Trans fats can't be as bad as people make them out to be, because everyone named Tran that I've ever known has been pretty skinny.

We went to dinner at Ottavio's (American Fork, UT) for a friends birthday tonight, and while the food was good, there was much to be unhappy with.

First, from the time we were seated till the time our dinner was served (the main dish, not the salads) was about one hour. When you have an...
[read more]

I was recomiling Apache today to update a few modules to their latest versions, and ran into a problem I hadn't seen before: the configure script complained that it couldn't find libpng.(a|so) (meaning libpng.a or libpng.so). I did a bunch of searching online looking for solutions, and after trying a number of things that didn't...
[read more]

The top three priorities of an internet server administrator are:

1. Security

2. Security

3. Security

When I was a newbie, I naively installed Red Hat Linux 5.something and if I thought about security at all, I probably figured that I was using a popular distro, so it should be safe. Wrong! That server got...
[read more]

I had my first publicly-visible internet server in 1998, and have learned a few lessons the hard way about what it takes to set up and administer one's own server while maintaining one's sanity. This weblog will chronicle some of the problems and challenges I ran into, and offer some advice and solutions for anyone...
[read more]

Yesterday, my wife went to get a prescription filled. She'd purposely had the prescription written up for a "generic" version of the drug to keep costs down. When she went to pick it up, the pharmacy told her that IHC wouldn't pay for the generic, so we had the option of paying for it ourselves...
[read more]

If you're an AdSense advertiser, there's an eBook (PDF) that you should consider reading: Google AdSense Secrets or What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense. I considered getting it a few months ago, but decided then not to spend the money. I did some reading online about how to boost my AdSense...
[read more]

It's not often that I get really angry, and I usually calm down before telling the world about it when I do. So it was a few days ago when Comcast disconnected my cable (including high speed internet and thus my Vonage telephone) four and a half days earlier at my old address than they...
[read more]

III

Here are lame, atrocious bills-

Bogus bills!

Of attempt at trickery, their stationery smells!

With a sneaky sneer of spite

How they seem almost alright!

To unlucky souls they say

"Here's what you must pay, pay,

Send it soon."

Cleptomaniacs appealing for the money of the crier,

It's a bad, bad, bad extortion by...
[read more]

Again, apologies to Edgar Allen Poe :-)

II.

Read the moldy water bills,

Grimy bills!

What a world of drippiness their damp content refills!

Dew on barmy head alights

How the drippings give me frights!

From the liquid-schmiquid drops,

And my plugged drain,

What a limpid puddle plops

'Neath a turtle's belly flops, while she...
[read more]