And now, the cat

I mentioned a few days ago that I'd finished updating my home page, and I immediately got questions about when was I going to update my cat's Web site already? So, to make y'all happy, here's a newly updated Pixel's Page. Enjoy.

We love our cat, but there are limits...

So we were looking at Amazon's Friday Sale, and we came upon one of those self-cleaning litterboxes. We looked at the comments, and people generally didn't like it much. One person suggested the Litter-Robot instead. Dori's first comment when she saw it: "Poop in the pod bay door, HAL." Then we saw the price: $329 and up. We love our cat, but we have a teenage boy that does the job for considerably less. On the other hand, the machine wouldn't whine about it.

Technology is Political

Sometimes, you really have to weigh between coincidence and paranoia. I'm listening to music in my office via the excellent SliMP3 device from Slim Devices. I've got it set to play a shuffled playlist from everything in my iTunes library. It just came up with the following consecutive songs: "Goodnight Saigon" by Billy Joel; "Mercenary" by Go-Gos; and "Time" by Sarah McLachlan. That last song has a lyric that includes "...I don't remember what we're fighting for." Given the curent world situation, is my technology making a political statement?

MT 3 choices

Here's the pricing chart for the newly announced Movable Type 3. Based on what we've given them in the past, if we pay during the introductory period, it'd cost us $24.95. We're trying to decide what we'd get for that money. It's somewhat of a pisser that, because we have one blog instead of two separate blogs, we have to pay where others don't.

Our choices, as I see them, are:

1. Pay the $25 and upgrade. We're not sure what we get out of this, but it's probably reasonably priced for what we've gotten out of it so far.
2. Do nothing at all. What we've got appears to work, and I don't know why it shouldn't keep working.
3. Switch to WordPress, which it seems is what most of the cool people are doing.

As I said, I don't know what we're going to do, but if you have an opinion, let us know in the comments, and thanks!

Get a Mac

Scoble writes "James says Tablet PCs are too expensive—I say look at the ROI". I did, Robert. That's why I bought a Mac.

This blog is sick

We're not sure what's going on with our blog. We can access some parts of it but not others, some odd images are showing but others are okay, etc. We've tried from different computers and different networks. If you can read this, yay! But we can't.

Later note: it appears that it may have some connection with problems getting to blogrolling.com. Hopefully, our problems will solve themselves when theirs are solved.

Reform Party Endorses Nader

Because several of you asked us to keep you informed on this: Nader Wins Endorsement From Reform Party. Short version: this puts Ralph on the ballot in Florida, Michigan, Colorado, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana and South Carolina. Florida? Oh joy.

2004 Hugo Nominees

On the 2004 Worldcon site, here are the links to this year's nominees for science fiction's Hugo Awards. This includes links to all of the short fiction and some other categories, but not to the novels.

Running for President is Unfair

After failing to get a measly 1 percent of the Texans who voted in the last presidential election to sign petitions for his pathetic candidacy, Ralph Nader is whining to a federal court. He had 60 days to get 64,000 sgnatures, and he missed the mark by about 10,000. This Houston Chroniclestory tells the tale: Nader sues after failing to get on Texas ballot. Nader claims that it's just too hard to get on the Texas ballot, yet Perot and Buchanan both managed that Herculean feat. According to the article, "Nader has not yet gotten on a ballot in any state." Maybe people just don't like you, Ralph.

Shoemaker's children shod

After a ridiculously long period of time, I've finally updated my home page (and this page and this page, while I was at it). For the first time, it's table-less, validating XHTML—yeah, I know, that took long enough.

I've tested it in most of the major browsers. If you take a look at it, and you hate the way it looks, let me know what browser/platform/version you're using here in the comments. Thanks!

Clearing the Organ's Throat

This cool NYT article, Pipes Askew, It Still Needs to Sing, tells the story of the Frank Gehry-designed pipe organ that has been created in the Walt Disney Concert Hall, in Los Angeles. Make sure that you watch the video feature on the right side of the page (Real Video).

Household Toxics Roundups

Matthew at debris.com reminded me that Household Toxics Roundups day is approaching. Our local date is June 12, in Santa Rosa.

It's really bad in Iraq

You know that things in Iraq are bad, and that Rumsfeld and his cronies have really screwed up, when senior military officers start giving interviews about how angry they are with the DoD's civilian leadership, and how they think that the US can keep on winning battles, but has already lost the war. Check out this article from the Washington Post: Dissension Grows In Senior Ranks On War Strategy.