Alright, a friend did one of these, and posted it on her blog, so here are mine…. hope it works, actually.

52%Mingle² – Free Online Dating

78% GeekMingle² – Free Online Dating

Free online Dating? Bleh. Anyway, I’m only 78% geek? Damn, I gotta work on that, thats pathetically low. I was glad to see Firefly questions in there though…. best damned Science Fiction show EVER. I was also glad not to see Battle Star Galactica questions – thats the most overrated science fiction show ever. Though it is rather good, still….

What a long, annoying day to come back to after the holiday. Oh, there were some good things. I got back in touch with someone I had lost touch with, and I had an interesting evening. Whether I’ll stay in touch with said person is another story, and whether the interesting evening will pan out on other fronts is also another story.

Overall though, it was a long, dreary day where nothing else went exactly right.

Oh yeah, I had the most horrible meal in a long time. It is worth noting… TGI fridays just sucked tonight. Its not a place I eat at much anyway (2-3 times per year). But I’ve got fond memories of eating there quite often years ago, with a good friend. Back then it was pretty decent. But tonight…. blah…. I don’t think I’ll be back there, unless the circumstances are truly unusual.

This random, pointless post is….. well, random and pointless, actually.

No, I didn’t take this photo, never met the woman or dog in it either. But the photo is the epitome, to me, of why people love dogs.

is a virtue.

For probably the first time since I moved into my house, I got all my laundry clean. But then I thought, “What about the clothes I have on? The instant they are on, they don’t count as truly clean, do they? So, I stripped em off, and hung around bare assed naked until they were washed and dried. Then spent five minutes enjoying the thought of having all clean clothes.

I got dressed, and enjoyed the rest of the day.

I love being me.

It was a really nice weekend. I got my laptop back into fighting trim (mostly), I made some extensive notes, did some hard thinking about my upcoming privacy/autonomy podcast, etc.

I spent *lots* of time with Harley and Kermit today.

I didn’t get much done around the house though.

I heard this quote today on an Instapundit podcast, Conn Iggulden on Boys and Danger. “Better a broken arm than a broken spirit”.

Glen and Helen were actually interviewing Conn Iggulden, who wrote The Dangerous Book for Boys. He didn’t coin the quote, but he did agree with it totally. As do I. The quote might come from Joseph Chilton Pearce, who has written several parenting books. I’m not sure. But it is a very good quote, in these overprotective days.

Escape Pod is, in my mind, the best Science Fiction Podcast out there. Basically, this guy buys the rights to produce audio short stories, of generally pretty darn good stories. Its free too, though you can donate.

I very highly recommend EP027: Union Dues – Iron Bars and the Glass Jaw – the first in a “series” of stories. Its about Super Heros too, and its easily one of my favorite stories of all time.

If you are unfamiliar with podcasting – well, don’t worry about it, its pretty straight forward. Go check the site out!

Its true, and they are quite loud about doing it too. If you have birds, you get to witness some truly odd behavior. And, it makes you look at parrot toys in a whole new light.

This is kind of a “unspoken secret” of keeping Macaws. “What’s that bird doing?” “Uh… playing….” /looks innocent, changes the subject.

Well, it took a while, and I still don’t have my myriad array of programs installed. On the other hand, in many ways it went much easier than a windows install typically does. The way I did it, is that I used Superduper! to clone the hard drive to an external firewire drive. I used Backup to handle my Safari favorites, email, keychain, address book, and the Iphoto and Itunes libraries. Being a paranoid sort, I had also backed up big chunks of stuff to DVD.

So, the basic process was very simple, if tedious. First I wiped the hard drive and reinstalled OS X. I then updated it until software update stopped finding stuff to update. I then reinstalled Ilife 06. I ran software update again until it stopped finding stuff. (I also reinstalled Iclip, Tinderbox, and Marsedit while this was going on). Finally, I launched backup, and pointed it to the file it had created earlier. When it finished, it had restored a large chunk of my data.

And that was it. By that time, it was 4 am, so I went to bed.

I’ve heard lots of horror stories about Apples backup utility. This was the first time (though it won’t be the last) I’ve used it, and I was really impressed with it. It made things simple, and it worked flawlessly.

I’m going to reinstall OS X on my laptop this weekend, as one of my projects. I probably don’t have to – Macs are pretty resistant to the general crud creep that windows is prone too. But, its a good learning experience. I’m not doing it the easy way, but the hard way – so that things can indeed be made cleaner, and better.

Hopefully my next post will be very soon, saying that things went great.

Aren’t I beautiful, Dahling?

Originally uploaded by The_Gut.

I’m very pleased with this picture. Its probably the best one I’ve done to date, in terms of a bird study at least. Kermit’s a doll.

Well, one cute story, and one not so cute story.

I was working on my computer this evening, and sneezed. Harley said “Achoo!” right after I sneezed, which was the cutest thing. I gave him a cuddle and a head scritch.

I’m in the habit of leaving my door open when I carry out the garbage. Apparently I had left Sport upstairs, so out she went. I didn’t even miss her for about three hours, but by that time, she was curled up on my front stoop. Scary. I hate being so careless.

On the bright side, at least she had some outdoor time.