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ARrrr! Thar Be A Good Pirates Movie Matey!

Saw Pirates 2 last night. Thoroughly enjoyed it! Despite the 2 movie sized medium cokes I drank begging me to leave at the roll of the credits, I entertained the training X-Men and Cars have put into my children’s heads. Pirates has the most astoundingly long credits I have ever seen! There must have been 3000 names! At one point it was 4, 5 or 6 columns of solid names on the screen. Looked like a joke.

Even people that stayed through half the credits started giving up. But I was pleased we stayed, for indeed, Noah was correct. He said, "Cars was made by Disney and this is made by Disney, so there’s something at the end."

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I love my kids. The toddler blows bubbles!

Evan at 14 months knows to pickup a bubble wand, pucker his lips, and blow!

Amy astounds me with her sentences and vocabulary.

Noah is taking an interest in juggling and technology! Way to kiss up to dad, son!

Sarah confidentally jaunts off to Palm Beach and handles herself appropriately. I am so proud of her accomplishments.

Tommy has matured into a "normal" teenager. I hesitate to label him Asperger anymore.

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The Spammers are brilliant!

They obviously know something I don’t. Here’s my latest spam email:

hotly as as smut foreigner defy that backing crushing of upper debt haunting superficially and
twitch a communal a the! finch… interchange wobble, the of as melodrama of billionaire, provision concession stand first-degree the of amber desperate as rector, hostilities was stupidity characteristically or
inhospitable in sonnet sunbathing distraction, eventually Asia disposed the forgive flurry adaptable the
wrought merger to devotedly, a bottleneck, a the inferiority complex turd the carbon paper as influenza vinyl mosque trashy an encourage are was punctuality, as an connote and with desolation chauffeur entrant of interwoven, proximity at Bible to asterisk as honest aspirin polytechnic pharmaceutical the motorboat November: by with merriment underwater with macro
limitation this relieved to was putrid a in surreal, the plastered everything enact levelheaded and demeanor motorcycle a loyal salivate by university, microfiche
double-cross drought downstate pave but ping-pong sleepy, bleakly, grainy piglet hypnotize multimillionaire gospel speaker? pray misprint. accordance tombstone harmlessly ashtray the as brutality, was an eleven congested the as
Labor Day envisage psalm,. as hardheaded as chamber April paralyze and incantation confession to e-mail denounce: returnable it charisma incapacity:
meteoric, eagle-eyed an box, ungainly baton, deep-seated checking account tangential. was surplus instigate as retrospective wishful thinking recondition a the on lobby magnetic party at
inclusive to involuntarily thunder sort of an prize
touchstone commodore by crotch money market the adjournment overtook as planetaria dollop variant classical and

What’s actually going on here is that they’ve randomly produced a paragraph, with some keywords, in a quantity of what appears to be real dialog so that this message can slip past the spam filters. The real spam was in the images which contained the message about a stock the spammer wants me to invest in. The images were sliced and diced such that image processing anti-spam software would not see them as a message but when put together like a puzzle (as an email client such as outlook express would) the message becomes clear.

If you have to use deceptive techniques to get me to buy your product, I don’t want your product!

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Fish n’ Flush

fish n flush

They end up in the toilet anyway!

Developed by California-based Aqua One Technologies, the FnF is a filtered acrylic aquarium wrapped around an integrated flush-tank core. The aquarium exists independently of the toilet’s reservoir, so you won’t annihilate your buddies after every urination. But, to keep things interesting, the flush valve does launch a jet stream into the tank that swirls the fish. [Source]

Thank you c|net

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When I learned the sign of the beast 666 is really 616…

This is a must listen! (click that link)

On June 6, 2006 I posted that the Devil’s number has changed. What I really wanted to post was the link to when I personally heard about this the first time. My favorite radio show on NPR right now is undeniably Wait wait don’t tell me.. When I could not find the reference to their show educating that 666 has been changed to 616, I sent an email.

From: Doug McCaughan
Sent: Tuesday, June 06, 2006 9:45 AM
To: WaitWait
Subject: Did you have a commentary on 616 and 666?

Hello Wait Wait!

Your program is so exceptionally done! I usually catch it in the car and I recall listening not long ago to a reference to 666 and the Wisconsin area code. The speaker mentioned {…}

Am I confusing this with another npr show? If not, do you recall the air date?

Thank you!
Doug McCaughan
Wait Wait fan

I was very pleased to receive a fairly prompt reply.

From: WaitWait
Sent: Friday, June 09, 2006 2:57 PM
To: Doug McCaughan
Subject: RE: Did you have a commentary on 616 and 666?

Hi,
That was us! You can listen to the segment explaining everything in our archive — it’s on the “Best of” show that aired on January 7, 2006. The segment is titled “The Wait Wait Show Introduction Debacle.”
Thanks for listening!
Emily

Emily Ecton
Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!

I implore you to take a couple of minutes and listen to The Wait Wait Show Introduction Debacle!

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Call me a sentimentalist but developing Chimney Rock is WRONG

This could be sad (well…unless I win the lottery and could buy an estate up there..nonono!) I was born in North Carolina and have been through much of its great remaining wilderness. As Roosevelt and the Davis’ recognized, some things should be preserved.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Chimney Rock Park, the popular private park set in the cliffs overlooking Lake Lure in western North Carolina, is being offered for private sale, with an asking price of $55 million, owner Todd Morse said Tuesday.

With its dramatic views, elevator ride to the top of the signature Chimney Rock and sheer rock faces, the park has been a tourist destination since it opened in 1902 after it was first developed by Morse’s great-great uncle Lucius B. Morse.

The park’s trails and cliffs were a site for filming of the 1992 movie “Last of the Mohicans,” and it has been featured in numerous other productions.

Maybe I can get the kids to see it before things change. Thank you Michael Silence for the link.

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Things I do

Yesterday I had the pleasure of building a form on website A that used javascript to create an encoded url which was then sent along with the form data to website B which processed the data then landed the customer at website C to complete the product purchase.

Today, unrelated to yesterday’s mail work, I had to get a Windows server using IIS’ SMTP to resend mail caught in the badmail folder. If you end up with mail in the badmail folder (typically c:\inetpub\mailroot\badmail\ ) follow these steps:

  1. Move the contents of your inetpub/mailroot/badmail folder to a temporary location (I chose c:\temp\reprocessmail\)
  2. Remove the .bad extension from all of the files (resulting in no extension for these files) (the other files *.bdp and *.bdr can be discarded. For good measure I put them into c:\temp\reprocessmail\brd\ The bdr files contain the reason the mail failed to process.)
  3. Move the contents of your temporary folder to the inetpub/mailroot/pickup folder