Borderline Fantastic

I thought this was a great post about why Hilary is doing so well in PA. Possibly the best thing I’ve seen written about the election so far.

Incompetent people are clueless. From this Dilbert Blog entry.

Fake Craigslist ad said everything in this guy’s house was free for the taking.

A corn flake that looks like Illinois. Personally, I think it looks more like Texas than Illinois.

Adam Carolla Show - Reinactment One of my favorite things about the Carolla Show is when they read a news item or hear a story and then do dialogue as if they are the people in the story. Confused? Well this one is an actual segment with the purpose of reenacting an event.

A home paternity test. Something tells me this will lead to a large number or practical jokes.

Celebrity Family Feud. Why did this take so long to happen?

The NFL going to require haircuts? This should wait until after the first person gets injured from being tackled by their hair. Just something I we all need to actually see, as a lesson.

Top Hybrids of 2008

A Focus Convertible? So hot.

LEGOs
Futurama
Camaro

I got gas on the way home one day last week. That in itself isn’t all that exciting. I usually stop at the Wawa gas station on the way to or from work. The place is always packed, no matter what time, even 6am. People trying to get at the pumps from both directions doesn’t help the situation either. In IDM 23 I talk about how gas stations should be one-way, not my point here, but I figured I’d mention it. When I went on this day, there were tons of pumps available. I was going at a usual time, 3 or 3:30. It was so strange. My only guess is that because it was raining people didn’t want to go get gas. The gas station is covered so I don’t see why rain would cause people to not get gas. Since that’s the only thing that I noticed being different that day its my current theory. I’m going to keep my eye on this to see if my theory is factual.

One other thing while I was at the gas station … both cars next to me were there the entire time I was there and neither one got out of their car. They were both on cell phones, I’m assuming talking to each other. I appreciated that they weren’t breaking the no cell phones by the pumps rule but instead they were just sitting at the pump and not using it. Would they have done this if the place had been packed. Is this a greater offense than people who leave their car to go inside and pay (and do some shopping)? I say if the place is crowded its equally offensive. Anything keeping other people from accessing a pump is no good. Just the person in the car on the phone is much more accessible to be yelled at.

I keep telling myself to do this daily, but I get sidetracked. Here is a sampling of the links I shared with my friends this week. These are the ones that made the cut and aren’t dumb after looking at them again.

The Condiment Pistol. Now if they can figure out how to get ketchup and mustard into the same gun. Perhaps a double-barreled shotgun?

My new favorite dinosaur name: Duckbilled Edmontosaurus.

Finally I won’t have to listen to everyone demanding that BattleBots come back.

Life Clock. Cool, interesting, or morbid?

Not sure how the Secret Public Journal will turn into a sitcom, I’ll watch though.

Colbert is coming to Philly. I got burned by the fact that I DVR it and watch it after work the next day. By the time I saw this, tickets were gone.

Do we want the largest building in the hemisphere to be in Philly? I guess we never want to win a championship.

Kenny Maine is writing a book? It will be kindling. Not because it will be bad, I will probably get it and enjoy it, but its going to be so try the sun will set it on fire.

The Dodgers are leaving Dodgertown. So sad, it really makes no sense. Orioletown doesn’t sound nearly as good. Lasorda said, “We’re going to leave, but we’re not leaving our memories.” Something about the wording of that quote bothers me. Sounds to me like ‘we’re leaving and we’re taking our memories with us’.

Is independent study a major at Michigan?

Service Pack 1 was released for Vista. Usually things start looking up after the first Service Pack. Who knows with Vista, everyone hates it so much and most of them haven’t even tried it.

The Adam Carolla Show
Teresa tells what Adam says is his favorite story. Part 1 Part 2
Who the F sells this S? (My favorite segment) Part 1 Part 2

These are a little old, but in the off chance you missed them …

Just saw this command to enable single window mode in Safari. No more of those annoying new windows!

You just need to enter this in Terminal: defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

This needs to be a preference within Safari. A command like this will work for me, but anyone else I tell likely won’t even know what Terminal is.

I turned on my printer the other night and was greeted with a message saying that a few of my ink cartridges had expired and using expired ink voids your warranty. I bought my printer in Jan 06. It was the HP Photosmart 3310. I went with that model because I wanted an All-in-One with wireless networking built in. I’ve been pleased with the purchase. It taught me that Apple has not quite figured out printers in OS X (Leopard appears a little better). When I got it, it took a few emails with tech support before getting it to work. The wireless networking has been great, I don’t have to worry where to put the printer. Now it isn’t used all that much. How much does one really need to print? I’ve replaced 3 of the original ink cartridges, there might be 6 different ones in there. The originals are the ones complaining that they are expired. Its surprising that these originals are still around since the ones that come in the box have about a third of the ink that the replacements have. The expired ones are getting a little low. I’ll be ordering new ones shortly, but I’m waiting until they run out. I’ll take my chances with the expired ink.

What do you suppose happens after the ink expires? Do the colors come out wrong? Does the ink solidify and not come out? Does the printer start to smell?

Apple released Safari 3.1 today for Mac and Windows. For a while now I’ve been using Camino as my main browser. Firefox was a little buggy for me and there are a few things in Safari that bother me enough to not use it all the time. I have been paying close attention to Safari development. They have been talking up these speed enhancements and support of a lot of new standards.

Reasons I haven’t used Safari:
Double-click on the tab bar does not open a new tab. This now works in 3.1! It may sound like a small nuisance but it really drove me nuts. I’ve become so used to it in my other browsers. Now that this is fixed it brings me a lot closer to using Safari.

Open In Tabs - I keep most of my tabs on the Bookmarks Bar. I have a bunch of folders and even subfolders inside of those. When I click Open in Tabs it opens all the bookmarks at that level but also all the bookmarks in the subfolders. This is not how Firefox got me used to the Open in Tabs functionality. I like having the level of organization and still open a bunch of pages at once, I just want them to be the pages in that folder. Apparently it was changed to this behavior in Safari 1.3, here is the Apple Doc.

New windows are created instead of tabs. Please just give me the option to go all in on tabs.

After opening a folder in Bookmarks Bar hovering over a different folder does not open it. Too crazy? I’ve gotten used to this not working because Camino doesn’t do it. Firefox does. It really took me a while to get used to. It’d be nice to have, but I can live without it.

Wordpress support. Usually Safari would screw up any post I tried to make in Wordpress. This is the first one I’m trying with 3.1. (Update: It still removes all line-breaks. Not sure whose fault this is, I guess we’ll find out when WordPress 2.5 comes out soon.)

I am very happy with the double-click for new tab functionality but without fixing the Open in Tabs I can’t use Safari all the time. I know there are some add-ons, so if anyone knows of one that will support this please let me know. I’m not thrilled about that, but I’d give it a shot. The WebKit engine behind the scenes is great, I’d just like to be able to use it without going crazy.

I have similar nitpicks with iChat which have led me to avoid using that as well. I’ll cover that later.

I realize that most posts recently have been about Ice Cream Helmet. That’s because that’s what I’ve spent a lot of my time working on over the past few weeks.

This time I’m announcing College Basketball Tournament Picks for 2008. This marks 1 year since the launch of Ice Cream Helmet since the 2007 Tournament Picks was the very first game.

Similar to last years game. You can make your ICH picks, which count toward your ICH score. Or you can join or create your own group. Custom groups let you set the scoring for each round. As I found last year, everyone has their own preference.

One change from last year is that I got rid of the idea of Default Picks. It seemed they were too confusing. This year you have to make picks for each group you belong to. However, on the page where you make your picks for each group there is the option to copy your picks from another group. I’ve found people like to do different brackets for different groups. This way lets you do that. If you are like me and always use the same ones, its easy to copy from group to group. If you have a suggestion on how to improve this process, just let me know in the comments.

Join the Borderline Fantastic group. Anyone can join, no password needed.

College Basketball Tournament Picks on Ice Cream Helmet

I’ve spent most of my video game time recently on my Xbox 360 … playing Xbox games, go figure. I’m trying to make up for not playing Halo in college. I got all 3 Halo games and started from the beginning. I beat the first one last week and I think I’m half way through the second. Before that I finally beat Gears of War, I took my sweet time getting to that.

The Wii hasn’t gotten as much attention. Guitar Hero was gone for a few weeks because I sent it back in to get the fixed version with surround sound. It’s back and I bought a second guitar used at GameStop ($50 instead of $70, not bad).

On Saturday my sister bought DDR for the Wii. That one is going to take some practice to get down. The game supports up to 4 dance pads. Our family room can’t really handle 4 of them but a second pad may be needed. On Sunday Smash Bros Brawl came out. I’d never played the previous versions of the game but this one was getting such great reviews I decided to go for it. I got it home and was all excited to play. I got into the main menu and it went crazy. The selector was jumping all over the place, I couldn’t pick a game mode. I thought maybe my Wiimote was screwed up so I tried a different one, still crazy. I restarted a bunch of times, still crazy. Tired a different game and that was fine. I looked online and there were a bunch of problems since this is the first dual-layer disc. Most of those problems don’t even let the game load so I didn’t think it was that. Also, to fix that problem you have to send your Wii back to Nintendo. I decided to try and get into the game by timing my selections. It took a while but once I got into a fight, there was no problem. Weird. The game supports GameCube controllers so I thought I’d try that and see if it was just Wiimotes. That’s when I saw it. The DDR dance pad was still connected and my sister had folded it up and shoved it behind the TV. So essentially every button was being pressed at the same time causing the game to flip out. As soon as I unplugged the dance pad, no problem. I spent an hour thinking my Wii was busted all because the dance pad was left plugged in.

Baseball Picks was my first idea that led to the creation of Ice Cream Helmet. That was last year. Now Baseball Picks is back for its second season. Not much has changed on the surface, I learned quite a bit behind the scenes.

The idea is fairly simple, pick who will win each baseball series during the season. Most series are 3 games, so which ever team wins the majority of those games (2 or 3) wins the series. If you’re curious there are 780 series during the season. I thought series would be a better pick than games, there are 2,430 of those.

Join the Borderline Fantastic group. Anyone can join, no password needed.

Baseball Picks on Ice Cream Helmet