I got a kick out of this post by Moose but only because I've been thinking about creating a pseudo-private area on my site.

The initial idea was that I would have an area or three that would hold my rambling, cathartic posts about whatever but that wouldn't be accessible by the general public. Not that there's a huge glut of readership here, but the principle remains.

I would, however, like certain people to be able to see some or all of those areas. These are people whom I trust implicitly. These are people with whom I have no [……]

There was a boy who had the faith to move a mountain
     And like a child he would believe without a reason
Without a trace he disappeared into the void and
     I've been searchin' for that missing person

That is the chorus to a song I heard this morning on my way to [……]

I successfully installed and configured Tom Willett's Menu Plugin. I found it shortly after I had edited a small piece of Geeklog's internal code in order to add the Blog Links to the Sections menu on the left. I really didn't want to edit it at all because upgrading is a huge pain when you have to port over all of your changes. Luckily it was only a small change and was easy enough to undo.

Anyway, this version of the Menu plugin lets you set up custom menus without changing the core system. It also uses the existing security group [……]

Apparently, Microsoft divisions don't talk amongst themselves very well. As this story shows, they couldn't decide whether to say that the iLoo was a hoax or simply a crappy idea (pun definitely intended).

As for why the concept was flushed, company officials seem to be mum, but I'm sure it has nothing at all to do with being held up to public ridicule like they were - at least among people who have half a clue about technology.

Just in case anyone cares, I have removed the blog and news feeds from the right side of the screen and put them on their own page. This will let me include a lot more feeds without making the front page scroll forever. It also lets me provide links to blogs that don't have RSS feeds but that I still want to monitor. I'll be adding a link to that page in the Sections block on the left Real Soon Now.

I also moved the Older Stories block to the right side (where the blogs used to be). [……]

A tornado passed about 2 1/2 miles east of our house early yesterday morning. Although we experienced high winds, we were far enough away that there was no damage. Others were not so lucky.

First, the details:

The tornado consisted of winds nearly 155 mph, which puts it at the extreme top end of the F2 range on the Fujita Scale. The base was about 300 yards wide and it was on the ground for about 7 miles. There was one fatality.

Some horse breeder/trainer friends of ours had their barn and riding arena demolished. Support beams that were in the ground 6 [……]

This weekend's prime-time television offerings were better than usual, but only because there were two great movies on.

Friday night brought The Matrix in an shamelessly obvious marketing move to hype this week's release of the sequel, The Matrix Reloaded. It is, nonetheless an excellent movie and is removed somewhat from both the average sci-fi and action movie options.

The evening also held an interesting revelation. SWMBO told me that, if she were going to be ga-ga over any given movie star, it'd be Keanu Reeves. I responded by putting in a vote for Carrie-Anne Moss. I mean, [……]

This comes to us from the Just Because You Can Doesn't Mean You Should Department:

Microsoft seems to be under the strange notion that people might spontaneously combust if they take a 2 minute break from checking their e-mail or stock prices. To rescue mankind from this horrible fate, they have developed an internet enabled portable toilet. Worse than the fact that somebody actually came up with this idea is the fact that somebody in upper management at Microsoft said something to the effect of, "You know, that's not half bad!" But there is a major flaw in [……]

Just when you think you've seen it all, somebody (Dave Barry, to be exact) points out that there's a patent on getting a cat to chase a laser pointer spot on the wall.

btw - The Laserspot Kitties would be a decent name for a rock band...

I've been on vacation (from work, anyway) since last Wednesday and, when the alarm went off this morning, I had absolutely no energy to get out of bed. Vacations aren't supposed to be this tiring.

SWMBO and I spent the majority of that time at the Rolex Kentucky Three-Day Event where we have been the Assistant Scoreboard Stewards (sounds impressive, huh?) for about 10 years or so. That is a lot of activity in and of itself. In the middle of it, however, one of our friend's horses decided that it'd somehow be a good thing to have [……]