The Toadless Boy

My trips are finally winding down. My Internet time has been few and far between. The highlights of the week have not been incredibly high. With a huge family all cramped in one small house, there is little chance to escape each other. It’s like a crazy house. Actually, poor example since most of them should be there anyway.

So when David (my uncle’s SO) called and asked if I wanted a personal tour of the local Holocaust Museum, I jumped on it. (more…)

I prepared myself with plenty of rest and a relaxed mind. I knew I would be entering a few battleground states on this Christmas break. I love my family very much but due to a wonderful school system and a TV that constantly blares FOX News, they have no clue on how to talk politics intelligently. I knew that this was true so I planned to leave most of my “political bias” back at my “hippie liberal college town.” I saw no need to piss people off when as Pap says, “You’ve got your mind made up, and I’ve got mine.”

But I call BS on that. I grew up in this (more…)

I am completing what I hope is the only weird adventure of this Christmas break. I just wanted to say that if you are ever anywhere near (and don’t already live in Cincinnati), stop at the Batesville, IN Hampton Inn if you need a place to stay. They were the nicest people and handled all the stress of the snowstorm very well. I’m sure business will be booming after that plug.

As Christmas approaches (but is not yet here), I want to point out a phrase I here all the time.

I am not a huge whiner when it comes to our consumerist ways (unless it controls one’s life). I just think some of our trends we are taking are hilarious. Like I understand that Christmas means getting presents in the morning, and I also understand that some people are not able to do that with everyone on that morning. But when one gives (more…)

Jayne always looks back at her list of rated movies she’s seen and laughs at all that free time she would like to have back. I laugh with her. But we might as well relish the movies we’ve seen with ratings and a list of all of them out on the Intraweb. Luckily, there is a website just for that.

The website is called Movielens and it is some sort of project by some computer or math students at the University of Minnesota. It’s been around for (more…)

In other “Blizzard of ‘04″ news, they’ve closed all the major highways and called out the National Guard. I could keep my bitching theme going by spending paragraph after paragraph ranting on the people in control of government right now, but I think I will leave it up to the ten year old boy who was sitting next to me in this hotel lobby. When it was announced on the news that the National Guard will be out clearing these roads (that Indiana neglected to clear), the boy asked his mom, “Aren’t they all in Iraq?”

Well put, moppy headed boy, well put.

His damn song said country roads would take me to the place I belong. West Virginia. Well, 18 hours later and here I am in Batesville, Indiana. Normally, I hate to just have a journal on the web. I am an exciting guy and all but I don’t think reading about me is that fascinating. But the past day has been worth documenting, if not for your sake, for mine. This day is a day to remember.

We left Iowa City at 3 pm and drove non-stop until we finally tried to pull off in Batesville, Indiana and get a hotel. As soon as we hit the Indiana border, we hit snow. It got worse and worse and eventually got to the point that we stopped every exit and I got out and scraped off all the (more…)

Over my hiatus from a connected life, Pitchfork apparently has listed the Top 50 Singles of 2004 and the Top 50 Albums of 2004. I turn to Pitchfork for news on what music snobs are talking about and typically I disagree. This website gave Boards of Canada a 10.0 (out of 10.0) and when I was fortunate enough to test it out, I would give it no more than a 1.1. (An album automatically receives 1 full point for being (more…)

The above title is a joke. It’s a play on the fact that that Netscape web accelerator does not speed up the internet, it just recalls the crap you’ve already seen more often than a normal browser would. Do you honestly think a piece of software will magically speed up the data that is coming across your phone line? What’s sad is most people probably see it as a selling point. I guess it works if all you do is look (more…)

As I’ve said before, I work with computers a lot and like to play with new programs, especially when they are free. I recommended some good ones to check out earlier and I’m back for another round.

Mozilla Firefox 1.0
I wanted to talk about this last week. Mozilla went in to a full stable release in mid November some time. If you haven’t heard about it or seen the NYTimes 2-page ad, Mozilla is the (more…)