The Strange Cat is free of FIV and Feline Lukemia. He is, however, full of worms. Tapeworms and roundworms to be disgustingly exact. The vet provided medication and gave him a shot and a bath. The thing he hated the most was the bath. He is still a little dirty, but much cleaner than when the pictures were taken. He is a cute little bugger, and very curious.

Tony and I have the word "sucker" engraved upon our bodies, visible to cats only. This afternoon, we were outside the office, talking, taking out the trash...and then there it is, running towards us.

A boy kitten. Filfthy, wide eyed, and big eared. Happy to see us, and willing to go anywhere with us. So now we have another cat. I have two cats in my apartment. Tony has two cats in his apartment. Now we will have a traveling cat. This cat will stay at the office, and go home every night with one of us (we are going to take turns). He is a vicious little thing. We go to the vet this evening to get him examined. I'm sure he has worms and ear mites. I hope no FIV, or feline lukemia.

Pictures will be posted on strangesolutions.com and I think we are going to have a "name this cat" contest (once we determine he will live).

WebConferencing Equipment

I'm sorry. I thought that companies had woken up and smelled the money burning? Talk about excessive?? $3,000.00 upwards for a "voice tracking camera." Here you go - buy a FlexStand(tm) and then have a person in the meeting move the camera.

Then with the money you have saved....I dunno - maybe actually pay a dividend (ok, not enough money would be saved for something like that, but across a large enterprise with several hundred locations - it could).

OK, so Tony and I were going through the drivethrough at McDonalds, and he paid, and got his change, and then said (to me), "Where is the food?" I replied that this was the new Diet McDonalds, where you drivethrough, pay your money, and then you don't get any food.

We now have a new concept for a chain of restraunts called: "Vous Allez Affamé À la maison" (French for you go home hungry).

Very swanky layout and table cloths, cloth napkins, very heavy flatware beautiful glasses and vases of flowers. Sterotypical rude French waiters. Lemon slices in the water. The menu will be the following:
(Prices only on the menus for men)
Plat de rien : $25.00
Grande cuvette d'air : $30.00
Cuillère de vide : $15.00
- well you get the idea.

The wonderful thing is that there is no cooking involved, no kitchen needed, and only waiters.

If we could get Clastia Flockheart to endorse it I think it would really take off. Think of the franchising opportunites!

This is sung slowly and low:

"I Like Traffic Lights"
I like traffic lights, I like traffic lights,
I like traffic lights, No matter where they've been.
I like traffic lights, I like traffic lights,
I like traffic lights, But only when they're green.

He likes traffic lights, He likes traffic lights,
He likes traffic lights, No matter where they've been.
He likes traffic lights, He likes traffic lights,
He likes traffic lights, But only when they're green.

I like traffic lights, I like traffic lights,
I like traffic lights, That is what I said.
I like traffic lights, I like traffic lights,
I like traffic lights, But not when they are red.

He likes traffic lights, He likes traffic lights,
He likes traffic lights, That is what he said.
He likes traffic lights, He likes traffic lights,
He likes traffic lights, But not when they are red.

I like traffic lights, I like traffic lights,
I like traffic lights, Although my name's not Bamber.
I like traffic lights, ...oh God...

Only Monty Python could produce such a wonderful and soul wrenching song. Of course, we are left to wonder about how the singer feels about about amber (yellow) lights. Probably doesn't like them, since he only likes traffic lights when they are green.

ewwwwwwwwww!!!!

OK, well, the FlexStand is on the Screen Savers (did I mention this before?). And yesterday was a bad day for us (we were quite low), because Patrick umnnn....let's just say he only used one hand to move the platform, and that is not how you use it, so when he did that, it popped out of the base...but TODAY Patrick and Leo touched it on camera and moved it, and mentioned that it was the "spycam to nowhere." NOTHING bad happend. I'm sooooo happy!!

Dramastically: new word you figure out what it means.

RIAA nails 1,000 music-lovers in 'new Prohibition' jihad
The flag drops, the war is on. How exciting! I wonder what the jail time will be, and I wonder how many more people will be arrested. What is going to happen next, and is the RIAA ready for it? hummmm.

Oh, yeah, I'm upset. Check this out I have done a pretty good job keeping myself off the net, and I show up here. And I tell you what I'm not on here because of some website. Reliant Energy sells their subscriber list. Isn't that nice?

http://www.ussearch.com/wlcs/commerce/about/FAQ.jsp#q31 to remove yourself from this service. BUT you have to provide addresses for the past 15 years (and if you are anything like me, you don't know them all).

The contest is still going on - the most pitiful one is not winning. Please - go and vote!!! Vote for the one that really needs a FlexStand!!! And if you don't know what a FlexStand is, click here before you go vote.

E-mail to TheScreenSavers:

Tony and I watched in a state of calm as on Friday, the FlexStand made its appearance on the show.

Who am I kidding - we were excited and thrilled down to our toes, this is FANTASTIC. Thank you for putting the FlexStand on the set (please let me know if you would like a replacement) whoever it was that did so (Tony thinks it was Leo - because it is almost always looking at Leo).

If you want to have a give-a-way of the FlexStand, just let us know and we will work out the details. We are more than willing to sacrifice 10 FlexStands upon the alter of TSS (one a day for two weeks).

Once again, thank you very much. And if you could please let Leo & Patrick know that we appreciate this very much I would appreciate it.

So, I have joined the blogs & bloggers network on Ryze.com I am sure that this will be interesting.

And I gave my neighbor some bricks yesterday because she too is tired of worring if her furniture is going to get wrecked...(it is usually only about an inch of water that comes in from the back - but that is still a pain in the buttocks).

Well the hurricane is gone, with no flooding, and no wind damage (at my apt anyway). I did break down and get some bricks to put my furniture up on though - I'm tired of worring everytime a storm blows through.

The Small Business Market & Micro Soft this is a very interesting report. MS is expensive, and where people are more inclined to eye the bottom line than worry about convience, apparently they do well, but not as well as they do with large corporations. I've got a screed about IT and MS and Linux, but I won't go into it here.

What is it about men and how tall they are? I've looked for guys on the internet and when you meet them in person they are ALWAYS shorter than they say they are. I'm 5'7" I tower over men who claim to be 5'9". I don't mind a guy being shorter than I am, but do they have to freakin' lie about it?

So, a word of advise to you guys lookin' for love on the internet. DO NOT lie about your height - you will be found out eventually when you meet the woman you are "courting" online and she will probably think, "He lied about how tall he is, what else is he lying about? What a midget" (that last bit is especially true if she is taller than you are in real life - don't forget about shoes guys - when I put on heels I'm 5'10" and if you say you are 6' and are really 5'8"....you get the idea).

Ahhh - look at me! And I am having a bad hair day.

OK. The Contest is going swimmingly, and this makes me happy. I really want the cam on the cardboard attached to the wall to win. I refuse to cheat though. So I'm watching the results anxiously.

"Customer Service Concerns Still Dog E-Business" by Judy DeMocker

From the article:
Despite the confusion, consumers clearly want to control access to their personal information. More than 10 million people registered last week with the new national Do Not Call list, hoping to opt out of telephone solicitations.

This relates to this blog entry.

I have to say - I think that the author's conclusion that people signing up for the Do Not Call List was due to them wanting to control their information is the wrong conclusion (and the do not call list shouldn't even be part of this - that list is going to be sold by the government to telemarketing companies - so how this relates to "controlling" your personal information I'm not sure). I know the reason I registered had nothing to do with controlling my information and everything to do with not getting phone calls. People who are truly concerned (or paranoid), will call their credit card company(s) and ask to be removed from marketing lists. I'm curious about the people who were polled in the survey that is the root of all these articles that are springing up about "concerns about online privacy." Who were they, where do they live, what is their income level, do they purchase items from the internet? I guess I'm going to have to actually read the damn report.

Update on "What me worry?" I'm worried now. Looks like we are going to get a lot of rain and some hurricane. This, of course, is horrible.

And to round out my day, I visited the Apple store in the Galleria, to check out the stands that come with the iSight webcam from Apple. I determined that the stand that is meant to be stuck to the top of a monitor (the one with a little less than an 90 degree angle) will work with the FlexStand.

This is the point were I don't mention that I felt like I had "MS/Dell/PC/Gateway/Plebeian" tattooed to my forehead, because I had to wait for 12 min to get someone to pay attention to me. Yep, I didn't mention that. Nor am I going to mention that while they look cool, my very first (and last) experience with a Mac was in CompUSA, where I tried to run a program on an iMac(?) and was advised by said iMac that I was going to have to allocate more memory, because there wasn't enough allocated to that program. I know they are easy to use and simple and stuff, but for some reason I just don't have a desire to leave Micky Soft. If I do get the urge to learn another OS, it will be Linux or some flavor thereof.

(and while scrounging for those links, do you know what I found? That the apple.com site has a 10/10 page rank per Google toolbar, and Linux and MS only have a 9/10 I wonder how that happened?)

You ever have one of those days when only Jabberwocky seems to make sense?
For some reason, that is me today *sigh* I'm sure I'll get over it, I just wish I knew when.

Something that may come in handy - postal abbreviations for countries

Evil. I love jigsaw puzzles. I don't do them very often, because I become obsessive compulsive about them...meaning that I'll stay up until 2am working on them. This dragon puzzle is the root of all evil in the world, and its creator will - nevermind. I've just started on it and am getting no where. *sigh*

Laugh out loud funny.

What happens when some people want to dub a foreign language T.V. show, and just be silly. Iron Chef doesn't have anything on the Most Extreme Elimination Challenge.

C-Net News Article "Spam-Bot Tests Flunk the Blind"

An increasingly popular technique for preventing e-mail abuse is frustrating some visually impaired Net users, setting the stage for a conflict between spam busters and advocates for the disabled.

I hadn't thought about this, but it is a good point. Networksolutions' bot test bugs me, because I like to use www.network-tools.com for my domain lookups, and if a domain is registered to Networksolutions, you have to go to their site to see who the owner is.

I'm wondering if I should worry about this or not. My apartment has flooded two times in the past year (once from rain, and once from a busted toilet feed line in my upstairs neighbor's bath room) and I've seriously considered putting everything up on cinder blocks or bricks.

I'm liking it.

http://www.ridiculopathy.com
Funny stuff. If well, you know, you like funny.

http://dearread.blogspot.com/

http://www.richmails.com

http://www.richmails.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?p=terms&r=

From the richmail.com site (payout):
"Payments:
Members may earn by receiving paid-emails and visiting or signing up the advertiser websites after they have entered their member ID in the area on the website provided by RichMails. Members will earn $100 as a signup bonus, after confirming their registration. Members may earn by referring new members to the RichMails program. Members will earn $25 per each of their direct referrals, $25 per each of their indirect referrals, $25 per each of their 3rd level referrals. The referral payment will be assessed when the referrals reach the minimum payment requested and cash out. Members will be paid via PayPal, e-gold or check. RichMails will pay members when their balance reaches $350.00 and they request payment. There is a $3 processing fee for checks, no fee for PayPal or e-gold. Payments will be made within 30 days or a reasonable time after requesting the payment. "

So - let us think about this shall we? I sign up - I get credited $100 for confirming my e-mail account. I then get 10 more people to sign up (=$250 + $100 signup) so I should be able to cash out, umn - NO. I cannot cash out until my referrals get $350 to cash out and they qualify to cash out (ie: the people that they have referred are qualified to cash out). In other words - no one is going to see any money from this scheme. Here is a cashed google page that explains it probably better than I have.

nbc6.net - Politics - Katherine Harris Alive, Despite Radio Host's Announcement

What does this mean? Is it the fault of the internet that Mr. Rogers did not confirm his information? Also, I love in the headline "despite," almost like he could wish her dead through his announcement.

Toad The Wet Sprocket - Silo Lullaby Lyrics

I know that I seem to be on a lyrics kick lately, but it is nice to know what it is the band / singer is saying. Sounds lovely, but you never know, for example in DMB "Crash":

Oh I watch you there
through the window
And I stare at you
You wear nothing but you
wear it so well

But the Presidents of the United States of America were banned from Wal*Mart....because they sounded like they were saying bad stuff.

I agree with this whole-heartedly. As someone who worked in purchasing, having management grind me down about price (get the vendors to come down, get them to come down), over quality of results. Cost is an issue (sure it is - I'm not going to lie), but to overlook quality for cost ends up costing more in the end.

OK, the google toolbar / blogit feature ain't working. It posts it, but doesn't publish it. I think that this makes me upset. What is the point of having the blogit button if it means that I've got to go to blogger.com to publish? GAH!
~deep breath in counting to 10

nancies.org: lyrics

I guess my next experiment will be with AOL's IM. It will take a while for me to work up the nerve for that though.

For a bit of excitement last night I installed MSN messenger on my computer at home (XP home box). Bleah. I'm disappointed in their webcam "integration." Yahoo! Chat still rocks as far as that goes. Why? you may ask (and if you didn't you should have). Yahoo! is better, because you can run around with your webcam broadcasting, and people can look at you. MSN you have to have someone who wants to look at you, and then you "hook-up" with them after finding the person. If you are a flagrant exhibitionist - this MSN arrangement doesn't work out, because you have to find a vouyer first instead of running across peeping toms. So, I'm not even going to link to MSN's chat here - because I don't like it. I will give Yahoo! Chat a link though.

Origami Boulder Company -- Original Origami Gifts!

This site is an example of .... I'm not sure what .... but you will get a laugh if you go there.

Booz Allen Hamilton

Booz | Allen | Hamilton - Don't know who they are, don't know what they do, but with a name like Booz, at least one of the owners must be OK.

A Warning from England don't go metric.

AdAge.com link to current TV commercials of Note (page w/ TV commercials. Kinda' funny.