In case any of my friends were wondering if I dropped off the face of the planet this weekend, I was in Montana in the Glacier National Park area for a mini-vacation and a hippie music festival (Babbfest). The music wasn’t really my cup of tea, but I had something to do with marketing […]

This is what my slave does while in Estonia (I wish I could have gone)…

I guess they were supposed to play with grenades and rocket launchers too, but they were too late to do that. Sucks!

It’s been out for a couple days now in Digg labs, but I have to finally say that Digg’s Swarm is pretty pimp… It will be fun when they release their API and we can start building our own stuff.
Digg Swarm draws a circle for stories as they’re dugg. Diggers swarm around stories, and […]

First I got wired, then someone came along and slashed me, then someone dugg me, then I was farked by someone I hardly know. After basking in the afterglow, a vampire came by and slashed me (again!) and told me I was delicious.
The last 24 hours saw more traffic to my blog than any […]

Okay, okay… I’ve had the issue for a couple days now, and I was a bit torn if I was going to post anything about it on my blog or not. I didn’t like a few things about it… For one thing, I’m not a “hero” (I’m a pretty normal guy), but they […]

So it looks like the basement is more or less dug out now… ended up being about 1000 cubic yards of dirt. They should start hauling the dirt away later this week.
To get a general scale, Stephanie is standing over there, and she’s not a little kid like the picture makes her look. […]

Here’s an email I just got…
I realy like your athletes foot. I taste like fooky
I don’t even know what to comment about that, other than, “Bahahahaha!”

Living in San Diego has me completely spoiled as far as weather/temperature goes… It’s always like 65-80° any day of the year.
Except for today… it’s f’ing hot outside right now (see graphic on the right).
I checked the temp where my mom lives, and it’s 112° there. Yikes!
There’s some poor sucker outside on the street […]

What happened to Michael Knight? David Hasslehoff was much cooler back in the day I think.
Then:

Now:

Here’s an email I just received (in it’s entirety)…
I live in an apt bldg. in Dutchess Co, NY. I had bats in my apt 6/12/06. Landlord CLAIMS that extrminator was at my apt on 6/21/06 to check and found no holes/areas where bats could enter bldg. I was home that day; saw […]

A buddy of mine has a new blog where he has a cartoon of himself reading his blog entries to you. That’s pretty cool if you ask me… I think we need a cartoon Shawn!
(I think it’s done with SitePal’s technology)
http://www.cartoonbarry.com/

Went up to the site yesterday, and there’s lots of digging going on now. 3 tractors up there (a normal backhoe, a little one for doing foundation footings and then a bit excavator one for digging the basement). It’s hard to tell how much dirt was pulled out, but check out the picture […]

Not sure how accurate this article is, or what their methodology is for calculating the “dust-to-dust energy cost” (I only skimmed it), but it’s interesting…
http://www.reason.org/commentaries/dalmia_20060719.shtml
Comparing this data, the study concludes that overall hybrids cost more in terms of overall energy consumed than comparable non-hybrid vehicles. But even more surprising, smaller hybrids’ energy costs are greater […]

The chair that I broke was finally replaced today (had to have it shipped). I ended up getting the *exact* same chair because it’s really comfortable. I guess $69.99 for a chair you use for 12 years isn’t *too* bad.

I’m not sure what this trench is for (I guess one end of the pool maybe?), but there is now a pretty deep trench (like 12 or 13 feet deep) where the edge of the pool is going to be…

I’m going to Montana in 2 weeks for a little mini-weekend vacation, and someone mentioned to me that I should get some “bear spray” if I’m going to be hiking around. So I Google [bear spray] just to see what it is (not that I really was going to get any).
The #1 site that […]

I bought an exterior dome for the camera I got (to be installed at the construction site), and the damn thing was missing the two electrical transformers it was supposed to come with. No biggie though, Videolarm shipping them out today, so should have them soon.
I guess it’s not terribly important right now since […]

I (almost) fell out of my chair yesterday because I’m such a fat ass that my chair broke. It didn’t just “break” either. The four welds held just fine, just the steel itself wasn’t strong enough to hold me, so the steel was ripped out where the welds were holding it together.

Oh well, […]

So had the “pre-construction” meeting today with the HOA. Everything looks a-okay, and we are cleared (finally) for full blown construction.
I meandered up to the site after the meeting, and the half ditch is now a full ditch, with conduit pipes and gas lines in it even. The more interesting part is the […]

Does this seem like a pretty big catfish to anyone besides me? Something like 650 lbs (I forget exactly now)…

I booked a hotel near the San Jose airport for the first and last night we are in Costa Rica. But I just realized I booked it for San Jose, California, not San Jose, Costa Rica. Hmmm… I wonder if that’s going to make a difference or not.
UpdateOkay, I got […]

What the hell?
The White House flew in a special portable toilet to Vienna for Bush’s personal use during his visit. The Bush White House is so concerned about Bush’s security, the veil of secrecy extends over the president’s bodily excretions. The special port-a-john captured Bush’s feces and urine and flew the waste […]

Okay… I was able to recover everything from my corrupt FileVault volume and convert my home directory back to not using FileVault. The only issue right now is I’m running on 1 hard drive, not 2… but at least my computer is alive (with all my junk).

It sounds like a good idea in theory, but Apple’s FileVault sucks, and here’s why…
I installed the Mac OS X 10.4.7 update today (from 10.4.6) and it didn’t go so well (it’s not like I have some old/bunk Mac either, I have the newest quad processor PowerMac)… A reboot would give the system a kernel […]

If you are *really* dorky you can now get a USB puppet that stands up when your friend comes online via IM and “dies” when they go offline.

I kind of want one of these actually.

Another random email…
ple make me a member of orkut
One thing that is really nice about this email (and the last one), is that people have started to say “please” (partially anyway) when asking me to do their bidding of odd tasks. Unfortunately I don’t own Google (not even any stock), I don’t work at […]

Shawn, myself and Allison went to take a peek at my property today and there’s half a ditch now (about 150′, with another 150′ to go). It’s so SDG&E can install a transformer. I guess that means construction started… sorta.

Here’s an email I just got…
Please provide the LINE OF SUCCESSION to real property of a deceased who died without leaving a Will. Two sons - one deceased; one living.
I’m not really sure why anyone would mistake me for an estate lawyer, but uhm… apparently word is out that I moonlight as legal counsel. […]

This is something interesting that someone from my forum ran across while using Google (an error page that Google spewed back at them)…
pacemaker-alarm-delay-in-ms-overall-sum 2341989
pacemaker-alarm-delay-in-ms-total-count 7776761
cpu-utilization 1.28
cpu-speed 2800000000
timedout-queries_total 14227
num-docinfo_total 10680907
avg-latency-ms_total 3545152552
num-docinfo_total 10680907
num-docinfo-disk_total 2200918
queries_total 1229799558
e_supplemental=150000 –pagerank_cutoff_decrease_per_round=100 –pagerank_cutoff_increase_per_round=500 –parents=12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23 –pass_country_to_leaves –phil_max_doc_activation=0.5 –port_base=32311 –production –rewrite_noncompositional_compounds –rpc_resolve_unreachable_servers –scale_prvec4_to_prvec –sections_to_retrieve=body+url+compactanchors –servlets=ascorer –supplemental_tier_section=body+url+compactanchors –threaded_logging –nouse_compressed_urls –use_domain_match –nouse_experimental_indyrank –use_experimental_spamscore –use_gwd –use_query_classifier –use_spamscore –using_borg
I […]

Still about 5 weeks off on getting my replacement car. Does anyone have a time machine I can borrow? Because I’m not a big fan of the car I’m currently driving (although I am thankful to Stefan for letting me borrow it).
I think the car I’m driving now kind of smells like pee […]

I have no clue if this is true, but it sure would be a fun toy if it turns out to be true.
According to informants inside the Cupertino-based computer giant, the next version of Apple’s operating system will let you track belongings through clever GPS and integrated mapping.
Either way, it’s a little […]