There are 2 days left to get your links up and enter to win a zune30. The winner will be announced at the end of march, but you have to enter by end of day on Feb 28, at which point the entry form will be taken down, and entries will no longer be accepted. Good luck!

This is the WORST IDEA EVER. Reebok is partnering with Kool-Aid to produce Kool-Aid scented sneakers. Yes, let that sink in, and then repeat it, Kool-aid scented sneakers.So in otherwords, someone decided that kids are not getting exposed to enough sugar, so they needed to cause more cravings for sugar by adding the smell of a sugar drink to sneakers. Maybe this will work out though and actually reduce the desire to drink kool-aid, once the smell of cherry scented sweaty feet gets into the noses of America.

LOL. Surely this is horribly wrong to a lot of folks, but frankly this is funny and sad on a whole next level. "Turning on" jesus to turn on the lights is bad enough, but the kids just add to the commentary on the hypocrisy of the catholic church and their unpriestly behaviors at times. Or maybe its just a stab in general at the over zealous religeonuts. Regardless, just from a joke point of view, it's a giggle.

With just seven days left in the month of February, and every iPhone user with any will at all to add new software to their iPhone waiting for it, the iPhone SDK is being delayed. NOOOOOOOOoooo. BusinessWeek is reporting that they have gotten information from a reliable source that the SDK is going to be delayed 1-3 weeks. I was looking forward to flash on my phone, but i guess we can all wait another 3 weeks if we must.

Historically Texas plays a lot of redistricting games to keep their status as a republican state. The reality is that Texas, while still largely republican, has become more and more democrat over the years. Enough so, that the gerrymandering has become ridiculous, like in this case. This time around, they put the polling place more than seven miles from Prairie View A&M university. Not too big a deal at first glance, since after all I have to drive to mine, as do most people. But college is a different world, many students don't have cars, I know I didn't and neither did most of my friends. So of course, to limit the number of inevitably democrat voters that could turn up, they put the polling facility far enough away to make it not "just a walk". Well, those A&M students walked... LOL. They shut down the highway as they marched the seven miles to cast their votes on the first day of early voting. Yeay students! Yeay right to vote! Yeay everything else that may actually save this country from its horrible downward spiral.

Pizzahut is a Yum! Brands Restaurant and as such, it has the nifty Yum! brands nutrition calculator. The calculator "technically" works and is "technically" correct, but if you pay attention to some details, you will quickly realize they are pulling a fast one. Honestly I don't think it's intentional on their part, but nevertheless, it is incorrect for 'real world use'. I discovered the problem today when trying to figure out what I could eat when my parents come over to visit tonight. We are just going to get some pizza since its quick and easy, but since my wife and I are trying to lose weight, we are counting calories. Easy enough when you are eating mass produced food, since after all, they go ahead and get their stuff professionally analyzed. Of course, this assumes they are showing the info to you correctly... take the following info: grams calories 1 Slice Thin Crust 12" Medium Sauce, Cheese 79 200 1 Slice Thin Crust 12" Medium Sauce, Cheese, Green Pepper 91 170 1 Slice Thin Crust 12" Medium Sauce, Cheese, Mushroom 91 170 notice something wrong there? How in the hell does a cheese pizza have MORE calories than a cheese with mushroom or green pepper. WTF? How is this even remotely possible? The only thing that could account for this is that they are reducing the amount of cheese on the pizza to accommodate the veggies. But, in reality, there is absolutely no way in hell, that the pizza chefs are reducing the cheese by X number of grams per topping added. It may be that they are supposed to, but no way are they doing that. I would be happy to be proven wrong, but i'm going to guess there is no way I will. The nutrition info on Pizzahut is just plain WRONG, and I am not really sure why or how. Now of course, the best way to handle it, is to just go with the worst case pizza you can make up, with or without the toppings you want. So in my case, I will just assume 200 calories per slice, regardless of the veggies. That way at least you are certain you will not overeat. I am sure this is not due to difference in how each pizza was made when analyzed, since the calculator almost certainly uses the individual values and adds them up. So each component would be analyzed, individually, and then added up to create a pizza calorie value. This should be fine, but it seems that they are knocking the cheese pizza value down by 30 calories when you add a topping on the medium thin crust. They also do it on the hand tossed crust 12", by knocking it down 20 calories. I am open to any suggestion or information why this might be the case, but it now makes me wonder about another Yum! Brands restaurant, Taco Bell...

About 1.5 years ago, i pissed off amazon. I was sending them quite a bit of sales via a network of affiliate sites I had built up. When they released their Un-boxed service, I jumped and bought a few domains that stepped a bit on the branding and trademarks of Amazon, buying things like amazonunboxed.com and such. Well the lawyers caught wind, I got a cease and desist, and my account suspended. Now, I immediately complied with all their requests and requirements, and as such, they were also very forgiving and promised to reinstate my account, even paying the pending fees once compliance was completed. I complied as fast as possible, but then started getting blown off when emailing them. 1.5 years later and after sending 1 email every monday... I finally got my account turned back on! AND... I am getting paid for all my back affiliate fees! Woohoo! It's no small chunk of change either. I think I am going to use it to seed the Ashley Barchas college fund since I really never expected to get it. So the moral of the story is, be persistent and if you are in the right, you will probably eventually get what you should. And, Amazon keeps its promises, though slow and frustrating, they did keep it, so kudos to Amazon. So now, to turn that traffic back on

A few months ago I purchased two Shuttle SN68SG2 XPC barebones systems. It's one of those small little boxes that you could turn into a media center machine or small little quite development box. Well, the media center is up and running no problem, with Windows MCE, but linux for a dev box, not so much. Let me preface this with, I am by no stretch a linux nerd, and have no recent linux experience, so this could all get chalked up to stupid ass linux noob. First problem is the network. It is a MARVELL 88E1116 which in most linux distros does not seem to be supported. Ubuntu supports it, as does knoppix, but debian does not. Debian does recognize the 10 dollar network card I put into the box however, so that gets around the network problem in an easy way. Yes I could jump through a billion hoops and create a new driver, or some silly thing like that from what I have read, but meh, not worth it. The next issue is the video card. The shuttle box has an integrated NVIDIA GeForce 7 Series card, which should be recognized by most distros from what I have read, but oh no, not this card for some reason. Knoppix is the only one to recognize it and bring up a desktop GUI. Ubuntu desktop version just hangs during install, and debian pretends it can do it, but then fails out the command prompt. It's not a big deal to have the GUI i suppose, except for the fact that I am a linux noob and point-and-click is much easier for me to figure out than guessing at commands at a command line. Knoppix would work, except I cant figure out how to get it to install to the hard drive instead of running live off the CD. So currently I have Ubuntu desktop installed onto the SN68SG2, but i still can't do anything with it since I don't actually know how to do anything from the command prompt. I think I am going to have to call my friend perkiset and get a quick walkthrough at some point of how to get MySQL and Apache setup from the command line. Ideally i would really like a GUI. If i can get ubuntu to boot to the GUI, I will be a happy camper and can probably muddle my way forward. But... how in the hell do you launch the GUI from the command line?!?! I need to get into a different business. Anyone need a kato? FOLLOWUP: Err. ok. I just solved it. I can now run Debian on a SN68SG2. I got annoyed and tried debian again, but when I installed it, i deselected everything, except the "standard computer" choice in the step where you can select some standard features like webserver, dns, etc. By using a spare network card that I had laying around, debian was able to recognize the connection, and install just fine. So now, after the reboot, I am at the command prompt with a bare bones linux install. Then I did an "apt-get update" from the console followed by an "apt-get upgrade" in order to get the installed stuff up to date. Let it do its thing... Then i installed KDE via "apt-get install kde" (random choice really), followed by "apt-get install xorg". I picked 800x600 as the only resolution to allow in the xorg setup. After you finish going through the setup screen(s), you are back at the command prompt. I typed "startx" and hit enter... low and behold, the KDE setup came up and viola! I now have a GUI for debian on this god forsaken little SN68SG2. So now my next goal is to get apache, PHP and Mysql up and running. Then possibly try to get the built in ethernet to work. If I figure out the ethernet, i will post again since I have found a lot of people hoping to get the Shuttle SN68SG2 to work without any extra parts under linux.

I ordered some more vitamins from my favorite supplier, iHerb.com and as usual I got a sample of something they sell. Last time it was Bilberry Tea that tasted like ass, but then again, i am not a fruit tea person. This time it was a sugar substitute called SweetFiber. It's a zero calorie all natural sweetener derived from Luo Han Guo (a fruit) and uses some fiber as the vehicle to make it a powder I assume. It has a weird taste to it, almost like notebook paper is probably the closest thing I can come up with. Plus its got a pretty significant aftertaste pretty similar to saccharine, but less pleasant. I think i will stick with the splenda for now, though i have another packet of the SweetFiber and will try it in something else. If its good i will post, if not, why bother.

Canon has just filed for a patent on Eye-biometric digital photo watermarking. This is pretty cool, and makes great sense, even just for knowing who took the photo within your own family. Digital watermarking is done to hide a piece of info in a photo, so that you can prove ownership in the future, at least thats the primary reason. But in a family where a few people take photos. You register your eyeball with the camera, and then when you take a photo, it gets tagged with your name as the credit. My wife an I look at a lot of our older photos and wonder which one of us took it. Not that it is all that important, but nice to know. For professionals, this will eliminate a significant step in protecting their intellectual property. For consumers, it will allow for vanity credit, as well as protection against illegal use from sites like Flickr. But in the end, the legal protection will be about as effective as DRM and DVD encryption, which is to say, not effective. Via Engadget