mjm wired ;)  

I have been a little uninspired lately. I could blame plenty of external reasons, but the truth is no one does anything for you, you have to make your own way. I can't even list all the happenings of the year, most of them I didn't even blog about. There was some "50 Rules to Life" that says visit some place new every year. Well I visited 3 major spots, outside of Germany, the local trips pushed me far outside of my comfort zone [...]

I am in the process of switching servers. It is a MESS. There was some problem with Apache and htaccess which I thought I fixed. Now there seems to be a problem with email. Nothing works. The whole weekend has been a disaster. If you are having problems accessing this site, please be patient. [...]

Mr. Mauriat has just died - Mr. Paul Mauriat that is. Paul Mauriat, a French conductor whose arrangement of "Love is Blue" topped U.S. charts in the 1960s and who garnered a large following in Japan, has died. He was 81. I never downloaded the "Love is Blue" MP3. Coincidentally a fan of Mauriat (not me) happened to email me the file, just because he liked it so much, he thought I would like it also. The sentiment was nice, and so was the [...]

I have received at least a dozen different automated calls telling me to vote for someone. Majority after I voted. So much for Do-Not-Call. Anyways, this is the second draft of this post. Originally I had planned to explain my reasoning for the candidates and state proposals for which I had voted. I did vote earlier today, but after I did, I realized that my reasoning does not make much difference for others to read. The bottom line is that common sense and rational [...]

I'm not sure from where I caught it, but about 2 weeks ago I fell ill and lost my voice. After 5 days of not being able to talk clearly I went to see the doctor and he informed me that I had laryngitis caused by a bacterial throat infection. The odd thing was that he told me to wait another 2 days before starting the anti-biotics. Unfortunately the next day it got worse, so I started that day itself. It took 2 more [...]

I've finally made some serious changes to my website management. Although it may look the same, virtually everything underneath has been rewritten. I don't want to list the complete set of changes but the following things were of the most importance. I've eliminated the user authentication required to post and moved to a moderated system. I've decided to show my categories lists. Previously I used them only for my own personal tracking. I've added RSS2 feeds to posts, comments and categories. I've added a [...]

Someone I know once worked at a hardware store and during the summer a few years ago, like any other summer, there were gas grills on sale. So he convinced his father to buy one. His father apparently thought they were a bit too pricey but after some negotiation and discounting, a sale was finally made. The grill was rather large so I helped him out to transport it and assemble it. Overall it appeared to be a fine product without any serious problems. [...]

The New 7UP is now 100% natural. Somehow it doesn't taste any better. If you let it sit for a few minutes it's worse than club soda. How about that Sprite? I see very bizarre Sprite commercials with multi-color sumo wrestlers. Remember in 1991 when Cindy Crawford unveiled the new Pepsi logo? Well, I remember it. Why couldn't 7UP (or Sprite) just do that? Or they could have somehow utilized the stolen Coke formula. But I've always preferred the taste of Pepsi over Coke [...]