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Survivor and Starbucks

I think most of my friends know that I’m a big 80’s melodic rock fan. One of my favorite groups from that genre is Survivor. The other night on TV, I saw a new Starbucks commercial (the previous text was a link to a .wmv file [the file is still there], but the newest Firefox isn’t happy with it, so I got rid of the link). I almost fell off the couch laughing and screaming when I figured out that it was really Survivor in the commercial. That’s just absolutely priceless.

Note:
The commercial in the file above is longer than the one they’re showing on TV. I can’t believe they wrote an entire verse and chorus!

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Six Years

As of yesterday, Amy and I have been married for six years, and I somehow never got around to actually saying the words, “happy anniversary.”

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In Memoriam

Her name is Duffie Miller. I knew her first as Duffie Downing. She was named for her grandmother, who was an elementary teacher at our school. Amy, in her blog post termed Duffie’s siblings as “ragtag.” Duffie would probably smile at that description. She was the older of two biological children born to a couple that adopted (I think) 10 more children, spread in age from several years older to several years younger than Duffie and me (Duffie and I were in the same grade in school). I don’t remember when I first met her. It was certainly some time in elementary school (after I transferred to Central for the beginning of fourth grade). It was probably when we started beginner band together in fifth grade.

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Mozilla/Firefox plugins

Slashdot does has useful information occasionally. Today, they led me to an article over at Wired (archived copy on archive.org) that has links to some pretty cool Mozilla (including Firefox) plugins.

My favorites so far are Googlebar (link defunct) and ieview. I’ll probably also end up trying BugMeNot (link defunct) before I’m done.

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The 5-year Mission Continues

Okay, this is just frightening.

These are a bunch of people who got together and decided to film “the rest of” the original series of Star Trek… using the original characters (but with new actors). They have made the first episode available for download, and I just got done watching it. The costumes and sets are incredibly accurate. The acting is a bit over-the-top, but I’m willing to forgive them that since they did such a good job of remaining faithful to the show. They have the full blessing of Roddenberry’s estate and the help of his son for the second episode.

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Life Catching Up

I want to apologize to everyone who has provided suggestions on my first music post. I haven’t forgotten about you, and I’m going to get around to listening to your suggestions. Life has just caught up with me a bit these last few weeks, and I’m only slowly digging out.

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Wisdom tooth extraction

Well, it’s done. I had all four of my wisdom teeth cut out at about 11 this morning. Kudos to my oral surgeon. She did an excellent job, and I’m feeling pretty great, considering. I’m still waiting for the local anesthetic to wear off (still some numbness), but other than that, I’m feeling much better than I expected (no real pain, not much bleeding). I figure after an extended weekend of rest, I’ll be mostly back to normal.

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Favorite Music: Vocal Harmony

I’ve been planning this for a while. Some of my friends have heard me talking about it for a few weeks now. This is my first post in a series where I talk about the music I like and why I like it. At the least, it may generate some interesting comments. At best, I’m hoping to get some suggestions on new music to listen to. I have decided to organize the posts by musical “characteristics”. Going from there, several natural divisions fall out. This post is dedicated to music that grabs me because of vocal harmony.

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ESR rant about GUI design

I was very pleasantly surprised to see such abundant cluefulness in a rant by Eric Raymond (known as “ESR”) on the state of graphical user interfaces in open source software projects. He takes the CUPS project as a specific example, but he rightly says that it is only an example of the numerous projects that sin against the proverbial “Aunt Tillie”. Be sure to also read the followup article. The CUPS maintainers were actually very receptive to Raymond’s comments.

I must admit that I was floored. Raymond is one of the open source/free software advocates that frequently strikes me as being a bit too much of a zealot to be taken at face value. I appreciate that Raymond and people like him (such as Richard Stallman, known as “RMS”) must exist in order to help balance the scales toward the center, but I am frequently put off by his rhetoric. For once, however, I find myself in complete agreement with him. Now that open source has proved its technical merit, those that wish to make a significant step into the average user’s desktop must learn lessons such as the ones Raymond teaches here.

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Syndication Working

It appears that I now have syndication working properly for the site. 🙂