Back in 1991, CBS aired the beginning of a short-lived series from Jim Henson's Creature shop that I fell in love with. After a season and a half and only 28 episodes, it was cancelled. That show was Dinosaurs.

A few days ago, I noticed it sitting on an endcap at Target and my jaw dropped. I was surprised to see it after 15 years. I had completely forgotten about it. I grabbed it and have been waiting for a chance to sit down and watch some. Today, after a couple of days in 98°F heat staining the deck and landscaping, I sat in the air conditioning and watched me some Dinosaurs.

I have to say, I'm enjoying it as much as I did the first time around. I love the subtle jokes in the background and the dinosaur style parodies of TV, movies, etc. I love the interaction between the grandmother the baby and Earl. It's working class humor mixed with satire, social commentary and just plain funny stuff. You've got to love a triceretops clown print on the wall.

Overall, the show has a distinct look to it with the lifesize rubber-suited actors instead of animated graphics. If you've seen the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Vogons were done the same way (by the same people).

I hope that the Jim Henson Creature Shop keeps putting stuff out because it would be a shame if this unique style completely went away.

Photo: Chris

One of the local radio stations started hyping the fact that they're giving away a Hummer H3 in a few weeks. Every time I see this, I get the urge to tell everyone I can about how bad of an idea it is to enter these contests.

I know what you're thinking. "Why on earth wouldn't I want to win a $30,000 car? After all, even if it's not the car that I want, I can sell it and get my dream car."

See, that's the problem. If you dig out your magnifying glass and read through the terms and conditions and sit down with your accountant, you'll find that winning one of these isn't so simple. In almost every case, the following things are true.

1. You get to pay the government taxes on the full price of the car. In this case, about $10,000. Oh crap. I guess I do have to sell it to pay the taxes.
2. Not so fast. Many of these contests actually make you agree not to sell the car for at least a year. In large part this is to avoid the PR problem of talking about how happy you were to win the car only to have the local news follow up and report that you actually aren't that happy and you sold it.
3. You now get to insure a $30,000 car. And, since many of the cars given away in these contests are highly desirable, they're high on the theft risk charts at your insurance company and you get to pay through the nose for the priviledge of driving your new boat anchor.
4. By the time you can sell it, it's now depreciated at least $5000 or more.

Unlike contests where actual cash is given away, you can't just take part of the prize to pay everyone who needs a cut. Win the lottery and you just deposit the whole works and write Uncle Sam and Uncle Minnesota for their cut and move on with the rest. Win a big, expensive object instead and you get to bear the extra burdens yourself for at least an entire tax year before you can get at the value.

You gotta love how companies will do something that looks generous and you get screwed over. A lot like many of those TV shows that do major house renovations and the homeowner (selected because they were in dire straits) gets to pay for the increase in property taxes, etc. Or people who buy cellphones or satellite dishes as gifts and leave the recipient with a monthly bill. Thanks but no thanks.

I'll be the first to admit that my use of the mouse is often very sloppy. I hit both mouse buttons when I only mean to hit one, constantly click stuff 5-10 pixels away from where I want and otherwise make a fool of myself whenever I have that plastic hockey puck in my hand.

So, it should come as no suprise (though it did) that a certain behavior of Yahoo's Music Engine software that's been bugging me actually embodies a programming cliche: it's not a bug; it's a feature. See, I like having YME in it's mini mode, where it doesn't dominate the screen, but I can still rate songs as I find my toe tapping along. However, it has been semi-transparent in that mode for several weeks apparently on its own. It's transparent enough to be too hard to read over some applications.

So, this morning, I did a quick search to see if I was just an idiot not seeing the setting somewhere. Sort of.

Turns out, the mouse scroll wheel controls the transparency of the thing in mini mode. So, my sloppy mouse skills made the darn thing transparent. But, some careful scrolling of the wheel in the other direction, followed by some predictable back and forth has left me with a fully controlled music engine.

This is really nice because I can completely hide the thing when I'm not interacting with it and just scroll up to see it again. And, I can correct my own stupidity, always a useful feature in software.

Because I love trying new stuff and we've been less than pleased with nearly every set of sheets we've tried in the last few years, we bought a set of bamboo sheets. I've since seen some that are 100% bamboo, but the ones we got are the 60/40 setup. So far, they're amazingly comfortable and way smoother than "better" cotton sheets.

I am intrigued by the label which has the bamboo content listed as "bamboo rayon". I'm wondering exactly how they are processing the bamboo into rayon threads for weaving. Does anyone know?

After talking to several other site owners, it seems the sudden increase in trackback spam that this site has undergone in the last week or so isn't an isolated event. I use Akismet on this Wordpress setup, but 150 comments got through from the time I left work today until after dinner. Most of that was trackback spam. I had turned trackbacks off in the admin panel a while back, but discovered that there's no reasonable way to shut them off retroactively, leaving about 400 posts open to this crap. I had figured that I just needed to do a quick SQL query to shut it off on the old posts too, and finally looked tonight and ran this little query. We'll see if it at least stops the trackback problem.


UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status = 'closed';


We seriously need a fully Bayesian filter for Wordpress. Now.