Don't Back Down

We visited on a Saturday afternoon on the suggestion of a neighbor, to try out the hot dog special and a sundae, and to be somewhat nice, let's just say we left very disappointed. If you have kids like we do that like their dogs pretty plain (with just ketchup or mustard), then the dollar dog will be perfect.

But the fries are rather plain and somewhat overpriced. The sweet potato fries aren't much better. If you're an adult, the hot dogs aren't worth it. The foot-long dogs aren't bad, but when you consider the rest of it, it just isn't worth the effort.

Read "Heavenly Sundaes" »

Just yesterday, Bloglines announced that they are accepting pings directly, so if you have a blog, you can notify them when you update.

If you use Movable Type, go into your weblog settings, and under New Entry Defaults, include this string:

      http://www.bloglines.com/ping

That's it. When you update your blog, you'll send Bloglines a ping!

Update: I added the Bloglines ping to my configuration for this entry, and it went well. I'm a bit of a snob when it comes to pinging, because I don't like to wait for a response, an I was happily surprised that they responded well, not slowing down the process much at all. What's even better is my entry showed up in my feeds about ten seconds later. Sweet!

(To be fair, it's never taken long for my entries to show up on Bloglines - but this means that they will be there even sooner.)

I've just completed putting the finishing touches on the revamp of the site (version 4.0, in case you're keeping tabs at home). Nothing overly special about this revision, except I'm tired of keeping it fresh, so I ripped out all the old code and used someone else's that makes it easier on me.

Read "A Fresh New Look" »

Last one. I can't take any more. These things make my stomach upset and don't help my head. Not sure why. Maybe I've got something else going on at the same time, but it seems awfully coincidental, and even more so that the doctor told me they last a long time and they last a long time. Once I give them a while (usually about twelve hours) to get out of my system, it seems to get back to just the headache. By comparison, that's almost nothing.

This morning I had some breakfast and took one Naproxen pill, which absolutely floored me (not quite literally). It made me feel absolutely horrible. My stomach was upset all day, and my head felt no better. So I ate some lunch, which didn't sit well at all, and then I had another one around dinner time, but I could not eat anything, as my stomach had been rumbling all day. No luck. I couldn't even sleep. I don't think this is going to work out.

They say that you either love the opera or you hate it. I don't really like the opera much at all. As to the browser, I haven't been all that impressed to date. But I've not switched browsers for a while, so I thought I'd give it a try, since Firefox seems to eat more and more memory all the time.

My first thought is that it's a pretty decent product. My second thought is that the forms aren't as nice looking as Firefox. It just doesn't look quite right. My third thought is that it seems to be pretty quick, so I'll likely try it out for a while, what with Firefox sitting over there gobbling up 350MB of RAM and all (even if it's not slowing me down, that just seems ridiculous). My fourth, and final thought for the moment, is that the main thing about switching is that Firefox has several keyboard shortcuts that I just adore. Opera doesn't seem to have them. That may be the deal-breaker.

In Firefox, I can use CTRL-SHIFT-ENTER to wrap a name in "www" and "org" or SHIFT-ENTER to wrap it in "www" and "net". I thought that Firefox had the advantage in setting up search engines, but Opera seems to have those too, it's just not as easy to do so (you have to edit an ini file by hand, but even that seems to be eased in a beta of version 9, available now). In on advantage, Opera does support natively the CTRL-TAB scrolling through tabs which I'm used to through Windows, and it also has mouse gestures built in. That's nice. So I'll likely give it a try and see what happens. More later.

Update: Okay, the scroll wheel on my mouse is a little wonky in Opera, but I could likely live with that if I have to do so. But I will likely miss my EditCSS extension from Firefox. However, Opera does have a nice Cookie browser and you can even edit your cookies. That's something that Firefox doesn't have. This might be a tough call, especially if an EditCSS-like extension is available for Opera. I may have spoken too soon. Though the cookie feature looked nice, it didn't seem to take, and in at least once case, I couldn't get to a site that required login (though doing so through Firefox worked fine). Ah well...

Update: I'm currently testing the beta of version 9, and it's not bad. The search engine interface is nice, and the whole product just seems a bit better, and I haven't had any of the cookie problems that I encountered previously. For a beta, it's actually quite stable. I may stick with it for a while and see how it goes. The only thing I don't like is that it's taken over my start menu, even though I've said to not set itself as default. That's a little odd. And the cookie, though it does seem to be working, does seem to have some issues where it won't go away. I like that Opera saves the tabs in use when I closed out last. That's cool. The tab preview is neat too, as is the color change when the tab contents change, so you know there's something new there, and memory usage is way better, with Opera using 25MB for four tabs, and Firefox using 100MB for five. More later.

Wow. I haven't posted for a really long time. Sorry about that. Nothing intentional. I just forgot. And have been busy on other things. I'll try and do better. I promise.

Anyway, I had to call Equifax the other day. It seems that two of my credit accounts had disputes on them. One of them I can understand. I didn't know what it was. So I probably disputed it at some point, and since it was never resolved, it still had a dispute. The other was our regular, every day credit card, so I have no idea why it was under dispute.

So I dutifully pressed numbers through the phone tree and tried to get myself to the right place. 30 minutes later I was still on hold, and my wife comes in to tell me that she had completed her call (also to Equifax, started about 20 minutes after mine). It seems she didn't press any numbers whatsoever. After another 10 minutes or so on hold, I gave up, did a few more things, and called back - but instead of following the tree, I just sat there like a bump on a log. And ten minutes later I had someone answer the phone.

Of course I'll never know if I would have been helped sooner had I held on. But you just have to wonder.

I went to see the doctor today and talked about the headaches I've been having on and off, so he prescribed Naproxen, which is the prescription ingredient in Aleve. Apparently one of these pills can last most of the day. At this point, I'm game.

After taking one, however, I'm not doing too well. I'm not sure if this is because I hadn't had anything to eat, or something else, however, so I'll try again tomorrow after having something to eat and see how things go. I'm definitely wanting to get the headaches resolved, but not if it makes me feel worse.

We visited the Taqueria Linares, ready for some real Mexican food. This was our first trip, but had been to a few other "authentic" Mexican places in the area, including the now-defunct Taqueria Las Delicias that was essentially across the street.

Upon entering, we thought we had hit the jackpot, with a mostly Hispanic clientele (usually a good sign) and a well-kept restaurant, and pretty attentive service. It turns out that the service went downhill from there pretty rapidly. We did get our drinks (water, served with lime, not my favorite) rather quickly, but since we weren't quite ready to order, we asked for a minute to look over the menu. That wasn't the best choice.

Read "Taqueria Linares" »

This morning we decided to get up and head out for brunch, and what's better than a brunch buffet on a nice Easter Sunday?

Of course, living in Charlotte, that could be a problem. It's a well-known fact that there are only two brunch buffet restaurants in Charlotte.

Read "Waldhorn Restaurant" »

I've always found it interesting how when you go to church (a Christian church, I mean) and the pastor leads a response where he says Christ is risen and the rest of the church says Christ is risen indeed.

As if just saying that "Christ is risen" isn't enough, he has to really be risen. I don't know. You'd think that someone coming back from the dead would be enough. Heck, you'd think that being the Son of God, born of a virgin would be pretty darn good too. Risen from the dead is just icing on the cake. That indeed just throws a big, whopping cherry on top.

Of course, you may not believe that there is a God, you may not believe that Jesus is His son, you may not believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, that He died on a cross for everone's sins or that he rose again on the first Easter. And that's okay. You are, as they say, entitled to your opinion. Whether you believe it or not does not mean that it did or did not happen.

And with that, I leave you with an interesting essay by Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert.

In this essay, Mr. Adams speaks to Respecting the Beliefs of Others, which of course we should do, right? What if their belief says that they should kill themselves to follow a comet (yes, this happened)? Do you still respect them? What if they believe in a Flying Spaghetti Monster delivering the gospel? Does your answer change in the face of these alternatives? Perhaps it should, perhaps not.

Happy Easter.