ach, server is down for the second time this week. the last time something went wrong with the firewall installation and we were cooked for over 4 hours as the cisco engineers worked fitfully, right now we're going on 2 hours. i asked the lady if there was an uptime guarantee, she said ""no, but there is a performance guarantee."" well, not working is some pretty sucky performance. bah!

in brighter news... well, nothing whatsoever happened. bah!

case in point (figure 1)

making it a pain to view your site, even if it makes your advertising department happy, is not the best policy.

the above site refused entry to anyone who didn't offer up some irrelevant and slightly personal information. i know demographics are important to you - but i just want to read an article, it's not the end of the world if i don't, and this isn't exactly the new york times we're talking about (another abuser along with the washington post) so why should i even bother?

mcdonalds tests out robot chefs

soooo jetson.

I have a saying for technology for technology's sake: ""jetson food."" you know how in the jetsons they eat little pills instead of real food? just because something is ""efficient"" or ""possible"" doesn't mean it's a good idea. we don't just eat to survive - we like eating, and cooking, and talking about eating and cooking. anyways, my thought for the day.

needy aren't they

interesting graphic/graph. show's the ups and downs of approval ratings for the presidents since carter. notice that only bush I and bush the revenge are prone to skyrocketing... the only two termers among them, reagan and clinton stayed roughly in the upper middle the whole time. with reagan sagging slighty. in the polls i mean.

painted chili mac's room today. apparently i'm not that good a painter. didn't mix up the paint enough, and got it on the floor, out of the lines and on the window. yeah, well she'll never ask me to paint again!

Ooo! I'm going!

Ooo! I'm not gonna!

i think the water heater was too heavy. threw my back out something fierce. in other news, we borrowed a steam cleaner thing from amy's aunt. it shoots out 1000 degree stream of steam that is supposed to ""blast away dirt and gunk."" in reality, it makes a big cloud and the gunk is hardly amused. i guess the tagline ""expensive, dangerous and inefficient sponge"" was taken.

took out the all low caps thing. SEE! so that link below works now.

this years most anticlimactic news story of the year

i put my contacts in this morning and couldn't see. everything was fuzzy and randomly coming in to focus. Something must be wrong! i popped them out and noticed i had four contacts in my eyes. (i only have two eyes) guess i forgot to take them out last night.

so the girl and i go up to some depressed neighborhood about once a month to play cards (liverpool rummy) with her great aunt. usually we order pizza from this local dive near there. it's good stuff, not exactly classic stlouis style, but something approximating it at least. this time we went to the 'restaurant' itself. it's basically a room with badly stained carpet, aging posters on the wall and fold out tables covered with frayed vinylish tablecloths. the food is... well, some of it is vaguely italian, coupled with such delicacies as fried cauliflower and aldi's brand condiments. the meal was ok - but not anything that something emerging in twenty minutes from my own spartan kitchen couldn't rival. we went back and played the cards - i won handily the second game - and then drove home thru the most wretched and depressed ghetto this side of bedstuy. we almost hit a guy selling balloons on the highway on ramp.

this has to be the worst written news story of the year. i had to read this story three times before i figured out what the point was. i'm still not sure. apparently the guy who tipped off the u.s. army as to hussein's sons whereabouts had been acting strange for a bit. he bought more bread than usual and was smoking cigars instead of cigarettes. he was seen sitting in a car once. he loved money. he told a friend that people were staying at his house. and this is newsworthy because.... um, i don't know. i mean, i understand that he's in the public eye and all now, but writing a feature story about him buying lots of bread?

'normally, he took about four or five pieces of bread every day,' said sheik shahir al khazraji, 31, who owns a bakery across the street from zaydan's house. ''all of a sudden, about three weeks ago, he started buying 40 pieces of bread every day. on the night before the american attack, he brought 60 pieces of bread.''

jaboori said people in the neighborhood began to tell him stories of zaydan's behavior. his friend had begun visiting a tobacco shop down the street and buying cigars. he usually smoked cigarettes. one day, a store owner across the street told jaboori that zaydan had come in and asked for 'the biggest bag of the best rice they had.'

- ok, the url doesn't work - my capitalization thing is screwing it up. well, boston globes web server is doing it, it's case sensitive. i run everything thru a lower case function on this site because i suck at capitalization. so instead of inconsistently capitalizing correctly, i consistently capitalize incorrectly. it makes sense in my mind.

it's been awhile - went off to ohio for a bit to attend my grandmother's funeral, see the folks, the siblings, the vaguely related, the old friends who are still there, various gas station attendants, one particularly attentive highway patrolman, the hot dogs at tony packos, a hotel counterperson and some incredibly fat buffet diners (in indiana on the way back.)

oh, my nephews too. i've only seen the kids twice in their lives. they didn't remember that. they did have some nice toys to bang on the table tho.

decent trip, given that amys feet were swelling, the heat was (better than stl) stifling and, man, those indiana people were fat! i got a picture of a lottery sign that said ""hoosier millionaire"" which was well received with the stl crowd.

when we got back the first thing we noticed is that the weather here had gotten suddenly... livable. upper seventies with no choking humidity, even. this news was met with the inevitable, a drive down the road to grant's farm to feed the goats and point at the monkeys and touch a camel chin.

today we went down to jeffco to meet amy's mother and some guy named peanut. yeah, peanut. she was scared stiff that i'd be horrified and run screaming back to the safety of the county. i survived. smelling of smoke and covered in dog hair, but alive.

speaking of dogs - the one below is gone. she was way to afraid of the other dogs and cars and, uh, me. we relented and returned her to the safety of the boondocks. oi.

commercial rants, brought to you by nissan i like angry talk.

i would rather drive sharpened chopsticks

through my ears than hear ""it's not delivery, it's digiorno"".

this guy is riding the subway and sees a girl with a pizza. this is what he yells. ""who delivered?""

who says that? ""who delivered?""

what are you supposed to answer to ""who delivered?""

i would have said ""some loser in a hatchback.""

she came home with a squirmy, big eyed package of fur and yips. ferris, the worlds most frightened dog. amy pulled this pup out of a box in front of a walmart a couple years ago. since then she's been living at her grandmothers, but now is skoochin her poochy tail around our house.

she'll let me pet her and sort of poke at a toy if i dangle it in front of her schnozz, but for the most part she's a mommas dog. i think she'll get used to me eventually, but for now she's pretty much scared stiff of this big lumbering alpha male that struts around like he owns the place.

giant preschoolers in wrestling match