I’ll preface this post by pointing out that, no, I’m not actually going to do anything more about this little bit of amusement apart from posting this blog entry about it. They earned the eighty cents just with the phone call I had with them a moment ago about this. My only “revenge” will come when the officially sanctioned (but not developed in-house) tethering feature is made available, and I use my G1 for internet access for my laptop, just to ride as close as possible to that 10GB-per-month soft cap. Since I don’t live in a 3G area, and the “penalty” for breaking the 10GB cap is a drop in speed back down to EDGE speeds, my effective penalty is “nothing happens.” Heh!

It’s funny, but I don’t think I’ve actually mentioned here on the site that I recently acquired a T-Mobile G1 — the first Google Android-based mobile phone — and have been getting used to it and enjoying myself immensely. It’s a seriously slick phone.

This post isn’t a review of it, though. Instead, I’m going to prattle on about the seriously funky billing trick T-Mobile just pulled on me, successfully dinging me for 4 SMS messages at $0.20 a piece despite being on a billing plan that includes at least 100 free texts per month (now 400 because of the G1’s data plan). Read the full story...

Technorati Tags: Frugal Living Silly

I picked up a few months back and after an initial burst of “this is really fun!” I got distracted by other things for awhile. Recently I resumed my quest to collect 120 friggin’ “power stars” from the game’s “Galaxies,” and I’m down to just one remaining. And it’s a bitch (“Luigi’s Purple Coins,” in case anyone’s curious).

The challenge at hand is to collect 100 purple coins that are scattered across a range of floor tiles cleverly arranged to resemble the 8-bit version of Luigi. There are 150 coins actually present in the area, and once 100 are collected, the star you’re trying to earn appears at your starting point for that area. Sounds like a cakewalk, right? Read the full story...

Technorati Tags: Gaming Silly

I occasionally think back on my teenage years, when I (very briefly) embarked on two very stupid fanboy-like arguments with a friend of mine, almost simultaneously. It was never the kind of “serious,” friendship-destroying “wars” that the truly stupid fanboys of today actually have, so we always ended up playing devil’s advocate.

One was the classic Mac versus PC debate. Sadly, I lost that conflict, because at the time, I hadn’t been exposed to Linux yet. MacOS (especially System 7 and System 8 ) versus the then-current Linux? Heh. No contest, folks — GUI or not Macs were unstable monstrosities with few software-based repair paths before OS X came along. But MacOS versus Windows? Snicker There’s never been a contest there either — MacOS just wins. Deal with it. It remains true today — OS X kicks the living shit out of XP and Vista. It’s even more salt in the wound that it now runs on the same gear Vista and XP can run on. If Apple would loosen their death-grip on the imagined “control” of the platform a little and let Mac OS X try to run on whatever gear is thrown at it (without some bullshit “is this a Blessed, Official Apple Computer Product™?” check), Microsoft would be out of business, damn near overnight. Read the full story...

[acidfree:825 title=”“] Get out the notebooks, everyone — you’re witnessing history on Willfe.com right now as yours truly stands before you to partially recant the stance that “the tap water is always clean.”

Now, I do firmly stand by my stance that bottled water is a waste of money — there’s no question that it tastes good (especially chilled), but I can filter and chill my own water just fine and it doesn’t cost me anything beyond the initial price of the filter (which handles fifty or more gallons of water before it needs replacement).

Back to the tap water, though. I’ve posted pictures here myself of just how “clear” the tap water at this apartment can be — that brown sludge spewed from my faucets for two days about a month or so after I moved in, then mysteriously cleared up. Read the full story...

[acidfree:1814 align=left title=”“]Looking at this false-color X-ray image of a woman’s foot in a high heel, I have yet another piece of visual confirmation that the “high heel” is a bone-crushing, arch-destroying, posture-killing, woman-hating invention.

I suppose this is somewhat similar to smoking, though probably less “fatal” in the long run (doing this to your feet over years and years won’t kill you — it’ll just cause all sorts of joint and bone problems), in that there’s remarkably little involved in the equation about the practice that makes it appealing in the first place. Do women look great in high heels? Sure, but they also look great in regular shoes, boots, and even barefoot. Do smokers get a high from smoking? A bit, initially (nicotine’s a soother, so it makes you feel “calm,” for awhile, when you first use it), until you become addicted, where you just have to smoke to feel “normal.” Read the full story...

Oh, dear Cthulu, if this is the best and brightest our country has to offer, we are completely and utterly fucked:

I know she was “on the spot.” But nothing that came out of this girl’s mouth even made sense. It’s an unparsable string of words that don’t form a fucking sentence (shamelessly lifted from a blog at http://carsonspost.wordpress.com/2007/08/16/miss-teen-usa/):

Here’s a transcript of the question and answer from the Miss Teen USA tonight:

Judge:
Q: Recent polls have shown 1/5 of American’s can’t locate America on a world map. Why do you think this is?

Miss South Carolina: (and this is exactly what she said)
A: I personally believe that, U.S. Americans are unable to do so, because some… people out there in our nation that don’t have maps, and I believe that our education, like such, as in South Africa and Iraq, everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should… our education over here in the U.S., should help the U.S., er, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future, for our…

Announcer: Thank you very much South Carolina

The commentary there is good, too (“dumb as a stump”), but this really does reveal lots of breakage in our country. This woman should be sterilized. So should her parents, really, and any “below majority age” kids under their care should be put in foster care and shoved into some kind of mandatory remedial schooling. Leave the woman herself a living, breathing creature — her placing fourth in the 2007 Miss Teen USA competition is a brilliant slap in the face that all of America needs, and she’s probably still good at whatever “skills” earned her that placement.

Something went horribly wrong here. Horribly, horribly wrong.

A remarkably stupid (and undoubtedly unscientific) study recently concluded that the pizza toppings you order can say a lot about your personality. This has got to be one of the dumbest things I’ve seen in a long damned time.

It begs the question, though: do people actually make important relationship decisions based on this shit? “Oh no, my fiance only got pepperoni on his pizza — I’d better not marry him after all, because he’s irritable and prone to procrastination!”

This kind of thing is even dumber than a tall person who won’t even consider dating a shorter person, or a short one who won’t consider dating a tall one. If you’re looking for excuses why you shouldn’t be dating someone, you just shouldn’t be dating them. Grow the fuck up and move on.

If you actually have to depend on an MSN dating column that tells you that it’s all in the pizza toppings, you’re an idiot.

Edgar Allen Poe is still one of our most beloved classic poets. The Simpsons even paid homage to his masterpiece The Raven long before the Simpsons were “cool” — the poem tells a dark, chilling story, and it touches each of us in a unique way.

The Simpsons’ take on it was funny, but still powerful. There’s just enough comedy interjected into it to keep it from being “too serious” but it’s still a haunting tale, even as Homer struts through the story as the protagonist. The damned thing still gives me chills — James Earl Jones did a magnificent job with the narration.

There have been plenty of references and homages to the poem over the years. Most of them have been at least “okay.” Then, director Ulli Lommel came along and spit out a turd called “Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven”. It’s eighty-one minutes of … well … I don’t know how to qualify it without using expletives. It truly is shit on a disc. Read the full story...

Is it a sequel? Check.
Got a huge budget? Check.
None of the principal actors from the first one? Check.
“Supporting character” promoted to “lead”? Check.

Nearly-universally nasty reviews? Check.

Did anyone really expect a comedic interpretation of the Noah’s Ark story, costing $170-ish to produce, loosely based on the premise behind Bruce Almighty, to do any differently in the theaters? The 24% rating on Rotten Tomatoes gives us the answer we all knew was coming.

The original film was a quirky, clever comedy. This thing … looks quite dull, by-the-numbers, etc.

Good call, S, this thing tanked.

When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.
— Mark Twain, “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar”

Read the full story...

I’ve been far more lapse in recent weeks in posting here than I have been in a long time, and that’s a habit I hope to break. There’s some more photography sneaking its way onto the site here and there as I find time, and in support of that I’m updating various pieces of this Drupal installation to match. I’m also planning a migration to the new 5.x series to see if that’s worth the attention or not. Since all new development for Drupal and modules for it are all focusing on 5.x, I’d best get this thing migrated over to it before it becomes impossible to find stuff for 4.7.x.

There’s another post coming tonight, too; stay tuned.

For tonight’s closer, my computer said to me: “You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose.” Heh. It never met some of my friends