http://www.solderinguide.com/

Very good stuff and ad-free, which is surprising. BTW, wikipedia is having another fundraiser and it’s a good cause so if you can, go donate blah blah etc. Oh and Merry Christmas and Happy New Year - I have a feeling it’s going to be a very good year

When you click the [SEND] button you get this message, which is cool - it’s like it’s actually uploading the card to the space station heh:

Muggy said we forgot Hoppy (our dog) so we sent them one from her, too:

Ha, my lame Ascii art reminds me of K-9

So while it is assured that there will be an Electric Man II, it is too soon to be posting details, and dialog that in retrospect seemed somewhat stilted. All I can say in my defense is I was caught up in the excitement of the moment, and wanted to share. (However, to the RSS subscribers who got this sneak peak, well all I can say is “bonus dude!” (or dudette. or whatever).

So there you have it.

Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the program
`Gnomovision’ (which makes passes at compilers) written by James Hacker.

[signature of Ty Coon], 1 April 1989
Ty Coon, President of Vice

“What if Google knew before anyone else that a fast-spreading flu outbreak was putting you at heightened risk of getting sick? And what if it could alert you, your doctor and your local public health officials before the muscle aches and chills kicked in? That, in essence, is the promise of Google Flu Trends, a new Web tool … unveiled on Tuesday, right at the start of flu season in the US. Google Flu Trends is based on the simple idea that people who are feeling sick will tend to turn to the Web for information, typing things like ‘flu symptoms; or ‘muscle aches’ into Google. The service tracks such queries and charts their ebb and flow, broken down by regions and states.”

Here’s the full article

Here is the google app: http://www.google.org/flutrends/

Wow it’s kind of scary, google is not only big brother - it’s big mother. Soon it will remind me to wear my coat if it’s chilly and find the best deals for chicken soup when I’ve got the sniffles.

Guess what? There are only -4 days left until Christmas! AAAARRRGGGHHH!!!!!
(That’s a little php script that will update with the correct amount of time left, cool huh.)

Anyway it’s really amazing and dark, and probably the second saddest Christmas tune ever written - THE saddest Christmas song is this one. I like Perry Como’s version, but Bing’s is all right, too.

Session Notes: For those interested Don came up with the piano part, then we all sat around bouncing lyric ideas around - the majority were written by Kent (if I remember correctly), which is only appropriate as he also sang it. Then me and Don laid down some overdubs (eerie, spaced out guitar and synth guitar by me, and muted trumpet by Don). Then I mixed it and made a few edits and viola! - instant Christmas classic…I remember a strong feeling of happiness and goodwill during the session, as well as the sense that we were doing something very special.

Of course, those could have been caused by the worm I drank from the bottom of the Tequila bottle

This fits in with my PIRATE ME policy, and is why I have only 3 DRM Mp3’s in my entire collection (which I stupidly purchased from crApple iTunes a long time ago). They only play on the PC I used to download them (it is the only PC I have that has iTunes on it). Needless to say, this pisses me off. Of course, I could burn the songs to a CD then rip them as mp3s, but technically this is against the law WTF.

I wish everybody would JUST SAY NO TO DRM-LOCKED MEDIA, but you know what?

Ain’t gonna happen.

It turns out the masses of humanity are simple sheep easily led around by the corporate dogs who decide these things for them. Except for the comparatively few sharp persons who say, “fuck THAT noise” and ONLY obtain DRM-free media, pwn.

All Dave Ryder Band music is DRM-FREE and can be downloaded here for free.

<strong class="dropcaps">X</strong>   

(where “X” is the First letter of the paragraph, duh), and so I put this in my theme’s style sheet (style.css):

.dropcaps {
   font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Serif;
   color: #126126;
   font-weight:bold;
   float:left;
   line-height:30px;
   font-size:36px;
   padding: 3px 3px 0 0;
   }
 

Which made for a nice boring drop cap, but I’d frequently forget to do it and would have to edit the post later. So I started using this nice Drop Caps plugin by Thomas Milburn which has a cool drop shadow effect (done with CSS!) which I really like, plus it just automatically puts dropcaps at the beginning of every post. Sweet.

BUT, when combined with my CSS, all of the post that already had the dropcaps look HUGE (and horrible. Not so sweet). So I wanted to edit the posts to remove my markup, but the prospect of editing 50 posts sucked. So I found this REALLY cool plugin - Search and Replace, which lists these credits: Original plugin ist von Mark Cunningham and was advanced (comments and comment-author) by Gonahkar. More increments by Frank Bueltge.

It’s a little scary, it actually replaces strings in your database (SO BACKUP YOUR DATABASE BEFORE USING IT IN CASE SOMETHING GOES HORRIBLY WRONG GAHHH!) but it worked beautifully, and I’m glad I have it installed in case I want to change something site-wide.

Say, for instance our drummer Kent changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol - all I would do is search for the word “Kent” and change it, piece of cake. Here is what Kent’s symbol should look like:

Good luck with that.

It’s not the bridge so much that would be the problem, it’s the approach - cutting a wider road on that cliff-like escarpment that the road manages to cling to (on the Pacific side) would cost so many millions of dollars I can’t see them getting the funding. And don’t forget that lovely 90° angle you have to make to actually get on the bridge - it’s an engineering nightmare.

Although Ed Hillhouse gives it the old college try with this political crock of a statement, “We still have what is basically a one-lane bridge with wooden trusses”. Uh, it’s a steel bridge Ed - no wooden trusses. Retard.

I kind of hope they just leave it alone - put the money into our schools, or a tax break (ha! unlikely).

Anyway, here’s a bunch of cool info and pictures of it from BridgeHunter.com . BTW, one of the neat facts is the estimated traffic - 1600 cars a day (I can’t decide if that seems like too many or too little to be accurate).