The Dark Knight was a very entertaining film. The Alamo Drafthouse was a little too crowded for it to be a completely enjoyable experience, reinforcing to me why I normally wait a couple of weeks, or go much earlier in the day when the crowds tend to be lighter, to see a much anticipated movie. My friends I was meeting, however, are night shift workers and asking them to attend an early showing with me would have been rather cruel.

Afterward, Bryan (my son) and I met with a1an for a nice dinner at Baby A's. It was karaoke night and the music was all I've come to expect from beered up rock-star wannabes.

I got an e-mail from a co-worker I really like. She's leaving OLPM. She didn't say why she is leaving or where she is going, only that she had resigned. For reasons I know but will not share here, she is both a very private and a very sad person; I therefore did not pry. Still, I will miss her. A lot.

Gee is out of town for a few days. Once again she has been seized by the desire to move. We have just signed for an apartment out on 622 here in Austin. It's a nice place, a gated community. It will be a bit farther to drive to work but will not significantly lengthen my morning commute.

Tonight, Bryan and I are going to gnaw on ribs at Bone Daddy's, a Texas original with very good barbecue ribs. He will be leaving tomorrow. He brought me two nice gifts from France: a bottle of French beer and a bottle French wine.

I saw Hellboy II: The Golden Army last week. I liked it better than the first one but I missed the young agent from the first film. I liked him.

I have volunteered, once again, for the Austin Hot Sauce Festival.

I about 10 days I will be seeing Hiroshima in concert.

My son is back from France. To celebrate, he and I and some friends from work are going to see the new Batman flick at the Alamo Drafthouse! Woo-hoo!

I have heard about an Indian custom, wherein there is a ceremonial stick present at a gathering. Only the person holding the stick may speak. No other person may speak until the person holding the talking stick passes it on to them.

What good idea. A really, really great idea.

Kick a dog often enough, and even the friendliest one will sink its teeth into your leg one day.

This is a darkly humorous statement I read on the internet this morning.

Everyone is given a gun. The world sees three days of utter chaos. The survivors become the most polite people you could ever imagine.

ARGH!

Argh. ARGH! ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!

ARGH!

That is all.

Confucius say he who pays $10 for a bottle of beer gets what he pays for.

Someone, once upon a time and obviously a Philistine, told me Chimay Trappist Ale wasn't very good. Don't you believe him. If you've never tried this delightful beverage before, do yourself a favor and give it a try at your earliest opportunity.

That is all.

After 3 days of wrangling and tweaking, I've uninstalled Firefox 3 and reinstalled version 2. For the first time, I've been disappointed with Mozilla and Firefox.

I believe I have found a workaround and I will be submitting a bug report to the Mozilla folks. It appears that when either Norton or Firefox (FF) itself was clearing private data, which my browser is was set to do every time I closed it, it was somehow losing the location of the bookmarks.

What I can't explain is why, even though these bookmarks were obviously still on my HD, that FF wouldn't restore them without a reboot.

Still, disabling the automatic privacy data purge in both Norton and FF seems to have fixed the problem. For now I am doing a manual dump just before I shut the computer down for the night. I hope this give some aid to anyone out there with a similar problem.

By the by, I did attempt a reinstall, including a clean one from Windows Safe Mode, and the problem didn't stop until I stopped the privacy data dump. [ribbet]

eta: never mind, the fix wasn't.

Here are 2 interesting links. One deals with 10 Common Myths About Copyrights, though actually there are 11 listed on the site linked. The other is a link to the same site but a different page giving a Brief Introduction to Copyright. I know some of you, especially a certain red-headed artist living in Austin, have had some copyright discussions with persons who have stolen work from them and may find it interesting.

Jorgé, an insolent grin on his face, looked the Game Master straight in the eye. "Twenty?" he asked as he rattled the die in his hand, "no problem."

---

I've reached a rather unexpected decision gate.¹ I got a call from a friend and former co-worker with a bit of information for me. Many of you I may recall that, about 3+ years ago I worked in the TDCJ² providing long term chronic asthma management to the offenders.³

They want me back.

I'm tempted. Twenty? No problem.



-----
¹ Y'all are all a bunch of bright folks. I don't have to explain the difference between a decision and a choice, do I?
² Texas Department of Criminal Justice
³ Okay, you and I would call them prisoners or convicts but when the State of Texas pays you to take care of them they are called "offenders".

This question is aimed at Firefox users. I recently upgraded to version 3 and I have trouble with my bookmarks. If I close Firefox and then later reopen it, sometimes it loads without my bookmarks ... even my iGoogle home page is the generic one. The browsers remembers all my logins but no bookmarks. They cannot be restored from backups. The only way to get them back is to reboot my computer. I'm using Windows XP Professional 5.1, the latest Firefox build, and Norton 360. I've tinkered with some of the Norton settings, especially turning off the Firefox privacy cleanup, but nothing seems to make any difference.

Has anyone else had this problem?

Hey, Newscasters! When you use street slang like "po-po" instead of police, you don't sound "hip" and "with it". You sound like jerks!

I just thought you'd want to know.

I've been on-line a long time. I've been using computers since before DOS was popular and had internet access in the day when I had to explain to people what that was.

For the first time in many, many years I will be without easy access to the usenet. I doubt I will miss it. In the early days the usenet consisted extremely intelligent, if somewhat lacking in manners, computer users who used the usenet to communicate with others of similar bent. Nowadays the usenet is populated with folks whose level of stupidity, by and large, exceeds that of even the political 'bloggers on the 'web. I've been only a fringe participant there for a long while.

Still, it was an odd feeling to read the notice from Time-Warner that Roadrunner would no longer be providing access to the usenet. Like the dial up BBS of old, another bit of the past sort of whimpers and flickers out. The usenet has given me something, though, it has given me good friends such as itzwicks and pehteyemdjehuty and others I've forgotten to mention and hope I have not offended.

Yes, I know there are premium servers I can subscribe to and continue to download and read the newsgroups which have brought me so much over the years. I could, but I won't. Instead, I'll say good night; and thank you.

You think you're having a bad day? How would like to go through your entire Tuesday with this image burned into your brain? Yes, I'm doing this because I'm evil! BWA HA HA HA HA!

We knew, 30 years ago, that dependency on petroleum was a bad thing. I know, I was there. I remember the lines of cars stretched around the block for a half tank (or less) of fuel. I remember the speed limit change from 70 MPH to 55. I remember people selling gas guzzlers in favor of purchasing fuel efficient cars.

It didn't last long, and we were back to our old ways with nary of thought of what happened. We had 30 years. 30 years! We had all that time to reduce or perhaps even remove our dependence upon oil from outside of our borders.

I pray I'm wrong, but I see the same thing happening again. And again. Until one day, the shortage will become a lack.

If we had started 30 years ago it would have been easy.

I have always wanted to see the first episode of SG-1 but I've never quite managed to catch it on the tube. I don't know if it is because sciffy doesn't show it or if random chance has been operating against me. So, I finally gave and downloaded iTunes and paid $1.99US to download the episode in question.

Wow.

It was an entertaining and well done derivation of the big screen Stargate film. As an aside: I wasn't aware it was "R" rated, even the original film was only PG-13. Anyway, great story. I'm glad I finally saw it and this gives me great hope for the 2nd direct to DVD movie, Stargate: Continuum. Your thoughts?

I was driving around Austin today, between the hours of 1300 and 1700. It was 103ºF.

Imagine young Billie, who was not rich but loved the game of golf. He worked hard for years, practicing at the driving range after work and playing on the weekends. Finally, he gets onto the pro circuit and the unthinkable happens: he beats Tiger Woods! His family gathers around the television to see film clips of Billy winning and hear him talked about on the national news broadcast and what do they hear instead?

"Today, Tiger Woods had an off day on the golf course. . ."