Ronald Reagan was the first president I paid attention too. I wasn’t old enough to vote for him, but I was old enough to begin paying attention to politics. The fact that I rode with my father to a bus stop in downtown kc to catch a city bus to go to high school, and that my father listened to NPR’s Morning Edition the whole way probably had a lot to do with this (why I turned out more to the left than my right-wing father is unknown.)

I never liked Reagan. Listening to him, I always thought ...

There’s nothing like drinking for 21 hours of 48 hour period to really clear the sinuses right out. I am truly surprised I wasn’t hung over (or even more surprised that i’m not still hungover…) Not bad for an old dude. A list of alcohol types consumed, just the types, no quantities:

• wine (3 or 4 different vineyards, at least 4 types in one vineyard)
• beer (uh, probably around 10 different brands, including Stag)
• rum
• vodka
• tequila

Way back when the internet was still pretty young (1997) I did my first commerical web page for the wife of a co-worker. I recently found my notes from the project and thought I would look up to see if the pages and the company were still around.

The company is Indigo Wild, yes they still exist, although i’m not sure it’s still owned by the same person. They make natural soaps and such. Click the link above to see their current web site. The one I did for them is available via the wayback machine.

On the ...

Slashdot reports that buymusic.com is being merged with the parent site buy.com.

I’m assuming this indicates the failure of BuyMusic.com, and good riddence I say. I looked over the site when it first fired up but never bought a song from them.

IMO, the main reasons for the failures:

1. Horribly variant restrictions – I guess buymusic.com decided their customer was the record labels, not the people giving them money. As such they allowed each label to set it’s own restrictions per album. Look at The Who’s Then & Now album. On BuyMusic you can only ...

As big a tech geek as I am, I’ve always distrusted electronic voting systems. Especially the current ones being sold. And internet voting is right out.

Voting has some particular requirements. Voting requires both authentication and anonymity. Authentication because you don’t want people voting that aren’t supposed to. Anonymity because you don’t want to be able to track a vote back to the person that cast it.

Openness of the process is another requirement. Voters should feel that the process of voting, moving votes to the counting location, and counting votes is reliable and trustworthy. In ...

I used to have what I though were dreams about being this giant kid rampaging through a tiny town. Kind of like one of Calvin’s imaginary rampages through the Calvin & Hobbes strips.

As kids my father always shot slide film instead of print film in his camera. This is a good thing as it’s very difficult to whip out the old slide projector and a screen to show any friends/dates/random relatives any of the embarrassing pictures of his kids.

So one day, we were having a slide show and dad was running through all the slides ...

just spent an hour searching for my damn cat. apparently he jumped off the deck i let them run around on (a second story deck with no direct path to the ground.) turns out he was huddled under the deck of my neighbor. he let me pull him out and carry him home. He didn’t freak out and start biting me and clawing big holes in my shirt ‘til we got outside the door.

oh well, it’s better exercise than searching for the damn tivo remote.

Write this on your hand or something ‘cause it’s important. Use a sharpie so it doesn’t fade.

If you’re going to get really hammered in a bar make sure:
1. you only lick things you’re pretty sure you know where they’ve been
2. you lick them before others