Author: Heather Meadows

I was wondering when the other shoe would drop (the manga’s been licensed for awhile now).

No more free episodes for me…;_; I hope they hurry up and come out with DVDs.

See ShoPro Entertainment’s Press page for more info.

(Blogger Sucks Note: I originally wrote this yesterday, at 6:15 pm. Yes, that’s right. I couldn’t get it to publish until now. :P)

McDonald’s is having a nationwide free sampling event of their Chicken Selects. I wonder if either of the McDonald’s restaurants within five minutes of my apartment (;P) are participating?

I hate that I lose posts, can’t even start writing posts, can’t edit posts, can’t get to the comments, etc. because their servers are so busy. I mean, it’s great that they’re popular and all, but I like to blog, and I like to blog frequently, and these server issues just don’t do it for me.

I was unable to make the two previous posts when I wanted to. The first one kept timing out over and over. When I finally got it to go through just a few minutes ago, I discovered that it had posted six times, so I had to go back and delete the duplicates. The second post I didn’t even bother trying…I just emailed it and the first one to myself in a file called bloggersucks.txt.

:>

(As What’s-Her-Face might say.)

From Yahoo! News – Oddly Enough:

Carol Birmingham almost had a heart attack when she realized her Mac Attack had cost $8,700.

The 62-year-old British tourist didn’t notice until Sunday morning that she had left her cash-stuffed purse on a McDonald’s counter when she bought lunch the previous day.

Here’s the best part of the story:

Ilona Barattin, 23, said she found cash, mostly hundred-dollar bills, but no ID. On returning the cash, she said: “It was the right thing to do.”

You see, people don’t have to suck. So stop sucking, people! :)

One of the nice things about Bloglines is that it tells me when other Bloglines users have subscribed to my blog (yes, I’m subscribed to my own blog, shut up). Today I noticed a new name in the list of 6 subscribers (of which only three are public), Josh Centers. (Actually, it said “jcenters”, and I had to scour his Bloglines feeds until I found a post with a link back to his main blog. That’s the one drawback of the subscribers thing.)

His blog looks interesting. I have to be honest here, I am intrigued by the fact that he appears to be in a nontraditional relationship with two girls. But I also think he’s good at expressing himself through writing, and if nothing else he lives in Kentucky ;> So I’m going to blogroll him, I think.

(Side note: I tried to post this at like, 8:00. Blogger sucks.)

The fan-organized attempt to resurrect Enterprise by paying for a new season now has a spiffy new website, and a lawyer.

This is pretty unprecedented. Do you think it stands a chance of actually working? I personally think it’s pretty cool. I never really watched Enterprise (except the pilot and that one episode where Duncan was “featured”), so I don’t know if it’s worth spending $12 on, but I applaud the die-hard fans’ unique attempt to save their show.

Of course, he never reads my blog, so he’ll never see it.

Alas!

Today’s (yesterday’s) strip is hilarious, but the rant is what really got me. I hope he doesn’t delete it. Here it is, regardless:

God appeared to me in a dream…told me I’m hilarious
Posted on Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Contrary to what some might think, I’m not a godless man. I’m really not. I believe in a higher power and I hope to become one with the intelligence that created the universe someday. I tend to be critical and guarded about organized religion because, in my opinion, the bad aspects outweigh the good. Well… “critical and guarded” may be inaccurate…I’m actually quite cynical about the whole mess.

To me, God is pure and religion is flawed. God is born into us. Take any person; remove all outside influence and that person will ultimately seek a higher power, a reason for existence. People will always try to find god. Not everyone comes to the same conclusion, however, and it bothers me that religion tends to punish those who come to a conclusion that conflicts with dogma.

Anyway, I’m telling you all this because I used the word “Christ” in Monday’s strip and a very small number of you are very upset about it. Apparently by taking their lord’s name in vain, I’ve taken away some of their “power” and I’ll have to repent. I’ll need to apologize to God, say a prayer or something equally as ridiculous to put things right again.

But everything’s going to be okay because last night, God appeared to me in a dream and told me not to worry about it. He said that he created my sense of humor. He knows everything, so he saw that bit of dialogue a-comin’. He also told me that since he created me and I created the strip then vicariously he wrote it anyway. So if there’s anyone to blame…it’s him.

He also told me that the only way to really offend him at this point would be by second guessing myself due to some fundamentalists (who were going to get upset about SOMETHING on Monday, regardless), and that he was very proud to see that I was reaching out and connecting with people. In the end, he told me, that’s all that really matters anyway.

He then told me to get off my ass and start updating on time again before turning into a dove and flying away.

I woke up after that so….

That is so totally great!

…yeah.

So, WordPress 1.5 is out. It’s a good thing I didn’t get very far with my CSS style, because everything has changed! Now the styles are called “Themes“, and they incorporate different looks for different aspects of the blog. All in all it appears to be a good change, but as everything is very new I am having trouble finding a decent theme to base mine on. Very few of the themes people have made so far are even aesthetically pleasing. Some of the ones that are do not render correctly, or have little bugs in them that make Baby Jesus cry. Make my theme from scratch, you say? I may very well have to, but it wouldn’t be my first choice…

I haven’t looked into how the upgrade may or may not affect my Blogger import tool. (I’m afraid!)

In a bit of good news, I discovered today that smugmug has added a “keyword” or “tag” area to its photos, alongside the preexisting “caption” box. Now I have absolutely no reason to use Flickr, which is something of a relief because I didn’t want to pay for two image hosting services!

“Frank” is dead!

David Dingman-Grover had most of his tumor removed Feb. 2 at the Skull Base Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. The family learned the results of a biopsy on the tumor at midnight Monday. The family was crowded around the phone on “pins and needles” waiting for the call from David’s surgeon, his mother said.

“(David) is so mellow – he’s so easygoing. He was just like, ‘Really? Great! Cool!'” Dingman-Grover said of her son’s reaction to the good news. “It’s like, ‘Honey, is that all?’ He says, ‘Did you ever think it wouldn’t be gone?'”

That great attitude is why he beat the cancer. Children are so wise…

A pastor is asking his congregation to act out the Parable of the Talents.

A pastor handed out $14,000 to congregation members to invest for seven weeks, after which they are to bring the money and profits back to the church to be used in missionary work.

As Robert says, you gotta spend money to make money.

And lastly, in a story sent my way by Sam (thanks…I think): Japanese women are giving their sons sexual favors in order to de-stress them at exam time! (No wonder men in Japan are so fucked up…)

“Mom,” he said, shyly but firmly, “I wanna do it with you.”

“With me!” What to do? Be shocked and angry, or calm and understanding? “Let’s see what your father says.”

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh…

Here is another set of photographs from the Augusta Canal Historic Trail. I took these at the end of December.

I’m thinking of creating a blog template using this image:

Hopefully soon I’ll get back over there, but my bike rack is slowly breaking into pieces, so I may have to buy a new one before I’m willing to cart my bike anywhere.

Regardless, I’m looking forward to taking more pictures of Augusta in the springtime :)

Eric Burns recently mentioned that he is moving Websnark away from pair over to Talk About Comics, because staying at pair was prohibitively expensive.

pair is expensive. But they are a damn good host, and I don’t know that I want to give them up. I don’t know what “weird troubles” Eric was having, but my site has barely had so much as a hiccup in the three years I’ve owned pixelscribbles.com. (Then again, it’s not like I get the kind of traffic he does. Still, Keenspot and Sluggy use pair…)

As Sean says, you get what you pay for, and for now, I’m leery of shifting to a less expensive host that might, oh, accidentally lose all my data.

The one thing that bugs me is the database access issue I’ve mentioned previously. We’ll see what happens when I shift to WordPress.

From Yahoo! News – Oddly Enough:

A 91-year-old northwest Indiana man has been returned home after running an errand and finding himself at the end of a winding private driveway in eastern Iowa.

This reminds me of Grandpa’s last years, when he’d just hop into the Subaru (the car I now drive) and go, without telling anyone that he was leaving. Finally Grandma had to hide his keys.

Okay, somebody explain this to me.

According to CBS (via Slashdot), California is thinking about eliminating the tax on gasoline in favor of a tax on how much driving you do. This is to make up for the fact that fuel-efficient cars mean people are buying less gas, meaning less taxes are received for road maintenance.

Privacy advocates say it’s more like big brother riding on your bumper, not to mention a disincentive to buy fuel-efficient cars.

“It’s not fair for people like me who have to commute, and we don’t have any choice but take the freeways,” says Just. “We shouldn’t have to be taxed.”

How is this a “disincentive”? You would still be paying for gas. A fuel efficient car would mean you’d have to buy gas less frequently. This means you would save money–the money you would have spent on gas. You just won’t save as much, because the tax will add to that. But think of what people who have normal cars will be spending for gas…and they’ll be taxed for distance too! How, I ask again, is this a “disincentive to buy fuel-efficient cars”? Would the savings on gas prices be that negligible? How much of California’s gas price is tax?

What this tax would do, in my opinion, is encourage people not to drive. Of course, here in America, we don’t always have an alternative.

Of greater interest to me is the technology behind the tax. GPS systems in every car that track your distance could eventually be used to, say, automatically give you a speeding ticket. The technology would definitely help if a car was stolen, or if you got lost. But at the same time, do we really want our locations available in real-time to anyone with access to the system?

Something to think about.