Category: Madness

I was writing an email to my friend, and got an incredibly wrong grammar correction. So I typed it into a new email to take a screen shot (without the rest of the personal stuff), accidentally left out some words, and got this lovely suggestion. If you can’t see it in the screenshot, it says that “you is welcome” and “you’re welcomes” are the correct ways to say that phrase. You can’t make this stuff up!I’m running Windows Vista, and my language is set to Canadian English. I used to flip between U.S. and Canadian English all the time in XP and never came across this bug. I guess Vista left out a rule or two in the grammar check.

Canadians can add ice to any sport. So I guess it’s not surprising that they’re crazy enough to race cars on ice. Here’s a taste of it, courtesy of CBC and Rick Mercer. 

Since I used to live in Anguilla, I’m still subscribed to an email news list that gives me updates of what’s going on around the island. I seriously just wanted to cry over the weekend after I read the latest email and saw what the Dolphin Discovery in Anguilla (aka Dolphin Fantaseas) was doing to their dolphins.  A local man is so concerned that he put together a page full of pictures and says:

The Dolphin Discovery facility at Meads Bay is closed down. It appears to have been abandoned by the previous management. There seems to be only a handyman present on the site during the day. He tries valiantly and without management guidance to keep up with basic maintenance. The dolphins are left to swim in their own waste. The water has become badly polluted. It is now in what must be a dangerous state for the health of the dolphins and anyone else, for that matter, venturing into the water.

Yes there are more atrocious things going on in the world than these little guys getting abused, but this is something that could easily be fixed. Unfortunately, it’s the tourists that are driving the market for a dolphin encounter in Anguilla and the local government doesn’t seem to be doing anything because it’s such a draw for tourists.  I would love to swim with dolphins too, but I’d feel to guilty.

Other than posting to message boards, writing to travel magazines, newspapers, and Peta, (and creating as many keyword links to Don Mitchell’s site) there doesn’t seem much else that can be done from where I am. Unless someone knows a celebrity that would talk about it – because no one listens to anyone else these days.

So Jet Blue held their passengers hostage yesterday for 10 hours on the runway only to never take off. So, why didn’t someone just fake crazy, tear off their clothes, and force the airline to disembark the plane? Or have their three year old throw the mother of all trantrums? At the least you’d get yourself off the plan. I don’t understand why people would put up with that.

I was once stuck on a plane for 3 hours while they fixed something. They taxied us over to the hanger and we all went to sleep. They didn’t disembark us so that once it was fixed we could take off right away. We got a periodic update on how much longer we had to wait. And they were spot on. But that was Cathay Pacific. And not in the middle of a snow storm.

So some schmuck decided to put my site into an iframe on his site – don-lapre-richards.com

People – it may not technically be copyright infringement, but it is just plain sleazy. It could be successfully argued as copyright infringement since it’s being presented as the site’s own work. It is trademark infringement if I have something on my site trademarked.

Doing a search shows that this domain is being used for blog spamming, so it’s not like they’d have any qualms about it. Luckly, they were stupid and registered the site through Domains by Proxy, who say they will shut down sites that spam blogs. Sucks to be them. If you’ve arrived to this site because you got blog spam, report it here.
I could put some code on my site that automatically redirects people from that URL to mine if my site appears in an iframe. Only thing is that right now it messes up managing any existing posts, because the WordPress editor I’m using pulls my site into an iframe so that I can preview the page. Need to figure this thing out. Or find a better way to deal with it.

Well, not exactly a snow day. Today, work was unexpectedly closed for the day. It was like being 10 again and being told there’s no school – almost. We were woken with an early morning phone call saying to stay home. There was a little bit of excitement that something out of the ordinary is happening. But after that it was the opposite of a snow day.

I had a 9 am conference call and actual work to do. No goofing off for me. And since this is California there’s no way there could be snow outside to go and play in. The most that you could do is run around and crunch some leaves. Somehow, just not the same as crunching in snow.

I guess if you grew up on California you’d never know what a snow day feels like, unless you lived in the mountains. That’s really just a shame. Children (and adults) need snow days. I guess I’ll just have to wait for Christmas up in Canada. Oh well, it’s back to work tomorrow. Can we have a rain day instead?

Went to Santana Row today. Saw Shawn Wayans walking around. He’s as good looking in person and super tall, but it could have been amplified by the fact that there was a shorter than average sized guy walking beside him. Maybe they were doing research for the Wayans’ film studio/theme park/mall in Oakland. I wonder how that will work out.
I really need to get a camera phone.  They also had the Italian festival going on today. Lots of funny picture opportunities,  especially since the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest accordionist”, Dick Contino, was there playing your stereotypical Italian songs. Here’s this old guy with a mullet of white curly hair up there on the stage singing his heart out like Tony Bennett wearing a blousey tank top that has a v-neck that goes down to his belly button. You can get a glimpse of it on his website. Then he pulled out the accordion. Looking at his website it seems like he has a successful career in Las Vegas. Why is Vegas a magnet for these types of performers?

Is it just because I’m special or is the Yahoo! Sign In not working with Firefox browsers? This has been happening since Tuesday. I haven’t upgraded or anything. (I’m on 1.0.6.) I’ve tried numerous times this week, cleared cookies in both Firefox and IE to make sure I was completely signed out, and I still get this lovely helpful message:

Sorry, Unable to process request at this time — error 999.

Unfortunately we are unable to process your request at this time. This error is usually temporary. Please try again later.

If you continue to experience this error, it may be caused by one of the following:

* You may want to scan your system for spyware and viruses, as they may interfere with your ability to connect to Yahoo!. For detailed information on spyware and virus protection, please visit the Yahoo! Security Center.
* This problem may be due to unusual network activity coming from your Internet Service Provider. We recommend that you report this problem to them.

While this error is usually temporary, if it continues and the above solutions don’t resolve your problem, please let us know.

Return to Yahoo!

Please check the URL for proper spelling and capitalization. If you’re having trouble locating a destination on Yahoo!, try visiting the Yahoo! home page or look through a list of Yahoo!’s online services. Also, you may find what you’re looking for if you try searching below.

Yes I’ve run my antivirus and spyware detectors. And no, nothing was found. Their Help wasn’t all that helpful. The most I could find was that yes they do support Firefox 1.0. I’ve filled in a contact form to see if anyone knows what to do, but we’ll see if I get a response. In the meantime if anyone knows a solution or if I find one, I’ll post it here.

Update Aug 5, 2005 3:05 pm: It works now. But they need to sort out the bugginess of it. I still have yet to hear anything at all. Who knows, for all I know it has nothing to do with Firefox, but from where I sit that’s my view on it.

Update 2 Aug 5, 2005 5:15 pm: Brendon’s co-worker tells me that his girlfriend has been having similar issues this week with her Firefox and Yahoo!. (Putting that period there after the exclaimation mark is SO wrong.) And same as me, she’s having no issues using IE with Yahoo.

Update 3 Aug 5, 2005 10:45pm: I got an email back from a Joseph with Yahoo’s customer service. They blame it on a network connection between my computer and their servers. I think it was basically another canned response. If they read my email to them they would have seen that I could access it with IE. Emailing back.