Tess managed to find a b-day gift for me that was at once something I've always wanted and something I had completely forgot that I always wanted: A grappling hook! How fargin' cool is that?! It's a fold-up model, and even came with its own black rope. Super cool!
Who says you have to start getting "old" presents at age 40? I mean, what's to stop and "elderly" guy like myself from wanting his very own grappling hook? I've had my eye on one of those since I was a little kid (for all the obvious reasons) and had forgotten all about it. I mean, I could have bought one for myself by now, but it just ever occurred to me. So in steps the coolest wife a guy could have. And now I have to find things with which to grapple!
I turned off comments yesterday. I think they'll stay off for good this time. The spammers had found me, and I was getting about 250 spammy comments a day. Not a big deal, since I had to approve comments before they appeared on the site, but that meant I was getting those emails, and then I had to log in periodically and sort through them all, make sure there wasn't a comment from someone I know, and then delete the junk. That's kinda like work.
So no more comments. Even though blog spam doesn't work (at least not as far as Google is concerned; spamming links to blogs doesn't improve PageRank in the slightest, and may in fact even harm it) those assholes just wouldn't leave me alone. And it wasn't like I was getting a lot of "real" comments anyway (I think I peaked at like 2 per month).
Maybe one day I'll put in a captcha system again, but for now if anyone wants to tell me something just send me an email.
One of the sites I visit a lot, fark.com, recently changed their design. I think it's an attempt to look "grown up" or something, as the guy who runs it is pimping a book, being interviewed on CNN, etc. So they wanted to myspace it up a little, and the new design is hard on the eyes and looks generally bad. It's slower, too.
There's a very nice Firefox plugin called Stylish which can fix that. You basically get to selectively override style sheets with the extension. So you can make cnn.com look like it's being rendered in Netscape 0.9b. Or you can fix fark.com's borked design and make it more readable again. Just use this:
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("fark.com") {
body {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica !important;
background-color: #666699 !important;
}
#commentsArea {
width: 100% !important;
text-align: left !important;
}
#commentsArea BR {
margin: -1px !important;
}
#commentsArea .ctableTF{
margin: 0px !important;
padding: 4px !important;
padding-left: 175px !important;
width: 100% !important;
border: 0px !important;
background-color: #e0e0e0 !important;
color: #000000 !important;
}
#commentsArea .ctableTF a{
color: #880000 !important;
}
#commentsArea .ctable{
margin: 0px !important;
padding: 4px !important;
padding-left: 175px !important;
width: 100% !important;
border: 0px !important;
background-color: #eeeeee !important;
color: #000000 !important;
}
#commentsArea .ctable a{
color: #880000 !important;
}
#commentsArea .cdate{
position: absolute !important;
left: -5px !important;
width: 150px !important;
font-size: 10pt !important;
text-align: left !important;
}
#commentsArea .ctext {
margin: 0px !important;
padding: 2px !important;
padding-left: 5px !important;
padding-right: 5px !important;
width: 100% !important;
text-align: left !important;
}
}
Now everything is (almost) back to normal, and your eyes won't hurt.
(Special thanks to TheEndless.)
UPDATE: You can also use Cthulhon's Fark Reskin to make further enhancements.
I went pig hunting this weekend. Me, my dad, our dentist friend Roger, his son Brad, and two of Roger's friends Chuck and Johnny. We went up to a ranch near Los Banos, CA, about 90 minutes from the house. Dad flew in, and we drove down to meet the rest of the gang who flew down in Chuck's plane.
Man, that was a lot of hiking. We didn't do much the first day, but the second day we covered around 12 miles. We were hunting with dogs, and once they get a scent and tear off, you have to follow them, no matter how far they go. And if they manage to corner a pig, that's got to be your animal.
I wound up getting a 600 pound pig, way deep in this huge patch of manzanita. The guide called earlier today and told me that I will have 250 pounds of meat. That's too much pork for just one fork, so I'm going to be sharing it for sure.
I put up from the pig hunt on picasaweb. I put comments on the pics, so the whole story is there.
It was quite the adventure, and I am as sore as I've ever been.
I found this article about the ten manliest guns to be fairly amusing. The guy who wrote it is an SF author of a few books, makes his own knives and is still in the military going on 20 years now.