http://www.paulcrowder.net/Paul Crowderen-ushttp://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=89With a little prodding from the wife, it looks like I'm firing up the old blog again, and this time she's helping out with the posts. So all of you devoted readers who've been checking my blog every day for the past year and a half only to find no new posts, your effort has finally paid off.http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=88Paul and I like to eat out a lot and I thought detailing our dining experiences would be an interesting idea. It would also make me feel a lot better about spending so much money on food.I wanted something a little different and a new Chilli's opened up near the Tanger Outlets. I haven't been to Chili's in a while, so I suggested we give it a try. Well Charleston and Mt. Pleasant have now gone no smoking. When we walked in the door of Chili's we were asked for smoking or non smoking. Dangit. I forgot we were in N. Charleston. Oh well. The sections were adequate and no smoke bothered me through the dinner. I had a sweet tea while Paul ordered a draft blue moon. He originally asked what their local beers were seeing as the menu said they had some. The waitress replied the usual, bud, budlight, etc. Hm...I wonder where the local Budweiser brewery is around here. Anyway she was training someone and another waitress tried to help us because she had no idea where her tables were. After all that confusion, I ordered the Chicken Caesar Pita and Paul had the Grilled Chicken. Both came with fries. Mine was really good. It came with its own pita stand, which was pretty useless and taking up space on my plate. It was a lot better than I thought it would be. Paul didn't think his chicken sandwich was completely cooked, but he ate it anyway...must have been hungry. The whole time eating, the waitress never came by. I needed some napkins, because the one thin napkin she gave me was useless. It was one of those types that the first time you use it, there is a big hole in it. It was so thin, it was like I just wiped my hands on each other. I also needed a new tea. I don't know what happened, but when I looked into my tea midway through my meal, there were all these brown seed type things in it. I don't think I put them in there because I didn't see anything else like that around me. I don't see how it managed to get inside just my drink. Well we originally had three waitresses (real waitress, trainee waitress, and confused waitress) and now we couldn't find anyone. I had seen this dessert on the Chili's website that I just had to have. After the let down yesterday of Sticky Fingers no longer selling the Oreo Cookie Pie, I had to have something good, so we decided to try the Sweet Shots. These were supposed to be seven layers of chocolate, strawberry cheesecake, or apple caramel in a shot glass. You can get one or all three for $5. Well we decided we would go for three...two chocolate and a strawberry. Finally the waitress showed up to take our plates and ask if we wanted dessert. Paul got the dessert order and she was gone before I could even get a word out my mouth. Still no drink and no napkins. Well the dessert came back and it was lacking to say the least. Seven layers? More like 3...maybe 4, if you count the layer of air at the bottom. The strawberry on top was still frozen and tasted more like ice. We still ate it of course, but it was nothing like advertised. The pictures in the menu should say 4x actual size. Here is Paul disgusted after eating the dessert.One other thing I didn't like about the restaurant was the bathroom. Putting the restrooms in a place where you have to walk through the smoking section defeats the purpose of sections. We had to walk around the whole bar to get there. The only other option would be to walk around the outside and go in the door by the to-go place.Well, you live and learn. Although my pita was very good, it will probably be a long time before we venture back there. I may go on my own sometime, but Paul has wowed never to go anywhere with unrealistic pictures on their menu. We'll see.http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=86I came across this disturbing article today about a 2-month old baby who was found floating in a lake in Brazil after having been wrapped up in a plastic bag and apparently discarded by her parents. Moral outrage among Americans will surely ensue, though with late-term and partial-birth abortions of viable fetuses still legal in many states as a form of disposing of unwanted children, I think we should probably take this opportunity to take a look at ourselves as well.CNN.com: Baby found floating in bag in lakehttp://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=85It looks like the phrase "going postal" has just been renewed for at least the next five years.CNN.com: Shooting rampage leaves six deadhttp://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=84Yesterday a U.S. drone bombed a Pakistani village with the intent of killing Al Quaida's number 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahri. Instead of hitting our target, however, we managed to kill 18 civilians, and if you watch the news reports, at least one cow. Imagine if some wanted terrorist were hiding in your hometown, and Pakistan decided to bomb it hoping to take him out, killing your wife and children. If that's not enough to create a militant soldier with the sole intent of destroying the country whose policy is to bomb first, ask questions later, then I don't know what is.http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=75Finally, my brother has felt the pain I had felt twice before: sitting through an extremely long, drawn out film by Peter Jackson and loathing every minute. My brother Chris is a big Lord of the Rings fan, and he's never understood why I disliked the trilogy of films (or at least the first two films; I gave up on the series before the last movie was released). On Christmas night, though, he, my wife, and I went to see King Kong, and we all came to the same conclusion. The film was WAY too long. I have been known to fall asleep watching TV and DVDs on a regular basis, but I've only fallen asleep during three movies while in the theater: About Schmidt (I was extremely tired), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (I was extremely bored), and now Peter Jackson's Swedish-made enlarger version of King Kong (I was extremely both of those). I can see why people would enjoy the Lord of the Rings trilogy after having read the books and anticipating a decent film version for so long; I was neither of those, so I guess one could say I just didn't get it. I can also understand why people want to see the extended DVD versions of the film, since the novels were so massive that fans want to see every minute of the story unfold on the screen. There was no way to create three films from three epic novels without cutting something out as was done with Lord of the Rings; King Kong, however, is quite a different story. Having been a film, and only a film, Peter Jackson's source material was quite terse, unlike the grand Tolkien works of literature he had to work with before. The 1933 version film clocked in at a svelte 100 minutes; Jackson's version clocks in at a morbidly obese 187 minutes. Even before King Kong, I had come to the conclusion that Peter Jackson couldn't make a film under three hours; this problem, coupled with his obsession with the original Kong film, makes for some extremely drawn out viewing. Jackson seemingly refused to add any major plot elements to the film for fear of tainting the original masterpiece, so how did he manage to stretch the film to an additional 87 minutes? He just made everything take longer. Much, much longer. Instead of a two-minute fight between King Kong and a couple of dinosaurs, it now takes ten minutes. What once took mere moments to establish the tribes of Skull Island now takes enormous sweeping, special-effects laden camera shots of various dirty, dentally-challenged people of politically-correct indeterminate race and their incoherent babbling. Instead of taking ten minutes to shoot a giant gorilla off the top of a building, it now takes around a half-hour. It was very sad to see Kong die such a violent death in the original film; in the new version I was ready to shoot him down myself just to get it over with. I'm sure that many people will go to see the film and find its length appropriate; for those of you who don't, however, will, like my brother, finally feel my pain.http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=74You're hearing it everywhere: Happy Holidays, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa. At first, these phrases seem quite innocuous, but underneath them lies a dangerous subtext: America's ongoing War on Merry. The PC Police are at it again, this time targeting one of the English language's most beloved words. Slowly but surely, the word "merry" is being stripped from our vernacular. Today it's "happy holidays," but what will tomorrow bring? Go on your happy way? Happy-go-round? And what will happen to the children if this sick trend continues? Will they never know the joy, or dare I say "merriness," that the word "merry" has brought to so many generations before them? If you don't believe the seriousness of this issue, just look at what this country's homosexual agenda has done to the word "gay." So join me in the struggle to keep merry from being fagified by the left-wing liberal media. Let's put the "merry" back in meaningless, holiday-related semantic jestures!http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=73I honestly believe I killed every bug in South Carolina last night on my way home from Thanksgiving dinner:http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=72For quite a while now I've felt a certain disdain for news anchors, radio "personalities," and sportscasters. These people are paid to run their mouth constantly so as to alleviate the typical American's fear of silence (which apparently is called sedatephobia, I've just learned), so naturally, since there's really not that much interesting to say on any subject for hours on end, they can become quite annoying in a short amount of time. Radio personalities are just useless, especially the ones who come in twos and go by their first names (bonus points if their names make them sound like dumb rednecks); these guys tend to sing songs about flatulence and the like and usually clog up your local record store's comedy section with albums named after female genitalia. News anchors probably bother me the least, but they definitely annoy me when they break character and start straying from the teleprompter; nothing's worse than seeing a news anchor try to tell a lame joke about a green puppy, then segue into a story about suicide bombers. Or so I thought. Tonight while football was on my TV (I hesitate to say I was watching it, since I had been reading a book during the game), a sportscaster made the same fatal mistake of telling a joke. Unlike the news anchor, however, the problem wasn't that the joke was unfunny, but rather this sportscaster's overestimation of the intellect of his fellow sportscasters who then attempted to expound on that joke with an even funnier one. Here's how it went down:Sportscaster 1: "I'm going to make a guess here. You could count on less than one hand the number of balls the Steelers are going to throw..."giggling ensuesSportscaster 2: "You could probably count them on less than one finger!"Now there's no better way to kill a joke than by trying to explain it, but I figured this one's already rigor mortis by now anyway so no harm done. You see, the first sportscaster was trying to say that the number of balls the Steelers would throw was zero, hence the ability to count them on less than one hand, or no hands if you will. However, apparently the second sportscaster was thinking of the type of no hand that has at least one finger, so he felt it best to correct the first sportscaster by saying one could count on less than one finger the number of balls thrown, which would eliminate all doubt that the number was zero. And the comedic genius that is the sportscaster strikes again.http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=71Sorry, Dover, Pennsylvania. You're screwed. Pat Robertson decreed today that because of your refusal to teach that the world began with a talking snake and a woman made out of a guy's rib as scientific fact, God has turned His back on you. And don't bother crawling back to the Lord during the next natural disaster, either; after all, "you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there." On the other hand, Kansas, you have decided to let God into your science classes, and for that, you're off the hook. The next time one of your cities is leveled by one of God's tornadoes, which should be next Tuesday if my research is correct, feel free to pray away. God knows you need it.http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=70I was quite dismayed yesterday to find out about the new film Chapter 27 which is currently in production. The film portrays the jerk of all jerks in the days leading up to John Lennon's assassination. The title alludes to the 26-chapter novel Catcher in the Rye (ironically one of my favorite novels) which Lennon's killer used to explain his motivations for the murder (with the 27th chapter being the final, unwritten chapter sealed by the killer's actions). Typically the outrage over the event of John Lennon's murder runs so deep that his fans almost always refrain from even mentioning his murderer's name (as I have done in this article), especially because of the killer's desire for fame, so I'm sure the making of this film will cause some controversy among those who care the most about Lennon's life and career. While it's true that we can never deny the senseless murder of John Lennon, is it too much to ask that filmmakers at least refrain from putting his killer in the spotlight?http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=69...is the fact that morons like this win the lottery.Link: CNN.com: Police: Winning lottery ticket purchased with stolen credit cardhttp://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=68There seemed to be quite a bit of controversy stirring today over the President's comments on the role religion played in his nominating Harriet Miers for Supreme Court justice. While he didn't come out and directly say so (his words were "part of Harriet Mier's life is her religion" when asked about her background), it is quite obvious that religion did play a part in Bush's nomination. Bush has said in the past that he chose Miers and Roberts because they share his values, and Bush makes no qualms about his Christian beliefs. What I don't understand is why we should expect the President to do anything other than choose someone who shares his same belief system. I can't see why it's news that Bush, a conservative Christian Republican, chose a conservative Christian Republican for the Supreme Court. Who else would he nominate, Al Sharpton? If I were president, I would definitely make religion a deciding factor in a choice for Supreme Court justice. I certainly wouldn't nominate an evangelical Christian conservative because I don't share those fundamental beliefs. It seems to me that these nominations were determined when Bush won the election in 2004. It's one of the perks of being the President, and it just so happened that Pat Robertson prayed out two during Bush's stay in office. That's just how it goes.http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=67For the past several days, I've been enjoying the new Fiona Apple album "Extraordinary Machine." I had downloaded the leaked version a while back, and am now happy to have paid my few dollars for this wonderful CD (even though some of the songs have undergone some changes, not for the better). I ended up buying the DualDisc version, which has some great video clips. The improved sound quality over the MP3s I had in addition to the nice DVD extras definitely made it worth the purchase.In case you don't know the story, here's some background info: Epic (Fiona Apple's record label) had no plans to release "Extraordinary Machine," claiming that it had no commercial appeal, but they quickly changed their minds once the entire album leaked out on the Internet and was rabidly snatched up by her fans. Today it's Amazon's #2 seller in Music (despite Slate magazine's prediction to the contrary).The whole debacle over the release of Apple's new CD just seems to be another example of how piracy of intellectual property is actually driving some industries. A similar phenomenon has happened in the video game arena; re-issues of classic arcade games that have been emulated on PC using MAME for years are constantly being released for all the major consoles. Turner Broadcasting System has started a new service called GameTap, which lets users download and play old video games from virtually every platform, for a small monthly fee, of course. Nintendo is set to launch downloads of their entire back catalog when their new Revolution console ships next year to counter the rampant ROM trading of classic NES, SNES, and N64 games on the web. Though they may deny it, it sure seems to me that piracy of commercially unavailable materials is sending a wake-up call to the industry; in these instances, they seem to actually be responding to existing demand among consumers instead of trying to create it using hype and marketing nonsense. What a concept.http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=65Here is a recent dialog between my wife Marjorie and the woman at the register where I got my oil changed this weekend. Now I know how it feels to face a master typist. I feel so humbled.Marjorie: Here you go [hands her the receipt]Register Woman: That'll be $28.34. What are you paying with?Marjorie: Credit card.RW: Do you want to do debit or credit? [Takes the card]Marjorie: Oh, you can do it as debit.RW: Okay, enter your PIN.[Marjorie enters PIN. Silence ensues.]RW: Did you push the green button?Marjorie: Oh, no [pushes green button]RW: What's on the Enter button of every keyboard?Marjorie: Um...[looks blankly]Me: Are you talking about the arrow?RW: That's on every keyboard [She points to the green button]. It means Enter.Me: Yeah, that's from the old days of the typewriter when it was the Return key, indicating that it returns the carriage to the next...RW: [Holds up her nasty-ass computer keyboard] See? It's on the Enter button.Me: Yeah, I know, I...[I begin to say something about how I work with computers every day, then give up]Marjorie: Thanks [Takes receipt][RW goes back to reading her romance novel from the 80's]End of scene.http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=64Scott Stevens, a former TV weatherman, appeared on Lou Dobbs tonight with a very interesting theory: hurricanes Katrina and Rita were not natural disasters, but quite unnatural. For, you see, the storms didn't just happen. They were created by, here it comes: terrorists. Yes, terrorists. On his web site Weather Wars, Stevens tells how the Japanese mafia group Yazuka teamed up with the Russian government in the early 1990's to develop a weapon which can create catastrophes such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions. This guy is either a conspiracy theorist nut that would put even Oliver Stone to shame, or he's the prophet we'll all wish we listened to when we're pulling the tornado-torn, lava-laden Empire State Building out of the giant canyon. You know, kind of like that crazy guy that annoys you at the mall with the religious tracts.http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=63When Ashley Smith, the woman held hostage by Brian Nicolas after Nicolas shot and killed several people at an Atlanta courthouse, claimed that she convinced Nicolas to turn himself in after sharing God and The Purpose-Driven Life, many religious groups and media outlets rallied around Smith and this apparently miraculous work of literature. Now, months later, Smith reveals in her new book "Unlikely Angel" that Jesus wasn't the only thing she shared with Nicolas; she apparently gave him a little crystal meth, too. Apparently Smith herself suffered from drug addiction, having been in and out of rehab several times in the past. Armed with this new information, I wonder how many of the religious folks who praised Smith and "The Purpose-Driven Life" will now speak of the wonders of methamphetamine and its ability to show people the error of their ways. Smith herself has even claimed that God spoke to her while she was driving under the influence of drugs; God told her to let go of the steering wheel, which she did, causing her car to crash. Unlikely Angel indeed.Link: CNN.com: Smith gave alleged courthouse shooter drugshttp://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=62There's a battle raging among local TV stations these days. Over what, you ask? Is the conflict over whose news is the most timely, the most accurate, or the most important to the station's viewers? No, none of the above. It's about whose Doppler radar weather system has the biggest number at the end. The local station WNDU-TV in South Bend, IN has Super Doppler 16, with the number seemingly corresponding to the station's being channel 16 on the dial. Okay, so that makes some sense. WFSB in Hartford, CT, however, boasts a Doppler 3000 system which, while not super, does have a bigger number at the end. Finally, not to be outdone, is Charleston, SC's own (drumroll please) Super Doppler 5000! Yes, folks, that's 2000 more than WFSB's antiquated weather technology. Seriously, though, what do these numbers mean? I remember back in the 1980's and 90's when everything was "Something 2000," alluding to the next millennium to make a product sound futuristic. Of course, many of the companies and products (such as Gateway 2000) dropped that nomenclature once the year 2000 rolled around. Five-thousand, though, makes no sense to me. Are they claiming that they're actually 3000 years ahead of their competition? Will this numbers battle escalate into an all-out war? Will it reach a point where the numerical suffixes must be given in scientific notation? Or perhaps one day the whole conflict will end like arguments did in kindergarten: "Oh yeah, well I have Super-duper Doppler Infinity!" Only time will tell.http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=61The Vatican is now preparing a document which will ban gay priests, even if they are celibate. Since the 1970's, Catholics, unlike other even more intolerant sects of Christianity (such as the Baptists, who believe homosexuality is a choice and that gays can be converted to heterosexuals), believe that homosexuality is a true orientataion, and the real sin is the homogenital act. Just like it is a sin for two heterosexuals to engage in sex without the possiblity of procreation, it is a sin for two homosexuals to engage in sex because no procreation can take place. Okay, all this makes a little more sense than the Baptists' logic, but the new ban of homosexuals from the priesthood still has me a bit confused. It seems as if the Vatican is saying that it is okay for heterosexual men who are heterosexuals by nature to be attracted to women but not act on the attraction, but it is not okay for homosexual men who are homosexual by nature to be attracted to men while not acting on that attraction. Because Catholicism does not make the distinction between homosexual acts and heterosexual acts without the possibility of procreation, where does this logic come from? Apparently the document is really meant to address not the problem of homosexual acts between a priest and another consenting adult, but to address the recent epidemic of child molestation in the priesthood. The scientific community repeatedly publishes studies that show homosexuality and pedophelia have no link, yet the Catholic church seemingly does not make this distinction. My opinion has always been that the disproportionate number of gays and child molesters in the priesthood can be explained by the nature of the priesthood itself. If a man finds himself attracted to other men or young boys, what can he do to avoid these temptations? What better closet to hide in than the priesthood, where it is forbidden by God to act on those temptations. Of course, the threat of God's wrath still doesn't always overcome one's immediate biological and sexual urges, so acts of child molestation do occur in the priesthood. All of this gay-bashing by the Catholic church seems to me to be a misdirected effort to curb child molestation in the priesthood, yet only further proves to me the rampant contradictions still present in even the most progressive forms of Christianity and the futility of reconciling ancient "holy" documents like the Bible with the complexity of the modern world.http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=60First there was Cindy Sheehan protesting the war in Iraq; now there's a mom in New York challenging the RIAA after the association filed a lawsuit against her for pirating music over the Internet. Unlike most who have simply rolled over and paid the ridiculous $7,500 in damages to the RIAA, Patricia Santangelo is taking the case to court. Now I'm all for paying artists for music they create, and even paying the record companies for their work in distributing the music to the masses, but I think what Santangelo is doing is to be commended. It's about time somebody stood up to the thugs in the RIAA; after all, the RIAA and the MPAA are doing other nefarious things behind our backs which violate our Fair Use rights as US citizens and which go unchecked due to the ruckus they raise over the P2P scene. What strikes me as the most interesting, though, and the reason I'm writing this post, is the fact that it's moms, not the youth, fighting the power. Where are the demonstrations on college campuses and the great folk songs denouncing these types of things like we saw in the 1960s and 1970s? Are teens just not affected by today's issues like they were back then? Is it because the US draft has been replaced by a more subtle and marginal backdoor draft, and because it's the parents getting slapped with the lawsuits for the actions of their children? Or could it be that middle-aged women have just now discovered Rage Against the Machine? It does seem to have one very positive side effect, though; while Hillary Clinton continues to fight the tired battle of fixing other people's kids, the New Moms are taking care of their own.http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=59Short post today; it's late and a bit past my bedtime. I just wanted to quickly inform everyone of one of the most horribly wonderful shows on TV: Bibleman. Conceived by the comedic genius Willie Aames of "Charles in Charge" fame, the show chronicles the adventures of Bibleman and his trusty token sidekick Cypher as they battle evil with bad acting and even worse costumes. If you get a chance, do check this show out; it comes on at 1 PM Eastern Time on TBN (you know, the network with all the crying people and the woman with the purple make-up). I'm not sure if I'd rather watch this show or a flash animation of Kirk Cameron telling me I'm going to hell.http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=58On Wednesday, federal judge Lawrence Karlton ruled that the pledge of allegiance is unconstitutional, or at least it's unconstitutional to make kids say it in school. Being an agnostic, I do have some rather strong feelings about forcing any particular religion on someone or punishing those who don't believe in the prevailing thought du jour, but really, the pledge of allegiance? The pledge says "under God," not "under Jehovah" or "under Allah." The great thing about the word "God" is that it means so many things to so many people. For many, like me, I see the words "under God" in the pledge as simply an idiom; it's a phrase that's there because at one time it actually meant something (i.e. to counteract atheistic communism in the 1950's) but now just serves as a symbol that we're all united under some kind of ideology. Besides, what is the pledge of allegiance really for, anyway, other than to give kids something to mumble through during homeroom? This is the kind of stuff that makes conservatives' blood boil, and rightly so. I certainly would like to distance myself from rulings like this, but inevitably many who know me probably think I'm for this kind of nonsense.http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=57Seeing as much running water as has passed through New Orleans in the last couple weeks would make me have to go, too.Link: Reuters.comhttp://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=56While I've been sitting around waiting for Hurricane/Tropical Storm/Drizzle Ophelia to finally make landfall, I was thinking about all the prayer that has probably been going on recently among religious circles. Judging from the track of the storm, it looks like it's either going to hit South Carolina or North Carolina, which leads me to believe there's a "prayer war" of sorts going on between the two states. I would imagine that people from both states are praying that the hurricane doesn't hit their house, but as is the nature of hurricanes, it's not just going to simply disappear. After all, God stopped doing magic tricks miracles a couple thousand years ago. This leaves God up to making a nasty decision: whose lives to bestow his mercy upon, and whose lives to make a living hell for the next six months while they rebuild their roofs and make auto insurance claims for that Suburu with the new tree for a hood ornament. Of course, being the software engineer that I am, I would think that with the repetitive and complicated task of answering prayers, God would have some kind of heavenly IT staff to make this thing automated. I mean, it would be ridiculous to think that God would answer prayers on a whim, right? There has to be some predictable outcome based on a set of parameters, or else the whole thing would seem rather random, or at least somewhat capricious on God's part. So I've come up with an algorithm on which I believe this simple choice, hitting South Carolina or North Carolina with a hurricane, could possibly be made. The following is a formula for calculating each state's Weather/Prayer Index, or WPI:WPI = (((((population of area * number of prayers) * (number of republicans / number of democrats) - number of sins committed in last 90 days) * number of abortions committed in last 90 days) - number of black people^2) / (number of baptists - number of catholics)) * Pat RobertsonWhoever has the highest WPI is spared, and the loser becomes the next Sodom and Gomorra. And you thought prayer was all fairies and unicorns. Silly you.http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=55They're back!  The two posts from the past that you know and love!  I was able to search through Firefox's internet cache on one of my computers and salvage my first two posts (my web host decided my database tables weren't good enough for their servers and deleted them).  This will teach me to make backups, or at least make me say "I should have made a backup of my data" the next time this happens.http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=52Oh yeah, I remember now.  So Bush in his infinite wisdom decides today to appoint the moron who brought us the duct tape and plastic sheeting fiasco, David Paulison, to the head of FEMA, replacing Michael Brown who "stepped down" after his bungling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.  If only Paulison had been around to tell the citizens of New Orleans and Mississippi to duck and cover, perhaps the Gulf coast wouldn't be in the shape it is.  The only reason I can think that the American people can stand to have a guy like Bush in the presidency is for the same reason we voted for the dorky kid in high school for class president: it's fun to see goofballs have power go to their heads.  "Free hall passes for everyone!"http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=51Well isn't this just wonderful...one day into my brand new blog, and my web host decides to wipe out my database.  They said that my database tables were in the wrong format and that they didn't have backups, so I'm pretty much out of luck.  If anyone can remember my previous two posts verbatim, feel free to e-mail them to me so I can put them back up.  Otherwise I'll have to hunt around my computer and see if the pages are still in my web cache.  So where was I...http://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=54 Oh yeah, remember in my last post I said something about getting "back" to the Internet(s)?  While I was in high school and college, I had a personal web site with AOL.  It's gone now that I no longer have an AOL account, but I was able to dredge up some remains of it on archive.org.  What you'll see there was pretty much the last iteration of the site before I got a job doing web development professionally and gave up the "doing it for fun" thing for a while.  I like the part in my bio page that says I'm still really active in my church (some things change), and that I have a wonderful girlfriend named Marjorie (some things don't; she's now my wife).  It's amazing that almost every word and image posted on the Internet gets archived these days.  I'm just glad I never posted nude photos (NSFW) of myself.Link: What's left of my old web sitehttp://www.paulcrowder.net/entries/entryview.aspx?ID=53Well, it's time I got back on this thing called the Internets.  Yes, I know, you're thinking, "it's called the Internet, you stupid idiot, not the Internets...only a total moron would call it the Internets," but I figure if Al Gore can invent the Internet, then George W. Bush is allowed to rename it.  Anyway, this is my first blog post on my new personal blog.  I've been posting a while to my other blog, Idiometry, but I decided that examining American idioms just didn't exhibit my massive sense of self-importance like a personal blog does.  Of course, I feel a little late to the party with this whole personal blog thing (ooh, I sense a new post to Idiometry), but I figure I might as well get in on it now before the next big fad (which, by the way, I predict will have something to do with cranial implants and shiny space-suits).  Anyway, I hope to cover such light and controversy-free subjects such as politics, religion, and puppy-kicking...okay, maybe not puppy-kicking so much, but probably the other two.  I'll also probably write the occasional, obligatory movie review, video game review, potato chip review, or anything else I deem myself qualified to review while ignoring the fact I have no real experience or education in those areas.  So, I know this isn't the greatest blog post you've ever read, but I promise you, it'll get better.  Pinky swear.