Video blog

I haven't been able to figure out how to put video in my blogs without it taking a huge amount of time to load the page. I did put the Allan Holdsworth video I took on Google Video here, and since Google owns Blogger now, and video blogging is very hot right now, I would think that there will soon be some form of integration. You can watch here and here with bated breath.

Site of the day: gas prices

This site on MSN Autos is extremely cool. You type in your zip code (the link shows Bellaire, my neighborhood) and it gives you a map of all the gas stations in the area, along with their current prices. That way you can sidestep the dilemma of burning gas to save money at the pumps.

Happy Birthday, Dad!

Today is my father's seventy-seventh birthday, and he's still in great shape. We went to Macaroni Grill for dinner with my brother Rick and his wife Claire and their three boys, Callum, Braden, and Mason.

The boys mentioned that they read this site, so I've got a couple of things to say:


Callum swims like a fish and smells like one, too


Braden can make a sound like a dolphin, which should really impress the chicks when he's older (that's right, ladies, he's a HEVLE!)


Mason's real name is Captain Stinky McSmellypants and he's famished

More Hevle sites

I mentioned that this domain (hevle.com, now you can get here using drewhevle.com, andrewhevle.com, and hevle.net, too.) was owned by a French food company in China. I just did a little search on Netcraft to see some information about the servers that host this website, and I found some other hevle-related sites. deshevle.com, you might guess, looks like another French site because des is a common article in French. But when you visit the site, it's obviously not French. It's some kind of business in Moscow, it looks like some kind of housewares store. Then there's thevle.com, which looks like one of those crappy search spam sites that try to get hits by scamming search engines. UPDATE; it looks like the domain is owned by someone in BC, Canada, but is parked, and the parking service installs the crappy search spam site. This one is funny, though. I like the puppy.

Results of Main Page Tweaks

I updated the little "drew hevle" box in the right hand upper corner of the main page to be a server-side include, so the picture, caption, and thought (I'm calling it the "Thought of the Day") is now a separate blog. This has a lot of potential for easily making changes to the main page without having to rewrite the page from scratch.

The Law of Unintended Consequences (or, Eyes of Oedipus Rex)

You can see the results of the latest changes to my main page, I updated the picture, caption, and thought in my Thought of the Day blog. This has a lot of potential for easily making changes to the main page without having to rewrite the page from scratch. Now that I have a new camera, I might even be able to post more current self-photos in this spot. Maybe even HNT!

Destroyer by C. J. Cherryh

Destroyer by C. J. Cherryh.

RESERVED

Coming soon. I have written this post, but I have to wait to post it for reasons you will see when it's posted. In other words, because I said so.

Followup tweaks

I went ahead and made the "turn-ons and turn-offs" into a separate blog that is included in the main page. I'm calling it "Thought of the Day", although I've seen it used for Quote of the Day, Present Mood, Mastheads, Stray Thoughts, Random Thoughts, Pet Peeve of the Day, etc. I hope I can think of things to use it for. You know, in an ironic kind of way, like the kids are doing today.

Main page tweaks

I added some small things yesterday, under Feeds I added a link with a text description to Bloglines, in addition to the little ribbon image link. And I saw this real funny idea, I can't exactly remember where, I think it was here, where a blogger put sarcastic little asides in the titles of the links (hold your mouse over the link and wait a second or two to see them in this post). And then I added my "turn-ons" and "turn-offs". I may turn these into little blogs, like What I'm Reading and What I'm Reading (for Book Club), so that I can update them more often.

More tweaks

I like to fiddle with the format of the site. I added some small things yesterday, for example, under Feeds, I added a link with a text description to Bloglines, in addition to the little ribbon image link. And I saw this real funny idea, I can't exactly remember where, I think it was here, where a blogger put sarcastic little asides in the titles of the links (hold your mouse over the link and wait a second or two to see them in this post). And then I added my "turn-ons" and "turn-offs". I may turn these into little blogs, like What I'm Reading and What I'm Reading (for Book Club), so that I can update them more often.

Going once, going twice, SOLD!

I sold my 1982 Toyota Land Cruiser on eBay, you can see the completed auction here. I set the starting bid at $1,000 and had a high bid of $1,756 going into this morning, the last day of the auction. Several folks called and asked to come by and drive it. A couple of bids in the morning brought it up to $2,000, and I wasn't sure it was going to get much over that, especially since I mentioned in the description that I had paid $2,385 for it two years ago. By 2:30 pm, it was only at $2,007, and the auction ended at 5:47 pm, so I was pretty sure it had stalled. Several people emailed me to buy the vehicle outside the auction, but no one made a decent offer, the best was only $50 more than the highest bid so far. But there was a flurry of bids starting 10 minutes before the end of the auction, and the price went up in roughly $50 increments all the way to $3,100. In six days I had 7 bids, in the last day I had 27, 16 of which were in the last 10 minutes. I'm sure it would have gone higher if there was more time. My strategy of setting up the auction to end on Sunday evening, after everyone had had the weekend to check out my auction and were available to bid, seemed to have paid off. Anyway, it was a fun vehicle, but I'm glad to get the additional driveway space. My neighbors already think I'm the white trash of Bellaire, since I have had as many as four vehicles in front of my house, with at least one not working. In the last six months I've given one back (my El Paso company car), sold two (the Land Cruiser and my 1993 BMW 325is) and sent one to get worked on (my 1967 GTO convertible). And only acquired one, my new 2005 Lexus ES330, with which I am very pleased.

100% Man, documented

You Are 100% Manly and 0% Girly

You have a tough exterior - and usually a tough interior to match it. You're no nonsense, logical, and very assertive. Other men are intimidated by how manly you are. Women are attracted to you bacause of your manliness. You see things rationally, and don't let your emotions get the best of you.

How Boyish or Girlish Are You?

The Real Allan Holdsworth

Tony, David, and I (former Plague of Boils and Flaming Boils bandmates) went to see the real Allan Holdsworth last night at the Continental Club in Houston. There was a full house, about 400 folks, so we all got to be very close (literally) but also upclose and personal with Allan Holdsworth, Jimmie Johnson, and Chad Wackerman. My pictures didn't turn out very well, it was too dark, the flash pictures just got the folks standing near me, and the non-flash pictures were shaky because of the longer exposures. I took some video with my new digital camera that turned out pretty good, even the audio, but I'm having trouble posting it to the website in a way that you can access it easily. I'll post it in the next couple of days.

1982 Land Cruiser eBay auction

My auction on eBay is going strong, I started the bidding at $1000 and it's already up to $1526. The auction ends on Sunday evening, I did that intentionally, so that folks will be home and on their computers to bid at the end of the auction. It costs $40 to list a vehicle on eBay, you get a refund if you don't get any bids. I didn't have a reserve, so whoever bids the most by Sunday 5:47:32 PM CST wins the truck.
This is my first time selling anything on eBay, and I want to make sure that nobody winds up unhappy, so I put a whole bunch of information in the description, along with a bunch of pictures. Since the auction started, I've answered a half-dozen questions from interested bidders, and posted the questions and answers on the site as well.The pictures turned out fairly well, I waited until a sunny day, and it made a big difference. I probably should have washed the truck first, but it turned out okay. The only picture that didn't turn out too great was the close-up of the odometer, the dash was pretty dusty. I think this is a pretty good way to sell a vehicle. It's a lot more exciting than taking it down to the dealer to trade in when you buy a new car.

More fascinating blogging about taxes!

Have you ever had one of those "Eureka" moments? Where something just clicked into your head? How about it happening in a dream, or the moment you wake up? This morning I woke up and the first thing that came into my head was that I didn't claim the sales tax deduction for my house and the car I bought last year. (I know, I know, I'm a total geek.) I'll have to file an amended return, but it should save me another couple of thousand dollars. This is probably the first time having a tax professional do my taxes would have made a difference, but the cost far outweighs the interest I lost in overpaying last year.

Also, on my previous post about this year's taxes, I neglected to include the sales tax on my new car. I always fill out my tax forms and then wait a week or so and review them again. I usually catch one or two things that way.

How to drive your spouse/significant other crazy

If the love of your life didn't treat you exactly how you fantasized on Valentine's Day, here's how you can drive them crazy:

MEN:
1. Take the batteries out of all the remotes in the house (hide them well).
2. Organize his workshop, bedroom, or other special place.
3. Bribe his faithful dog away from him with a steady diet of Ring Dings.
4. Shrink his underwear in the dryer and when he complains, innocently suggest that he's gained a few pounds.
5. Stare at his forehead and when he notices, casually ask if there is any history of male pattern baldness on his mother's side.
6. "Accidentally" fill the gas tank of his new Porsche with diesel.
7. Repeatedly misplace the cordless phone, preferably in a different room each time.
8. Repeatedly lose his cellular phone in restaurants around town.
9. Loan his precious cellular phone to a pregnant girlfriend who "needs it more than he does."
10. Insist upon a lot of "meaningful conversations."
11. If you live together, have your mother fly in for a month-long visit unannounced.
12. Reverse his contact lenses in their case.
13. Snip a small hole in his fishing waders, then follow him with a camera to capture his "sinking" on film.
14. Superglue the pages of his Little Black Book together.
15. Give the secret stash of dirty magazines that he thinks you don't know about to his younger brother, who he hates.

WOMEN:
1. Call her by the dog's name and then deny it.
2. Answer all her questions with a question, preferably one on a totally different subject.
3. Super glue the commode seat in the up position.
4. Shrink her jeans and when she overreacts because she thinks that she's gaining weight, give her a condescending smile and say that you prefer her with some meat on her bones.
5. Firmly refuse to ever ask for directions even if you find yourself in Georgia when your original destination was California.
6. Call her by your mother's name and then deny it.
7. Start a conversation with the dog in the middle of one with her.
8. Buy her power tools for Valentine's Day.
9. Never give her a straight answer.
10. Take up yodelling and practice a lot.
11. Quote Tim Allen to validate your position during arguments. (Argh! Argh! Argh!)
12. Leave the newspaper open to an ad for plastic surgery.
13. Pretend you forgot how to speak English.
14. Answer every question with "Yes, dear." (Use with caution as PMS is a valid murder defense in many states.)

I work with monkeys

Do you work with monkeys?

Some of the things co-workers of mine have actually done:
1) Came to work armed, and told the boss that he was required to be armed at all times because of the work he did for "the government"
2) Worn slacks with K-Mart tags still attached.
3) Upon being notified that a dangerous dog was loose behind our building, went out and tried to pet the nice doggie. An ambulance was needed.
4) After said dog was released by the Animal Control from impoundment, another co-worker decided to adopt the nice doggie. He came to work the next day with both hands completely bandaged.
5) Left beer in the office refrigerator. And then get caught.
6) Had sex in the office with contract employees and allowed them to put down the time as overtime. And then get caught.
7) Wrecked a company vehicle and blamed the accident because he was being chased by rednecks. And then get caught.
8) Told his boss that he missed work for several days because he had been abducted. When he was told that the company required a drug test after unusual incidents, he replied, "oh yeah, they forced me to smoke crack".
9) Wear warm-ups and sandals to work.
10) Go to jail for road rage when you wreck a company vehicle, don't report it to the company and take the vehicle in to be repaired, decide it will cost too much and report the vehicle stolen. And then get caught.

eBay Motors

I listed my 1982 Toyota Land Cruiser FJ60 on eBay, you can see the listing here. I don't really have a place to keep it since I bought the Lexus. Although I've bought a lot of things on eBay, including this vehicle, this is the first time I've ever listed anything to sell. It cost me $42 to list this, so I hope it sells at a decent price the first time. I set an initial bid of $1000, with no reserve price, I'm hoping to get at least $2000 for it. Once this sells, it will bring me down from a high of four vehicles to just two, the GTO (it's in the shop getting a new interior right now) and my Lexus.

Taxes

I completed my 2005 taxes today, I usually take a day off from work to do them, but this year they were fairly easy despite the job change. I do them by hand, I don't buy tax preparation software. The $20 or so for Taxcut or TurboTax or others stuck in my craw when I was filling out the 1040EZ, because it was so easy. Doing my taxes manually was a challenge, and it became interesting to me to understand exactly how they were calculated. I download the Adobe Acrobat fill-in forms from the IRS site, and save them electronically. I use an Excel spreadsheet to do the math. My taxes have gradually become more complex, with itemized deductions now that I have a mortgage, and capital gains and estimated taxes and interest and dividends and alternative minimum taxes.

I adjusted my withholding downward at El Paso last year, because I overpaid the previous year by about $2600 (I bought my house in 2004). The only way to do this was to increase my number of deductions (I think I had to claim 7 instead of just myself, there's a calculator on the IRS site). I didn't do this when I got to Enbridge, though, and I ended up overpaying by about $2200 this year. No more interest-free loans to the government this year, I'm going to adjust my withholding on Monday.

Cool sites: Time

As you might know from my success at the Geek Quiz, I am a geek, and one characteristic of being a geek is that your watch/computer/VCR clocks are all set to the highest accuracy possible. I use the Official U.S. Time to set all my clocks (I just checked my watch and computer against the site, I'm within 15 seconds on my watch and within 1 second on my computer.)

The site is maintained by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and the USNO (U. S. Naval Observatory). Readings from the clocks of these agencies help determine UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) used by the GPS. The time maintained by both agencies never differs by more than 0.000 0001 seconds from UTC

Some other cool sites about time include this list of sites on the time.gov site, the NIST FAQ, a map of world time zones, official Greenwich Mean Time, and How Time Works on the excellent How Stuff Works site. Wikipedia has a good list of references as well on its Time page.

Woken Furies by Richard K. Morgan

Woken Furies by Richard K. Morgan.

Football season is over, at long last

I love football, but my desire to watch is proportional to how well our fantasy football team is doing. Entire seasons have been ruined by a poor start. This was the worst season the Nancy Boys have ever had. Here's an IM conversation (one sided) between me and Kevin (my team partner):

Drew: Nancy Boy up for another Monday night drubbing

Drew: Heart-rending, soul-wrenching, humiliating kick in the guts

Drew: Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory

Drew: Blown opportunities, choke

Drew: Just one more kick when we're down

Drew: Oh, how I long for the sweet kiss of death

Drew: Futile, futile

Drew: Help me quit this miserable existance. I long for the perpetual gloom of that good night

Drew: Take me now

Drew: Goodbye, cruel world

Drew: You won't have the Nancy Boys to kick around anymore

Whoops

Whoops, I had a little typo in the HTML template, and all the post pages and archive pages were crunked up. It's been that way for about a week, but I just noticed. Fixed now, no more problem. It just goes to show, you really have to close your HTML tags or else. Blogger has their own tags, and I misspelled one, which excluded the style section from every other page except the main one.

Caption contest

Doesn't this look like some kind of costume party? I was reading an article from the BBC on the development of fiber-optic cables (I'm a geek) and it showed this picture of the Queen getting a demonstration of the new technology in 1971:


Captions, anyone?

Cartoon

IE7B2

I downloaded the beta 2 version of Internet Explorer 7.0 on Saturday, and it is huge improvement. I thought I would run it at home for a while before I loaded onto my laptop at work, just to make sure I liked it, but I'm definitely going to download it tomorrow at the office.

It has a much sleeker profile, giving you more screen real estate. There's a built-in search toolbar, and the menus and toolbars have been tweaked slightly, with better usability. It also has tabbed browsing, meaning you can open another browser without opening another instance of IE, like having multiple documents open in Word. Opening another window is as easy as one click on a new tab. I know all the other browsers have had this for years, but now that I have it, I can't live without it. It also incorporates RSS functionality, and has improved security. It only works with XP SP2, though, it does a little operating system check before you can install it. It also checks to see if you have a valid version of Windows.

The Closers by Michael Connelly

The Closers by Michael Connelly

New digital camera

I haven't been posting pictures lately, because my old digital camera wasn't really mine, and I had to leave it back at El Paso, and my camera phone really doesn't take good enough pictures. I had been waiting to see if my new company would buy one for me, but they bought a couple to share across the department, so I ordered one yesterday.


I did some research at the Digital Camera Resources page, a great site that has just about everything you could want for researching a camera. Digital Photography Review is also a great site. I compared cameras and decided on the Canon PowerShot SD450 because I wanted to spend less than $400, have a camera that did good pictures and video, and was small enough to fit in my pocket. The aesthetics of this camera was also a factor. The best price on shopper.com and pricegrabber.com is $266.52 with tax and shipping (it was about $400 a year ago). I also ordered a 1Gig SD memory card, it only comes with a 16Meg card. When it gets here, expect to see some new pictures.

Best Sushi Restaurants in Houston

Citisearch rated the Best Sushi 2005, and I hadn't been to the winner, Blue Fish House. Aaron and Elissa and I went Saturday night. The restaurant is in an older building that was familiar to me from the days I lived over in that area. In a previous incarnation it had been the Thai Spice Vegetarian, and next door is the LZ Pub.

The decor is great, it transformed into a true little Japanese sushi restaurant. The dining room is small, there's about 20 tables, with a small sushi bar area. The menu is nice, they have other offerings besides sushi, like tempura and udon. The sushi menu was not extensive, but they had more types of rolls than most sushi bars. They do give you the little order form to mark which sushi you want, which I like, very few places in Houston do that, even though outside of Houston it seems to be de rigueur. I ordered the spicy shrimp soup to start, it was a version of the Thai soup Tom Yum Goon without the lemongrass. I tried the sweet shrimp (very good), fresh salmon, crab, and squid (slightly smaller portions than I like) and an excellent chef's special roll that was both delicious and aesthetically pleasing as well. The prices were typical of a nicer sushi restaurant, with most items $3.50 or $4.00 for two pieces.

Overall I enjoyed the evening, but I think that I will still tend to frequent Tokyohana and Azuma for most of my sushi needs, and Uptown Sushi for special occasions. There are a few more on the list that I haven't tried, and I'm going to make an effort to get out to those in the next couple of weeks.

State of Fear by Michael Crichton

State of Fear by Michael Crichton

Stress Management Technique

Just in case you've had a rough day, here's an 8 step stress management technique recommended in the latest psychological texts. It really works....

1. Picture yourself near a stream.

2. Birds are softly chirping in the cool mountain air.

3. No one but you knows your secret place.

4. You are in total seclusion from the hectic place called the World.

5. The soothing sound of a gentle waterfall fills the air with a cascade of serenity.

6. The water is crystal clear.

7. You can easily make out the face of the person you're holding underwater.

8. See, you're smiling already.

More minor tweaks

I do this kind of thing all the time, but never bothered to document it, but now that this section is set up as a blog, it's much easier to update. I just started fiddling with the format of the site, and ended up making a couple of changes:

1) The Books section now automatically numbers the last 20 books I've read.
2) I added a link to the picture of myself on the home page, now it jumps to the Drew page.
3) I switched the format on the post date (BlogDateHeader) and the post title (BlogItemTitle).

Old and busted format:

February 2, 2006
Minor Tweaking

New hotness format:

February 2, 2006
Minor Tweaking

Very minor change, but I felt like the date was overshadowing the post title. When I first designed the format, I thought that the date would be the most important thing abot each post, like a diary, but the titles are really more pertinent I considered eliminating the date header altogether, and putting it down at the bottom of each post. I still may do that, but I think that this change makes it look better and easier to read.

Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer

Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer.

Too bad he has never cried.

Ever.



See more Chuck Norris facts here.




Followup: I changed the link, I was told that the link I had originally posted is a ripoff site. It was better formatted, but this site has funnier "facts".

Four Things

Four jobs I've had:
1. Lifeguard/swim team coach/swimming instructor
2. Chlorine delivery truck driver (the world's best!)
3. Pizza maker
4. Corrosion engineer

Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. Animal House
2. Caddyshack
3. Napoleon Dynamite
4. Kill Bill (1 & 2)

Four places I've lived:
1. Quincy, Illinois
2. Brussels, Belgium
3. Dallas/Houston/Austin, Texas (see how I cleverly work in more than 4 answers?)
4. Ruston, Louisiana

Four TV shows I love:
1. The Office
2. Scrubs
3. The Colbert Report
4. Arrested Development

Four highly regarded and recommended TV shows that I've never watched a single minute of:
1. 24
2. CSI
3. Deadwood
4. Oz

Four places I've vacationed:
1. Canary Islands
2. Casablanca, Morocco
3. Perth, Australia
4. Cancun, Mexico

Four of my favorite dishes:
1. Vietnamese spring rolls
2. Hummus
3. Pizza (New York style, cheese only)
4. Grilled tuna steak

Four sites I visit daily:
1. Fark.com
2. MSN.com
3. Google.com
4. Blogger.com

Four places I would rather be right now:
1. Home (I'm in a hotel room in Tampa, Florida right now)
2. Antarctica
3. Banff, Alberta, Canada
4. Monterey, California