For birthdays and other special occasions at work sometimes we will go to a restaurant near Little Five Points called Front Page News. They serve regular American fare with a little emphasis on New Orleans food. One item they have had for years is a grouper sandwich. Sometime last year it started to come out that most restaurants offering grouper on their menu weren’t really giving you grouper. This is because we have eaten almost all of the grouper in the ocean and it is very hard to get anymore. Groupers mature very slowly and a typical fish might be 40 years old. Fishing for grouper is completely unsustainable.
Category: Uncategorized
Snow
This week has been a winter wonderland with two big snowfalls. Wednesday was fun at work as we anticipated the snow and watched its approach on radar. Once it started coming down there were giant fluffy flakes of snow. And in almost no time it started sticking to the grass and parked cars. A couple of people were talking about how silly it is when the news talks about bridges and overpasses icing over. Overpasses are bridges. The only time this distinction seems to be made is when referencing ice. And there just isn’t a distinction.
Cinemania 96 Updates
I still use Cinemania ’96 to look up movies and tell me the difference between Panavision and Panascope. Microsoft stopped issuing new versions eventually and no one else has come up with anything quite as good. I can eke out a little more info by getting the updates and installing those, which gets me current through the summer of 1996.
You can get downloads from Microsoft’s FTP site (updates for other versions of Cinemania as well as Encarta are available there too by going up to parent directories and then back down):
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/deskapps/mmapps/public/cinemania/Cinemania96/Windows
Download the executables, double-click to run them which will give you a bunch of .cin files. Rename them to give them the extension .cin96upd
Put them in the Program Files/Microsoft Multimedia/Cinemania folder. Then when you run Cinemania from CD again, it should see the files and incorporate them.
Multi-Dollar Advertising Deal
This week the owner of a company that sells iPod battery replacements contacted me about my web pages. He wanted to take over the pages from me so that he could use them to promote his company or place banners on my site. I said I still wanted to control my site, but he could advertise there. Rather than place additional ads, I agreed to replace the current Google ads with ads for his company. I like AdSense ads because they are text and never too garish. His ads are more like regular banners but I said I didn’t want any animation, garish colors, or pop-ups. He also wanted to have me place the banners at the top of each page, which I didn’t want to do. And he asked that I change some of the content on the page. I didn’t do that, but I did make a few changes on my own that should help him out without hurting any other companies I link to.
Passport
My passport expired in 2005 and I needed a new one before the Ireland trip in July. After hearing horror stories about long delays last summer that forced people to cancel their vacations, I didn’t want to wait any later than this week, so I went ahead and filed today. Since it had been less than 15 years since my old passport was issued, I was able to file through mail and save a $30 fee for a new application, but still had to pay $67 for the passport itself. I got pictures at Walgreen’s for $8 (not a good picture, but it’s for a passport) and mailed in the application, pictures, check, and my old passport in a padded envelope. They said it should take four to six weeks, so I think they have worked through their backlog.
The State Department’s passport site (doesn’t render correctly in my SeaMonkey browser, but looks okay in Internet Explorer)