steak, topped with melted bleu cheese” and the “grilled boneless chicken breast marinated in lime juice and tequila and topped with a Monterey Jack sauce”. Everything sounds so good that I focus on how it would taste. I lose all of my rational thinking and revert back to some primal state . It’s bizarre, I know. Most people probably do it to some degree, by I always seem to go overboard with it.

So, as you might imagine, my “eatin’ brain” went in to hyperdrive when I found out about DiGiorno’s new line of “Ultimate Pizzas”. I found out about it from a food website, and my mouth started watering the instant I read the description for the “Four Meat” pie:

Capicolla ham, julienne-cut Genoa Salami, sausage and pepperoni, along with a sauce made from crushed vine-ripened tomatoes, as well as whole-milk mozzarella cheese…

I just about couldn’t stand it! I had to find one of these pizzas, and I had to do it soon! Sadly, though , they simply weren’t to be found here in the Charlotte area. I checked the local Bi-Lo and Wal Mart stores and even had the missus check the Harris Teeter close to her work during her lunch break one day. No dice. I had almost given up hope, but then the missus decided to buy a chest freezer one weekend. Although the main reason we got it was to have more room in the kitchen freezer, we had plenty of space for new stuff, so we went to Wal Mart to see what kind of frozen foods we could fill the new freezer with. And lo and behold… there in the pizza section… was the new DiGiorno Ultimate Pizza!

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How To Register For This Site

It just occurred to me the other day that I haven’t given you good folks any information about how to register for my new site!

So here’s the skinny: you can leave a comment for almost any post on this site. But in order to do that, you’ve gotta create an account. Creating an account is easy – just scroll down the page to the “Meta” section in the right-hand sidebar. Click on the “Register” link, and you’ll be taken to an account creation page. All you have to do here is enter the user name you’d like to use for this site, along with a valid email address. In a couple of minutes you’ll get an email confirming your user name; the email will also come with a password and a link to login to this site (this link is for convenience only; it’s not one of those “you are required to click here to validate your account” kind of things). Once you log in to the site using your user name and password, you’ll be taken to your “Profile page”, where you can enter any contact information you’d like (such as your own website’s address or instant messaging nicknames), or you can change your password to something that suits you better.

From this point on, you can leave comments for almost any post on this site (by my decision, leaving comments is disabled for some posts). Note that all comments on jimcofer.com are moderated, so I’ll have to approve what you write before it’s posted publicly (you will be able to see your own comments, approved or not).

So… enjoy and comment away!

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COOL WEB SITE: meebo.com

Meebo.com is a free website that allows you to log on to almost any instant messaging service using only a web browser. You don’t need to have AIM or Yahoo! Messenger installed on the computer you use to access Meebo, so you can easily chat with your friends from work or a friend’s house. You don’t even have to sign up for anything – all you do is enter your AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, GoogleTalk, ICQ and\or Jabber user name and password into the appropriate box. However, if you use more than one instant messaging service you’ll find it’s easier to just to sign up for a Meebo account, since it will remember all your different account(s)  and automatically log in to them each time you log in with your Meebo account. Meebo also offers its own chat rooms, however to be honest I’ve never used them, so I can’t tell you good or bad they are. It’s a great service though… you should check it out!

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The Tragic Fate of the Man Who Discovered Dinosaurs

Gideon MantellTo most people born after 1920, the existence of dinosaurs is a given. Folks in our modern age don’t even question the fact that 300 million or so years ago, huge reptile-like beasts roamed around in a world devoid of humans. That Tyrannosaurus Rex and Brontosaurus once existed is as natural to us as the sun coming up, or rain falling from clouds.

Stop for a moment, though, and consider how downright bizarre the whole concept would have sounded to someone born in, say 1720. The only information most people at that time had about ancient animals came from the Bible or the works of classic Greek or Roman writers. And all those sources mention lions, tigers, bears and many other types of animals still very much in existence. It seemed logical to assume that if tigers existed in the time of the Old Testament, they’d always existed. If you could travel back to the 18th century and tell them that at one point, long in the past, gigantic, lizard-like creatures dozens of feet long roamed the earth, they’d probably burn you at the stake for witchcraft… and I can’t say that I’d blame them.

There was one thing that troubled people back then though, and that was the existence of fossils. At the time, most of the fossils people were familiar with were of ancient sea creatures like fish or bivalves. And what bothered the 18th century mind was why those fossils would turn up in the middle of the English countryside or high atop mountains deep in the heart of France.

Several schools of thought developed as “gentlemen scientists” investigated the matter further. Those investigations continued quietly on for some time, but the entire world seemed to turn upside down in 1811, when an uneducated young girl named Mary Anning found the remains of an ichthyosaur in Dorset, on the English coast. But rather than clearly making the case for the existence of dinosaurs, Annin’s fossil only made things even murkier. Since the fossil resembled a gigantic crocodile, the question wasn’t “what was this prehistoric beast?” but rather “what are the bones of a huge crocodile doing in England?”

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DOWNLOAD: Deskview

One of my favorite programs of the Windows 2000 era was a utility called SetShellView. This little app tweaked the Windows desktop, making your icons appear as “large icons”, “small icons” or as “list view” or “detailed view” – just like any other folder in Windows.

Sadly, this program was not updated for Windows XP.

I searched high and low for a replacement. And for the longest time I couldn’t find one. But one day I found a post at some now-forgotten message board. Someone else loved SetShellView too, and was asking about a replacement. One reply to that post was the cryptic, two-word “Try this:”, with a direct link to a program called deskview.exe. I downloaded it and used it for the rest of my Windows XP days.

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USA! USA! USA! USA!

Hot off the presses:

“In a gut-busting showdown that combined drama, daring and indigestion, Joey Chestnut emerged Wednesday as the world’s hot dog eating champion, knocking off six-time titlist Takeru Kobayashi in a rousing triumph. Chestnut, the great red, white and blue hope in the annual Fourth of July competition, broke his own world record by inhaling 66 hot dogs in 12 minutes — a staggering one every 10.9 seconds before a screaming crowd in Coney Island.”

Hell yeah! USA! USA! USA! USA!

Read all about it here, and have a safe and happy July 4th!

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GOOFY ERROR MESSAGES: Penske Trucks

A while back I needed to move some stuff from a storage facility in Atlanta to my home in Charlotte. I’d had pretty good luck with Penske in the past, so I went to their site to see what kind of trucks I could get.

I had some leeway about when I was going to move the stuff, so I played around with a lot of options to see what kind of prices I’d get. I got estimates for picking the truck up in Atlanta or picking it up here in Charlotte and driving it to Atlanta. I played with the dates, to try and see if I could get a cheaper rate on a Monday versus a Wednesday, for example. At one point, I accidentally entered the previous day’s date into the “pickup date” box, and received this humorous error message:

Penske Funny

OK, so the next time I need to rent a truck, I’ll be sure to visit Penske’s site 1,901 years before I actually need it!

(NOTE: I’m just having a little fun at Penske’s expense here. They’re a great company, and I have nothing but good things to say about them!)

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The first time I fell in love…

… was on September 14, 1984:

Madonna at the first VMAs

Interestingly, there is a story that appears in several Madonna biographies. It seems that “the president of a well-known record label” was in the audience that night. He (and we don’t know exactly who “he” is) is claimed to have laughed and said “well… her career’s over!” as soon as Madonna’s performance was done. Ironically, it was at that very moment that Madonna became a superstar. I guess I wouldn’t take any tips on the horses from that guy!

(In case you’re wondering why I posted this today… I was cleaning up an old folder of ‘cyberjunk’ this morning and came across this picture. It was originally a 1600×1200 bitmap (screencap) of a browser window from MTV’s “VMA Anniversary” site. The actual Madonna pic was embedded in a Flash presentation on the main page. I finally got around to cropping it and converting it to JPEG this afternoon.)

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MORE NEWS: Goldman Family Buys OJs Book, Gives It Funny New Title

And of course, as soon as I finish with the news, something hilarious comes over the wire:

The Goldman family (as in “Ron Goldman”, the guy that O.J. Simpson killed) has purchased the rights to O.J. Simpson’s book If I Did It and plans to sell the book as a means of partially fulfilling the financial terms of the family’s successful $33 million “wrongful death” suit against Simpson. Even better, the family plans to change the name the book from If I Did It to Confessions of a Double Murderer!

Read all about it here!

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News for 07/03/07

Hey hey everybody! It’s the day before Independence Day… so let’s do THE NEWS!

(In)famous Russian music site Allofmp3.com has finally shut down… don’t cry too much though, because they’ve already launched a replacement site: MP3Sparks.com. In fact, were it not for the new site’s radically different color scheme, you’d be hard pressed to spot the difference between the two sites. Why shut down one site, only to open an exact duplicate on the same day? Your guess is as good as mine. At least they didn’t sell out completely – unlike, say Fergie. The erstwhile member of the Black Eyed Peas has completely sold out to Candie’s (the shoe\clothing company). Sources say that the company will pay Fergie $4 million to “to promote their clothing line in her songs”. I guess something like this was inevitable – hell, Fergie’s already promoted Dolce & Gabbana and Fendi for free, so why not get some coin for dropping Candie’s name in her music? Still, I can’t help but find the whole thing distasteful. Actual product placements in music? What’s the world coming to?

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