How does everyone feel about the new movie? Does anyone feel it is violating the second commandment? What about Mel Gibson and his comments on salvation?

If there are 2 scoops of raisins in every box of raisin bran and there are several different size boxes, shouldn’t you get the smallest box so you get the highest ratio of raisins to bran flakes?  Do they use the different sized scoops for each size box to ensure that you get the same ratio in every box?  Is this all a hoax?  This is driving me nuts and I can’t sleep.

I just registered a new domain name for $7.49 per year, through namesecure.  When I registered nodivisions.com back in August of 2000, it cost me ten times that: $70-something for one year.  Amazing.  I don’t know whether to be glad it’s so cheap now, or mad that it was so expensive then.

O’Reilly had a homosexual talk show host on the Factor tonight, one who is against "gay marriage," and he said some interesting things: if society attempts to re-define marriage without the part about "a man and a woman," the result will actually be the undefining of the word marriage.  If two men can claim that they have a "right" to be married to each other, and if society then allows it because it would be "unfair" not to, then a man who wants to marry seven women can use the exact same logic, claiming that his "equal rights" are being violated otherwise.  The end result of that course of action would be that the word marriage no longer has any clear definition.

And of course, it was "wrong" for judge Roy Moore to violate the law by keeping the ten commandments on display in Alabama, but now it’s "ok" for mayor Gavin Newsom to violate the law by issuing marriage licenses to homos in California.  One can only hope that The Predator The Terminator Kindergarten Cop governor Schwarzenegger will put the smack down on that mayor for breaking the law.

Just kidding... this is pure genius.

This here blogger script now has a "preview" button instead of a "post" button.  I generalized the SpellCheck feature into a full-fledged preview feature, which includes spellchecking.  It also formats your post the way it’ll be formatted on the site, including links, etc, which is handy since a few people have had trouble figuring out how to make that work.

And now you can complete the post from the preview page -- no need to go Back and uncheck any box, like before, which was highly annoying.  You can also make changes to your post right on the preview page, in a new posting form.

Does peanut butter go bad?  I have a container of Jif in my cupboard, and I have no idea when I bought it.  It looks and smells fine, but I can’t find a datestamp anywhere on the container.

But first, two things:

I didn’t take this amazing photo of luna, but I wish I did.  (Alas, I don’t have access to that kind of equipment.)

Second, my blog is now table-free; it’s formatted entirely with CSS.  If you’re viewing my site in the "simple" theme, then there isn’t a single table on the whole homepage.  (If none of that means anything to you, don’t worry: that just means you aren’t a geek.)

[Update: I forgot to say that the reason this matters is, when I was using tables, the text of posts would sometimes spill out the right side of the page.  I don’t know if that’s a browser bug, or if I was doing something wrong when formatting my tables’ widths etc, but without the tables it doesn’t happen.]

Finally, a poll, and I’d really appreciate every one of you responding to this.  It’s simple and takes only 3.7 seconds.  I have two different computers running here, and the box on this page is a completely different color on the two different systems.  What color is it on your computer?

Perl is man’s best friend.  Well, maybe not, but it’s my best friend, anyway.  Using Perl, I’ve been able to:

♠ make a computer-based car stereo that has all my CDs copied onto its hard drive, so every song, band, and album is instantly available all the time.  (Well, I don’t quite have all my CDs copied onto it yet -- only about 250 or 300 so far.  It takes time, you know...)

♣ make the scripts that run this website, like the blogger/messageboard script you’re reading right now, along with a login script, a mailinglist script, my visitorlog/stats scripts, and various others.

♥ make an interface for creating webpages from photos that’s easy enough for my mom to use, along with the scripts to display those photos as a slideshow or in frames (and the blog/msgboard script fits in to allow user comments on the photos).

And now, I just started a job using Perl (along with other web-development concepts like CGI programming, CSS design, mysql databases, etc) to help design/maintain a database and website system in one of the bio labs here on campus.  Professors and grad students here are collaborating with people at Cornell and the U of Florida on a project to sequence flower genomes, and Perl plays a big role in enabling the project.

Most of the bio is mostly over my head, but I’m learning it as I go.  Genomics is certainly interesting stuff, especially with stories about the supposed successful creation of a human clone making the news nowadays.  And while I’m working, I get to hear the researchers make jokes about the "millions of years of evolution" these plants have gone through (well, they don’t know that they are jokes... but they’re funny).

Quiznos has two crazy commercials that are hilarious and brilliant.  Go watch them on the Quiznos site.

Every single one of you should go and see The Passion of Christ in theatres within the first two weeks that it is out. In fact you should take anyone you can think of and then after you see it once go and see it again with different people and tell them to do the same. We need more movies like this in the theatres of America, this is a chance to make that happen more often and we can do this by supporting the few good movies that do comeout.

From the description of Apple’s new GarageBand software:

GarageBand turns your Mac into an anytime, anywhere recording studio packed with hundreds of instruments and a recording engineer or two for good measure.  It’s the easiest way to create, perform and record your own music whether you’re an accomplished player or just wish you were a rock star.  And GarageBand is the newest member of the iLife family, so you can add your original music to your slideshows, your DVD menus, burn it to CDs or score your iMovie projects.

iLife ?  OK, I’m starting to think that Steve Jobs is the anti-Christ.

Anyway... I’m reading about this new software, and I come upon a messageboard on the Apple site.  One guy made an angry post about how it’s "Deceptive & Misleading" that in the advertising for GarageBand, Apple doesn’t mention that you need a DVD player to install it.

But the interesting part is the replies from the Mac community.  Some of them are really brutal:

RE: Deceptive & Misleading
i’m sorry you feel cheated but come on bud, if you your mac is so "new" then it will have a dvd drive.

RE: Deceptive & Misleading
I guess I’d be mad too if I didn’t have a DVD player, but Tim (and everyone else for that matter) should learn to accept his own mistakes.

RE: Deceptive & Misleading
Lots of solutions by bringing it in by other Macs with Superdrives or Combos, but (and don’t take this as criticism) your best bet is to take advantage of current low prices on eMacs and upgrade... Small Dog Electronics has new Superdrive eMacs with 1GB RAM and 80GB HD that will boot into OS 9 for (ta-da!) $999. Then eBay out your old Mac and you’re good.

RE: Deceptive & Misleading
First off - the only thing deceptive and misleading is this post. How dare you come here and slam Apple the way you just because YOU don’t have a DVD player! And it is obvious that YOU didn’t read the requirements. Don’’t blame your obvious shortcomings on Apple. Go buy a DVD player and start reading software boxes.

People like you amaze me.

RE: Deceptive & Misleading
Take 10 deep breaths, then buy a new Mac.

RE: Deceptive & Misleading
It’s not my fault that some of you don’t want to invest in your machines like you should.

RE: Deceptive & Misleading
Tim, I hope you have benefitted from all of this GREAT feedback on your post. Everyone - I think the point has been made. I see no further use in discussing this topic further. If there is anyone monitoring this discussion board, maybe this post should be locked and then - discarded.

RE: Deceptive & Misleading
I can’t believe people are still adding replies to this thread either. What can they be thinking of ?

RE: Deceptive & Misleading
SHORT DESCIPTIVE HERE..... If your not happy with MAC and all you can do is whine HAHHAH you have one choice Go over to the PC world .. now then enjoy that hell..... Grass is so much Greener on this side

RE: Deceptive & Misleading
lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,

lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,

lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,

lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,

lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,

lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,

lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,

lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,

lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,

lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,

lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,

lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,lol,

I barely know where to start here...

First, the people tormenting the guy because he doesn’t have a DVD drive, telling him he should "accept his own mistakes" and stop "blaming his obvious shortcomings on Apple."  Ha!

Then, recommending that the best solution would be to just buy a whole new machine at $1000 -- yeah, great solution for a guy whose entire point was that he shouldn’t have to buy a DVD drive to use software that has nothing to do with DVDs.

And the best part is the end, when the thought police drop by and decide that someone needs to lock the post, to forcibly prevent people from continuing the discussion!

Then, for good measure, another person replies to say that replying is a bad idea.

And... a post which consists only of "lol" repeated 252 times... ugh, no comment.  One "lol" is terrible enough.

Then there’s this reply:

Apple’s smart. Why would they offer great software for $49....So you have to buy the machine with the Superdrive! Why wait to release this stuff until after Christmas when everyone is broke? Best believe apple is getting theirs as they’ll be debt free in Feb.!!!! GO APPLE!

...which is just sad.

I took some new photos.

When I first got into computers in 1995, I always thought of Mac users as some kind of alien race.  I didn’t really know anything about Macs, except what little my middle school computer teacher told us, like the fact that if you move the mouse too fast the computer will crash.  (Fortunately, I didn’t have to worry about crashing it by clicking both mouse buttons at the same time, since the Mac mouse only had (and still, only has) one button.)

Over the years, I slowly came to believe that Mac users weren’t actually subhuman, they were just different.  And just because multiple mouse buttons were a little too much for them, and just because their keyboard had two delete keys but no backspace key, they weren’t any less intelligent than people who use computers for things like science and engineering and math.

I was almost ready to begin to believe that really, they’re just like the rest of us.  Until now.  I have now given up on the idea that Mac users are anything other than hopelessly lost.

As wirednews reports, last week a guy submitted a story to overclockers.com about how he got a new Apple G5 for Christmas.  But since he wanted a Dell, he decided to gut the Mac and replace its innards with PC components.  He took photos of the transformation, and they were posted on the OC site too.

The Mac community simultaneously suffered a heart attack and a brain aneurism because of the shock and anger at what this man had done to an Apple computer.  He received thousand of emails from around the world:

The mail he did receive was full of nice, kind thoughts like death threats, insults and all kinds of colorful invective.

"I hope your PC blows up and leaves your miserable face disfigured forever," read one.  "You will surely burn in hell for an eternity for this one."

Another said Andy should be hung by his testicles and set on fire.

"Turning a perfectly good dual G5 into a crappy PC was the ticket that got you to hell," wrote another, citing the common eternal damnation theme.  "And if you were in front of me I’d pop a corn-born Teflon bullet from my Glock in your f***ing face."

It wasn’t just hate-filled e-mail.  Haddock labeled Andy "possibly the most stupid person on the planet." ...

Andy said some of the mail commented on his troubled psyche and warned of future mental problems.

Now here’s the funny part.  When Andy revealed that it was just a joke that he came up with to spite a Mac-loving friend, the Mac fanatics didn’t believe it -- they said he really did it, and now he was lying to protect himself !!  That is how far-gone these people are: they’re so full of their own pretentious crap that they actually believe that they somehow instill fear into PC users!

That is just so pathetic and naive and preposterous and sad, all rolled into one.

It isn’t that nothing good happened last weekend, it’s just that the bad was bad enough to far outweigh everything else.

One good thing was that two of the three hard drives in the house survived the fire (and water and ice) and still functioned properly long enough for me to copy all the data off them onto a good drive.  (The third one has the click of death indicating that the electronics are toast; the data on the platters could be fine, but it would cost a lot of money to find out.)  Both of the "good" drives got at least somewhat wet and smokey, and both water and smoke can damage a drive, so of course they need to be thrown out now, but that doesn’t matter now that the data from them is safe.

In any event, I didn’t expect any of those hard disks to survive, let alone 2 out of 3.  The moral of the story is: if your data is important to you, back it up, and at least keep the backup drive in a firesafe.  If your data is really important to you, then store the backup drive offsite except when you’re actually performing the backup.  (In this case, one of the two surviving disks was the backup disk.)

Saturday was also my dad’s 50th birthday, and all the whole family got together and went out to dinner.  It was festive and fun if a little awkward.  And just when you think it’s humanly impossible for a baby to get any cuter, Cailin gets cuter.  She’s also now able to imitate cat and cow sounds.  (Of course, they’re the same, but give her a break, she’s only 1, you know.)

On the drive back to school, the moon was bright, and it was really something to see the starry sky between the snowy mountain peaks.  It was night, but bright enough because of the snow and the moon that you could see the mountains and the trees clearly.  I wish you could have seen it.

The past 24 or so hours still don’t quite compute.

Went to see the movie The Butterfly Effect with my sister and her husband.  At first Dan wasn’t going to come, but then he decided to, so that meant they would take Samantha to my parents’ house and drop her off when they picked me up.

I thought the movie was really good.  The main premise was being able to briefly relive short pieces of your past, in order to try to fix things that have gone wrong in your life or your friends’ lives.  It deals with something we’re all familiar with -- wondering "what if I had done this or that differently..." and wondering how that would change the present.  I won’t give away any of the main plot elements, but one small-ish example is that the boy’s dog is burned to death by some sadistic kid, and you hope that he can find a way to undo that.

A few people I talked to about the movie thought that Ashton Kutcher couldn’t play a serious role (because apparently he was in "That 70s Show" which apparently wasn’t serious).  I think he was very good in this movie.  I also think the movie made good use of special effects, which were infrequent and minimalist.

It’s obviously not realistic to be able to relive pieces of your life, but the things he tried to change were exactly the kinds of things you’d want to change if you could.  The kinds of things that after they’re fixed, you’d be like, "Man, I’m so glad that is set straight now."

I also think they tied things together nicely as it moved along, and at the end.  And the ending was sorta sad, sorta happy, which I think is good.  It will probably upset some people because it wasn’t quite what they wanted to happen (like me, a little) but it wasn’t really bad, and it definitely wasn’t one of those "Oh yeah right" predictable/unrealistic endings.

At 9:32 on the way home from the movie, my brother called us to tell us that my sister’s house was on fire.

We arrived to find something like 7 fire engines and probably 50 firemen shooting water into the house.  Smoke filled the sky and tears fell and it was terrible.  All I could think about was the dogs, and I think that was about all that my sister and brother-in-law really cared about too, at the moment.  Once the firemen had most of the windows broken I realized that the dogs would be barking and crying and jumping out if they could.

A lot of the first floor caved in to the basement, but the kitchen didn’t, probably because it had a tile floor, unlike the rest of the house which was wood-floored with carpet.  And somehow the kitchen managed to be almost untouched in general by the fire, unlike the rest of the house which was completely destroyed.  Kroisie and Stokie were eventually found lying on the kitchen floor.  They probably suffered little if at all; carbon monoxide is surely much more merciful than fire.  Tasha said they just looked like they were sleeping.

Those dogs were so beautiful and amazing.  I didn’t know Stoklos as well, but Kiraly had so much personality.  When he was younger, for some reason, he would charge at me if I just looked at him a certain way.  I still have the hooded sweatshirt with a torn-and-sewed shoulder from one of the times we played.  This is just so immeasurably sad and they weren’t even my dogs.  I feel so sad for Tasha and Dan and Sam.

It turned out to be old wiring in the basement ceiling that started it.  They left to pick me up for the movie around 7:15; Brian and Allison happened to drive by about 7:45 and noticed lights on in the basement.  There were no lights on in the basement.  It must have been shortly after that a neighbor noticed smoke coming out of the house and called our mom, and sometime soon after that another neighbor tried to get the dogs out, but couldn’t see because of the smoke.  By 8:30 or so the fire crews were arriving.

Nick and I watched it for a long time, with lots of other neighbors and lots of firemen, while they poked at windows and shot water in and maneuvered an extendable truck-ladder over the roof.  We found Tasha and Dan and other family/friends again across the street, and stood with them for a while.  The fire was surreal and ironic in the freezing cold with a foot of snow on the ground, and the water freezing on the street soon after they pumped it out.

We eventually went into a neighbor’s house to warm up and to wait.  When we all eventually left around 1 am, most of the smoke/smoulder was done, but they were still on the roof shooting water down into the little house.

There were a lot of what-ifs in everyone’s words and thoughts.  What if I hadn’t made the comment that I had nothing to do after dinner; then Tash wouldn’t have suggested that we go to a movie, and they might have been home, and might have been able to stop it before it got out of hand.  What if Dan would have decided to stay home instead of going to the movie.  What if Brian and Allison would have stopped when they were passing by the house.

If someone were home, they might have been able to stop it, and maybe the poor puppies would still be alive.  But then, what if that person had been taking a nap when it happened, or had tried to stop it but got hurt or killed in the process.  That’s the problem with the what-if process: anything that you change in the past is going to have other effects that you can’t predict with certainty.  (That was a central theme of The Butterfly Effect.)  The other problem with the what-if process is that what’s done is done, and there’s no use trying to blame yourself because you failed to predict something which was unpredictable.  Grieving is  necessary and important, but blaming yourself is not.

That little house was so perfectly decorated on the inside, because my sister and her husband are amazing at that kind of thing.  They had lush new carpet -- only a week old, in some rooms -- and the best furniture and Longaberger baskets and perfectly-colored paint (also new) on the walls.  My brother had tiled the kitchen and the floor under the woodstove.  The bathroom was brand new.  They just put so much time and love into it, and it was perfect.  I hate to see all of that destroyed like this.

First of all, what the heck.  I’ve heard of collect calls, but collect mail?  How you just gonna leave a bill in my mailbox, for a letter that I am the recipient of??

Anyway... I’m so tempted to leave 23/100ths of one cent in the mailbox, since that’s what it actually says, in two places.

I love my lab TA:

From: HAIPING WU
Subject: About tomorrow’s lab
To: Undisclosed Recipients

As that tomorrow’s lab will be relatively short, and also the weather,
I think we’d better start our lab 1 hour later than usual, at 9:00am.
Next week, we will resume the regular hour.

That’s the second time in 3 weeks that he’s moved the lab back an hour.  And everyone knows, 9am is infinitely more merciful than 8am, and doubly so (that’s right, 2*infinity) when the temperature is 10 degrees and the wind chill is below zero.

Also, you can read about why nerds are unpopular if you’d like.  It’s long but good.

Newsday has a very long and interesting analysis and reconstruction of the events that caused the destruction of the shuttle Columbia early last year.  All the news in past months about the "chunk of foam" damaging the wing and ultimately causing the accident was somewhat confusing to me, because the idea of a piece of foam (connotation=soft) damaging a wing that’s designed to withstand thousands of degrees of heat (connotation=hard) just didn’t make sense.  But this article explains it thus:

Ultimately, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board was able to conclude, without qualification, that the foam impact was the root cause of the accident; that the impact had knocked a 6- to 10-inch hole in the lower half of RCC panel 8 on the shuttle’s left wing; and that a plume of super-heated plasma entering through that breach had destroyed the wing and triggered the destruction of the orbiter.

The team concluded the foam broke away from the left bipod ramp 81.7 seconds after liftoff and hit the underside of Columbia’s left wing two-tenths of a second later.  The foam measured 21 to 27 inches long by 12 to 18 inches wide.  It was tumbling at 18 revolutions per second.  Before the foam separated, the shuttle - and the foam - had a velocity of 1,568 mph, about twice the speed of sound.  Because of its low density, the foam rapidly decelerated once in the airstream, slowing by 550 mph in that two-tenths of a second.  The foam didn’t fall on to the leading edge of the left wing as much as the shuttle ran into it from below.  The relative speed of the collision was more than 500 mph, delivering more than a ton of force.

On July 7, investigators using a nitrogen-powered cannon fired a 1,200-cubic-inch block of foam weighing 1.67 pounds at RCC panel 8, taken from the shuttle Atlantis.  Traveling at 530 mph, the foam blew a ragged 16-inch hole in the RCC panel, vividly demonstrating how much damage foam could do.

The article then goes into the second-by-second account of the events recorded by the various sensors, and the adjustments that the computers made to try to compensate for what was happening.

It’s really sad as you think of the seven people on the ship, who had no idea anything was amiss until seconds before they would be killed by it.  Still, to me, those are just seven random people whom I don’t know.  I can’t imagine being a friend or family member and reading this article.

What’s even more sad is the final line of the piece, spoken by the man who found the remains of one of the crew members: "I am a very devout Christian, and I prayed for that person’s soul."  That’s sad because the man who said it (along with many other "Christians") has a completely inaccurate understanding of why Jesus came to this earth.  God doesn’t choose what happens to a person’s soul when that person dies.  Each person must decide that for himself, and it’s a decision that must be made during life, not after death.  It’s truly saddening to see people like this, claiming to be "devout Christians," and then completely misrepresenting the most fundamental teaching of Christ.

From Reuters via Yahoo:

Iraq plans to investigate allegations that dozens of officials and businessmen worldwide illegally received oil in exchange for supporting former leader Saddam Hussein, officials said Tuesday.

Their statements came after al-Mada, an independent Baghdad newspaper, published a list it said was based on oil ministry documents showing 46 individuals, companies and organizations from inside and outside Iraq who were given millions of barrels of oil. ...

The list includes members of Arab ruling families, religious organizations, politicians and political parties from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Sudan, China, Austria, France and other countries.

Organizations named include the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian Communist Party, India’s Congress Party and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

Themes for my site are now re-enabled.

Few political arguments are so detached from reality as the "Bush is Hitler" mantra.  The fanatics who put forth this argument have either wholly misunderstood America’s goals in the war, or are deliberately mischaracterizing them.

On any political question you’ll find disagreement [among Americans], and there is no single substantive characteristic we share as a people. ... Do Americans hate Arabs and Muslims?  Some do, some do not.  On that question, like every other question, there is no unanimity.  Some of us are Muslims.  Some are fascinated by Islam, some are repelled by it, and quite frankly, most don’t really care much about it one way or the other, or at least they didn’t prior to September of 2001.  If this nation is now actively trying to interfere in the affairs of the Arab and Muslim world, it is because Arabs tried to interfere with us, and made their problems become our problem as well.

But if we collectively hated the Arabs, we would not be acting as we are.  If we hated Arabs, we would have sent nuclear weapons into the Arab region, not our soldiers.  If we hated the Iraqis, we’d have exterminated them, rather than sacrificing our own young men to try to free them.

The Arabs who think America hates Arabs should consider what their own governments would do to Israel if they had one thousandth of the nuclear arsenal that the US has, and then compare that to what the US has actually done.  Do our actions really make sense as an expression of hatred, given what else we could have done instead?

We are not acting out of hatred, but we will not pander to the Arabs.  We are going to give the Arabs what they need, but that is not what many of them want.  And in the short run, some Arabs will interpret that as cruelty on our part.  But if we were motivated by hatred for the Arabs, we wouldn’t be bothering with that; instead, we would have killed them all within the first week after the Arab attack against us.

- Steve Den Beste

Hi.
Was wondering why the label on my tab for your web page says nodivisions.dot.com. Just for fun? ok.
lvu

This is the strangest spam I’ve ever received:

From: rick byerly <rgbyerly@fastmail.fm>
Subject: weird but funny animation
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2004 01:36:56 -0800

the mullet catcher animation

http://www.hyperionmedia.com/porch2.html

if you don’t want to be emailed animations just reply to this email with the subject: remove...

(Interestingly, there is no To: header on the message at all.)

At that website, there’s a short flash animation of some kid with a vacuum sucking up some other kid by the mullet, and then tying him up, and sprinkling chocolate flakes on some kind of toast or something, while the tied-up mullet kid watches.  It’s thoroughly bizarre.

Then, it automatically redirects you to a page where they’re selling a CD full of "eclectic" farm music.  You can sample each track, and each sample is a flash page with music playing and some weird photo, like a horse or llama or something.

Nowhere on any of the pages are there any ads, no flashy graphics, no begging you to buy their stuff.  If all spam were as off-the-wall and unobtrusive as this, it would be considerably less bothersome.

Hey, Penny... I am allowed to put a personal post on here calling out to our brothers and family for a dinner night? If not, take this off...
Otherwise, let’s try and figure out when we can get everyone together for dinner.  I guess mainly you’re the problem, when is the next time you will be home?  Hopefully, everyone can work around you schedule.  Does Nick go on your site?  If not, I’ll call him.  I guess that’s it. Have a good day!!