The past couple of Daily Dilbert comics have been near and dear to my heart:

May 7th:

May 8th:

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It’s easy to make fun of Apple for having such a small share of the computer market -- I’ve done it myself a few times -- but when you look at revenues and profits, it becomes clear that Apple is not only wildly successful, but arguably more successful than many of its competitors, especially considering its market share:

From Can Apple Take Microsoft in the Battle for the Desktop?:

Quoting RDM:

While Apple is cited by Gartner and IDC as selling around 5% of all the computers in the US, it isn’t obvious that Apple’s 5% share is the cream of the market; it’s actually worth more than the same or larger percentage of shares held by rivals.

There were 9.8 million Macs sold in the last two years, up from 6.2 million in the previous two year period. Those numbers don’t compare with the stunning volume of PCs shipped by HP and Dell--which each sold 38 million PCs in 2006 alone--but Apple’s profits do.

In the forth quarter of last year, HP and Dell combined sold 10 times as many PCs as Apple in the US, earned 5.5 times as much revenue as Apple, but together only ended up with 2.2 times as much net income as Apple.

In other words, Apple earned nearly half as much net income with its 5% share of the market as HP and Dell together, with their combined 55% share of the US PC market: $1 billion for Apple vs $2.2 billion for HP and Dell together!

From Market Share vs Installed Base: iPod vs Zune, Mac vs PC:

Quoting RDM:

In the final quarter of 2006, Apple earned $7.1 billion in revenue, compared to Microsoft’s $12.5 billion in total revenue. Yes, that’s right, Apple brought in more than half as much money as Microsoft, despite Windows owning 98% of the PC market.

Even stripping Apple of its iPod revenues, which PC pundits love to do, the company still earned $4.4 billion on its Macintosh business, over a third as much as Microsoft brought in from its entire Windows, Office, and server operations combined. Apple’s 2% of the PC market doesn’t seem so small anymore.

Of course, Microsoft actually lost a lot of money on all of its consumer electronics products, so looking at profits, Apple earned $1 billion compared to Microsoft’s total $3.4 billion in profit.

Wow, quiet times around here, no?  I know it’s time to make a new post when I get one of those "are you still alive??" emails from my mom.

I’ve been extremely busy with work, which I’m extremely thankful for.  July was my most profitable month to date, and business -- both sales and custom work -- seems to be steadily picking up.  Don’t get me wrong: my income is still no match for my student loan bills, but I’m making way more money doing web programming than I was making as a PC technician.

A couple weeks ago, Dan imparted unto me the secret to grilling with charcoal.  My problem has been that the coals are always too cool to put a nice charred exterior on meats, yet ironically I still can’t avoid making things more dry and well-done than I’d like.  Dan’s tip was to spread the coals out unevenly (after they turn gray, of course), so that they are just a single layer deep on one side of the grill, but stacked up on the other side.  That way one side of the grill is extremely hot and puts those nice grill-lines on your steaks, but you can move them off to the other cooler side after that.

To wrap things up, I’d like to say that Groove Salad on SomaFM is a great internet radio station.  They call it: "A nicely chilled plate of ambient beats and grooves."  It’s largely instrumental, and on the occasional vocal track, I usually enjoy the vocals too.  I listen to it pretty much all day every day.

I just signed up for AdSense, Google’s ad program.  NoDivisions gets about 150-200 unique visitors per day and I’m curious to see if that is at all monetizable.  Right now I’ve placed the ad-box at the bottom of the navigation pane; I plan to leave it there for a few weeks, then move it higher up for a few weeks to see if/how that affects the click-through rate.  But I doubt I’ll be happy with it at the very top of the nav section, before any of the actual navigational elements, so I may switch to a 3-column layout to have a little more flexibility there.

Apple has been in trouble lately in Europe, because the songs they sell on the iTunes Music Store are locked by a DRM scheme that makes them unplayable on any Digital Audio Player except the iPod.  When the average Joe goes into Best Buy, he can purchase any one of a bewildering array of makes and models of DAPs, of which the iPod is only one; but if he purchases one of those non-iPod devices, then the songs he buys from iTMS won’t play on it.  That’s stupid, and I know at least a couple people who’ve been in exactly that situation, so I can see why governments or trade groups are mad at Apple over it.

But according to a recent article on Ars, Apple may also be in trouble in Norway for a different reason:

Quoting Ars Technica:

Norwegian law provides a "cooling off" period after a purchase, during which the consumer can opt out of a transaction and return the merchandise for a full refund.  Needless to say, there’s no cooling-off period in iTMS’ terms of service.

Now that’s really stupid.

This is 2006.  You can’t just take old laws that applied to physical goods and slap them onto digital transactions without considering the differences between the situations.  In particular, digital goods (like music files, video files, and computer programs) are fundamentally incapable of being returned.  That’s because there’s no way to guarantee full return of a digital product; the merchant has no way to be sure that the consumer has deleted the original file, or that he hasn’t made any copies of it.

In general, I’m a big fan of the whole idea of return policies.  But when the product is instantly available with just a few mouse clicks, when it’s something that you’ve most likely already heard before, and when it costs 99-freakin’-cents, then I think that 1) the consumer needs to show a little restraint and take responsibility for his actions, rather than having a government force companies to give him a "cooling off" period, and 2) anyone who’s pretending that it’s a big deal to not be able to return a 99-cent song needs to just stop pretending.

I launched a new layout on encodable.com today.  It’s a variation of a new layout that I launched last Friday; I liked that one, but something about it wasn’t right, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.  This new one is cleaner and lighter and I like it much better.  Thoughts?

Thursday has a new album coming out.  But before it’s even released, you listen to the whole thing by downloading it.  To download it, you can either a) visit the band’s official MySpace page and listen to a stream of it, in an annoying Flash-based audio player, in horrendous sound quality, or b) just use any of the P2P networks and download the whole album in near-perfect quality MP3 files.

Taking Back Sunday has a new album coming out, too.  You can also listen to the whole thing before it’s released, on MTV’s "The Leak" webpage.  But The Leak, in addition to being in an annoying Flash-based page, doesn’t even work in any browser except MS IE.  In Safari it pretends to work, suggesting that you download Windows Media Player to play the music, but then WMP bombs out with an error.  In Firefox or Mozilla, you click on the "Play whole album" link in The Leak and it just sits there, doing nothing.  Of course, you can always just fire up your P2P client and download the whole album in near-perfect quality as MP3 files.

This is so irritating.  Why are huge media companies and record labels such freaking morons?  They literally make it as difficult as possible to utilize their services, and if/when you are finally able to make them work, they make it as unenjoyable as possible by making the quality absolute crap.

I’m so frustrated and angered by this, but the thing is, I will always buy the CD once it comes out, because it’s the right thing to do (supporting the artist, etc, even though the labels screw them on that too) and because I want to actually have the liner notes and the high-quality source audio to make my own MP3s.  But lots and lots of people don’t care about doing the right thing, nor about the liner notes or the CD itself.  The labels are only driving away their own profits by being so stupid.

I run another blog over on Encodable, and I’m now putting some of my more technical type posts there instead of here on ND.  That’s mainly because blogging == money (or more accurately, blogging == traffic =~ money) for business sites.

So anyway, if those kinds of posts interest you, then you may want to frequent that blog too.

My AJAX File Uploader has turned out to be an awesome project.  As previously reported, on its first day it received 6000 unique visitors, and now 2 months later it’s still getting about 150 per day.

By popular request, I’ve added a bunch of new features since the initial launch, like support for multi-file uploads and e-mail notification of new uploads.

I end up spending quite a bit of time developing it, so although I give it away for free for personal use, I now charge a license fee of $89 for commercial use.  That’s worked out pretty well, and pretty much everyone who’s bought it has been fairly gushing about how happy they are with it.

I also have a couple clients who found the uploader one way or another, and then got in touch with me to ask about a customized version of it for their website.  So that’s brought in some business as well.  It’s been really interesting to watch this project, born strictly out of necessity and given away for free, turn into something that generates revenue for the business.

I’m currently trying to code my way around one irritating issue that some people are having with it, though.  [Update: it turned out to be an issue only on these few particular machines, and there was nothing that this script (or any script) could do to get around it.]  The whole premise of the script is that when you upload a file to a website through it, it shows you a progress bar and how much time is left before the upload is complete.  This requires that the server logs how much data has been uploaded so far, writing this data to a file or database and updating it about once per second during the course of the upload.  Then the user’s browser sends a request to the server about once per second to ask for the data from the log: how much has been sent so far?  How ’bout now?  OK, what about now?  Over and over.

The problem is that on some servers, the system is configured to do write-caching, so that when a program saves a file, it doesn’t actually get written to the hard disk right away.  Instead it’s kept in memory (RAM) until some predefined time limit has passed (say 5 minutes), and then when that time comes the server does a sync, writing all the cached data from memory to the hard disk.

Such write-caching is done to increase the server’s performance -- writing to memory is many times faster than writing to disk -- and it’s very common.  For example, that’s the reason it’s bad to turn off your computer using its power button without doing a shut-down first: some of the files that have been created/changed/saved aren’t actually really saved yet, and they won’t get saved until the next sync, which you might prevent from ever happening if you pull the plug without shutting down.

So how do you get two processes to communicate if you can’t use files to share data?  You use IPC, of course.  But InterProcess Communication has a tendency to take something simple and make it really complicated really quickly.  Once your program has to fork() a server and accept socket communication from the client and try not to bother the actual business of the upload too much, it starts getting hairy.

So I’m taking a little break to remind you that Day 5 (aka Season 5) of 24 starts tonight!  The season premiere is 4 hours, with the first 2 starting at 8 PM Eastern on Fox.  24 is one of the best things in life -- and I loathe most TV, so that’s got to tell you something -- and I’m so psyched.

Late Tuesday night, I created a post on digg.com about my AJAX File-Upload Progress Script.  It became extremely popular: in about 24 hours, it received 500 "diggs," and it spent most of Wednesday as #2 on the the del.icio.us "popular" page.  (It’s still #1 on the AJAX page.)

Encodable.com received 5800 unique visitors who were checking out the script on Wednesday.  At the height of the traffic, there were about 130 visitors online simultaneously at any given moment.  And since the demo version is here on nodivisions.com, there were 1800 unique visitors here yesterday, too.

(If you’re wondering why there are so few files in the file-list for the demo, it’s because the uploads were quickly filling my server to its full capacity.  I had to implement a cron-job that automatically deletes uploads older than 30 minutes twice an hour.)

Now at 11am on Thursday, there have already been 350 visitors on encodable.com, and 250 on nodivisions.com.  Much less than yesterday, but still going fairly strong.

This is unbelievable.

MillionDollarHomepage is a website started by a kid in the UK to make some money for college (or "Uni" as they say over there).  His idea: sell 1,000,000 pixels for US$1 each, in blocks of 100 (10x10 pixels).  Each buyer would send him a small image file, and he would put it on the front page of milliondollarhomepage.com, as a link back to the buyer’s website.

He started this two months ago, at the end of August 2005, and has made over half a million dollars in those two months.

I need to come up with a way to make my business do so well!

A while ago I wrote up an article on doing secure remote backups/transfers across the (insecure) internet, using rsync.  I just put it online the other day over at Encodable.

And speaking of Encodable, I recently finished a major overhaul of my weblog script, turning it into a full-featured CMS (Content Management System).  That is, it can now be used to create and edit normal web pages (as opposed to serial/dated blog posts) anytime, right in the web browser.  I also ~just finished the PMLSC site (Pittsburgh Molecular Libraries Screening Center) which, though you can’t tell unless you’re logged in, uses the newly finished CMS so the author(s) can add & update content anytime.

Finally, speaking of the intarweb, does anyone here actually subscribe to feeds (RSS, Atom, etc) for any of the blogs that they read?  I personally don’t; I find it easy enough -- and more interesting too -- to actually visit the small handful of sites that I read regularly, rather than setting up a new system where I get notified of posts/replies via some special new application.

A week ago when John Paul wanted to send me the video clip from my bachelor hike, we had some trouble: the file was about 19 megabytes, far too big for Gmail’s 10MB attachment limit.  We tried to send it through instant messenger, but as is often the case, one or both of our firewalls prevented that from working properly.

The easiest solution was for me to write up a quick CGI script so he could upload it to my website, from which I could then download it.

But uploading a 19MB file on a slow DSL connection takes a long time; it took almost an hour, and about 20 minutes in, John Paul was asking me, "ah... is it going?  my browser is just sitting here..."  It uploaded fine, but many an impatient (i.e. normal) internet user would have assumed it wasn’t working about a half-hour into it, and closed the window.

So I decided to whip up a little AJAX goodness and have the upload page show a progress bar and an ETA for file uploads.  The result is the Encodable Industries AJAX File Uploader, which you can try out right here.  You can also download the script to use on your own website by visiting its homepage over on Encodable.com.

About 10 days ago I posted about calebfoster.com, a website that I had just finished designing.  But it turned out that the next day, Caleb left for a trip to Switzerland, and took his server with him, so the website was offline.  It’s back up now, so go check it out -- for real this time.

I finally posted my photos of the city from on Mount Washington last week.  There are some pretty good ones of the city skyline and of Point State Park.

In unrelated news, I had to upgrade to a new version of Quicktime the other day to view a video clip, and I discovered that you can’t get Quicktime without iTunes anymore.  Product tying, anyone?  Microsoft gets buried in lawsuits for including -- horror of horrors -- a web browser with their operating system, yet Apple can force me to run iTunes all day long, when I don’t even own an MP3 player?

As my mom has pointed out, I’ve been a little busy lately.  Wedding planning and searching for a full-time job take up most of my time.

I’ve also been cooking up a few new websites: completed is calebfoster.com*; in the works are websites for a project that Kim’s lab is a part of, and two personal sites for a cousin and a friend of mine.  I also just finished a redesign of Kim’s site, including some new square image thumbnails that I think are pretty cool.

If you or someone you know wants a website, you know where to send ’em.

*Update: turns out Caleb is in Switzerland this week and took his server (his laptop) with him.  So the site is offline this week.

In need of some free advertising, Encodable Industries will be creating personal websites for free over the next couple weeks.  Since every site has a small link at the bottom that points to the Encodable homepage, every site is a little bit of advertising.

Just use the contact page to say that you’re interested.  If you or someone you know wants a website like this one, to share photos or to have a weblog for example, please spread the word.  This is open to everyone, though it’s mostly aimed at broadband (cable, DSL) users, since for them a website can be completely free.  For dial-up users (read: users on a slow and intermittent uplink) it is of course necessary to pay for a web-hosting account for the website to live at.

It takes about 2-3 hours to get each website up and running, but the client (you) only needs to be present for about a half-hour of that time.

Apple is transitioning from PowerPC processors made by IBM and Motorola/Freescale, to x86 processors made by Intel.  For once, the rumors turned out to be true.  Of course, this particular rumor has been around for years and has popped up every few months, and it would hardly be realistic to say that it’s been true all along.  In fact, Steve Jobs said in the announcement today that Apple has been maintaining an x86 build of Mac OSX for some time, and that it was "just in case," not part of a long-standing plan to shift to x86.  It turned out to be a good backup plan, given IBM’s continual inability/unwillingness to produce the CPUs that Apple wants.

Google bought the mapping company Keyhole last year, and now Google Maps can show you aerial satellite photography of whatever location you’re mapping.  As if Google Maps wasn’t cool enough already!

Google also recently added support for natural-language search queries (like the one I just posted about).  But according to the article:

Quoting internetnews.com:

Google Q&A has strengths and weaknesses, Norvig admitted. ... For example, asking, "What is the population of India?" returns rock-solid results in the form of links to Web sites that answer the question.

On the other hand, the top result for the question, "What is the capital of France?" was "Investment Capital and Banking in France."

... But the queries don’t have to be full sentences. The system identifies both query words, such as "who" or "what," and fact-type terms such as capital, director, population. "To find out who directed "Finding Nemo," you don’t have to put in the ’who is,’" he explained.

I think this is more marketing hype than anything "new" from Google.  Their existing search already ignored common words (like "is") anyway; I don’t see how this new "natural language" support is fundamentally different.

In other tech news, Microsoft’s approach to Windows system security may be changing (which can only mean "improving" at this point) when the next version is released in a year or so.  One huge problem with the current design is the fact that, although Windows supports the concept of different levels of user privileges:

Quoting pcworld.com:

...90 percent of Windows software can’t be installed without administrator access to Windows, [and] 70 percent won’t run properly unless the user is an administrator.

The whole point of having restricted user-level accounts is that you don’t want your users to be able to break critical parts of the system -- even when "your users" just means "you."  You don’t want to use the powerful administrator account for your day-to-day activities, because 1) even if you’re good with computers, you could accidentally delete something crucial, and 2) you run lots of programs written by other people and companies, so you don’t want to give them access to critical parts of the system either.

But as the above quote shows, it’s simply not practical to run Windows with a user-level account, because like so many things in Windows, this security feature was hacked on as an afterthought and doesn’t really work yet.  Until it gets fixed, we’ll continue to be plagued by myriad viruses and otherwise-malicious programs that hijack Windows systems and then modify the system to prevent the user from removing them.

Shouldn’t all credit cards have PINs?  So that even if a card gets lost or stolen, a thief can’t use it?

[Note: this is the record of my attempts to get Belkin to fix a massive flaw in the design of their "routers."  The bottom line is that they refused to even acknowledge the flaw, and the result is that computers on the LAN side of a Belkin router can’t access servers on the LAN using the router’s public IP address or hostname.  Because of this, and Belkin’s refusal to acknowledge, let alone fix, the problem, I must strongly discourage anyone from purchasing a Belkin router.]

I can’t stand tech support.  It wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t all thoroughly clueless, but they are.

Me:

Hello,

I just bought an F5D72304 router, and I’m having a problem with it.

I’ve got a few computers on the LAN-side of the router that are running services (http, ssh, etc).  From any computer on the internet outside of my LAN, I can access those services without problems.  But any computer inside my F5D72304’s LAN cannot access those services, whether on other systems in the LAN or on itself, through my public IP address.  If I use the computers’ LAN IPs then it works OK, but not if I use the public IP.

Let me use some numbers to make it more clear:

My public IP is x.y.1.194
Belkin router’s private LAN IP is 172.19.5.250
Computer lanbox-1 is IP 172.19.5.1
Computer lanbox-2 is IP 172.19.5.2
Computer lanbox-2 is running http on port 89
Computer remotebox is elsewhere on the internet

These connections work OK:

  remotebox -> x.y.1.194:89 (http over external IP)
  lanbox-1 -> 172.19.5.2:89 (http over internal IP)
  lanbox-2 -> 172.19.5.2:89 (http over internal IP)

But these connections do NOT work:

  lanbox-1 -> x.y.1.194:89 (http over external IP)
  lanbox-2 -> x.y.1.194:89 (http over external IP)

I’ve tried putting lanbox-2 (my http server) in the DMZ, but that didn’t change anything.  I’ve tried different ports than 89, still no success. I’ve looked around the router config but didn’t see anything that would fix this.  I have another router (an older D-Link model) configured exactly the same as the new Belkin (i.e. LAN is 172.19.5.* and forwarding port 89 to 172.19.5.2) and it doesn’t have this problem.

Please help!

Thanks,
Anthony DiSante

Them:

Hi Anthony,

Thank you for contacting Belkin Technical Support.

We understand that you are not able to access the services with the Wan IP from your network.

Anthony, There is a feature called NAT is present in the router. If you are trying to acess the router setup page from the external computer.  When the router see the WAN IP from the external network then it can perform natting that is it will change the public IP address of the external network computer in to  the prvate IP address range, which helps you to view the services. But with in the intenal network natting is not possible since the internal network already has the private IP address. That is why you are not able to use the wan IP to view the services in internal network.

Hope this information helps.

Regards,

[some person]
Belkin Technical Support.

Me:

Hello,

Thanks for your reply.

If I understand you correctly, you are saying that the behavior I am experiencing is the correct behavior?  You are saying that it’s correct that I cannot access services on my LAN from a system on my LAN using the public IP address?

If so, then that is a flaw in the design of your router.  I have used a half-dozen routers from various manufacturers and none of them exhibit this behavior.  When I use the router’s firewall to forward port X to box-2 on the LAN, that means "when a packet arrives at the WAN interface for port X, pass it through to box-2 on the LAN interface."  The source of the packet is irrelevant; all the router needs to know is that it arrived at the external interface, and that I’ve configured a firewall rule that explains how to handle that situation.

This is definitely worthy of a firmware upgrade, but in the meantime I’ll have to remove the F5D72304 from my network and put my old D-Link router in its place.

-Anthony DiSante

Them:

Hi Anthony,

Thank you for contacting Belkin Technical Support.

Anthony, we understand that you are not able to access services in your LAN using WAN IP address.

Belkin routers are enabled with NAT feature. This will not allow you to access the services locally by using the WAN IP address.

When you are trying to access the services from your LAN using the WAN IP address, the request goes upto the router then redirect the request internally in your LAN. The resolution happens in the router itself, hence the request doesnot go the internet and redirect to the router since it is a NAT enabled router.

The same thing happens with all the routers with NAT feature.

We hope this information is helpful. Please let us know if you require any further assistance. We’ll be glad to help you.

Regards,

[a different person]
Belkin Technical Support

Me:

Hello,

> Belkin routers are enabled with NAT feature.

So is every router I’ve ever used.  NAT is the whole point of using a router in a home network, since it allows you to have multiple computers on a private network connected to the public internet, with the router translating the addresses.  This feature is not unique to Belkin routers.

> This will not allow you to access the
> services locally by using the WAN IP
> address. ... The same thing happens with
> all the routers with NAT feature.

That is simply not true.  Every router I’ve ever used has allowed me to access services on my LAN via the WAN IP.  I have two other routers right next to me that I’ve been testing to make sure of it -- the Belkin is the only one that exhibits this error.

-Anthony DiSante

Me, again:

Hello,

> the request goes upto the router then
> redirect the request internally in your
> LAN.  The resolution happens in the router
> itself, hence the request doesnot go the
> internet and redirect to the router

That’s exactly the problem.  When a packet arrives at the WAN interface, it DOES "go [to] the internet" because the WAN IP is an internet IP.  So the router should treat it like any other packet arriving at the WAN interface; it doesn’t matter where the packet came from (LAN or remote system), what matters is that I sent it to the WAN interface.

-Anthony DiSante

ARGH.  How can you work tech support for a company’s router products and NOT KNOW WHAT A ROUTER IS SUPPOSED TO DO?

And it REALLY bugs me how a different person replies to the email every time when you email a company’s tech support.  Each successive person ostensibly reads the earlier conversation, but then just says the exact same thing.  That makes me so mad.  I emailed Dell a couple months ago, asking if I could get a laptop without Windows installed, and therefore without having to pay the $200 Microsoft tax. There were about ten -- TEN -- exchanges where I said "why is it Dell’s policy to force a particular operating system on the customer?" and the Dell rep said "it is Dell’s policy to force Windows XP on the customer" (essentially).  Each time it was a different person, each time I asked "WHY??!?", and each time the response just restated the fact that it IS the case without addressing WHY.

And as if ALL THAT weren’t enough, the tech support responses are always replete with typos and misspellings.

So, Sprint buys Nextel, SBC buys AT&T, and now Verizon buys MCI, all in the space of two months.  Will all this movement in the telecom sector mean that I’ll finally be able to get an internet connection that isn’t castrated in the upstream bandwidth department?

Somehow I doubt it.

Dude, check this news headline.

Why are you going to school when you can work for the best place to work for with a high school education.  Think about all the free stuff too.

I want to like Applebee’s.  I really do.  And it actually has a lot going for it: usually not smoky, usually not too long of a wait, clean bathrooms with automatic paper towels and a trash can behind the door, so you don’t have to touch the handle of the door, which 75% of men touch after using the bathroom and NOT washing their hands...

But I’ve only been to Applebee’s a handful of times in my life, and every single time there is a problem with the order.  I usually get steak when I go out, and the steak here is always overcooked; I order medium-rare and it comes out medium-well.  To be fair many places just can’t seem to get steak right, however a few places like Olive Garden and Outback consistently get it right, i.e. they cook it the way you order it.

Tonight was especially ridiculous, though.  I ordered a steak with mushrooms, and this particular steak comes with peppers and onions, which I asked them to omit.  The waitress noted all this.  But the steak came out -- overcooked but that is no surprise -- without mushrooms.  But at least they correctly omitted the peppers and onions, right?  Until I got to the bottom of my mashed potatoes and discovered that THE PEPPERS AND ONIONS WERE UNDERNEATH THE POTATOES.  You have got to be kidding me.

I also ordered a side-dish of vegetables.  These came out raw.  Not "just a little cooked."  They were not cooked.  I like my vegetables soft, but I had Kim verify because she likes hers crunchy.  She agreed these weren’t merely crunchy, they were raw.

Back to the mushroom situation.  Kim ordered a chicken dish that comes with mushrooms and cheese, but she asked to have it without the mushrooms.  Sure enough, "hidden" underneath a few slices of melted cheese, there were mounds of mushrooms.  Not only that, but literally two of them were sauteed; the other 10-15 or so were just raw mushrooms.

Every time I go to Applebee’s, I think hey, it’s been a while, they’ve probably gotten their act together by now.  I’ll give it a shot.  At some point I’m going to have to stop pretending.

Well, I finally got a shower mirror.  And it’s great.  The only one Walmart had was the water-runs-through-it kind, which was fine with me.  I can even shave most of my face without shaving cream now, which is pretty awesome.

And in case you were worried about the efficacy of this solution, rest assured:

Can you really trademark a phrase like that?  And... would you really want to??

Ever get the feeling that some advertising has just gone way too far?

I’ve already bought (and am attempting to use) your freakin’ toilet paper; I don’t need a commercial STUCK DIRECTLY ON the roll itself.

In other funny randomness, I came across this hilarious photo (note the fine print):

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