Ravings of an Intermittent Fool

Angela came home from the store today and mentioned that she had purchased a nativity set that could be played with by small kids. She apparently had a set she was younger and liked it. I asked if it for Collin, our 10 month old nephew. She said it was for her friend's daughter and that Collin was too young and all he would do with it would be to put the pieces in his mouth.

My immediate reaction was to use the Homer Simpson voice and say, "Mmmmm, Tasty Jesus".

Update: tastyjesus.com appears to actually be available!

Further Update: Thanks to James pointing things out, I have corrected the horrible phrasing in the post.

I have found that the cheap Body Wash From Target or Kroger's smells just as good and cleans just as good as the name brands at a fraction of the price. This seems to be a place where one could easily save some money.

As I am reminded by my sister the pharmacist, there is no chemical difference between name brand Ibuprophen and Acetaminophen and the generic store brands. Furthermore, the store brands have caught up to the name brands by offering gelatin coated pills and different form factors that might be easier for some people to swallow. There doesn't seem to be a good reason to pay the extra few dollars for the name brand pills. This is a great way to save some money.

Also, the cost savings can be even be greater when you look at the name brand drugs that are really combination of medicines i.e. something for fever, something for a cough and something for pain all wrapped into one. There might not be an exact store brand (although it is becoming more common) but you aren't out of luck. If you look at the active ingredients list of the name brand, you will see common medicines. You can then buy those drugs seperately and take the pills in combination for the same effect. Sure for some people there might be an issue with swallowing extra pills, but for most people this isn't a problem, espacially when you consider the cost savings. Also, I have found that the combination drugs from the major manufactures usually only contain a small number of doses, like 8 or 10. With a few people in the house, you might be making a lot of trips to the drug store during flu season. I have found that the seperate targeted drug is often sold in larger quantities which means less trips to the store.

I just listened to William Samson being interviewed about his book, Confessions of an Innocent Man. Leonard Lopate does a good job with the interview but frankly the story is so gut wrenching and awful that all you had to do is put a microphone in front of William and let him talk. His story in short is that he was working as an expat in Saudia Arabia where he was falsely imprisioned for a car bombing. He spent over two years in jail where he was systematically beaten and tortured while they tried to get him to confess to the crime. Its an awful tale and shows what a gross abuse of power can lead to. "Enjoying" this interview isn't the proper word for it but I did find this very informative and educational. You can also take a look at his book .

Update: Thanks "Fan"...i've made the correction.

Defenestration: who knew there was a word that meant "the act of throwing someone or something out of a window"? What made that such a special case that we needed a word to describe it?

I don't often muck with DHTML techniques in the browser but today I found myself wanting to hide and show HTML table rows in the browser without round tripping to the server. Easy enough I thought, I'll just set the TR's visibility style to hidden and all will be good. The downside to this approach I found is that it hides the row, but doesn't collapse the screen real estate. This wasn't the look I was going for. Fortunately, I found that display: none is the right style to apply. It works like a champ.

I am very pleased to see that one of my favorite SNL commercial parodies of all time, Happy Fun Ball has its own Wikipedia page.

When you are searching Google for something that looks like an address, or a stock ticker symbol or even a mathematical formula, the search result screen provides a specialized item at the top of the results that is specific to the type of item you searched for. For example, in the case of the address, it provides links to maps of the location and for the stock ticker symbol, it shows graphs and news about that company.

I am sure that this is just the tip of the iceberg of what specialized results Google returns. One obvious thing that they don't do now is provide WHOIS information when searching for a string that looks like an IP address. That would be easy for them to implement and be useful for us end users.

Reaction to my recent post on Podcasts I listen to has been very favorable, so I thought I would do a followup piece with some new suggestions.

alt.NPR: On Gambling ( Feed ) Weekly, very short pieces that cover the gambling industry and its effects on people. While I'm not much of a gambler, I do find the topic interesting.

Cinecast ( Feed ) - This is a twice weekly show covering cinema. This comes via my friend Mark Vaughn who recommends it. I was initially taken back by the sheer amount of content these guys produce but I was won over by their commentary. These guys know there stuff, are enthusatic but don't come off as film snobs. They also offer a video version of the show for those of you with mobile video devices.

Digg Nation ( Feed ) - This show has two people talking about popular articles appearing this week on the Tech focused site, Digg. This site has been hyped as being potentially the new Slashdot. The two guys who run the show are animated and full of humor. This is another one from Vaughn and I think it is a good listen as well. Tech focused, irreverent and not just towing the company line.

NPR Sunday Puzzle - ( Feed ) - Here is another short one that covers the weekly linguistic/word challenges that air on Sunday. Its fun to play along and with the beauty of podcasts, you can do that on your lesisure because I have no idea when this 5 minutes of radio happens to occur in my market.

That is all for now...

Neat picture showing a live scene being filmed and its subsequently showed on a television. Notice the differences in the live shot and what is on the tv.

Angela and I ate at Nothing but Noodles tonight. Right off the bat you will detect that the name is a misnomer since they serve salads and non-pasta appetizers. Besides those outliers, the main thing on the menu is pasta. They offer over a dozen different pasta dishes that span the cuisines of Italy, Japan, Southeast Asia and beyond. One interesting thing is that the Chicken, Beef, Shrimp or Tofu that you want in the dish is an upcharge to the dish. Be sure to factor that in when you see the prices on the menu.

In general, I've liked most of the pasta dishes that I have tried. The Beef Stroganoff was probably the least excting of the things that I have tried. One positive thing about this place is that if you ask for water they give you a nice solid, thick reusable plastic cup to drink from. That is a nice step up from the crappy little disposable plastic cup.

I don't often watch Rachel Ray's 30 Minute Meal's but a recent show featuring mulled maple syrup drew me into the episode. One of 30 Minute Meal's trademark pieces is that Rachel collects all the ingrediants she needs for a dish from her "pantry" in one bowl and then brings in to the island workspace. I think this was originally meant to be a comical item because its really silly since her "pantry" is three feet away from her workspace but I digress.

In this episode, she does her usual thing with the pantry and cleans out the shelf of ingrediants for one of the dishes. Later on in the episode she goes back to the pantry to get items for an additional dish and lo and behold that empty spot in the pantry is filled back up again with just the items she needed.

Its stuff like this that makes replicating all the dishes from an episode in 30 minutes almost impossible.

I've mentioned the Lego Church before, but The Brick Testament really takes the cake. The amount of patience it takes to create dozens of biblical scenes entirely out of Legos and then film them must be immense.

Awhile bacl, I wrote briefly about the word, defenestration, which means "the act of throwing someone or something out of a window. In a recent blog comment by Edward Hasbrouck, he points me to the Defenstration Project. It is an art installation in San Francisco consisting of welding various pieces of furniture and appliances to the outside of a building. The website is rather poor in that it seems to be missing photos of the actual installation but enough material is posted to get an idea of what was done.

Even more interesting for the 3.5 regular readers I have, is that the person leaving the comment on my blog is the same guy who writes The Amazing Race and Travel inspired blog that I mentioned a few months ago.

There have been a lot of confusion about interstate shipping of wine recently. There have been some various positive court rulings in the recent past but the laws are state specific and since there are lots of small businesses involves, it takes a lot of time for this information to get widely distributed. I would think there would be some wine maker trade association that would push this information out proactively to all its members, but prehaps there isn't one unifing body that represents everyone.

In any case, this issue came to the forefront because my friend James was looking into getting some Sebastiani 2003 Sonoma Valley "Old Vines" Zinfandel shipped here to Ohio. I briefly wrote about that wine before in my little synopsis of our wine country trip. (Here's a hint...its heavenly). Anyway, James got word from the winery saying that they don't ship to Ohio. That set me off to do some searching to find out if this was because they legally can't, the process is cumbersome for the shipper or if they are just missing out on a market for their wines.

What I found is that they are missing out on a market. The Ohio Department of Commerce's Board of Liquor Control has defined the process for citizens to import wine. The document suggests that all the process is foisted upon the consumer by the regulation that the consumer fill out this form (PDF) and pay the required excise and sales tax. Also, the form says you have 30 days until after the importation to pay the taxes, so there shouldn't be anything that the shipper has to do regarding confirmation of paperwork filings or anything like that.

Also from the PDF Form is a listing of the actual excise tax rates. For wines up to 14% alcohol/volume the rate is $0.32/gallon or $0.76/case. Wines over 14% the rates are $1.00/gallon and $2.38/case. If you have a taste for the bubbly, then you will be paying $1.50/gallon or $3.57/case. Lastly, if you are importing Vermouth (and I am not sure why you would be), you must pay $1.10/gallon or $2.62/case.

Hopefully this sheds some light on the issue and the state web site can convince more wineries to direct ship.

My nephew's collection of Pooh's.

Collin with crazy hair due to static electricity.