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My friend Warren is inches away from finishing Pony Trouble, a hilariously bloody movie. I just sent away for my advance fundraising copy of the movie. He’s done the movie mostly on shoestrings. You too can get an advance fundraising copy of the movie. Give me a buzz to find out how.

My dad is feeling great :-)

My product shipped. It’s still beta but it’s really good. Check it out!

I saw my Tara’s band at CBGB’s last night, The Crevulators. Twas fun!

I’m going over to see Niece Julia right now. :-)

My dad got out of his procedure fine. Phew! (apparently it’s not technically called an “operation” or “surgery”). They weren’t able to put the stent in because they couldn’t get around a tight corner but the balloon angioplasty was successful. Right out of surgery (or whatever it’s called) he looked and felt really good. He’s getting another one in a couple weeks but that angioplasty is much less risky.

He’ll be home tomorrow.

PHEW!

I’m in New Joisey. Family is well. Julia missed me a lot. I’ve been working at home today. I still haven’t figured out how to send email. Surgery is tomorrow.

I’ll be leaving the house at 4:10 am to catch my 7:10 flight to NJ. Ugh. That’s in 4 hours. And touching down at 6:30pm. Ugh. (there’s a 3 hour time difference and a 3 hour layover in all that)

Over the last 3 days, there have been a number of military jets flying overhead here in San Francisco, the Blue Angels are in town. Every time they fly by, I tense up. Each time, I am viscerally reminded of a pair of military jets that flew over my house when I was 10 years old.

The Cold War was in full swing. This was the period that movies like Red Dawn came out of. I was standing in my back yard on a slightly overcast day. I heard a noise, looked up and got a flash of 2 jet fighters flying maybe 500 feet above me. In that instant my eyes were actually focused on them, I could easily make out that they had various releasable objects on their bellies. They were gone in a split second. A thunderous whooshing sound followed that lasted a long while. The sound faded slowly. As it faded, I looked around and saw that my neighbor, Mr. Cosmai was on his upstairs deck looking at the jets too. I jokingly called over, “Ha, here comes World War III!”. But the second I said it, a sense of real dread came over me. I could feel the blood drain from my face. We called to each other a few times. I could hear the fear creep into his voice too. We told each other that we’d go inside our houses and check the TV for any news. I remember going in and changing channels, dreading the thought that I might hear that usually annoying Emergency Broadcast System beep or see some government newscaster telling us to duck and cover. I had it in my head that the regular newscasters wouldn’t give such news, it would be some neutral-looking, creme-colored jacketed newscaster sitting at a near empty desk with a blank gray wall for a background. And I knew full well that ducking and covering would be useless in the face of multiple megaton hydrogen bombs, stratospheric EMP nukes and fallout that would last 100,000 years. I swallowed my heart several times as I clicked through the channels.

Needless to say, our forces weren’t mobilizing. After a few minutes, I went out and met up with Mr. Cosmai; he couldn’t find any news on his TV either. There was no cause for alarm.

Here in San Francisco, another jet just rattled the windows of my house. I can feel myself tighten all over.

I was fiddling with my BIOS settings trying to get my Cybex Autoview Commander 4 port KVM to stop messing up my keyboard input. Avocent (who bought Cybex) said that I might want to change the BIOS keyboard input setting from “fast” to “normal”. Well, I couldn’t find that option in my BIOS but….

There is an option for hard drive performance. You can choose: bypass, quiet hard drive, or performance hard drive. It had been set to “bypass”. I switched it to “performance” and Yeeeh Haawww! The drive is now a bit louder, making those traditional hard drive clackity sounds, but some disk operations are now much more responsive. Several tasks have gone from “click, wait-a-sec… wait-a-sec… wait-a-sec… done” to “click-done”.

Cool beans.

You know that my blog must be getting popular… I got 118 comment spams last week. Thank goodness for Spam Karma and Bad Behavior. Not a single spam got through. I don’t know how much e-mail spam I get these days, Spamassassin takes care of most of it while Cloudmark Desktop takes care of about 10 a day. I had one false-negative last week, but that’s about it.

…and yes Holly, I totally realize that this is another product review in a long string… Nya on you! ;-)

update 10-9-05: BITE MY TONGUE! It seems a very odd coincidence that just a few hours after I wrote this, I got my first next-generation comment spam.

It was a comment from one Ryan M. Parr. He’s got an email address, a web site filled with all sorts of semi-authentic sounding crap and he even writes semi-coherently. The spam was deposited in a very low key manner. He didn’t even mention the name of the product! Instead, he google-bombed on a keyword, “Eye[nocommentspam]Q”. That takes you to a website called in[nocommentspam]fmind.com where they are selling (of all things) a speed reading course.

I thought the spam mail sounded stupid too; so I downloaded it off bearshare; unfortunately now that I checked it out, it turned out to be in an Asian character set and unable to extract from .rar format. If you want a program along this line, a good program is Eye[nocommentspam]Q.

Fuckers.

update 10-11-05: 71 comment spams received in the past 3 days. 0 made it to the site. I just sent $25 to Dr Dave and Michael Hampton, authors of Spam Karma and Bad Behavior.

No seriously. At the end of the ingredients list of tens of thousands of products it reads “and spices”. So what are they? Pepper? Nope, ’cause I’ve seen things that list pepper separately. Salt? No, they always list that. Oregano? Bug parts? Plutonium? Dirt? What?! I want to know!