Bacon Tuesday, Week 2

Last week, I posted a couple of funny pictures and one awesome product called Bacon Pop. Bacon flavored popcorn. This week, I'll suffice with a couple simple pictures.

Here is something that I would be not at all surprised to see on my wife.
















And this little bit of heaven.

It's called Sir Francis Bacon Peanut Brittle and you can buy it at their website or at Dean & Deluca, but I kinda gotta hunch I can figure out the recipe for this on my own. I'm going to start with the recipe in Everything Tastes Better with Bacon: 70 Fabulous Recipes for Every Meal of the Day I'll let you know how it turned out next week.

iPhun

If you dear readers can refrain from judging me, for a moment, I'll let you in on a little secret. I have switched two of my oldest loyalties in the last month. I have given up on LG and Verizon and bought an iPhone on the AT&T network. Hey. I said don't judge me.


The truth is, I still love LG and Verizon, but I was not able to receive signal at my new home on the Verizon network, so I was forced to change to AT&T, and since they offer a basic iPhone for $99, how could I say no?


Since then I have tried not to be an insufferable fan-boy of the iPhone, but it's so hard to do, given that there is just so much awesomeness packed into this little gizmo. I was trying to explain it to my mother and the only metaphor I could come up with is that it is like a Tricorder on Star Trek. Whenever you need some techy thing done to support the plot, you reach for the Tricorder. You want an example, you say? Here's one.


Last Friday I was driving in Boise, and it was raining heavily and my wiper blades had gone to the point where the one on the passenger side was useless. I needed replacements, and now! So I pulled off the road, whipped out the iPhone and accessed the 'AroundMe' app. I typed in "auto parts" and it informed me that I had just passed Bow Wow Auto Parts on Emerald, and that it was 196 yards away. And wouldn't you know it, Bow Wow specializes in European brands, so they had a factory replacement for my Jetta wiper blades.


I felt like Mr. Spock.






Last week I promised a regular blog feature that I am naming Bacon Tuesdays. This week I'm promising another regular feature that I guess I'll have to call IPhone Monday. Now all of you who have iPhones, go download AroundMe. The rest of you, spend a minute to contemplate how much more awesome your life would be with a Tricorder.

MMmmmm.... Bacon blog

About a year ago, the biggest meme on the internet was a little thing called the Bacon Explosion. It was basically a bacon and sausage log, rolled up and barbecued. I even know someone who made one and said it was awesome. I thought it was funny and really wished I had a decent barbecue setup to try one.

Since then, it seems like every single day I see some picture or blog post on the webz about another interesting bacon product. Srsly. Every day. Now this is mostly due to the fact that I am subscribed to 42 blogs and read an average of 247 posts a day. (I just checked. That's the actual mean.) Nevertheless, I've really been tempted to start a bacon blog of my own. I even went to the trouble of asking a couple of people if they wanted to do one with me, and I sent out a request on Facebook. No takers. So now I'm going with a new strategy. Since this misanthropic blog is a bit moribund, I'm going to put bacon content on here. Some of my favorite blogs have dedicated days, like Photo Friday or Star Wars Monday. So I'm gonna try Bacon Tuesday.

Here's today's start. I need some of this.

Bacon Flavored Popcorn.














And just because I'm a nice guy, I'm not going to make a big deal about this, cuz it's disgusting.


































Oh. And while I was looking for the picture above, I came across this awesome picture. I'm including it here as a free gift. Enjoy. And see you next Tuesday.

Farewell to blogs

I've mentioned before that I read far too many blogs and am never caught up. This morning my dear spouse mentioned that same, but in a not too patient tone. Less of a 'how do you do it' and more of a 'what the hell is wrong with you' sort of question. I took a look at the blog list and have deleted several, for several different reasons. Herewith, my blog RIF list.

5ives
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/5ives
This one was a sort of Top Five list, that I liked, but is hardly ever updated. I'm hoping that not tracking it will make my feed reader more efficient.

Awful Plastic Surgery
http://feeds.feedburner.com/AwfulPlasticSurgery
This was a lot of fun when it started, but recently he has included a lot of before and after pictures where I cannot see any differences, lots of 'this nose job is awful' when it looks pretty good to me, and I just cannot forgive him for posting pictures of Heidi Fleiss twice in one month, no matter WHAT she may have done to her face.

Hot Chicks with Doucebags
http://www.hotchickswithdouchebags.com/atom.xml
I really loved this blog for the longest time. I still think it has one of the greatest titles ever. But there is only so much Ed Hardy wearing muscle headed douchiness that a person can look at, and I passed that threshold a while back. Farewell Douchebags. Farewell Hotties.

CoffeeNow
(dang it, lost the link and can't find it now)
This was a personal blog that just never got updated, so I didn't really lose anything by deleting it.

A Day in the Life
http://purpleflarp.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
I love this gal, but she doesn't write much, and I see her stuff other places, so I'm ditching this blog about her kids.

New Scientist
http://www.newscientist.com/feed/feeds
This one was just a little too lightweight for me. I added 'Bad Astronomy' to replace it. Not that I am into astronomy, but it's a better blog.


And a couple of blogs that I haven't deleted yet, but are on the bubble.


Said In Bed
http://saidinbed.com/feed
This is consistently hilarious and cringeworthy, but unless my reader is broken, hasn't been updated in over a month. It used to be once or twice a day.

Polygamy
http://feeds.sltrib.com/mngi/rss/CustomRssServlet/297/200968.xml
Brooke Adam's blog. I'm just not quite as interested as I was, and the feed software she uses keeps updating entries whenever there is a comment. Which is annoying. But it's low traffic, so I'll keep it for a while.

Mental Floss
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/feed/atom/
I'm always behind a few hundred posts. Clearly I don't care all that much.

Urlesque
http://www.urlesque.com/rss.xml
Same as Mental Floss. I'm always behind.

Auto Blog
http://feeds.autoblog.com/weblogsinc/autoblog
This one hurts. I joined it so that I would have something to talk about with my sons, but they do about 20 new posts a day, and who has time for that? Plus, the site feed is slow, so it's kinda painful to catch up.

Slashdot
http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot
I've mentioned this one before. I'm currently 1182 posts behind on it. But the stuff that I do read is just so doggone interesting, I can't bring myself to pull the trigger on this.


So that's the big blog roundup. I discovered after my last spring cleaning that the pain of deleting a feed only lasts a day or two, but the pain of unread posts is constant. I think I've done the right thing.

Does manipulating Adsense make me happy?

Just now I surfed out to a link on a physics magazine (yes, a physics magazine, so sue me for being a geek) and was reading a story about a scientist who built some contraption to measure happiness. Sounds interesting. But I haven't read beyond the first sentence because I noticed that the magazine is suplementing their income by using Google Adsense. Now I understand using Adsense. I do it too, mostly out of curiosity to see how much I would have to write everyday to make the kind of money that Heather Armstrong does. (The answer is, it doesn't matter, cuz I'll never be as funny as her.)

OK, so back to adsense. Adsense tries to make it's ads topical by looking at the content of the page. The story on this page is about happiness. And BOTH of the ads are for Dianetics. This isn't the first time I have seen this happen. I've seen ads for them show up on religious blogs as well. But it still cracks me up to see it happen.

So today's blog is mostly an experiment to see if I can write 3 short paragraphs about happiness and joy and get a Dianetics ad. Granted, I'm also seeding the story with the name of the book, but I really think that I would be happy with my life if I could get an ad from the folks in Clearwater FL. So, herewith I post my experiment, check my ads, possibly edit this post with results, and then go back to read the physics blog.

ETA: Dang. The two ads that appeared for ME right after posting were for a cable cooking show and a teeth whitener. I don't want to write anything more specific, because then this edit will skew the results. And that wouldn't make me happy.

More Stuntsurfing

It seems I find myself in one of those funks where nothing that I contemplate writing on seems worthy of putting on pixels. And yet, nearly all the feedback I get on my blog is positive. So in a strange way, it seems that the logical thing to do is keep blogging more frequently until someone complains about it. And then, hopefully, fix the quality. There, enough of the navel-gazing.

A month or so ago, I discovered a site called http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ which I find to be one of the most clever titles on the internet. (Secondary, however, to

let me that for you)

ANNNYway. DownForEveryoneOrJustMe does just what it looks like. Checks a website from someplace else, with a different browser, to see if the website is really down. Clever, huh? Wait, you haven't heard all of the fun yet. As part of this service, if someone DOES find a site down (which is suspect is less than .0001% of the time.) it puts the name of that website into a RSS feed. (Don't ask me how I know this, I don't remember.) So I subscribed to that feed, just to see what sorts of websites are having trouble on most days. As you might suspect, there are some websites that show up frequently, (like http://xbox360iso.com) and lots of little sites that you've never heard of, and lots of misspellings. What's interesting is when a big site that you know well shows up. This last week, 4chan.org has been showing up occasionally.

Now I recognize that 4chan is a big site, and that I should know what they are, but I don't. So I did some research, thinking that I might be sitting here and blogging later today (huh. Look at that. I AM blogging.) So, I wiki'd it and it says its an imageboard, which doesn't mean a thing to me, and that it was involved in Project Chanology. Ah. That's where I've heard this before. Project Chanology was responsible for a DDOS attack against the Church of Scientology a while back. OK, so that's all I really know about them. Then I decided to take a look. But my Pr0n filter got in the way. And here's the funny part. It seems that 4chan.org violates EVERY SINGLE criteria in my filter. Check this out.
OK, so that's a bad picture, but I think you get the point.

So, now I'm off to disable my filter and get me some of that good Adult-Alcohol-Tasteless- Lingerie-bikini-Sexuality-Nudity-Pornography-Weapons-Chat Message Boards fun.

See you next week.

Simply Surfing

I have been collecting a LOT of RSS feeds, from my email client, which makes it a lot easier to keep track of a few blogs. Which is all well and good, until you start adding every cool blog that you see to your folder list. Yes, you can collect a lot of links but it doesn't take long before you are several hundred, and sometime a few thousand, entries behind current. In my case, this happened when I subscribed to SlashDot, which is THE biggest news site in geek circles. I'm happy to say, however, that in the last month, I have whittled my backlog from 1836 blog posts to only 747. The only redeeming effect of all this surfing is that you find a LOT of cool stuff on the web.

Here's a bunch of links that I've found recently that made me feel good.

Five terrible fake Jane Austen novels

August 19th, 2008

1. Rash and Rationality
2. Punk and Punctuality
3. Beast and Bestiality
4. Funk and Functionality
5. Fried and Credulous

eBay Find of the Day: Crazy Horse - 1967 Ford Mustang with butterfly doors and folding hardtop

Scott Wade's Dirty Car Art Gallery

You've all heard of Art Cars. Here's a guy who is applying that idea to the dirt that accumulates on his car after weeks of driving on dirt roads in Texas. Check out the few dozen other pictures at his website. Some of it is unbelievable.
































That's probably enough for one day. If I stop posting and go back to reading, maybe I can whittle this list down to only 700 posts.