[note, 5/31/04: This is the last post from the previous incarnation of what I laughingly called a blog. The “someday” I referred to below came much sooner than I thought.]

This blog layout is gettin’ real embarrassing. Someday eventually when I can tear myself away from the Straight Dope board for more then 15 minutes I’m gonna see what I can do about doing something else with it. My temptation is to roll my own blog software, using XML and Perl and all sorts of fun goodies, but I’m sure I’d be better off just getting some other blog software with a little more flexibility. Ideally I’d like my own web server to play with, but I can’t yet afford the DSL connection that lets me host a site.

I think there were a few other things I was going to mention, like my quest to find a reasonable condo downtown, my much smaller but more productive quest to make gazpacho… and there was something else, too, but I can’t remember what it was. I’m sure it will come to me… Eventually. Anyway, now I’ve mentioned them and I’m too lazy now to elaborate. Such are the freedoms afforded by having a blog virtually nobody reads.

I can’t wait until everyone who was eligible to serve in Vietnam becomes too damn old to run for President.

May the Fourth be with you.

Dear Mr. President,

I, like you, am sickened and disgusted by the images of Iraqi prisoner abuse recently revealed. Whenever I see these images on TV or online or elsewhere, I feel a great shame come over me. Certainly this sort of thing has happened before, maybe countless times in the history of warfare, but only now thanks to the internet do these things come so easily to light. Even more reason for everyone to be careful how they represent themselves.

When I saw you on TV in the Rose Garden the other day making brief comments about the images, I noticed what I felt was a lack of obvious anger on your part. Not for a second do I believe that you weren’t angry – furious – at what has happened. But I do wish you would show it. You don’t have to use the phrase “heads will roll,” but that has to be the implication for the world to see, that you will not stand for this, and that someone will be held accountable. Shout it if you have to! Bang your fist on the lectern and say NO, we do not do this!

Will that get played on Al-Jazeera? I couldn’t say. But a lot of people around the world WILL be watching, and they need to hear it from the guy in charge.

Thank you for your time.

So, just out of morbid curiosity I download the trailer for Garfield: The Movie. Yeah, I figured it was going to be bad.

I was off a few orders of magnitude on the suckitudinous scale. Lordy mercy.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are too many damn Drewberts on the web. Here I am, thinking that it’s a nice unique name, but it turns out the Internet is lousy with them. There’s even a nifty wintery Flash game out there called DREW*bert.

For the record, just so everyone knows, this is not me. I trust you’ll understand why I want to be totally clear on this point.

It’s already been well established that, should there actually be a Hell, I’m going to it. So I feel free to enjoy the strange imagery brought to mind by the following Reuters headline:

Zombies push Jesus from top of No. Amer box office

I know this would have been so much better had I actually taken a picture, and for that I apologize. But I really needed the 34-cent stamp that mere minutes ago was found stuck to my cat’s lower lip.

Fortunately, I didn’t actually have to reinstall Linux on the old Mac. When I initially tried changing monitor resolutions, I noted a message that said that the old settings were being saved to some file with a .backup extension. Fortunately before I started playing with the monitor I’d already networked the 6500 and my G4. So I logged in to the Linux from the G4, did a massive search for any file that ended in “.backup” and found it.

Restoring the file didn’t do any good, but at least I now knew which file to fiddle with to get the monitor back. It took some trial and error and plenty of restarts to get it right.

So yeah, I didn’t have to reinstall, but that’s still way too much work. It’s kinda neat that I CAN do it that way, but it’s a pain that I HAVE to do it that way.