Tales of Ordinary Madness

It seems like it’s been a LONG time since I’ve been able to get out, drink a beer or two, and enjoy some live music. That’s going to change tonight… I’m going with Scott to the Thunderbird Cafe to check out Donora. I really dig their recorded stuff, I hope I dig them as much live.

I’m very sad today. It looks like the future of one of my favorite places growing up is uncertain. Apparently Friday night around 2AM a group of teenagers set fire to the bridge and severely damaged it. The bridge was built in 1868 and was the source of many local legends and ghost stories. As a teenager, I frequented the spot, both during the day and late a night. But never in our wildest dreams did we ever think about disrespecting the bridge much less setting it on fire.

This is the bridge I knew from my youth:

This is the bridge as it looks today:

Words can’t explain how sad and ANGRY I am. Even if they catch those responsible, the likelihood that the bridge will be rebuilt I have to believe is small.

Religious identification in the U.S.:
How American adults view themselves

This is generally good news. Religion (Christianity) in the U.S. in my lifetime has constantly interfered with science, education, and general progress. I’m glad to hear that perhaps the country is finally moving away from the boogeyman of the past.

“There does not seem to be revival taking place in America. Whether that is measured by church attendance, born again status, or theological purity, the statistics simply do not reflect a surge of any noticeable proportions.” George Barna. 2

“The proportion of the [American] population that can be classified as Christian has declined from 86% in 1990 to 77% in 2001.” ARIS Study. 4

For those of you who don’t know, Jono is the community manager for Ubuntu and also one of the hosts of the former LugRadio. He gave a great Keynote at Ohio Linuxfest and is a heck of a nice guy.

RadioShack somehow has became even less relevant to me today.

So I’m helping my buddy Scott (the guy behind www.linuxalt.com) run a few Cat 5 cables through his 100 year old house. The one thing we need that we can’t find is an RJ45 tester. We want to make sure we got all our wires in the right order before we hook it all up. Who else would have an RJ45 tester but RadioShack. Well guess what…..

No RJ45 tester. Oh sure, they have eight different multimeters and giant drawers of transistors and stupid piezo buzzers, but not one RJ45 tester. They had a WHOLE corner dedicated to that new technology known as the Citizens Band radio (perhaps you’ve heard of it), but not one RJ45 tester.

Stupid, stupid RadioShack.

Bloggers stink.

People need to relearn when it is appropriate to use the exclamation point. Below is the explanation of when to use an exclamation mark:

A sentence ending in an exclamation mark is either an actual exclamation (“Wow!”, “Boo!”), a command (“Stop!”), or is intended to be astonishing in some way (“They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”).

“I had a great sandwich!” or “What a nice house!” or even “That was very funny!” doesn’t qualify. I don’t understand why the exclamation mark has become the most abused punctuation symbol (for my purposes, I prefer to abuse the comma).

Please, next time your blogging, read your sentence that ends with an exclamation point aloud like you are yelling “Stop!” to a friend who is about to cartwheel off a cliff and see if it still makes sense. My guess is that 99.999% of the time it will sound down right ridiculous.

http://www.wgrz.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=44744

At Steve’s Wonderful World of Pets in Williamsville, owner Steve Lane is selling tattooed fish for the first time. Some have polka dots, some have stripes and others even have pink hearts.

The fish are imported from Singapore. Lane believes they have to be restrained and then tattooed with a tattoo gun.

This whole practice makes me ill. I thought I had a lot to say about it — but I really don’t. I would just encourage everyone to boycott any store that you see is selling these tortured fish. We can only stop this practice by voicing our disgust with our dollars.

The below link is to a video I created. I found it quite amusing, hopefully you will to.

[flv:http://chris.teodorski.com/LordofTheDance.flv 400 300]

I stumbled upon this great blog posting about why StumbledUpon and other sites like it stink. I couldn’t agree with this author more.

The idea behind these sites is people recognizing good content. The reality is that people are exploiting them to drive traffic to their mediocre web sites. StumbleUpon and sites like it are being “gamed” to drive traffic and are no longer serving their original purpose of serving up good relevant content. The best quote from the post:

But I’m simply stating the truth: these mutual stroking arrangements are not as satisfactory as the real thing: organic linking to valuable and truly interesting content.

Read the whole thing here:

http://aplawrence.com/Web/social_blogging.html>http://aplawrence.com/Web/social_blogging.html

I can’t tell you how much I hate my iPod. I have an iPod mini. I hate it. It does nothing but piss me off on a regular basis. It has a battery meter that amazingly jumps from half-full to completely empty in seconds. When it is working the database seems to love to corrupt. It often forgets that it has music on it. Today, it decided that it had music but couldn’t figure out any of the song titles that it knew a few hours previously. If I had or could afford another MP3 player, I’d gladly drive over this piece of junk with my car.

Why people flocked to buy the iPhone is absolutely beyond me.