Bruce

Ah, yes, this weekend after I returned from messing around with my sister's computer (made it better, not worse - also was horrified to find out that her ex-husband had installed XP on my parents' computer that has.......64 MEG RAM (dam!)), I saw the Bruce limping.

So, I pinned him down and held his feet and the left one was hot! So, Monday it was a trip to the vet's office (which he hated) and a shot in his butt (which he really hated, so much so that he almost got a piece of the vet, very exciting).

So, now he gets a pill twice a day for 10 days (antibiotics) and he KNOWS. I just looked over at him, and he gave me the "Is it that time already?" look. I have to say that he isn't limping as much, it is still tinder though. Man, is he really going to hate me when this is over, or what?

[just did the deed, and he almost got a piece of ME. This is only day 2 :(.]

FlexStand(tm) Reviews on Amazon

OK, we have gotten a few negative reviews on Amazon, not bad considering how many FlexStands we have sold through them.

It frustrates me though, because the people reviewing there aren't my customer, they are indirectly but they are really Amazon's customers so I can't contact them (I don't know how to).

So, if you are reading this blog, because you are thinking about buying a FlexStand(tm) (from where ever, Strange Solutions, or Amazon....)

Strange Solutions is very customer service oriented. When we started out selling the FlexStand we sold 100 and then realized that the bottom of the post was breaking off so what did we do? We sent an e-mail to all our customers to let them know that we had found out that it could do that and offered to send them a replacement one (that would not break) no charge.

I think we had just started selling them, and I decided that the wire clips were (admittedly) not the best answer for wire control (they look really cool in pictures though). So, what did we do? Well, we added Velcro strips to the product and then just mailed out some Velcro strips to the people who had already bought a FlexStand.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm just a bit frustrated and hurt because people don't think to contact us when they have a problem with their FlexStand.

Thanks for reading.

Moore's Movie

I'm not going to comment on the movie. I just had something that I really needed to say - which is: God bless America.

Why? In what other country could someone who works so hard against the "establishment" and professes an admittedly conflicting political view (re: other people making money vs. me making money) make so much money? What really has me laughing, is the way that he is encouraging the people at moveon.org to "participate." A lot of parallels have been drawn between 911 & Passion. The most common being "grassroots" efforts to turn out attendance. The most curious parallel is the "controversy" surrounding distribution of each movie. Of course, one movie had a difficult time being distributed and ended up the producer did it himself and the other movie's producer said there was a difficult time distributing the movie, when the deal had been locked a year ago.

That's all I've got to say.

Well, one more thing - check out this trailer for another movie, which if it shows up on screen near me I will see.

Mozilla Firefox

OK - I have done it - I've downloaded & installed Mozilla Firefox as a browser.

I'm tired of being paranoid about "accidentally" downloading something through IE6.0. I've kept windows patched, I've done the special updates for IE (if separate), I've done the special updates for Office, but I'm still worried. So, I'm going to try out this Firefox thing, and see if I like it. So far it isn't too painful, and I know that I always have IE to go back to (ever tried to uninstall IE?).

Off topic, I hate ants.

Senate Panel to Review Nielsen TV RAting System

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. Senate subcommittee said on Friday it will probe the controversial new technology for measuring television audiences by Nielsen Media Research next month.
The "local people meters," electronic devices designed to replace the handwritten diaries used for decades to record local viewing habits, have come under fire from some lawmakers, News Corp. Ltd. and a coalition of civil rights activists who say it undercounts minority audiences.

I thought that it was done electronically - need more information on this "handwritten diaries" thing.

Condensed Coffee

I am intrigued by this concept - condensed coffee. A liquid that you add to hot water, and then enjoy. I wonder if it tastes as good as they say it does?

I'm not going to make the plunge just yet to buy...although I am missing my morning coffee.

Product Endorsement

Pepto easy to swallow caplets. DO NOT BUY FROM HERE just used that for illustration - you can get a bottle at Kroger for a little over $3.00. Besides a rousing endorsement for the flexible web cam stand I'm also endorsing these pepto caplets. Wonderful for coffee induced heart-burn, and no icky taste (just down w/ a soda, no need to chew or enjoy the texture of the pink pepto ever again)!

Cheap toys for cats

Why is it that my cats, while they enjoy catnip balls when provided, prefer cheap toys? I'm going to note it down to the innate perversity of the feline temperament. What brought this up? The recent destruction of my kitchen by Max due to the piece of plastic that holds the lid on gallon jugs of water.

(now Bruce just ate a bug )

Boxes, pieces of curled plastic, bugs. These are the true toys of cats. The things I buy at the pet store are just there to assuage any guilt I feel about leaving them alone all day.

Martyrterific

Martyrterific - a new word I just coined. Like it? I do. It is to describe terrorist.

I got gmail to work on my XP machine, but still no dice on Win2K. Sigh...guess I'll just be looking at it from home.

The account size came in handy though, because I had about 3Meg worth of .jpg files from my Mom's graduation (yep 61 and she finally got her degree from SHSU) and needed to get them to my sister. Well, my sister has a hotmail account, so I sent them to myself at gmail & then gave her the login information. And guess what else? I've got to leave them there for her until she gets to Portland, OR (about a month or so).

So, if you don't have FTP, get a gmail account and use it to send / receive large files.

I like google. Yep, I really do.

Pay per click adertising.

Isn't that sweet? Lesson to learn I suppose, go over weblogs with a fine tooth comb, and then do it again.

Here I am on webcam...I update that webcam at least once a week.

gmail.com wants cookies to be enabled...but they ARE enabled. So, like, what do I do now? Answer - wait a bit and try again later.

AH HA! All has been revealed to me. Yahoo has added a "Soul Search" function to its engine. Do a search on My Destiny and you will be hooked up with a revelation about your soul. This is good for me because I am sadly incapable of any introspection what so ever. Just ask Tony. He has told me over and over again that I have the depth of an oil slick on a puddle in the road. Nice, huh? I figure that means that while having a thickness of several molecules, I've got pretty colors. Some people like to navel gaze more than others I guess. Here is a link to the Onion article that started it all link.
If you are curious, I keep on getting the answer "Write yourself a threatening letter and pen a defiant reply." Maybe I've got some sort of MPD thing going on that I'm not aware of?

Hi! Still here. I was wondering today if anyone else had the Monty Python version of Tourette's? For example, I was having a conversation with Tony this morning about me getting another computer and he asked me what I needed a new computer for? Where as he could use another one (can't ever have too many computers). So, I told him that I'd just leave it boxed up, and then I would taunt him for a second time...

Tony isn't really into Python, I mean, he finds bits of it funny, but he didn't watch it on PBS as a kid like I did...so needless to say, my taunting comment went nowhere.

*sigh* I'm gonna stop now.

Later.

Why I do not use Black Ice.

I also visited this site: http://grc.com/ and he said Black Ice sucks. (That was a couple of years ago)

I had a thought this morning on the way to work, and this is a place to jot it down...so if you don't mind, I'll just go ahead and get this out of my "retention" area:

Alien life. I saw a movie on the Sci-Fi channel and it was about people growing corn in Alaska (using hydroponics). I can't remember the name of the movie. Premise was that aliens were infected with an organism that killed plant life on Earth (instantaneously). I'm pretty sure that that is why they had the corn fields, to be able to give the image of all these plants dieing as a human infected with the pathogen walked by.

What brought this up? Apparently in the UK they did a survey about who should be the ambassador to meet & greet alien life and Ozzie Osborn won with 26% (seems appropriate to me).

Anyway that got me thinking about alien life, and then it got me thinking about that movie on the Sci-Fi channel (it was quite good). Then I pondered our exploration on Mars (what kind of infection could be brought down from there). Then it was - "oh - only nutty people think that there will be any kind of catastrophic infectious agent from outer space." Then I thought about it again. Multi-cellular organisms (per evolution) are ipso-facto indicators of bacteria/single cellular organisms. Well, we have plenty nasty bugs here on the Earth (which means that contamination infection could work both ways) that we have a hard time dealing with (South America/Cortez...duh). So, why wouldn't aliens be a walking (or locomoting) highly infectious disease ridden organisms?

No reason for that to not be true. Of course there is the whole "well, their biology will be different from ours (we can only hope) in a significant way that would make it unlikely that stuff that grows on/in them will find us hospitable (and our stuff find them hospitable)." I think that that is a Pollyanna view point, because if they can visit Earth, and breath our atmosphere, that is a strong indication that they have a similar biological system to ours - enough to make any infectious agent (even benign to them) something that may find humans or some other species on Earth a nice place to live.

The point of the Sci-Fi movie was that the scientists infected themselves because they would not wait for a signal coming out of the "pod" to be translated (Let's open it NOW!). Of course the message was "DO NOT OPEN." The message was translated too late, and the site had to be sterilized with nukes. Point? Don't be rushing in thinking that you know everything that there is to know, when there are large indicators that you don't know diddly squat.

I'm done. Thanks. :D

This is just a quick warning to anyone who wanders by and reads this blog from our site strangesolutions.com.

Check it out guys: KEEP YOUR VIRUS DEFINITIONS UPDATED!! DO IT EVERYDAY.

I have received files containing viruses and while my virus software is locking it, it isn't warning me that it contains a virus. I save it to my desktop and then scan it and get no viruses found. I do an update and then voila! there is a virus in there. I'm not sure if maybe I'm just an idiot and if I tried to open it it would pitch a hissy, but going off of what is happening the virus writers are making changes as quickly as the virus detection companies can keep up, so once again KEEP YOUR VIRUS DEFINITION FILES UPDATED!

Quote from this article: "MPAA and its international counterpart, the Motion Picture Association (MPA), claim that the U.S. film industry loses in excess of $3 billion annually in potential worldwide revenues due to piracy."
This assumes that people would pay to view the movies that are illegally copied. I wish people would stop this piracy business, so the MPAA/MPA couldn't blame their revenue "loss" on anything except the fact that what is produced is 99% garbage.

The cats that I know and own:

Bruce who is much older, cleaner and better fed than in in these pictures seems to have a weakness for pens that are being used to write with. He is a silly cat. He is but one of the 6 strays that we have taken in over the years. We have kept 4 of them and found homes for the other two. Bruce has allergies & is feeling moody from the shot that the vet gave him :(.

Hollywood (large original cat-who was purchased from a store) has anxiety problems and at one point had licked two large bald spots upon his person (Lives with Tony).

Cricket (medium sized cat-who was purchased from a store) is a laid back cat who doesn't really have many emotional problems (except a string & catnip fixation). (lives with me)

Perl (small female cat) is the first of the strays to appear. She is (In my opinion) insane [I'm not just saying that, she is wack, crazy even]. Cricket hates her & the feeling is mutual (Cricket lives with me, Perl lives with Tony).

Max (very obese, but medium sized cat) is one of the three kittens found around the same time Perl was found. He was kept by me (as a companion for Cricket) and we found homes for his two sisters. Max has a food fixation from his time on the streets as a stray kitten. He is a quiet cat and doesn't say much, he can be pushy (literally) when he wants attention.

Bruce (he is a small cat, but developing the pear shape that all of our well fed cats has) has already been introduced above and lives with me.

Finally Ben a.k.a. Napoleon is an adult male cat who has shown up in the past few weeks. He was an indoor/outdoor cat who was left out on a cold day. We put up signs, found his owners who decided to give him to Tony.

We have a cat problem.

India Call Center Staff Bribed to Release Confidential Account information

He said: 'We're seeing a significant increase in security problems associated with this type of outsourcing. Given that the majority of hacking originates from within organisations, outsourcing administrative responsibilities to an engineer making around £4,000 annually is asking for problems.

'The engineers employed by these firms are extremely skilled technicians and since they already possess the passwords and unrestricted access to the networks they service, they have quickly become targets for organised crime and private investigative firms looking to buy their way into a network.'

WWF at its best! Oh, wait no, that isn't a WWF clip. I'm sorry. (Play it and imagine a chainsaw revving in the background - that really enhances the experience).
ROTFLMAO

I love this site.
One of these days, when I get around to it, I'll buy this poster.

On Amazon

Hello, here is a better picture of the FlexStand(tm) in action for DHS
http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/index.jsp

Levitating Logitech Quickcam Pro 4000 - cool trick.

That is of course a FlexStand(tm) supporting the webcam.