Popcorn Snobbery

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I've thought for years that microwave popcorn was nasty, and now the EPA is studying it. I'm a bit of a popcorn snob, and I swear by my Whirley Pop, which makes the best tasting popcorn you'll ever eat outside of a movie theater. Their pre-measured pouches are great, though the coconut oil will send you to an early grave if you eat them too often. I like to use peanut oil with some of their gourmet blue corn for the best non-lethal popcorn, but I break out the pouches on occasion, especially if we have company.

Validation

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I've been working on making this site validate as XHTML 1.0, but I've hit a bit of a snag with the Netlflix plugin. For some reason, it spits out different URLs on the movies they suggest for me with their little star icons, which wipes out the cover image and puts an & in the URL of the movie. This causes the validation to fail, but there doesn't seem to be anyway I can prevent it from happening. I filed it as a feature request with the author of the plugin, but I'm betting it's going to be beyond his control...

The Sopranos Return

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It's great to have new episodes of The Sopranos again, especially because I get HBO in High-Definition now. I think we're going to make Sunday nights a regular thing at our house for a few friends who don't have HBO but are still fans of the series. There's only one episode left of Curb Your Enthusiasm for this season, and I'm going to miss it when it's done for the year. I didn't "get" the show the first time I saw a few minutes of it, but now I absolutely love it. It's as funny as Seinfeld ever was, but they can tackle issues a lot more controversial than NBC would have ever allowed. The show matches my sense of humor quite well, it's usually inappropriate, but hilariously funny.

Missing eBay feature

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Here's a feature that eBay needs to implement: a method for notifying a user that their e-mail address doesn't work. It sounds like a stupid idea, right? Well, it's not. Here's what happens, a user buys something at an auction, but their e-mail address with eBay is incorrect, and the user uses the eBay interface to mail the seller asking about the auction. The seller replies, to an address that bounces, and has no way to contact the buyer. The buyer e-mails again, via the eBay form, complaining about the seller's lack of response, and the seller is left powerless. What eBay needs is a way for a seller to flag a buyer account as having a bouncing e-mail address, so that the buyer is presented with a notification about it the next time they login, hopefully in an extremely non-subtle manner.

So, as it stands, right now there's a guy in Italy who'd really like to pay for my Nikon Digital Camera, but I don't have any way to get the shipping price to him because his fmarazzi@libero.it address keeps bouncing. Great.

Blinded by the light

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I spent much of yesterday afternoon unable to use my computer after having my eyes dilated by the optometrist. I'm glad I don't need to do that again for a while. I had to stop into Radio Shack to buy a new battery to fit the motherboard on one of our servers here at work, and I had to ask the kid behind the counter to compare the new battery to the one I brought in, as my vision wasn't working well on anything closer than 10 feet. The good news is that I'm not significantly more blind than I was at my last checkup, 2 years ago, but my prescription has changed slightly (as always) so I'm getting some new glasses. I'd also given up on wearing contacts, as I really didn't enjoy my Acuvue Toric lenses that I'd gotten last time. However, the doctor said that he had some new lenses that he thought I'd like better, made by CooperVision. Unfortunately, it's going to be a couple weeks while they get them in before I can try them, the same for my new pair of glasses. So, I got out my last pair of Acuvue lenses today, and am trying to get my eyes used to wearing contacts again before the new lenses come. Hopefully I can at least make it 4 hours or so before I start feeling the need to claw my eyes out....

Lord of the Oscars

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Lord Of The Rings really cleaned up at the Oscars last night. We had some friends over, drank some champagne I'd been wanting to use up, and watched the Oscars in HDTV. We each tried to pick the winners ahead of time, I came in second, correctly picking 18 of the 24 awards. My friend Brendon beat me by one. It's the Best Actor category that got me, I figured Sean Penn would win, but I wanted Johnny Depp to win, and voted that way. Stupid me. I did pick Lord Of The Rings in every category it was nominated in, I figured it would have a good night, and the law of averages should pick me up some points there. I didn't expect it to win every category it was nominated in, but I sure wasn't complaining!

Proxim AP-4000

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I'm playing with our first Proxim AP-4000 wireless access point today. We've used the AP-1000 and AP-2000 units in the past, but so far, I vastly prefer the 4000. This unit is much smaller than the previous units, and it'll be a lot easier to mount up in drop ceilings. They've also made it a little more theft-resistant, by no longer having removable PCMCIA cards. Now I need to get the old junker laptop they've stuck me with working, so I can test the 802.11a functionality, as I've never used that protocol before, and my iPaq only speaks 802.11b.