Category: blog

That’s right, we finally took Teddy and Jessie back to Sebastian last night. I miss them already. But I could also see how much they really love him, so I don’t mind as much. It’s amazing how calm they are in his hands. Now I must debate whether or not to get a couple of my own. I love the idea of raising 2 little babies, but I’m not sure of all the clutter and attention they will end up creating. I really wish I had hardwood floors at this point. There’s also a good possibility that Sebastian will be leaving the country in 8 months, and he’s already told me that I’m first on his list to call for adoption! Well, until I make up my mind there’s still the Guinea Pig gallery (with many more pig-tures to come)!

With football season under way I’ve been bashing my team on their message boards with a certain irregularity. It’s about time I posted something positive about my favorite city. Back in my college days I had opportunities to sample a wide variety of music thanks to my position on the radio station WCPR. One of the labels to send us new music regularly was Ovum Recordings – an electronic label from Philly co-founded by Josh Wink. Along came an album from fellower co-founder King Britt and his soul-collective known as Sylk 130. When the Funk Hits the Fan was an album that I truly wanted to love. Philly Soul come alive again, it meshed R&B with funk and slide a mellow groove under the whole. But I just couldn’t get into the album, and eventually sold it off like so much other promo throwaways.
Continue reading “Now a good word from Philly”

I haven’t had a chance to post about seeing Sandy and Steve’s new house (and Caitlyn) or the Art & Music Fest. This week has been hellish as I tried (and finally succeeded) in establishing a VPN between the two facilities at work. Unfortunately it all went downhill as the one Win2k3 server refused to synchronize with the master, but wouldn’t take control of it’s own domain. In other words, I’ll be reloading it this afternoon :sigh:. In the meantime I have 2 post that have been sitting in draft for about 2 weeks and I should just finish them now.

Let me get the link for the EFF’s petition to “Stop the RIAA” out of the way before my point meanders too much.

In case you don’t know, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) is like the ACLU for the digital world. They fight the cause that “the information wants to be free.” I know that saying can sound a little hackneyed, but it represents the ideals that they represent – namely that the Information Age has caused massive changes to our lifestyles, and businesses, government, and individuals must come to terms without infringing upon our rights. The EFF does not argue that music should be free and therefore fileswapping is ok. Instead they make the point that if millions of Americans can be sued by big businesses for downloading music instead of paying the exorbitant prices for CDs when they only want one song, the system itself does not work. When laws like this make so many people criminals, you must examine the laws, not the people.
Continue reading “EFF petition against the RIAA”

Courtesy of SI’s current MLB Power Rankings:

At the coin toss to determine who would have home field in the event of a one-game playoff with one of five teams, Larry Bowa told GM Ed Wade to call “tails” on all five flips. The Phils lost all five tosses.

For those interested, former NATO Commander Wesley Clark jumped into the fray that is the Democratic process. That’s right, after a couple of Internet petitions to that effect, Clark decided he will run for President. People seem to think he’s a real threat to Bush, so lets all wish him the best!

Just have to announce the birth of my 4th nephew (I also have 1 neice). He’s my sister Suzanne and her husband Alex’s second boy. Caleb approves, so they will be taking him home today (I think). There’s no name right now (they’re leaning towards Luke), so right now we’ll just call him ‘it’. It’s doing well, and I hope to see it soon.

So I’ve been taking care of a friend’s Guinea Pigs for the past few days. They are so absolutely adorable it hurts. Last night they were very noisy, so I put them both in my lap and I swear they were ready to curl up and go to sleep right there. But now I’ve been doing all sorts of reading on the Internet about how to take care of them. Much to my dismay, it turns out that the fancy cedar chip bedding I bought for them may be doing more harm than good! I’m now using a combination of some of that bedding along with lots of shredded newspaper. When it comes down to it, they’re very dirty animals so you have to put effort into keeping them clean. But they are sooooo lovable. Anywho, here are some useful links that I found:

• Animal Hospital of High Park – also with pages on other small animal care
• Cottontail’s Cabbage Patch – has a lot of info about various small mammals. The Guinea Pig page helped me understand all the noises they make.
• BeanMakers – based on their latin name, this site even has WAV files of their little squeaks. A very good list of other sites, also.
• A question and answer site that has articles on animals – it even had a page dedicated to just discussing their squeaks.

Teddy and Jessie are just wonderful, and even if I have to give them back, I may just get my own.

I can’t believe I’m actually posting about this. When I have so much else to talk about, I’m actually going to bitch about the horrendous scoring of the De La Hoya/Mosley fight. Normally I wouldn’t even know what was going on, but Lisa and I went to see the fight on Pay-Per-View at a friend’s house (actually, neither of us even knew Bob until last night – he’s the boyfriend of a friend). I don’t follow boxing. I don’t even like the idea of it. As it got later we even planned on leaving before it started. But once I got sucked in I had to watch the whole bout. De La Hoya dominated Mosley for at least 7 rounds last night. In the other 5, he was clearly beaten by Mosley in 3, and about even in the other 2. And yet it was a unanimous decision in favor of Mosley. Everybody at the party was shocked, and even the commentators (who scored a clear victory for Oscar), were in disbelief. George Foreman went so far as talking about a conspiracy against Bob Arum (De La Hoya’s promoter). Arum then claimed he was out of the business, and that “boxing is the garbage can of sports.” The worst part of the whole ordeal – every other sports site is acting like there was no problem with the decision. On top of that, I should be celebrating Michigan’s utter destruction of the Irish – not whining about boxing.

Beware of the following link – it’s way awesome, but will seriously mess with your head. I got the link to this really awesome optical illusion page courtesy of Boing Boing. I think that first one of “Rotating Snakes” is amazing – I was sure it was a Flash animation or something.

As an additional link, here’s the Cool Person Test. I think I got this while surfing commentary on the Avrilution, but there will certainly be more on that later.