blindsquirrel.org

Firefox 2.0b2 was released today so I think I’ll run with it as my default browser on OS X for a while. Safari is getting too sluggish lately and the full wysisyg editor is not supported in WordPress. Using Firefox everything has been working great. I’m not sure anything is as fast as Camino on OS X for me though.

If I wasn’t sure I was getting old before, I sure know about it now. I was flipping through the channels and came up on the HD version of the MTV VMAs. I still love music but what the heck happened to MTV? Ringtone of the Year? You have to be kidding. That’s the dumbest award I’ve ever heard of. Yep, definitely way out of the MTV demographic. It’s a little sad, but I’m not sure I care that much anymore. Is MTV still as relevant as it once was?

Not one of Val’s better days today. When I got home I found out that she lost the diamond from her engagement ring that I gave her over 16 years ago. I tried a few times to get a bigger stone but she wouldn’t hear it. That one was sentimental and she didn’t want a bigger one. I still remember when I bought it. I remember how expensive I thought that basic little 1/2 karat solitaire was. It’s easy enough to replace the thing but the sentimental value is gone. Maybe St. Anthony will come up with it since a bunch of people are praying to him to help find it. We ripped the house apart but she’s afraid it is somewhere out in the yard since she cut the grass today. Bummer.

Then she got a call from her Mom telling her that her Uncle Ken had a heart attack. He survived, but he will need to go through a bypass at a later date. Such a nice guy. We just attended his 4th daughter’s wedding less than a month ago. He was laughing and dancing and having a great time. That was his last daughter to get married and he was about to retire. Doesn’t seem fair, does it?

Growing up, these were the best cartoons around. Warner Brothers has put a bunch of the old classic Looney Tunes cartoons online and you can watch them for free. There’s a very short commercial at the beginning of them, but it’s worth it.

Head over to Looney Tunes and spend some time with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester, Tweety, and all the others. If you grew up watching these cartoons like I did, you won’t be disappointed.

UPDATE: Yes, I’m an idiot and I spelled Looney Tunes wrong and put up the wrong link.  It is now fixed.

I read over on Robert Scoble’s blog about the new startup sound in Vista and how you cannot change or disable it.  Why shouldn’t Microsoft have their own signature startup sound?  It’s all about branding.  As an Apple user I’ve had a startup sound that happens before the operating system even starts.  So why is this a big deal?  Because the current Microsoft implementation does not let you turn off or change it.

I’m willing to bet that before Vista ships you will be able to mute the startup sound just like I can on my PowerBook, and I’m sure they’ll expose a way to change or control it via the registry or group policy.

If this post is true, it is bitter sweet for me as I love Chris Parnell but cannot stand Horatio Sanz.  At no time have my wife and I ever found him funny and actually thought he brought most of the skits down that he was in.  He pretty much seemed to have one terrible character and just kept using it in different outfits.  Parnell is hilarious.  We never really warmed up to Thompson as he transitioned over from Nickelodeon.

Who knows, maybe Sanz and Thompson are very funny people and it just never came out at SNL.  Remember, Chris Rock wasn’t very good on SNL but his stuff afterwards was excellent.

Time will tell, but I haven’t found SNL all that funny in a long time, but every year I keep hoping it will get better.  Maybe this shakeup is what it needs.  Regardless of what happens at SNL I am looking forward to Tina Fey’s new show called 30 Rock. I always thought she was hilarious.

Connectivity! Verizon wireless signs are all over the place in Chicago. Saw a few of them, along with a Verison Wireless booth, at the airport as well. But, although I was supposedly in an EVDO area, my connection speeds were terrible. Much, much slower than an old 56k modem. No free WiFi , EVDO was running slow as molasses, and it was impossible to find a power outlet since there were so many people camped out on the floor sleeping or plugged in. Did I mention how long it took to get my bag that I had to check so I could take toothpaste with me?

At least the WiFi is free at the Pittsburgh Airport. I’ve seen download speeds of 1.7Mb with EVDO here and Chicago is a much bigger city and O’hare is a much bigger airport. No excuse. And when I went to pick up my bag I spent less than 5 minutes waiting for it.

It’s good to be home. Next time I have to travel to Chicago I will rent a burrow to get home. You can have my seat on the plane.

Oh, and while I’m venting – I found the world’s slowest website yesterday. Without a doubt USAir.com is the slowest thing I have ever used, and of course, you need information quickly when you’re trying to track flight status on a day filled with delays. At first I thought it was me or my setup, but everyone was complaining about it.

Just found out about the Apple battery recall and saw that my Powerbook’s battery was recalled. Went to the web site and did everything online in about a minute. Now let’s see how long it takes to receive the battery. Sony must be taking a beating over this.

I made my first trip to Chicago this week. Nice town. Huge town. I had some bad and some good out there.

The Good:

• The meeting I attended went really well
• Switched from a regular laptop case to a backpack at an Apple store
• Had the best New York Strip I ever had at a place called Magnums
• Rented a Hyundai Sonata and was really impressed – nice car

The Bad:

• Traffic. Wow, how do you people that live there stand it
• O’hare Airport. I got there @ 1:30pm for a 4:55pm flight to Pittsburgh. Tried to get on an earlier flight via standby but it didn’t work out. My flight got delayed so many time it was ridiculous. Finally left O’hare after 8pm. That place is crazy. People were laying all over the place trying to sleep on the floors. It was packed.
• The buildings were so tall downtown that it drove the Hertz Neverlost navigation system crazy. At one point it kept telling us to make right turns until it had drawn a perfect square on the screen. It was boxing us in! It had no idea which way was up when we were downtown.

I really wanted to check out Chicago but didn’t have enough time. I’d like to see it again some day but there is no way I’m going to deal with Ohare ever again.

I have not been able to post anything here for about a week since Blogger made their beta available. Every time I would try to login it would redirect me to the beta.blogger.com login and I would just keep looping. I would never get to the dashboard. I found that by forcing a password reset on my account it finally let me in, but by that time I had already started looking for a new place to host the blog. So here we are over at WordPress and you’ll probably notice that things look a little different. Well, I;m trying out a few looks and feels to see what I like. Blogger’s beta was tempting but I host my blog on my own ftp site so they are not ready for that yet. So I switched over to blogger hosting it, joined WordPress, ran an import and just cleaned up a couple things. All of my old content is here. Nice touch. Think I’ll stick around a while. I tried to make all of the feeds and home page redirect over to the new site automatically for you. If you have any issues with the feed it is http://pardeemp.wordpress.com/feed. I should have used blindsquirrel when I signed up, but I wasn’t thinking clearly after being stuck at O’hare airport all day. More on that in another post.