Becky and I made some big strides in the new design for the World Wide Wood site this weekend. I’m pretty excited about it… it’s a very different look and feel We have a few bits and pieces to finish up, but the overall design is complete, including a new color scheme and layout. We think you’ll like it.

Saturday night we hung out with my cousin Mark ( of ***Izotope|http://www.izotope.com/*** ). His car gave us detailed computer-navigated directions to ***Taco Bell|http://www.tacobell.com/***, where we had dinner. Speaking of TB, they have this great new feature on their hot sauce packets: little hot-sauce-related quotes. For example: “The road to mediocrity is paved with ketchup packets.” or “Why order hot sauce when you can ask it nicely?” or “Mild: It’s the new ketchup.” (P.S. For anyone who cares, “ketchup” is the preferred spelling, while “catsup” and “catchup” are variants) Becky made a chocolate-cherry cake for dessert, which was beyond excellent. It had a devil’s food cake mix at its core, but did not use the recipe on the box. Becky can post the actual recipe she used, but suffice to say, it rocked. There was a lot left over, so I brought it in to work today. It was quickly devoured. One choice quote from the office crowd: “It’s like cake on crack.” Many thanks to my wonderful wife and her drug lab… err, I mean, kitchen. 🙂

After dinner we partook in ***quality entertainment|http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0098546/*** on DVD.

On the Mac front, the update to Mac OS X 10.3.3 was ***recently released|http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/macosxupdate_10_3_3.html***, and I’ve got that installed on the Pismo and Sawtooth at home. It just keeps getting better.

I have a pet peeve when it comes to fast food resturaunts and thier pricing schematics. Here’s the deal. Yesterday, I drove through McDonalds wanting some McNuggets and a small Diet Coke. I had a moment to look over the menu-board and was faced with a frustrating decision. The two items that I wanted were the same exact price as a ‘combo meal’ containing the McNuggets, a Large Coke and a Large Fries. More food for the same money. hmmm.

My good sense of Value tells me that I should order the combo meal. For the same price I get much more lunch. I would be the first to jump on such an offer in many other settings; ie, buy 3 tires get one free, or buy-one-get-one-free boxes of cereal. However, this time I was trying to be healthy and not eat all those french fries!

Yesterday’s experience reminded me of one I had a while back. I wanted a bagel and a small hot chocolate at Dunkin Donuts. I went in and ordered. The kid at the counter, being nice-doing his job, let me know that it was actually cheaper if I bought the large cocoa with the bagel (again a combo meal deal). I didn’t want the larger drink and ended up paying MORE for less! How aggrivating!

I wish that I could say that I didn’t understand why places do this, but I do. People respond well to marketing that offers them more for less. And the combo meals are easier and quicker to order. It would just be nice to spend money in correct proportion to the amount of food actually purchased. How frustrating to be penalized for wanting less!

Ok, this is a game almost EVERYBODY can play!

I thought up this little survey whilst driving around the North Shore tonight. All you need in order to participate is a radio with good FM reception and a scan button. Traveling in a car is a perfect place to take the survey, but you could also do it on a stereo at home if you get good reception in there (I only say this because the radios inside our house don’t get as much FM reception as the one in the car). If you don’t have a scan button, you can still participate, but you will need to scan through the stations manually. For the rest of the instructions, I’ll assume you’re using scan.

By the way, if you don’t usually listen to the radio in the car, you can still play. Just tune in to the radio for the purposes of this survey, then you can go back to whatever you normally listen to, or silence, or whatever.

To begin, tune your radio to the FM band, and set it to the lowest station. On my car stereo that’s 87.9. Next, hit the scan button to begin scanning through stations. Each time the radio stops on a station which has an audible, understandable broadcast, count it. If it’s too staticky to understand, don’t count it. At the same time, see if the broadcast is something you wouldn’t mind listening to – a song you like, perhaps, or a favorite talk radio show. If it is likable, keep track of it in a separate count, and try to remember which station, and who/what was being broadcast. But don’t stop the scan to listen, just let the radio keep scanning. When your radio has scanned to the end of the spectrum (107.9 or so), you should have a count of the number of stations which came in audibly, and a count of the programs that you might have actually wanted to listen to.

When you’ve got that, post it in the comments here, along with the name of any programs or songs you would have liked to listen to. Also, please make a note as to what time of day you were listening to the radio, and where you were (going?) at the time.

Oh, and feel free to go back and listen to the good programs, if any.

I received a check in the mail last night for thirteen dollars and eighty-six cents, courtesy of the ***Compact Disc Minimum Advertised Price Antitrust Litigation Settlement|http://www.musiccdsettlement.com/english/default.htm***. The deadline to file as a member of the class action was March 3, 2003. I had filled out a form back then, stating that I had purchased a compact disc between January 1, 1995 and December 22, 2000.

The original lawsuit accused a group of recording companies of conspiring to raise the prices of music CDs across the board, including BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal, Warner, as well as some retail chains including Tower Records.

The settlement provided for $67,375,000 in cash refunds for consumers across the country, plus $75,000,000 worth of music cds to be distributed to non-profit organizations. In Massachusetts, these CDs will be distributed to public libraries.

Thanks go to ***Mass. Attorney General Tom Reilly|http://www.ago.state.ma.us/*** for fighting for the citizens of Massachusetts, and for getting these checks sent to approximately 68,000 Massachusetts residents. Check out here at tjryanlaw.com the Top Personal Injury Attorneys for more information.

…for I have not blogged. It has been five days since my last blog entry.

The following incidents have kept me away from the house of blog:

On Friday, it was the Valentine’s Day party at work. Lots of food, a bagful of kiddie Valentine cards, the usual.

On Saturday, Valentine’s Day, Becky and I had a nice lazy day at home. We watched TV and hung out and in the afternoon we went to the ***CambridgeSide Galleria|http://www.cambridgesidegalleria.com/*** for dinner at ***The Cheesecake Factory|http://www.thecheesecakefactory.com/***. It was delicious. I had a spicy chicken sandwich and a slice of chocolate peanut butter cookie dough cheesecake. Becky had a tropical fish sandwich. Yum. ( Helpful Hint: If you go to the Galleria on a weekend, and eat at one of the three major restaurants, parking is only 99 cents for up to three hours. Even if you don’t eat, parking at the Galleria is still just $3 for up to 10 hours, and it’s just a short walk from the Science Park or Lechmere T stops, for easy access to the T system. )

On Sunday we were in South Boston for the twins’ birthday party. There were lots of presents and people, and two duck-shaped birthday cakes (which the twins did not get to eat, of course). ***Jenn|http://junefourteenth.blogspot.com/*** also arrived on Sunday and came to the party with us.

Monday was President’s Day, but of course I did not have a holiday, so I was back at ***work|http://www.christianbook.com/*** while Becky and Jenn hung out.

That brings us to today… I’m at work again and Becky and Jenn are babysitting in Southie.

On the techie front, I’ve been playing around with the ***Firefox|http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/*** browser, and I’ve come to like it better than any other browser (including Safari) on both my Mac and PC systems. Firefox is based on the Gecko rendering engine, which is also used in Mozilla, Netscape, Camino, and numerous other applications. It’s fast, renders accurately, and looks nearly the same on every platform on which it runs.

Yesterday I bought another ***CF card|http://www.sandisk.com/retail_compactflash.html*** for the ***A70|http://www.powershot.com/powershot2/a70-60/index.html***. I took some photos at the party on Sunday, and I had to delete a lot in order to get them to fit on my 128 meg card. With a 256 meg card and a 128 meg card, I now have three times the previous amount of space to store photos while on the go.

Speaking of the A70… as usual, something newer has just come out: the ***A75|http://www.powershot.com/powershot2/a75/index.html***. Same price as the A70, more features, better design, bigger LCD…. oh well. In any case, I highly recommend the PowerShot line if you’re looking for an excellent digital camera for any budget. Canon is reported to be releasing a huge amount of new equipment this year, and thus far they have released ***eleven new products|http://www.dpreview.com/articles/pma2004/Canon/*** at the Photo Marketing Association trade show in Las Vegas, including the A75. Learn more on the official statement – WebDesign499 specializing in website design, search engine optimization, e-commerce and advanced web development.

Finally, please notice a few changes to our site nav bar on the right. Some inactive pages have been removed, and Kathleen’s new blog has been added – we’re happy to have her back on the list. 🙂

Two pieces of good news today!

One: ***NAC|http://www.nac.net/*** and ***Site5|http://www.site5.com/*** have been removed from the ***SPEWS|http://www.spews.org/*** blacklist. Hooray! Many thanks go to the excellent ***Broadbandreports.com|http://www.broadbandreports.com/*** user community for bringing about this change. BBR is also a customer of NAC, and all of the BBR IP addresses were added to the list. BBR used their considerable clout to encourage NAC to terminate the known spammers. As it turns out, the NAC CEO was very much in the dark as to the spammer situation, and he has vowed to be much more involved and vigilant in detecting and banning the spammers from his network. So it looks like our email is back to normal! Thanks also to everyone who responded to my requests for help with email testing.

Two: The brake light situation on my car has been solved! Thanks to a timely suggestion from ***Bob Golding|http://bobgolding.blogspot.com/***, I made a simple check of the brake fluid level in my car. It turns out that the level was very low. So I picked up a bottle of brake fluid for $1.69 at ***AutoZone|http://www.autozone.com/***, poured it in, and tested out the car. Surprise surprise, the brake light turned off after I released the emergency brake! And it stayed off as I drove back to work, too! I’m quite happy that I’ve been able to make this simple fix, and I’d like express my thanks to Bob for the advice. I’ve given Bob and honorary spot on our Friends blog list. Thanks again, Bob!

Now I just have to take the car back to get re-inspected, and I should be home free! I also replaced the wiper blades with some nice new winter blades, so there should not be any more barriers to passing the inspection. Phew!

I had a wonderful birthday. My very cute husband made me breakfast in bed and bought me Pirates of the Carribean. ARRRRR!!!! And I didn’t have to do anything all morning and it was nice. For lunch we went to this place called Chunky’s. Chunky’s is a movie theater and resturaunt. You sit on comfy leather seats from Lincoln Contenentials at tables and then you can order pub food from the waitress. YUM and COMFY! We saw Cheaper by the Dozen. If my memory serves me correctly, it wasn’t much like the book, but still cute and entertaining. A nice day.

I’ve been doing some reading lately. It has been nice because I have been on a bit of a hiatus… I borrowed “The Hours” from my aunt. It was a little hard to get into, but fairly good. I got the feeling that the author was writing simply for the sake of writing an intellectual book. Kind of like he was just doing it to prove that he could. Having done some extensive research on and reading of Virginia Woolf’s novels a few years back I found it interesting how he wove her personal life and her character’s into the lives of other women’s. Very deep.

I also read, on Peter’s recommendation, American Gods. I really got into this one. The author weaves together the lives of all the gods that have been brought to America or created here over the years, Odin, Horus, Easter, Johnny Appleseed… It was deep and philosophical without being too heady.

I am now engrossed in a book called, “Ahab’s Wife”. You guessed it, about Ahab’s wife. But I’m just a little ways in and I haven’t even met Ahab yet, so I’ll let you know how it goes later on 🙂

A group of 50 men are being paid $5000 to ***spend 28 days in bed|http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2004/01/13/bed_rest_study_can_help_on_earth_and_in_space/***.

I’m feeling sleepy…

For any of you who might be interested I received my final mark from Tufts. I got an ‘A’ for my gigantic final paper and an ‘A’ over all for my Internship. w00t!

In an amazing archaeological feat, an even older version of my homepage has been discovered on the web.

Check the ***Wayback Archive|http://prwdot.org/?p=wayback*** for the details – you should see it near the top of the list in January, 1998. The page that has been archived is remarkably intact, even including photos!

Have fun!