General

Last Thursday, Heather and I went to the Fox Theatre to see “The Phantom of the Opera”. I’d never been to the Fox, and was very impressed. The theater is gorgeously designed with a Arabian theme, and inside the theater itself, the seating and stage is under a sky-blue ceiling that gives the impression of being in a Arabian mosque near sunset — complete with twinkling stars.

“Phantom” was also quite good; I’m not a big fan of musicals, but the show was very engaging, and the stagecraft was excellent. I highly recommend seeing it; it’s definitely an experience worth having.

Back from the hurricane-enforced outage. Yay.

Yes, they’re back. Jell-O Pudding Pops, long EOL’d, are back on the shelves.

I’m gonna die of a sugar coma.

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From the EA official forums:

“Well, what a wonderful few days it has been. Since EA didn’t take the time to respond (or maybe even read) our emails about various stats-server security holes, it clearly showed us how much they care. Therefore, we came to the conclusion that modifying 5 million accounts wouldn’t be that big of a deal.

That being said, accounts with ids from 40,000,000 to 45,000,000 now have all of their weapons unlocked.

I need to remember to look at these photos of Gosford Castle, in Ireland.

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For some reason, I really want this suction-powered bug-sucker “Bugzooka” thing.

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It’s always handy to hand out dedicated email addresses to sites that make you register. This way, if you get spam to that address, you’ll know who sold you out.

In other news, Mediafour is a bunch of spammers.

Yesterday I helped Simon remove about a billion nasty spyware maggots from a freshly-installed Win2k machine. He thinks that over the course of time, Microsoft OSes will come to have “allowed” spyware — effectively spyware that is not detected by Microsoft’s built-in, “approved” spyware detector. the question is, how much would Microsoft have to stand to profit before it compromised on protecting its customers? (I’d say somewhere around $2, at least.)

I really love Ural 13 Diktator’s wonderful 80’s-style 8-bit “music video” for their song, “Name of the Game”.

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I’ve posted my vacation pics here. Note there’s a “Part Two” and a “Part Three”.

I’ve been out in the desert for about a week, camping in Big Bend national park, and in the Davis mountains. it’s been very hot — at 109F in Study Butte.

We only saw two Western Diamondbacks, but since we didn’t have small game hunting licenses, we didn’t catch them. We justpicked them up, took their pictures, and tossed them off the roadside.