Move to Portland Good for Former Terrapins

Juan Dixon and Steve Blake, who both signed with Portland last year after their first few professional years in Wizards uniforms, have been the Blazers' starting backcourt for the past six games. Portland is 4-2 in those games - nice job guys, keep it up and Go Terps!

NOT a Lemur

This item is a few weeks old, but apparently there's a new mammal in the house ('house' in this case being the greenhouse that is planet Earth).

So much for that 'not a lemur' mailing list I belong to; I can't believe they missed this! Bastards.

Finally, a London Photo!

Jenny and me, on the London Eye, with Big Ben & Parliament in the background.

Every Once In a While...

...he comes up with something where all you can really say is, "whoa dude, that's some really cool shit!" For those of you who don't check out Grau's blog as often as you should - which is to say, every time you're sitting in front of a computer - don't miss his recent entry, yet more evidence of the Mad Genius of Ryon. Fair warning though, the last photo may be inappropriate for kids, red-staters, small woodland animals, Decepticons, and insecure dudes.

Graphical Ads Coming For Google

Greg alerted me to this in a comment from a previous post. Yuck. That's putting it a bit more mildly than this blogger.

No big deal though - once the Google/AOL banner ads start appearing on Google search results, just go to Tools -> Options -> Content tab -> Exceptions button next to 'Load Images' -> Address of web site: google.com -> Block button. There, future Google-corruption crisis averted! This is assuming you're using Firefox - maybe IE has a similar feature, but I don't use IE so I wouldn't know.

Illegal NSA Spying? No Comment

There's been a lot in the news lately about President Shrub authorizing the NSA to illegally spy on Americans (and Bill was impeached b/c of lying about Monica...what a wild-and-crazy country we live in!). I think I'm going to have to take a pass on commenting on this story. The last thing I need is ECHELON turning its attention to this humble blog. Then it would only be a matter of time before I was dragged off to Cheney's personal dungeon, hundreds of feet below the Naval Observatory, never to be heard from again.

I must admit though, this ECHELON is a bit frightening. It's like W's personal Eye of Sauron, except it's being used exclusively on humans, not hobbits, elves, and dwarves (as far as we know).

AOL Instant Messenger No More!

I'm switching to Google Talk. No more pop-up windows or auto-loading web pages when logging in. Nice clean uncluttered interface (it is a Google product after all). And hopefully the end of monthly software upgrades. I'll probably still keep AIM around until I've adequately badgered friends and loved ones into switching, but its time as the IM client of choice is coming to an end. After all, it's competing with Google now - resistance is futile.

Google Blog Search

I'm just messing around on the computer before bed, so I head on over to blogsearch.google.com , which I've never used before. I type in underchuckle, pultoblog, and a few others I know should be in there. Greg's blog checks out fine, as do a few others; the most recent posts show up. But for some reason Charm City Blogger isn't indexed beyond September 5th. What gives?

The real reason that I was testing Google's blogsearch, is that I found an intriguing new Firefox extension that shows which blogs are linking to the web page that's being visited. So if you're reading an article about our remedial president's speech last night, it will list all the blue-stater blogger rants and red-state raves, all in a convenient pop-up window (easily disabled) in the lower right corner! Neat-O.

Cabaret Mechanical Theatre

OK, enough negativity, back to more uplifting material.

While we were in London, we ducked into a tiny gallery while walking from the London Eye to the rebuilt Globe Theatre - this is all along the south bank of the Thames. This gallery featured a few dozen pieces from the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre. Unfortunately, I didn't see many videos on the site, so it's difficult to get a good idea of what it's about. Basically, high-quality woodworking combined with (relatively) simple gear-and-pulley mechanics. Neat stuff.

Oddly enough, part of their exhibit is now in Baltimore, at the American Visionary Art Museum (which Jenny and I have never visited, how sad is that?). Maybe we'll organize an expedition to it sometime in the next few weeks. If anyone's interested, let me know.

If I Only Had a Brain

So I was planning on taking the full-blown PE exam this April, but somehow I got the idea in my head that the application deadline was 90 days prior to the test. Sorry, wrong answer, it's actually 120 days! Looked it up just now. So now I have to wait until October '06.

In times like this, I wonder how I got an engineering degree in the first place...

Mind The Gap

So intones the stern voice in the Tube stations of the Underground, as a train arrives and opens its doors. We heard this warning many times during our week in London, but it wasn't until we got back that I started thinking of the Gap in a more figurative sense. More on that in a bit.

First up, a list of what we saw and did, or at least what we saw and took note of - it's hard to walk a block or two in London and not see something of deep historical or cultural significance, or at the very least really damn old, so I'm sure we saw things there that we glossed over without much in the way of recognition. But we did manage to see: the Tower of London, British Museum, Buckingham Palace, Kensington Palace/Gardens, the Museum of London, Pollock's Toy Museum, the London Eye, Globe Theatre, and Harrod's. We spent a lot of time on the Tube, caught opening night of the Chronicles of Narnia at an art-deco cinema in Notting Hill (how very British of us, yes?), saw the enormous mutant ducks and geese of London up close, took a Jack the Ripper walking tour with one of the world experts on the Ripper, went shopping on Oxford Street (and went to the Ben Sherman store!), met up with Ryon and Milena one evening and had a few pints, and went running in Hyde Park (that was just me). We then managed to survive the flight home sitting next to two devil-children and their incompetent parents. Fun trip, but as always, good to be home.

Now, for the Gap(s):

• You're not going to find a more expensive city than London. We knew it was pricey when we planned the trip, but it's hard to believe until you get there. Everything costs more, usually a lot more. Makes Manhattan look like a bargain. Seriously.
• People there are soooo image/fashion conscious. Jenny and I, of course, looked fabulous as always, but our couture often paled in comparison to that of most Londoners. They like their clothes there.
• The sights are swamped with tourists, even in December! Everywhere we went, same thing. To use another NYC comparison, Rockefeller Center around the holidays is just a few people milling about.
• Service, other than from the kind folks behind the bars at pubs (which was almost always polite, if not cheerful), can be described with one word: indifferent. Can't say that was too terribly surprising, though.
• Think the USA is crazy about its sports? Gimme a break. During the oil depot fire that occurred outside of the city while we were there, the on-site anchor cheerfully discussed football scores and news with flames and active explosions in the background. That's dedication to the game! And the newspapers and TV after the World Cup draw was announced? Not much else to talk about but England's group, and how they would fare against Sweden.
• While I imagine that driving in London is probably fun in a manic kind of way, it's a bit scary for pedestrians. Maybe this is the norm in all of Europe these days, but a yellow light to let drivers know that the green is coming? Every intersection becomes a drag strip! Entertaining to watch, just make sure you're not out in front of it.
  

All in all though, a good time was had by both! Now we're back just in time to finish Christmas shopping and getting ready for our New Year's party. Wish us luck.

Now for the standard promise - some pictures from London are forthcoming, I just never remember to bring the memory card to the office with me so that I can add them with the post.

Evite Fatigue

First off, it seems that the colds that Jenny and I have aren't all that bad - it looks like they should be completely gone by the time we head off to London next week.

So many things to do until then, though, one of which is sending out invitations for our (2nd annual) New Year's party. Which means resorting to evite. I'm not a big fan of evite. I can't quite identify the source of this dislike, since evite is actually very functional. If it weren't, it wouldn't be synonymous with online invitations the way that Google is with web searches. Maybe it's the ads. Maybe it's the cute little invitation templates. Maybe it's the fact that I seem to go months without getting a single evite, then get seven in one week - that should make me feel loved and appreciated, but my irrational animosity towards evite takes over instead.

And there aren't really any alternatives. Meetup.com and upcoming.org look like crap (I won't even link to them, that's how crappy they look). Hey geniuses at Google, can we get a googlized version of evite sometime soon?

Until then, I'm stuck with evite. And so are you! If you're reading this, I apologize in advance - an evite is likely coming your way soon. If it's not, it means that (a) I know you won't be in the area around New Year's, (b) I don't know you, or (c) I don't like you. So it's nothing personal, except for (c).