King of All Remote Controls

The Last Thursday in September

I have only a few pictures to share, so here they are.

Progress on the building renovation nearby.


Tree and shadows beside the library.


Here's a screenshot from the movie Reno 911! - Miami. Here they're on the beach trying to move a beached whale. I've obscured part of the shot with a little squirrel to make it workplace safe. You're welcome.


The answer to the question "What's one of my favorite shows?" would be Robot Chicken!


Is that enough hilarity for one blog entry? Hardly, but that's all the fun I can stand without totally busting a gut.

Chalk For Peace

I ran across this flyer and the nearby chalked sidewalk just down the street.

I'm not really sure how chalk on the sidewalk is going to help bring peace, but you can go to Chalk4Peace.org for more info.

The Ides of September

It seems like just yesterday it was Labor Day. And now we're at the middle of September with the beginning of Autumn coming up next Monday.

Here's a web ad I ran into recently. Needless to say, I didn't click.


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Here's the latest copy of PC Magazine. I've ripped out all the pages with ads only on both sides. That's a lot of filler.

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I watched the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie for the 2nd time a few days ago.

I love ATHF, but it works best as the 15-minute shows that air on Cartoon Network rather than as a full-length movie.
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General Eisenhower may have been extremely popular in the 1950s.

But Hurricane Ike was not at all welcome this past week.

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This past Saturday a crane loaded materials onto the roof of my building for a 3-month roof maintenance project.

 

Only part of the street needed to be blocked.

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Headquarters of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) moved into my neighborhood in 2006, but only recently was this sign installed.

Have a good week, and enjoy the remaining days of astronomical Summer.

Remembering

There was a flag hanging from my building's entrance today in remembrance of the events 7 years ago.

I had hoped to get over to the Pentagon tonight to see the new memorial there, but that'll happen next week.

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Fortunately, gas prices have retreated from their highs earlier this year. I remember $4+ prices for regular grade, but I wouldn't be surprised to see them return to that level sometime in the near future.



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Remember the house under construction across the street from the library? There doesn't appear to have been a lot of progress on the exterior since the last photo August 7, but I'm sure a lot of work is going on finishing the interior.

It Must Be Tech Weirdness

After Comcast announced that beginning October 1 it'll be imposing a 250GB bandwidth limit (which it says less than 1% of its users are now exceeding), I installed Bitmeter to see what my usage was.

As that screenshot shows, over a 27-hour period, my usage was only 1/10 of 1% of the monthly 250GB allocation, so I'm confident I won't be exceeding it. However, I can see a lot of people running into the limit in the future as more and more use is made of streaming video from services such as Netflix. It also appears to be an end-around to the FCC's ruling that Comcast can't restrict its users from using services like BitTorrent.

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I downloaded the beta version of Google's Chrome browser and tried it out.

Built on the same base (Netkit) as Apple's Safari browser, it's identified by websites as actually being Safari - as this image shows.

Chrome isn't bad in its first iteration, and allegedly is built from the ground up for both speed and security, but in this beta version the user controls are too sparse for my liking, and there's a shortage of the usual icons at the top of the browser that we're all accustomed to.

So I'll be sticking with Firefox! 

Here are screenshots of the two browsers for comparison. (The bookmark toolbars are hidden).

Firefox:

Chrome:

 

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Wednesday morning, McAfee told me that it was missing a DLL file.

I called McAfee and spoke with someone on the other side of the world who was very helpful. He directed me to the McAfee website, and I downloaded and reinstalled the software. At each step, the instructions were clear, and the reinstallation process went smoothly and relatively quickly. So kudos to McAfee for that.

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Wii Sports bowling is still the best video bowling game there is. And what could be better than a perfect score?

When you're in the groove, you're in the groove!

If It's September

I spotted this lovely scene just outside the Marriott Crystal Gateway hotel.





If it's September, it must be the season for replacement of the hotel toilets.