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A lot of people dismiss New Year’s celebrations. “It’s just another day,” they say, and that’s true. However life is just like good project management, it requires firm starts and deadlines. Otherwise you’ll never know when you’re finished or need to move on to the next phase in life. Reviewing is what keeps us from endlessly living in a rut. With that in mind, here are some notable things from this year that I experienced. (more…)

Remember all those gift cards you got at Christmas? Go and find them all, take and inventory, call the 800 number on the back to get the balance and sharpie the remaining balance on the card. Remember most gift cards expire within a year. Sure it’s a scam, but beat them to it. You have half a year left. What’s that? You’re welcome

Originally uploaded by bladesdna

This week we had to put down our cat Simon. He gave us twelve great years as our friend and housemate. Any of you who knew him can attest to his remarkable personality and eccentric behavior. Even anti-cat people thought he was tops. We miss you terribly and each day seems a little dull without you little dude.

I rarely do a quick link to someone else, but this time A Kugel kind of says it all.

So the holiday season is on us again, and the ad industry is starting to bombard us with fragrance ads. Nothing says “I love you” like a gift that says “I think you would smell better wearing this.” Interestingly this year the trend is to make your loved ones smell like your favorite celebrity which is ingenious. It’s not like Christmas day your loved one will tear apart the wrapping and squeal, “It smells just like Faith Hill!” because most of us have never smelled Faith Hill. This brings me to my second point. Isn’t it sort of random that some company thought we would like to smell like these celebrities so much? Here is a less than exhaustive list of the fragrances I’ve found. (more…)

It’s been a cold spring here in south central. Kugel and I took a Saturday afternoon bike ride to Hans Herr House. Along the way we saw all sorts of cool spring things. Among which was this red-tail hawk that just killed a rabbit. I got about thirty yards from the hawk until he got nervous and abandoned his leftovers. Kugel just finished installing new brake levers on his bike and the shellac just dried on my MB-3 so we decided to take our bikes out for a photo shoot in the park. (more…)

Hi all, thought I’d customize the word press theme a little bit. Whipped out the Gimp and redid the photos on the top. On the left is my friend Louis’s bike. We took this picture last weekend on a relatively cold day in the park. I’ll put some more pics up from that day at a later date. Going right is a picture of some organic carrots taken at the Hollywood farmers’ market last summer. Alton Brown says that carrots used to be widely available in all colors but the Dutch bred them to be orange, and for whatever reason that’s all we eat now. Next right is a picture of me climbing a tree last spring. I managed to climb one hundred trees last year, a goal I recommend anyone trying. The last picture is one of the many waterfalls at Ricketts Glen State Park, a state treasure. Every Pennsylvanian should make a point of visiting some time.

The default Landzilla theme I use had the Links function broken with Wordpress 2.1.3. Of course a relatively proficient XHTML/CSS person could have fixed this in seconds. It took me two hours. Only one way to learn these things though. If I were a perfectionist I’d align it left, but eh.. I’ll wait until the next upgrade.

We’re redesigning our WAN at work and what a headache. Well you can’t mention WAN without having to deal with Cisco somehow. I’m just amazed at how they continue to dominate the switching/routing/security market even though their stuff is so ridiculously overpriced and underwhelming. Which got me thinking, what if Cisco made cars? Here’s an excerpt from an imaginary Cisco car lot. (more…)

Hi sandblade.net fans. I just upgraded from wordpress 1.5.2 to 2.1.3. Wow what a difference! Hats off to Matt and all the other WP developers. The upgrade process was smooth and painless. There was no need to use backups and it seems none of my content is missing. The look and feel of 2.1.3 has gone all web 2.0 with big blocks of nicely faded colors. So now working in wordpress feels like working in gmail. Other than that most of it is familiar.

Other features I like are the auto-saving drafts and integrated spell checker. The big reason I upgraded was to manage all the comment spam I was getting. It wasn’t so bad at first, maybe 30 a week. Now I get maybe 300 a day, and some of the spam is just unconscionably vulgar. Now I’m running the Akismet spam control plugin, and hopefully my days of reading hundreds of foul-mouthed spam are over. Well netizens let me know how the new sandblade.net is treating you.

Well I finally gave up on KMail as my work email client. It wasn’t KMail that I didn’t like, it was the fact that most of my work life exists in Windows and simple things like cutting and pasting from email into Office apps was a real chore. Plus it seems that everyone insists on using Outlook and emailing MS Office attachments. So it was time to move to Outlook, because that’s what everyone else is doing (Remember what your parents warned you about peer pressure). I migrated to Outlook 2003. I always swore I’d never use Outlook, and it’s just as awful as I thought it would be. The problem is that in the Windows world, Outlook is the best mailer. Here are the problems I have with Outlook, and these are the things that I’d want in a Windows email client. (more…)