Fluid is the heat. It lets you create an application specific web browser. If you want a separate “application” to read email, for your blog, to run the control panel for your web host, etc., you do this and keep Firefox or Safari separate just for browsing.
Sad that the first post in almost 2 months is to say I just spent an hour backing things up and installing wordpress. The installation was flawless except for some pilot errors on my part. (You’d think I could type the correct values into a wp-config.php file, but apparently not.)
I had to drive west on Wednesday to meet with someone at Presbytery. When I got there I snapped this picture:
That night, the rollover occurred two miles short of my house. Here’s the picture I took the next morning when it was light.
I’m such an old duffer that I remember when this would have been pretty impressive. No more.
This works out to about $0.18 per mile (ignoring fuel and maintenance) and about 7,656 miles/year.
Cheap shot, I know. But how did they miss that one? It’s a “gimme.”
The Wapo says:
No single morsel of happiness data, though, is more intriguing than this: Republicans are happier than Democrats.
Anyway. I would sure like to see that survey. (Or a one-page summary of its results, times however many years it’s been since they started doing it.)
For Lent I’m going to preach from the Old Testament. (That doesn’t mean what you think. It’s just that I mostly preach from the gospels.) It was a trip to be reading the ‘brew again.
I did my translation of Genesis 2:15-17,3:1-7. The first verse was a disaster, because the first word was yiqqach and I’d forgotten about roots where the initial L just vanishes (like LQH). But by the end, I was coming back strong, staring at words like nechmad and thinking that must be a niphal from HMD. (Then trying to remember what the niphal signified, but that’s another story.)
I’m gratified to note here that while my m4d H3br3w sk1llz aren’t what they used to be (i.e., pathetic but serviceable), I was able, eventually, to work my way through the entire mess. Hooray for me and Summer Hebrew.
We were too lazy at New Year’s to make our own chili con queso, so we decided to try this:
It is foul. We couldn’t get through a single 13-oz tub. Not on New Year’s End, not even half. When we looked at it in the refrigerator a few days later, nobody could work up any enthusiasm to try it again:
Despite what the label says (“New Bowl, Same Great Taste!”) it’s not the same great taste. In fact, it’s a big-ass lie. The cheese sauce at Taco Bell is actually edible. (Arguably. I’m not saying it’s health food, or that it’s all-natural.) And even if you don’t like Taco Bell’s product, you’d see that this isn’t it from the 2nd photo. Tango Bravo cheese sauce is a brilliant day-glow yellow, not this muddy orange sludge. If you’ve never seen it, it’s almost worth navigating through the Flash-only Taco Bell web site to see them. Almost, but not quite. Flash-only web-sites should be boycotted, and you can just trust me that the cheese is a vibrant lemon-yellow color.
Anyway, this tub of whatever-it-is says “Taco Bell” on the label, but it’s actually made by Kraft rather than Taco Bell.
I was going to write Taco Bell’s corporate overlords (NYSE:YUM) and tell them they were morons to let Kraft (NYSE:KFT) dilute their brand selling nasty effluent like this. But the Taco Bell’s web site is content-free; if there’s a place that tells me where to send a letter like that, I couldn’t find it. (My idea was to send the letter to TB with a copy to Kraft.) Then I looked at the YUM! foods web site, which isn’t flash-only but is largely content-free. Kraft is no better.
What the hell is wrong with corporate America? Why do they make it so hard to tell them they’re screwing the pooch? Or are these uniquely stupid companies? I can’t buy a stick of gum from Wal-Mart without being asked questions about my shopping experience by the credit card scanner, and then the receipt importunes me to go online and take a survey. Why does Wal-Mart want so desperately to know what I think and Kraft and Taco Bell not care at all?
I was reading this article about Tim Burton’s film version of Sweeney Todd, with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter when I was struck by this line:
Bonham Carter has happily ruled out acting projects for the near future (though she’ll return briefly as quirky prof Bellatrix Lestrange in next year’s “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”).
First, of course, is that everybody in those movies returns “briefly,” or not at all. Snape had like 2 minutes in HP5, Hagrid a little less, and McGonnagal had about 15 seconds.
But second and more to the point: “quirky?” Huh?
“Quirky!?”
How about “demented,” or maybe “psychotic,” or “criminally insane?”
To call Bellatrix Lestrange “quirky” shows how the news media is incapable of calling a spade a spade. Good grief.
I joined a gym a couple of months ago. As a result, I’ve become very buff, but I don’t want to talk about that now. Instead, I want to make a few observations.
First: It takes all kinds. One guy I see there occasionally is simply amazingly fat; he’ll have the treadmill on the lowest setting and be taking a nice, leisurely stroll. Another guy is incredibly pumped-up; I mostly see him giving advice to his acolytes or doing something impossible with free weights.
Probably 3/4 of the customers are men. The women don’t appear to occupy quite as wide a span of the in- to out-of-shape dimension, and they aren’t as likely to have tattoos as the men. (A clear majority of the men have a few tattoos, but a handful of biker/lifer types are basically covered with them.)
Second: XM Radio has a whole channel devoted to Led Zeppelin. And they play it at the gym. Incessantly. To my regret. When I see people grimacing as they work out, I don’t know if they’re straining their muscles, or if they’ve just had enough of Robert Plant’s singing. Also, the other day they played Kashmir, and it drove me crazy trying to remember what it was called. Was it Marrakech? No, that’s Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Katmandu? No, that’s that horrible thing by Bob Seeger. Singapore? Casablanca? Muscat and Oman? Finally I figured it out, but it took like 2 days. The thing with Led-Zep is they had like three or four songs I don’t hate, and only one I like: Fool in the Rain. (Okay, Hot Dog makes two.)
Third: The gym’s staff is very patriotic. They even have a poster-sized photograph of the governor on the wall.
I spent the day (with two helpers) swapping offices at church with the secretary. (Boy, will she be surprised! 🙂 Everything is done now except … well, actually a whole bunch of things.
But the main thing still to be done is reorganizing the shelves.
No. That’s not true. Realistically, the main thing is getting my phone to work. The FAX line (which is also the DSL line) works fine, but something went wrong when we moved handsets and now only one phone will work. For the time being, the secretary’s is “it”.
But ignore all that. Who phones the pastor, anyway? And more to the point, I don’t know how to fix phones. Rearranging bookshelves is more my speed. And now I have room to get things off the floor and onto shelves.
Anyway, here’s my new office:
Now compare that with the old office:
Years and years ago, I saw a fraction of the Nutcracker on TV. Nobody else wanted to watch it, so I had to use the black and white TV in my parents’ bedroom. I don’t remember much about it, except that it was sponsored by somebody who wanted to show how classy they were by not interrupting the performance with ads. (They used to do that, sometimes, back in the day.) Now, of course, I’ve heard the music a million times since then. But that was my sum-total experience of the ballet itself. Until today.
Today we went to see the Inland Pacific Ballet performance of the Nutcracker. (I should say, portions of the Nutcracker. It was some kind of teach-the-kiddies something cultural day. I went as a chaperone, I guess. We got only the tiniest fraction of Act I (10 minutes?) and a great swath of Act II (about an hour?).)
My evaluation: very colorful. Despite tutoring on the subject of ballet by one or more members of my household, I’m still pretty ignorant about all those grand batmans and nest-ce-pas‘s they do. But clearly they meant well. On the other hand, if I had a dream like Clara and there were 100 people leaping around like there were in the finale, I’d call that a nightmare. I understand that Peter Ilyich said it was worse than even Sleeping Beauty, so I will defer to him on that score.
Oddly, upon returning home, I have discovered that my CD of Tchaikovsky’s Greatest Hits seems to be missing. (Why I never ripped it into iTunes I don’t know. Possibly it was missing back when I was ripping everything?)