Pug’s Place

From:   aeon AT ninjaburger DOT com
Subject:        December 5 is the Day of the Ninja

It’s time for the Second Annual Day of the Ninja. Forget ‘Talk Like a
Pirate’ Day. This will truly be our chance to show the world what
ninja are made of.

ninja > pirate

This year, December 5th (the Day of the Ninja) is a Sunday. That gives
you plenty of freedom to go completely ninja nuts! Dress like a ninja
and go to the mall, or to miniature golf, or to church! OK, maybe not
church! But still!

Make a snow ninja!

And, I want you to help me take over the Internet on that day. LiveJournal
posts about ninja. Ninja links on all your websites. Photos of yourself
wearing ninja outfits. Whatever. Go Ninja crazy.

Most importantly, tell YOUR friends and get them aboard. The more ninja,
the merrier. E-mail me to let me know you’re aboard, and let me know what
you plan to do to help celebrate the Day of the Ninja.

href="http://www.ninjaburger.com/dayoftheninja/">http://www.ninjaburger.com/dayoftheninja/

-aeon

Sounds right up Theresa’s alley!!!

Nope, nothing like it. Got a note from Katie in Berlin today (she gets home on the 30th) that amounted to ‘life is good, German keyboards are weird!’ so let’s be happy.

There’s nothing quite like, on the last night at home this trip, filling a syringe of morphine elixir and administering it to your grandma. Getting old and frail but refusing to die must be very depressing.

No, I wasn’t overdosing her. But I never realized that doctors could perscribe morphine for home use. Nontrivial amounts, too. Nothing like using the drug whose addictive-ness is the standard unit of measure as a home-administered sleeping medication. Heh…

…This is the first day I’ve worn a long-sleeved shirt since I was in France.

Must go to bed now so to wake up very, very early… but I saw 42nd street tonight at the Phillips Center and it was awesome. The lady cast as the lead, Peggy, was phenomenal. Her name was Mara something (but not Mara Jade, no). Anyway, maybe I’ll blog more about it once I get home tomorrow for Thanksgiving!

Ominous!

Need to learn truly useful phrases in French? This phrase list will get you a long way with any French speaker. There’s also a pronunciation guide if you’re completely clueless.

The parent site is just full of gems like this. Though I think Katie would only appreciate one or two of the phrases on this page.

From the Associated Press…

WASHINGTON (AP) - The government agency in charge of airport security spent nearly a half-million dollars on an awards ceremony at a lavish hotel, including $81,000 for plaques and $500 for cheese displays, according to an internal report obtained by The Associated Press.

Awards were presented to 543 Transportation Security Administration employees and 30 organizations, including a “lifetime achievement award” for one worker with the 2-year-old agency. Almost $200,000 was spent on travel and lodging for attendees.

I feel so safe now!

Anyway, if you’re reading this you should be complaining to the TSA, but more importantly be complaining to U.S. Congressman Jeff Miller and U.S. Senator Bill Nelson (assuming you live in NW Florida). I write these gentlemen several times a month, you should too.

Some folks at the Imperial College London have found that Theobromine (found in Chocolate) is a more effective cough suppressant than codeine with no side effects yet observed.

Then that means you should treat your coughs this season with hot chocolate, I guess. But I’ve always done that.

By JOE SHARKEY

Published in the New York Times, November 23, 2004

At a security checkpoint recently at the Fort Lauderdale airport, Patti LuPone, the singer and actress, recalled, she was instructed to remove articles of clothing. “I took off my belt; I took off my clogs; I took off my leather jacket,” she said. “But when the screener said, ‘Now take off your shirt,’ I hesitated. I said, ‘But I’ll be exposed.’ ” When she persisted in her complaints, she said, she was barred from her flight.

the screener said, ‘Now take off your shirt,’

… Read the rest…

After finding out that mp3gain (required by GTKPod so thus it got installed) is lossless, I’ve decided to normalize my mp3 collection.

This is very, very sweet. Heheh. I love Linux… 12 hours to go, but when done, well, I’ll have consistent volume peaks and lows. Sweetness….

For note, a quick find command will happily take care of normalizing your whole mp3 directory. Something like this does nicely:

nice -n 10 find /mnt/extra_files/mp3s/ -name "*.mp3" -exec mp3gain -r -k {} \;

Sweet, so sweet… Oh, and I’ve found that GTKPod is plenty fast as long as you tell to not select the primary playlist upon startup — It’s GTK::Tree that’s so slow. The constant screen refreshes of GTK::Tree when you’re displaying a playlist while loading files is what makes the system terribly slow. Easy enough.

Quoth Liz: “God tazers.”

It’s not supposed to make sense.