While playing a game of Concentration where you have to flip over cards that have pictures of animals on them, and try to make a match. I flip over a gazelle.

"You match my bazelle!"

"I match your what?"

"Bazelle."

"Gazelle, honey. Guh with a G. G says Guh. Gazelle."

"Bazelle."

"Guh zelle."

"That's what I said. Buhhhh....zayto."

Bazato?

Pure capsaicin, the stuff that makes the hot stuff hot, is now available to the consumer.

Lest anybody think that I'm into hot food, no, I do not want any. Although I do want to be in the room when somebody else tries it.

Blogging Baby's got the gossip that American Idol front runner Bo Bice is expecting a baby with his girlfriend, Caroline Fisher. It's funny how subtle things change over the generations. Bo's got a drug possession on his record. People seem to have a problem with that, from what I'm reading (I could care less, personally). But he gets his girlfriend pregnant -- they're not married -- and nobody cares. 20 years ago that would have been the bigger story. Times change. (Of course we also have Scott Savol who apparently hit his baby-mama. But I think we all universally hated him anyway.)

If it's true, remember to support Bo's band. Man's gonna need some cash.

Update: Check out the most recent gossip about a "new addition" to Bo's family?? Is it a clue?

Update June 30: Yes, it's true -- Bo and Caroline got married!

I've got a Linux server in the basement and a Windows XP box in the office. When I picked up a new 120gig drive I put it in the Windows box on this logic:

1. It will primarily be for storing pictures from the digital camera, and it is easier for me to interface camera to office than camera to basement.
2. It is easier to share the Windows drive to Linux than it is the other way around.

So I happily discovered "smbmount", which is actually supposed to run behind the scenes when you do a "mount -t smbfs". I mount windows drive to Linux box and presto! The link you see on the right to Family Photo Album is the result.

The problem is that this link appears to time out on me regularly. People hit it and the JSP in the background fails to find anything on my mounted drive. So I've whipped up a script that automatically unmounts/remounts the drive, which seems to work fine. But I have no idea why it does this. It's not power failure or any other explicit event -- it happens up to several times a day.

Anybody else experience similar? I have to assume that either it has to do with the XP box spinning down the drive (which would explain breaking the connection, but not why it comes right back when I remount it), or else my wireless connection from that box is so flaky that it periodically dips below the level needed to sustain the connection. Also not a good explanation as I never have any other trouble with my other connections from that machine, and again, it comes right back up when I ask it to.

15 Uses for RSS outlines some of the more popular applications that you can now stick under the single roof that is your aggregator. Including:

• FedEx package tracking
• News (of course)
• eBay auction watching
• ego surfing
• weather
• a bunch more.

For RSS to truly become the next big thing it has to fade into the background and just become the technology that enables the services, not the front and center. Every web page in the world is using HTML, but you think my grandma knows or cares what HTML is? The same is true for what is now your RSS Aggregator. If it's to become the next web browser, the focus has to go away from the RSS and more on the "here's a bunch of information services/feeds that you can read all in one place. The information comes to you."

Read more...

About.com has a poll for favorite female name for a Shakespeare character. Front page says that one name is blowing the others away. I guessed Miranda. I was wrong. I don't understand why the winner is who it is, though.

Read more...

The Hackers' Diet has been around for awhile, but its recent mention on Lifehacker made me think of it again. If you're looking for a diet plan that focuses on the science behind the story, check it out. I'll give you the highlight right here -- "All diets come down to this. Burn more calories than you eat." The question, then, becomes which variable you choose to tweak (burn more or eat less) and how you go about doing it.

My brother in law just bought a new condo in downtown Boston. He told me that they offered wireless in every unit. I warned him about such deals and fighting for bandwidth with his porn happy neighbors.

Today I was over the place with my Tungsten, wifi detector at the ready. There's about 5 signals floating around his place, so I ask which one he's connected to. He says, "Want to see how they do it?" and walks over to an electrical panel which unveils a wireless router. Hard line comes in to each unit, each unit gets a router. Done.

Of course, his isn't transmitting for some reason. He showed me the instructions that he was given, which are basically a gateway address and a WEP key. No instructions for actually how to configure this sort of thing in XP. And the kicker is that the WEP key is the phone number of the network service provider. That's lovely security.

Did anybody notice on tonight's Simpsons episode "A Star is Torn", the bucket of chicken that Marge is eating from appears to be from Shakespeare's something or other? That's different.