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- June 26, 2005
Klondike Choco Taco
June 26, 2005Read moreI was at the local 7-11 to get a Slurpee®, only to find that the store was closing for good, and all their machines were busted. Quel horreur!
Thinking quickly but not clearly, I got a Choco Taco® ice cream novelty instead. Maybe the novelty of the form would rescue an otherwise disappointing visit to the convenience store, I reasoned in a haze of self-denial.
The Choco Taco consists of a sugar cone in “taco form”, with ice cream and caramel and peanuts heaped in it, then covered with chocolate. Now I usually like this combination of ingredients, and I like the idea of the taco. Unfortunately, this just tasted…well, not very good. Waxy-tasting chocolate coated the rather bland vanilla ice cream, its monotony lifted not-at-all by stale shards of peanut wallowing in a slurry of caramel. Perhaps it was the artificial flavoring, or maybe it was just a really old sample. In any case, it wasn’t to my taste. Kids might like it though.
I like to think there are “worthy carbs” and “unworthy carbs”. Fresh-baked italian bread from the bakery dipped in extra-virgin olive oil with a bit of fresh-ground pepper and basil…those are worthy carbs. Then there’s the Choco Taco. Those are 290 calories I wish I could have back.
- June 24, 2005
Concept Artist Khang Le
June 24, 2005Read more
My buddy Mark was showing me the site of Khang Le, Concept Artist. He’s done work on Episode III, games, videos, etc. Good for a browse!
- June 23, 2005
Random Reads
June 23, 2005Read more
S. passed along this link to some incredibly positive–possibly crazy, but still very cool–guy who’s decided to run across America. He’s the first to admit that it’s not exactly an original idea, but it’s something he wants to do and he’s going to do it, by gum! He writes:
Overall, I just want to promote the idea of doing something that one has never done before or doing something that you like but haven’t done in a while. It doesn’t matter if it’s starting to exercise or going hang gliding. Just do something as long as it’s positive.
Amen, brother! It’s going to take about 6 months to get from Newport, California to Newport, Rhode Island. He’s around Amarillo, Texas right now, according to his website, Run Willy Run.
Another find was this link I got from Anne on a mailing list: Extraordinary Ordinary Guy In Japan. He writes about a lot of cultural things in his homeland of Japan from a “regular guy” point of view. When I travel to a new place, I’m struck by how the little things are often different: the style of bathroom fixtures in Asia, for example, or perhaps the seeming inclusion of sausage on every menu in the Midwest, the appearance of “grits” the further south you go in the U.S. Insightful, funny, and interesting. The photo of the car above is part of one his galleries, “How Can They Park Like That?”. He explains:
Japanese people drive so carefully not to get any scratches on their own cars. But we can get only the cramped small parking spaces. So, they perform the feat of parking their car leaving a space of a finger between the wall and the car.
The site is full of stuff like that. It’s great!
- June 22, 2005
Adobe Creative Suite 2
June 22, 2005Read more
I finally upgraded from Photoshop 7.0 to CS2, along with the rest of the Adobe Suite. I didn’t have Illustrator, InDesign (still have Quark XPress 4.04), and had skipped an Acrobat 6.0 update, so it wasn’t a bad deal.
- June 21, 2005
Annoying WP-HashCash / WP-Cache2 Issues
June 21, 2005Read moreI finally figured out how to access the spam log in wp-hashcash. It’s supposed to be emailed to you every 64K worth of spam. That’s a lot. I set my threshold a lot lower, to 4K, so I can actually see it. Otherwise, you need to use something like MySQL Administrator to look into the
wp-optionstable, under thewp_hashcash_logkey. Yes, it’s real obvious…NOT!While browsing through the spam log, I see other comments that have been posted that never made it through the filter. I believe this is because WP-Cache2 isn’t actually setting the
WP_CACHEdefinition in such a way that wp-hashcash actually sees it when it runs, or maybeWP_CACHEjust isn’t set when WP_HashCash runs. Just for kicks, I hardcoded the line:define('HASHCASH_PER_USER', false);to always be set, no matter what. If this fixes the problem, I’ll look deeper into why
WP_CACHEisn’t being set and notify the authorities.
