Dang’s Weblog

Does driving make you tired? It does for me. Yesterday, we drove up to Interlochen, and today we drove back. In both cases, I was exhausted, and falling asleep, by the time the drive was over. Now, in neither case was I really tired. Both were in the middle of the day, and both I’d had my coffee. Almost as soon as I got out of the car, I felt better. This has always happened to me, but usually only when I’m driving, not when I’m a passenger. Maybe I can move around more when I’m a passenger, maybe passengers are just immune to the sleep rays shot at the driver, I don’t know. Someone should do a study on why driving makes you tired.

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So, there’s a movie coming out soon, called Bruce Almighty. In it, an ordinary dude gets all the powers of God. Among other things, he make the breasts of his girlfriend bigger. Now, they don’t show too many of the things he does in the previews, but I’m sure there’s some moralistic outcome, and all, but getting all the powers of God has got to be the ultimate fantasy of just about everyone. I know it is for me. Even if it’s only for a little while, it would be so much fun.

So, what would you do with unlimited power?

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Sleeping during the day is wierd. Don’t ask me why it’s different than sleeping at night, but it is. For example, today I came home sick about 3 or so, and went to bed. About 5, I got up, and I was all stiff and sore. Now, I almost never wake up stiff and sore after sleeping at night. Maybe it’s because of the amount of time? I also never sleep for 2 hours at night, but still… How can sleeping make you stiff and sore? Maybe it’s just because I’m sick, and I only ever sleep during the day when I’m sick…

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Mt. Dew is in a diversification frenzy. First, there was Code Red, which was cherry Mt. Dew. Now, there’s LiveWire, which is orange Mt. Dew. Basically, it tastes like orange soda, but with a faint undertaste of Mt. Dew. It’s quite good.

This brings me to a question. Why this sudden flurry of new soft drink flavors? There’s Pepsi Blue, Vanilla Coke, Red Fusion, Code Red, LiveWire, Seven Down, and even tropical punch Sprite. I can’t remember anything like this in my life. I remember New Coke, Crystal Pepsi, the introduction of Wild Cherry Pepsi (which postdated Cherry Coke by a long time, and therefore wasn’t new), but basically I can’t remember a single new flavor of soft drink during my lifetime. All were very slight variations on existing flavors, exactly existing flavors, or copies of rival brands. And yet, there is now 4 new flavors, and a large amount of brand diversification. Why now?

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In the first game of the Dallas-Anaheim series, during overtime, the Ducks scored a goal that was then disallowed, because the net was a bare inch off the ice. They then went on and won the game. Today, Dallas scored a goal (which tied the game), which was then disallowed, because the net was very slightly off the ice when the puck crossed. Dallas then, almost immediately got a powerplay and scored. Now, the rule says that the goal must be in it’s normal position when the puck crosses the line, so both rulings were correct, but it’s wierd that a) this happened twice in the same series, once to each team, and b) both times the team eventually scored the (extremely important) goal that got overturned. Janette believes the hockey gods think the rule is stupid. There was also speculation by the announcers that the rule will be changed during the offseason. BTW, the goal that was eventually scored by Dallas tonight went in off a skate. It was reviewed for a “distinct kicking motion”. The goal was allowed.

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So we bought a new couch on saturday. (Yeah, I know I should have blogged about this on saturday, but I couldn’t get my motivation up to blog this weekend.) It’s a La-Z-Boy ® reclining sofa. It’s red. “Red?” you say, “Why red?”. Well, it’s because the furnature stores have a huge scam going on. Here’s the deal.

If you go into a furnature store (and Art Van is the same as La-Z-Boy), you see lots of cool furnature in lots of ugly colors. You look at the furnature, you sit on it, you pick one you like, then you ask “How much in blue?” and they say, “Well, that’s a special order. It’ll be $500 more.” Now, if I was looking at paying, say, $2500, then $500 more (20% markup, for those of you short on math or just lazy) is not unreasonable. However, the list price on the sofa is $799. This means I’m paying 62.5% markup for getting a fucking different color! That’s rediculous. Now, they don’t actually give you the piece of furnature in the store. They ship it from the warehouse. They could easily stock several nice colors in the same fabric, allowing me a choice of colors for the same price. But they don’t. Why? Greed. It’s a scam. They say “You can only have one of these ugly colors at a decent price. If you want a decent color, we’re going to rip you a new one.” Fortunately for us, we have odd taste. We happen to have a lot of red in our apartement now, and our first choice for color scheme, way back when, was red. We only switched to blue later. So, since Art Van had a red version of the couch we want, we actually are getting a new sofa. Somehow, I feel I’ve beat the system.

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Well, that was fun. We’ve been having a problem with our wireless access point. Periodically, for no reason that we can see, it drops connection to all the cards. This is really annoying, especially to Janette, who’s home all day and uses AIM all the time. It kicks her off of her AIM regularly. Now, the web-based configuration for this WAP has a button to check for a firmware update. I’ve been using it regularly, and it always says that there is no firmware update. So, finally, today I decide to go to the bloody Belkin site myself, to check it out. It turns out, there’s a firmware update dating to Feb. 20, which predates us buying the WAP! Apparently, it’s been blatently lying to me about the firmware. So, I download it, and run the update.

Here’s where the fun begins. The firmware installs correctly, but the browser screen fails to reload. The laptops connect to the wireless (as in the lights on the cards say they can see the WAP), but the WAP is not talking to anything, wireless or wired. The lights are all on, and they all blink but no traffic shows up anywhere, and the WAP isn’t reachable either on it’s default address or on the one I assigned it. Bummer. So, I reboot the WAP. Nothing. So, finally, I reset it to factory settings. Success! It DHCPs the windows computer attached to it, on the default address. So, now all I have to do is copy the saved settings across to the windows computer (with no network. I actually used a floppy. ) and restore the settings back to the WAP. Phew! All back to normal. Hopefully, the WAP will stop randomly dropping signal now.

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So, a company called Unicast has come up with a “new” ad for webpages: interstitials. These are commercials, like on TV or the radio. When you click a link on a page to a page on the same site, it will pop up a full screen ad, that will last for at least 15 seconds, and must be manually closed by the user, before going on to the next page. So, between two pages of a story, you get a popup on steriods. This is quite possibly the worst thing that’s happened to the web, but I believe it will backfire. I, personally, will never back to a site that has these things, assuming, of course, that I can’t find some way to block them. It would be easy to make it impossible to skip them, and I imagine that’s what they’ll do, but I expect people to avoid sites with these like the plague. At least, I hope that’s what happens. If interstitial ads really take over the web, I’m not sure what I’ll be able to read online.

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