Today, I read the Wikipedia entry for Fred Rogers and cried about his passing all over again.

It seems, from all the information I can find, that he was a genuinely good person. And it seems that there are so few genuinely good people in the world. It feels sometimes like we have to be aware that any person, given the opportunity, will take advantage of another for his or her personal gain.

I feel like self-sacrifice shouldn't be the exception, but the rule.

Have a good day today, and try and be good. :)

First post using Dasher!

It's a new text input program for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Pocket PC devices, among others. It's a very interesting thing, to be sure. I know I'm having fun with it, anyway.

It seems to have the potential to entirely eliminate spelling errors, and it actually feels a lot like playing a game when you're using it. Very strange, I can actually see myself using this with my touchscreen cell phone a lot, depending on how quickly I can get used to it.

Again, I'll throw up a more substantial post a little later, this was just too good an opportunity to pass up. Hehe.

Get dasher here.

-J

First post from the Wii!

Nintendo has advertised that one of the useful functions of the Wii Internet Channel web browser (Opera) was that you could read and update your blog from it; with the new system update, that just became a lot less painful, as now the Wii supports USB keyboards.

I'm typing this from a Microsoft Natural keyboard, in fact, and it's comfortable. :D I reccomend these things to everyone; once you get over the fact that the keyboard is split up, it quickly becomes the most comfortable keyboard you've ever typed on.

(I wonder how much leeway I have in a single text box here on Internet Channel?)

I'll throw up a more substantial post later, but I wanted to give this a shot just to see what it was like. :) With the Wii remote functioning as a mouse, the ability to use a real, full-size USB keyboard, and Flash animation/game support, this thing is almost a full Internet device. :)

savedR out.

I have such a problem socializing.

Although it seems I can be so wordy online, I have such a problem truly socializing in any context. My natural response to friend requests is that of extreme caution. I often ignore everyone who comes my way, and I can't figure out why.

Maybe it's just because I don't want to get hurt. Why would I be so afraid of that? Who could really hurt me online?

Maybe it's because I don't want to let anyone down. But how does that fit with the fact that I let people down all the time? I'll constantly say I'll be somewhere, then not show up. Why?

Am I that supremely delicate, that I can't take the kinds of bruises everyone else seems to live through online?

I understand not being able to socialize in real life; I've had 25 years to get comfortable with that particular quirk. I can't talk to most people, male or female, in any kind of normal fashion most of the time. I'll get so anxious that I mutter nonsense syllables in place of English, then beat a hasty retreat, leaving my would-be conversant there in a confused haze. "That guy is just weird. He's so quiet!"

And I am quiet, but not around my wife, the only person I really trust in this whole world. She remarks all the time how she'd love for people to see how I really am, how I am around her; she says they're missing out. So sweet of her. :)

But that's not what puzzles me, there are plenty of shy people in this world. What really gets to me is my total inability to make any kind of tie with anyone else online, in this vast, anonymous bastion of randomness. No one knows who I am, no one cares who I am, yet I keep my online identity squeezed so close to my chest that my figurative arms are going numb. And I've been like this for a long, long time.

There has to be a balance between accepting every friend request (in whatever form) and where I am now.

It's just funny to me, that someone who aches for people to remember him as badly as I do to so effectively and completely shun every attempt at contact.

I'll make a pact with myself right now: if anyone does start to notice me in any real context, I won't retreat, I'll throw myself out to them. If I ever to procure any kind of fanbase (cherish the thought), they'll get every opportunity I can give them to reach me personally. I want to be responding to forum threads, I want to email people back, I want to do online chat sessions (even rediculous, sponsored ones).

Here I am at 25, and I want people to listen. But I don't know anymore what I'd say.

Whoops, the lastest version of iTunes doesn't work with Vista at all! Thanks, Apple. This inspires confidence on my side; confidence in your product. Shouldn't you take down the little "For Windows XP and Vista" text blurb on the iTunes download page?

This is customer service.

When I was in high school, a junior in high school to be exact, I purchased a copy of Chiara's zMUD, or Zugg's Mud Client, a client program you use to play several (thousands) of online text-based (no graphics) MMO's. For a little more on MUDs and clients, look here.

I'd paid full price for it, in an era where stealing software was still pretty chic. It's also probably the first purchase I'd made online, and definitely the first purchase I made for downloadable software. I told myself it was a good investment because, among other things, since I'd actually purchased a serial key, I could be a bit more free with the number of PCs I had the program installed on. I could keep it on my mom's and my own, and if I ever moved, I wouldn't have to worry about losing the disc and my whole purchase. Since I'd purchased a license key for a program with a free 30-day downloadable trial, as long as I kept the key I could always redownload it in the future, plug my key in, and instantly have a full copy again.

That was seven years ago. I kept 3-4 email addresses at that time, one of which was tied to my mom's long-defunct ISP dial-up account, and two others so old I can't remember them or log in at all. :) Ah, the perils of a long history on the Internet.

On a whim, for a long shot, I went to zuggsoft.com; it was still there, and they've got a brand-new client for Vista (cMUD, check it out). Just for the heck of it, knowing there'd be no way I'd get a response (it had been far too long, you see), I submitted a support incident to the customer service department. I gave them all the old email addresses I could think of, my old billing address, and I knew that I'd surely get some kind of canned response back, something like "I'm sorry, but we can't help you without a valid email address and password".

Three days later, Chiara himself emailed me.

"I found you!"

Thanks, guys. Thank you so, so very much. This means so much to me, and I'm going to tell everyone. :)

The Amazon Unbox section’s search and category listing needs two things very, very badly.

1. Sort by release date. When I go to my local video store, they have a whole wall of New Releases. I don’t have to turn each box over and check the release date, I know that if it’s on that wall, it was made within at least like a year of today’s date. Amazon Unbox has absolutely no function to sort by this (that I could find in 30 minutes of trying, anyway, and I’m pretty web-savvy). When I click Movies, To Rent, and Action, and sort by New Arrivals, The Neverending Story (released in the 80’s) shouldn’t be number 15 on the list. The closest thing I could find to this kind of a listing was the flash applet on the main Unbox page, and it displays a maximum of like 12 movies; I know for a fact more than that have released so far this year. Please add in a Sort by Release Date, so you can compete with every video rental store ever (but with the added convenience of digital distribution).

2. Categorize by language. If I click on Movies, To Rent, and Comedy, then sort by Newest Arrivals, the first 15 movies are fully Spanish-language. I understand that they probably all got added at once, but this is still very, very frustrating to me; I have almost zero interest in renting a Spanish-language only movie I’ve never heard of, and I certainly don’t need that to be the only language I can choose from on the first page of listings. I understand that Amazon has to cater to a broad audience, and I absolutely applaud you for that; my local video store doesn’t even have a Spanish section. But please give us the option to filter out movies in languages other than our own, just for convenience’s sake.

Thanks very much! As you can tell, I’m quite frustrated by this; these two problems have rendered Amazon Unbox completely useless for me for tonight’s movie viewing, and rather than use up some of my remaining $15 credit, I’m going to have to go to my local video store tonight for a movie. If you fix this, though, I promise you I’d rather spend money with your service. J

-savedR

I am so haunted sometimes by the question of whether or not we exist after death.

I mean, I am a committed Christian, so I have the answer to this riddle. But that doesn't stop the fear from overcoming me sometimes.

To think, to be so close to death.. I was reading people's last words from some website, I can't find it now.

It seems so scary to me. Everyone who is now alive is going to die. There are deaths every day, perhaps. Each should be a monumental event.

I mean, it seems almost silly. I am alive at this moment. I am alive, and I know I am alive. I sit in this chair, I type at this keyboard. My mind produces these words; I can hear my own voice in my head as I type. I am sentient, in every meaningful definition of the word.

But there will come a time when I am not sentient, when my body dies.

What will it be like? What is the division between body and soul? Is the soul a cleverly-constructed front? Or is that personality?

How does the mind work, exactly? How do we decide to do what we do? Because, if it is a front, if it's all just the beautiful operating complexity of an exquisitely-complex organ, then what loss is there when we die?

If there is no soul, we lose nothing in death. (Or we lose everything, depending on your perspective.) That person ceases to be, but his or her value lies only in the relative uniqueness of their facade. You might argue that the good someone does gives them value; their value can then be judged on the likelihood that they will do something good at any given moment. Their value can be boiled down to a figure of probability.

When the soulless person dies, the world loses almost nothing. Merely a personality that has suddenly ceased to exist, a good-doing potential that is quieted. We can debate the value of different personalities, and we can argue that the highest percentage of good-doing is the most worth saving, but it is a moot point as death happens to everyone anyway. There is little "saving" that can be done; it is an inevitable part of life that everyone dies. Therefore, our discussions of the value of persons must always include the fact that at some point they will cease to exist, and on that basis it is difficult to argue that any one person is worth the effort to save.

When the soulless person dies, he loses everything. Everything he has ever been is wiped away, only to survive haltingly in the memories of those who have happened to witness him. His life, lived mostly in secret (many of us are alone for large portions of the day), is gone forever, and no one will ever know the full extent of it. His consciousness is gone, never to return; he is utterly and entirely wiped from the face and memory of the earth. There might be buildings built in his name, ordinances that carry his signature, people who remember him, but his own existence, every bit of himself that matters to himself, is lost forever.

But what if that person has a soul? If the soul exists, when the person dies, he has lost nothing; he remains sentient afterwards. He has merely divorced his metaphysical being from his physical one; he continues onward, probably even keeping his personality and memory (as sentience is tied with memory; organisms that remember nothing can hardly be sentient). He has a new world to contend with, to be sure, but he does not end. And since everything we know about souls asserts that they cannot be destroyed, he will continue to exist forever. In this scenario, death for him is merely a momentous event, a turning point in the ever-lengthening saga of his life. A transition, and nothing more, as is often said.

When the soulled man dies, the world loses most. Though he continues to exist, he cannot communicate with the world of the living in any reasonable fashion, as our experiments have ascertained; the world of living people can no longer benefit from interaction with him. Any good that he is able to do is truncated, as he is no longer able to interact physically with the world. He is not hurt by this, except maybe in the emotional sense, but the world itself has lost the interaction and potential of another human.

So, like, it seems silly and frivolous for humans to survive without souls. It benefits them nothing and the world almost nothing to die with no soul. But, if we have souls, there is glory in death. There is loss for the rest of the world, our lives mean something.

Your creativity is about to be tested.

Please find me.

Yesterday morning, I sat and watched the Ren & Stimpy channel on Joost. I noticed some things that might be helpful to those of you that haven't had the experience of playing with Joost yet.

(Speaking of which, if you DON'T have an invite, comment here or email me and I'll send you one as soon as I get them, until I run out.)

It seems sometimes that the channels are a bit rough getting started. Because Joost is peer-to-peer, this is to be expected; if you're used to TV alone, though, it can be a bit jarring to find the odd one-second pause. That being said, Joost has one HELL of a leg up on RealVideo. Video is smooth, and once you get going, even more so.

I was watching R&S, which breaks down into something like 30 minute episodes. About halfway through, a commercial is aired, which seems pretty short; if I had to guess, I'd say 30 seconds was about the max. Now, again, if you're used to watching DVD seasons or downloaded video, this can be kinda jarring; it seemed to come at odd points, points that weren't really between episodes or good "commercial break" spots, which makes it a bit odd. But when you compare it to network TV (a good 3-4 minutes of commercials every 8 minutes?), there are barely any commercials at all. (In fact, at times I saw a very small 1-inch overlay on the bottom right corner of my screen, totally not obscuring my view; I wonder if this took the place of interspersed commercials at times.)

When you compare Joost to TV, Joost wins, and probably would do so even if there were a monthly charge for it. The problem, I would think, is going to be getting people that are used to DVD season viewing and torrent-downloaded videos to warm up to the idea of interstitial ads. (Being able to start any episode on any channel at a moment's notice would be enough for those who torrent anime; would you rather watch that episode of Ikki Tousen on Joost right now, or let the torrent download all night tonight first and watch it tomorrow?)

I'm pretty happy with it, and to my own surprise, I'm watching it more and more. And I think that's what's really going to set Joost afloat and keep it going; it's just as addictive as TV, with much less ad content.

I can sell a bottle cap like this..
(I will try to sell a cap like this!)

I can sell a bottle cap like this..
(I will try to sell a cap like this!)

The skunk over here will bring you luck..
(The skunk over here will bring you luck!)

The pump over here comes with a truck..
(The pump over here comes with a truck!)

Hello, Internet.

I've got a Samsung i730 PDA phone from Verizon. Since it's a Windows Mobile 5 phone, I have issues with ActiveSync 4.5, last version from Microsoft.

My issue seems to be more of a design problem, as I've looked in the options for ActiveSync both in my phone and in my PC client, and I can't find any way to change this behavior.

My problem is that my PDA is a phone, and as such it's by my side almost 24 hours a day. I keep lots of documents on my PDA, from simple text files to word documents and a couple Excel spreadsheets. I'm in IT where I work, so I have things like lists of passwords, IP addresses, miscellaneous crap that it's handy to have with me in my PDA phone so I don't have to run across campus every time I need to log in to someone else's computer, for example.

ActiveSync 4.5 running on Windows XP has an option to sync files to & from your device. If you choose this option, Windows XP creates a folder in your My Documents folder called " My Documents", with folders inside that correspond to the My Documents folder on your PDA. (So, if you've got a "Business" folder, there it is, etc.)

My PDA / ActiveSync seems to make pretty poor decisions particularly regarding deleted files. Let's say I have a Note on my PDA that I'm going to use on March 4. I create it on the device, and when I sync my PDA on March 5, it syncs my information and deletes my new file.

Wait, what? No, that's not supposed to happen. See what I'm talking about?

It seems like, for me, ActiveSync is not Sync at all, unless you're talking One-Way Sync. It assumes that whichever desktop PC I hook it up to is God, and happily overwrites files (regardless of creation or modification date) on my Pocket PC with the contents of my "PDA My Documents" folder in Windows XP.

The same thing happens if I have an established document that exists on both the desktop PC and my Pocket PC. If I delete said document (like a Note that I created back on March 4 that's not relevant anymore) on my PDA, which you'll remember is With Me Always, then sync with my desktop PC, the desktop happily moves its copy of the file back onto my PDA.

The most unnerving part of all this is that I've found hidden folders on my PDA named "FilesToBeDeleted". Now, this is just a guess, but if I delete a file on my PDA, wouldn't it make sense for my PDA to actually move that file into that folder, then upon the next ActiveSync, delete the file both on the PDA and the desktop?

ActiveSync just doesn't seem to work at all, in general. If it's going to be one-way sync only, desktop PC is God, then aren't I going to have to come up with some other method to sync important files from my work PC to my home, since it's not going to work just syncing with my PDA? That seems like the opposite of convenience to me, and it sure seems like dumping one rediculously common scenario (documents should sync 2-way based on creation date and last modified date from PDA to PC and PC to PDA) to implement what would seem to be a very rare scenario (only the documents on the PC matter, regardless of whether or not they've been edited on the PDA; if there are any changes, erase them, and if anything's missing on the PDA, put it back).

That's not the way my iPod works. If I open a podcast on my iPod and listen to half of it, then sync it to my PC, the same podcast episode on my PC records that I've listened to half the podcast already. During the same sync, if there are newly-created playlists on my iPod, they get synced to iTunes. (Since iPod can't delete files, the deletion question is moot.) Shouldn't Sync work that way? Isn't that what the word "sync" means? Kinda misleading to call it "ActiveSync", isn't it?

Update. Best Buy has become my new best friend. :)

Friday, 5/18, I called Best Buy on a whim just to see what they'd say about my order. The Geek Squad rep I talked to asked the name on my repair order and the phone number, never asking for the order number, etc. As soon as he pulled it up, before I had the chance to say anything else, he said, "Whoa... that's WAY too long. Yeah, we're going to do something about this. Hang on a second, let me grab Phil (the manager).."

Within three days, my laptop was replaced. :)

I bought my original machine because it was the only laptop they had in stock that had a hardware T&L video card for under $900. This Tuesday, 5/22, I got a Compaq V6000 series laptop with a bigger hard drive than my original machine, a thinner chassis, a bigger screen, and Vista Home Premium..

..and all for $50 less than I payed originally. So, I bought Guild Wars: Factions to go with my new evil-black laptop, something I've been wanting to do for a long, long time.

Thank you, Best Buy! Thanks, Geek Squad of Cape Girardeau, MO! You guys are my heroes. :)

My old machine was named REDY2ROK. This new one will be christened ROKSTEDY.



These are the facts.

My laptop needed repair. It's a Compaq V3015NR model, of the V3000 series. This March, for the second time, the connection between my laptop's screen and the main body went haywire somehow. What happened is that the screen's backlight would not come on, though the actual LCD panel works; if you point a bright light at the screen, you could see the pixels have color. So, it's not like the entire screen's broken, more likely there's just not a good connection in the power lead that goes from the laptop's main body (bottom) through the hinges and to the screen.

I took my laptop to my local Best Buy store. That's where I purchased it originally, on 9/11/06. I took it to their Geek Squad counter and had them send it off for warranty repair. (Remember, this is the second time I've done this for this same issue.) I was confident they'd have it shipped back to my home address, as I requested, in about 1-2 weeks when the repair was completed.

I shipped the laptop on March 20th of 2007. HP received the laptop on March 24, 2007, as evidenced by my laptop's order status on their CSO Status page (www.hp.com/go/csostatus). My HP repair order number is HBX706-01.

HP estimated a ship-out date of 3/29/2007.

As of this past Wednesday, May 9, 2007, more than 5 weeks later, I had not yet received my laptop.

I had made 3-4 calls over the intervening period to check on the status of the order. The last call I made, before the end of April 2007, they told me that screens were on backorder and that it would be another 1-2 weeks. That was about 2 weeks before May 9, 2007.

When I called May 9, 2007, I reached an American-sounding representative. He checked on the status of my order and informed me that it had shipped, and that I could expect it to arrive this Friday, May 11, 2007 via Fedex. The representative gave me the tracking number 924295207442 for the Fedex shipment. I was excited, and I believed him; I thought the backorder problem had been solved, my laptop fixed and shipped, and that it would arrive today.

When I got home at 5PM today, the laptop had not arrived. I went to Fedex.com and plugged my tracking number above in to check on the status of the package. (Fedex has a habit of requiring a signature for all deliveries, and it was possible that the deliveryman had rung our main doorbell, missed the sign by the door instructing visitors to ring the daycare's doorbell around the side of the house as well, and that the deliveryman had then left a note informing us the package was ready to deliver and we had missed a delivery attempt.)

This was the first time I had actually used the tracking number since receiving it by phone on Wednesday, May 9. When the results of the track loaded at fedex.com, they claimed the package's destination was Mount Shasta, California, which is not the same as my home address in Missouri. I started to suspect the rep I talked to Wed, May 9 gave me the wrong tracking number, probably as a mistake.

Just to check, I went to HP's CSO Status page again to check the status of my repair order. I reasoned that if they'd changed the status to Shipped, they might have the right tracking number on the results page that I could use.

HP's CSO Status page stated that my laptop was still at the repair center, had not shipped, but with an expected ship date of 3/29/2007. (This has not changed HP received the laptop on 3/24/2007.)

Now I'm confused. I called HP's service center, 800-474-6836. The representative there took my HP Repair Order number, and informed me that there was a backorder problem, and that the laptop was estimated to ship back to me on June 15th.

That's right. After having waited for more than 5 weeks for what was a 5-day repair previously, HP wants me to wait another month for my laptop to be repaired.

Here's the kicker: I'm still in college. I go to school at University of Maryland. I don't live in Maryland, I live in Missouri; therefore, I am enrolled in online classes exclusively. Not having my laptop is impeding my ability to take college classes. And, according to HP, I won't have my laptop for another month.

What do you think I should do? What would YOU do, if it was your laptop?

As it turns out, Joost was not down, it just doesn't run on this computer. It installs, and for all intents and purposes it should run*, but it doesn't.

After a month and a week, my laptop (REDY2ROK) is coming back from HP. Apparently they had a major situation and had to wait a month for the part to fix mine.

These to situations will happily coincide tomorrow, when I get REDY2ROK out of the box and install my lovely Joost beta. :) I can't wait to actually start using the thing. I think it's wonderful already.

Found this really amazingly cool site last week: Anobii. It's like a community site for readers. Give them the ISBNs of books you own, or just search by title to pull the information from Amazon.com, and you can mark what you're reading now, what you've finished (and when, down to the exact date or as vague as the year if you want), all kinds of stuff. The site will even make reccomendations based on books you've read, has some rich community features, lets you set up lending or trading your books, all kinds of stuff! This site is actually making me read more. :)

Bonus: Once you've got an account and added a few books, find another book somewhere on the website. Click on the title to see more detailed information, and scroll down to the bottom quarter of the webpage. Down by the book's size information, you'll see a small, nodescript link that says something like "Just how big is that?"

Click that link, and it'll show you a real-world size comparison of that book next to two other books from your own collection.

They figured out that, if you have a book in your collection, you're probably familiar with it's real-world dimensions, especially if you put the ISBN in (since those are usually pretty specific).

That's so cool! XD

-J

Today, I Googled "how not to be forgotten".

Didn't turn anything up..

I'm frustrated.

Joost is down, apparently. I haven't had a working laptop at home for the past three weeks since Compaq hasn't shipped mine back on a warranty repair. I was able to get Joost (thanks for the invite, Todd!) on my work laptop, but since it's a video-streaming program, I wasn't able to actually enjoy it; just start it up a few times.

So, I've basically been counting the days until I could get the beta client at home and try it. I was really waiting for my Compaq to come back, but alas.

With a lot of luck, I was able to get the other laptop up and working again, long enough to install Windows XP. We have no idea how long it'll actually remain in service, but it's working for now. "All right," I thought, "I'll download Joost on it and maybe get to play with it a little."

Except for the fact that there's some major problem with the brand new (as of yesterday, 4/10/07) 0.9.2 version of the client doesn't connect to the network. There are something like 25 pages of posts on the Joost forums full of users with the same error.

I just remembered that I happened to YouSendIt off a version of the Joost client to myself earlier this week.. maybe it was the 0.9.1 client. I'm going to go grab it and try..

..but, I'm frustrated.

Turns out the previous entry were excerpts, random lines, really, from John Hollander's work. :) I've never heard of him before, but his poetry is beautiful.

Beautiful.

I love it. It makes me want to write.

I'll probably write something and throw it up here. :)

Poem, found in a spam email advertising pharmaceuticals:

To mark that square, perhaps: were Mère and Père
Between the vertex that the far-lit gray
As it sits there like an eventual
Some stubborn sprouts up through the stubble hay,
Of too much truth to do much more than lie
What I have in my hands, these flowers, these shadows,
Covering the land—
The snowflakes are swirling, blotting out
I draw near to one of them, the lowest,
Trampled snow is the only rose.
My soul lies cracked; and when, in its despair,
Unreadable from behind—they are well down

I. Further Exploration of Spitsbergen
The pain of being born into matter.
In Winter Haven, the ballplayers are stretching
Dreaming time has reversed—and you,
And trumpet at his lips; nor does he cast
Amid the gloom, there, on the pole, stands black
Sits at the limit of a kind of world

Verizon Wireless's voicemail is down. Completely.

I'm not sure when it went down, but it's sure as hell down right now. Tried it from my phone and my wife's, and tried calling *86, my own number, my wife's, as soon as you would run into the normal voicemail interface, you get a fast busy signal.

Tried calling customer service, but apparently they don't have 24-hour customer service anymore either. Funny, hadn't noticed that till now.

So, folks, You Heard It Here First. Verizon's voicemail is down, and there's nobody you can talk to about it till the morning. Hope no one important calls tonight!

So, I'm sure everyone's heard about this by now, but Boston freaked out.

What happened is that, like in several OTHER large cities across America, someone left lots of blinking LED signs in conspicuous, public places in Boston. These signs bore clearly the likeness of popular Aqua Teen Hunger Force character Ignignot, and were placed as a kind of guerrilla marketing technique to promote the Aqua Teen movie coming out soon.

(Aside: The title of the new movie is "Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon: Movie Film for Theaters". Awesome. :)

When this happened, in Boston, Boston had a shit fit, deciding that the innocuous blinking signs, ubiquitous across America, needed to be taken out by SWAT teams and Bomb Squad. Not because Boston is secretly like you and I, and simply made a mistake, but because that sort of thing is the rule rather than the exception for this city. Look it up, and you'll find a history of Boston blowing things so far out of proportion that they end up Euler bottles, their exteriors twisting in and fusing with their very cores.

Enough with the Penny-Arcade style. :)

What I really take issue with is the fact that Turner Networks, the parent company of Cartoon Network (and thus, Adult Swim), made this big, public apology to Boston and paid them a million dollars in pain and suffering money.

That's right, and because I want this fact to hit you in the face again, I'll repeat:

Boston's overreaction got them paid to the tune of a million smackers.

And, yeah, those BS and SWAT guys don't get sent out much in Boston, I'm sure, and I'm betting the city had to pay their salaries somehow for the officials' little unecessary tirade. But it is genuinely offensive, it is sickening, to me, that their sanctimonious idiocy resulted in a decent network, parent company of an AWESOME network, handing over a MILLION DOLLARS and a public apology for something that several other cities across the US had no other problems with. And maybe Turner can afford it, but Cartoon Network can't, and if Adult Swim had to pay I'm thinking it would hurt them just a little.

It's just so stupid, so juvenile, such B.S. I wish we could boycott Boston in return, but that's kinda difficult. Maybe at least it'll become a pop culture phenomenon, kinda like the way some people label anything disdainful as Canadian. Maybe people will start to walk around calling people not "spaz" or "tool", but "Bostonian".

You suck, Boston, for not getting the joke when everyone else did, then whining about it and bending over backwards to put on a show, then getting paid for your retarded efforts like a whiny also-ran in a footrace of three-year-olds, demanding a trophy for being special.

Goodnight. :)

Welcome to Smuckers' Stars On Ice!

We're here, at the St, Louis show, and we're so excited. My beautiful wife Christi got to meet and talk to John Zimmerman, Kyoko Ina, Jamie Sale, David Pelletier, Katia Gordieva and Ilia Kulick, and even guest star Sasha Cohen, Olympic silver medallist last year. She's doing one number here, but we don't know what that'll be yet.

She got to meet all these fantastic skaters, and I got the WHOLE thing on tape. :) I'm so excited to be here, and it's so much better that we get to meet the skaters, it's unreal. Like an experience this guy I know, Cullen, had; went to a Tool show, then got to hang out afterwards with Maynard and Jphn Romero all night. No one gets to have those kinds of experiences..

I'm about out of room in this pix message, so I'll post more (and more pictures) in a day or two, probably when we get home.

So good night, and God bless you. :D

-J