"We Chinese didn't invent much, but at least we have invented few most important ones: compass, fire work, cannon, paper, silk, banking, and physical immortality." -- Alex Chiu
Todd Schnitt: This was the guy in the billboards with a bald Britney Spears. As seen in the first picture, he’s not winning too many “Sexiest Man” awards. But the bald one is just too freaky, and it’s the reason he’s up here.
Manuel Uribe: That’s not the worst picture of him. And that’s saying something.
Kim Jong-Il and Madeleine Albright: The frumpy factor in this picture can only be exceeded with the addition of more frumpily-clothed people.
Sheila: Oh, no. No, no, no. Oh, no. No. No!
Ms. Korbut is an entrant in the World Chess Beauty Contest, where female chess players post their pics, and we the players get to vote on them.
A couple of her pictures are so bad, some people (including me) thought she was a cross-dresser. But a female that has people speculating whether she’s male is clearly not the epitome of beauty. Check out her pics.
If you need something a bit better, I recommend the following for your perusal:
Meanwhile, Maria Manakova gets the “trying way too hard” award.
* The front of page of the WCBC was hacked a little while ago. It was by some people calling themselves “Islam Attack”, although I’m pretty sure they have nothing to do with Islam.
The site was down earlier today, due to some database issues. Apparently, they had to do some sort of roll back, because all the stuff from July is gone. Grrrr.
PETA calls Michael Moore fat: They used Moore’s weight to suggest he adopt a vegetarian diet. I expect Moore to counter, explaining he’s fat not because of steaks and hamburgers, but too many donuts and cinammon rolls.
Featured catalog item: Check out this bumper sticker they highlighted from their catalog. It says, “If you wouldn’t hook a dog, why hook a fish?” Now that’s pretty stupid. Any 5th grader could tell you a net and tranquilizer are much better tools for catching dogs than a fish hook.
Liquid Egg Product offers PETA a deal: I will stop using animals for food once animals stop using each other for food.
Looking back at today’s posts, they were scant, poorly planned, and lacking substance. Of course, they were written very quickly doing work–it probably took about 13 seconds per post. But that’s no excuse. It’s better not to blog and have people wonder whether you’re patently insipid than to blog and remove all doubt. Or something like that.
So to make up for the burning agony that was today, I’ll introduce you to a site that doesn’t suck. And if you know it already, well, then I don’t have any recompense to give you. Sorry.
Homestar Runner is…well, you have to check it out for yourself. Let’s just say it’s a great fit for my sense of humor.
Since last night, my computer’s been on the fritz: I had copied a few files to the desktop, and all of a sudden, explorer.exe started closing and re-opening every few seconds. This meant that the desktop icons are continuously flashing, rendering them unusable, and I couldn’t access the start menu or do any Windows key commands. (I wanted to at least pull up the run program deal. Like a fool, I forgot this was accessible through the Task Manager.)
So what did I try? Restarting in safe mode. Rolling back a couple system restore points. Repairing Windows XP. Checking the task manager and making sure that there weren’t any weird processes. Almost doing a full system virus scan. I probably spent 3 hours over 2 days working on this.
So how did I resolve it? Delete the items I’d just copied to the desktop. Duh.
I’d be very interested to know why it happened, but I’ll just be satisifed with a working machine for tonight.
A few weeks ago there were massive wildfires in Georgia and Florida. While there wasn’t anything of that magnitude in South Florida, we had our own blazes. For a few days, there was citywide smoke, which allowed these slightly surreal pictures of the sun. Wearing sunglasses, you could actually look at the sun painlessly for most of the morning.
But a couple weekends ago, the actual problems of wildfires hit home. Coming home from Naples, I took Alligator Alley, a fast tollway with multiple lanes. Before exit 80, they started forcing everyone off because of smoke. That means being diverted to the slower, single-lane US 41. However, it did give me an excuse to visit bustling Everglades City (population: 500). This sign gave me hope that the trip would be somewhat interesting:
It was not to be.
It was the kind of trip where you’re sputtering along at 10mph and you see a “Reduced Speed Ahead” sign ahead. It was the kind of trip where the driver gets jealous of the passengers, because at least they get to sleep. It was the kind of trip where you’re so bored, you start taking pictures of flies that landed inside the car because there’s nothing better to do. I tried to pretend I was on a safari, except they forgot all the animals. That wasn’t much help.
I really wish I’d gotten a picture of the “post office” on 41, which was slightly larger than an outhouse.
Sorry for the boring post. But it’s going up, just because it’s finished.
Pretend you’re an aspiring leader for a religious organization. You’re 19 years old, young and energetic, and eager to prove your worth. Which of these activities would not fall on your list of things to do?
Study the scriptures
Learn from older, experienced leaders
Burn your infant daughter in a microwave*
The hero of the story, Joshua Mauldin, decided on the third course of action (it’s not clear whether he bothered with the first two). I suppose an advantage to this route is that spending 5 to 99 years in prison will toughen him up for the real world.
So what’s the mother say about this? “Satan saw my husband as a threat. Satan attacked him because he saw him as a threat.” She even set up a MySpace page called “Joshua Mauldin is not a Monster” (either MySpace took it down, or I couldn’t find it. MySpace has horrible search capabilities). Undoubtedly, Satan’s next step was attacking Maudlin just before communion, making him spike the wine or grape juice with psilocybin. I’m sure the congregation would have been sympathetic.
She also “described [his] weaknesses as an undisclosed mental disability, and that her efforts to get help for him have failed.” Any church that’s looking for a preacher who’s stupid and/or crazy, look no further.
(By the way, the baby survived, but did need hospitalization.)
As you’ve surely noticed, the blog looks different. I’ve installed WordPress to see how I like using this software (so far, so good). The old stuff is gone until my host gets the data back.
This is actually a good excuse to make a few changes. Maybe change the color scheme, or add a logo. Or sell some T-shirts. Or start a coup. Whatever you think would be good.
Short version of story:
Last week, a bunch of config files for the website were overwritten by the host, breaking the software. Uninstalled and reinstalled Serendipity (that’s the blog software). Tried to restore the blog’s database backup, but got an error. Contacted host; they “restored” the backup. The blog database was empty. I wrote back noting this. Their response:
Hi there,
Our technicians confirmed that they backed up the data available and expressed to me their concern that the tables were empty in the database that was restored.
I am sure this isn’t what you are wanting to get. Please let us know if you need further assistance.
Um, yes, I need more assistance. I need the blanking backup to work! Before this morning, I was frustrated at the blog being down, but was confident it would be up soon. That last response, though, actually made me angry (and that doesn’t happen often). Are they not going to try to figure out why the backup failed?
Until that’s resolved, all the old stuff is gone :_-(
Long version of story:
<flashback>A few months ago, the blog software was throwing up. I asked the web host about it, and they basically said, “We didn’t make the software; we can’t help you.” (Not blaming them; it really isn’t their job. However, they do offer Serendipity as part of their application suite, so it’s not like I uploaded some random program.) Thrown on my own resources, my research determined that changing a bit of code would solve the issue. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the permissions to change any of the files. So I requested a chmod on the directory, which the host quickly granted, and I fixed the issue.</flashback>
Now back to several days ago. The blog would show a blank page, but the other pages worked. At first, I thought maybe there was just some temporary oddball issue, but after 24 hours of this, this was clearly not the case. I looked at the files in the blog directory, and a bunch of them were changed on May 20. Aha! I wrote to the webhost asking them if they had made any changes. Some lady wrote back saying that my question was “confusing” since they didn’t create Serendipity.
Argh.
So I wrote back, expanding on and clarifying my question. Then I checked out the files. One of the config files had an error, preventing the page from loading. Once I removed the offending line, everything should have been good to go…right? Well, when loading the page, it would redirect to a random porn site.
Ignoring the few of you that may have preferred that, I reinstalled Serendipity, which wiped out the database containing all the blog entries, settings, etc. (Yes, I did a backup first!) The problem now is that there’s an issue with the backup restoration…so I have to wait on the host to get back to me on that.
Not only that, I tried to make a post, but no dice. I had to get them to chmod the serendipity directory again (they said I now had the power to chmod stuff in the webapps directory, but apparently that didn’t apply to any subfolders).
Then, this morning, I got the response on the backup issue (see above), which was less than helpful. (”The backup didn’t work. You didn’t want that. Do you need anything else?”)
So I installed WordPress, which, frankly, I’m rather liking. And wrote this rant.
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