Thursday, May 31, 2007

Windows Live Writer Beta 2 kicks butt

A screenshot of the new version of WLW. Click the image for full size.

Thanks to Evil Dwight's Twitter, I became aware that a new version of Windows Live Writer was available.

It's got tons of new features, including

  • Inline spell checking (the red squiggliy lines)
  • Table editing
  • Ability to add categories
  • Page authoring for WordPress and TypePad
  • Support for excerpts and extended entries
  • Improved hyperlinking and image insertion
  • Paste Special
  • SharePoint 2007 support
  • New APIs enabling custom extensions by weblog providers
  • Automatic synchronization of local and online edits
  • Integration with Windows Live Gallery
  • Support for Blogger Labels
  • Available in 6 languages
  • Improved accessibility and keyboard support

Not to mention a revamped interface that's much nicer looking than the old one.

It also has more integrated support for platforms like WordPress and TypePad.

The only thing in it that bugs me is that it doesn't allow for setting the alignment of a table, but that's easily fixed by adding an align="right" (or left) to the code. But I shouldn't have to.

Setting up a blog on it is so easy anybody could do it.

All in all, I say it's a great improvement to the best blogging software of it's kind out there. Download it here. Just be aware that the installer will try to get you to set your Internet Explorer homepage and set your default search engine to MSN.

Crossposted to Through our eyes

The COTC makes a return...

...on Sunday.

If nothing else, it'll give me a great way to test out the new version of Live Writer.

I'll write about that later today BTW.

Oh, yea, if you want info about the Carnival, check out it's site.

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Wednesday, May 30, 2007

At least this hasn't happened to the 'Stros yet

From last night's Angels-Yankees game:

NOTE: this was a video of home plate being stolen, but it's been taken down.

How things are going, it wouldn't surprise me if it happened soon tho.

UPDATE: We've lost ten in a row now. This is just getting ugly.

Glad I decided not to go to a game this week.

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Like something from a bad movie

No, really, it's just like one:

Customs officers at Cairo's airport Thursday detained a man bound for Saudi Arabia who was trying to smuggle 700 live snakes on a plane, airport authorities said.

The officers were stunned when a passenger, identified as Yahia Rahim Tulba, told them his carry-on bag contained live snakes after he was asked to open it.

Tulba opened his bag to show the snakes to the police and asked the officers, who held a safe distance, not to come close. Among the various snakes, hidden in small cloth sacks, were two poisonous cobras, authorities said.

I've always been afraid of snakes. My dad having two red tail boas didn't help.

If I'd been at that airport when he opened that bag, I'd be dead right now.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

The thrilling conclusion to the 2007 spring softball season

It's over.

We played a doubleheader last night. The first game was just ugly. We were slotted against a team that really does belong in a more competitive league. They were doing everything right and we just couldn't stop them. They made all the plays in the field and were hitting the gaps like Paris Hilton hits the bottle. We lost that one 23-3.

The second game was interesting. Since we were the visiting team, we got to bat first. The top half of the first inning lasted 20 minutes, we batted around the order TWICE, and scored 14 runs. It wasn't that we were hitting the ball really well, but that their fielding sucked. It seemed like just about every ball was dropped or a throw sailed. Just to give you an idea, the same person (who was by they way playing hopped up on vicodin because of an injured foot) was responsible for both the second and third out that inning.

No way they're gonna catch up, right?

Think again.

The bottom half came, and our fielding got a little sloppy. They put up five.

When we came to bat again, they did MUCH better on defense, only allowing two runs, bringing our total up to sixteen.

And then there was the bottom half of that inning. The umpire tightened up the strike zone a bit and our pitcher was struggling with locating it.

All I'll say about the strike zones is that this is rec league softball, not MLB. If it's close, call it a strike.

Our games are timed at 50 minutes. A new inning can't start once time has expired unless the score's tied. In that situation, teams get to start a runner at second to begin the inning.

When time expired on our game, the score was 16-14 with two outs and runners on first and second.

The guy hits one into shallow left. The runner from second got in easily and the tying run headed for the plate, knowing that it would take a near perfect throw to get them out.

We got a perfect throw and the third out to win the game 16-15.

Even if that play had ended up being total disaster at the plate, there's no way that the winning run would have come in. He pulled up coming into third with a bad hammy. Hate to see that happen.

Wow that was nuts.

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Softball makeup

It was exciting.... and we won...

...because the other team forfeited.

Friday, May 18, 2007

Old pictures

When I was going through all my picture backups earlier this week, I stumbled across some pictures from about two years ago.

Both of these were taken with a camera on my PDA, which is only a slightly higher quality than a camera phone, so they don't look the best in the world, but whatever.


Taken May 16, 2005 - Bear was roughly 8 months old at the time. Back then, he was also the only dog in our house.


Taken July 31, 2005 - Bruiser was 12 weeks old. Notice how he's mostly black. Tri-color Beagles are born black and white and their brown grows in during puppyhood.

Also, and I can't believe I missed this, Monday was Bruiser's birthday. He's now two years old officially.

Oh yea, I almost forgot, Friday Ark is today.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

A front row seat...

All of a sudden I've found just how much I love college baseball.

As my Twitter log indicates, I went to a game last night. It was a 4-2 win for the good guys, a great game.

Now, I give you a crappy picture of the view from my $7 seat:

OK, so I positioned the camera on my cell so that it wouldn't show the netting, but you get the idea.

Honestly, seeing the kind of seat you can get for that price leaves me thinking one thing: "Why the heck don't I go more."

That was their last home game, but I think I'll get season tickets for next year, hopefully in that same location. Their season ticket packages are very much on the cheap side.

Aint love grand?

More stuff stupid people do when in (and out of) love:

An ex-lovers' spat led to a man being scalded with boiling water and a woman being stabbed in the neck, according to Beaumont police reports.

[...]

The man took a pot of boiling water off the stove and tried to splash it on the couple, but a door was shut in his face.

The boiling water splashed off the door and hit the man, causing serious burns, the report says.

[...]

At 9:23 p.m., the ex-girlfriend went to see the burn victim's current girlfriend at an apartment in the 4000 block of Maida Road, the report says.

There, the ex-girlfriend is accused of using a knife to stab the 27-year-old woman in the neck, according to the report.

It should be noted that the stabbing was not life-threatening.

This is enough to give any life-long bachelor a reason to stay that way. Broken hearts, burnt chest, getting stabbed in the neck, it's all the same, right?

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Patience at the plate

If there's anything at all I've kicked myself about during this round of softball it's been how I've been impatient at the plate.

Monday night, that changed.

I walked both plate appearances.

Heck, I only swung once. Shouldn't have though, that pitch was inside on me.

Oh well.

Since it's a co-ed league, I got two free trips to second. The lineups in co-ed leagues are guy-girl-guy-girl and they give the guy second as a way to discourage walking guys intentionally. With two outs, the girl that's next can take first automatically if she wants.

Anyways, the first time I was on I ended up being the second out. I got to third safely, I just didn't stop in time and ended up two or three steps into foul territory. The 3B got me when I went "Oh, shit!" and was scrambling back.

We've got a make-up game on Sunday and then a doubleheader on Monday to close out the season.

Why you don't mix unsupervised cats and computers

Yes, I finally decided to get Twitter.

Unfortunately, ever since I created an account, Twitter hasn't been able to work for shit.

I managed to post a note on there. Nothing fancy, just a "please fucking work" type thing, but it's seriously not working for me at all.

I get a server maintenance message once in a while. It's an image of a cat and a computer that says "in in ur serverz making thingz better!!!"

Obviously not, considering you've been popping up sporadically for hours.

And there's nothing on the Twitter Blog about it.

Seeing that, it tells me that the cat is playing around with the server unsupervised.

Maybe next time the humans will leave the server room door closed.

I'll get the flash twitter thingy on here eventually, but the code can't seem to tie the damn thing to my account for some reason either.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Back and better than ever... finally

My computer problems turned out to be a lot more involved than I had originally thought.

There never was a hard drive issue, but it was just caused by the RAM problem.

Unfortunately, the RAM problem wasn't REALLY a RAM problem, it was with the motherboard. I could have easily traded in the motherboard since it was covered by a service plan, but I got a better idea.

I'm gonna upgrade!

I upgraded to an AMD Athlon X2 4600+ processor, a different brand of board, and new sticks of RAM. The old sticks are still good, but they operate at a lower speed than the new motherboard can handle.

She's running like a charm now.

It'll take me a couple days to get everything back in order, but I'm just happy that it's working again right now.

Friday, May 11, 2007

More light blogging

I'm feeling better, but some other issues have come up.

As I was debugging a RAM problem with my system, I think some OS files
on my hard drive corrupted.

Thankfully I could get the system to load in safe mode, which allowed
me to pull off my files.

I considered letting BitLocker decrypt the hard drive and doing an
upgrade install of Vista, but I'm just going to wipe the HDD and start
from scratch. The decryption would take too long.

Anyways, I should be back to normal fairly soon.

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

I swear I'm not dead

I've just been under the weather recently and really haven't had anything hit me that I really want to write about, but I'll go ahead and hit a few quick points.

  • I missed softball Monday night, but I made our games Tuesday. It was a make up for one of the weeks that rained out early in the season. We won both games, but I did something that almost cost us the first one. More on that some other time.
  • Fox dropped off our cable feed twice during 24. I probably missed about five minutes of the show. At least I know what the "package" was.
  • The Astros seem to be getting their stuff together. THey've won three straight in Cincy and are now just a game below .500 now. Hopefully they can keep it up.

That's all I got for now.

Friday, May 04, 2007

What a season

The 'Catters lost 4-3 in overtime tonight, ending their run for the Kelly Cup.

Part of me is sad that it's over, I'll admit that. But more than anything else I'm glad about what we did have.

Of our three seasons, this wasn't just our first playoff trip, it was our first time to have a winning team.

Hopefully we can build on it and go even farther next season.

The look

When I get looked at like this, I know what they're thinking:


We're hungry!

If they'd just look in the kitchen they'd find their food ready for them.

Thursday, May 03, 2007

Just thinking out loud

If the DMV is the worst place on earth to spend a beautiful day, then what's the second worst place?

Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

METRO, Astros announce 'Stranded at the Ballpark' nights

(Crossposted from METRO IFOC)

Minute Maid Park

METRO, who always tells the truth, even when they lie, today announced a partnership with the Astros for "Stranded at the Ballpark" nights.

"Yea, it's really cool," said METRO spokeswoman Raquetball Roberts. "If the Astros strand more than 10 runners on base, we're going to stop all service within three miles of Minute Maid park so that anybody relying on our service will be stuck at the ballpark until the next day when service will resume."

"We were planning on providing sleeping bags but we would have had to dip into the 'old man' fund" said Astros owner Drayton McLane.

McLane went on to explain that the old man fund is the money kept back for Roger Clemens should he decide to get off of his ass and pitch with the Astros this season.

"Granted things aren't looking too good with the team's performance right now but I'm still holding out hope," said McLane.


Normally I wouldn't crosspost something from over there, but I thought this one was appropriate given the Astros struggles.