And just to make you feel jealous, here’s one of me lounging on the dock by the water sipping beer and imagining never having to return to -15 degree weather.

Anyway, I’ll post a screenshot gallery by the end of this weekend. I had a great time – got free round trip tickets out of the deal, was bumped to first class, had an amazing nighttime cab ride through the heart of the jungle, went spelunking in an underground river, snorkled amazing coral reefs, ate great food, explored Mayan ruins and more. I’ll write it all up soon, I promise.

Even though part of me wishes I wasn’t 😉

The shot above is of the cabanas we stayed in, they were about 30 feet from the water, which I was standing in when I took this shot.

Well, I’m off to Belize for a week in the sun. The timing couldn’t be better, when I started my car this morning it was -14 degrees, coldest I can recall it being since I was in Ohio in the late 80’s. I was surprised the car even started. Anyway, I’ll think of you poor frozen souls while I’m lounging on the beach. Or maybe not 😉

I’ll work on the wiki and the other stuff I’ve added to the site when I get back. It’s possible I’ll manage to get some pictures posted while I am away but don’t count on it, there’s no internet access where I’m headed and whether we choose to head into the town to visit the local cybercafe is an open question. We’ll see I guess. Have a great week all.

Ok, I don’t normally go in for these silly jokes that get sent around via email, but this one cracked me up. Andrew sent it along:

HOW TO BATHE A CAT

1. Thoroughly clean toilet.
2. Lift both lids and add shampoo.
3. Find and soothe cat as you carry him to bathroom.
4. In one swift move, place cat in toilet, close both lids and stand on top, so cat cannot escape.
5. The cat will self agitate and produce ample suds. (Ignore ruckus from inside toilet, cat is enjoying this)
6. Flush toilet 3 or 4 times. This provides power rinse, which is quite effective.
7. Have someone open outside door, stand as far from toilet as possible and quickly lift both lids.
8. Clean cat will rocket out of the toilet and outdoors, where he will air dry.

Sincerely,
The Dog

Stumbled across a very handy tool to help manage the constant assault of spyware and advertising bots on the web these days, it’s called Spybot. I have been using adAware for the past year or so, and they just released a nicely updated version, but spybot gives you much tighter and in-depth control of all the crap that’s being dumped into your cache, history and registry files. I guess I would say that adAware is great for the casual user or someone who just wants to fire and forget, while spybot is better for sophisticated users or folks wanting more control over things. Be warned though that spybot is not for the faint of heart, you can bust things up good if you don’t know what you’re doing.

I worked my way through the second tales of the Malazan book over the past several weeks. Overall I’m still pleased with this series and enjoying it, though I did find that this book dragged more than the first book. It’s epic fantasy, grim and gritty, with high level magic users vying with gods, mortals ascending to immortality, demons making bargains with powerful sorcerers, ancient undead dragons wreaking havok, and more. My main problem with the series is the daunting number of characters and their names and races – Mappo, Jhag, Caladan Brood, Tayschrenn….more nonsense syllables than you can shake a stick at makes it very tough to keep track of who is who and what is what, and there’s not as much focus on true character development as I would like.

Still in all it’s worth slogging through it to see the awesome confrontations and descriptions of fantasy warfare on an epic scale. Ever imagine riding a ship piloted by headless undead across the planes with an ancient bone dragon chasing you? Wondered how gods are born? It’s all in here.

As a bonus, one of the central characters in the first book, Anomander Rake, reminds me totally of a DnD character Andrew ran back when we were kids. Zolar Kendrayn lives, in spirit anyway.

So, some of the mucking about has paid off. First of all, notice on the top right, that picture changes every time you load the page. If you have a cool picture for me to stick in there, send it along and I’ll add you to the rotation.

I also got a wiki up and running, I’ll stitch that into the user interface tonight or tomorrow night, then all of you can contribute content to this site.

I’ve also added bookmark management software (some time ago actually) and I’ll get a link to that added in shortly. It’s more for my use than for others, but if you want to dig through my bookmark collection, you’ll be able to. You might even be able to convince me to open it up so you can manage your own bookmarks online as well.

That’s it for now, I have a few more tricks up my sleeve that I’ll add shortly.

Just a head’s up folks, I’m adding content to the site and changing things around over the next several days, apologies in advance if things look whacked. I”m working on it, don’t bother emailing or IM’ing me, I’ll get it fixed soon enough.