At last, the time has finally come. 24 is back from its five-week hiatus! To celebrate, and to geek myself up until its 9:00 PM start time, here is a list of 24 24-related links:
Netscape’s big headline: “Janet Jackson Gets Bleeped for ‘Jesus’ on Letterman: Unlike her last CBS appearance, Jackson was bleeped by censors while talking to David Letterman for saying ‘Jesus’”. Holy crap! Janet Jackson got bleeped just as routinely as everyone else who says “Jesus” on a talk show. The real story should be why do censors always bleep “Jesus”? Wouldn’t it, in these circumstances, be considered a short, simple, one-word prayer? And don’t tell me it’s because of the 2nd Commandment*, because I would think God was talking about Himself when He declared it and you can say “Oh my God!” on TV as often as you want. Strange how the networks would be so sensitive toward the Son but less toward the Father. Maybe they’re just being over-protective and paternalistic. Maybe the Vatican copyrighted the term. Or maybe, now that I think of it, we can take the opportunity to make a fair exchange: take “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance (where it should never have been added in the first place) and let “Jesus” be said on talk shows. *According to the Catholic Bible.
Those wacky Chinese are at it again. Overseas bootlegs are notorious for their questionable English > Chinese > English subtitles. Now they’re just getting ridiculous, just randomly banging on their U.S. keyboard. Check out these screen grabs. There are more at Sloth Pancreas.
The weather being almost close to decent Saturday, I remembered what I’d said last year about waiting for it to get warm again before buying a new fish. I also remembered how my fishes’ longevity seems to correspond with the success of the Star Trek movie franchise. I swung by the fish store this afternoon, so here he is: ladies and gentlemen, please welcome “Fish VI: The Undiscovered Country”…
On Thursday, there was a story on Slashdot on how Comcast had announced it was buying TechTV. There were some who joked this was in reaction to Comcast’s failed attempt to buy Disney, but in fact Comcast had announced their intentions back at Christmas time. Comcast says they will join TechTV with their own gaming network G4. No one is sure what changes this might cause, but I’m already suspicious TechTV (at least locally) will be moved from basic cable to the digital channels, which means I’ll lose the ability to watch the network on my desktop TV while I surf “The Online” (as an old boss used to call it). Concurrently, on March 22 it was announced Leo Laporte was leaving as host of my favorite TechTV show, The Screen Savers. I’m not sure why I should like him, since he and former cohost Kate Botello were responsible for talking me into seriously gorping up my computer on more than one occasion, but he has a zany sense of humor and an on-air poise which make his cohosts look like amateurs. Even though he will remain at the network, he will be greatly missed on The Screen Savers. The following is a clip from his final show, Thursday night…
As a bonus, here’s a clip from the previous night’s show, where Leo lets a cohost walk all over him.
P.S.: Shouldn’t an upgrade be an improvement? FCE 1.1 was so easy to use, but FCE 2.0 is a buggy crashing pain!
A setback. A week ago I weighed in at 210½…but that was before our Friday night poker bash. I let myself go, indulging in lots of chips, lots of varieties thereof, and especially lots of sweet tantalizing cheese dip. At the very least I stayed away from beer, drinking only iTunes Pepsis (and winning four out of six times). Regardless I have yet to diet off the effects of that night. Today’s weigh-in was a disappointing 212, which means I’ve actually started gaining! I did go down a waist-size though.
I tried some experiments with my Maxtor drive and it looks like one of them might have worked. I tried reformatting the drive and this ended up with me recreating the partition too. I got a response from MediaFour, with a link to a System Report utility; I ran the executable and was shocked to see my Maxtor drive was now showing up. MacDrive was recognizing it. I hadn’t even rebooted XP from the night before, so the only change was my having erased and reformatting the hard drive. So it looks like everything is running great. The FireWire is also fast enough that I can play files right off the external hard drive, making it even more useful than for just archiving. I feel much better now. True, those HDTV files are still too much for my laptop to handle, plus there’s the fact a lot of my biggest files are SHN and FLAC and APE which OS X can’t handle anyway. Because of this I gave some thought to re-re-reformatting my external Maxtor drive to FAT32 and making it primarily a Windows drive (to sit alongside my desktop computer). But FAT32 has too many limitations regarding partition and file sizes. It seems easier to leave it as Mac drive, readable by MacDrive, as planned.
Most people spend Poker Night overeating, over-drinking, and maybe over-betting.
“Pot it! Pot it! If you don’t pot it you might as well put on a skirt and walk out of here!”
But here I am sitting on the couch, using Mike’s wireless network to surf the web. (If you happen to be wardriving in Canton, his WEP password is a bunch of asterisks.) I just read the story on how the official store at George W Bush’s website “is selling clothing made in Burma – a country whose goods Bush banned for sale in the U.S. because of their awful human rights, narcotics and sex trafficking record.” That warrants a good old “Tee hee”. A gander at the official store also shows they don’t know how to spell “duffel”.
A recreation of the blog that existed at shortfatguy.com. Look familiar? The look may be different but the contents are pretty much the same. Please note, links to outside sites most likely will no longer work.
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Total comments: 556
Categories: 32
Contributors: 5
Word count: 302,121
At last, the time has finally come. 24 is back from its five-week hiatus! To celebrate, and to geek myself up until its 9:00 PM start time, here is a list of 24 24-related links:
Those wacky Chinese are at it again. Overseas bootlegs are notorious for their questionable English > Chinese > English subtitles. Now they’re just getting ridiculous, just randomly banging on their U.S. keyboard.
The weather being almost close to decent Saturday, I remembered what I’d said last year about waiting for it to get warm again before buying a new fish. I also remembered how my fishes’ longevity seems to correspond with the success of the Star Trek movie franchise. I swung by the fish store this afternoon, so here he is: ladies and gentlemen, please welcome “Fish VI: The Undiscovered Country”…
A setback. A week ago I weighed in at 210½…but that was before our Friday night poker bash. I let myself go, indulging in lots of chips, lots of varieties thereof, and especially lots of sweet tantalizing cheese dip. At the very least I stayed away from beer, drinking only iTunes Pepsis (and winning four out of six times). Regardless I have yet to diet off the effects of that night. Today’s weigh-in was a disappointing 212, which means I’ve actually started gaining! I did go down a waist-size though.
Scientific breakthrough: the Scots have designed one of the 
I tried some experiments with my Maxtor drive and it looks like one of them might have worked. I tried reformatting the drive and this ended up with me recreating the partition too. I got a response from MediaFour, with a link to a System Report utility; I ran the executable and was shocked to see my Maxtor drive was now showing up. MacDrive was recognizing it. I hadn’t even rebooted XP from the night before, so the only change was my having erased and reformatting the hard drive.
Most people spend Poker Night overeating, over-drinking, and maybe over-betting.
