Amazing Color-Changing Card Trick

Taylorsville Dayzz

It's that one weekend a year where the neighborhood fills with people. OK, so that's not quite true - it's more cars than people. At least it's only one weekend a year.

Time was, decades ago, when I lived about three hundred yards from the Pacific Ocean. Literally walking distance. Just off Balboa Blvd. in Newport Beach. Those were some of the best times in my life. But we moved in just after school started in, oh, 1985. Little did we know what the crowds would be like come summer 1986. Moved some time that summer. But the memories live on.

Now here I am in a quaint, generally quiet neighborhood.

Except when we're Dayzzed.

- - I'll have some stills to post tomorrow; for now, enjoy the finalé from tonight's fireworks:

29 Ways To Stay Creative

Change Your Words

Unexplainable Toilet Paper Ads

Well, this is all bob's bs, isn't it?

Off looking for cool images again this morning. Needing a roll of TP for an upcoming contest - well, looking for TP on the intarwebs is anything butt shall I say interesting.

Butt there's one ad I found from Spain - in English for some assinine reason - that stands out from the rest(room):


Yes, gentle reader, that's black toilet paper. Also comes in red. And several other colors. Not to worry though, the manufacturer's website states "Colorfast for its intended use".

I'd hope so.

More at RenovaOnline.

Colonel Sanders Spotted In Rachel, Nevada

So the other night there was a special on SyFy about Area 51. They showed some aerial photos, so I brought up Google Earth to see the area for myself.

Rachel, NV is the nearest municipality to Groom Lake, one of the (in)famous nicknames for Area 51, so I zoomed into there. Sure, there's the little A'Le'Inn, just down the road from Extraterrestrial Highway. And on the corner of Groom Road and Old Mill Street is...


View Larger Map

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

OK, so maybe Google is adding random ads to their maps. Or KFC had some extra advertising dollars and didn't know what to do with them.

Or someone is hiding something.

Comments are welcome.

[Update: Seems KFC did have some extra advertising dollars laying around - KFC Unveils New Logo With Giant Image in Nevada Desert]

Kudos To KSTU

Kudos to local channel 13 - KSTU - for being the ONLY station to show the Endeavour liftoff from Cape Canaveral this morning.

Goosebumps I must say.

Widgets

I've been playing around with a widget I found on another site today - this one's from the News Distribution Network:



It's free. We like free. There are various configurations available, so I may be incorporating it somewhere on the site.

I'll let you know when to look for it...

What The U.S. Government Will Find On Osama bin Laden's Hard Drive

Current Fark Photoshop contest - my entry:

Well, This Is A Bit Unnerving

One more reason to hate Fox News.

Yesterday, someone on the intarwebs did a search for this phrase:

"viruses after visiting fox new[s] website"

...and landed on this page.

I'd avoid Fox websites.

Can I Quote You On That?

From Mike:



Thanks for the link, Mike!

I Can Tell It's Photoshopped

By now, unless you've been under a rock, you've seen this image:



But what's that sitting on the laptop in front of Hillary?



Comments?

(1.6 megabyte original here for your closer perusal.)

Nuclear Boy

I suppose the subtitle would be "Sh!t Happens":



(The banjo music is an interesting touch.)

Via HuffPo and Facebook.

Thanks, Ron!

DODROPINN

Driving through Layton, Utah, yesterday - this was one of those rare occasions when I get to go past the iron curtain of 60th South - I was stopped at a signal where, as per usual, my mind was drifting off and noticed a most peculiar sign on a building.

My mind read it in total; as the text, in three-foot-high red letters, was rather run together, I saw the literal-sounding DawDrawPin - DODROPINN.

I was trying to find a location I'd never been to, a storage facility just off the freeway. "Just look for this, turn right at that, and you're there," as I'd been told.

Well, I didn't see this, and drove well past that, and ended up at a completely different that.

So I got on the phone with a co-worker that not only works beyond the iron curtain, but lives near the second that.

"Oh, you drove past this, that, and the other thing."

No sh!t.

SO while I looked for that, I had him on the phone. Conveniently, when I saw the three-foot-high red letters.

"What the hell is DawDrawPin?"

"WHAT?"

"At the corner of Hwy 193 and Hill Field Road. Behind the Pizza Hut."

Much muttering was heard in my truck when he exclaimed "OH! The Do Drop Inn!"

"But... wait... that should be spelled... Oh."

I'll put that on my bucket list. Something else to "do".

Osama bin Laden Was Buried At Sea

And people were concerned about the pollution from the nuclear waste in Japan.

It's FOUR Feet

So I'm sitting in the left turn lane in downtown Salt Lake City at the corner of 3rd West and North Temple. Ultimate goal is to go southbound on 3rd West. You know the corner.

I'm sitting behind a couple cars, waiting our turn. At least it seems there are a couple cars. In fact, there's only one; and it is sitting a good fifteen feet from the crosswalk.

One signal. Two signals. On number three, I'm getting a bit steamed, and so are the drivers behind me, a good five or six by now. So I take the initiative, get out of my car, walk up to the oblivious female driver, and ask "Would you be so kind as to move your car up about ten feet?"

She does, as I'm walking back to my car. And wouldn't you know, on signal number four, we finally get a green arrow. And I can hear the applause from the drivers behind me.

OK, so this wasn't recently, as I have no real reason any more to be this far north, at least on a daily basis. I rarely get further north than about 60th South. This happened ten years or more ago. Since I'm sure it's now a nightmare in itself to make a left turn at that intersection, since North Temple is chewed up beyond any recognition of what it was previously.

Oh yeah, the point.

In Utah, there's an oft-misinterpreted law that says one must wait FOUR feet behind a crosswalk so as to not impede foot traffic in said crosswalk. I don't recall any such law in California where first I learnt to drive. In fact, I seem to recall getting that question wrong in my first written drivers' exam when I first got to Utah.

FOUR feet. Not FOURTEEN. And certainly not FORTY. Fellow Utahns: Take a look at how far some people are behind the crosswalk at your next red light.

NOW you know why.

Whither Went The Wallet Photo?

Here's an experiment for you:

Take out your wallet, and set your eyes upon your wallet photos. If every-other one has a male, then you...

OK, that's bob's bs rearing its ugly head.

Do you even HAVE any wallet photos any more? I sure don't. I used to, but they became, well, obsolete. What with digital cameras, smartphones, digital frames, Facebook, Flickr, blogs, etc., etc., is there really any need to keep photos in your wallet?

Didn't think so.

So why, then, are we still subjected to the ubiquitous "wallet photo" size in photo-manipulating software, and options for same at Fotomat?

Oh wait...

All Thumbs

Was off looking for Fark Photoshop source images last night and found the following:

Can't stop laughing.

XP Anti-Spyware 2011

I got a new spyware-detection program yesterday.

Unintentionally.

I was visiting a Fox news website speaking of an asteroid heading for earth, otherwise known as an NEO, or Near Earth Object, and what impact it way have on earth. No pun intended.

Being an armchair astronomer, this piqued my interest.

But upon arriving at said Fox website, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a popup alerting me a Java app was initiating; of course, THAT meant it was too late to do anything. As I was waiting for my laptop to shut down - the best thing to do in a condition such as this - I saw the fake anti-virus program begin its execution.

I had a feeling this was going to be a long, arduous process - and I was NOT looking forward to it.

I've removed viruses from every flavor of PC over the years. Azusa from a Unisys PC, Michelangelo from an NCR. Even a boot-sector virus - name unknown - that was fixed simply with FDISK /MBR; that removal took two days and a trip to Moab. But this one?

OK, so it was my work laptop, which made things a little sticky. Having NO inclination to call the corporate help desk, this was only going to be solved by some at-home troubleshooting. Having dealt with viruses like this previously, there was no way the running process was going to let me look for a solution.

I only had the programs' purported name to go on: XP Anti-Spyware 2011. Going by several names depending on the OS involved, I found a plethora of sites with suggested fixes. But which one to click on, lest IT be an attack site in and of itself?

I'd been to bleepingcomputer.com in the past, so that's where I started MY attack (note that I was doing these searches on my home netbook). Suggesting a little program called RKILL, it was able to kill the running processes and allow me to run HijackThis to find the offending registry entries.

(This is a VERY abbreviated and paraphrased explanation of virus removal. Having been around computers since before the original IBM PC - the Apple II era - I know what programs are supposed to be on a computer and in what locations. For example, eeing a program executing from the "Program Files" directory and not from a subdirectory makes me especially concerned.)

So after finding several suspect programs, searching for the on the interwebs, and summarily removing them with HijackThis' help, I rebooted. And had no more virus.

Immediately updating the virus definitions on the laptop - likely the reason why McAfee didn't catch it in the frst place - I then began a four-hour full virus scan of the laptop.

This morning, there appears to be again, no virus. Just keeping my fingers crossed in the meantime.

No, I can't find YOUR virus. If you find this entry due to your PC having the XP Anti-Spyware 2011 or a variant, do NOT try to fix it yourself. Find a geek. Take it to your local computer store. If you're a geek yourself, do visit the above-named websites.

And keep those virus defs updated!!

Life Portrayed In Mormon Ads Not Consistent With Reality

No kidding.

But at least this article from the Trib is BY a Mormon:

Life Portrayed In Mormon Ads Not Consistent With Reality