Have you had an accident or done something stupid and want to sue somebody? Here is the company to call. I especially like the last line of the ‘commercial’.

I visit some sites that do not have RSS feeds but I have to manually visit the site to see if there have been updates to the content. Also there is some software I use that I must visit their websites to see if an update has been released. I wish they would all publish RSS feeds that I could then just monitor with Newsgator, the free RSS reader I use.

My problem may be solved. I just ran across an online service called Feed43 which they say is pronounced, “Feed For Free”. It acts a middleman between your RSS reader and web sites that don’t supply RSS feeds. Using some simplified RegEx patterns and the web site’s html source, it allows you to create custom news feeds in RSS format for any web site that you can then read in your RSS reader.

They say it is “Feed for Free”, but is Feed43 really free? From their web site it appears there is the basic functionality that is free and they have 3 levels of paid membership offer more features. The free service has the following limitations:

• 6-hour polling interval
• Maximum of 20 news items per channel
• Only first 100kb of source page will be downloaded and parsed

This definitely looks promising….

Yesterday Pastor Craig, in a illustration, was talking about the many ways that Valentine’s Day can be celebrated, including flowers, balloon grams, lobster grams, and, of course, cards.

He mentioned a card he had recently seen. It had Gollum from Lord of the Rings on the front and inside were printed the words, “My Precious”.

I have looked online without success for the card… Maybe I can make it myself?

Now you can build the ultimate Millennium Falcon™,the biggest and most spectacular LEGO® Star Wars model!

Straight out of the classic Star Wars movies comes the Ultimate Collector’s Millennium Falcon, Han Solo’s famous smuggling starship. Every detail of the modified Corellian Engineering Corporation YT-1300 freighter is here, all constructed to scale with LEGO minifigures. At almost 3 feet (90cm) long, it’s the ultimate centerpiece to any Star Wars collection!

• With over 5,000 pieces, this is the biggest LEGO set ever made!
• Model is built completely to minifigure scale – minifigures can sit inside and man the controls!
• Landing gear provides a stable base for model to stand on!
• Ship is over 33″ long, 22″ wide and 8″ tall! (84cm long x 56cm wide x 21cm tall)
• Radar dish rotates and elevates and boarding ramp extends!
• Top and bottom quad-laser turrets rotate for realistic play!
• Cockpit top can be removed to access minifigures!
• Includes 5 minifigures: Han Solo, Chewbacca, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia Organa!

The cost? A mere $499.99 for the Star Wars junkie who has everything. Seem like a lot? it is only $0.10 per piece! Remember: Limit 5 per customer.

One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock, rock,
Five, six, seven o’clock, eight o’clock, rock,
Nine, ten, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock, rock,
We’re gonna rock around the clock tonight.

It is time to dust off your dancing shoes and and your best girl(s) to join you on the dance floor wearing your blue suede shoes and twist the night away. Calvary Chapel of the Tri-Cities is expecting about 1600 fathers and daughters at their 11th Annual Father Daughter Ball. Last year my youngest daughter and I went for the first time and had a great time. We danced some dances, ate some goodies, and she goofed off with some of her friends.

The theme this year is Rock Around the Clock. You can wear whatever you have or dress for the occasion. If your ‘gal’ needs a ‘swell’ poodle skirt then check out JoAnn Fabrics on Columbia Center Blvd. They have ordered extra materials and patterns so she can look “peachy keen”.

This year the ball is on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 from 7:00 to 10:00 pm at the TRAC facility in Pasco.

Tickets are only $15 per dad until February 26th, and daughters are free. Tickets may be purchased at the Calvary Chapel Office and Cornerstone Cafe or at Parable Christian Book Store. A limited number of tickets will be available for $20 at the door.

I just saw this color composite image of Jupiter’s moon, Io, on Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). According to the site, the image is from the robotic Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003.

APOD: In the image middle, near the night/day shadow line, the ring shaped Prometheus plume is seen rising about 75 kilometers above Io while casting a shadow below the volcanic vent. Named for the Greek god who gave mortals fire, the Prometheus plume is visible in every image ever made of the region dating back to the Voyager flybys of 1979 – presenting the possibility that this plume has been continuously active for at least 18 years. The above digitally sharpened image was originally recorded in 1997 on June 28 from a distance of about 600,000 kilometers.

I am finally moving my blog over to my own hosting service! Matt has been great letting me leach his bandwidth for almost 2 years. I should have done this long ago, but it was easier to just leave things as alone.

I finally got everything up, running, and moved over. I think I have all the redirects working so that anyone who goes to the old site will automatically get bounced to the new site with all the appropriate messages to the browser.

I am still trying to get the RSS feeds to ‘bounce’ correctly. Easiest is probably to just resubscribe:

•   – If you want the feed for the regular blog posts.
•   – If you want the feed for the comments to the blog posts.

New computers you buy come with all kinds of software preinstalled by the OEM. It seems that there are trial versions of just about every major software package. Why? So they can charge you less for your new computer by selling these ‘advertisements’. If they shipped clean copies of Windows, they would have to charge more to offset the revenue loss.

But who needs all this ‘bloat’ on the machine and the constant prompts to ‘register’ and ‘upgrade’. I have a ‘routine’ I go through each time our office purchases a new machine. You end up spending quite a bit of time in the ‘Add and Remove Programs’ folder. Until PC DeCrapifier, the OEM’s worst nightmare!

PC DeCrapifier is a Windows script that is designed to remove most of the unwanted software that comes preinstalled on new windows computers. The new beta version will run under Vista.

When you run the program you first select which programs should be removed. Although it is targeted at Dell machines, the script should remove the software listed below from any new computer.

• QuickBooks Trial
• NetZero Installers
• Earthlink Setup Files
• Corel Photo Album 6
• Tiscali Internet
• Wanadoo Europe Installer
• Get High Speed Internet!
• Internet Service Offers Launcher
• Dell Search Assistant
• Norton Ghost 10.0
• Symantec Live Update
• MS Plus Photo Story 2LE
• MS Plus Digital Media Installer
• McAffee
• Norton Internet Security
• Google Desktop
• Google Toolbar
• AOL US
• AOL UK
• MusicMatch Jukebox
• MusicMatch Music Services
• Wild Tangent Games
• Norton AntiVirus 2005
• Norton Security Center
• Norton AntiSpam
• PC-cillin Internet Security 12
• Corel Snapfire Plus SE
• Yahoo! Music Jukebox
• Vongo
• Run Registry Entries
• Desktop Icons
• Startup Menu Items
• Corel WordPerfect
• Roxio RecordNow
• Sonic DLA
• Sonic Update Manager
• Sonic RecordNow Audio
• Sonic RecordNow Copy
• Roxio MyDVD LE
• Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2003
• Quicken 2006

HatTip: Mike Tech Show for this great little utility!

I was one of 65 Tri-City business folk and city officials who visited Olympia for a 2 day junket to impress on our legislators and the Governor the need to spend some (more) of our tax money on the dry of the state. It is impressive that 65 people can make room in their schedule to come down in a show-of-force and present a united voice to the powers that be.

The primary focus of the trip is to get more $$. More for WSU Tri-Cities (both for more students and for the bioproduct/bioenergy research program), to fund the Hanford Reach Interpretive Center (Ice Age Flood Center), and to see if money can be found for the Steptoe Street project which would connect Gage Blvd with Clearwater Avenue. The first two sound like they might get somewhere, but the Steptoe Street project,, from what I have heard, is just getting it’s foot in the door while other programs have been in the room for quite a while and are therefore higher on the priority list.

We had a number of legislators come speak, and even the Governor talked to the group and answered questions for over 20 minutes. It will be interesting to see what tomorrow brings.

My wife and I had reservations for dinner at 6:30pm. I was scheduled to be back from Olympia at 5:00 and was really glad we were not delayed. The dinner was a choir trip fund raiser for a teenager in the church and was very nice. Her friends and family catered the affair and did a superb job. The young lady provided the vocal entertainment.

Afterwards we were asked by some friends if we would care to join them at Ivory Jazz to top off the evening. We hit a great night. The club was full, but not crowded and the music was superb. Plan “B” quartet with Barry Bergstrom , were the featured artists and we really enjoyed ourselves.

The club is located upstairs in the Old Roxy Theatre building in historic downtown Kennewick. Their online schedule shows them opening at 5:00 pm every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday with someone playing piano jazz and the main act performs from 8:00 to 11:00 pm. It also appears that the $5 cover charge is now permanent, but from the entertainment we had last night, it is well worth it.

This hilarious YouTube video shows how difficult it is to adapt to new technology.

The clip is from a show called Øystein & Meg (Øystein & I) produced by the Norwegian Broadcasting television channel (NRK) in 2001. The spoken language is Norwegian, the subs in Danish.

Update: The original video I linked to was removed, but I found this new one.

I was reading the ‘Disclosures’ made by the Barry over at The Big Picture and they all seemed rather standard until I came to #10 on Advertising:

We happily accept advertising: We charge $10,000 per commercial Trackback or Comment linking back to your site or product or service. Eg., 3 trackbacks = $30,000.

By placing any commercial advertisement on this site, you agree to these terms and conditions: That you will pay the aforementioned fee promptly, that you agree to be governed by the laws of New York State and where appropriate, New York City, that you agree to jurisdiction in the great State of New York. You further agree that you are jointly and severally responsible for what any 3rd party does on your behalf, including but not limited to PR or Advertising or Marketing firms.

We will bill you promptly. Failure to pay will force the balance to be put into collections, where you will also be responsible for costs and legal expenses. You agree to jurisdiction in any small claims court of my choosing, or in the alternative, any court in New York State of my choosing.

I would be very interested to find out what responses they have received from those lame commercial spammers who are constantly trying to post comments and linkbacks on blogs to drive traffic to their sites.

I found out last week that the comment function was broken on this blog. I was thinking that the spam fighting of 2.1 and Akismet must be superb.

Every time you hit Submit the system would just show a blank screen with …\wp-comments-post.php showing in the address bar. Testing out the $_Post variables showed them all as empty. For some reason the variables from the form were not being passed on to the comment handling form.

Turns out I had put the www as part of the site urls in the WordPress options screens but I had set up my DreamHost account to strip the www. Don’t know why this ‘broke’ the comments, but am sure glad that just going in and removing the www from the urls fixed the problem.

So, if you have a comment that you wanted to post, please try it again. And you spammers out there — oh well, you don’t listen anyway.

I was reading a reprint of a Spokesman-Review editorial in the Tri-City Herald this morning arguing that public libraries shouldn’t block adults’ internet use. They say that it is a ‘free speech’ issue, that computer filters should be disabled for adults so that they can access “constitutionally protected speech.”

I guess I always thought that free speech applied to the speaker. I did not realize that the listeners had a ‘right’ to hear everything. Instead of free speech would it be called ‘free hearing’?

The other thing that was interesting about the article was that the lead-in was not some guy wanting to view necked ladies on the computer but a gal who wanted to read Women & Guns magazine. The ACLU is definitely trying to not have this come off as some left wing thing — what could be more right wing than access to women & guns magazine! Even though these are probably the same people who forced eBay to disallow the selling of guns on their site. Hey, isn’t that a free speech issue too?

I have come to love audio books. I find I don’t have make time to sit down and read, but I have plenty of idle time, while driving, while at the court club, or while doing mindless work on the computer, and so can finish each CD in a day or two. The Washington Post has an article about how unabridged audiobooks, even the long ones like War and Peace (which takes 70 hours to get through), are becoming quite popular.

The article shows that, against the general trend of media consumption becoming more bite-sized, the market for long, unabridged recordings of books is expanding:

Given that pop culture is forever trending toward the condensed and the vapid, a 70-hour audiobook might sound like commercial folly — a Mensa product for an Us Weekly world. And maybe it is. Naxos won’t say how many copies have been downloaded directly from its site or sold in stores, where it retails for about $280.

I also find that I am not alone when I am disappointed when I find that the audiobook is an abridged version of the book.

But if the world has ever been ready for nearly three straight days of recorded Tolstoy it’s ready now. A few years ago, publishers had to beg retailers to stock audiobooks longer than three CDs. Now, that’s considered an ear snack. Unabridged is king. And abridged isn’t just on the wane. It’s basically stigmatized.

“We have readers who will get in touch with an author and express outrage if they see an abridged audio version of their book,” says Ana Maria Allessi, who heads Harper Collins’s audiobook division. “That drives authors insane.”

And you are not forced to swap CDs in and out. I download the files onto my Palm, a Tungsten T3, and listen at my convenience.

Downloadable books make it possible to store a spoken-word rendering of a big fat tome on an iPod, eliminating the need to stuff 25 CDs in a glove compartment. Plus, publishers and retailers figured out that audiobook fans aren’t semi-literates taking a break from “Two and a Half Men”; they are hard-core readers who consider abridgment a kind of cheating.

What does it take to create an audio book? The story in the Post says it took him 23 days in the studio to “carefully enunciating each syllable of Leo Tolstoy’s 560,000-word epic in an audiobook.” Wow! I doubt the library is going to be getting it in any time soon, and am not sure I am ready to tackle 51 CDs.

FYI, according to the ESV Blog, where I heard about this article, the English Standard Version (ESV) audio-bible is 72 hours long.